Violent Spring Read online

  “Monk, it’s Marasco, call me tonight.”

  That was a surprise. Monk called Kodama’s house and got her machine. “Just seeing if you were in, Jill, I’ll call you later.” He had a cup of coffee and a bagel and headed out to Redondo Beach.

  Some years back, while chasing down a bail-jumper who’d been arrested for a series of burglaries and rapes, Monk had waltzed into a bar in the south bay town for a drink after a day of futile effort.

  A man wearing a banner marking him as a plague carrier would have been more welcome. Couples, huddled close and intoxicated with the smell of one another, stopped talking to gape at him. Men, standing at the bar belting back beers, turned as their fellow drinkers pointed or nudged one another. Every eye was on him as he enteredall-white watering hole. But he’d be damned if he was going to back out. He walked up to the bar and leaned on it, acutely aware of the stares locked onto him. The bartender, a pleasant-enough-looking middle-aged gent with a trim silver mustache, wiped down the bartop in front of Monk. He then said, in an even tone without rancor, “We don’t serve niggers here.”

  Monk considered his options, all of them ending with him either in prison or the infirmary. He about-faced and marched out of the bar, mad, scared and humiliated. That wasn’t the last time he’d come to Redondo Beach, and he knew some black folks lived here now, but it was the last time he’d considered buying a drink in the town known for turning out volleyball and surfing champions.

  He arrived as the early evening traffic of the 405 disgorged power-suited men and women in their BMWs, Infinitis and even the occasional Volvo, into the belly of the upmarket community. Killing time, Monk meandered through the fashionable King Harbor section with its upscale shops and one-hour fanny tuck salons. Eventually he took Prospect north and found the street he was looking for, a palm-infested lane close to the Torrance side of the geography. On it were single family houses and a turquoise-stuccoed apartment complex with one of those sunken car ports, on one end of the street. Monk passed by Bart Samuels’ place, a recently painted duplex. The address for Samuels was the second floor unit off a landing and stairs covered in gamma-ray-green astro turf.

  Monk parked diagonally across the street and hunkered down in his seat. An hour later, Bart Samuels, ponytail and all, drove right by Monk in a 1976 Pontiac Le Mans whose out-of-adjustment valves he could hear tapping through his half-open window. The car swung into a driveway and went into the back of the building.

  Momentarily, Samuels appeared, walking back into the front by way of the driveway, a lone grocery shopping bag grasped in one meaty arm. He ascended to his apartment and entered. Monk waited. He wanted to confront him, but he also wanted to do it to his advantage. He was strapped, the .45 snuggled beneath his herringbone sport coat, but he wasn’t about to go up there, bust in the door and shove the gun under his nose.

  One, that could cost him his permit, and two, Samuels was bound to shove the gun up Monk’s ass sideways. No, in a situation like this, where obtaining information from a potentially hostile source was the goal, the psychological approach was the best method.

  He’d give it another twenty minutes or so, let Samuels sit down to his dinner, maybe quaff a glass of beer or wine. Relaxed, unwary. A knock on the door, who might it be? Surely only a friend would come calling at the dinner hour. The time passed, Monk readying himself for his approach, his opening line. Casually, like a man delivering a pizza, he went up the livid green stairs. Reaching the top of the landing, Monk raised a brass knocker, a large ring through the nose of a lion’s head impaled on the slate-blue door.

  Before the thing left his hand, the door swung inward. A stooped figure—Monk instinctively knew it wasn’t Samuels—stood in the doorway, backlit from within. At the same moment, something loomed on the periphery of his right eye, and Monk turned to it, reaching for the automatic. Orange flares blossomed around his corneas, and a purple ball rose from the astro turf. Monk was keenly aware his head was down and his body tipped forward. The lavender sphere enveloped his head, blackening out the light.

  He felt a hand grasp his, which held onto the .45. As the well of unconsciousness vised his head, Monk dully registered a loud noise. Pain lanced his knees, and he descended into the well and its soothing purple water.

  MONK CAME TO, rolled onto his side and vomited.

  The head was not meant to be socked. It upset your thinking after a while, as Muhammad Ali and countless fighters of lesser stature could attest to.

  When you were unconscious you didn’t cough, and your breathing slowed. The light stage, as it was euphemistically referred to, was a temporary concussion, with the more pernicious state being a coma. And even if you should awake—and Monk was painfully aware that he was conscious—there might be disorientation, dizziness, loss of memory and continued vomiting.

  The sudden rush of night air into his lungs caused Monk’s chest to ache and the food he’d had earlier to collect in his throat. Fighting down the bile, it suddenly came to Monk where to find Dexter Grant. It’s funny how your brain works after being slapped upside the head unconscious. What the beeps meant had come to him as he drifted somewhere between the purple sleep and the harsh awakening. Maybe there was some kind of drop-off point. Get hit in the head every now and then, and it cleared up the tangled morass. But get knocked once too often, and your thought processes became mush.

  Sure.

  Monk got to one knee, braced by his elbow on the raised wall that bordered the landing. He looked out onto the street and instantly went down behind the wall. A Manhattan Beach patrol car was parked in the street. Two muscular cops, standing under a street lamp, were talking with a woman in a designer sweat suit in front of a house trimmed in green.

  Sitting with his back against the wall, Monk stared at the closed door to Samuels’ apartment. He looked up and was thankful that the porch light wasn’t on. He felt a second grip of nausea, and it made him act. There would be way too much explaining to do if the cops caught him dazed and armed on a porch in the middle of the night. And just where was his gun?

  Monk looked to his left onto the enclosed end of the porch. There was a pile of old newspapers, a lawn chair with several busted plastic straps, a squat hibachi and two potted plants. Monk crawled over to the area. Searching between the plants, hidden in deep shadow, was his automatic. He sniffed it and could tell it’d been fired recently. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger, but otherwise why had the woman called the cops?

  Monk crawled back toward the front end of the porch. He peered around the corner of the wall and watched the two cops walking along the sidewalk, coming toward the apartment complex.

  One of them was using a flashlight, but neither seemed to be in any hurry. That meant the woman must have heard the gunshots but had not seen the tussle up on the porch, and wasn’t sure where the shot had originated. But Monk couldn’t rely on luck to keep him safe.

  He twisted his body in the direction of the door and pushed on it with his outstretched hand. Nothing. He looked up at the latch, and it seemed as if he were a Lilliputian trying to get into the giant’s castle. If he reached up to tug on it—and there was no guarantee it was unlocked—would his arm be seen? He hesitated. The footsteps of the two cops got closer.

  Fuck it.

  Monk reached up, got his hand around the thing and tugged downward on the cold metal with his thumb. The latch didn’t give. His heart stopped beating. Then it released, and the door moved inward on hinges Monk was sure could be heard in Bolivia. He scrambled inside and shut it, quietly as possible. The room was dimly lit by a table lamp. Moments dragged into minutes with Monk, sitting on the floor with his back against the door, imagining the cops stationing themselves outside on the landing, their 9mms ready to blast him to Kingdom Come. If there was one, as his mother believed.

  After some time, his queasiness subsided, and he got off the floor. He went to a window that overlooked the street below. Monk pulled back the shade and saw one of the cops, the one with the fla
shlight, meandering around in front of the apartment complex. Damn. They must have heard the hinges. But, he rationalized, they thought it was only a nosy neighbor sticking his head out to see what was going on.

  The other cop knocked on the door.

  Monk got his anxiety under control and pulled off his sport coat, tossed his holster and gun into a chair out of sight of the doorway, and unbuttoned his shirt. He went to the door and opened it.

  “Excuse me, Mr.…”

  The member of Manhattan Beach’s finest couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. There were still pimples along the base of his lantern jaw. He was blonde, blue-eyed, and could have been the iron-lifting buddy of Samuels.

  “Monk,” he said. He thought he remembered there was no name on the mailbox at the foot of the stairs. But the cop just stared at him. Goddamnit, was there a name? Did he smell the vomit on the porch?

  Finally, the puffed-up kid said, “Did you happen to hear anything about forty minutes ago?”

  He was looking past Monk, into the room behind him. Monk said, “No, I’m sorry I didn’t, officer. But I was in the tub and had the radio going. I looked out because I saw you and your partner out there in the street through the window. Something happen?”

  “Mind if I come in and talk with you?”

  “Well, yes I do, officer.” He gave it the right pause. “I wasn’t alone in the tub, you see.”

  A corner of the young cop’s lip lifted and he said, “Some other time, eh, Mr. Monk?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He shut the door as the cop started down the stairs. Monk exhaled, and locked it. He turned on another light in the living room, a lamp whose shade was screened with an Erte design, and began a search of Bart Samuels’ quarters.

  And what was it James Robinson had told him about that time he’d stopped at the Hi-Life after the uprising? There was a man in there who was a hunchback. And Monk had the impression that the man he’d seen, the one who’d opened Samuels’ door as he was about to knock, was different. The body slightly off-kilter.

  What he had dismissed as bullshit from Robinson—something to tell him for the forty he’d weaseled out of him—was starting to sound like it had legs.

  Surprisingly, the living room was furnished in pieces that displayed a certain sense of style and taste. The chair he’d thrown his gun on was one he’d seen with Jill at Civilization, a hip furniture store on Venice Boulevard in L.A. And the other stuff was not particularly expensive, but smart and functional. Monk finished in the living room and went into the other parts of the house.

  The kitchen had been done in amber and sea-green colors. The counter was of polished stainless steel and there was an overhead rack of stainless steel pots and pans. Monk went to the back door and opened it onto a set of wooden stairs leading down to the small backyard and the dual garage. Evidently that was how the other man had entered. But Monk had a memory of turning to his right on the porch and someone grabbing at his gun. A third person. Or Samuels, after having gone out the back door. Worry about that later.

  Monk closed the door and went about the search. Samuels kept a goodly supply of natural food products, pasta and vitamins in his cupboards, and fresh fish and chicken in the refrigerator. Along with several canisters of muscle bulking powders of the kind Monk used in his twenties on a free-standing butcher block table.

  In a drawer of a glass-fronted cabinet built into the wall, which contained wine and highball glasses, Monk found an unused smoke detector and a file folder. He removed the folder and spread it open on the kitchen table. There were insurance papers, some credit card bills marked with check numbers, and a few auto repair bills.

  Monk returned the folder to the drawer and noticed some business cards that had been underneath it. He picked them up. One was from a garage, another from a health food store, and the last one from Maxfield O’Day’s office. Monk looked at it and considered what it meant.

  Samuels and the late Stacy Grimes had worked at the Odin Club where O’Day was a member. Did Samuels need legal help? But he couldn’t afford what O’Day spent on his tie allowance, so why the card? Maybe O’Day was being generous to the natives, giving the kid a thrill. Monk tossed it back in the drawer, and it landed upside down. In a compact, masculine hand, a phone number had been written on the back. Monk retrieved the card and wrote the number in his memo book.

  In the bedroom, there were several items of clothes, clean and folded, on the made bed. The sliding door of the closet was pulled back and the lineup of shoes on the floor had been disturbed. Obviously, Samuels had packed.

  On a shelf in the closet, in a cardboard box, were some fascinating items. Monk found two crocheted socks done in the shape of a penis and testicles, a pink eight-inch dildo which he didn’t touch, a ceramic set of vaginal stimulation balls, one day-glo vibrator and a black one, an assortment of flavored edible body oils, and some learner straps. He closed the lid and returned the box to the shelf.

  Monk sat on the bed next to the nightstand where a framed photo of a muscular young woman in a bikini resided. She was on one knee with both of her arms extended in the classic pose of flexing her biceps. They were quite impressive. Her sculpted body was set against a backdrop of the kind of grey wrinkled cloth used in photo studios. She’d written on the photo “From one big hunk to another.” It was signed Myra.

  Monk slipped the photo out and turned it over. The name of the photographer and a phone number were on the back. From now on, Monk grinned to himself, he could just go around turning over pieces of paper all over town and get clues. Stray bits of information, a name here, a phrase, the title of a song, a partial phone number there, and so on. Then he’d get his nephew to construct a computer file with all the stuff he’d gathered, waiting for a client whose case would connect him to his vast array of seemingly useless data. But of course, he’d have to memorize all the information, and that meant taking some kind of memory course, and this was a sure sign he was going crazy.

  He made a note of the name and number and put the photo back. Another hour of searching yielded nothing further. Besides, the blow had produced a sizeable headache, and Monk had to sit down more than once as he got a spell of dizziness. He realized he was running on the rush produced by his encounter with the cops. It was wearing off and he was wearing down. Monk made a call in the living room. After the familiar strains of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he said, “We’re on. Tomorrow, you know the time.”

  He quit Bart Samuels’ home. The cops were gone and Monk walked to his car, trying to look casual but deliberate just in case the woman in the sweat suit was watching. He got in and drove home on automatic pilot. He swallowed three Excedrins and two glasses of orange juice and dropped into a deep sleep. He didn’t even bother to play the messages on his answering machine, though its light blinked incessantly, like a one-eyed oracle awaiting its acolyte.

  “IVAN, KEYS SEEMS to be nosing around, trying to dig up dirt on you to put the squeeze to you through official channels.” Marasco Seguin’s voice paused on the tape. “You know if it comes down to it, I’m in your corner. I have a meeting with the chief in a day or two, stay in touch.”

  A thin smile crossed Monk’s unshaven face. The next message from last night played. “It’s me, baby. I miss you when I don’t see you.”

  The third and last came on after Jill’s. “Long time no see, bro’. I hear we might be of some aid to one another. I’ll try you again.”

  Monk played the third message again to make sure it was who he thought it was. Ray Smith. He was glad it wasn’t a long message and Smith didn’t leave a number. What with the shadow of the FBI falling all over this case. It was already past ten so he left a message for Jill on her private line in her chambers.

  A long shower, shave, including trimming his goatee, and a breakfast of turkey sausage, three eggs—scrambled hard—two pieces of wheat toast and two glasses of orange juice shored up his energy and chased the vestiges of Weariness from his head’s encounter with wha
tever it was that sapped him. A bruise behind and to the left of his right ear was tender, but Monk felt good, confident despite what Keys was doing. He was garnering the intricate fragments of the meaning of the riddle. And it was the solution that beckoned him forward.

  But every answer has to obey the laws that govern the known world. Every answer has a reaction, a consequence. And what would be the repercussions of finding the killer of Bong Kim Suh? Another fire? Another outburst of rage and frustration? Would Monk feel compelled to bury the truth for the greater good if he found out that Crosshairs Sawyer did indeed murder the Korean shopkeeper? Monk had to admit that he was no purist solely in the pursuit of the eternal truth. It was actually the working of the problem, all the permutations on achieving the desired results that really charged him, made him feel useful, alive.

  Buttoning his shirt, he wondered if it came to it, would he make a decision to suppress evidence because it was politically expedient?

  Monk was born in a hospital, Queen of Angels, that had been shut down due to county budget cuts. He could remember from his childhood when the first black City Council member got elected in this town. And the Helms Bakery truck would cruise along his street and sell those goddamn, sugary sweet, heavy-as-a-lead-weight donuts. Or when Watts exploded, or the first time he got jacked-up by two of then-Chief Davis’ Boys in Blue.

  L.A. might very well be lurching toward a Balkanized future, each ethnic group carving out its larger or smaller fiefdom. It might make a lie of the theory of multiculturalism, American history having long since made a lie of the great melting pot. The city might indeed become a low-rent Blade Runner, too beat and too broke to pay for the special effects.

  But it could also be the example, the last possible chance for sanity in a world where the law of the pack—led by the rapaciousness of the big-money boys who fed at the trough that Reagan and Bush slopped for them from the pickings of the poor, the working and middle class—had to be halted.