Violent Spring (25 page)

“That was about three or four thousand dollars ago, Ray. Before you fucked up your life with cocaine and washed out all the bridges your friends tried to build for you.”

Smith sat on the arm of the couch, “Hey, man, I admit I made some mistakes. Sure, I borrowed money I didn't mean to pay back. But that was then. I've been clean for more than a year now.”

“But you're still hustling, Ray. Still working any angle you can to make a dollar.”

Smith leaped up from the arm of the couch, shouting. “Like you so noble working for them Koreans.”

“It's an honest buck,” Monk said defensively.

Smith snorted loudly. “Shit, who you foolin'.” He started to head toward another room, then turned around. “You asked me why I was hangin' with the Daltons. Well, I wasn't always fucked up on dope or running from the consequences of my last scam. I actually did some gang intervention work for the city for a while. Some of these kids got to really trust me.” He stepped closer to Monk. “Until I fell back into the pipe and almost caused the death of a young brother by letting the wrong word slip. It was a Scalp Hunter so none of the other gangs cared. But I did. Deep down, I knew I couldn't go on in life looking for the next high.”

“So this is your way of making up for lost time.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, but you called Tina looking for money.”

Smith bowed and spread his hands. “It was a hustle, but for a good cause. You might say I was fundraising in the only way I knew how for the truce.” He went into another room and closed the door.

Monk mapped out the remaining parts of the house. Past the living room was what had been the dining room. In it was a futon with quilts on it and a mattress with only a dirty sheet. Two end tables were in the room and on one of them sat a lamp minus its shade. On the other was an old-fashioned dial telephone.

The kitchen was spotless and the refrigerator was well-stocked, if lacking robustness in its fare. There were cold cuts, processed cheese slices, commercial half-pint tubs of potato and macaroni salads, candy bars, sodas and cans of beer and malt liquor. The cupboards held dishes and glasses and an assortment of canned goods. The windows were barred and the back door was of solid wood and triple locked.

Off of the kitchen was a back bedroom which had a mattress on the floor, a portable radio and various posters of rap artists taped to its wall. Connected to that room was a bathroom tiled in old-fashioned ceramic like the ones in his mother's house. The door leading out of there led to another room which seemed to be the study, for lack of a better term.

There were various chairs in various stages of disintegration about the room. It also had a large drafting table populated with writing pads and loose pieces of paper. There was a bookshelf which contained a stack of comic books, some shotgun shells, an ashtray with reefer butts, a couple of watch caps, a green-tinged braided gold chain, a fake skull with a candle stuck in it, a book about gangster rap and
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon. Revolution a la hip-hop.

Monk looked at the papers on the drafting table. It was an outline showing the prominent gang members in favor of the truce, those that were against it, and a lengthy discourse on the next phases of the truce.

The door from this room led into the room that Smith was in. The detective retraced his steps and went back into the front room, carrying the outline.

He removed the quilts from the futon and took off his windbreaker, shirt and shoes. Monk lay on the sagging couch, covering himself with the quilt. Fatigue overtook him while he read the outline. It included a series of ideas for micro enterprises and there were passages urging those members who'd made their money illegally to take what they had left and put it into legitimate concerns. There was even some thought given to what kind of structure they envisioned to run these businesses. Top down management versus more worker-owned or something in between. Monk's eyes closed.

In the still of the early morning, his mind reeled off images of the people and incidents involved in the case. Names and locations floated in Monk's brain. Some of them were stacked in a small file on his colonial desk. The others were kept in a mile-high chamber. It didn't worry him that the structure was brimming with files. What worried him was losing the one key he had to opening the massive containment tank. And the key was in the basement of the SOMA offices.

“Monk,” a voice said to him.

His eyes came open. For a moment, he was disoriented. Where was Jill and where did this quilt come from? Then he remembered. “What's up, Ray?” Pretending to scratch his leg, Monk checked to make sure his gun was still there. It was.

Smith's head jerked toward the phone. “Mad-T just called, said he'll be here in about an hour.”

“He say he's bringing anybody with him?” Monk swung his legs onto the floor.

“He said be ready to roll.”

“Shit. What is this, a fuckin' Chinese puzzle box?” Monk picked up the truce document from the floor and placed it on the coffee table.

“It's the way it is, Ivan. The cops and the FBI are running around out there looking for Crosshairs and Conrad, and you, too, now. And quiet as it's kept, some of us have the opinion that there are some on the police department who don't want to see the truce succeed. 'Cause they know the next step for these young brothers and sisters is to become politicized. From there it might be the next Black Panther Party.”

Monk got up and stretched. “As long as they learn from the past, Ray, as long as they learn from the past.” He went into the bathroom to wash up. Afterwards, he and Ray each had a cup of instant coffee and Monk ate a couple of pieces of the beef salami cold cuts in the icebox. Presently, Mad-T arrived, and he and Monk departed the house. Ray Smith was left behind.

They traveled east in a military green 1973 Bonneville. Mad-T took them on a route that eventually headed south along Alameda until they reached Imperial Boulevard. The car made a right and Monk knew where they were going. Over to the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts.

It was a vast subsidized complex built in 1944, one of four public housing projects built in Watts during the war years. Watts, once called Mudtown, had been incorporated as a city in 1907. But the cigar boys downtown maneuvered to disenfranchise its growing black population, and the city was annexed back to Los Angeles in 1926.

Mad-T entered the front gate into Imperial Courts and wound the car through the tracts of cinder-block abodes and trimmed lawns. A car marked security passed them and the driver nodded his head at Mad-T.

“He just know you, or is he something else?” Monk asked.

The young man stuck a toothpick in his mouth and said, “We got to be like the motherfuckin' CIA and have our ears everywhere if we want to know what's goin' down.”

He parked the car in a stall of a block of units along the southeast end of the place. They got out and Monk followed the Dalton along an alleyway, then between two buildings. They arrived at another set of units and Mad-T knocked on an unmarked door. The door swung inward on quiet hinges.

“After you,” Mad-T said.

Monk walked into the apartment, a two-level townhouse, followed by the young man. It was dark due to the fact that the drape was drawn against the large picture window. Two men sat on chairs at opposite ends of the front room. One was decked out in an oversized prison-style jean jacket, Dee-Cee khaki pants, Nike tennis shoes and a purple baseball cap with the words South Central stenciled on the crown. The other one Monk recognized.

He wore coal black jeans, a smokey grey shirt with gold colored buttons and a rounded collar buttoned all the way up, black wingtips, and his apparently omnipresent grey homburg with the feather stuck in the band. As in their previous meeting, his eyes took in everything but betrayed nothing. Neither man moved or acknowledged the presence of Monk or Mad-T, save the one in the homburg who looked down at his hands then looked back up again.

“What it be?” the one in the purple cap said.

“It be like that,” Mad-T responded.

Monk thought he was trapped in a hip-hop episode of
Get Smart
.

Homburg rose and stepped close to Monk. “You gonna do what you said.”

The lack of inflection seemed to make it more of a command than a question. Monk said, “I'll get you a meeting with SOMA. I don't promise that you'll get any money out of it”

“You search him?” Homburg said.

“What for? So what if he's carrying a piece. Every motherfucka' in this room's got a piece and then some. What he gonna do?” Mad-T smirked.

“A wire, genius.” Homburg stepped back, moving his head slightly to glare past Monk at Mad-T. The light through the open door illuminated the left side of his face. The ear was missing its lobe. Something that Monk hadn't noticed the other night in the half-light of Elrod's garage.

Mad-T said to Monk. “Take your jacket off, G.”

Monk did so and submitted to a pat-down from the younger man.

“I've got a gun strapped to my right ankle,” Monk volunteered.

Mad-T retrieved the rig and the piece, and continued with his task. He finished his thorough search and straightened up. “No wire,” he announced.

Homburg said nothing nor moved.

Monk said, “What's it going to be, Crosshairs?”

Mad-T whined, “I didn't tell him.”

Crosshairs walked past the men in the room and went up the stairs. Mad-T and Monk remained standing while the one in the cap sat impassively. He heard the muffled creak of the floorboards above his head, and Crosshairs and another man came down.

He was taller than his cousin and his face elastic with expression. Conrad James was dressed in faded blue jeans and a sweatshirt lettered with a Morehouse College logo. He had the shoulders of a wrestler and the hips of a running back. He was a poster stud for a randy sorority house.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Monk.”

He took the other's hand and said, “Ivan.”

“Antoine and I have talked this over, Ivan,” James began, indicating Crosshairs who stood behind him statue-like. “He thinks you ain't shit, but don't take it personal.”

“Oh, I don't. I can name a dozen people who think I'm nothing but shit, so what do you think about that?”

Crosshairs sniffed. James grinned and said, “Anyway, I'm the one that insisted that we talk to you. See what you could do for the Daltons and vice versa. Plus I can't keep this up forever. This ain't my life.”

“Can we talk in private, or does the Greek Chorus need to be around?”

James said, “We can talk upstairs.”

He started up and as Monk walked past the immobile Crosshairs, he felt a light touch on his arm. “Don't try nothin' slick, slick.” Crosshairs hissed.

Monk went on up to the second floor. There was a built-in linen closet next to a small bathroom off the small hallway. On either side of the closet and the lavatory were bedrooms. One of them had three mattresses spread about and several empty bottles of soda and beer. In the other was a couple of folding chairs, a writing desk with a PC and a printer on it, and a set of steel weights. James walked into this room. Monk sat on one of the folding chairs and the younger man sat at the table. A morning breeze blew in from an open window.

“Was that your outline I read at the house near Budlong?”

“Based on some input from Antoine and some others,” James said.

“Just so I can get it out of the way, did you kill Bong Kim Suh?”

“No, I did not. Nor did my cousin or any other gang member as far as I can tell.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I saw Bong twice after he shut down the store.”

“About what.”

“The first time he got in touch with me was to have me talk to Ruben Ursua.”

“About what?”

“Well, Bong knew that Ursua was into hot cars, and he wanted Ursua to get him a short.”

“Suh wanted a hot car?” Monk asked, raising an eyebrow.

“He wanted a car that had a good motor, one that he could pay cash for but that had its serial numbers altered and registered under a false name.”

“So he wanted wheels other than his own. And if somebody took down the plate number, the name of Bong Kim Suh wouldn't come up.”

“I guess.”

“Where did Ursua deliver this car?”

“I don't know. Once I set it up, Bong told me to have Ursua be at the Scorpion at a certain day and time and he'd contact him. The Scorpion is a bar Ursua hangs out in over on Figueroa.”

“What was Suh's reason for closing the Hi-Life?”

“He said he needed to be moving around, needed to be mobile for the next few months. He couldn't be in one place where they could get him, he said.”

“Did he say who ‘they' was?”

“No.”

“So you and he talked on the phone several times.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened the second time you saw him?”

“That was in September. Bong came over to my pad all keyed up. He said he would have something he wanted me to take care of for him.”

Monk got excited. “What was it?”

“That's just it. He said he was going to get this thing to me, but that was the last time I saw him.”

“You have any idea what he was talking about?” Through the open window, two women could be heard arguing about the fate of one of the characters on the
All My Children
soap opera.

“I'm not exactly sure. Bong never would tell me outright. But he hinted it had something to do with some of the kinds of people he knew back home.”

“You mean like intelligence agents.”

James wagged a finger at Monk. “What I remember him specifically saying was that he had something on those bastards, the same kind of bastards who had ruined his life in Korea.”

Monk considered the information, then asked, “What made you go on the run?”