Death Walks Skid Row Page 8

  “But I need more money. I need to buy things.”

  “The mission can’t help you with what you need?”

  “They don’t want me to come around anymore,” Sal said.

  The Governor doubted that was the truth, but arguing would be pointless. “How much do you need?”

  “Twenty dollars, like they paid before.”

  “What are you going to use it for?”

  Sally stared at the ground. “It’s that time.”

  That’s another thing nobody stops to think about when they talk about people living on the streets, the Governor thought. Sure, there’s no place to go to the bathroom, but for women, dealing with what his mama used to call ‘the curse’ was as hard as finding a toilet.

  “Look, Sally, I got a sawbuck on me, and you can have it if you really need it, but don’t go spreading around that the First National Bank of Governor is open for business, you dig?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Sal held out her filthy hand, which showed traces of old blood smears.

  “Pull your hand back,” the Governor said softly. “I don’t want anyone to see this transaction.” Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the crumpled $10 bill and slipped it to her.

  “You’re the last of the good ones,” Sally muttered, palming the bill. “How’d the two of us end up like this anyway?”

  “Life happens.”

  “You mean shit happens.”

  “Sometimes there’s not much difference, Sal,” the Governor said, turning and walking away, hoping he hadn’t fallen for a fast line. She might be going off to buy a bottle of Red Lightning, a brand of popskull so toxic it also left red stains on the skin.

  Her question “How’d the two of us end up like this anyway?” echoed inside his head. More and more lately, the fact that the Governor was a fraud weighed on him. The only real difference between him and that kid Aspen, and apparently this Danny Speakman guy that the police were hunting, was motive for the fraudulent behavior, because like them he was not really homeless.

  Nobody on the streets knew where he stayed at night. If anyone ever had stopped to wonder why the Governor was never seen emerging from a pile of ragged blankets in a doorway, or a sagging cardboard box in an alley, or tucked into a corner of a mission or huddled on the walkway of the Second Street tunnel in the rain, they never asked about it.

  There was little reason for them to, since on Skid Row people stayed where they stayed, and that was their problem. It took so much strength just to stay alive that worrying about somebody else was wasted effort.

  For most.

  Even so, the Governor made a practice of glancing side to side with every step he took as he walked back home, to make certain that no one was following him with their eyes.

  ‘Home’ was a two-story, red brick residential hotel, small – only eight units – stashed away on a block of Harlem Place between Main and Spring at the edge of Skid Row. The Governor occupied half of the bottom floor, where two units had been combined. The place was kept up reasonably well, but not so well that someone driving by would wonder why it looked better than any of the neighboring buildings. And the rent was kept cheap, but that hardly mattered to the Governor – he didn’t pay rent since he owned the building.

  Sharlton “Charlie” Grosvenor’s story would have made a Column One in the Times if he’d allow it to.

  He had grown up in Mobile, Alabama, did his stint in ’Nam, and after mustering out moved to Los Angeles to get into the music business. He had always played a mean guitar, but discovered he wasn’t a mean enough person to turn pro. At least not enough of a cut-throat.

  Instead he learned the art of short-order cooking and worked at a string of restaurants in the city, finally gaining enough support to try and open his own place, The Grove, on Hoover, just up from 25th. He went into business with a couple of sharp yuppie types and offered the kind of food on which he’d been raised: ribs, barbecue, sweet potatoes and greens – what a decade earlier would have been called ‘soul food’. For a while the place was successful. It was even written up in the papers. But then strange things started happening. The books began not quite adding up, and by the time Grosvenor became concerned enough to pull his head out of the smoker and try to find out what was going on, his partners – each one with a powerful craving for nose candy, he would later learn – had vanished. So had the money required to keep The Grove open.

  In fact, everything was gone, except the cans currently in the store room and the growing pile of bills, most of which he thought had already been paid.

  Charlie Grosvenor was not the first to learn that the people to whom he owed money couldn’t have cared less that he had been totally screwed by his trusted partners. He likened it to the demise of an old buddy from ’Nam, who had returned to the States in a box, but only with his top-half intact. This is what it feels like to get your legs cut off, he thought at the time. They’re there one minute and then bam! The next they’re gone and you’re not even sure how it happened.

  Charlie reacted to the sudden spiraling disaster the way so many had before him. He slid down the thin neck of a liquor bottle and splashed around in the dark wetness of despair. He lost the restaurant and before long, lost his home. What’s more, the woman with whom he was living decided she wanted to go eat off of someone else’s menu. Before Charlie even knew what was happening he was out on the streets living alongside the people he used to drive past and not think very much about.

  He had been on Skid Row for nearly five years when the reprieve came.

  It happened at the end of a particularly bad week, even for a streeter, in which he had been beaten up by a much larger man over half a bottle of Everclear. Having a couple bucks in his shoe that his assailant didn’t find, he had made his way to a market to buy something that would dull the pain in his ribs and jaw. Instead his attention was attracted by a new Lotto sign behind the counter. He was suddenly struck by the only possible way out of his situation.

  It was insane to even think it would work, but it was the only particle of light in his life at that moment. So Charlie Grosvenor bought a Lotto ticket.

  And lost.

  But he bought another one the next week.

  He lost again.

  He bought a third and a fourth and a fifth one.

  He lost, lost, lost.

  Yet it remained a particle of light. With each failed ticket, he thought ever harder about what he would do with the money if he ever won anything. He could not get his head around the revenge of living well, and not being particularly religious, he did not plan to tithe it all to a church. God never got any of that money anyway, only his advance men. Playing the ‘if-I-won-the-Lotto’ game for Charlie always came up with the same mental response: he would use whatever money fell his way in the wind to help others on the street. Like him, many of these people did nothing to warrant their desperate situation. They were victims of circumstances, too, playing a sloppily-dealt hand against a society that held all the aces.

  To ensure he had enough to buy his weekly Lotto ticket, Charlie stopped drinking anything harder than a Burger King root beer. He bought ticket after ticket after ticket.

  And racked up loss after loss after loss.

  He skipped one week, giving his two dollars instead to a woman with a small child, both of whom looked like they had not eaten in a week. But the next week he bought two tickets.

  And lost.

  And a ticket the week after that.

  And lost.

  And one the week after that.

  That was when Sharlton Grosvenor won $8.6million.

  Once the shock abated, he ran to the Midnight Mission and stayed in one of their hot showers until he was forced to get out. He got a haircut and shaved his beard, and took the best suit of clothes he could find that fit his lanky body, in order to look good enough to accept his check from the California Lottery.

  On a whim, he asked one of the mission’s cooks if he could borrow an apron, which he
wore over his clothing at the check ceremony, explaining that he planned to use the money to open a new restaurant. He gave his real name to the press, but that was one of the last times he ever used it. It was also why he was so cautious about revealing it now. In the long run, though, it didn’t matter. What people remembered, if anyone remembered his winning at all, was the Guy in the Apron, not someone named Sharlton Grosvenor.

  For the next year he lived a double life, spending his days back on Skid Row, helping people out as subtly as he could, while retiring each evening to a plain but pleasant apartment not far from his bank branch. He contacted a financial advisor who had no idea of his daytime activities or persona, and then set about buying a few residential buildings in the Downtown area that no one else seemed to want, and began offering units dirt cheap to people who wanted to escape living in the other kind of dirt.

  Eventually he moved into one of them himself.

  Charlie also paid for classes for those who wanted to take them, to help get them off the streets, but always through a foundation he had set up rather than in person. He did not want anyone on Skid Row knowing who he was, or what he was worth.

  The only luxury he permitted himself out of his deal was to buy a good Gibson guitar. He learned his old, creased fingers were still able to make the strings sing when he wanted them to. (Though his frequent spicy chicken dinners at TiJacques’, the Haitian restaurant on Fifth and Main that he had invested in after a devastating fire from faulty wiring threatened to shutter the place, could also be considered luxuries.)

  When Charlie Grosvenor arrived at his building, he went in through a normally locked back door, looking around to make certain no one saw him. The ghost act was hard to keep up, particularly when the two young boys who lived in the building were playing outside, but he managed.

  Opening the door of his suite, he noticed that he had forgotten to turn off the DVD player after watching a film last night. “Damn,” he muttered to no one. Six or seven-million bucks left in the bank still didn’t mean he needed to be wasting electricity. Every streeter could eat lunch for the cost of the juice he’d just squandered through carelessness.

  After turning it off, he went to the kitchen and he grabbed some milk from the fridge, then opened a fresh package of Nutter Butters. He gobbled down a half-dozen of the cookies with a swig of moo juice. Then he went to his bathroom and peeled off his clothes, dumping them in the special hamper that contained his ‘work’ outfits. He had four identical, or nearly so, sets of clothes, all kept in varying states of dirtiness and disrepair, but none of which were so reeking as to pollute the air in his rooms.

  When he needed to wash up, like when he had to visit the offices of his attorney or financial planner, he could easily do it, and then explain away his sudden cleanliness to the others on the row in a variety of ways – if they asked. Most didn’t.

  As long as the Governor was ready with a dead president, either coined or printed, most did not care if he looked scrubbed or not. He was, however, glad that he had not done a wash-up in the days prior to Detective Knight’s asking to see his hands.

  Since today’s errand was not as official as visiting an office, he had planned to spray off the top layers of grime. But once he got under the shower, Charlie didn’t want to leave. He ended up doing the full wash, wax and detail, including shampooing his hair and beard for the first time in a month.

  After the shower he dried his hair and brushed it into an acceptable style, and then worked to shape his long, full beard. When he was finished, he looked a little bit like the comedian Dick Gregory.

  Putting on some fresh underwear (which was yet another luxury because nothing in his life as a millionaire meant more to him than clean Jockeys anytime he wanted them), he reached into a tiny closet for a pair of khaki slacks and a deep blue dress shirt. After slipping into a pair of loafers, he angled a Panama hat over his semi-tamed hair, put on an expensive pair of sun-shades. Tucking his wallet into his back pocket, he ventured out again.

  No one seeing him would recognize him as the Governor.

  Charlie wanted to find out more about this Danny Speakman, who, according to the detective, was some kind of writer or reporter. And if someone worked in the print trade legitimately, there was one place where they could be traced.

  CHAPTER 9

  Even though the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library had become dwarfed by the skyscrapers that had grown up around it, it remained an impressive-looking building. The new wings that were constructed after two devastating fires in the 1980s took away the original building’s symmetry, but he loved the mosaic pyramidal cap on top of its tower, and all its exterior carvings and engravings. The pyramid was a fitting image since the building’s interior was laid out like a pharaoh’s tomb, with long escalators taking the place of shafts rising up and down between chambers, old murals covering the ceilings like early 20th century hieroglyphics, and even sphinx statues flanking a grand staircase that was no longer the main access from floor to floor.

  A long time ago Charlie had read that the middle name of the library’s architect was ‘Grosvenor’, though he doubted they were related.

  Rather than walk to the Downtown landmark, Charlie had taken a bus.

  At times, he worried he was spoiling himself.

  The lunch hour was wrapping up when he got there but the library courtyard, a tiny square of nature amidst a world of concrete, steel and glass, was still dotted with workers from the surrounding office buildings eating their brown-bag meals or poking into takeout containers. There were several streeters as well – none begging for food, but simply appreciating a place to sit, if not lie down.

  Going through the enormous doors or the structure, Charlie nodded to the security guard, who said, “Hello, sir.” Normally his first stop during a library visit was to go up and gaze at the murals which represented the history of California … at least the Eurocentric history that was widely accepted in the 1930s when they were painted. He loved the murals. They were old and faded and wore a dark patina of grime from decades of exposure. A little like him.

  On this day, though, he went straight to the Tom Bradley wing, which was named after the former mayor of Los Angeles. There the computer lab was located. Anyone with a library card could log onto the Web for thirty minutes.

  Charlie had thought about getting a computer of his own many times before. He never did so, however, because he remembered somebody at a bank one time telling him that once you put your name on the internet, you forfeit any semblance of privacy. Whether that was true or not he didn’t know, but it was enough of a caution to cause him to fear that his presence on the web might somehow lead to discovery of his secret.

  Luckily, there was no line of people waiting for a computer, so he had to cool his heels for only five minutes before a terminal opened up.

  A self-taught typist, Charlie Grosvenor was a hunter-and-pecker, and he had never fully mastered using the mouse, so a couple of precious minutes of his half-hour were wasted getting accidentally shuttled into unfamiliar screens. Finally he made his way back to the homepage, where he typed in the name ‘Danny Speakman’. Of the five pages that popped up, representing three different Danny Speakman’s as near as he could figure, none indicated any relation to a writer or journalist.

  Next he tried a bookselling site to see if Danny Speakman had any books published, and came up with nothing. Then he realized that ‘Danny’ was likely a nickname. Charlie tried a general search for ‘Daniel Speakman’, but again came up with nothing.

  The mystery of Danny Speakman was deepening.

  He was about to give up when a voice just behind him whispered, “I can’t find him, either.’” Startled, Charlie turned around to see a strikingly beautiful Latina’s face hovering inches from his own.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that, young lady,” Charlie said.

  “Sorry.”

  “If you’re waiting for the computer, I still have about twenty minutes lef
t.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m Ramona Rios. I used to be on the television news.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re the one they call the Governor, right?”

  “They who?”

  “People on the street. The homeless. I’ve been following you, and—”

  Now Charlie Grosvenor was alarmed. “You’ve been what?” he cried, unable to keep his voice down.

  “You were pointed out to me this morning by a bagman, and I followed you to an apartment. I thought about knocking on the door and forcing a meeting, but instead I waited. I saw you come out looking like this, different. Then I followed you and got on the bus behind you.”

  “Damn, girl. Since you say I look different from the street man you followed to an apartment, how do you know I’m him?”

  “Your walk is the same,” she said. “You hold your head higher than other homeless people.”

  “Who said I was homeless?”

  Ramona smiled. “You did.”

  Charlie looked at her skeptically.

  “You just asked me about the street man I followed to your apartment, but I never said I followed a street man, I only said you were pointed out by a street man. All I said was that I followed a man known as the Governor. You identified yourself as a bum.”

  “That’s not a term I like very much, young lady,” Charlie said. “Unless you’re talking about a baseball team. I prefer the word streeter.”

  “Sorry, but you are the Governor, aren’t you?”

  Charlie sighed. “Yeah. And I hope you’re on my side.”

  “I am, believe me. I’m looking for Danny, too. I ran into him just a few days ago and he spun me a story about posing as a bu … a streeter for an article he was writing.”

  A young man approached them and said, “If you’re done with that computer and just going to talk instead, can I get on it?”

  “If the only thing you’re looking for is Danny Speakman, then you’re done,” Ramona told Charlie. “I promise that you won’t find him.”

  “All right.”