Sorrells thunked a key. “You talk to that detective?”
“No.” Magrady sat down in a chair angled toward the piano. “What am I gonna tell ’em?”
“I’m Tony Blow’s son.”
The murdered gang truce leader’s real name was Anthony Sorrells. When Magrady had read that, he recalled Banshall’s introduction of the members of his quartet.
“It could be a coincidence,” Magrady said. “The last name. But he died violently and now Ty gets murdered.”
The younger Sorrells plinked several keys.
Magrady continued: “Anyway, those supposed coincidences itched at me. I got to thinking about Tony Blow back in the day. I’d met him a couple of times, a charismatic dude. He had real potential.”
The son looked at him evenly.
“Of course, there were also the rumors about him.”
The pianist remained motionless behind his instrument. “So you got online and went down the rabbit hole about my dad.”
“Some of that,” Magrady admitted. That’s how he’d learned about the passing of J.M. Rikemann. Among his achievements, he’d been one of the FBI supervisors overseeing COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence operation to destroy the Black Panthers and make sure Martin Luther King Jr. would not become the Black messiah. Magrady also recalled Daryl Gates, the chief of the LAPD in the ’90s who had his own counterintelligence unit, the Organized Crime Intelligence Division. Several of its officers had infiltrated leftist groups and spied on local elected officials.
The younger man went on looking at him blankly.
Magrady said, “Being old school, I wanted print. I know about this archive in the hood, the Southern California Library. It was started by some Reds,” he chuckled. “The library has all kinds of books on the labor movement, Chicano liberation, and so on. Naturally, there’s several books they have there about ’92. One of them examined the gang truce and its aftermath. The woman who wrote the book talked about this white guy named Rikemann.”
That seemed to catch Sorrells’s attention.
“She stated that in the ’90s, Rikemann, after leaving the FBI and stints in the Reagan and Bush White Houses, was a kind of disruption consultant to law enforcement. An imperialist for hire, she wrote.”
Sorrells snorted. “He confessed to me, Magrady. Ty knew who I was. Kept tabs on me over the years, he said. When he came back to town, he finally wanted to come clean, atone. He sought me out specifically for this last gig.” He paused, regarding the older man. “I guess age makes you think about setting the record straight before it’s too late.”
“It does. Why did Ty kill your father?”
Sorrells’s laughter reminded Magrady of Christopher Lee as Dracula. “From what Ty said, he had Rikemann’s bootheel on his neck once upon a time.”
Magrady wound back to Soul Alley. “Smack. Ty knew a few cats who got into dope over there, using and selling. But I don’t remember him ever being on the needle.”
“He wasn’t. Back in the States, this Rikemann had him by the balls on a federal rap. Not for using but for importing. Instead of putting him away, Rikemann got him to snitch on the civil rights activities he was involved in.”
”There’s a statute of limitation for a drug bust,” Magrady noted.
“Ty didn’t want his past being exposed,” Sorrells said. “At least not back when my dad found out about him.”
“How did your father find out?”
“Rikemann put the squeeze on Ty, threatening to expose him. That motherfucker was paying attention to what was going down after ’92 and didn’t want my dad becoming what he and his kind feared the most: a new Malcolm X. From gangster to Black leader.”
“Ty was supposed to see if Tony Blow would go for the okey-doke,” Magrady said.
“Yeah, but he was changing, according to my mom, about to tell all, like who was part of the coke pipeline he profited from. My mom knew he’d been trying to get a book deal.”
“Damn. So Rikemann supplied your dad?”
“Who better to sell the drugs helping to keep us down than a War on Drugs warrior?”
“From the Golden Triangle to Colombian marching powder,” Magrady said.
Sorrells leaned back from the piano. “Now what, you gonna avenge your buddy the sellout?”
“I don’t really know,” Magrady stammered. “Shouldn’t I?”
Sorrells rose. Magrady remained sitting, a hand in his jacket pocket.
Rikemann’s memoir, which he’d written in longhand, was published about a year after he died. In those pages he named names and made startling allegations further fueling conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies up to no good in the nation’s inner cities.
Part III
The World Is a Ghetto
Sabor a Mi
by Roberto Lovato
Slauson Park
Roque “Rocky” Anaya bobs his head to the mellow beats of melancholy and sweet bolero love songs blaring inside his beat-up Toyota. The rain pelting the windshield blurs his view of the crime scene across the street, on the soccer field in Slauson Park on 54th Street near the corner of Compton Avenue.
He closes his eyes, as if in meditation, giving the war veteran — turned-detective a vulnerability he never displays in public. Rocky’s confident that, at one a.m., nobody will mess with him while he does his music thing. This despite the popular perception of the Alameda corridor neighborhoods in South Central as a “gang-infested” industrial wasteland with pockets of Black and Brown people living in between factories, warehouses, and empty lots.
The sight of Rocky doing his music thing would lead any late-night passerby to think he’s either jacking off or in a trance. Like what the Salvadoran and Guatemalan feligréses experience weekly speaking in tongues in their crowded Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal la Resurrección church across the street.
Nobody would guess what he’s actually doing: deciding whether he really wants to investigate the murder of a Salvadoran man hacked to death with a machete across the street from la Resurrección. Neither would they believe that he’s up at this late hour on a hot August night figuring things out while listening to, of all things, “Sabor a Mi,” a sultry bolero classic loved for decades by generations of local lowriders, young and old people across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Latino United States. And even his closest friends don’t know he’s listening to the music to ponder the savage murder of Arnulfo Cartagena, a man he’s known since their childhood in the Barrio Santa Cruz slum in prewar El Salvador.
Lyrics fill his head and body as he ponders the possibilities and pitfalls associated with the tiny country of titanic sorrows named for the Savior.
If you deny my presence in your life, it would be enough to hug you and talk...
Fuck. Why the fuck am I here? he wondered. My goddamn stomach’s bloating like I’ve been dead for three or four days.
Rocky’s jaw tightens.
He’s fine occasionally doing Jack’s “Latino” cases — finding migrants kidnapped by cartels, figuring out if “disappeared” means “dead,” surveilling Hollywood hotshots, surveilling cheating spouses, corporations doing dirty work in Latin America or the Latino United States, investigating links between local power brokers and narcos, etc. But this Salvadoran shit is the last thing he wants to investigate.