“Well,” he said, “thank you for your time.”
“Of course. No bother. Sure will miss him.”
“Me too.” Magrady turned back toward the entrance. She was rolling her cart inside her place, closing the door. Magrady didn’t want her hearing him go up the stairs, arousing suspicion. At the main doorway he placed a waded-up piece of paper in the doorjamb cavity where the lock would catch, then closed the front door, faking like he was leaving for good. He returned to his car to retrieve a hammer and chisel. These he placed in a paper bag along with some cheap cotton gloves he’d bought to make it less obvious he was carrying the amateur burglary kit. He sat behind the steering wheel, listening to a podcast debunking conspiracy theories.
After another forty minutes he went up the steps, unlatched the front door, and moved inside. He heard muffled voices through the closed door of the older woman’s apartment — she was watching her stories on TV.
Up the stairs he went. At Banshall’s door there was no X of crime scene tape. The door was locked. Gloves on, he inserted the chisel between the door and the jamb. Three quick raps of the hammer on the head of the chisel, and the door popped opened. Magrady paused then stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him. Fortunately, these rooms were not above the older woman’s place. For a moment he felt disoriented, viewing the main room in the light, knowing the recent inhabitant was never to return.
He glanced around, not sure what he was looking for, though he supposed he should try to find a next of kin. But the medical examiner’s office would do that as a matter of course. Yet it seemed impersonal if he didn’t also try. There were a couple of framed photos on the mantle, including one with Banshall in a sport coat with his arm around the shoulders of a woman in a mink coat. Both were smiling.
Staring at his dead friend’s face, he could tell it had been taken a few years ago. Should he try to find the woman? He picked up the frame and slipped the photo free. Nothing was written on the back.
Before putting the picture back together, he took a shot of it with his phone’s camera. He picked up the black wooden rectangle also on the mantle. The thing that seemed to puzzle Banshall by its presence. Magrady had one just like this. It was a commemorative gift given to those who’d worked on a successful political campaign more than twenty-five years earlier. What went down on and after April 29, 1992, were etched memories. The days-long conflagration had jumped off at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Everyone had been tuned in to their TVs or radios as the not-guilty verdicts were announced that afternoon for the four LAPD officers who beat the living hell out of Rodney King after a chase-and-stop in the San Fernando Valley. The two passengers in his car untouched. In those days there were no smartphones with cameras to chronicle police violence, Magrady reflected. On that evening, it was grainy images captured via a video camera operated by a plumber from his apartment’s balcony. He’d been awakened by the commotion from below.
The memento Magrady held had been handed out by a grateful candidate who’d won a city council seat, running on a platform of neighborhood empowerment zones and racial reconciliation several years after ’92. It had been a contentious race. Banshall had headlined a benefit concert to fundraise for the campaign. The singer had been a woman calling herself Tempest. Magrady had been one of several in charge of the canvassing, the door knocking. Tsuji must have searched the apartment once he got the tox report from the coroner. The detective must have also talked to the musicians who last played with Banshall that night at the World Stage. That might have been another way in which he’d zeroed in on Magrady. But who had Banshall run up against since coming back to town?
Banshall had a good number of vinyl LPs arranged on a shelf in the tidy dining room. Magrady sifted through these but no hidden treasure map fell out. Frustrated and feeling aimless, he was hesitant to leave but he was getting nowhere. Well, he reasoned, he’d try to hunt down the woman, though he had a feeling that was going to be a dead end. Magrady poked about some more but nothing jumped out at him.
When he stepped outside the apartment, he heard the main front door opening. For a blink he froze but knew he had to feign being nonchalant. He descended the stairs as the woman he’d seen in the morning started up them.
“How you doing?” he said, angling past her with his paper bag.
She glared at him but didn’t say anything as she ascended. He didn’t think she took him for a cop. But she was going to notice the broken in door any second. It wouldn’t latch and that was noticeable.
“Hey,” she called out.
Magrady quickened his pace through the entrance and out onto the walkway. Hopefully she wasn’t packing. He jogged as best he could, bad knee and all, over to his car to get away from there.
Later that night, not having had a visit from the law, Magrady leafed through the contents of a large ten-by-twelve gray envelope of mementos. If he couldn’t find out who poisoned Banshall or who might claim his body, he could at least revisit parts of a past they shared. There was a Polaroid of a young, thinner him in the Three Clicks in uniform, a Vietnamese “B girl” sitting on his knee. They were obviously both tipsy. Another picture showed Banshall blowing the sax on the club’s tiny stage accompanied by a guitarist and a drummer, the musicians also in uniform. Hard to believe any of them had been that young.
Magrady kept sifting through the items in no particular order. There was a letter his daughter Esther had written him years ago, begging him to get clean. He was glad they were no longer estranged these days. He scanned some newspaper clippings from the city council campaign, finding his name mentioned in an article from the Sentinel, LA’s Black newsweekly. But it was an article from the Los Angeles Times that he fixed on. It was an interview with the candidate, Tina Chalmers, and she was talking about the death of one of the architects of the gang truce between the Crips and Bloods. This had been an effort begun before April 29 but had gotten traction when it came into effect afterward. The truce eventually broke down, but Chalmers was talking about its merits and the need to redouble that sort of effort.
“Tony Blow does not need to have died in vain,” Chalmers was quoted as saying.
Tony Blow was the street name for a reformed gangbanger who’d been killed. He was controversial as he was the face of the gang truce, even being interviewed on national news. But it was also alleged he was under investigation by the FBI for drugs and guns. Magrady couldn’t remember his real name. He got on his laptop and found a pertinent article about his death. Blow was found shot to death in a rear house on 76th Street off an alley. His murder was unsolved at the time of the article, though believed to have been gang related. Magrady did more checking and it seemed the murder was still open now, decades later. He returned to the original article. Toward the end of the piece, he found Blow’s real name. Then he read it again to make sure.
“I felt no particular emotion about poisoning him. It was just one of those things,” he said, a slight smile on his composed face. “The more it stayed on my mind, though, the more it seemed I should do something about it. He was my father after all. When I knew he was gonna bring the quartet over after our opening night for a little celebration, it all came together.”
Magrady stood in his windbreaker before Lee Sorrells, who sat at a piano. They were in a half-lit space, the back room of McDade’s Wholesale Beauty and Fixture Supply on Avalon Boulevard. Sorrells had an arrangement with the owner and this was where he rehearsed. The space was sparsely furnished, only one other chair and a mini fridge on the concrete floor. High up in the rear wall were three barred windows overlooking an alley. This provided what light there was.