Violent Spring (6 page)

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 work 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.”

“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.

T
HE 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.