Violent Spring (21 page)

“Uh-huh, except when Ivan Monk waves his around, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you think that's our only attraction for one another, Ivan?”

“We can't divorce it from who we are, Jill. But that's not to say if tomorrow one or both of us were doing something else, we'd fall out of love.”

She raised an eyebrow.

Monk sat back in his chair, studying the woman before him. “I'll always want you.”

Kodama leaned across the table and kissed Monk. “You're such a romantic.”

“We can't all be hardboiled like you,” he said. At length they arose from the table and went back to Kodama's house above the reservoir in Silver Lake. She made dinner, a rarity, and afterwards they snuggled near a fire Monk built in the study's fireplace. “I've got to see a man about a horse.”

“What?”

“I've got to be down in Anaheim by eleven-thirty tonight.”

“Why does that not surprise me,” she said, sneering at him.

He opened up a magazine on the coffee table and wrote something on a page. He tore it out and handed it to her.

She read it, then threw the page into the fire. “Put on some music, honey. Put on some Diz, will you? His music is magic, and you'll please his ghost by invoking it,” Kodama said. “You'll need his protection in the days ahead.”

The phono played a scratchy album that was one of the lord of be-bop's outings with him and Roy Eldridge on trumpet, Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Mickey Roker on drums. By the time the needle found the opening groove of “I Cried for You (Now it's Your Turn to Cry for Me),” Monk laid a blanket on the sleeping judge. She'd fallen asleep with her head in his lap and he'd managed to place it on one of the couch's pillows.

As John Burks “Dizzy” Gillespie plowed into the second chorus of “Indiana,” Monk eased out of the house into the chilly evening, the moon a broken quarter of bitter light. Faintly, he could hear the strains of Eldridge's solo as he got in his car and drove away. Monk took pains to make sure he wasn't being followed and he got out to San Pedro seventeen minutes past eleven.

It was a harbor town and its population included an interesting mix of Italians, Greeks, Serbs and Croats. They each had their own social clubs, expressed by their segregated soccer teams, and several community papers. Monk drove past a storefront whose Slavic lettering had several large flyers pasted up in the picture window. He couldn't read them, but could guess it pertained to the continuing bloody conflict in the Balkans.

He reached 4th Street and went along it till he got close to Beacon and the water. Once upon a time, Dexter Grant had informed him there was a hill here, and the radical union of the Industrial Workers of the World held their rallies there for the Maritime Union which was one of their locals. And, Grant had gone on to tell him, in 1925 there was a big rally here where Upton Sinclair, teetotaler, the author of
The Jungle
, and who ran for governor as a socialist in California in the '30s, came to speak. This was another facet of life Grant's Wobblie Uncle Logan had bestowed upon his nephew.

Liberty Hill was what they called it. Parked at the curb along Beacon Street was Grant's 1967 Buick Electra 225. Monk pulled in behind it and watched the older man get out of his car and into the passenger seat of the Galaxie.

“I was about to give up hope on my number-two protegé” he said.

“Who's number one?”

“Me, baby, me,” he said, putting a file folder on the dash, and holding onto a Winchell's styrofoam cup of coffee.

“It was a good clue, Dex. Using beeps for the foghorns of the harbor here.”

“Just like your first time in the sack. You don't forget where it was that someone first took a shot at you. Or the time.”

“And people say you're a bad influence on me.”

“Fuck 'em, and feed 'em fish. What's happening on the case?”

Monk filled him in, then asked, “What did you find out about brother Suh?”

“There's an all-night strip joint over on Gaffey. Let's go over there and talk.”

Monk stared at Grant.

“The place is circular. We can sit at a table and one of us watches the front while the other keeps an eye on the back. The music's a good cover in case your girlfriend Keys is using a directional mike or some of that other sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. We're both good at shaking tails, but let's face it, the Bureau's been at this longer than both of us have been alive.”

“Okay,” Monk said, gunning the motor to life. “I think it's just an excuse for you to leer at naked young women more than half your age.”

“Sure, there's that, too.”

The Chain Puller's clientele was sparse, but diverse. A couple of the typical middle-aged businessmen with their ties askew in their Hart Schaffner & Marx costumes, a trio of bikers—one of whom gave Monk an “I-dare-you-to-fuck-with-me” look—some collegiate types who looked underage, and a lone woman in a peasant dress who drank in a corner and scribbled on a pad of paper.

Grant and Monk took a table toward the middle of the rear. The stripper, a thin brunette with a protruding rib cage, did her act on stage as heavy metal music played. It was loud enough so that they both felt safe talking, but not so much that they had to shout.

It was a two-drink minimum in the place, all well drinks were five dollars, plus the cover charge. They both ordered beer from the topless waitress. Monk browsed through the contents of the folder.

“Bong Kim Suh,” Grant began, “was a labor leader in a large steel mill in Inchun.”

The waitress returned with their order, and he waited until she put down the order to continue. Monk said, “I don't think there's anywhere on her to hide a bug, Dex.”

The older man was staring at the departing woman's backside and didn't respond. He went on. “From 1945 to about 1965, the U.S. supplied the sometimes less-than-democratic governments of South Korea over 12 billion big ones in military and economic grants. Not to mention some spare change they picked up from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and so on.”

“All in the name of stopping the red hordes to the north.”

“Something like that,” Grant conceded. “Anyway, the South Koreans sniffed the then-subtle shifting of political winds, and knew they best be about developing some economic independence. They started what would be the first of several five-year plans.”

Monk took a sip of his tepid beer and made a face. “That sounds kind of socialist to me.”

“National Socialism, I guess. After all, the Nazis began Germany's nationwide healthcare system, and it's still used today.”

“But we digress.”

“The first five-year plan called for economic diversification. They normalized relations with their former colonizers, Japan, and received $800 million in government grants and loans, and private industry loans, too. With that, and the fact that U.S. aid also continued, they achieved some degree of their goal.”

“Which was?”

“Increase in electrical energy capacity, upping the production of food for internal use, and building up the industrial infrastructure.”

“This leads us to the second five-year plan.”

“Absolutely, weed hopper.”

One of the bikers and a businessman had gotten into a shouting thatch but one of the frat boys had stumbled over to them. A drunk referee. After several moments of consultation with the young man, the bikers and the businessmen pushed some tables together, and all of them commenced to have a grand time of it.

Grant returned to his subject. “In the second phase, the economic wizards sought further food production, an increase in employment and retooling of industries such as textiles. As a matter of fact, GNP shot up damn near 12 percent during that period.”

“The beginning of the rise of South Korea as an economic power in the East.”

“Partly accomplished because most of the union officials were paid by the company.”

“Handmaidens of the government,” Monk elaborated.

Grant continued. “In the '60s the workers lived on industrial estates or in towns near the factories they worked in. Bad pay, long hours, lousy housing and no playgrounds for your kids, quite a fucked-up deal. Most of the unions worked in concert with the big companies to fuel the economic miracle.”

“The only place to go, as far as the workers were concerned, was up,” Monk added, having given up on trying to drink the swill the Chain Puller passed off as beer.

“Right. And there began a new militancy on the part of some workers who put it on the line with their unions. But,” Grant held up a finger, “General Pak Chung Hee, who'd been in power since 1963, wasn't about to have any of that. And he wasn't about to step down, though two terms was the prescribed limit on holding the presidency.”

“This is about in '71, right?” Monk said. “He declared martial law.”

“Sort of. He finagled the National Assembly to allow him a third term. Everybody was screaming, the people, the business leaders and so forth. But he managed to squeak through in a very shady election. Chung Hee could see democracy was not for him, not if he wanted to stay in power, so he declared a national emergency and suspended the constitution. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency and the cops got a free hand. Chung Hee used the spectre of communism as his excuse to crack down on unions, political movements, university students, and whoever else pissed him off.”

“Old story,” Monk mused. “His version of Yushin.”

“You've been doing your homework, youngster. Anyway, during this period, as you can imagine, there was a lot of opposition to this iron hand of government, particularly in the ranks of labor. As I said,” Grant stopped because the screeching music had suddenly stopped. It was now quiet in the strip bar save for the carousing crew of bikers, businessmen and students. But all of them seemed too drunk to notice that the stripper had left the stage as they continued to laugh at one another's jokes. The woman in the corner continued to write.

Grant went on. “Like I was saying, Bong Kim Suh was a worker in a steel mill and he was also a member of a group that didn't express themselves as socialists, but they definitely were left of center. He'd been through trainings for union leaders at church-based organizations who, later, would be influenced by the Liberation Theology movement. Suh was bright, articulate and courageous. He became a shop steward on a platform of more union independence and more militancy.”

“I imagine he got his hand slapped once or twice.”

“He made a visit to South Mountain, which was a nice way of saying you got picked up by the KCIA and taken to their headquarters. There they practiced a little bit of the ol' ultra-vi to make you see the error of your ways.”

“And did he?”

“He took it, and more. He and some others organized a strike in the late seventies that resulted in the deaths of some twenty workers.”

“Anything about his wife?”

“That's a bit sketchy. But I concluded she was involved in some union business, textiles. Seems there was a job slowdown and the bosses hired some goons to teach
the
ladies the true meaning of labor relations. She was killed sometime in the mid-seventies.”

“Damn. What else on Suh?”

“Well,” Grant said, sipping his beer, “that's where I got my hand slapped. The background stuff we've been talking about, most of the stuff that's in that file, can be obtained from books and magazines written about South Korea. My contacts at State were okay about supplying that.”

“But when you started to ask about Suh?”

“I got as far as his labor background and the strike in the late seventies. Then all of a sudden, my contacts dried up.”

“Like they got a memo to be cool,” Monk offered.

“There's no doubt.”

“Keys must know about you and me, so he must figure I have this info.”

“But he must know the complete history of Suh.”

“Which raises the question as to what it hides. What bearing does it have on his death in South Central Los Angeles?”

The waitress returned without being summoned. She placed two more beers on the table and said laconically, “That'll be ten dollars plus tip.”

Monk's eyes assailed her, but he could not pierce the veil of distance he'd seen on the faces of women like her, those who mostly by factors they could never control found themselves trapped in the sex trade. He put a ten and five on her tray. “Okay.”

She picked it up and looked at him. “Thanks, man.” And off she went.

Grant hunched forward across the table. “How about this scenario? After the strike there came reprisals from the government. Suh flees and for the next several years bounces around and winds up here in '82, okay?”

“Yeah. But something makes him close up shop a week before the upheaval and then he starts keeping odd hours where he lives.”

Grant's brow furrowed. “Like he was on to something. That would explain closing the store. Harder to find a guy if he ain't where he's supposed to be.”

“Yet his actions would seem to indicate he was working on something. And it has to be all tied in with Jiang Holdings.”

“But you told me the phone number you got for them is now out of service.”

“And the address is an empty lot. But Jiang holds the liquor certificate on the Hi-Life liquor store, the non-operation certificate for Suh's car was filed by the concern, and most importantly, it would appear that Bart Samuels and the late Stacy Grimes were employed by Jiang.”

“For the purpose of buying up distressed properties.”

“So I need to know who is behind Jiang,” Monk said.

“Bong Kim Suh probably found out and paid for the knowledge.”

Monk nodded his head in the affirmative.