Hoodtown Read online

“So who is this guy Black Eagle anyway?” Sullivan asked around a soggy mouthful of burger. He was the only one eating.

  “He was big a few years ago,” I told them. “Everybody I know who worked with him said he was a sadistic prick with a monster ego. Liked to get rough in the sack but he was over with the training-bra set. Had more rattas than the Casanova Theater. Skin girls, too.” I sipped my coffee “Typical.”

  Sullivan held his burger in both hands, chewing thoughtfully as I continued.

  “Jasmine says he picked her up, gave her 100 bucks and told her to meet him in a room at this motel on Conejo and Fire, that the door would be unlocked. Said he didn’t want to be seen going in with her because he was married. She says she could tell he was a wrestler right away but it took her a while to place the gimmick. By the time she remembered him, she was already in the motel, fighting for her life and trying to stop him from cuffing her to the bed.”

  “Ok then,” Cray said dumping sugar into his own coffee, like that was gonna help “All we gotta do is find this Black Eagle guy and we’ll have our perp. Think she’ll testify?”

  “There is one minor problem, bozu,” I said.

  Cray looked at me with a puzzled frown. Sullivan rolled his eyes and peeled the last of the meat off his bun. I turned away, squinting out at the passing traffic.

  “Well, what?” Cray finally asked.

  “Black Eagle is dead.”

  “Dead?” Cray looked at his partner and back at me. “What happened?”

  “Some mob thing,” I told him. “I don’t know.”

  “So the guy’s dead.” Sullivan said, dropping the soggy rind of his burger bun on the plate. “Then the girl is wrong. She was scared, things got crazy and she remembered wrong.”

  “Maybe someone with a similar mask?” Cray suggested.

  “But it’s weird.” I said. “She seemed so sure.”

  “Memory’s a funny thing,” Cray said. “In stressful situations...”

  “Look, I’m gonna stay with her a while. Work on getting her out of that place.” I stood and slapped a few coins on the table. “If she remembers anything important, I’ll give you a call.”

  As I walked away down the gauntlet of hostile Skin faces in the other booths, I heard Cray whisper:

  “Why does she keep calling me Bozo?”

  “Cause you’re a dumbass,” Sullivan replied.

  I laughed silently, pushing open the door and sucking in city smog that tasted like fresh mountain air after the tense greasy atmosphere inside the diner. Bozu didn’t mean stupid. It meant... I don’t know. Kid, I guess. It came from Japanese originally, something to do with a shaved head, I think, but by the time it got to Hoodtown it was more like what you call a young luchador, someone who’s still green in the ring. Someone with more passion than experience.

  I wondered if Cray was really gonna go the distance. He was green, but he seemed honest, with a genuine interest in solving the case. Not like that prick Sullivan who was just shuffling puzzle pieces to look busy while he was on the clock. I’d never had any faith in cops to do more than count money and break heads but there was something about that kid. He had a questioning mind. Politics didn’t seem to matter to him. He would solve it, not because it was the right thing to do, but because that big voracious brain of his would not leave him alone until he did.

  The real question was, what would he do with the answer when he found it?

  I shook my head and headed back down into Hoodtown.

  Good luck, bozu, I thought. You’re gonna need it.

  14

  Jasmine’s rented room, clean but cramped with one tiny window. Rickety table under a sign that read “NO COOKING” in English, Spanish and Japanese. On the table, a single hotplate with one battered pot, a stack of colorful ramen noodle packages and a jug of water. A cheerful yellow glass full of chopsticks. A fashion magazine full of smiling Skin women. Nearby, a shoebox-sized sink and some handmade shelves lined with cheap cosmetics and gaudy bottles of fancy perfume. Tacky little Japanese jewelry box full of cheap glitter but she had a brand new radio by the bed and a new mink jacket still swathed in tissue. It seemed obvious that our girl was doing fairly well, or at least she had herself a few rich regulars. But what she didn’t have was any photos. No family, no history, nothing. Sitting on her bed, surrounded by all her things and holding her pale yellow máscara in my hands, I felt a huge bleak depression settle over me.

  I came here to get that poor kid a hood and maybe find somebody that would give a shit that she was still breathing but suddenly it was all just overwhelming. Who did I think I was anyway? I wasn’t a cop or a fucking superhero. Just a tired old used-to-be with a few belts, a stack of bills and no time to play Santo.

  But before I could settle in too deep, the scratching of a key in the lock pierced my dark ruminations. I stood to face the door, feeling obscurely caught. I had my explanation of why I was there in the first place all ready to soothe the landlady or boyfriend or whoever was about to give me the “who the hell are you” routine but when the door opened, it fell out of my head and all I could do was stand there with my guts in a knot and a suffocating silence thick in my throat.

  Can I even explain this to you, the way I felt at that moment? Well first I better tell you who was at the door. It was El Jaguar de Juarez. Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you know he’s the middleweight champion of the known universe. Fifth generation técnico. Idolo de los Niños. A sterling fucking hero in the flesh, looking just as beautiful as the day I walked out on him in that sleazy little hotel in Neo Guanajuato twenty years ago.

  At first he was as stunned as I was. He just stood there, rain dripping off the brim of his hat and dark eyes full of confusion. He had flowers in his arms and a key and I realized in a cold flash of understanding why he was here.

  “Looking good, Jaguar,” I managed to say. “How’s the wife and kids?”

  He flinched a little at that and I immediately felt like a monster. I turned away.

  “X,” he said, laying down the flowers and closing the door. “What are you doing here?” He looked around. “Where’s Jasmine?”

  “Kuso.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “You better come with me.”

  15

  The ride to the hospital was excruciating, the plush interior of Jaguar’s sporty little coup thick with unspoken emotion. Everything about him tortured me. His scarred and swollen knuckles as his thick hand worked the gearshift. The unconsciously heroic set of his shoulders and the gorgeous golden profile of his legendary hood. His suit was expensive and tasteful but underneath it all I could still see the subtle edges of the hungry kid he used to be.

  Eventually the awkward small talk evaporated and after a strange hot silence, Jaguar began to tell me about Jasmine.

  “I’ve been seeing her for about a year. I keep trying to get her to clean up, get out of the life. At least let me move her into a better neighborhood. She used to tease me all the time, tell me to quit playing guardian angel. She never could stand the idea of anybody trying to take care of her. Just like you. Now this...” He gripped the wheel, eyes full of pain and guilt. “Some angel, huh?”

  “This ain’t your fault, Jaguar.” I knew I was supposed to do something comforting, but I was terrified to touch him. I was afraid if I did, I might not be able to stop. Instead I laced my fingers tighter in my lap. “You can’t fix everything.”

  He looked over at me then. I could feel his eyes on me but I wouldn’t look up until he turned back to the road and spoke.

  “You know I did everything I could for you when you...” He paused. “When Blue Velvet died.”

  I could feel things getting out of control, dead things inside my head thrashing in their coffins. I turned away and looked out the window, silent as we turned the corner and hung a left into the hospital lot.

  Inside, we passed through the hollow lobby, through the dingy waiting room full of outdated magazines and sagging chairs that looked like they were donated afte
r they became too worn for a skid-row hotel. The linoleum floor was scarred with cigarette burns, worn down from thousands of hopeless, pacing feet. There were a few yellowed posters showing perfect little Hood kids being examined by wise white-haired Skin doctors and dire warnings about trusting Hood Barbers to do things better left to the Skin medical establishment.

  Jasmine’s room was at the far end of a nearly deserted hall.

  “Jasmine?” I said, lingering in the doorway, full of a thousand complex and murky emotions.

  Jaguar pushed past me, rushing to her bedside while I hung back, bristling.

  “Jasmine, it’s me, Jaguar.” He shook her loose, sleeping form. “I brought your máscara. Jas, baby, wake up!”

  Her arm flopped out from under the covers, sludgy blood dripping from her middle finger. Jaguar grabbed her wrist and turned it over, revealing a ragged vertical gash.

  He pulled back the blanket with a surprised grunt. The bed was drenched in blood and littered with broken glass. Both wrists had been deeply slashed.

  “Jas?” He shook her limp body pointlessly. “Jas?”

  I swallowed my disgust and outrage and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Jaguar,” I said softly.

  He continued to say her name, shaking her so her head rolled back and forth, skewing the cheap paper hood. Jasmine’s real mask fell from Jaguar’s hand and landed in the blood pooling beneath the rusted bed frame.

  “Enough,” I said, gripping Jaguar’s arms and turning him to face me. “Jaguar, stop it now. She’d dead and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  His eyes were wild and filled with revulsion and pain and the sudden urge to put my arms around him hit me like a stealthy suckerpunch. It was so powerful I had to bite my lip and breathe deeply, pushing it down inside myself until I could speak again.

  “Get out of here right now.”

  “But...” He tried to turn back to Jasmine’s cooling corpse but I wouldn’t let him.

  “Listen to me. You need to go now, unless you feel like explaining to the cops exactly how you knew the deceased.”

  He looked up at me, understanding flooding his eyes and then the panic was gone. He nodded and turned to go.

  At the door he paused.

  “X, “ he said, without turning back. “The Kabuki. Room 1101. You remember, don’t you?”

  I nodded, memories twisting like hot wire somewhere deep inside me. I needed to find the night nurse, get the cops in here right away and deal with this mess. I did not need a trip down memory lane.

  “I remember,” I said anyway. Of course I fucking remembered.

  I picked up Jasmine’s crumpled mask off the floor, trying to wipe away the blood and succeeding only in smearing it around. I tried not to listen to the echo of Jaguar’s expensive wingtips as he walked away and failed at that too.

  16

  About twenty minutes later, Cray and Sullivan arrived on the scene. Cray looked like he’d been dragged out of bed. Sullivan looked the same as ever.

  “What the hell happened here?” I asked, trying not to watch the nurses lift the stiffening, sheet-wrapped body onto a rickety stretcher.

  “Smashed drinking glass, slashed wrists,” Sullivan said, switching a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Looks like a suicide to me.”

  Again the urge to let the Skin prick have it, and again it stayed buried as I pulled in a deep breath and turned to Cray.

  “That your assessment of the situation too, Junior G-man?”

  “Come on now, X.” Cray took off his hat and rubbed a palm over his close-cropped hair. “You told me yourself that for a Hood, having your mask stolen is a terrible thing, traumatic, almost sacrilegious. Maybe it was too much for her.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, silent for a moment, before I was able to speak.

  “You’re telling me that this woman, a woman who’s survival instinct was so fierce that she fought off the man who tried to kill her with her bare hands, that this tough cabróna made her way through the streets to this hospital, hoodless, and endured who-knows-what humiliation and barbaric treatment by your Skin doctors to heal her wounds, just so she could turn around and cut her fucking wrists with a drinking glass?”

  Cray said nothing but I could see a tiny flicker of doubt in his eyes so I pressed the point.

  “Jasmine wouldn’t kill herself.” I said. “I know she wouldn’t. I thought you guys were supposed to have a cop on the floor to watch her.”

  “We did,” Sullivan said thumbing a young, pimply uniform standing by the nurse’s station, holding a paper cup of coffee and looking a little green around the gills. “He didn’t see nothing.”

  “Wait a minute...” I frowned. “I didn’t see any cop when I got here.”

  “Must not have been looking.” Sullivan took the toothpick out of his mouth and poked Cray in the chest with it. “Look, there’s nothing more for us to do here. What do ya say we go grab a bite.”

  I could feel corrosive fury burning through my calm and I clenched and unclenched my fists. I might have just slugged the bastard after all and spent the rest of the night down in lockup but something stopped me. It was the look on Cray’s face. The hook of doubt had sunk deep and I could see in his eyes that he smelled a rat as much as I did.

  “Hold on a second here, Mick,” Cray said, but Sullivan had taken him by the shoulder and was forcibly marching him down the hall like a naughty schoolboy, talking close to his ear, too low for me to hear. About halfway down, Cray looked over his shoulder at me, his broad, naked forehead drawn in a troubled frown. Then they were gone and I was alone with a body under a sheet and the growing conviction that I really was involved now, like it or not.

  If only I could scrape up some kind of concrete evidence, I knew I could get the kid on my side. But where to start? There were a million things that stank about this case. A million places where things just didn’t add up. A dead guy who wasn’t dead. A suicide that wasn’t a suicide and the one girl who knew for sure was under a bloodstained sheet in a shitty Skin hospital waiting for a one-way trip to the morgue.

  A tall, scrawny orderly picked that moment to show up, sheepish in the doorway.

  “Gotta take her now,” he said softly.

  “To the morgue, huh?” I looked away from the shape under the sheet and out through the bars at the captive moon. I had an idea.

  17

  The morgue was just what you’d expect. Dim, grungy, lit by buzzing, greenish fluorescents that made everyone look like a corpse. Chipped porcelain table with a drain at the foot. Dirty sink filled with ugly, violent instruments. Battered metal drawers like filing cabinets for the dead. The gray-green linoleum had a dark track worn into it in a path around the autopsy table.

  Most Hoods never wind up here. Pretty much anybody with a dollar and people who love them gets taken care of by the family Barber. Only the broke and the hopeless, the unloved and the unwanted end their days in this dreary little room. The unwanted and, of course, murder victims.

  Jasmine’s body was there, sheet-wrapped and still, stretcher shoved indifferently into a corner. Her bare feet stuck out the end and there was a big green and white tag hanging from one exposed, glossy-nailed toe. At least that tag had her name scrawled across it in spidery longhand above the block letter lie: SUICIDE. Not like the other victims, anonymous and unidentified as butchered rabbits in a carnicería window.

  At this hour, the Skin pathologist was snug at home in bed with his hairy-headed wife. There was no one there but an old, crusty diener with a faded purple and black hood and suspicious eyes. It took all my charms just to get his name, which turned out to be Zopilote.

  “I brought this,” I said, holding out Jasmine’s bloodstained hood like a peace offering.

  He nodded. There was no need to explain. He wheeled Jasmine’s body into the center of the room and removed the sheet. She was nude, battered face still hidden behind that crummy paper hood. I looked down at the linoleum as he wrestled he
r inert bulk onto the autopsy table, horrified by how much she looked like me. It was like seeing my own corpse and filled my gut with cold, creeping chills.

  “Go ahead,” he said, stepping back and pushing the now empty stretcher away.

  I stepped up to the edge of the autopsy table. My mouth was dry and my hands slick and shaky. Jasmine’s corpse just lay there, indifferent to my turmoil like a big cold doll, like an image in a not-so-fun house mirror. I closed my eyes and slowly, methodically got my shit together.

  When I opened my eyes, I shook out the bloody hood, loosening the laces. Gripping the back hem of the hood, I lifted Jasmine’s cool, heavy head, ignoring the bad, lumpy feel of it beneath the hospital mask, and swapped the paper for the fabric in a single fluid motion. For some strange reason I remembered Minnie changing my hood for me as a kid, standing me before her tacky, gilt-framed mirror and teaching me how to make sure that not even a sliver of facial skin was visible during the switch. I learned that skill before I learned to tie my own laces. We all did. As I snugged and tied the laces on Jasmine’s mask, I wondered who had taught little Jasmine how to change her hood and where that person was today.

  Zopilote was standing on the other side of the room, back to me, picking things up and putting them down and giving me the space to do what had to be done. I laid Jasmine’s hooded head gently back down on the table and crumpled the paper mask, tossing it into a steel step-lid trashcan.

  “Been here a few years, have ya?” I asked Zopilote’s back, making awkward conversation and trying to figure out how to ask him what I wanted to know. It’s kinda hard to be nonchalant when you’re surrounded by corpses.

  Silence and then a barely discernible nod.

  Unable to come up with something clever, I just went ahead and asked: “What do you make of these murders?”

  Again ticking silence and finally he turned towards me and spoke.

  “First one’s still here.” He tipped his chin towards one of the drawers. “The Jane Doe.”