Hoodtown

by Christa Faust

  I started perusing a gossipy little rag called Lucha Lowdown. There was tons of press surrounding the car bombing that killed Black Eagle. Apparently he got rough with the wrong girl, a girl with connections. There had been several threats and even a failed hit before someone finally caught up to him. El Jefe denied responsibility but was quoted as saying; “I wish it had been me. The lousy bastard is lucky I don’t dig him up and kill him again.”

  I noticed all the Black Eagle pieces had the same byline — La Cazadora. Guess I needed to hunt down the Huntress and see if she knew anything more, any holes in the story that might prove Eagle’s death wasn’t on the level.

  21

  I found La Cazadora at a local Yakitori joint down the street from Madrugada’s. She was Minnie’s age, mostly Japanese with an olive drab hood and a five-pack-a-day voice that was deeper than Malasuerte’s. Her thin, spidery hands were restless on the table, snapping skewers and ripping napkins, turning her tea cup around and around.

  “Black Eagle,” she said, picking at the corner of her place mat. “Ese fucking yaro. What a piece of shit.” She waved the young, trampy waitress over to our table. “More tea. You want tea?”

  “Sure.”

  I watched the waitress plunk down a cup and fill it with steaming green tea. She had a flowery black and pink gimmick and her breasts nearly fell out of her low-cut, see-through blouse as she leaned over me with the teapot. The display was wasted on me, but Cazadora was eating it up with two forks.

  “Tell me.” I considered a sip of tea and then decided to let to cool a while. “Was there anything about Black Eagle’s death that struck you as odd. Suspicious maybe?”

  She dunked a hunk of chicken into hot sauce so vicious it was making my eyes water from across the table and then neatly stripped the meat from the skewer with long, yellowed teeth.

  “Not at first,” she said. “I mean, en serio, we were all surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

  I said nothing, breathing steam from my tea and waiting for her to go on.

  “Then just as I’m about to go to press with the story, I get this call from a guy at the morgue. Buzzard? Vulture? What the hell was his name again.”

  I felt a chilly squirt of adrenaline.

  “Zopilote?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.” She dunked another skewer. “Anyway he tells me something’s not right, something about the body. I hightail it over but by the time I get there he’s changed his tune. Nothing strange at all. He was mistaken.” She snapped the wooden skewer neatly in two. “Well I’ve got a deadline so I just go ahead with what I’ve got but I always wondered what the deal was with that guy.”

  I sipped my tea. This was more interesting by the minute. Guess I was gonna have to pay a second visit to my buddy at the morgue.

  Cazadora swept all the broken skewers into a heap and dumped them on her now empty plate.

  “You think this has something to do with the unmasking murders?” she asked.

  I finished the cooling tea and set the cup down.

  “I think it might. I just don’t know yet.”

  She laid a business card on the table between us.

  “You find out anything you call me. The Lowdown don’t pay for shit but this is big news. Skin news even. You keep me informed and I’ll take care of you.”

  22

  The morgue is not a place you want as a regular hangout. Hospital’s bad enough.

  Zopilote didn’t come on until the night shift so I swung by Orchidia’s for a quick shave and then headed over to my usual joint for a good cheap bite.

  El Super Taco Bowl was a typical Hoodtown restaurant. Occupying the corner of Kendo and Lutteroth with two sides open to the street and a long L-shaped counter that allowed you to sit either outside facing in or inside facing out. I took my habitual gunfighter’s seat at the inner elbow of the L, facing out.

  Nearly every other seat was occupied with familiar Hoods. A pair of old ladies that lived down the hall from me, both with sexy, dramatic gimmicks that were probably really stunning fifty years ago but now just looked creepy perched above black clad bodies like folded up umbrellas. A group of young toughs in loud hoods and matching suits, chowing-down with their muscular arms curled around their bowls like someone was gonna steal their food. Hood girls from the sweatshops, a whole family with insect gimmicks and a grizzled old mini sitting on three phonebooks. To my left, that Skin with the fucked-up face, pink, ugly burnflesh like its own kind of mask, sitting with his tiny Hood wife.

  The proprietor was an old blind guy who had a stylized bat design on an intricate, eyeless hood with openings for his large, hairy ears. He and his three daughters — all older than me — had run this joint for as long as I can remember.

  “Irasshai-mase,” he said, shuffling over to where I sat.

  “What’s up, Murcielago?”

  He grinned and wiped the spotless counter in front of me with a damp rag.

  “The usual, X?”

  “Absolutely,” I replied.

  Seconds later he slapped an icy Tinieblas down in front of me and popped the cap, steam wreathing the mouth of the bottle. Before I’d swallowed the first slug, he followed it up with a huge bowl of the house special, Ramen Al Pastor.

  I seasoned my food liberally and when I had everything just like I like it, I snapped apart a pair of chopsticks from the juice glass by the napkin dispenser and dug in. It was fantastic, as always. Succulent pork sliced fresh off that huge, sizzling hunk turning on a vertical spit at the end of the counter and served floating in a dark, spicy broth with chopped green onions and tons of chewy noodles, topped off with near transparent slivers of roasted pineapple. I sat and chewed, mindlessly content for the first time in what felt like ages, forgetting all the bullshit and the drama in the simple distraction of a good, greasy meal.

  When Murcielago came by with the check he set down a small dish of ginger ice cream.

  “Desert is on the house, X,” he said.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  “De nada,” Murcielago said. He paused for a moment, left ear cocked towards me. “I heard about what happened at Minnie’s.”

  I couldn’t blame him for bringing it up. I tried to pull my earlier contentment back around me like a kid hiding under blankets when she doesn’t want to go to school but nothing doing. All the details, all the questions were back, refusing to be ignored.

  “Yeah,” I said, poking the ice cream with the back of a spoon and shaking my head. “What a world.”

  I paid the check and left a generous tip, but I still had way too much time on my hands so I decided to kill another hour in a neighborhood dive down the block called La Sandia. Nobody there but me and a pair of grim, silent teporochos like matching bookends holding up either end of the bar. As I sat there, nursing my warming beer in the dank comfort of the tiny, familiar joint, I wondered what I was gonna say to Zopilote. I wondered if I was gonna have to get rough with the old buzzard, and if I did, if I’d be up for it. He could have been some retired old-school shooter, but somehow, watching his wheezing struggle with Jasmine’s dead weight, I just didn’t think so. There’s something kind of low about strong-arming a guy old enough to be your dad but what the hell else could I do? I only hoped he would fold when I told him I was wise to him and save me the embarrassment. When it seemed like enough time had passed, I paid the scrawny seagull of a barmaid and made my way back to the morgue.

  23

  When I arrived, the old man was there, mopping up some awful, greenish brown fluid with slow, mindless strokes.

  “Evening, Zopilote,” I said. “Remember me?”

  He nodded, eyes on the mop slopping back and forth, back and forth.

  “I was wondering if I might have a look at Jane Doe.” I pulled the photo Diamond had given me. “I think one of these girls might be her.”

  He looked up at me, mop frozen for a second.

  “Suit yourself,” he said and continued.

  I steeled myself and pulled
the Jane Doe drawer open.

  She wore a cheap paper hood like the one the doctors had put over Jasmine’s battered face. She had been scrubbed clean and her eyes were shut but otherwise she looked very much like she did back in Minnie’s motel. A little puffier maybe, and weirdly flattened but otherwise unchanged. She could be anyone. She could be Jasmine, or me for that matter, same broad, strapping body, same big ass and legs. I held up the blurry picture of the two girls and struggled to compare the minutiae of their bodies to the chilly clay laid out before me but there was nothing that cinched it, nothing that either eliminated or confirmed either girl. No moles, no scars, nothing. Without the hood, it seemed an impossible task. The girls in the photo were like creatures from another planet. Their eyes were frisky, laughing at the camera as if nothing like this could ever happen.

  “Is this you?” I asked softly, my finger touching first one girl’s máscara and then the other. Behind me the old man continued to mop. “Are you one of these girls?”

  I felt cold and silly, talking to a corpse, but it was a lousy, awful thing that she was here like this and I felt like I ought to promise her that I would do something. Promise her and Kitsune and Jasmine that I would make sure the fucker who did this got taken care of. I thought of Gitcho whispering to me between the bars down in Hoodtown lockup and I found myself wishing there was someone else to do this, anyone else but me. But there wasn’t, so I pocketed the photo, closed the drawer and turned back to the old man.

  “You ready to tell me what happened with Black Eagle?”

  He looked up at me, furtive like a rat and then back down at the mop.

  “Listen, cabrón,” I said, reaching out with one hand to still the mop. “I know you know something about Black Eagle’s death. I spoke to the reporter you called. She says you told her something was fishy about the death. Something about the body.”

  He wrenched the mop out of my grasp without looking up at me and turned away, dunking it into a pail of greasy gray water.

  “Don’t know anything about that,” he said.

  “Oh you don’t?” I took a step closer, crowding him into the corner and using my size to show him I meant business. “Cazadora says different. She says you changed your story. Chickened out at the last minute. You calling her a liar?”

  “It was a mistake. There was nothing. Nothing.”

  “Come on now, pops,” I said taking a second step towards him. “I’m gonna find out one way or another. Why not make it easy on yourself.”

  The old bastard skinned his lips back from his shiny white dentures and caught me totally off guard by slamming the mop handle into my sternum. The bucket tipped over, stinking mop-water sloshing over my shoes and the legs of my trousers and I grunted with surprise as Zopilote made a crazy break for the door.

  I spun and caught him easily, grabbing him by the back of the shirt as his feet slipped out from under him and his head bounced off the corner of the autopsy table. He collapsed in my arms and I hauled him bodily over to a small rolling stool on the other side of the table.

  “Santo!” I said, plopping the old man into the chair. “Crazy old fucker.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a faded handkerchief with cherries on it, pressing it beneath his bleeding nose. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He muttered into the hankie, shaking his head.

  “Look, I don’t want to hurt you.” I refolded the handkerchief and pressed it back under his nose, tipping his head. “I just have to know if Black Eagle is dead or not.”

  He took the hankie as I leaned against the counter and told him everything Jasmine had told me. He just listened, occasionally refolding the hankie and snorting back blood.

  “Don’t you see, if there’s any chance that Black Eagle is alive, that he might be the one killing these girls and stealing their hoods, I have to know. He has to be stopped. If you don’t tell me and that hijo de puta goes and kills another girl, it’ll be your fault. You have to tell me, before you wind up with another body down here.”

  The old man glanced at the drawer marked Jane Doe and back at me. His eyes were grim slits inside his dark eyeholes.

  “I was paid,” he said, almost too soft to hear.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was paid not to tell.” He took the handkerchief from his nose. It had stopped bleeding. “My wife, she is sick. We have no children to help. That money paid our debt to the Barber and made sure she always has good food to eat and heat in the winter.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to find a way to continue.

  “When Black Eagle’s body came in it was badly burned. The Medical Examiner barely even looked at him, but I did. I did. Even though that body was found in Black Eagle’s car with what was left of Black Eagle’s hood melted into his skin...” he paused and slowly pulled himself to his feet. “It couldn’t have been him.”

  He walked over to the fallen mop, righted the bucket and began to mop again.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Why couldn’t it have been him?”

  Zopilote looked up at me.

  “The body was partially burned and there was damage from the explosion, but the knees? The shoulders? They were all perfect.”

  I frowned. “What are you saying?” I was pretty sure I knew where this was going, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  “Look at you.” He gestured with the mop. “I see your knee gives you pain. Your left shoulder is stiff and even dislocates sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Santo,” I said, eyes wide. “Of course.”

  “They tell me this is the body of a luchador, yet there are no old breaks, no bad joints, no pre-mortem injuries at all except for a large traumatic break in the skull.”

  I whistled. Jasmine was right. Black Eagle was still alive. That didn’t explain it all but it was enough. Enough to get Cray back into the case, maybe even enough to get that fucker strapped into the electric chair.

  “Who paid you, Zopilote?” I asked. “Please, you have to tell me who was behind this.”

  He paused, seeming to weigh the consequences for what felt like an eternity. Then he hefted the bucket and dumped the filthy water into the sink.

  “El Nezumi” he said.

  24

  I didn’t like the idea of going to Nezumi’s rat’s nest alone at this time of night but Malasuerte was out and I wasn’t about to call Jaguar. Cray wouldn’t be down at the station until morning and while he may be approaching Hoodfriendly, he didn’t leave me his address or home phone or nothing, so it’s X on her own again. Not like that’s anything new.

  168th street was as quiet as the morgue as I walked along with my purse tucked tight under my armpit and my mannish jacket buttoned up to the throat, trying to look like I was too busy for trouble. I was almost surprised to find Nezumi’s building still standing.

  There were five junkies nodded out in the stairwell and three in the hallway. As much as I banged on the door, I got no answer but beery cries to knock it off from neighboring apartments. I slipped the lock with ease and squeezed inside.

  The place was empty, unchanged from the last time I had visited. Creepy, like visiting a crime scene after the body has been removed. A dead end. I wracked my brains to think of where he could be. Bars that he sleazed around in on a regular basis. Strip joints. Whorehouses. Not exactly what I was hoping to do with my evening but no one else was volunteering.

  The Kitty Kat Lounge. It’s a red vinyl hole in the wall down at the far end of Lastine, nowhere anyone with any sense wants to be. Surrounded by industrial wasteland and silent, hulking textile mills, the Kat was nominally a strip club. That is to say there was a tiny stage that sometimes had a girl on it. If you had a few extra bucks, the girl might jack you off in the men’s room but you had to be careful she didn’t pinch your wallet while she was at it. Other than that it was an out of the way meeting place for people who wanted to do business best carried out in shadows. Nezumi was there nearly every night of the week, running scams, working
his hustles and fighting with bookies. He wasn’t there that night.

  On a whim, I pulled out the photo of the two missing whores. Most of the Kat’s clientele just sniggered over the shot and asked how much I wanted for it. The “dancer” got all huffy about it and said she didn’t do that lesbo stuff. Finally I showed it to the bartender, a young kid with some kind of aquatic gimmick, waves and stylized fish on his aquamarine hood. I thought I saw a spark of recognition in his blue eyes so I ordered a beer and sat down for a minute to let him decide if he felt like talking.

  I watched the dancer stagger from one side of the stage to the other, wobbling on too high heels and shaking her skinny shanks.

  “Dulce’s an old friend of mine,” I said, laying down a hefty tip on the sparkly bar. “Just wanted to catch up.”

  The bartender swept my money into his stained apron and then turned to mix something fruity for a fat lush three stools down. Napkin and glass down and change counted out in terse, practiced moves and then he was back by me, eyes restless across the crowded room as he spoke.

  “Go ask Snake Eyes down at the Cherry Blossom,” he said, wiping glasses and setting them into a rack above his head. “I think he hired them on for a few nights. Heard they split with the till.”

  “Oh yeah?” I finished my watery, awful beer and slapped a few more bills on the bar. “Thanks.”

  25

  I continued my tour of the Hoodtown underbelly at that classy joint known as the Cherry Blossom Ballroom. Sure, it was better than the Kitty Kat and at least they had Tinieblas on tap but it was still no place I would choose for a fun night out on the town.