Perdition, U.S.A. Page 5

  He looked up the streets in his Thomas Guide. They were eerily close. The shootings, though all of them took place in the Shores’ black section, seemed to have no other pattern connecting the three.

  He quit the room and spent the next two and a quarter hours doing the career-enhancing, mind-expanding task of shop inventory with Elrod. As a petty bourgeois capitalist, Monk was pleased to discover that the price of sugar had dropped, owing to a glut in the Third World. But as an international citizen, he had to wonder what that meant for the common folk in those countries. Elrod snapped him out of his reverie with evidence that their flour salesman may have been overcharging them.

  “I’ll have a sit-down with him and appraise him of our discovery,” Elrod said implacably. “I’m sure we can reconcile the matter and receive the proper credit.”

  “Talking means, talking, yeah?” Monk beamed at the big man, not bothering to correct his malapropism.

  “Of course, chief.”

  Monk tried to reach Clarice but no one answered at her home.

  “I’m gone, blood,” and Monk wound his car up onto the Harbor Freeway heading south. Taking the Broadway exit off the 710, Monk entered downtown Long Beach a little past three in the afternoon.

  Once referred to as Iowa-By-The-Sea, Long Beach had started out as a subdivided tract of rolling land leased to an Englishman named William Willmore. He promptly christened it Willmore City, and decreed it alcohol-free. This and other factors contributed to its economic failure and he had to deed it back to the land-rich Bixbys.

  Eventually the town took on the name Long Beach, and for several decades it became a haven for residents—many from Iowa—whose idea of fun was a rocking chair and a pitcher of lemonade on the porch. But the discovery of oil, and the laying of tracks for the Red Car trolley line changed all that. When Monk was a kid, his mother and father occasionally brought the family here to the Pike, a now-defunct amusement pier modeled after Coney Island.

  Standing in the parking lot of the Press-Telegram, Monk was swept with a powerful memory of one such excursion when he won a teddy bear for his mother at a ring toss game. As he pridefully showed his mother the prize, several drunk, laughing sailors, reeling from a roller coaster ride, sloshed by. When one of them mumbled something about “niggers”, his dad was going to take off after the crew but his mother restrained him. She reminded him that if the police were called, it would be him—not the sailors—arrested.

  On the way home that day, Monk and his sister Odessa sat in the back seat of the family’s Chrysler staring at the stuffed animal on the seat between them, somehow hoping the inanimate bear could explain a harsh reality they’d just barely started to grasp. That night, Monk was so troubled by the incident he couldn’t sleep. Wandering to the kitchen for a glass of milk, he found his dad sitting at the table, silent and brooding.

  Before him was his favorite whiskey, Crown Royal, and a chipped coffee cup half full of the liquor and ice.

  Josiah Monk’s chair was propped back against the wall, a hand held to his temple, his eyes closed. Sensing another’s presence, he stirred, focused, and snatched a stiff piece of paper next to the bottle.

  “You see that, Ivan?” Josiah Monk asked his son, shaking the paper at him.

  “What is it, pop?”

  “My honorable discharge from the Army. After Korea, son.”

  His father’s bleary gaze bore down on him. For the first time in his young life, his dad was making him scared. “Uh-huh.”

  “The white man said go fight them red gooks. Said we had to keep the world free from being put in chains by Mao and Moscow. Well I did. I even made three stripes, and got some shrapnel in my side for the trouble.” He grabbed the boy by the shoulder, his callused mechanic’s hands digging into the young muscle, hurting him. The father drew him closer, the alcohol emanating from him like a backed-up sewer.

  “But what about ours, boy? What about ours?”

  The demographics of Long Beach, along with its economic base, had shifted since his dad had first asked that question. But no answers, from father or son, had come in the meantime.

  About the size of San Francisco, Long Beach was now a vibrant, sometimes volatile, co-mingling of Samoans, whites, African Americans, Latinos, Filipinos, and Cambodians. The last were arrivals whose lives had been forever transformed by their survival and escape from the kill-happy Khmer Rouge in the mid-70’s. Little Phnom Penh was now a thriving community in dramatic juxtaposition to the conventional but moribund “attractions” of the landlocked Queen Mary and the empty dome that once housed the Spruce Goose.

  Monk entered the quiet offices of the newspaper and asked for the morgue. He was directed to a well-lit space on the second floor where a middle-aged black woman in a chiffon dress sat at a desk, writing on an pad of unlined paper. She looked up as Monk approached.

  “Can I help you, sir?” She had high-boned cheeks and an even tan coloring. Her lined eyes were oblong, and her face, framed by black hair piled high and streaked intermittently with grey, made an arresting impression. Her gaze lingered on Monk. “You’ve come to look up your old college record.”

  “Pardon?” Monk suddenly felt flush at the collar.

  The woman rose, and by doing so demonstrated how well she kept herself in shape. “You look like you used to play some ball, Mr…?”

  “Monk. I played back in college, linebacker, but that was a long time ago.”

  “How long, Monk?”

  Jill sentencing him to the torture of a thousand sharp knives flashed in his mind and he revealed to the back-issue bombshell only his card. “I’d like to see the last two weeks of the Telegram, please.”

  “Sure.” She moved from around the desk and smothered him with a look that made him nervous somewhere below the thorax. Monk followed her to some shelving behind a row of file cabinets. She pointed at a particular stack. “After a month, we photograph the issues onto microfiche, but these cover the period you’re looking for.”

  She extended her hand and Monk shook it. “I’m Gloria, Monk. If I can help you in any other part of your investigation, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

  “I’d be a fool not to.”

  She was about to comment when a new customer appeared at her desk. “Excuse me,” Gloria said, and went over to talk with the woman, a short-haired Latina in a business suit holding a slim attache case.

  Monk took the pile to a nearby desk and went through the stack. He found the accounts of Scatterboy’s death and the recent shooting of Jimmy Henderson, the kid whose name he’d never forget. With the issues in hand, Monk walked back to the magnificent Gloria.

  “Where can I make copies of the articles I want?”

  “Oh, you can have those, we can get more from circulation. Just let me make a note of the volume and number.”

  As she wrote the information down, Monk was aware that the woman in the business suit was standing to one side, appearing to browse through a bunch of back issues. But he had the distinct impression she was eavesdropping on his conversation with Gloria. “There you go,” the tidy woman said. She handed Monk the issues with her business card.

  Monk pocketed the card. “Thanks for your help, Gloria.”

  “Of course.”

  On his way out, Monk caught a glimpse of the short-haired woman walking briskly toward the shelves with the back issues. He left the newspaper and drove over to Clarice Moore’s house in the Shores to pick up the contract. His knock produced no answer. There was a car in the driveway but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He knocked again, waiting and listening. After the third attempt, he left a note and drove away. Back into Long Beach, he discovered a Norm’s, a bowl of soup, a turkey melt, and a side of coleslaw.

  Sitting at the counter, Monk read the afternoon edition of the L.A. Times while working on his second cup of coffee and puffing on a thin Cuesta-Rey. Presently, he got up and dialed a number on the pay phone situated between the men’s and women’s lavatories.

  “
Hello,” the honey-dipped voiced murmured.

  “Hi, Gloria, this is Monk.”

  “Well, well, couldn’t stay away, huh?” The voice went down a notch for a throaty effect.

  “’Fraid I’m still on the client’s time, my dear.”

  “Shoot.”

  “And since I am, would you mind telling me who that woman was sneaking around when I was there?”

  The voice went up two octaves. “You call me up to ask about another woman?”

  Monk chided, “Come on.”

  “She wouldn’t tell me, Shaft. Though she was a little put off by the fact that you took those two particular issues of the newspaper.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh,” Monk could almost see her cocking her head, “she went through the pile and then nonchalantly asked if I could get her copies of those issues. I said sure, no problem. Then she tried with the small talk, asking me if you were a friend, had you come there before, that kind of thing.”

  “What’d you tell her?” Out of the corner of his eye, Monk could see a young man with long hair suddenly retch and throw up on the counter.

  “You’ll have to buy me a drink to find out.”

  That wasn’t too hard a request. “Sure. Where?”

  She told him and Monk hung up. A waiter had retrieved a bucket and mop and was cleaning up the mess as the kid watched him glassy-eyed. Walking to the cashier to pay his bill, Monk reminded himself how innocent this all was, just doing his work, he’d buy the lady a drink and get his information. It wasn’t as if he and Jill weren’t solid. Then why, Monk rolled over in his mind as he sat in his Ford, did he allow himself to be put in a potentially compromising situation? Could it be the relationship was reaching the same ’ol same ’ol stage? Was it her own growing ambivalence toward him that made Jill hesitant to move in together?

  He fired up the car, its carburetor gulping air and fuel like a hungry cheetah, the motor growling in a basso-profundo confidence. Maybe, he smirked to himself, he was just trying to rationalize an excuse to take a tumble with Gloria.

  To kill some time, Monk went to a favorite used bookstore called Acres of Books. More than an hour later, he left with several volumes including a second edition of Chester Himes’ The Real Cool Killers and drove to his rendezvous at the Hideaway, as Gloria had instructed him.

  He entered a dim-lit affair replete with hanging plants and a guy in a tux at a piano with an oversized brandy snifter on it.

  Monk bought Gloria Traylor two Manhattans while he dueled with a Cuba Libre. She ran through the highlights of her life story. A term as a pit boss in Atlantic City. Trips to Africa. Sunsets off the pier in Hermosa Beach.

  Traylor told him the woman with the tomboy haircut hadn’t given her name, nor had she, Gloria, given the woman his name. But Traylor definitely had the impression the woman was a professional of some kind from her clothes and the authentic Louis Vuitton attache case she was carrying. The woman got copies of the same two back issues he’d obtained.

  “She say anything else after receiving the copies?” Three-quarters into his drink, Monk was beginning to feel mellow. The kind of looseness that in combination to sitting and talking with a good-looking woman could lead to other things beside sitting and talking. He banished tempting images from his mind and zeroed in on her words.

  “She put them in that fancy case of hers, which by the way had the initials ‘XY and C’ in gold Gothic English letters embossed on it.”

  “Huh?”

  She winked at Monk over the rim of her glass. “You heard me, handsome. An ‘X, Y, hyphen C.’ She tried to think up more stuff to talk to me about, but really she was just trying to get your name.” She paused. “But that would ruin the spell you’re putting on me, or is it the other way around?”

  Anticipation and anxiety fought for control of Monk. As his libido wrestled with his conscience, he tried to keep his voice neutral. “You observe anything else about Ms. X?”

  The older woman placed a hand on Monk’s forearm. “Is business all we’re going to talk about tonight?”

  Monk smiled awkwardly. “Before this leads us somewhere, maybe I better be straight with you—”

  “You’re married,” she interrupted.

  Lying was a good way out, but he relied on the truth. “No. But I do have a girlfriend and we’re committed to each other.” At least he believed they were.

  “How committed, Monk?” she said too sweetly, allowing him to twist the knife he’d put in himself.

  “Shit,” he exhaled after more rum and coke. “You know you’re fine, Gloria, and you damn well know I find you attractive.”

  “And pleasant company.”

  “Yes, that too.” He placed his hand flat on the bar and fixed her with a look. “I’m not saying I’m a candidate to take over when Mother Theresa steps aside, but I want to try and walk the line, dig?”

  “You got the shoulders to bear the burden, honey.” She leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth. Monk didn’t make much of an effort to pull back.

  “I’m not waiting by the phone, or any of that other romance novel bullshit, baby. I got a life too, dig?” She got up from her seat and turned for the door, then held a hand up in the air.

  “I think she was a lawyer,” Gloria said, swiveling her head in Monk’s direction.

  As if emerging from a trance, Monk said, “What makes you say that?”

  “When she opened her briefcase, I got a glimpse of a letterhead that said something like Fuler, one ‘L’, Evans, I think, and another name.”

  “Sister, you’re a real gone chick, as my dad used to say.”

  “Ha.” She bent down and kissed him on the cheek and walked out of the Hideaway as the piano man played a Duke Ellington number, “I Let a Song Go Out of my Heart.”

  Monk ordered some water. He downed it, and left to the sounds of clinking glasses and laughter. The sexual energy shot through the place like lightning waiting to strike. He got in his Galaxie, turned the motor over, then clicked it off.

  An epiphany had suddenly descended on him. He was going through the motions, but what the hell for? What, if anything, was he really going to discover concerning the murder of Scatterboy Williams?

  All right, three young brothers had been shot, two of them were dead. But those two weren’t exactly sterling characters, and Henderson may have been an isolated incident. He was the one that broke the pattern. His case seemed like an out-and-out robbery attempt.

  Clarice’s hundred was spent, and even if he had the inclination to ask, there wasn’t going to be any more scratch from her. He was operating on his own funds. Altruism was fine, but that didn’t keep gas in the Ford.

  Had he really wanted to meet with back-issue Gloria to learn more? Or was it just the handsome woman’s attention he desired. Out on the parking lot, a man and woman were arguing.

  The woman started to walk away, the man grabbing at her arm. Monk had his hand on the door handle, but the man missed and slid down against the fender of a wine-colored Mercury. The drunk man laughed uproariously, sitting against the tire. The woman gave him the finger as she raced away in her car.

  Monk also left. Driving past dilapidated buildings held together with memories of better times, he felt an anger rise in him. It emerged from vague questions which stabbed like an ice pick at his psyche. Was there anything to this case? And why was he involved in it? He had empathy for Clarice, but so what? She was naive, wanting to believe there was a profound truth behind her boyfriend’s death. But there wouldn’t be. The tragic demise of youths like Williams, caught in a web of uncertain origin, would never have meaning.

  He headed for Clarice’s house. He’d refund her money if need be, and move on to more profitable ventures. There, he finally admitted it to himself. That’s what was lurking behind his anxieties. He had to come up with his end of the ducats for him and Jill to even consider playing house together. Jill was too diplomatic to say it but maybe his position further down on the economic s
cale was one of the reasons for her hesitancy. She didn’t go around flashing her pay stub, but Monk knew a superior court judge’s annual salary was $99 grand plus some change, on top of which she earned more through speaking engagements and writing assignments for various publications. Monk did well to make 40 or 50% of that in a year, including his small income from the donut shop. Goddamn. His foot accelerated the Ford through the evening streets even as he neared Clarice’s neighborhood.

  The anger at himself and his situation was smoldering by the time he got to Clarice’s house. He rang the bell, waiting. There were lights on inside, and the same powder blue Cressida in the driveway. A shade moved in the window next to the front door. Another moment passed, then someone said. “Yes?” through the door.

  Monk identified himself.

  Another silence then the female voice spoke again. “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to see Clarice.”

  “She ain’t your client,” the voice he knew must be Clarice’s mother retorted.

  “I’d still like to talk to her. It’s about what she wanted me to look into.” Monk raised his voice. If nothing else, she’d have to open the door to make him be quiet. He heard the mother talking to someone else. The porch light came on and the door opened slightly.

  “Clarice don’t want your services anymore,” the mother’s disembodied voice said from the black aperture.

  “Let him in, mom,” Clarice all but shouted from inside the house.

  “Girl, I told you to watch that tone with me.”

  The door closed but didn’t shut, and Monk could hear them talking heatedly with each other. He pushed on the door, and it gave way to his touch. He stepped inside.

  The mother, a good-sized, light-skinned woman in a jogging suit and curlers, was talking hurriedly with her daughter. The mother’s hands were on her hips, her back to Monk. She whirled around upon noticing the reaction in Clarice’s face.

  “Now I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but you can take your private peepin’ ass back out of my house.”

  Monk barely heard her. It was Clarice’s face that got his attention. In the light of the living room’s lamps, the fresh bruises on the chin and side of her face were as stark as lit flares along a midnight highway.