Perdition, U.S.A.

by Gary Phillips

  “There’s a future waiting for you in international diplomacy.”

  “See how you do?” Shawndell was squealing delightfully at the sound of her mother’s raised voice. “You always got a come back, but you think ‘oh she’s just a youngster,’ so what I got to say don’t mean anything.” Clarice picked Shawndell up and bounced her daughter on her slim hip. The child giggled quietly, her amber eyes locked on the paperweight.

  The young mother went on. “But I know plenty, Mr. Monk. I know I got to raise this child, and that I got to stay in school and, I got to get out of the Shores.” She stopped, adjusted something on the baby’s overalls, then spoke again. “It took me an hour and a half on the bus and blue line to get down here, and all you can do is be a smart ass.” She struck a defiant pose.

  Monk leaned back in his chair, alternately annoyed and bemused by the young woman. Finally he said, “What do you want to know, Clarice? Do you want to know that the father of your child owed money to some hustler and got his reward for being late in payments? Is that how you want your daughter to know about him?”

  Clarice stopped bouncing her child, and stared at Monk. “That’s my concern. As it is, she’ll never get to meet him.”

  Monk felt ashamed. “You got heart, Clarice.”

  “You sayin’ you’ll look for his killer now,” she said hopefully.

  “Yeah, I’ll try. But,” he wagged a finger at her. “You gotta come clean about some things. How is it that Scatterboy had that money on him?”

  “He did odd jobs.” She set the child down.

  “It’s not like I’m not going to pull his record, Clarice. Save us a little time, dig?” He leaned forward expectantly.

  Shawndell squirmed loose and set off for the desk. She did her best to reach the sought-after paperweight. She gave up and went off in the direction of the brass coat rack Monk kept in the corner.

  “He used to sell watches and rings and things like that, you know,” Clarice finally offered.

  “He steal these items?” Monk asked matter-of-factly.

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes he got them from some others who made them.”

  “Knock-offs.”

  Clarice’s eyebrows and shoulders lifted.

  “Who was his supplier?” Monk watched Shawndell as she tried to shake the coat rack. But her hands weren’t big enough or strong enough to get a good grasp. Content to make the effort, she’d periodically push her forehead into the center pole.

  Clarice folded her arms and sat on the edge of Monk’s desk, her neck pulled inward like a turtle’s. She spoke with her head cocked downward. “I was with him one time when we went to pick up some of these watches. I don’t remember the address but it was a place near downtown.”

  “You mean Long Beach?”

  The head swung quickly from side-to-side. “No, it was L.A. One of those places where they sew clothes near the Sports Arena.”

  There were numerous such garment operations on Grand, Hope, and the other streets east of the Arena and Coliseum, sweatshops that paid low wages or piece rates to Central American immigrants and carried perky names like Little Miss Casuals or California Burst.

  “Do you remember what street it was on, what the name was on the building?” Monk was up once more, pulling a note pad out of his desk drawer. “And what was the name of the cat you two went to see?”

  Monk could almost see the neurons connecting in her head, the look of concentration was so intense on Clarice’s face.

  “Swiss … no, Dutch.” She paused, rubbing the side of her head. “Swede. That was it. Swede is what Scatterboy called him.”

  Monk was writing it down. “And the place.”

  Shawndell was crying but Clarice ignored her. “I wasn’t driving.”

  “So that means you don’t remember where it was?”

  The baby was on her back, her legs and arms working circles in the air as she gave her lungs a workout. “I’m not sure,” the young mother said as she picked up her child to comfort her. “I had Shawndell with me and that took all my attention. ’Sides I waited in the car while Scatterboy went in to take care of business.”

  Casually, Monk stroked the ends of his goatee. No rush, no sweat.

  Presently, having quieted down the baby with a bottle, Clarice said. “Oh yeah. The building was brown with yellow stripes running around the top.” She rocked back and forth with Shawndell. “It was near Broadway.”

  “Broadway and what?” Monk was sitting in the Eastlake, looking out the window at a sea gull doing a loop-the-loop in the morning sky.

  “Broadway after downtown,” came the terse reply.

  Monk checked any sarcasm he was considering. “Like around 29th Street? 34th Street? Adams?”

  “Before Adams. ’Cause we drove up Adams afterward and got something to eat at a pastrami place.”

  “Making progress,” Monk mumbled to himself as he made notes. “Did you see the one called Swede?”

  “Nope. Scatterboy came back out of the building with his watches and we took off.”

  Monk said, “Did you bring the sheet you wrote those names on the other night?”

  She produced it from the diaper bag and handed it to him.

  He brushed talcum powder off the sheet and read it. Several notations were now included next to two of the names Clarice had originally written down. There was a street address for the one called Li’l Bone and another hangout for Two Dog.

  “How much do you want me to pay you?” Clarice asked guilelessly.

  Monk looked up from the writing. The teenager and her daughter were playing silly face with one another. He figured to give it a go for a few days, reach a dead end, then inform his client it was hopeless. But if he didn’t charge her something, she’d be pissed and suspicious.

  “Give me a hundred as an advance and I’ll have Delilah give you our standard contract. You are old enough to sign, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in three months, Mr. Monk.”

  “Okay. I’ll get Delilah to draw it up now.” He was going to add, “send it home with her,” but he felt bad about putting Clarice and Shawndell back on what passed for public transportation in L.A. “Then let me give you a lift, so you and your mother can read it. She’ll have to sign the contract.”

  “You can take me to my aunt’s place in Wilmington. She’ll watch the baby while I go to work. Now are you gonna do your best to find out who killed Scatterboy?” She gazed unblinkingly into Monk’s face.

  “You really loved him,” Monk concluded.

  “Just realizing that, huh, detective man?”

  “I’m slow, but I’m thorough.”

  “I hope so,” she said seriously.

  Monk entered the automatic double doors to the intensive care ward and asked which room Jimmy Henderson was in. Behind him, a man was being wheeled in by two paramedics. The elderly gentlemen was covered in a blood-stained blanket, his body rigid, the resigned look of certain death composing his face.

  Monk’s mother was a nurse and he’d seen more than one dead body, had even been in on autopsies, but the I.C.U. of a hospital always gave him an ill feeling. The beeping machines they plugged the near-dead into, the respirators for the lung-impaired, and the infusion of drugs to fool failing organs were bad enough. But the worst was the morphine tap, reserved for the greatest pain, a zombitizing technique that family and friends were grateful for, and that caused the patient to slip numbly away like a rudderless boat bobbing on waves of a chemical sea, soon to disappear over the horizon forever.

  But while they tapped and jabbed and inserted, they let you know, in their taciturn way, that everything was going to be just fine. And as the staff went about their tasks, they joked and carried on about what they were going to do after work or who was sleeping with whom. How else could someone deal with decaying bodies and weeping relatives in this constant parade of sorrow, amid the stench of body waste and Lysol?

  “Are you family?” a young doctor asked irr
itably. Off to his side, a nurse was attending to the man they’d just brought in.

  “I’m a good friend,” he lied.

  The intern looked over at one of the rooms that surrounded the nurses’ station. Each intensive care room had a large window in the wall and a large pane set in every door.

  In one of these rooms, Monk could see three black people. One was a thin, handsome woman in her forties. The other was a heavier man, a little older, in a pullover knit shirt. The third was a studious and serious younger man. They were gathered around a figure in the bed, the focus of numerous tubes and wires leading from equipment and monitors. It was there the doctor had directed his gaze.

  “As you can see, Mr. Henderson’s family is already in there,” the young intern unnecessarily informed Monk. He was busy filling out information on a chart. “You’ll have to wait until they’re gone and then we’ll see about letting you in.” He kept writing.

  The woman had begun to weep, placing her head on the older man’s shoulder. The younger one had a determined bearing about him, his hands gripping the bed’s railing. Monk walked away from the station toward the room. If the young doctor noticed, he didn’t say anything.

  The door was cracked and Monk could hear the sobs of the woman and the man saying the things people always say to comfort another’s misery. Now was not the time to ask questions, but it was opportune.

  In the bed, Henderson’s chest barely rose and fell. The young man’s face was obscured by an oxygen mask and there was a catheter trailing from beneath the heavy blanket. Both of his arms had solutions flowing into them as the monitor droned over the bed.

  Placing himself halfway into the room, Monk quietly said, “Excuse me—”

  Suddenly the body convulsed, the monitor sounding a high pitched wail, and all eyes fastened on the wounded man. A nurse and the young intern rushed in. Monk felt like a reporter from a supermarket tabloid, a ghoul slobbering for the next body to expire.

  Another nurse wheeled in a machine on noisy casters and the family was ushered out. Unaware of Monk, they were looking through the window as the new machine was hooked up to Henderson. Like a pariah, Monk drew back from them, trying to will himself invisible. The staff feverishly worked over the body for some moments, then stopped. The doctor looked at one of the nurses, then at the family. He came outside.

  The mother shook her head as if to ward off the evil of finality the doctor brought with him. He touched the older man’s arm, whose face was ashen. The younger man looked away, noticing Monk. He walked over to him.

  “You a cop?” he asked belligerently.

  “No.” He told him who he was and why he’d come.

  The other one digested this in silence, touching his glasses. “I see. Can I have one of your cards?”

  Monk handed him one. “How’s Jimmy?”

  “My cousin’s in a coma.” He turned and went back to his aunt and uncle.

  There they hovered over the almost still body, the father’s head tilted upward, possibly hoping to invoke the intercession of a deity.

  Riding down in the elevator, Monk had a pang of conscience. If he’d taken Clarice seriously the first time, would Jimmy Henderson still be whole? Probably not. To thwart this outcome would have taken a lot of insight and more than the usual amount of luck. Still, his inaction had been inexcusable.

  It strained credulity to believe that it wasn’t the same gunman who’d cut down all three victims—he’d learned about the killing of Aaron after a call to the Press-Telegram—in so short a time. A serial killer targeting young African American men was not too far-fetched. A new kind of Night Stalker. The Black Stalker. Jesus.

  He’d have to check to see about the caliber of the bullets used. And whether the sheriffs department out in the Shores was looking at these killings as related.

  In the car, he reviewed other possibilities, for example, gangbangers exacting their own payback. Williams and Aaron were bad actors destined to meet bad ends, while, on the surface, Henderson seemed legit, but if not, he wouldn’t be the first college kid to walk between two worlds.

  By the time he got to his apartment, he’d developed more theories. But he kept coming back to the similarities among the three shootings. The more he went over it, the more he knew he was stretching it. Making excuses for the guilt he couldn’t shake.

  Monk got a glass from the cupboard, put some cubes in it, and poured a desensitizing dose of Ron Montusalem rum. He was on his third go-round when there was a tap at the door.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ivan, it’s me.”

  “Come on in, baby.”

  Jill Kodama used her key and entered the apartment. She looked at the bottle and his feet up on the dining room table. “Long day, honey?” She made no attempt to hide her displeasure at his drinking alone.

  Monk let it go. At this point, he was letting a lot go by.

  Kodama sat at the table. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Eventually.” He had some more rum.

  A drawn out, “Okay,” issued from her. She got up and went into the kitchen. Drawers were opened and shut, bottles on the refrigerator door rattled, the butcher block slid out, a bottle cap was twisted off. Kodama returned with half a sandwich, three olives, a quarter of a pickle, and a tall glass of sparkling water.

  Monk drank, she ate. He finally said, “’Member I told you about the goofy kid with the baby who came to see me?”

  “Um,” she said over a mouthful.

  “Well, a third young black man has been shot in Pacific Shores. He’s alive, but just so.”

  “Critical?” Kodama finished.

  “Coma.” Monk had another taste.

  “So you’re celebrating the fact he’s not dead,” Kodama stated sarcastically.

  “Something like that.” He placed the glass heavily on the table.

  Kodama chewed and studied him. “Do you think we’ve settled into a routine?”

  “Maybe this booze gave me a fever, but did we just segue in our conversation here?”

  She picked at a space between her teeth with a clear nail. “You heard, bub.”

  Monk patted her leg. “I was trying to unload my troubles on you. See that means we’re communicating.”

  “Did you know I was coming over tonight?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “But you’re not surprised either?”

  “Jill, you have a key to this place like I have a key to your house. I mean, we’re a couple, right?”

  “Absolutely.” She tipped her glass up and bit down on a piece of ice. “But you still haven’t answered my question.” Kodama ground the chunk up on her back teeth.

  “If you’re implying are we tired of one another, I can without reservation say I ain’t bored in this thing we got going.” He paused, considering whether he wanted another drink. Monk decided the buzz he had on was best left unstoked. “Can you say the same?”

  Her dark eyes were unwavering. “Of course.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t be so fuckin’ fast. The fact is we both have careers that require too many extra hours and too much emotional drain.”

  “We’re always there for each other, Jill.”

  “I know, doll.” She leaned over and kissed him passionately. “Maybe I’m getting possessive in my advancing years and want some more of your time.”

  “Hey, I’m the one that suggested we move in together awhile back,” Monk pointed out.

  “And I said I’d think about it. But I don’t want us having a home together and it’s just some place to shower and change clothes. I know too many professional couples doing that bit.”

  “Well just like dominoes, you gotta work at it to get good.” Monk winked at her.

  She scratched his goatee. “Sure you’re right. So why are you so worked up over these Pacific Shores shootings?

  Monk had to search around in his head for the answer he wanted. “Really, I guess I feel funny that I was all too willing to write off Scatterb
oy’s murder as just another street death.”

  “And what made you change your mind?”

  “I’m not sure I have. Only seeing how Jimmy Henderson’s family is shaken by his condition reminded me that even the bad deaths deserve an answer.”

  Kodama calmly took a bite of her pickle. “A hustler gets killed, the cops don’t care, the man don’t care. But Ivan Monk, the people’s detective is supposed to be different.”

  “You goddamn right,” he said, smiling.

  Kodama got up, standing over him. “Come on, let’s get some rest. Then we’ll get you back on your horse in the morning, Tex.”

  Exhausted, Monk grumbled, “Yee-hah.”

  Chapter 6

  Monk raised his arm in time to block the ballpeen hammer coming at his head. He caught the shank across his forearm and yelled. Monk tensed his leg muscles, lowered his shoulder, and drove into his opponent’s mid-section, pinning him against the wall of the loading dock, air escaping in a bleat from the man’s lungs.

  Quickly, Monk rammed his knee into the smaller man’s groin.

  “Pinche mayate,” the man wheezed as he sat heavily on the floor.

  Monk plucked the tool from the man’s limp grip. From behind, he heard several loud gasps. He turned toward the shop floor while still watching the man propped against the wall.

  Three long rows of compact work tables filled the factory. Sitting at them were women, mostly Latinas with a few Asians sprinkled about. Each table contained a sewing machine, bolted in place, spools of thread, scissors, thimbles, and assorted pieces of fabric. Behind each seamstress was a large cardboard box containing an explosion of silks, rayons, and cottons. On the floor in front of the tables were smaller boxes that contained their finished product. Today’s job seemed to be ensembles for the upwardly mobile working woman.

  Monk grinned, “Relax, ladies, I’m just going to hit him once or twice at most.” He devoted his attention to the man at his feet. “Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t split your head open?”

  “Fuck you,” the other man spat in clear English.

  Without missing a beat, Monk took a vicious swipe with the hammer, pulling loose a chunk of plaster less than an inch above the belligerent man’s head.