The Setup Man (9 page)

“What kind of church you want?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I pause, reconsider: “Catholic is best.”

Five minutes later, Marcus hollers. He reads the shingle out
front: “Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. Says they welcome all worshippers.”

“Perfect.” I haul the Eldo into the dark parking lot and coast around to the back. Behind the church there’s a little entrance for the rectory, a mailbox, and a porch light that has been put out for the night. I maneuver the car against the fence at the rear of the lot—far enough from the rectory that the priest won’t hear the idling V-8. I put the car in park and cut the lights.

“Give me a hand?” I ask. Marcus leaps out onto the blacktop. We move around to the rear of the Cadillac. I put the key in the trunk and turn the lock; the lid swings up.

I know it’s a cliché, but I am surprised by how peaceful Bam Bam looks in death. His eyes are shut—lips, too—and a single dime-sized hole mars his forehead. It looks like he’s been rocking a well-kept goatee, sort of a Latin Satan look, but his cheeks now sport a healthy five-o’clock shadow. His head is cocked toward one meaty shoulder. Bam Bam was never a slim character, but I estimate he has put on nearly a hundred pounds since his playing days.

“You got him in here by yourself?” I ask Marcus.

“Guess I was pumped,” he says.

“Guess so.” I reach in and touch Bam Bam’s tattooed wrist. The flesh is cold to the touch. “You want head or feet?”

“Seriously? Feet.”

“Okay, count of three.”

The body is as stiff as a bundle of two-by-fours, which means my uneven grip on Bam Bam’s head and shoulders is good enough. I take care not to let the fingers of my left hand slip too far inside the cavity where the skull was blown out. The brain is cold, too, and firmer than I expected. It will be a long time before I scoop the seeds out of a cantaloupe, that’s for sure.

I catch Marcus’s eye and nod toward the back door of the
rectory. My plan is a kind of morbid ding-dong ditch—or a twist on Lazarus, if you prefer. We’ll drop the body, ring the bell, and speed off in the Caddy. It’s not the most graceful plan, but it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.

We are standing in front of the door, getting ready to drop the load, when the porch light comes on. I look at Marcus. His eyes go wide, and he breaks for the car, dropping Bam Bam’s feet. I drop the other end and follow. Behind me, I hear the door open.

“Hey!” a man’s voice says. “What’s going on here? What the hell is this?”

I run to the rear of the Cadillac and slam the trunk shut. After I slide into the driver’s seat, I look back at the rectory. The door hangs wide open, but the priest—at least I assume he’s the priest—is no longer there. I experience a moment of terror as I consider that he might have run around behind us, maybe to get a look at our plates. But then he appears in the doorway: a short, balding man. Thin through the shoulders. From this distance, maybe twenty-five feet, he looks Asian. Then I see he’s got a shotgun. He’s peeking at the breech, checking the shells.

I throw the transmission in gear and floor it. The parking lot is gravel—that or some seriously decomposed asphalt—and the wheels of the Cadillac spin before catching. The car lurches forward.

“Come back here!” the priest yells. “What do you think this is, Skid Row?”

He fires a shot, but he must have aimed wide, because nothing breaks and the car continues down the driveway. Without checking traffic, I swing a hard left back toward the freeway and narrowly avoid colliding with an oncoming semi truck. Walgreens, it says on the side. Good to know the world will have Q-tips and ChapSticks when they wake up tomorrow.

There’s another loud noise as I escape down National Boulevard, maybe another shot from God. Maybe nothing. I don’t look back. When we’ve driven ten minutes, I pull into the deserted parking lot of a medical-office plaza. I idle the car, look at Marcus. “Do you think he saw the plates?” I ask. I feel awful for what we’ve already done to this girl’s car. An APB would be the icing on the cake.

“Hold on,” Marcus says. He opens the glove box and removes a Phillips-head screwdriver. “Ain’t the real plates, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I took some before I picked you up at the airport.”

“Took some from where?”

“I don’t know—a dump truck or some shit. There’s a city yard near my girl’s place.”

Sure enough, when Marcus returns with the plates, I see that the first digit is an “E” inside an octagon, the symbol for a tax-exempt California government vehicle.

“A dump truck?”

“Or a cherry picker—some big truck. It was dark.”

Oh, it was dark, all right. I want to puke. When did my life become so dicey? To this point I’ve had a comfortable run in the investigation game—cheating spouses, paternity threats, nothing bloody or life-threatening. Now I’m disposing of bodies in the dead of night. To quote my new favorite preacher: “What the hell is this?” Meanwhile, in my real life I’ve been chugging along for a decade-plus as a setup man—a very comfortable groove, if I say so myself—and now, suddenly, I’m promoted to closer. Why me? I’m not sure I like either of these developments. I feel like a rookie, and as any big-leaguer will tell you, that’s about the worst feeling there is.

Marcus tells me to head for Hollywood, where he says we can spend the night. “Natsumi loves ballplayers,” he says. “Just act cool.”

Half an hour later, we’re turning onto a quiet, tree-lined street off Fountain, near Hollywood High. I pull the Cadillac into the driveway, leaving it behind a pair of old Volkswagen Beetles, one on blocks. Natsumi’s place is a single-story house in the Spanish style, with a tile roof and security bars on the arched windows.

“What about the trunk?” I say. “I read about this cleanser you can use. It contains bacteria that actually digest blood.”

“Tomorrow,” Marcus says.

Marcus can stay up most nights, but once he hits the wall, he’s done. He gives a ten-minute warning, and if he hasn’t found suitable bedding in that time, he will sleep where he falls. Aside from the silver hair, this may be the only way he shows his age.

“Hey, baby,” he says when the door opens. Like the windows, the door is arched and short, as though the house were built for a family of Hollywood dwarves.

“Y’all later than I thought,” says an African American woman in a white shift nightie. She is middle-aged but well
preserved, dark-skinned, and on the thin side, with prominent cheekbones and a dazzling smile. “This your friend?”

“Johnny Adcock, meet Natsumi.”

I put out my hand. “It’s a pleasure,” I say. “Thanks for letting Marcus borrow your car. Sorry we’re so late—my flight was delayed. Fog, you know.”

“Um-hm. I ain’t been in the Bay Area for years, but Marcus is always saying he gonna drag me back up there. Ain’t you, Marcus?”

“It’s late, baby. You got a place where Johnny can crash?”

Natsumi whisks us inside and shuts the door. It takes me a minute to adjust my eyes to low light. The living-room walls are covered with framed posters of Natsumi in boxing regalia—padded headgear, gloves clenched before a snarl. One of the posters is a reproduction of a magazine cover:
Boxing News
, it’s called. Natsumi is the cover girl. She’s alone in a boxing ring, holding a metallic belt the size of a car’s floor mat. If her hairdo is any indication, the photo is at least twenty years old.

“What position you play, Johnny?” she asks me.

“I’m a relief pitcher.”

“Course you are. Marcus say you got a little business on the side, too.”

“That’s right. Just a little something, that’s about the size of it.”

I look over at my friend and see that he’s found the only chair in the room—a cheap-looking plastic folding number in the corner—and is already nodding off.

“You used to box?” I say. “My dad was a boxer.”

“Was he, now?”

“Just amateur, but he was serious about it.”

“That’s the only way to do it. Can’t use your fists no other way if you want to live.”

“I guess not. Hey, listen, Natsumi, can I ask you something?”

With Marcus gone for the night—thank you, Marcus, you have done your duty for today and many days to come—I decide to air out a question that has been bothering me since I spoke with Bethany.

“Sure, what you want to know?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that ‘Natsumi’ wasn’t the name your parents gave you.”

It takes her a minute to see I’m not teasing, but then she loosens up. “That’s right,” she says. “My daddy never even heard of soy sauce.” She walks over to the magazine cover and points to the name at the bottom: Linda Jones. “That was me,” she says.

“So what makes a woman want to change her name?”

She smiles broadly. “Oh, there’s lots of things.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, if you getting married, that’s one. Same if you getting unmarried. Or if you trying to hide from somebody.”

“Yeah, what about that? Since you changed your name, do people look you up less? I know you’re not hiding from anyone, but if you were, do you think it would have worked?”

“I wondered that myself. I think the answer is no.”

“It didn’t hide you?”

“Right. ’Cause I still got lots of people showing up at my door. And not just people who know me from boxing. I’m talking about folks I known my whole life, folks from Oakland and Hollywood and everywhere I been in between. Lord knows how they found me. Seems a person can’t stay hidden these days. I think it’s the computers.”

“Could be.”

I am both satisfied and worried by Natsumi’s answer, because it is the same conclusion I have reached on my own. This girl, Frankie’s passenger, should have known that another name (or another couple of names) would not hide her. Not
with fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition. Even if she only knew this stuff from cop shows, she would understand that it was pointless to change her name if her goal was to disappear.

“You know, Johnny Adcock, I wasn’t trying to hide from nobody. You want to know the real reason I changed my name to Natsumi?”

“What’s that?”

She grins. “Because it sounded pretty.”

I wake up in Natsumi’s spare bedroom. The clock says it is six-thirty in the morning. There is blood crusted along my cuticles and under my fingernails, but my first thought is not to scrub it off but to lie there and do nothing. I have not had a day off in three weeks. I lie inert for another five minutes, because that is what you do on a day off, or so I recall. Finally, I get up and take a shower, helping myself to a towel from the bathroom closet. Afterward I find I’m still the only one up, so I turn on the TV. On the morning news, a reporter with plastic hair speaks earnestly into the camera:

“We are here at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown L.A., where a crowd of the faithful is gathering. Earlier this morning the archbishop announced via Twitter a major development in his yearlong crusade against crime. Diocese officials are reporting that a body was found at the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows in West Los Angeles this morning, an apparent murder victim. The deceased has been identified as Javier Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican native who went on to play baseball for several major-league teams before embarking on a second career in hard-core pornography. The archbishop’s Tweet went as follows, and I quote, ‘Welcome back, Javier Rodriguez, from the dominion of Satan. You will always have
a home with the Lord. Praise be to God.’ A touching story of redemption, here at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Now back to you in the studio …”

This is even better than I had hoped. I expected that the parish priest would fall in love with Bam Bam, but I had no idea he’d share the news with his boss. And no mention of the fleeing car. Just goes to show that, although you cannot rely on the kindness of strangers, you should not rely on the absence of kindness, either.

I make some coffee and wait for Marcus to wake up. I’m hoping the news about Bam Bam’s redemption will settle his nerves. That and whatever art Natsumi practices in her bedroom. I feel bad about putting him in this situation. We have been in some tight scrapes before, but never this bad. Now we’re in the shit, as they say. Marcus has shot and killed a man, and I helped dump the body. To be honest, I’m less worried about the law than I am about whoever Bam Bam was running with. I doubt they make an exception for self-defense.

I grab the paper from the front porch and pull out the sports section. The Dodgers lost by one to the Rockies, and I notice that my friend and former roommate George Luck took the L. I played with Luck at Fullerton, where he was drafted by the Dodgers after his junior year. By the time I made triple-A, George was already established in the bigs. In fact, it was George who took me in after Ginny locked me out, when I had nowhere else to go. I remember calling him from a gas station in Culver City, telling him what had happened. The Dodgers were on the road, but he told me where to get a key to his place in Manhattan Beach. I only stayed three weeks, but it was a kindness I will never forget. We texted last week about grabbing a drink after one of the games in this series, but with the Herrera case heating up like this, I am not sure I will have time—unless George is up for more than a beer.

Marcus comes out of the bedroom, rubbing his face with one of his enormous palms. He was one of those pitchers who seemed to be able to wrap their fingers around a baseball twice. Imagine Jimi Hendrix as a pitcher, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The hand is so large, Marcus doesn’t see me when he enters the kitchen.

“Good news,” I say.

Marcus jumps. He drops the hand, and I see he’s got a shiner on his left eye.

“What happened to you?”

“I told Natsumi about the car.”

“I thought you said she was cool?”

“She is, but the car was supposed to be a wedding present.”

“For whose wedding?”

Marcus looks at me.

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

“Course not. I never told nobody.”

“I can see how that would be a problem.”

“You better leave.”

We shake hands, and I pull him in for a hug.