Violent Spring Read online

  “Learning is always a tortuous process, an old ship’s captain told me once. All we can do is keep going forward.”

  “For a cynical private eye, you carry around quite a bit of hope in your back pocket.” She looked into his face and kissed him for a long time.

  They made love, there in the study, spread out, their hips on the sofa, their legs across the coffee table. They sweated to climaxes while Muddy Waters sang “Baby Please Don’t Go” on the stereo, his voice rich as the Delta fields he came from.

  In the bedroom, a circle of light illuminated them by the Tensor lamp on Jill’s nightstand. She straddled him wearing black lace panties as Monk lay naked underneath her. She bent over him and finished trimming his goatee with the small scissors, then put them on the nightstand. Monk cupped her breast in his hand.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said, rocking to and fro on him.

  “Huh?”

  “You took the job because you want to prove a point. You get off on the idea of out-maneuvering Li, Perry, all of them and still find the real killer.”

  “I’m not that deep, baby. I need the business. You’re the one who sits on the bench, keeping the snarling dogs of Aryan fury from being unleashed on us poor citizens.”

  He pulled her close, and she bit one of his nipples. “You’re full of shit, Ivan.” She nuzzled his neck. Jimmy Smith, jazz master of the Hammond electric organ, played a steady, driving beat underneath their conversation, “Eleanor Rigby.”

  Her fingers rubbed a spot over his left rib cage. It was an elliptical section of flesh that had the consistency of a dried orange peel, the legacy of a .22 slug which had fragmented on impact. It took the doctor who worked on Monk more then two hours to dig the pieces out of him. Further up on his torso, a .38-caliber ricocheting bullet had ripped into his collar bone. The result was a bone chip that caused him arthritic inflammation in cold weather. But the wounds, and the ones who caused them, were far from Monk’s mind.

  She inched her body forward until the ‘V’ of her legs covered Monk’s head. Dexter Gordon’s wails of urban angst filled the room. The judge turned her body so that she was on her knees over him, taking him in her mouth as he did her. The saxman preened notes, dove in and out of sections as a race car driver might take a raceway.

  Afterward, they lay side by side in the bed, each staring at the shifting shadows on the ceiling thrown by the votive candles on the nightstand and the diffused light coming through the curtained bedroom window.

  “I was in this Greek village once, back when I was a merchant seaman. It was called,” he searched his memory, “Kilada.”

  Jill rose up on an elbow to take a sip of her wine. She smiled at him and put her head on his chest.

  “We were walking around—”

  “Looking for Mediterranean babes.”

  “Taking in the sights,” he continued. “And on some of the clotheslines hung octopuses, or octopi or whatever the plural is, drying in the sun. Later they would be marinated, cooked and served with ouzo. See, a lot of the porches were covered, so these creatures gave off weird shadows across the raw stone of the houses. None of them alike, yet related.”

  “Like a Rorschach test,” she offered.

  “Yes. You could see in the shapes whatever you wanted to. But there’s always something solid beyond the pattern.”

  “Is that right, Mr. Monk?”

  They both laughed. After a while, Kodama fell asleep and Monk eased out of the bed. Unable to sleep, he went downstairs to the study, got a book and came back to the bedroom. Sitting in a chair in the corner, he switched on an Art Deco wall sconce. He read several chapters from Jim Sleeper’s The Closest of Strangers. The patterns on the walls shifted as the wicks grew longer in the candles and the curtain swirled about the open window. The shadows of ectoplasm.

  THE ROOM WAS quiet like a run-down watch. Next to him, Monk heard the rhythmic breathing of the woman he loved. Gazing at her, he imagined what she was dreaming. What do women dream about? What do they see in men like him? Three years. Not long in the annals of humankind, an eon in relationships in the city of dashed hopes.

  He scratched his side, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom. Then he trod into the kitchen and started brewing some coffee. He slipped on the jeans he’d left draped over the faux Louis XIV chair in the study. Out front, on the well-tended lawn, Monk picked up the morning edition of the LA. Times, the folded part moist from the morning dew.

  Back in the kitchen, Monk poured two cups of coffee in over-sized stoneware mugs. Black for Jill, liberal amounts of sugar and milk for him. Paper tucked under his muscled arm, he strolled back into the bedroom with the hot coffee. He put the cups on the nightstand and sat on the bed, digging the Metro section out of the paper.

  Jill moved under her blanket and slid an arm onto Monk’s thigh. The covering moved below the middle of her back. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Monk read the article about yesterday’s news conference the Merchants Group had held.

  Jill’s hand rubbed his leg. “What time is it?”

  Monk glanced at the clock. “Six-forty.” He leaned over and kissed her shoulder blade.

  “Would you hand me some coffee, baby?”

  He retrieved it as she sat up in bed and handed it to her.

  “Thanks. I’ve got to—shit!” she suddenly exclaimed, clutching at the blanket and drawing it over her nude torso.

  Monk had been sitting on the bed facing Jill. From her position, she faced the bedroom windows running on the south side of her house. He spun in that direction. There in one of the windows was a blonde bush. No, Monk corrected himself, it was the ash-blonde mane of Kelly Drier, one-time minor league ball player, currently six figure sensationalist hack for the number-two local TV station in town.

  Drier knocked lightly on the window and pointed at the two on the bed. He mouthed something which Monk couldn’t make out. A tight grin pulled his lips back. “I’m going to go out there and stick my foot way up that moron’s ass.”

  “As your lawyer, I must advise you if you do, Drier will have it all over the four o’clock news.” Jill calmly sipped her coffee, eyeing the reporter who continued to gesticulate at the window. “I think he wants to talk to you, Ivan.”

  “Uh-huh.” Monk went to the window. Drier, a kind of sun-tanned version of ex Vice-President Dan Quayle, but with better taste in ties, smiled broadly. Solemnly, Monk pointed toward the front of the house. The reporter’s head worked up and down as if it were a clown head on a spring.

  It occurred to Monk the analogy was not too far strained as he put on his shirt, tail out. He padded to the front in bare feet. Opening the door, Drier stood there blow-dry fresh, his cologne cloying like a woman’s. Behind him and to the left stood a minicam operator holding his camera at rest, waiting for the word from the maestro.

  “I’ve never met you before, Mr. Drier.”

  “But you dug me on the tube, right?” he interrupted.

  Monk blinked, hard. “But yeah, I recognize you from the TV. Now why the fuck couldn’t anything you have to ask me wait until I was at my office?”

  “Because Monk, my man, you’re the wild card in this deal. And from what I’ve read about you, I think you’re going to be where the action is.”

  He hated when people, guys who didn’t know him called him “my man.” The camera operator hefted his device, adjusting the lens.

  “You haven’t heard, have you? It was on the news radio stations about half an hour ago.”

  “What?”

  “The cops and the FBI did a raid at a house near Adams and Western.”

  “Looking for Conrad James, I bet.”

  “That’s right, homeboy. ’Course they didn’t find him, but they did manage to roust a mother and her two children out of bed and tear up a chest-of-drawers her grandmother gave her.” The microphone, it must have been at his side all along, appeared under Monk’s nose. The red light winked red on the minicam. Drier swiveled his coiffured head to th
e camera.

  “I’m here with private eye Ivan Monk who has just learned that the combined efforts of the local police and the FBI, operating in a joint task force, have conducted an early morning sweep for the suspect in the murder of Bong Kim Suh. A murder Mr. Monk has been hired to solve by the Korean-American Merchants Group.” The blonde head pivoted back.

  “What are your reactions to this, Mr. Monk?”

  He mumbled some inanity as a reply. Drier continued for several minutes with questions whose purpose seemed to be to get Monk to pontificate on the state of the cops, the Koreans, black folks or the universe in general. He was getting edgy with boredom.

  “Finally, Mr. Monk, if this murder does indeed turn out to have been done by a black murderer, do you think the city will explode again?”

  Monk clamped his lips and rubbed the back of his neck. “Then he deserves a fair trial by a jury of his peers.”

  “But you’ll admit that’s hard to come by for a black man around here.”

  Monk knew where it was going, but what the hell. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Then the city could go up again if a black man is arrested?” A lascivious gleam lighted Drier’s baby blues. The microphone inched close enough for Monk to shave with it.

  “Well I’m sure if that happens, you’ll join me in helping to keep the peace, Mr. Drier.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean right here and now on live morning TV, I’m joining with you.” Monk put his arm around Drier’s shoulders. “As a representative of electronic journalists, as a man who has said he believes in activist reporting, I’m asking you to pledge that you’ll come with me into the deepest, darkest heart of South Central and together we will meet with the brothers and sisters on the battle lines. They respect you down there, you know.”

  Drier’s glare bored angrily into Monk who remained stone-faced looking at the camera. With practiced fluidity, Drier regained his facile composure. Through thin lips he said, “Bearing in mind that my job is to report breaking events, of course I’ll do everything I can to maintain calm if those riotous events should repeat themselves.”

  “Good, good.” Monk clapped him several times on the shoulder. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Brother Drier, my coffee’s getting cold.” Monk wheeled about and went into the house, silently closing the door behind him.

  The older man sat in the chair reading a current issue of Popular Science, his feet propped up on the semi-circular desk. His long legs were clothed in dungarees, and his barrel chest covered in a plaid flannel shirt. A pair of threadbare chukkas shod his feet. On his head was one of those formless fishing hats with a brim like the undulating body of a jellyfish. Beneath the hat, the platinum hair curled past the shirt’s collar.

  The office wasn’t open yet, it was eight-twenty, and Monk entered, deactivating the alarm after throwing the two dead bolts that allowed him into the rotunda.

  “’Bout time you got here,” the older man said, not lifting his head from the article he was reading in the magazine. “Back on the farm, half of the day would already be wasted.”

  “Why don’t I just give you a key to the place, Dex?”

  “I like to keep in practice, youngster.”

  Monk crossed to the coffee machine and started it to brewing.

  “Says here,” Dexter Grant began, pointing at the Popular Science, “engineers are working on the fusion angle, using deuterium-tritium to produce energy.”

  “That’s nice,” Monk said. He unlocked the door to his office.

  Grant rose, stretched and put the magazine back on the small table in the center of the chairs for waiting clents. “They figure it won’t be until 2030 when there’s an online fusion plant though. Assuming this particular energy source holds up.”

  “That’s fucking fascinating.”

  “Goddamn, you and Jill go at it this morning?”

  The two entered the dark office. Grant flipped the lights on and slouched down in one of the Eastlakes.

  Monk angled behind his desk. “How do you know I was with Jill?”

  “’Cause I went by your pad before I came over here and the Ford wasn’t there. Barring the notion that it had been stolen, and I would have heard about the bodies lying along the avenues if that would have happened, I am left with the irrefutable fact that you were over at Jill’s. You don’t sleep around, you don’t have the temperament for it like some cops I knew.”

  “Get us some coffee, will you, smart guy.”

  In a dead perfect imitation of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Grant said, “Sure, boss, comin’ right up.” He left and returned with two cups and set one down on the massive desk. “So what’s up?” His body poured back into the chair.

  Monk sipped, and regarded the man sitting before him. Dexter Grant was built like an over-the-hill fullback from the era of Red Grange, leather helmets and footballs made of pigskin. He’d been a kid off an Oklahoma oil lease who found himself in World War II. Big shouldered and raw-boned, the young Grant had only made it to the ninth grade when his folks had to pull him out of school to help out on the land. But that hadn’t stopped him from reading everything he could get his hands on nor listening to the tales of his uncle Logan when he came to town.

  The uncle, through marriage to one of his mother’s sisters, had been an organizer for the Wobblies. The Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, had been organized in 1905 by progressives in the labor and socialist movements for the purpose of joining all workers regardless of job type, color or sex.

  Uncle Logan had tales to tell a wide-eyed lad who’d never seen more than the rear end of a mule and a pressed shirt for Sunday-go-to-meetin’s. True tales of his imprisonment in Folsom on trumped-up charges, and the brawls against the guards he and other Wobblie organizers had to win to survive. Of bloody Ludlow and John D. Rockefeller’s goons cutting down striking miners with machine-gun fire.

  At seventeen, Grant had been signed into duty by his father. It wasn’t the elder’s idea, but they’d lost the lease, and the younger Grant saw the Army as a way of eating steady and sending something home to his folks and younger sisters. At basic training at Fort Wachuca, it came out that Grant had a pretty fair grasp of written and spoken German, another gift from his uncle Logan, who was of German extraction.

  And so the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, saw that it could use a quick-witted youngster who read a lot and understood the enemy’s language.

  Monk told Grant about the case and gave him a copy of his notes. “I need you to find out something on Suh. I want to know who he was before he got to the States.”

  Grant fingered the file before him on the desk. “This is all they gave you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think the Merchants Group is purposely holding back on Suh’s background?”

  “I think some of them in the organization have their mind set on one direction. Find the guilty, and damn the rest. And far as I can tell, Suh was an independent type. He didn’t belong to their group.”

  Grant touched his lips with the side of his index finger. “So they want to set an example, make a point that Korean shopkeepers won’t get pushed around.”

  “Exactly,” Monk said.

  “Yet the only employee they show that worked there is this Conrad James. The two of them couldn’t have worked ten to fourteen hours a day, and keep the inventory and whatever else you gotta do to keep a store going.”

  “I realize that,” Monk said testily.

  “So why don’t they have other people listed who worked there?”

  “I’m working on it. I don’t even know if anything Suh did before he came here has any bearing on this case. Hell, I’m not sure Suh came straight from South Korea or Steubenville, Ohio. But I damn sure want to find out.”

  “And since I’m the one with the State Department contacts.…” Grant let it trail off.

  “Come on, I’ll let you buy my breakfast.” Monk and Grant left the office and walked down the block to the
Cafe 77, a retro-fit Chinese joint that served great biscuits and grits for breakfast. Afterward, Grant drove off in his mint-condition ’67 Buick Electra deuce and a quarter, and Monk traipsed back to his office. Delilah was at her desk.

  “Marasco called for you. Dexter was here wasn’t he?”

  “Yes he was.”

  She tapped the cylindrical vase to her left. Sticking out of it, unnoticed by Monk before, was a single fresh cut pink rose.

  “Careful, baby. You might blow his circuits if you fool around with him.”

  “Or he mine,” she replied to his back as he entered his office.

  Monk had an idea what his friend Lt. Seguin had called about and he was none too anxious to get into it with him just yet. On the other hand, he couldn’t ignore the call. Marasco was a good man, better than okay as far as cops went. But he did work for the LAPD, and when they put their pointed heads to it, they damn sure could land on you with both feet.

  Certainly it wasn’t a walk in the park for a Chicano straight off the hard streets of Boyle Heights to keep his nose relatively clean, not kowtow to the racism of the department, and still make lieutenant before forty. Added to that, he remained friends with a black private eye nobody else on the force associated with. But a call from a cop is a call from a cop.

  Monk dialed the inside line to the detective’s section of Wilshire Station on Venice Boulevard. “Is Marasco there? This is Monk returning his call.” A pause, then the line picked up.

  “Ivan. Glad you called me back.” There was a formality in the voice that raised Monk’s antenna.

  “Of course. What can I do for you, lieutenant?”

  “We’d like you to come down here and discuss this case of yours.”

  “We being you and the chief?”

  “You two can cut it out,” a new voice said. As Monk assumed, someone else was listening in. “This is Special Agent Keys, Mr. Monk, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As field commander of the task force looking into the murder of Mr. Suh, I’d consider it a professional favor if you’d meet with us.”

  Jesus, this guy believed in the carrot and the stick in the same swipe. “It’s gonna have to be day after tomorrow, agent Keys. Or Monday.”