South Central Noir

When he stepped outside the apartment, he heard the main front door opening. For a blink he froze but knew he had to feign being nonchalant. He descended the stairs as the woman he’d seen in the morning started up them.

“How you doing?” he said, angling past her with his paper bag.

She glared at him but didn’t say anything as she ascended. He didn’t think she took him for a cop. But she was going to notice the broken in door any second. It wouldn’t latch and that was noticeable.

“Hey,” she called out.

Magrady quickened his pace through the entrance and out onto the walkway. Hopefully she wasn’t packing. He jogged as best he could, bad knee and all, over to his car to get away from there.

Later that night, not having had a visit from the law, Magrady leafed through the contents of a large ten-by-twelve gray envelope of mementos. If he couldn’t find out who poisoned Banshall or who might claim his body, he could at least revisit parts of a past they shared. There was a Polaroid of a young, thinner him in the Three Clicks in uniform, a Vietnamese “B girl” sitting on his knee. They were obviously both tipsy. Another picture showed Banshall blowing the sax on the club’s tiny stage accompanied by a guitarist and a drummer, the musicians also in uniform. Hard to believe any of them had been that young.

Magrady kept sifting through the items in no particular order. There was a letter his daughter Esther had written him years ago, begging him to get clean. He was glad they were no longer estranged these days. He scanned some newspaper clippings from the city council campaign, finding his name mentioned in an article from the Sentinel, LA’s Black newsweekly. But it was an article from the Los Angeles Times that he fixed on. It was an interview with the candidate, Tina Chalmers, and she was talking about the death of one of the architects of the gang truce between the Crips and Bloods. This had been an effort begun before April 29 but had gotten traction when it came into effect afterward. The truce eventually broke down, but Chalmers was talking about its merits and the need to redouble that sort of effort.

“Tony Blow does not need to have died in vain,” Chalmers was quoted as saying.

Tony Blow was the street name for a reformed gangbanger who’d been killed. He was controversial as he was the face of the gang truce, even being interviewed on national news. But it was also alleged he was under investigation by the FBI for drugs and guns. Magrady couldn’t remember his real name. He got on his laptop and found a pertinent article about his death. Blow was found shot to death in a rear house on 76th Street off an alley. His murder was unsolved at the time of the article, though believed to have been gang related. Magrady did more checking and it seemed the murder was still open now, decades later. He returned to the original article. Toward the end of the piece, he found Blow’s real name. Then he read it again to make sure.

“I felt no particular emotion about poisoning him. It was just one of those things,” he said, a slight smile on his composed face. “The more it stayed on my mind, though, the more it seemed I should do something about it. He was my father after all. When I knew he was gonna bring the quartet over after our opening night for a little celebration, it all came together.”

Magrady stood in his windbreaker before Lee Sorrells, who sat at a piano. They were in a half-lit space, the back room of McDade’s Wholesale Beauty and Fixture Supply on Avalon Boulevard. Sorrells had an arrangement with the owner and this was where he rehearsed. The space was sparsely furnished, only one other chair and a mini fridge on the concrete floor. High up in the rear wall were three barred windows overlooking an alley. This provided what light there was.

Sorrells thunked a key. “You talk to that detective?”

“No.” Magrady sat down in a chair angled toward the piano. “What am I gonna tell ’em?”

“I’m Tony Blow’s son.”

The murdered gang truce leader’s real name was Anthony Sorrells. When Magrady had read that, he recalled Banshall’s introduction of the members of his quartet.

“It could be a coincidence,” Magrady said. “The last name. But he died violently and now Ty gets murdered.”

The younger Sorrells plinked several keys.

Magrady continued: “Anyway, those supposed coincidences itched at me. I got to thinking about Tony Blow back in the day. I’d met him a couple of times, a charismatic dude. He had real potential.”

The son looked at him evenly.

“Of course, there were also the rumors about him.”

The pianist remained motionless behind his instrument. “So you got online and went down the rabbit hole about my dad.”