Bad Night Is Falling (16 page)

Monk poked his tongue in the side of his mouth and sampled his wine. “Well, goddamnit, what would you do?”

“About Jamboni?”

“Don't be cute.”

“I can't help it, baby. What's there to do, Ivan?” she asked rhetorically, changing her tone. “Make Dex crawl over glass and bricks for his transgressions? I mean, it's not like you haven't been known to do what's expedient on occasion.” She leaned back, enjoying her Chablis.

“I stand accused,” Monk acknowledged. “But that's because there was a greater good.”

“The same might hold true for Dex. It was the best he could do given the situation.”

“What was the trade-off?”

“For Dex or for the Rancho?” Her voice was clear, her eyes unyielding in the smokey light of La Faucon, the Burmese-French restaurant on the outskirts of Monterey Park, a city referred to as the Chinese Beverly Hills, given the influx of striving immigrants and Asian-Americans.

“He saved his ass, Jill. There ain't nothing else to it.”

“I read that part in Wilkenson's manuscript. But he also states later this DeKovan made good on his promises. He financed the construction and supplied the staffing of the job training center.”

“Ingot Limited.” Monk visualized the citation inside the now useless shell of the center.

“So you did read more.”

“Not exactly. When I first went to see Fletcher Wilkenson, he told me briefly about DeKovan, the Merchants and Manufacturers Consortium, and the rest. After I saw him, I talked with Henry Cady, a longtime resident. He said the construction of the center was some kind of /files/10/51/28/f105128/public/private arrangement; federal money covered the continued overhead. DeKovan's company bought the land the center was on in eighty-one—it was belly-up by then, the Reagan years you know—in a lease back arrangement. Then he sold it off to some recycling company as far as he could tell. Not too much later this outfit went bankrupt before it could set up its recycling plant.”

Monk bit on an end of his chopstick with his front teeth as if attacking prey. “But it was in reading that part of Fletcher's manuscript I learned of Dex's little, ah, ethical indiscretion.”

Kodama plucked a clump of broccoli and a sliver of beef off her plate with her chopsticks and worked the pieces in her mouth. She finished and answered him. “Wilkenson states that he got a call from DeKovan when he first told Dex and his partner Jakes to go to hell. See, if you hadn't been so worked up, you would have known that.”

“You got me, prof.” Monk's teeth glistened.

“Anyway, Wilkenson recounts how DeKovan knows he's been trying to get the job center set up, and all the roadblocks to getting it done, how can he help.”

“At best that makes him a rich, condescending, noblesse oblige prick. Really, it means DeKovan was the grand master, Jill. Dex and Jakes his puppets.”

“Dex is the one who told DeKovan about the plans for the center.” She kept a steady gaze on him.

“Wilkenson say that?”

“No, I called Dex and asked him. Or rather it came up.”

Monk put down his chopsticks. “So you are a meddler.”

“I stand accused.” She extended her arms at ninety degrees and bowed slightly.

“So Dex knew DeKovan was a limousine liberal. I'm sure as a way to assuage his own guilt he threw that bone to the rich boy.” Monk did a passing imitation of Grant's coarse baritone. “See, Fletch, everybody wins. Sure you gotta make a sacrifice, but the Rancho gets the center you want, and, well …”—he used his own voice—“you get the shaft, baby.”

“You should ask him,” she said confidently.

“Maybe I'll go to the source.”

“Do so, my dear.” She worked her sticks, raking more steamed rice onto her plate.

“You're so hep on my situation, huh?” Monk smiled knowingly.

“Jamboni and me is not the same thing, Ivan.”

“Really,” he said through a sigh.

“Yeah.” Her head thrust forward with a bull elephant's brashness.

Monk let moments tick by before he spoke. “It's about unfinished business, Jill. It's about do we let bastards like DeKovan and the assistant D.A. set the agenda or do we.”

Kodama's eyes glittered with a quality Monk couldn't identify. He suddenly felt as if he were drifting in a glossy ether with no point of reference.

“Jamboni wants this to be not just his launching pad into the head D.A.'s seat,” she leveled. “There's rumors he isn't even going to waste his time with that if he and his allies get a win by getting me unseated. I understand he's interested in the governorship.”

“Your point being.”

“I don't want to be part of the opéra bouffe he's staging. I won't be this year's pincushion for the media and the spinmeisters.”

“And you'll accomplish that by doing nothing. By sitting it out and letting the system take its course. Or is that, its
toll
?”

“There's no way my decision is going to be overturned. I'm standing on solid case law in California. Several conservative judges have done the same thing I've done.”

“To repeat myself, this ain't about facts, Jill, it's about perception. You want logic and reason to prevail, and that's really swell, you know? But you got to work those facts to your advantage, 'cause you can be damn sure Jamboni is going to work overtime on the perception angle.”

“Look, it's not like I don't want to fight to keep my job. And not because I have to be a judge, but because I think I do make a contribution on the bench.”

“Sure, you're right,” Monk agreed.

“I just don't want this to become”—she hesitated—“out of control, I guess. MFs like Jamboni think judges are just lawyers who couldn't cut it in the marketplace,” she added self-deprecatingly.

“He's on the public dole too,” Monk noted.

“But he's got bigger goals, Ivan. I can see it in his insincerity when he gets close to me. He's of the opinion the only reason I ride the pine is because I'm a mediocre lawyer. No guts, no heart.”

“I know different.”

“You're just trying to get in my pants.” Kodama smiled, wriggling a sliver of chicken between her front teeth.

“That still leads you back to jumping in. But you take the high ground. We set up some interviews for you at various ethnic presses. While the homeowners attempt to mine white anxiety, you build support in the 'hood, and tap what remains of the liberal west side, or wherever the hell it is they moved to. You can talk about that Chinese honors student the cops tried to slam as a gangbanger, and how you lambasted them last year for that.”

A goofy smile twisted Kodama's mouth. “Somewhat self-serving, wouldn't you say?”

“We get the story tactfully leaked,” Monk conjured.

Kodama laid her chopsticks on her empty plate. “Where do you want to go for coffee?”

Hand-in-hand the two strolled along the refurbished Old Towne section of Pasadena. People thronged about eating cups of frozen yogurt, discussing the latest mile-high salary commanded by the most recent mumbling, moody acting sensation, or stopping to gawk at bald-headed female manikins in clothing store windows wearing studded leather skirts with slits and feathered-ankle work boots.

Kodama moved her hand up and squeezed Monk's arm. “What's the word, thunderbird?”

He kissed her on the forehead. “I was thinking about you.”

“Liar.”

He chuckled softly. “I was thinking I don't want any more surprises between me and Dex.”

“I understand.” They walked along, passing by a store with a pyramid-shaped blue canopy over the entrance. A crowd snaked out from the front door, and Monk and Kodama slowed to see what was the attraction.

On a blackened picture window in machinelike gold lettering the name read: V
IRTUAL
E
XCURSIONS
.

“I heard about this place,” Kodama said, as they stood to the side of the line. “It's a virtual reality salon where you pay for the goggles and a kind of cockpit you sit in to plug into a space trip, a Polynesian beach, or whatever.”

“Want to wait and go in?” Monk asked.

Before Kodama could answer, a young white woman in black shorts and cowboy boots who'd been in line pointed at them. “Hey, aren't you the one who let that killer out of jail?”

Monk tightened his hand on Kodama's arm, but she wasn't moving. “I didn't let him out of jail, he's doing his time.”

“Yeah, but he, like, raped somebody, right?” She turned her head from looking at the couple to her friend, similarly dressed.

“Didn't he rape the wife and kill the husband?” the misinformed friend added.

“Why don't you two get the case straight?” Kodama admonished.

The friend put her hands on her ample hips. “Well, honey, I'm not the one going around getting murderers off with a little pat on the rear.”

“Yeah,” the first one jumped in, “you people think you're above the rest of us, with your big expense accounts, and hanging out with people like that Leslie Abramson.”

The other one uttered a distasteful “E-uuuuu.”

Openmouthed, Kodama stared at the young woman. “What is it you think I do?”

“Huh?” the friend inquired, also openmouthed.

“How is it I was involved in this case you two know so much about?”

“You're the—What do you call it?” the first one rattled, looking at her friend to complete her sentence.

“Defense attorney, right?” the friend offered, looking at others in the crowd for confirmation. “Like the one that got T-Dog, or whatever that rapper calls himself, off for murder.”

A visceral snarl of disapproval materialized from the crowd.

“Shit,” Kodama bleated, guided forcefully away by Monk.

“At least they didn't think you sold used cars,” he quipped, looking back to see if some righteous-minded citizen was bearing down on them. No one was coining; though a few had detached from the pack they didn't travel far. They were like radical cells whose encoding had suddenly been lost in transition from the main stem. The bodies moved about aimlessly, but not forward.

“We were going to get some coffee,” Monk reminded her edgily.

Kodama said nothing, staring ahead, lost in another time zone. Warm air coiled around them, embracing storklimbed palms and tear-shaped cypress trees along a ventricle off the main thoroughfare, Colorado.

In the near distance, another funnel of heat moved off the barren San Gabriel Mountains. Monk only had a sensation of tines of cold working the base of his cortex. They approached a coffeehouse with several people huddled in earnest over caffe lattes and carmel-colored cappuccinos sitting at white lacquered wood tables along the sidewalk. Monk slowed, but Kodama kept on. He fell in step.

“Fuck it, people sometimes get the karma they deserve.”

“That's rather profound, my dear,” Monk said evenly.

She stopped, her tongue sliding across the tips of her teeth. “You're fucking right it is. It's those kind of dickheads back there that Jamboni and his sycophantic homeowners are playing to.”

“That's what I've been saying.”

“And you honestly think I can change those kinds of minds?”

“Not change necessarily, but engage the discussion. Plus you know there's always going to be a certain percentage on the sidelines. That's the segment you can sway, Jill. The real truth is, babe, in the era of terrorist bombers getting their manifesto printed in national dailies, everything is the media and how it gets carved up in it.”

“So no purity of law? No pursuit of an unfettered balancing of the scales?” She sounded sad.

Monk pulled her close. “There might be; I wouldn't know. What matters is you believe in the pursuit of it, the chance that this thing, this justice, or something like it may be out there.”

She snickered, tugging on the lapels of his sport coat.

“And I know you're too good, too valuable to get pushed aside like an empty bottle,” he added.

Her hand touched the corner of Monk's trim goatee. “Kiss me, you fool.”

Twelve

M
onk lay on the couch watching a rerun of “Starsky & Hutch” on WGN. Kodama had gotten up early, pumped and focused. He was happy to have been useful getting the judge out of her entropy. They'd stayed up till past two discussing how she would go about launching her counteroffensive, first by calling a friend of hers who worked in public relations for some ideas.

Monk was so elated for her, he managed to avoid thinking about his blowup with Grant. Concentrating as they both were on her situation, she hadn't brought up the excop again either. But once Kodama had departed, he suddenly felt like a gnarled gnome trapped in a house of mirrors. Regardless of which way he turned, he had to face the twisted visage.

Yet putting his mind on his mentor seemed to deplete his resolve. A protective torpor attempted to overtake his psyche. It was much less painful worrying about what was going to happen to Huggie Bear as the bad guys threatened him with knives and crowbars, the two heroes burning rubber in that ostentatious red and white Torino on their way to rescue their snitch buddy.