Violent Spring Read online

  Smith didn’t say anything, but looked past Monk’s right shoulder at a point somewhere beyond the room.

  Monk thrust the notebook at Smith as the Dalton treaded closer. Grinning like a demented clown, Monk hamthered at the other one. “Come on, junior, and jump bad with me. I’ll pop a cap in your ass faster than you can blink.” Monk showed him the butt end of the .45 he’d recently strapped back on under his sport coat.

  The young man halted, measuring his youth against the older man’s reflexes.

  “Sit down and shut up. I haven’t got time for the testosterone follies today.” Monk’s hand hovered near the .45, hoping that once again in his life, he didn’t have to shoot someone so young, so redeemable.

  “Do it,” Smith ordered.

  The gangbanger walked out of the room, slamming the door that led to the kitchen.

  Monk pointed at the notebook. “I did what I thought I had to do to not get knocked out of the box on this one. And that,” he tapped the notebook in Smith’s hand, “names the real players.”

  “So why you giving it to us? Ain’t no Dalton speak Korean. Yet.”

  “I’ve got reason to believe that someone, or someones, will try to snatch it.”

  “You got copies.”

  “I just made some more. But courts like to see the real thing, in so far as authenticating evidence and so on.”

  Smith regarded the notebook. “So you’re trusting us.”

  “Let’s say it’s my way of restoring your trust in me.”

  The kitchen door opened and Monk’s hand went toward his gun. The Dalton emerged, holding a beer. He glared at both of them and regained his chair.

  Monk opened the front door, and he and Smith went out to stand on the porch. “This isn’t a joke, Ray. That book is going to become more valuable than IBM stock.”

  “Which ain’t worth much anymore.” For the first time since they’d seen each other during the last few days, Smith’s demeanor momentarily took on the characteristics of his old friend, the bright, gifted student and athlete who was going to set hearts afire and blaze his trail in a furious world. But the world savaged and discarded him as one did a spent thatch.

  Monk shook the nostalgia loose and concentrated on business. “Take very good care of that thing. Look at it as protecting the interests of the Daltons.” He got off the porch and stepped across the trimmed lawn. The sun was down and Monk headed the Galaxie 500 into the west, where eventually the land ended, and a vast ocean rolled and crashed.

  MONK DID A series of sit-ups on the rug in his living room. He worked up a sweat and then did some sets of push-ups and some toning with his chrome dumbbells. He finished and tried to wind down by watching an old movie on TV but couldn’t get into it. He opened up Sleeper’s book, The Closest of Strangers, to the bookmark he’d placed midway in it. Again, he couldn’t concentrate. He was too psyched, his mind and body ready for conflict.

  Unnecessarily, he took apart and reassembled his gun. Oiling it, Monk looked at it. Looked at it as when his father had shown it to him on his thirteenth birthday.

  “This is not a toy, and it’s not for settling arguments. And it’s definitely not meant to be shown off to make you look big.” The words of Josiah Monk echoed back to him over the years. “I know you know that I have this gun. That I keep it in our house for protection should we need it. Your mother doesn’t like it, but she’s come to accept it. Even though of course, as a nurse, she’s seen more bloodshed than I saw in the war where I got this weapon. Go on,” his father had said, “hold it”

  Quietly, Monk rose from the table where he’d been working on the gun and padded into the bedroom in his bare feet. He put the automatic on the nightstand, moving the piece of furniture closer to his bed. He went back out into the kitchen and poured himself a neat shot of rum. Just enough for a brace, and not enough to dull his responses. He sat again at the table.

  “Aim a little to the right of where you want the bullet to go,” his father had instructed him. They’d taken to going out to Needles, in the desert, for the lessons Josiah Monk taught his son in handling a gun. Pulling the trigger, getting used to not blinking at the flash; allowing for the recoil. Later, his father showed him how to care for the weapon, a tool to be maintained like a torque wrench or a good set of sockets.

  The first time Ivan Monk had found himself standing in a room with the gun in his hand, it was just like when he and his dad used to watch Have Gun Will Travel on Saturday nights. Paladin, the Shakespeare-quoting gunslinger reincarnated in the urban, post-Watts ’65 landscape. Only the fantasy ended the day Monk had to actually pull the trigger, not on a beer bottle but on a target the bullet sank into, ripping and rending flesh and bone, changing his and the other person’s life forever.

  Yet after the initial shock, he became intoxicated with its power. A gun in your hand immediately changed the equation. It took too long for Monk to learn that guns were not the answer to crime, only the end product of flawed social and economic policies.

  The phone rang and he answered it. Whoever was on the other end said nothing but they made a point of making their breathing audible. They hung up. The phone rang twice more and each time Monk picked it up to the same effect It stopped after that.

  Inside of his front door, allowing for its arc if it were to be opened, Monk placed some small, cheap, hard plastic toys he’d purchased at the local grocery store. They would make a resounding crunch if stepped on. At the back door in the kitchen, he unplugged the refrigerator and rolled it flush against the door.

  He took both of his phones out of their jacks and went to bed. As far as he could tell, nothing happened during the night, because he was alive in the morning.

  HE MADE HIMSELF a breakfast of three eggs (he had to get that cholesterol rechecked) scrambled hard, three pieces of oat bran toast, five pieces of turkey sausage links, downed two cups of coffee and a large glass of orange juice. He shaved, showered and read the front section of the LA. Times. The refrigerator was rolled back into place and plugged in again.

  The blue serge suit in his closet, which was last worn at a wedding he attended with Jill, was removed and put on. Monk complemented it with a dark burgundy shirt and a grey and green Hugo Boss tie. In his dresser he found a pair of charcoal grey socks with little white clocks on them, and donned them and his brown wingtips. Catching himself in the bathroom mirror, he looked like an insurance salesman with a pocketful of jokers. And his one deadly ace-in-the-hole.

  Monk picked up the automatic, briefly weighing leaving it at home. He dismissed the idea as now was not the appropriate time to become a peacenik. The private detective strapped it on using his alternate holster, which allowed for drawing the gun out sideways. He went down to the street, scanning the buildings around his apartment. Would Keys and Diaz still be watching him or sitting in their task force room figuring out what other devilment they could hatch against him?

  He beeped off the Ford’s alarm and started the car, silently praying there wasn’t a bomb attached to it, and smiling at his own bizarre notions. Well-founded, he thought, but illogical. They—whoever the “they” are—would need the original notebook. He’d have to be captured and tortured to reveal its whereabouts. That was probably what had happened to Bong Kim Suh. His compiling of information about who was behind Jiang Holdings, despite his attempt at hiding out, had no doubt brought their wrath down on him. But he must have been caught away from the garage apartment in Lincoln Heights, otherwise the notebook would have been found.

  But torture in the hands of amateurs could go too far, not allowing for the pace one needed to make it work effectively. And, of course, the victim’s body had to partially recover and his mind have time to amplify the horror. Or so Dexter Grant had explained to Monk once. He never asked Dex how it was he’d come to that analysis.

  Of course, the method of Suh’s death meant they intended to kill him all along.

  Monk arrived at his office and Delilah motioned him to pick up line one. He did.<
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  “Brother man,” a voice Monk didn’t recognize began, “got any more hot tips for me?” It was the people’s newsman, Kelly Drier.

  “What are you talking about, Drier?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You set up the FBI to look like a bunch of Keystone Kops.”

  “They don’t need my help to accomplish that. And if you’ve got Keys and his boyfriend Diaz on the extension, tell them this bad boy is about to bust. Tell them to back off and give me free reign or I’ll make it so that their next assignment will be guarding the men’s room at Bureau headquarters.” Monk softly replaced the handset and went into his office. Forty-five minutes later, Kenny Yu charged into it.

  “Do you know what you’ve got here?” Yu exclaimed, waving the papers before him.

  “I have some idea,” Monk said.

  The other man sank into an Eastlake. He laid the loose sheets on the desk, breathing hard. He rubbed a hand across his clean-cut face. Yu seemed to be having trouble getting his vision in check. “Jesus Christ, Monk, where did you find this?”

  Not wishing to answer that question, Monk said, “What does it say, Kenny?”

  “I got to my office early this morning and this thing,” he waved a hand at the pile, “was waiting for me.”

  “It’s not a bomb.”

  “It is and you know it. It’s a goddamn box of TNT waiting to go off. I’ve only skimmed it, but Suh names names, places, and where the money is, or at least how he thinks it’s channeled through.”

  Monk felt a constricting of the muscles in his throat. “Who are the names, Kenny? Who the hell is Jiang Holdings?”

  TINA CHALMERS LEANED back in her creaky chair. The seal of the City of Los Angeles, the Valley of Smoke, was printed on an aged piece of parchment and framed on the wall above and behind her. A symbolic guillotine that had made many a head roll in the name of maintaining the palace. But the moat was rising, and everybody in local government could feel the water at their ankles, if they didn’t act to right this city.

  Chalmers let out a long sigh. “Most of the stuff in his notebook is unsubstantiated. It’s hearsay from other shopkeepers and small businesspeople, and rumors other Korean-Americans and Korean Nationals passed along to him.” She closed the file folder of executive summary Kenny Yu had prepared from the translated pages Monk had obtained from Roy Park.

  “It’s done in a chronological manner. It puts names with dates, and lists various addresses and phone numbers. It raises enough questions, Tina. It got Suh killed.”

  “What about Grimes?”

  “I think he was killed because he got to be too much of a wild card. He was the one who kept getting busted because he was always escalating the strong-arm bit. Samuels seemed to be the cooler head, the one that thinks clearer.”

  “So it was just him being hotheaded when you had your run-in with him at the Odin Club.”

  “Maybe he did that on orders.”

  “But he was on the shit list.”

  “Yeah. They have him attack me, he gets killed by his pals, and then the obvious suspect is me.”

  “Why?”

  “A magician always uses misdirection. Suspicion on me muddies the waters, and nobody looks beyond me or the other set-up, Crosshairs. The task force tries to keep me on a long leash, hoping I give them Crosshairs. They know Grimes figures in this somehow, but the Rolling Daltons’ leader is their main worry.”

  “That would imply they knew that Ray Smith had made contact, and your name came up in our conversation,” Tina said, a daring tone in her voice.

  “All wiretaps ain’t legal, Tina.”

  She mulled that over, men said, “If the City Council is going to discuss the matters raised in Suh’s notes, I have to supply them with translated copies. What I’m saying is that for us to really discuss it we have to have a closed session. The Council needs a good reason to go behind closed doors.”

  “But if you pass copies around, sure as hell there’s gonna be a leak,” Monk said, thinking ahead.

  “What if there is, Ivan?”

  “Then some of the big fish might swim away.”

  “Well, what can you do? If you want action, why haven’t you taken this information to Keys?”

  “I don’t want this thing to become compromised.”

  “Meaning you think Keys or one of the cops is in Jiang’s backpocket.”

  “I don’t know what I mean, Tina.” Monk got up and paced around the room. “I just know my gut feeling is I need to play this out the way I started it. You, Jill, Dex, EIrod and a few others are all I can trust. Everybody else is a could-be conspirator.”

  “What about your buddy, Seguin?”

  Monk didn’t want to formulate an answer. “I think we can force their hand, exposing them.”

  “I suspect I might know where you’re going with this and it’s a dangerous place.”

  “Dig my grave deep, baby.”

  “I DON’T CARE if he’s in a meeting with Queen Victoria herself,” Monk angrily said into the phone. “Tell him it’s Monk, and tell him I’ve read the notes.” Onto the line came one of the soft rock stations, and Monk listened to a Lionel Ritchie number while waiting. The chorus was repeating for the third time when O’Day came on.

  “What do you want, Mr. Monk?” He tried his best to sound bored.

  “About two hundred thousand dollars,” Monk said with equal aplomb.

  “Really.”

  “Really. You, Park Hankyoung, a few others from the Merchants Group and several of your good ol’ boy golfing buddies are Jiang Holdings.”

  “You’re in way over your head.”

  “Then you better throw me a life preserver. Say one that costs about a quarter of a million.”

  “I’m going to hang up,” O’Day said, without much conviction.

  “Go ahead,” Monk challenged. “I’m itching to send my story around to the papers. Oh, and not the Times, I know you and the publisher both take breakfast at the Odin Club. But the folks over at the weekly alternative in town, and the black paper The Sentinel, and hey, maybe somebody at The Nation or Mother Jones might think it’s worth a few inches of ink.”

  “Everything is spelled out in Suh’s notes.” There was a crack in the veneer, a sliver of desperation in the silky voice of the lawyer and power broker.

  “You know it, slick.”

  “I thought you were a standard bearer, Monk. The post-modern, hip-hop private eye operating in the Land of Nod. The city-state trapped forever between the sea and the desert. The perfect metaphor for lives born in the womb of wetness only to dry up and blow away in the harsh unforgiving arid landscape.”

  “Nice imagery there, M. O. Did you have something similar in mind when you sent your goons on their errand to scare Jill? Sent them on a bogus drive-by so I’d be all hot and bothered to go after Crosshairs.”

  “You’re swimming a little deeper.”

  “Sure I am, big boy. Like you were the one who sicced the Consumer Affairs Board on me so I’d jump more, and Keys and I wind up chasing phantoms rather than the real crooks. Hiring me so you could keep an eye on what I was doing, and because you think you’re the lord of the manor, and can do anything you want. Even flaunt Suh’s death by burying him at Florence and Normandie. Knowing then it was going to be the sight of a SOMA groundbreaking. A not-so-subtle warning for the other shopkeepers to keep their noses out of the business of Jiang Holdings.”

  In a measured manner, O’Day said, “Grimes was fucking up. We had to make some good out of a bad situation.”

  “Right. Like Suh really believed you were going to let him live.”

  “How much was that amount again, small change?”

  “You know goddamn well what it was. And I just tacked on another 50 Gs ’cause your breath stinks.”

  “And you give me back the original. Not, I might hasten to add, that there’s probably anything in there to legally indict me. But it might stir up unnecessary concerns.”

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sp; “The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.”

  “You mock me with Rousseau, Monk. But you don’t mock my money. Stay by the phone, my greedy friend, you shall hear from me soon.”

  Monk stared at the phone. He doubted if Keys and Diaz were still listening in, but what if they were? Would they intervene, or were they in O’Day’s pockets, too?

  The door to his office moved inward and Dexter Grant, carrying a cup of coffee, entered. That unmistakeable gait of his took him into one of the Eastlakes.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You look worried.”

  Perturbed that his old mentor could read him so well, Monk went on the offensive. “Dex, is there something I can help you with today?”

  He crossed his bandy legs and slouched in the seat. As was his custom, he put the cup on the floor next to the chair. “I was watching the news yesterday, and there was this reporter talking about how the special task force had blown an arrest.”

  “I told you about Drier, so what?”

  Grant gulped down some coffee. “So I got to wondering who might have tipped off Crosshairs and why.”

  “Of course,” Monk said non-committally.

  Grant folded his arms and waited.

  “I suppose you won’t be satisfied until I tell you everything that’s happened since I last saw you.”

  Grant took another leisurely sip of his coffee.

  Reluctantly, Monk filled him in.

  “Sheeoot, as granny used to say.” He was about to go on when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” Monk said into the receiver.

  “I’ll have your money tomorrow. But how do I know you won’t try something with one of the copies you’ve made?”

  “That’s your lookout, O’Day. The deal is for the original.”

  “And your silence,” he added flatly.

  “Three-thirty at the sports store on the second floor of the Baldwin Hills Mall. And it has to be you.”

  “No.”