Violent Spring Page 10

  Meticulously he wiped parts and oiled some others. He reassembled the weapon and put on his harness. “Just want to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with.” The .45 went home into the holster, and Monk shrugged into his loose camel hair sport coat hanging in Kodama’s closet. “See you later?”

  “You betchum, Red Rider.”

  He came over to her and they kissed passionately.

  Monk drove the Galaxie into the heart of L.A., heading for the Cork. Arriving on Western, not too far from the auditorium where the meeting between Perry and Santillion was to take place, he decided to stop there and see what was going on. The parking lot was jammed, and he had to put the car two blocks away and walk back.

  Inside the auditorium, the joint was jumping. On the stage was a long folding table with chairs and two microphones. Linton Perry, casually hip in slacks and a muted sport coat sat on one end of the table. On the other was Luis Santillion in a three-piece suit, black shirt and blood-red tie. In between the two sat the moderator, Tina Chalmers.

  The theater-style seating of the place was filled to capacity. Men and women, mostly brown and black with a smattering of Asians, occupied all available seating. Most, Monk judged from their manner of clothing, were blue collar but a few he surmised to be professional types. Interspersed along the sides of the aisles and down into the front were African-American and Chicano men who, it appeared, were the security for the event.

  Several electronic and print journalists were also present, including Monk’s pal, Kelly Drier.

  A middle-aged Latino man in a plaid shirt was standing and pointing at the stage, his voice raised several notches above normal. “You say you’re for jobs in the community, Mr. Perry. Well, I live in this community twenty years and pay my taxes and my kids go to school with black kids. They come to our house for dinner some time, and mine go to theirs. So how come you only fight for jobs for black people when it’s brown people living here too?”

  Applause and hooting erupted from some of the Latinos in attendance. The black security personnel flexed as one. Tina Chalmers’ mouth twisted slightly into a wry smile.

  Perry pulled one of the microphones close to him.

  “Mr. Santillion has told me that when it comes to the concerns of Latinos, El Major is the organization that will take care of that.” Perry waited then added, “And that black people need to step aside since it’s the Chicanos who have the numbers in this city.” He pushed the microphone back.

  Boos and catcalls emanated loudly from many of the black people in the audience. The Latino sergeants-at-arms looked at one another and pulled back a step or two from the audience. Santillion, his face a mask of controlled anger, spoke into a mike. “What I’ve said is that if black leaders like Mr. Perry insist on treating us as if we are invisible, then we will treat him and the ones associated with him with equal disdain.”

  “Rather than letting fly with accusations back and forth,” Chalmers began, “why don’t we try exploring those areas where we have commonality? Surely there’s something to be gained in a joint project that involves hiring all unemployed or underemployed residents of a community, be they black or brown, on some of these SOMA projects.”

  “And who gets priority?” Santillion demanded.

  “We break it down by numbers, Mr. Santillion,” Chalmers said, cooly. “There are some areas of this city where it’s fifty-fifty, so that would be the hiring ratio.”

  “And what about Pico-Union which is heavily Latino?” Perry asked.

  Chalmers glanced at him sideways. “I think the answer is obvious, Mr. Perry.”

  Monk was leaning against the back wall and turned his head at the sound of the rear double doors opening. Chung Ju Li, president of the Korean-American Merchants Group, Kenny Yu, and several other Korean-Americans strode into the room. They looked around for seats, and finding none available, they too lined up against the back wall. Monk gave Yu a high sign, and he moved near the private eye.

  “Mr. Monk, how goes the work?” The young lawyer extended his hand and Monk shook it.

  “Progress, Mr. Yu, progress. Would you have time to see me on Monday morning? Say early, around breakfast time?”

  “Your office.”

  “No. How about Maria’s Kitchen on La Brea at 8:30 A.M.?”

  “Yes, I know it.” Yu focused on Monk. “Why do you want to meet with just me and not Li and some of the others.”

  Plain-faced, Monk said, “Because I think you’ll tell me the truth about Yushin and what it meant to Bong Kim Suh.”

  Yu took a breath and was about to say something when shouting voices drew their attention to the front of the auditorium. Perry was standing and pointing toward the rear. He shouted, “Why don’t you ask Mr. Li, Ms. Chalmers? Ask Mr. Li about the rumors of bought-up riot-damaged property on the sly and the cheap. That’s about real economic displacement.”

  “The question was about the property you own around town. Like the commercial printing shop down in Compton, Mr. Perry. The shop where you fired two workers for trying to organize a union,” Li said, moving down the center aisle. His hands held tightly at his sides, his head thrust forward like an attack dog.

  Perry shot out of his seat, upending it. “I think you’ve got a lot of nerve coming here and trying to lay that at my doorstep.”

  “I came here,” Li began, “because I knew you’d use this forum to try and make the Merchants Group look like villains.”

  “If the shoe fits,” Perry said. “Tell them I’m a liar about you funneling some of that 7 million in relief money raised in South Korea for the Korean victims here and using it to buy property in South Central and Pico Union through dummy fronts.”

  “You’re a liar and, I think this is the right expression, a two-faced bastard.” Portions of the crowd reacted visibly. “He just asked him to call him a liar, the bastard part he could have left out,” Monk whispered to himself, pushing away from the wall.

  Perry, standing behind the table, was rigid with fury. His voice a whisper of wind across an arctic landscape. “You should be wary of things you say, Mr. Li. Chickens always come home to roost.”

  Li advanced toward the stage. Several black people in the crowd were on their feet.

  Monk gently but firmly put his hand on his shoulder and spun him around. “My advice would be to consider that you’ve made your point, and now get the fuck out of here.”

  The head of the Korean-American Merchants Group stared open-mouthed at the private eye. It took him several seconds to recognize Monk. Finally he said, “This is a free country. I can go up there if I want to.” He shook loose from Monk’s grasp.

  Monk looked past him, at Perry up on the stage. Chalmers had her hand on Perry’s arm, who now stood in front of the table. A look Monk could only interpret as expectation contoured his smooth face. Over to his left, Monk saw two Asian men stand up. Some of the members of the security duty inched closer to the rows the two men stood in.

  “Give it a rest, Mr. Li,” Monk said evenly.

  “I think you forget who works for whom, Mr. Monk,” Li said imperially.

  “It hasn’t slipped my mind. But I can’t very well collect my fee if you wind up in a bed with a tube sticking out of your ass.”

  An odd grin shaped Li’s features. “But it is you blacks who have taught me this lesson. That to get something out of this system, one must make noise and confront those who would deny you.” With that bit of social observation, Li swung around and walked stiff-legged up to the stage.

  Perry waved the guards aside and Li stepped close to the African-American community leader. Chalmers too had come to her feet, standing roughly center and a foot back from the two. She spotted Monk and brightened as he approached. Luis Santillion remained seated, bemusedly gauging the antics of Li and Perry.

  Past his shoulder, Monk heard a commotion. He pivoted at the noise. A young Latino man and two young black men were standing up in their respective rows yelling incoherently at one another. Some of the secu
rity, of both races, moved forward. They kept a cool head and managed to escort the three out of the auditorium. Monk started for the stage again.

  Li was standing very close to the taller Perry, his finger wagging vigorously under the other’s nose. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, my friend.”

  The guards stopped Monk, but withdrew at the urging of Chalmers. He climbed up.

  “I’m damn sure not your friend, Mr. Li. And I’m damn sure of what I said.”

  “Silly rumors,” Li responded contemptuously. In a fluid motion belying his age, Li turned, scooped up the mike, and held it close to his face. “What about those workers you fired, Mr. Perry? You don’t believe in fair pay for a fair day’s work?” He was a minister exhorting his congregation, swaying his body to the emotional flow of the gathered.

  Li turned his body in the direction of Santillion. Clearly enjoying the spotlight.

  “And you, Mr. Santillion. What have you to smile about?”

  “I don’t own any property where I fire the workers,” Santillion said.

  “Ah,” Li began theatrically, “but your organization does have payroll checkoff through the county employee system.”

  Santillion came alive behind his passive features. “What’s your point?”

  “I know that you’re under investigation by the IRS for possible misuse of some of those funds.”

  Gasps went up from several people. Li was playing both men like a concertmaster. Monk was interested in where he got his information.

  “How did you know that?”

  Coyly, Li said, “I read a lot”

  A large middle-aged black woman rose from the assembled masses, adorned in a shapeless black dress of some dull, light absorbing material. Cylindrical, muscular arms complemented her robust frame. She pointed one of the meathook appendages straight out. The index finger that extended from it was composed of misshapen knotted joints. This was a woman who had worked hard all her life, and only thankless toil would follow her to the grave. She had the attention of everyone.

  “I can’t speak to the business of the Korean gentleman or the Spanish fellow,” she rumbled. “But I knows something about Mr. Perry. I been watching him since he came on the scene after the Watts riots in ’65. Just a teenager then, but already a firebrand.”

  A couple of older black women shook their heads in affirmation. Church was in session. Monk moved closer to Chalmers.

  “What ‘I’d like to know,” the woman went on, “is since the Harvesters been goin’ since the late seventies, how come since all that government money and charity money y’all get, you ain’t never done no training in the community.”

  “We have several job programs that we administer, ma’am,” Perry said.

  “No. I meant training black people to be a leader like you, Mr. Perry. Training some of these young mens and women we got to build their thing up, do for their neighborhood. Why you got to be the one always in front when the cameras go off? Why you got to be the one shaking the mayor’s hand or O’Day’s hand in the newspaper?”

  Amens floated up to the ceiling. Li, recognizing the momentum was no longer his to control, graciously handed the microphone to Perry. Monk took Chalmers by the arm and guided her to the rear of the stage.

  “Is this why you were trying to get ahold of me?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “By the way, what was that about meeting you at the Cork? You know it changed names when the new owners bought it.”

  “I know.”

  She frowned at him but Monk didn’t elaborate.

  Forty minutes later, the meeting broke up and people filed out. The woman’s comment and Perry’s rejoinder to it had diffused much of the tension building between the three principals, the focus having shifted onto Perry and his justifying his life as a community activist. Li had quietly slipped out, and Santillion had contented himself with a mini-meeting of his own on the side of the auditorium with several of his constituents.

  On his way out with Chalmers, the head of El Major pulled alongside Monk.

  “I have some information you might find useful,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “This is the first case I’ve ever had where people are tripping over themselves to help me.”

  “Well if you don’t want it.”

  “No, no. I do.”

  “Good. Call me Monday.” He drifted back to his crowd.

  Monk and Chalmers drove over to the Satellite bar on Adams in separate cars. Years ago, when Monk had been a two-fisted bounty hunter, full of himself and playing out some character from a blaxploitation flick starring Fred Williamson, the Cork had been his hangout.

  And it was a dive right out of a Chester Himes novel. Miller beer and Royal Crown whiskey offered in front, a crap game on Tuesday and a three-dollar-raise poker game on Fridays in the back. Prostitutes with trowled-on eyeliner and teeth so brown they looked wooden prowled the bar while a couple of LAPD vice cops were paid to hassle other establishments unwilling or unable to pay the Cork’s freight. Even freebasing made the scene in the back room of the Cork at its nadir.

  Monk got his messages there, once in a while drank his breakfast there, and on more man one occasion after closing time, did the do with a good-looking young lady on the smooth felt of the bar’s pool table. And if hazy memory served, Tina Chalmers was one such participant. Oh yes, in those days Ivan Monk was going to score some long green by tracking down America’s most vicious and retire before thirty to Martinique.

  But that was before Monk began thinking about what made a fifteen-year-old stab his father and run away from home, or a forty-year-old wife shoot her husband in the groin. Actions and motivations, the past, and the things one did to determine their future began to gnaw at his conscience.

  Sometimes you had to peer behind the words on paper, you had to listen to the chased and not a grinding bureaucracy plodding away on entropy. But that revelation was late in coming to him, before he dropped the business end of a hogleg on a seventeen-year-old who’d just stuck a shiv in him. Before those young eyes opened wide knowing the crush of fate was about to close them forever. Or maybe that is when it occurred to him.

  Monk escaped to the sea to unravel the Sphinx his own life had become to him. Yet the haunt of those young eyes, forever sealed against the light, would always revisit him.

  They arrived at the Satellite, the renamed Cork. The previous proprietor, one Samuel “Juke” Nunn, had been found with a Macintosh knife buried to its hilt in the back of his neck, his body laid out across the cracked and missing tiles of the women’s restroom. The new owners stopped the graft to the vice squad boys and sent the hoes packing. The crap game floated to other environs, and so too the practitioners. The bar wasn’t exactly a family place, but its iniquity was mostly confined to pedestrian these days.

  “Incredible,” Chalmers said upon hearing Monk’s suspicions about the FBI crawling into bed with him.

  “So that’s why I was cryptic in my call.” They stood at the bar and Monk said hello to Channa, the co-owner/ bartender with the masters degree in engineering.

  “Hi, Monk, Tina.” She said amiably. “I thought you might be in tonight.” She reached below the bar and produced an index card. She handed it to Monk.

  On it, printed in uniform capital letters was a note from Grant. It read “OnYushin trail, can’t make it tonight, Dex.” “When did he call, Channa?”

  “It was on the answering machine when I opened up this afternoon. But the call had to have come in sometime between two this morning and then.” She handed them their order, and Chalmers and Monk took a seat in a booth. Monk placed the index card on the table between them.

  Chalmers tapped the card. “Do you know what Yushin means?”

  “Jill told me it’s from a Chinese word meaning restoration. And apparently in the context of Japanese history, the Yushin period signaled the beginning of their military and industrial expansion in1800s.”

  “And Pak Chung Hee, who bought his t
hird term as President of the Republic of Korea in ’71 with money from Gulf Oil and Japanese industrial giants, used it to describe his suspension of democracy and cracking down on political and labor organizations.”

  “How the hell do you know all that?” Monk said.

  “My district is changing, Ivan. More influx of Korean businesses, and I don’t mean just mom-and-pop stuff. Things like shopping plazas and large supermarkets that only cater to a Korean clientele. Where there’s money and influence, there’s bound to be some right-wing politicos manipulating it. Shit I need to be aware of.”

  “Does this have something to do with why you called me.”

  “Could be. I called you because I heard from Ray.”

  “What made him surface?”

  Tina Chalmers tilted her head back, flaring her dreadlocks. Monk took it all in.

  “He wanted some money.”

  “That’s not new with him.”

  “He wanted reward money from the City Council. He says he knows where to find Crosshairs Sawyer.”

  KENNY YU WAS five minutes early for their breakfast meeting at Maria’s Kitchen on Monday morning. He was dressed in a somber Perry Ellis suit, a buttoned-down oxford cloth shirt and a paisley tie. He carried an attaché case with a scuffed finish and placed it at the foot of his chair when he sat down at the table.

  “Are you familiar with what Yushin means, Mr. Monk?” Yu said, after they had ordered their breakfast.

  Monk told him what he knew and added, “I’m much more interested in what it meant to Bong Kim Suh. Was he involved in a political organization in South Korea?”

  Yu arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know. My involvement with the Merchants Group is not what you’d call,” he rotated a hand in the air, conjuring up the word, “deep.”

  “Why are you a part of it?”