Violent Spring Read online

  “Today would be better.” Keys’ tone was flat, unshaded. The threat hiding in back of it.

  “As one pro to another, I’m sure you understand I’m in the middle of things just now.”

  There was a silence on the line. Finally, Seguin spoke. “It’d be good if you got over here tomorrow, Friday. Around noon.”

  Just to irk Keys, Monk said, “Two o’clock then.” He hung up before either could voice an objection. Monk pushed away from the desk, rubbing his temples. He made three more calls and left the office again.

  He drove over to the Culver City DMV and waited in the registration line. Reaching the counter, he was greeted with the apparition of a reed-thin man in a cheap suit way past the need for pressing. The bureaucrat’s face was sunken and partially hidden by the thick lenses of his glasses. He stood motionless, waiting for the last customer in the last line on a career to nowhere.

  “I’ve been the victim of a hit and run,” Monk said.

  The skeleton said nothing. His face a zero of acknowledgment.

  “I want to find out who hit me. I have the license number.” Monk enunciated each word as a tourist might to a person who spoke another language.

  The arm of the man with the build of a stork’s leg disappeared under the counter and reappeared with a form printed in blue ink. “Fill this out, including your own license number. Bring it back to this window. You do not have to get back in line again.”

  Monk filled out the form, putting down the license number he’d gotten from Betty, Bong Kim Suh’s exlandlady. He returned it to the counter.

  The DMV clerk looked at it, said nothing and went away. Presently he returned and said, “That’ll be four dollars.” He pointed to another counter. “Pay the cashier and bring the receipt back. You don’t have to wait in line,” he said in his blank slate of a voice. Monk did so and returned to the charmer. The man’s bony hand passed a print-out to the private eye. As Monk walked away, a woman behind him came up and began shouting at the deathly thin man.

  “Why the fuck has my car had one of them boots put on it, huh?”

  Without a change of expression, he produced another form.

  Monk read the information on the print-out. A certificate of non-operation had been filed on the 1988 Honda Civic DX Suh had driven. It was dated from November of last year. The address on the certificate was in Orange County. He took out his notepad, and sure enough, the Orange County address was the one given for Jiang Holdings in Stanton, the company that now owned the liquor license on Hi-Life Liquors and Minimart.

  But a jaunt behind the Orange Curtain was going to have to wait. Monk had other fish to fry for the moment. He got in his Ford and drove east on Washington, away from Culver City, back into Los Angeles.

  Reaching Hauser, Monk swung the car left and arrived at the Hi-Life liquor store at the corner of Pico and Hauser. There was a parking stall behind the establishment accessible off of Hauser just north of the intersection. Monk parked in it and walked in the front.

  Behind the counter was the woman he’d seen sweeping down the sidewalk the day before. She was dressed in an orange and tan jumpsuit, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. In the corner, two kids Monk made to be around twelve or thirteen played on one of the video games. There was a lot of those sounds you hear in dubbed kung fu flicks when the hero is beating the hell out of a dozen bad guys. At each violently loud impact, the two youngsters would laugh and exude ‘aghhs,’ twisting their bodies as if they too felt the blows.

  The woman studied Monk as he approached the counter. He had his photostat out, pushed toward her. “My name is Ivan Monk. Mr. Li of the Korean-American Merchants Group hired me to look into the murder of Bong Kim Suh.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I saw the news.” She gestured at a compact portable TV on the counter. It was surrounded by an open box of Baby Ruth candy bars and baseball cards, near a horizontal rack of polybagged ten-dollarsper-pack for three soft-core girlie magazines. The set played a silent soap opera. “I remember your name.”

  Monk replaced his wallet. “Did you know Mr. Suh?”

  Her eyes looked over at the two youngsters, then back to Monk. “No.”

  “How did you come to buy this business?”

  “Why not? It was for sale.”

  “By who?”

  “The Bank. Ginwah Bank. When Kim Suh leave, payments stop, bank take over. We pay them, take over business.”

  “How much did the liquor license cost you?”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Bank say liquor license belong to Jiang Company, not our concern. We get good rate on store, Bank take care of Jiang.”

  “Look, Ms.…”

  “Chung. Mrs. Chung.”

  A tall clean-cut Korean-American young man stepped from the rear of the store through a door next to the beer case. Monk took him to be twenty-two or three, and he wore knee-length baggy shorts and a T-shirt with a giant ‘X’ on it.

  “What up, Aunt So?” the new arrival said. He came up beside her on their side of the counter.

  “This is the one the Merchants Group hired.” She shook a thumb at Monk. “Answer his questions, I got work to do.” She marched off into the back.

  “Hi, I’m David,” the young man said, extending his hand.

  Monk shook it, introducing himself. “I was asking your aunt what she knew about Jiang Holdings.”

  David lifted a shoulder and an eyebrow. “Who are they?”

  “The company that has title to the liquor license of this place.”

  “Well, homey, that’s beyond me. I just work here part time to help the folks out and shit.”

  That’s why your aunt sicced you on me. But Monk said, “Do you know anything about the people Suh had working here before your aunt and uncle bought this place?”

  “No. Wait a minute,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I was in here one day and this chick came in, fine too. Anyway, she said she used to work for Suh and was wondering if we’d heard from him.”

  “He owe her money?”

  “I don’t know, man. But I think—” He stopped himself in mid-sentence and pulled out a drawer in the counter. He dug around for several seconds then produced a scrap of yellow, blue lined paper. This he handed to Monk.

  “Can I keep this?” Monk said, shaking the piece of paper.

  “Sure. Don’t look like we’re gonna hear from Suh now, huh?”

  Monk handed the young man one of his business cards. “You never know what a dead man might tell you. If you think of anything else, give me a call, will you?”

  “Sure, Mr. Monk.” And they shook hands again.

  Monk walked past the action video game. Only one kid played now, his eyes semi-glazed, mouth hanging open. The game was called, “Bring me the Head of Saddam Hussein.”

  Out at the curb, Monk noticed two young black men, also in their early twenties, stopped on the other side of Pico Boulevard in a late model, gun-metal grey Blazer with Weld rims. He noticed them because the one in the passenger seat was pointing toward the store. Or him. The utility vehicle pulled away quickly, and Monk wasn’t about to rush out in the busy street and try to get the license number. He got in his car and took Hauser south to Adams, then made a left. Deeper into the black belt, the more segregated portion of Mid-City which eventually became the Crenshaw District.

  Nearing La Brea, Monk passed a stretch of shoddy motels laid out one against another like fallen dreams. In the gated courtyard of a pink and green stucco model, he spied small Latino children laughing and kicking a ball back and forth. One of them stood at the gate, looking out at the passing traffic, a thumb lodged comfortably in her mouth. In the next motel, with an ungated courtyard, two young men stood under the eaves. Each was dressed in black khakis and black Air Jordans. One of them, short and muscular, had on a purple shirt buttoned at the cuffs and collar, the regalia of the Rolling Daltons.

  The other wore a fedora with a feather in its crown crammed low on his head, and he whistled at Monk as he drove past
. On the corner where the motels ended, a woman darker than Monk with hair dyed an eye-hurting color that might charitably be called blonde, lolled against the east wall of the building.

  Above her, on the roof of the motel, was a billboard. It was the logo of SOMA printed in garish colors. In reversed-out letters below the flaming logo were the words “The Future Begins Today.” The woman smiled at Monk, revealing gold-capped front teeth.

  He reached Palm Grove Avenue and turned right. Monk parked the car at a rectangular duplex sitting on a lot of brown grass in the middle of the block. The porch had spots of chipped red paint, and the apartment on the right had a hole in its screen door. The one on the left, the one that Monk approached, had a heavy gauge security door fronting it. He rang the bell.

  The inner door opened but he couldn’t see beyond the opaque mesh of the screen. “Yes, may I help you?” The voice belonged to a young woman.

  “Ms. Jacobs, my name is Ivan Monk. I’d like to ask you a few questions about the time you worked at Hi Life Liquors.” He produced his license. Maybe, he absently reflected, he ought to have the thing stenciled to his shirt he was showing it so much.

  “Okay. Come on in.” The screen door swung outward revealing an African-American woman in her mid-twenties. Her hair was dreadlocked and pulled back from a handsome face. She was dressed in jeans, a loose top and sandals. Her head was oblong shaped and the eyes in it were alive, observant.

  “I didn’t think any of us were Mike Hammer types.” Her smile was genuine.

  “I’m not, that’s for the Hollywood tough guys.” Monk passed through the door jamb into a neatly appointed apartment. Karen Jacobs closed and locked the screen door, leaving the inner door open.

  “Have a seat.” She sat in an overstuffed chair where two text books and a pad of yellow paper rested on one of its arms. Block printing covered the pad’s surface.

  He sat on the couch. “I got your name from David Chung. He says you’d been there asking about Mr. Suh.”

  “Yeah, that was terrible. He was really a nice man. But I don’t know what I can tell you. I only worked in the store part-time up until the beginning of last year. I’m going to school at UCLA, you know.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Economics.”

  “Gonna start a business?”

  “No, not how you mean. I plan to do economic planning and fundraising for community groups and nonprofits.”

  “Bet. We don’t need more profiteers in the ’hood.”

  “You go to some kind of socialist private eye school?”

  Straight-faced, Monk said, “I can’t even spell the word. Did Bong Kim Suh owe you money? Is that why you asked about him?”

  “Nothing that mercenary. I’d heard that he wasn’t around and was just curious is all.”

  “He was that nice a boss.”

  “Yes.”

  Monk said, “Really.”

  “Yes,” she insisted.

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  There was a gap of time that elapsed while Monk stared at her. “You sure this didn’t have something to do with Conrad James?”

  She looked at the ceiling and then at Monk. “Well, I guess you know Conrad James also worked there. I was kind’a curious as to what had happened to Conrad.”

  “When did Conrad go missing?”

  “Around October of last year.”

  “He and Suh hung out?”

  “The two of them got on well.”

  “Did you and Conrad get on well?”

  “We went out a couple’a times. He was nice, and not like a lot of other guys. He could keep his hands in his own lap.”

  There was a smart comeback there, but Monk wasn’t going for it. “What kind of guy was Suh?”

  Her eyebrows went up a notch. “I don’t know, really. Except I think he was kind’a aware, you know?”

  “What led you to say that?”

  “Mr. Suh was a pretty bright cat. I saw him once reading a copy of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And another time he came up to me to ask me about some words he’d read in John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle.”

  Monk wrote in his notepad. “Did he talk about politics, or the local scene? Black, Korean stuff in Los Angeles.”

  She digested the question and pondered it for a few moments. “Actually Conrad would be the one to ask about that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. He and Conrad got along, as I said. Conrad even took Mr. Suh to a Raider game since he hadn’t seen American football in person.”

  “So he and Conrad saw each other socially?”

  “They weren’t ace boon coon, but yeah, you could say they socialized to an extent. I remember after the Du thing they’d get into discussions about the incident at work.”

  “Arguing?”

  She paused, searching for the right words. “They didn’t shout at one another, but it was more like two peers who had different points of view on the same subject.”

  “Interesting. Suh ever talk about his life in South Korea?”

  “Mr. Suh mentioned he’d been married once.”

  “And.”

  “All he said was his wife had died back in South Korea.” Her brows knitted. “It was a sad thing for him to bring up and he didn’t again.”

  “You remember anything else he said about his life then?”

  The handsome head moved from side to side then stopped. “I remember something about Yushi, no, Yushin, I think he said. Mr. Suh was on the phone talking to someone and they got into an argument in Korean.

  “I remember the word because he said his wife’s name, Jai Choo I believe, and then some more words, then Yushin repeated several times.” She spread her hands before her. “He slammed the receiver down, then covered his face and cried.” Her face clouded at the memory of another person’s pain. “He was a nice man,” she said in elegy for Suh.

  Monk asked some more questions and got three other names of people who had worked at various times at the Hi-Life liquor store.

  “Did you think Suh read or talked about black folks just for show, you know, have his employees think he was down and all?”

  “No, no. I think he was quite sincere about that. I mean I think he had a real interest in learning about his environment. He didn’t ask a lot of goofy questions but he was always observing and reading the local news, you know. Not just the Times, but The Sentinel too.”

  Monk continued to write in his little notepad. The Sentinel was the weekly black newspaper of Los Angeles. “What about his private life?”

  She leaned forward. “Are you saying did he ask me out?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Did he ever say anything about what he did away from work?”

  She spread her hands in the air. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “But you and Conrad were still going out after Suh stopped running the liquor store in April?”

  Warily, she said, “A couple of times, yeah.”

  “Until when? What month?”

  “Sometime around September.”

  “And he’d seen Suh since he’d left the store?” He said it nonchalantly, slipping it into the conversation as if it were an afterthought.

  A tick twitched the left side of Karen Jacobs’ face. “Not that I know of.”

  “Why’d you and James stop seeing each other?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “Did the two of you talk about why you thought Suh quit the store?”

  She was on guard and wouldn’t play the game anymore. “Look, Mr. Monk, I’ve got plenty of studying to do. Okay?”

  “Sure, I don’t want to wear out my welcome.” He rose. “If you don’t know where Conrad is now, could you tell me where he used to live?” She couldn’t duck that one.

  Jacobs hesitated, then went to a cabinet built into the wall and took out her address book. Monk drifted near her. She sat at a table and wrote down the former address and telephone number for the missing Conrad James. She tore of
f the corner of the yellow pad, almost an exact duplicate in size to the note she’d left at the Hi-Life, and handed it to Monk.

  “Thanks.” He put one of his cards on the table. “Let me know if you think of anything else.” It occurred to Monk he was giving out more cards than an ambulance chasing lawyer.

  “I will,” she said unconvincingly.

  He drove away from the duplex, west up Washington toward his office. The black woman with the ostentatious hair was still there next to the motel. She was talking to the men in the grey Blazer with the Weld-style rims. The vehicle was turned into a driveway, sideways to the boulevard so Monk couldn’t get a look at the plates. He checked his mirror, but the Blazer wasn’t following him.

  At the address Jacobs gave him for James, Monk found an apartment whose current occupant never heard of the young man, didn’t want one of his cards, and wouldn’t tell him who the manager was. The private eye quit the place and grabbed a beer in a bar.

  FATHER DIVINE, THE Depression-era conman/ preacher of Harlem, was giving him a lecture on the best method of preparing catfish stew and mustard greens. This he didn’t mind. But they were having an argument on how many cardamom seeds to put in the Turkish coffee. Matter of fact, as the both of them sat in Tiger Flowers’ sauna drinking Cuba Libres, the others in the room asked them to take their senseless discussion elsewhere.

  Monk was about to say something to Paul Robeson, he being the most vociferous about his and Father Divine’s departure, when the goddamn bell went off again.

  “Shit, answer that motherfucker,” Monk mumbled, climbing out of sleep. He groped, found the handset, and pulled it to the pillow somewhere in the vicinity of his head.

  “Sorry to wake you, my friend.”

  What?

  “Mr. Monk, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “As I’d said, I apologize for the earliness of the hour. But having raised five children of varying ages, my body clock is eternally attuned to getting up at five-thirty each A.M.”

  Jovial son-of-a-bitch. And then the voice made its way past the skull into the brain. “Mr. O’Day.”