Violent Spring Page 4

  “I’m Betty,” she said, extending a purple nailed hand.

  “Ivan Monk.” He returned her firm handshake and showed her his photostat.

  Betty wore a grey V-necked sweater top that strained itself around a chest built like the front end of a B-52. Monk kept his mind on business. A radio playing the allnews station could be heard behind her. “Mind if I ask you some questions about Suh?” They stood talking in the doorway.

  “Not much I can tell you, honey.” She appraised Monk as if he were a prime piece of steak. “He paid his rent on time and kept to himself. Never any trouble.” She tilted her head which caused the large hoop earring she wore to bang against the door jamb.

  “How long did he live here?”

  “’Bout four years or so. I’d talk to him occasionally about the weather or this and that. Nothing important really. Say, who hired you to look into his death? I don’t watch TV but I heard about them finding his body on the radio. Jesus, living in the city, huh? That’s funny that the cops haven’t been around to ask me anything.”

  That occurred to Monk also. It probably meant they were assembling a task force. He told her who hired him then went on. “Did he disappear from here the same week he left his store over on Pico?”

  “You know that’s the funny part. I read in the papers—I like to keep up on things you know—about how he wasn’t supposed to be around a week before the riots—oh excuse me—the uprising.”

  “But he was still around.”

  She squinted her eyes, seeing into the past. “Oh yeah. Now, I don’t know the comings and goings of all my tenants, Mr. Monk.”

  “Ivan, please,” he said, flirting just to keep in practice he rationalized.

  “Ivan,” she responded, displaying even teeth. “Anyways, I didn’t have any reason to believe he wasn’t still running the store until I drove past there, oh, I guess it was a month after the fires, and I noticed it was closed up.

  “Did Suh continue to pay his rent on time?”

  “Oh yeah. First of the month like always right up until October. And there’d be mornings when he’d leave and come back at night. I think there were several times when he was gone for days.”

  “Really. You have a record of his last payment?”

  She shook her head in the direction of the interior of her apartment. “Come on in, I gotta look it up.”

  Monk entered the place. It was furnished in preserved vinyl chairs and a sofa done in tubular post-modern lines. There was a bookcase filled with current and past best sellers as well as a healthy dose of non-fiction books on topics ranging from the S&L crisis to a biography of Golda Meir. Along the walls were inexpensive prints of Picasso, Braque and Nagel.

  “Did you ask Suh why he’d closed up?”

  Betty was looking through her book of receipts on a neatly ordered desk. “I thought about it. Sure was curious him paying the rent on time and all but having no visible means of income. But frankly, I didn’t work up the nerve to.” She found what she was looking for and walked over to where Monk stood in her living room. She gazed at a slip of paper.

  “I made this note to myself. October 1st was a Thursday and I collected the rent, and I didn’t see Mr. Suh that whole day.” She lifted her eyes off the paper. “I remember now. On the following Saturday I happened to be up early watering the plants out front and I saw him come up.”

  “Walking or driving?”

  “Driving. But it was a different car than the one he had before. It was brown, small, but I don’t know from cars. I asked him about the rent, and he assured me I’d have it that afternoon. Only that was the last I saw of him.”

  Monk wrote down the make and license number of the car Suh had listed on his rent application. “Do you know what time he left that day?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “How did he seem to you that morning?”

  “Like he always was, I guess. I don’t mean to be racist or anything, but Mr. Suh was always pleasant, always composed, like I notice a lot of Asians are. Self-contained you might say.”

  “He didn’t seem to have anything on his mind?”

  “Like I said, Ivan, he just walked up calm like, we exchanged a few words, then he went on in.” She squinted her eyes again. “He was carrying a big—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it—but a large accordion file folder with a flap over it and tied up.” She pantomimed the size of the file. “He had it tucked under his arm.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yep. A week went by from that Saturday, and on the following Friday I used my key to let myself into his place. Gone.” She did a thing with her hands like an umpire signaling “safe.”

  “What became of his personal possessions?” There was an anxious edge in Monk’s voice.

  “I waited two weeks more, then gave his clothes to the second hand.”

  “Damn,” Monk swore.

  “Hey, at least I should be able to get a tax deduction for the lost income,” she said defensively.

  “What about books or papers he had?”

  “Threw them out. A lot of them were in Korean.” She held up her hands pleading self-defense.

  He stared at her intently. “Do you remember anything about them?”

  “I leafed through a couple of the Korean magazines. There was a picture of these cops beating people and some others showing people throwing Molotov cocktails.”

  “This was coverage of what happened here?”

  “No, these were Asians, Koreans I guess.”

  “What about anything in English?”

  “Oh, just some Time and Newsweek magazines, and some business ones also.”

  “Listen, you’ve really been a big help.” He handed her one of his business cards. “If you think of anything else, give me a call will you?”

  “I sure will.” She put the card in the hip pocket of the jeans.

  “See you around.” He started to leave.

  “Could be,” she said, smiling.

  And Monk allowed his mind to wander as he drove to Continental Donuts on Vernon Avenue near Crenshaw.

  When Monk signed out as a merchant seaman, being single and having no children, he’d managed to save a tidy sum. He told his friends he wasn’t going to do any more bounty hunting, that he wanted to try something different. He thought about opening a car repair place but he’d had enough of engines, save working on his own. Dexter Grant, his ex-boss, told him about the donut shop.

  It belonged to a friend of Grant’s, an ex-cop like he was, and the guy was looking to sell. Getting up in years, and with a changing neighborhood, the place was more than he was willing to handle. Continental Donuts had been built in 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. It was an L-shaped affair done in Streamline Moderne with a counter, fixed stools and several booths of blood red leather. On the roof was a plaster donut twenty feet in diameter with the title of the establishment painted on its side.

  At least that’s how it had looked back then. When Monk saw it, stucco was falling from it like leaves off a tree in the fall. The donut on the roof was missing sections, and the booths bled their cotton stuffing. But Monk thought the joint had promise, so he hired Abe Carson to oversee the redoing of the place.

  Yet after eight months of deep frying dough and mastering the fine art of glazing cinnamon rolls, Monk the donut king was bored. He turned the running of the shop over to others, then went back to doing bounty hunting work with a vengeance, mainly working for two bail bondspeople, a man named Lasalle and a woman in a wheelchair named McLeash.

  He hunted bailjumping burglars with ache-scarred faces and fleeing gang members hefting Uzis with Reeboks on their feet that cost more than their weapons. He searched for runaway daughters, and sought to find what made them run. The detective, like Jesus, walked the walk of thieves and murderers, cheats and liars. But unlike Jesus, the detective had no forgiveness to dispense, no great truth to find, only the hand that pulled the trigger, or grabbed the money from the til
l, or sunk the blade below the third rib. And what it was that made them do it. After a fashion, Monk settled into investigative work and concluded that was his evolutionary niche. His reason for getting up in the morning.

  He parked on the lot the donut shop shared with the gas station. A couple of doors east of the lot were the burned out hulks of more stone victims of last Spring’s revolt. Monk smiled ruefully at the memory of him and Elrod, the manager of Continental Donuts, standing guard on the lot during that crazy time. Monk’s .45, Elrod’s Remington shotgun and signs stating “Black Owned” on the two structures were all they had against the torrent of frustration that swept through Los Angeles.

  He waved to Curtis, the co-owner of the gas station. Using his key, he entered the donut shop through the security screen in the rear.

  Instantly, a shape—was it Mount Kilimanjaro?—blotted out the light from the overhead fluorescents. A hand anviled from wrought iron emerged from the shape and clamped around Monk’s shoulder.

  “What up?” the voice rumbled.

  “Nothin’ much, Elrod. Everything okay here?”

  The hand returned to its owner. “Same ol’, same ol’, chief.”

  Monk craned his neck upward at Elrod. A Cruise missile would have to hit the place directly to faze the six-foot-eight, 325 pounds of solid mass. “I gotta do a little computer work then I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure.” The big ex-con ambled off to further demonstrate the involved process of making donut holes to the teenager he’d been instructing when Monk arrived.

  Turning down a corridor in the ‘L’ shank of the building, Monk unlocked a steel-sheeted door diagonally opposite the employee restroom. He entered the room and closed the door behind him.

  The lights in the ceiling hummed to life and revealed a cheap wood-paneled room containing a standing safe, two heavy duty file cabinets, a cot and an IBM PC on a small table. A folding chair fronted the table, and two more, folded up, leaned against the wall. There was a phone jack currently sans phone. Monk sat at the computer and powered it up.

  Tumbling across the black ether of the monitor came yellow phosphorescent text. With two-finger effort and studied concentration, Monk entered his preliminary notes on the case. A knock sounded on the door.

  “Yeah?”

  Elrod’s voice came through the door. “Chief, Delilah just called. Said you better get back to the office quick. Shit’s jumpin’.”

  THEY CROWDED THE rotunda where Delilah’s desk and computer sat. Dressed in Calvin Klein and Alexander Julian suits, their ages ranging from mid-twenties to early fifties, the members of Harvesters Unlimited were a GQ version of an occupying army. Monk threaded his way through the phalanx of African-American men. Counting heads as he went, he calculated at least fifteen were jammed into the reception area.

  Gaining the front, he spied Linton Perry leaning on Delilah’s desk, amiably talking with her. Perry turned his head as Monk glided in.

  “Brother Monk. We meet again.” He held out his hand and Monk shook it. Perry was tall, taller than Monk and fleshly in the body. He was lighter in complexion than Monk, and there was a grey shock cutting a swath through part of his hair. The hand Monk shook had a gold ring on the middle finger and a silver one on the little.

  Pointing his thumb behind him, Monk said, “Why the big turnout, Mr. Perry?”

  “To impress on you, my brother, that I didn’t come here speaking for myself. I came here with these gentlemen who represent various constituencies in our community so you could see we are united on this matter.”

  A sour taste gathered in Monk’s mouth. “And what matter is that?”

  “Why, these clients of yours, the Korean-American Merchants Group.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There was a press conference this afternoon in front of their building announcing just that.”

  Monk swore under his breath. Goddamn thing was already being turned into a circus for everybody’s benefit except his. He eyed the room. “And you decided you needed to remind me of how to do my job.”

  Perry stood up. He was relaxed yet Monk sensed it was all an effort at tight control. A mannerism that hid a volatile nature. Much like what he’d felt with Li. “We came here because we can’t have brothers doing things against other brothers. We can’t be seen to be working at cross purposes, at least not in the public eye.”

  Monk rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Come in my office please. Just you.”

  “I’d prefer it not be just me.”

  “It’s you or I’m out of here. I’m not in the mood to get Mau Maued this late in the afternoon.”

  A long stretch of seconds passed as they stood looking at one another. Finally Perry said, “Okay, if it’s all right with everyone else.” He looked at the others in the room who shook their heads in concurrence.

  The two entered the office. Monk removed the sport coat he wore over his starched khaki trousers with cuffs, blue-striped button-down shirt and tassled loafers. He hung the coat up and sat at his desk. Perry eased his large frame opposite. He tented his hands, waiting.

  “What is it you expect me to do or not do, Mr. Perry?” Monk said testily.

  “Are you determined to pursue this matter?”

  “I’m going to look into the murder of Bong Kim Suh.”

  “Then we hope you aren’t going to play their game, brother Monk. We hope you’ll be fair and impartial in your investigation.”

  “How do you mean their game?”

  “At the press conference, Li answered reporters’ questions. He said it was his opinion that Conrad James, if he could be found, might shed some light on this case. It seems to me that the Koreans want to put the noose around the young brother’s neck a little too soon.”

  “James hasn’t been around much. It is logical to want to talk to him. And I intend to. But I’m not naive or a handkerchief head, Mr. Perry. I know what time it is. I realize the Merchants Group hired me for PR value and as a wedge to pressure the cops into action.”

  Perry assessed Monk with new eyes. “It might interest you to know that James was let go by Suh that week. James locked up that Friday, came back on Saturday and there was a note left on the door for him by, allegedly, Suh.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I keep an ear to the street, Mr. Monk.” Perry bowed his head to silent applause. “My understanding is the note instructed James, who was the manager by the way, where he could find the pay coming to him plus another two weeks.”

  “Did this note say why Suh closed up?”

  “As far as I know, it did not.”

  “And do you have an address for James?” The file given to him by the Merchants Group lacked that as well.

  Perry stirred in his seat. “I didn’t come here to do your work for you. I came here to make sure you aren’t going to be the goat for the Koreans.”

  It was meant to bristle him and it did. Monk fought down a response and remained quiet.

  “Bigger things than the death of a Korean shop owner are at stake in this.”

  “Like SOMA?”

  “My being on the board of SOMA is just one means to an end.”

  “And what are your ends, Mr. Perry?”

  “Economic justice for the black man, Mr. Monk.”

  “And your way of achieving that is getting your name in the newspapers often?”

  Perry rose, brushing imaginary lint from his trousers. “It was a pleasure having this little talk. We’ll have another one soon.” He smiled warmly and departed.

  Nighttime came and Monk prepared dinner at Jill’s house. It was a two-story angular model a la Richard Neutra located on a hill in Silverlake. The view from the window in her study overlooked the Silverlake reservoir. And on Sunday mornings one could find various people, including the judge and a city councilman who lived nearby, jogging around its concrete skirt. Rarely Monk.

  He did his best to cut down on red meat—the judge was a virtual vegetarian—and w
ork out regularly, but he’d rather be dragged behind an IROC Trans Am butt naked than endure the ennui of jogging.

  Monk brought the plates of steaming yellow rice and shrimp, black beans on the side, to the dining room table. Kodama tossed a salad and poured equal amounts of an especially dry sauterne for both of them. She’d changed from her downtown business suit into form fitting cords and a loose flannel shirt. She was a Japanese-American woman of above average height with an intelligent face framed by walnut dark hair of medium length.

  They sat, clinked glasses and ate their food, making small talk. Later, they nestled on the couch in the judge’s study. The room was done in somber paneling with a large floor-to-ceiling Cherrywood bookcase filled with tomes of all sorts. Wing chairs occupied two corners like silent sentinels, and the judge’s desk was a twin of the one in Monk’s office. The floor was covered with a rug in bold Assyrian patterns. On the wall were various framed photos including one of Kodama being congratulated at an ACLU dinner. There was also a black lacquer frame around a photostat. It was Executive Order 9066, the law that FDR signed sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps during World War II. Including Kodama’s parents.

  “You know, Ivan,” Kodama began, “this city scares me more now than at any other time.”

  He caressed her hair. “How so?”

  “There’s too many trains running. Black leaders like Linton Perry who play the nationalist card when it suits him. And the next week saying how badly he wants to build coalitions with Latinos and Koreans.”

  Monk said, “And cats like Luis Santillion writing editorials saying in effect that African-Americans are incidental when it comes to numbers and therefore why worry about alliances when they have 41 percent.”

  She laid her head in his lap. “It’s all so depressing. Los Angeles’ capitalists trying to desperately leverage this place as the center of Pacific Rim finance and kids going hungry and people sleeping in their cars. And where I’ve had bricks thrown at my car because black people thought I was Korean.”