Violent Spring (14 page)

“We have several job programs that we administer, ma'am,” Perry said.

“No. I meant training black people to be a leader like you, Mr. Perry. Training some of these young mens and women we got to build their thing up, do for their neighborhood. Why you got to be the one always in front when the cameras go off? Why you got to be the one shaking the mayor's hand or O'Day's hand in the newspaper?”

Amens floated up to the ceiling. Li, recognizing the momentum was no longer his to control, graciously handed the microphone to Perry. Monk took Chalmers by the arm and guided her to the rear of the stage.

“Is this why you were trying to get ahold of me?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “By the way, what was that about meeting you at the Cork? You know it changed names when the new owners bought it.”

“I know.”

She frowned at him but Monk didn't elaborate.

Forty minutes later, the meeting broke up and people filed out. The woman's comment and Perry's rejoinder to it had diffused much of the tension building between the three principals, the focus having shifted onto Perry and his justifying his life as a community activist. Li had quietly slipped out, and Santillion had contented himself with a mini-meeting of his own on the side of the auditorium with several of his constituents.

On his way out with Chalmers, the head of El Major pulled alongside Monk.

“I have some information you might find useful,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.

“This is the first case I've ever had where people are tripping over themselves to help me.”

“Well if you don't want it.”

“No, no. I do.”

“Good. Call me Monday.” He drifted back to his crowd.

Monk and Chalmers drove over to the Satellite bar on Adams in separate cars. Years ago, when Monk had been a two-fisted bounty hunter, full of himself and playing out some character from a blaxploitation flick starring Fred Williamson, the Cork had been his hangout.

And it was a dive right out of a Chester Himes novel. Miller beer and Royal Crown whiskey offered in front, a crap game on Tuesday and a three-dollar-raise poker game on Fridays in the back. Prostitutes with trowled-on eyeliner and teeth so brown they looked wooden prowled the bar while a couple of LAPD vice cops were paid to hassle other establishments unwilling or unable to pay the Cork's freight. Even freebasing made the scene in the back room of the Cork at its nadir.

Monk got his messages there, once in a while drank his breakfast there, and on more man one occasion after closing time, did the do with a good-looking young lady on the smooth felt of the bar's pool table. And if hazy memory served, Tina Chalmers was one such participant. Oh yes, in those days Ivan Monk was going to score some long green by tracking down America's most vicious and retire before thirty to Martinique.

But that was before Monk began thinking about what made a fifteen-year-old stab his father and run away from home, or a forty-year-old wife shoot her husband in the groin. Actions and motivations, the past, and the things one did to determine their future began to gnaw at his conscience.

Sometimes you had to peer behind the words on paper, you had to listen to the chased and not a grinding bureaucracy plodding away on entropy. But that revelation was late in coming to him, before he dropped the business end of a hogleg on a seventeen-year-old who'd just stuck a shiv in him. Before those young eyes opened wide knowing the crush of fate was about to close them forever. Or maybe that is when it occurred to him.

Monk escaped to the sea to unravel the Sphinx his own life had become to him. Yet the haunt of those young eyes, forever sealed against the light, would always revisit him.

They arrived at the Satellite, the renamed Cork. The previous proprietor, one Samuel “Juke” Nunn, had been found with a Macintosh knife buried to its hilt in the back of his neck, his body laid out across the cracked and missing tiles of the women's restroom. The new owners stopped the graft to the vice squad boys and sent the hoes packing. The crap game floated to other environs, and so too the practitioners. The bar wasn't exactly a family place, but its iniquity was mostly confined to pedestrian these days.

“Incredible,” Chalmers said upon hearing Monk's suspicions about the FBI crawling into bed with him.

“So that's why I was cryptic in my call.” They stood at the bar and Monk said hello to Channa, the co-owner/ bartender with the masters degree in engineering.

“Hi, Monk, Tina.” She said amiably. “I thought you might be in tonight.” She reached below the bar and produced an index card. She handed it to Monk.

On it, printed in uniform capital letters was a note from Grant. It read “OnYushin trail, can't make it tonight, Dex.” “When did he call, Channa?”

“It was on the answering machine when I opened up this afternoon. But the call had to have come in sometime between two this morning and then.” She handed them their order, and Chalmers and Monk took a seat in a booth. Monk placed the index card on the table between them.

Chalmers tapped the card. “Do you know what Yushin means?”

“Jill told me it's from a Chinese word meaning restoration. And apparently in the context of Japanese history, the Yushin period signaled the beginning of their military and industrial expansion in1800s.”

“And Pak Chung Hee, who bought his third term as President of the Republic of Korea in '71 with money from Gulf Oil and Japanese industrial giants, used it to describe his suspension of democracy and cracking down on political and labor organizations.”

“How the hell do you know all that?” Monk said.

“My district is changing, Ivan. More influx of Korean businesses, and I don't mean just mom-and-pop stuff. Things like shopping plazas and large supermarkets that only cater to a Korean clientele. Where there's money and influence, there's bound to be some right-wing politicos manipulating it. Shit I need to be aware of.”

“Does this have something to do with why you called me.”

“Could be. I called you because I heard from Ray.”

“What made him surface?”

Tina Chalmers tilted her head back, flaring her dreadlocks. Monk took it all in.

“He wanted some money.”

“That's not new with him.”

“He wanted reward money from the City Council. He says he knows where to find Crosshairs Sawyer.”

K
ENNY YU WAS five minutes early for their breakfast meeting at Maria's Kitchen on Monday morning. He was dressed in a somber Perry Ellis suit, a buttoned-down oxford cloth shirt and a paisley tie. He carried an attaché case with a scuffed finish and placed it at the foot of his chair when he sat down at the table.

“Are you familiar with what Yushin means, Mr. Monk?” Yu said, after they had ordered their breakfast.

Monk told him what he knew and added, “I'm much more interested in what it meant to Bong Kim Suh. Was he involved in a political organization in South Korea?”

Yu arched an eyebrow. “I don't know. My involvement with the Merchants Group is not what you'd call,” he rotated a hand in the air, conjuring up the word, “deep.”

“Why are you a part of it?”

“Because it makes sense politically. As you may know, my organization, the Korean Urban Council, has taken public stands against some of the more reactionary positions of the KAMG.”

“You think you can change the Merchants Group's perspective?”

“Provide an alternative viewpoint at times. As Rodney King said in the wake of 4/29, ‘We're all stuck here for a while.' So we either try to build it up as one, or L.A. might make Sarajevo look like a rehearsal.”

Their food and coffee came. “Why wasn't Suh a member of the Merchants Group?” Monk asked.

“The way I understand it,” Kenny Yu said over a mouthful of eggs, “is that early on he was, but gradually he came to fewer meetings, until finally they expelled him.”

“Any reasons given for why Suh didn't come around.”

“Like I said, it was before my time. Contrary to popular belief, Koreans can have sharp differences of opinions like anyone else. And there's plenty of chances of that in the Merchants Group.”

“Yet you're a member.”

“It's only when I and some of my comrades from college and law school started the KUC that the elders took attention of us.”

“Particularly since you began to get better press than them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who are the big players in the Merchants Group?”

Kenny Yu swallowed a dollop of coffee and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Li you know.”

“Aside from being the president of the Merchants Group, what does he do?”

“Business ventures, import, export, has a little money in property and a couple of car dealerships.”

“Where'd the money come from?”

“You'd have to ask brother Li about that,” he said wryly. “Though I have heard his family had it back in the old country. Heavy industry or something like that.”

“Okay. Who else?”

“Park Hangyoung owns property big-time. The office building where the Merchants Group is, for instance. He was one of the developers of the Western Gardens Plaza, and has some land out in Orange County.”

“In the name of Jiang Holdings.”

Yu looked at the ceiling then at Monk. “It sounds familiar, but honestly, I'm not sure.”

“Are either of these two on the board of Ginwah Bank?”

“Born of them are as well as John Hong.”

“And he's in the Merchants Group?”

“Yes, he'd taught math on the university level in South Korea and does some consulting work here and some teaching in junior colleges.”

“I see.”

“Possibly you don't. It's not some grand conspiracy for three middle-aged, connected men, men who know how to work the American system, to be on boards where those abilities can come in handy.”

“Capitalists are capitalists after all.”

Yu lifted his coffee cup and tipped it in Monk's direction.

The meal ended, Monk paid the tab, thanked Kenny Yu for his time, and went to his office.

“Hey, you look tired.” Delilah stood at the coffee machine pouring herself a cup. She wore acid-washed denims so tight Monk swore they were tattooed on.

“You ain't never lied. Dexter didn't call, did he?” Involuntarily, Monk found himself twitching his head, as if the FBI's listening device would suddenly appear at the sound of the secret word.

“Somebody called the machine around three-thirty this morning. There was some beep, beeps, you know like punching the star button repeatedly, then—”

“Give it to me,” Monk shouted, cutting her off.

“Sure.” Delilah removed the standard cassette from the answering machine and Monk ran down to his car. For the better part of Sunday, he and Jill had inspected the Galaxie searching for a bug. They found nothing, which didn't totally relieve Monk's anxiety, but it was as safe a haven as he could manage under the circumstances.

Monk turned on the car's ignition and placed the tape into the radio's cassette player. He heard the phone coming online and then a series of long and short beeps. It wasn't Morse Code, which he'd learned in the Merchant Marines, but they were deliberate bursts. Therefore, he knew it was from Grant. His message about the Cork had put Grant on guard. That, and probably what he'd learned about the past of Bong Kim Suh.

Monk replayed the beeps. Again, and again. Whatever it meant, it wasn't coming to him. He was thinking too hard about it, wanting to solve it right then and there. He played the tape once again. But this time to put it in his brain, let it gestate there and hopefully the answer would sprout in the relaxed soil of his mind.

He turned off the power and got out of the car and returned to his office, the tape in his jacket pocket.

He called O'Day's office but was told he was out of town. He then dialed Luis Santillion, but he was out and not expected back until the afternoon. He got Elrod on the phone.

“Any luck on what we talked about?”

“A little something. Matter of fact—”

Monk stopped him. “Right on. I'll be over there around two. We'll talk about it then.”

“Sure, boss.” The big man severed the line.

Monk went out into the rotunda. He got another tape from a desk drawer and inserted it into the answering machine. He could feel Delilah's curiosity burning into him. “I'm sorry about yelling at you, D.”

She cocked her head. “It goes with the job.”

“I've got some stuff to do away from the office, and I'll probably be in after three if anyone calls.”

“All right,” she said, still waiting for an answer.

Monk only gave her an enigmatic look and turned at the sound of the door to the reception area opening. Marasco Seguin and another cop, a large brother he didn't know, entered.

Seguin said hi to Delilah, then to Monk. “They want to see you over at the station, right away, home.”