Violent Spring (18 page)

“Okay.” Some blips and taps later, Coleman brought up a club called Frothy and an address in Redondo Beach.

“Now how about Samuels' employment record?”

“Can't do it. At least not with this service. That's one you've got to fill out a form for and they come out and interview you.” Coleman took a sip of hot chocolate and a healthy bite of the raisin square his uncle had brought him.

“Let's do this,” Monk began, “let's look up Mr. Park. Try the PhoneBank again.” On the map page for the section of Redondo Beach he was looking for, Monk found the approximate area where Frothy is, or still was. Not far from it was the street where one of the Samuels lived.

Monk looked up. Several Parks phosphorized onto the screen along with their numerous addresses.

“Damn,” Monk said. “Hey.” Monk looked at the notes he'd been taking. “Try this address where the assault happened with Grimes and Park.”

“Try it how? I need to know what field you want to be in.”

“Roy Park's name, then the address in South Central.”

“Okey-dokey.” Coleman's fingers worked the keyboard as he watched the screen, its yellow glow casting his face in pale saffron. In seconds, more information appeared along with the name of Roy Park and the address on Vermont Avenue.

“Well, well,” Monk said. He recognized the address as some small stores on Vermont near Jefferson.

Puzzled, Coleman said, “What is this?”

“It's land Mr. Park owns, Cole. Rental property that he holds the deed to.” And the words of Linton Perry from the other night flooded Monk's memory. Absentmindedly, he tapped the plasticine cover of the map book.

“You did good work, youngster. But I better get you home 'fore your mother skins me.”

The young man rose, and Monk was startled to see he came to his shoulders. “When the hell did you start growing?”

“Always,” he said, gobbling down the remains of his raisin square. “Anyway, it's a proven fact, as you get older, you get shorter.”

“Come on, slob head.”

Monk took his nephew home, and walked with him inside the modest house on 4th Avenue. His sister was sitting at the dining room table, getting her lessons plans together for tomorrow. Odessa taught sixth grade in the massive, and massively underfunded, Los Angeles public school system.

“Hi, Mom.” Coleman leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

“Hi, sweetie.” She patted him on the cheek.

Coleman waved at his uncle. “I got some homework to finish. Thanks for the ballgame, Unk.”

“Sure, man. See you soon.”

The nephew entered a door with a poster of Michael Jordan taped on it. Over that it read in blue letters on a white field “Females Only Need Enter.” Monk sat at the table where his sister worked and massaged the back of his neck.

Odessa looked at him over the rim of her half-glasses. “This case getting to you?”

“A bit.”

She put down her pencil. “How are things with you and Jill?”

“What makes you ask that?”

Odessa did a thing with her lips. “Just wondering.”

“I don't know,” Monk answered honestly. He got up, uneasy with the prospect of exploring where his relationship with Kodama was going, unsure of the territory he was in. More willing to see what would happen rather than intervene and try to alter the course of fate.

“I asked,” his sister said, “because someone I know saw you and Tina being all cozy at the Satellite last Saturday night.” She leaned back in her chair, waiting.

Monk said, “That was just about this case. Tina had heard from Ray who said, for a fee naturally, that he'd tell the City Council where to find Crosshairs.” Inwardly, a stab of guilt assailed his psyche. He had been mesmerized by the image of Tina throwing back her head and her dreads haloing around her strong features. There was a strong pull in him to those times in the past when each of their bodies was attuned to the sexual rhythm of the other.

“Ray, Ray Smith?” Odessa asked incredulously.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you believe him? Did Tina know where he was?”

“No and no. I told her he was full of shit like all the times before.”

“He wasn't always,” Odessa said, who knew, as Monk and Tina knew, a once-kind and charming Ray Smith. The one that still existed for them in their collective past.

“I'll let you get back to work.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and started for the door.

“You talk things out with Jill, Ivan.”

He halted.

“I used to be against you and her going around, as you know. Being a black woman, I thought you should only be with another black woman.”

Monk turned from the door.

“I'm not saying that all of a sudden everything's the rainbow and all that shit,” his sister went on. “If anything, things have gotten worse as far as race relations go. God knows I see it enough even in elementary school. But the world is too small and our time too limited to live by rules the heart can't keep.”

He smiled at her and left.

The next day Monk had the unshakable perception he was being watched again. He searched the Ford but couldn't find anything. Still, driven by the palpable feeling knotting his stomach, he switched cars with his sister at her school. Just as well, since later he planned to keep an eye on Samuels' place in Redondo Beach. And he knew the Galaxie by sight.

Monk got a call from Luis Santillion's office shortly before noon. Delilah put it through.

“Mr. Monk?” the woman on the other end of the line said.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Santillion would like to know if you can meet him at the Taquito Factory in the Grand Central Market at one tomorrow?”

“Sure. Exactly what does Mr. Santillion have in mind?”

“Tomorrow at one,” she said.

“All right,” and he rung off.

His inside line rang, and he picked it up.

“Yes.”

A series of beeps, long and short greeted his ears. Monk listened as it repeated again, men the line went dead.

He replaced the receiver, thinking. Somewhere in a pocket of neural synapses, Monk got a tickle, like a savory taste long absent from the palate. He concentrated not on the sound, but on the things that he and Dexter Grant had done. Their history together of places they'd been and people they knew.

But only the hint, amorphous as morning fog, ebbed around his thoughts. The fog wouldn't part, wouldn't allow the answer to emerge. Monk swore and got up from his desk. He went down to the Cafe 77 for a lunch of teriyaki chicken and rice and a bottle of Bud. He then drove over to Ruben Ursua's house on East 55th. The Monte Carlo was no longer anywhere in sight. Monk knocked but got no response. He went around back.

The rear yard was overgrown crab grass bordered on two sides by a wooden fence missing several slats. There was a clapboard garage that the fence connected to, and two trash cans leaned against the garage. Monk took the lids off the cans. In one were two empty pints of Jim Beam, and several white plastic garbage bags. In the other were more sealed trash bags. Monk went back to his car and drove to a hardware store over on Main. He returned twenty minutes later with a pair of leather work gloves and proceeded to open the plastic bags. Carefully, so as to seal them back when he was done,

After many minutes of combing through the personal debris of the inhabitants of the house, Monk found something of interest. A crumpled-up napkin with a woman's name and phone number written on the back. On the front was the imprint of a bar called El Scorpion. It depicted the black arachnid, gleaming as if its body were sheathed in ebony chrome. The deadly stinger of the insect was curled in the air and poised to strike a shot glass filled with booze beneath it.

Monk pocketed the napkin and kept searching. He unearthed, among other items, a fragment of a Lotto ticket, an empty Colonel Sanders cardboard bucket, beer bottles, wrappers from McDonald's, and so on. Then Monk heard a car pull into the driveway in front. Quickly, he set the lid back on the can and went around to the rear of the garage. He wedged himself between it and the rickety fence. Feeling like one of those sleazy reporters for a supermarket tabloid, Monk strained to listen. He remained still for ten minutes.

Then he eased around the corner of the garage and made for the front, glad he was driving his sister's straight car rather than the Galaxie which Ursua's girlfriend knew by sight. Maybe he ought to start driving a more nondescript car on cases other man his bad-ass '64. That shit that TV private eyes did, like Magnum PI tailing guys in a bright red Ferrari, was dangerous if you really believed you could get away with it.

Sitting in the driveway was a big-barreled 1974 metal-flake blue Cadillac Eldorado with gangster-white sidewalls and polished crushed red leather seats. Ursua had taste, if somewhat on the ostentatious side. Stealing away from the house, Monk could hear raised voices originating from inside. He paused, then went on as the loud talk continued. Maybe, he somberly opined to himself, men and women were meant to always be at war with one another, forever bound in a social/sexual/psychic dynamic old as the universe and just as mysterious. Monk got in the car and drove away.

He made a stop at a coffee shop and called Delilah for his messages.

“Nothing important except Tina Chalmers called and said for you to call her when you had a chance,” she said.

“Okay, thanks.” He hung up and dialed his machine at home.

“Monk, it's Marasco, call me tonight.”

That was a surprise. Monk called Kodama's house and got her machine. “Just seeing if you were in, Jill, I'll call you later.” He had a cup of coffee and a bagel and headed out to Redondo Beach.

Some years back, while chasing down a bail-jumper who'd been arrested for a series of burglaries and rapes, Monk had waltzed into a bar in the south bay town for a drink after a day of futile effort.

A man wearing a banner marking him as a plague carrier would have been more welcome. Couples, huddled close and intoxicated with the smell of one another, stopped talking to gape at him. Men, standing at the bar belting back beers, turned as their fellow drinkers pointed or nudged one another. Every eye was on him as he enteredall-white watering hole. But he'd be damned if he was going to back out. He walked up to the bar and leaned on it, acutely aware of the stares locked onto him. The bartender, a pleasant-enough-looking middle-aged gent with a trim silver mustache, wiped down the bartop in front of Monk. He then said, in an even tone without rancor, “We don't serve niggers here.”

Monk considered his options, all of them ending with him either in prison or the infirmary. He about-faced and marched out of the bar, mad, scared and humiliated. That wasn't the last time he'd come to Redondo Beach, and he knew some black folks lived here now, but it was the last time he'd considered buying a drink in the town known for turning out volleyball and surfing champions.

He arrived as the early evening traffic of the 405 disgorged power-suited men and women in their BMWs, Infinitis and even the occasional Volvo, into the belly of the upmarket community. Killing time, Monk meandered through the fashionable King Harbor section with its upscale shops and one-hour fanny tuck salons. Eventually he took Prospect north and found the street he was looking for, a palm-infested lane close to the Torrance side of the geography. On it were single family houses and a turquoise-stuccoed apartment complex with one of those sunken car ports, on one end of the street. Monk passed by Bart Samuels' place, a recently painted duplex. The address for Samuels was the second floor unit off a landing and stairs covered in gamma-ray-green astro turf.

Monk parked diagonally across the street and hunkered down in his seat. An hour later, Bart Samuels, ponytail and all, drove right by Monk in a 1976 Pontiac Le Mans whose out-of-adjustment valves he could hear tapping through his half-open window. The car swung into a driveway and went into the back of the building.

Momentarily, Samuels appeared, walking back into the front by way of the driveway, a lone grocery shopping bag grasped in one meaty arm. He ascended to his apartment and entered. Monk waited. He wanted to confront him, but he also wanted to do it to his advantage. He was strapped, the .45 snuggled beneath his herringbone sport coat, but he wasn't about to go up there, bust in the door and shove the gun under his nose.

One, that could cost him his permit, and two, Samuels was bound to shove the gun up Monk's ass sideways. No, in a situation like this, where obtaining information from a potentially hostile source was the goal, the psychological approach was the best method.

He'd give it another twenty minutes or so, let Samuels sit down to his dinner, maybe quaff a glass of beer or wine. Relaxed, unwary. A knock on the door, who might it be? Surely only a friend would come calling at the dinner hour. The time passed, Monk readying himself for his approach, his opening line. Casually, like a man delivering a pizza, he went up the livid green stairs. Reaching the top of the landing, Monk raised a brass knocker, a large ring through the nose of a lion's head impaled on the slate-blue door.

Before the thing left his hand, the door swung inward. A stooped figure—Monk instinctively knew it wasn't Samuels—stood in the doorway, backlit from within. At the same moment, something loomed on the periphery of his right eye, and Monk turned to it, reaching for the automatic. Orange flares blossomed around his corneas, and a purple ball rose from the astro turf. Monk was keenly aware his head was down and his body tipped forward. The lavender sphere enveloped his head, blackening out the light.

He felt a hand grasp his, which held onto the .45. As the well of unconsciousness vised his head, Monk dully registered a loud noise. Pain lanced his knees, and he descended into the well and its soothing purple water.