In the Court of the Yellow King (37 page)

He arrived on the northwestern side of MacArthur Park, the walking beer finished, crushed flat, and stowed inside his jacket like a hidden badge. Police cruisers and fire trucks and news vans and the gathered crowd all stood and looked up like a chorus at the front of the Park Plaza Hotel on the corner of 6th and Park View, facing MacArthur Park. The Tacos Tamix truck was parked nearby, just outside the media circus. No one waited in line.

lesh and Stone

The carved head stared down from its perch overlooking the bronze front door of the Park Plaza. Above it was block lettering chiseled into the sandstone by the original builders back in the 20’s as a calling card for their Lodge:

All things whatsoever ye would

that men should do to you

do ye even so to them

This clumsily constructed proverb was flanked on each side by a pair of war angels spaced twenty feet apart and thirty feet up, hands resting on sword hilts, blades pointed down, ostensibly at the ready for days such as this. Between the angels and the singular head, two drop cloths were slung across the wide matching expanses that made up the outer frame of the front entrance jutting out from the Park Plaza proper. The tarps mostly covered what was underneath, as the LAFD attempted to spare the locals from the latest indignity unleashed upon the populace. Even still, four heavy trails of blood had dripped from whatever was hidden beneath the draping, daring the mind to fill in the gruesome details. Far above this, a phrase was painted across the top floor walls and windows, the blackening blood contrasting sharply with the light yellow stone.

The play’s the thing

How did someone reach down that low from the roof? Or how did someone reach up that high from the ground? Firemen’s ladders weren’t available for loan-out to the local punk ass graff crews.
THE PLAY’S THE THING
... Shakespeare. Taggers must be getting real uppity these days, or maybe spending more time in JUCO between lowering property values across the city.

The perimeter on Park View in front of the building was cordoned off by yellow police tape, holding back a growing crowd of concerned locals and rubbernecking commuters, cell phones taking it all in for safe keeping. Behind the plastic barrier, gray tarps covered four mounds on the asphalt, two on each side of the front door, shadowed by the building behind them. The size and shape of the shrouded remains seemed too small to be complete bodies, each one measuring what was probably three feet across. The coroner’s van pulled up and parked in the middle of Park View. Forensics was already on scene, snapping pictures and bagging up splatter, of which there seemed to be an abundance. A bouquet of lemon yellow roses lay in the gutter next to the van’s front tire. Water from a burst pipe up the street streamed down the pavement, stripping off the petals and dragging them into the storm drain at the end of the block.

Ganz sidled up to a beat cop, blond crew cut topping a sunburned cinderblock head that continued unimpeded into his navy blue uniform stretched tight over his juiced up shoulders and arms. He was eyeing the crowd through wraparound Oakleys, the white tan lines on the side of his face wider than the black plastic frames. New shades, purchased from a bygone era ruled by Jeep Renegades and Bon Jovi and wraparound Oakleys.

“How did someone get up that high?” Ganz muttered just loud enough.

The cop didn’t take his eyes off the crowd.

Ganz pulled out his pad and jotted down a few notes. “I mean, they’d need some pretty heavy-duty equipment to get all the way up there, with their paints and whatnot... You think this is some new kind of guerrilla marketing?”

The cop noticed his notepad. “Who are you?”

Ganz shoved a Winston between his teeth and squinted a humorless smile. “You don’t know?”

The cop stared at him, his hidden eyes – most likely the empty blue of February sleet – most likely glaring. This wasn’t a new thing, his anonymity amongst the LAPD uniforms, but it always surprised him nonetheless. He was all over the news back in ’87. This thick-necked fullback in the 80’s shades was probably still playing with his Transformers when Ganz was getting interviewed as the hero on the steps of the justice building downtown, just days before a routine investigation turned sideways and everything around him went to shit. Elijah liked Transformers. Ganz hadn’t seen Elijah for 25 years. How old would he be now? As old as Ganz was back then... Jeep Renegades and Bon Jovi. The smashed can in his jacket itched at his chest.

“Local press,” Ganz said, wishing he’d picked up another beer at Araya. He took a drag and pointed his cigarette at the building. “You know who did this? Some new tagger crew?”

“Who’re you with? You gotta pass?”

“LA Times. Vic Baumgartner sent me.”

The cop puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “Fucking great... Talk to the Lieutenant.”

“I have,” Ganz said. “He told me to come to you. That you’d have the story.”

The cop snorted. “I don’t have shit. I’m just crowd control... and keeping my eye on those guys.”

Ganz followed the sightline of the uniformed fireplug out over all of the black haired heads and baseball caps and Pompano cowboy hats, toward the back of the crowd. There was space between the group of mothers and fathers and grandmothers and children looking up at the building and a half circle of figures standing behind them. All of them wore black canvas shoes, pants and hoodies, topped with featureless white masks covering their faces. Perfectly round black eye holes seemed to suck in everything that stood in front of them, including the middle-aged man with the itchy veins and notebook.

“Who are they?” Ganz asked, this time totally to himself.

“I have no fucking idea,” the cop said, clenching his belt with thick hands. Walnut crushers. The leather creaked, and the .45 in his holster rode up higher on his waist. “They look like one of them dance crews my niece watches on TV, but no one is dancing around here today.”

“And too early for Halloween,” Ganz said, figuring that it was August or thereabouts, based on the heat and the thickness of the smog rimming the San Gabriels to the northeast. September would be worse. The worst month of the year, when the wind stopped and the foothills burned.

“Those ain’t Halloween masks.” The cop crossed his arms, stress testing the polyester fibers of his shirt.

Ganz left the cop and pushed through the crowd. It wasn’t easy going, and as he approached the semi circle of masked figures, he couldn’t tell if they were looking at him, as they hadn’t changed the angle of their necks, nor their posture. And he couldn’t see their eyes inside those weird, contoured masks. Viewing them more closely, it was difficult to tell if they were male or female, as their identical, baggy outfits rendered them thin and sexless underneath. They weren’t physically imposing or outwardly dangerous, but somehow seemed threatening by their uniformity, and their stillness. Things on the streets were loud and obvious. Visibly aggro. This group was a mystery. And they didn’t move a muscle, even as Ganz approached them and stopped only a few feet away from the group. Just like with the neighborhood walls, what Ganz thought were white masks were actually the same pale yellow as the new coats of paint all over Pico Union, as the stone hotel behind him. The last, tragic shade of yellow before the color fell into an eternal expanse of dead white. And at this close distance, he saw their eyes underneath. They were large and staring, each set of irises populating every shade of the rainbow save red and purple. And none of them blinked. Just stared, with a quivering intensity.

Ganz stepped back, and as he did, the spell seemed to break. The figures turned and walked slowly away from the crowd with hands shoved deep into pockets, scattering a flock of pigeons and stepping over nodded out junkies curled up on the beatdown grass. The birds rose silently into the air, and instead of circling back, took off for another part of the city rather than settling back down on their home base. Ganz had never seen pigeons move with such determined direction, and with such speed. The masked figures continued walking toward the lake at the center of the park, their silhouettes fusing with the palm trees surrounding the alkaline lake that hadn’t naturally hatched a live fish since the natives sold the swamp to the broken promise of the 18th century.

f King and Kingpins

Ganz made his way home as the sun set, putting on a private show for him and him alone. He liked this time of day, when the sun gave up and packed it in, giving the night over to the darkness. The dying rays glinted off the skyscrapers to his left, which lorded over downtown like protective pimps minding their stable. He blinked away the flash of dying daylight, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand gripped around a fairly fresh beer.

The California sun always hit his eyes strangely, something he first discovered sitting in the back seat of his family’s Studebaker all those decades ago, creeping along slowly with Friday afternoon traffic on the 10 Freeway on the outskirts of Los Angeles. While his father chain-smoked his curses at big city traffic, his mother had made a comment about finally being in Hollywood, and Little Henry Ganz sat up straight and pulled himself up to the window, expecting to see movie stars and limousines strobed by machine gun flash bulbs. Silver screen glamour girls like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and Elizabeth Taylor, lounging in deck chairs on the shoulder, winking to all the new arrivals behind giant sunglasses. Frank Sinatra backed by a curtain of diamond palm trees, singing us home. But all he saw was a cloudless pale above him, and the blinding gleam of silver white chrome all around. So little color, and so much bright... He never knew he had sensitive eyes until that day, exposed by the endless snake of freeway, scaled with heated steel that singed little Henry’s insides. The pallid gleam of those tentacles writhing from the heart of Los Angeles into the ashen desert overwhelmed his sight, accustomed as they were to mud and gray clouds, and his eyes had never gotten used to it, turning one shade of brown lighter that day.

Ganz stopped at an empty bus bench to jot down a few thoughts, leaning back into the jumble of magic marker graffiti scrawled across the backrest. Before he left the park, he’d overheard two detectives talking about the covered remains. What had hit the ground was only half of them. The rest of the four bodies were sunken into the building itself, integrated into the stone of the structure. ID found on the lower half of one of the corpses revealed that he was Hector “Little Death” Alameida, a heavyweight in the Mexican Mafia, presumed murdered eight years ago even though street rumors and
nar
co corridos
told otherwise. Not only had Little Death been discovered alive, but alive enough to be verifiably murdered in a bizarre and very public way. The other three half bodies didn’t have identification, but the extensive Salvadorian prison tattoos on the legs of one of them made it seem real likely that Ernesto Dimas, the head honcho of MS 13 in Los Angeles, had met his end right next to his rival. The third vic was obviously a member of Aryan Nation, based on his own ink of fascist bon mots and Nordic runes, accented by bullet scars and the single shamrock on his backside, which told the cops everything they needed to know. The fourth was a black guy, wearing vintage blue BK “Blood Killer” tennies, and therefore most assuredly someone associated with the Crips. Probably Eight Tray or Rollin’ 60’s, as they both made runs at this side of downtown on occasion. If his identified cohort was any indication, he and the other unnamed were probably higher up in the ranks than your average drive-by foot soldier, and certainly specifically targeted.

Two, and possibly four, gangland kingpins shoved face-first and torso-deep into the side of a building, everything below the waist severed and left on the ground. Aside from the assault on known physics, this presented a seriously fucked-up metropolitical situation, and could unleash spectacular waves of retaliatory violence and brutal repositioning that Los Angeles hadn’t seen since the height of the gang wars in the late 80’s, before Rodney King and Chief Gates and the riots that let most of the fizz out of the bottle, paving the way to the color truces and the Big Police Purge of 1993.