Violent Spring (2 page)

The City Hall photographer, an old rummy named Lucasiks who Monk knew in passing, lurched forward to get the shot. The mayor spaded the earth onto the edge of the pit. He held his body rigid, one foot on the shovel, the other planted on the ground. He bent forward slightly, as Lucasiks got into position. Tina Chalmers and Maxfield O'Day stood on either side of the mayor, their shovels held upright in one hand, the blades barely breaking the surface of the soil. Terrified, Monk reasoned, that if they worked up a sweat they'd ruin their photo op.

Lucasiks took three shots of the pose. The mayor glanced down into the pit, then his head came up slowly. He looked over at Chalmers, then looked back into the pit. The motion wasn't wasted on Monk, who began to move onto the field. The mayor straightened up and motioned for the five Los Angeles Police Department officers, who up until then had been standing around listless and bored, to come onto the field.

They ran up, the crowd instinctively halting itself as the law revved up. The sergeant, a bruiser with a smashed nose, looked into the pit, got down on his knees to take a better look, then got up. He whispered something to the mayor, and the demure man nodded in response.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the mayor said in a loud voice. “I ask everyone to please stay behind the barricades for their own safety.” To underscore his request, the five cops stationed themselves in front of the pit, which only heightened the crowd's curiosity.

“What's in the hole, Mr. Mayor? Is it a possible crime scene you're trying to protect?” one of the news people shouted. A chorus of echoes went up from the other news folks and several of the community residents. The news people prowled back and forth, in and around the crowd. A pack hungry for a sexy story and sniffing its proximity, they weren't going to let the scent go until they landed a kill.

Monk, standing on tiptoe behind several others, couldn't see anything. He looked at Tina, but she would only return a blank stare. His mother and sister were behind him.

“Ivan, what do you think it is?” Odessa asked him, also straining to see.

“I don't know.” But he did have a guess.

One of the cops left the field and headed for a patrol car, two broadcast journalists trailing him. A video camera operator clambered onto the roof of his station's news van.

The sergeant noticed it and swore audibly. The camera operator zoomed his lens onto the hole. The cops closed tight around it to block the shot.

“Goddamn. It's a body in there,” someone shouted from the crowd. “It's gotta be. That's why they're trying so hard to hide it.”

People looked at one another and back to the field. A heated din rose from the crowd like naked electricity. Monk felt himself being pushed forward. Another human's death was a magnet for the living that he'd never get used to. The cops hoisted their batons and advanced.

The mayor glowered at the sergeant, and the two exchanged quick words. The sergeant pulled his men back, their clubs held at present at arms rest. The crowd moved in, sawhorses falling away like so much
papier mâché
.

The four cops didn't flinch, but Monk could feel the tension rise. The news crews maneuvered forward, trying to get a picture. Mikes jabbed at the mayor, the councilwoman and O'Day. The cops poked their clubs into several rib cages.

“All right folks, this is now an official police matter. If you don't disperse, you will be arrested,” the sergeant yelled.

The crowd slowed its pace, then stopped.

“Please, everybody, just step back and let the police do their job,” the mayor cautioned.

The citizenry of South Central glanced at one another, uncertain of how to proceed. Two of the cops came forward, arms up, palms outthrust. Slowly, but forcefully, they eased the crowd back to the edge of the field. The news people protested the loudest, but they too were moved back away from the pit.

Monk could see three patrol cars come south on Normandie and turn onto the dirt lot. The cars sped to where the pit was, billowing flowery plumes of brown dust. Cops exited the vehicles
en masse
, and some took up their command around the hole. The remaining ones formed a curtain of grim-faced dragoons between that portion of the field and the crowd. Many of the residents were already starting to leave.

“I guess the show's over for today,” Nona Monk said. She started to head toward her car, Monk and his sister following behind.

“Yeah, but who did the body belong to? And who put him in his grave?” Monk said more to himself than to his family. He turned various scenarios over in his mind as they walked.

“Take it easy, Boston Blackie,” Odessa said, patting his back. “You can't solve all the murders in Los Angeles. Leave a few for the cops to do.”

The trio laughed, but Monk couldn't help taking a last look at the field. The sergeant and another cop were down on their knees, doing something with their hands in the hole. Tina Chalmers and the others stood back, their eyes fixed on the cops working in the pit.

Heading for their car, they passed Maxfield O'Day who managed to escape the whirl of events on the field. He sucked on a thin cigar ratcheted in his tight jaw. His eyes smoldered with icy fire. He looked toward the field, and visibly drew back as two TV crews descended on him.

O'Day was standing under the banner that spelled out the name of his organization, an amalgam of private business people, public officials, community leaders and charitable foundations. A grouping that went by the acronym of SOMA, Save Our Material Assets. The logo was a stylized hand—its hue and shape indeterminate of race or gender—with a globe in the open palm emerging from red and orange flames.

SOMA was the name of the drug people took to induce docility in Aldous Huxley's classic book of a corporate future England,
Brave New World
, a book Monk reread two times as he worked his way around the world, and half again when he was an engine mechanic as a merchant seaman.

Truly an inspired title he concluded, getting behind the wheel of his mother's late model Taurus. Several more news people were now around O'Day, who seemed to have regained his composure. He gestured with his hands making boxer-like thrusts in the air, and threw his head back to explode in quick bursts of laughter. Alexander the Great holding court for the unwashed and unknowing.

Monk brought the car to life. As he drove away, he could see O'Day pointing to the SOMA banner for the camera crews. Maybe he got the joke. Or maybe, Monk surmised ominously, it was his joke on the city.

T
HE TUESDAY AFTER the Saturday of the aborted groundbreaking at Florence and Normandie, the name of Bong Kim Suh was bandied all over town.

TV commentators, local news anchors, the second column under the fold in the
Times
' Metro section and even a popular radio talk show host on the AM band were focused on the murdered liquor store owner. For it was his decomposed body found in the dirt field at the infamous intersection. A field that once, before the conflagration, had been the site of a check-cashing place and Laundromat.

The deceased Mr. Suh was also the topic of conversation at the Abyssinia Barber Shop and Shine Parlor on South Broadway.

“So you found the body, Monk?” Kelvon Ulysses Little asked him as he sat in the chair to get his hair cut.

“I was there when they uncovered it by accident with the bulldozer.”

Little draped the black striped white shroud across the front of Monk. “Oh,” the barber and co-owner of the shop replied. “Brant said you found the Korean's body.” He encircled Monk's neck with tissue paper to prevent loose hairs from falling down his collar. It never worked as far as Monk knew, but who was he to break tradition.

Willie Brant, a 58-year-old retired postman, leaned forward in his chair, pointing at Little. “That ain't what I said, man. I told you 'fore Monk got here that what I heard was that he was there at the field and saw the body being taken out of the ground.”

Monk raised an eyebrow. Willie was bald. Completely without hair on his dome since his early thirties. The only reason he came to the barber shop was to hang out and hear himself talk. “I wasn't there when that happened either, Willie. All I know about this is what I read in the papers same as you.”

“Well if you want my opinion,” Brant started, aware that few ever did, “I think them Rolling Daltons are behind this.”

“Now how do you get to that conclusion?” Old Man Spears said. Spears sat in the corner, as he always did, half-listening to the baseball game on the ancient Philco and half-listening to the conversation.

“Cause this truce thing they initiated with that other gang, them Swans, ain't nothin' but a smoke screen they're usin' to take over all the rackets in South Central. And they startin' by bumpin' off all them Ko-reeans.”

Little deftly passed the clippers through Monk's hair. “Some grey's creeping down there in your roots, Monk,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “That fine oriental gal of yours must be wearin' your ass out.” A chorus of good-natured laughs made the rounds in the barber shop. Then, Little said, “I think them young bloods is sincere in this truce thing. Man, I believe them when they say they're tired of killing one another and running down our neighborhoods. If there's one good thing to come out of the uprising, it will be them getting together to do a Black Panther number like we saw in the '60s.”

“Shit,” Brant eloquently replied.

Abraham Carson, who sat one chair down from Brant, put down the copy of the
Sports Illustrated
he'd been reading. “What do you think, Monk?” The self employed carpenter's voice was quiet in timbre and deep as a well.

“About the truce?”

“About the body in the field.”

“According to the paper, this Bong Kim Suh was last seen a week before the riots of '92. He was a bachelor, and he employed local black folks in his liquor store.” Monk paused, assembling the data in his mind. “I don't think he was killed by the Daltons or any usual stickup.”

“Why you say that?” Brant demanded.

“Look at the facts, Willie. The Metro section states he was found with his wallet still on his body. Ninety bucks still in the thing. And the reporter said he was shot execution-style. Which means in the back of the head, into the neck. Professionals do that so there's no blood splattering on them.”

Kelvon Little edged the hair around Monk's ears with the barest touch of the clippers. He said, “So who do you think did this?”

“Damned if I know. But I do know the cops are going to have a lot of pressure on them to solve this thing.”

“You mean from the Korean-American Merchants Group,” Abe said.

“Yeah man,” Brant began again, “you gotta hand it to them rice cake eaters. Say what you will, they stick up for their own.”

Monk all but rolled his eyes in his head.

It was somewhat of a misnomer to say that Olympic and Kenmore was the heart of Koreatown. Like a lot of the other sections of the city that sprawled from the ocean to the desert, where one neighborhood ended and another began was sometimes not always easy to tell.

In Echo Park, which was heavily Latino, one found left-wing lawyers of various races, long-time community activists and punked out white kids wearing African medallions mixing along lower Sunset or Melrose at places like the Club Fuck. That part of Sunset also was the beginning of East Hollywood and the gay belt. It ran into Silverlake and enjoyed a seemingly peaceful coexistence with the cholos who prowled the boulevards in their chopped '63 Impalas with McLean wire rims. Off the main drag were streets that wound into the hills of Silverlake and the city officials who lived there and people who worked in the real Hollywood as prop builders, camera operators and the lowest of the low, the writers.

Central Avenue had been the cultural Mecca of Black Los Angeles in the '30s through the early '50s. Joints like the Club Alabam, Jack's Basket and Cafe Society swung to the 24-hour beat of the hip, replete with jazz giants such as Dexter Gordon and Teddy Edwards, or Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald.

To make the scene, hep-cats would be draped in Zoot Suits complete with spearpoint collared shirts, fob-chains, satin picture ties and gold pinky rings. Chicks in slit skirts, rodeo jackets and rolled socks would drop in for a set or two then amble down to the Dunbar Hotel—where all the black entertainers stayed—and juice up in the Turban Room, the bar in the basement of the hotel.

Now Central Avenue was home to mom-and-pop furniture stores with names like Zuniga, and where Jack's Basket was stands a branch office of the Southern California Gas Company. And at present, there were no signs in the Korean alphabet gracing strip malls along Barrington in the upper-class, white Brentwood part of town. But on the side of a three-story brown-tiled building on Olympic Boulevard just east of Kenmore, blue relief letters in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, announced the building as the headquarters of the Korean-American Merchants Group.