Conviction

FOUR

MONK STUDIED THE LEMON RIND FLOATING IN THE TINY CUP OF espresso, incongruous in his paw of a hand. "Should have ordered a double," he observed. "Less rind, more caffeine."

Terri emptied her own cup, cold now, its contents bitter on her tongue. "Tell me about Flora Lewis."

* * *

They didn't find a witness for two fruitless days, spent going door-to-door in the crack-ridden streets of Bayview, hilly and sunny and stark, where black kids loitered on the pavement from childhood until, in their twenties, half the boys were dead or in jail. To outsiders, it was a foreign country—taxi drivers wouldn't go there, cops blew off domestic violence calls rather than stick their necks out, and the whole mess was sitting on a Superfund site, with exposure to buried poisons as toxic as the lives of many who were born there.

Once it had been a place of hope, its white, blue-collar residents joined during World War II by African American shipyard workers who remained there, thinking the jobs and sunny weather—best among the city's microclimates—might presage a better life than whatever they'd left behind. The jobs vanished; many blacks remained, predominant now, mingled with pockets of Tongans and Samoans, a few Asians, and remnants of the white home-owning classes—stranded in the houses they still owned, Monk knew, by an economy which otherwise had passed them by. Some, like Flora Lewis, saw Bayview as a prison.

She lived two blocks south of Thuy Sen's accustomed route to school. Cracking open the door of her tiny Edwardian home, she peered above a door chain at the two black men—Monk and Rollie Ainsworth—who had come there unannounced. Only when Monk thrust out identification and stated their purpose did Lewis let them in.

The next thing she did seemed odd. Going to the window, she craned her neck to peer out, one palsied hand drawing open lace curtains, her frail body still bent away from the window to conceal herself from view. When she spoke she did not turn.

"I'd have moved," she said, "but all I've got is my social security and my parents' house."

Glancing at Ainsworth, Monk saw his partner's shrewd, round face appraising her and concluding, as Monk had, that silence was best. "They live across the street," she told them.

Uttering this non sequitur, her voice was parched. Her eyes maintained their vigil. "Who?" Monk asked.

"The Price brothers, two boys, if you could call them that. Cars squealing up at night, men and trampy-looking girls streaming in and out, music getting louder all the time and more obscene." Her tone became quieter, to Monk, etched with bitterness. "It always felt to me like anything could happen—their grandmother locked up like a prisoner, the boys with no one to control whatever impulses they had."

"Tell me about them."

She faced Monk now. Behind her wire-rim glasses Monk saw hesitance and fear, and a grimace deepened the seams of her face, drawing down her mouth. "The older one's named Payton," she said. "Quick-moving, with a bad mouth, who thinks he's clever. Used to be bright-eyed and almost pretty-looking—you watch them turn cruel, over time, and it would break your heart if you could believe they still had hearts of their own. But the younger one scared me from the time that he was four or five. You could see he'd be a hulking brute even before he became one.

"Even more than his size, it was his expression. It never changed. You just looked at him, and saw no feeling." Her eyes closed. "I can only imagine . . ."

"Imagine what?"

Silent, Lewis shook her head. When her eyes opened again, she said softly, "She was there. With them."

"How did you know it was her?"

Reflexively, her eyes sought out the television to one corner of the cramped room—an ancient couch, a coffee table, photographs of a woman and man who must have been her parents. Though tense now, Monk forced himself to remain patient, calm.

"She was Asian." Lewis hesitated, then finished. "It was the day before her picture was on the news."

Ainsworth glanced at Monk. "Tell us exactly what you saw."

Lewis paused, as if to summon an image in her mind. "They're sitting on the porch with one of those big, boxy radios blaring this chanting kind of music—Payton all jittery with his head snapping from side to side. The big one, Rennell, is staring at the sidewalk like he's been hypnotized. Minutes pass with him not moving.

"Then she comes by."

The last phrase held a fateful certainty. "Can you describe her?" Monk asked.

"Asian," she repeated simply. "Straight black hair, and even without seeing her face I can tell by how she carries herself. Eyes straight ahead, fixed on the sidewalk, like they do. Acting like she doesn't notice them."

"But they noticed her."

Flora Lewis bit her lip. "It was the big one," she said with quiet anger. "Rennell.

"He stands. I see his mouth open, calling out—it's like a pantomime, because I can't hear him with all that barbaric chanting from their radio. But I see the girl hesitate for the briefest moment before she's moving again, still not looking up.

"That brings the big one off the porch. His mouth opens again, calling out." Lewis turned back toward the window, staring through the curtain as if at the remembered Asian child. "I can only imagine what he said. Suddenly, she's frozen there—petrified, more like it. Then she turns to face him.

"He comes down off the porch, towering over her. Payton's still twitching back and forth in his chair. She's standing with her back to me—you can see her glancing from one to the other, guessing at who scared her worse.

"Then Rennell says something else to her. She looks up at him, slowly shakes her head." Lewis finished in a monotone. "So he just reaches out and takes her by the arm."

Monk felt his own sense of foreboding. "And then?"

"Slowly, Rennell pulls her forward. She stumbles, like she'd been trying to stay rooted on the sidewalk. After that she just lets him pull her toward the house.

"Her shoulders are drooping now. But the thing I remember most is her looking up at the porch at Payton, and him standing. Like what's about to happen involves him now, too." Lewis slowly shook her head. "Then the big one says something to him, and Payton opens up the door."

Lewis stopped abruptly. After a moment, Ainsworth asked, "What happened then?"

"Rennell leads her to the porch, then puts his hand on her back and pushes her toward the door. I remember her stumbling on the doorsill. Then Rennell steps in behind her, and I can't see her anymore. He was too big." A mist clouded Lewis's eyes. "The last thing I saw was Payton closing the door behind them."

Monk and Ainsworth stayed quiet, letting their unspoken question fill the silence. "I'm afraid of them," she murmured with muted shame. "When I saw her picture, I told myself they'd find her. But not like that."

Monk thrust his hands in his pockets. "If the girl was Thuy Sen, by the time you saw her picture she was dead. All you could have done you're doing now."

But not without a house call from us, he thought to himself. And maybe not if you'd called us when the big one pushed her through the door.

"It would help," Monk said, "if you could remember what the girl was wearing."

The old white lady looked more grateful to him than she deserved to feel. "A plaid skirt," she answered. "And a dark green sweater. As long as I live, I'll never forget."

* * *

Monk and Ainsworth stood with a burly plainclothes cop in the squad room of the Bayview station. "Shit," Larry Minnehan said.

Monk shrugged. "If the girl was Thuy Sen, she wasn't taking her usual route. You started looking where you should have."

"I meant about this old lady. She damned well should have called us. Now all we've got is another fucking homicide."

Monk nodded toward an oversize bulletin board on the cinder-block wall behind Minnehan. "So tell me about the brothers Price."

"They're fungible, man. Like a lot of these gangbangers." Turning to the board, Minnehan contemplated roughly a hundred mug shots of young men organized by gang affiliation, with typed notations of their more salient characteristics—arrest records, whether they were in prison or dead, maybe even who had killed them. A wall of blank eyes staring from blank faces which were all black.

"This one's Payton," Minnehan told Monk, pointing out a picture at the right side of the board.

Moving closer, Monk began committing the face to memory. It was more memorable than most: thin and handsome, close to refined, with a glint of irony rarely found in such photographs, whose subjects tended to prefer stone-cold indifference. "Payton's the supposed mastermind," Minnehan said. "Runs a network of dealers."

"Crack?"

"Natch. But I give him this—he's not hooked up with any gang. A true small businessman, with the kind of entrepreneurial spirit which makes this country great."

Ainsworth studied the photograph. "Not easy, down here."

"Payton's a nervy bastard," Minnehan responded. "A real survivor. You know what dealing crack is like in the Bayview. A lot of scuffling and hustling on the street—fractious, paranoid, and violent. We're like the Balkans for black folks."

Monk gave a short, mirthless laugh. "How's Payton work his business?"

"The usual way. Buys powder cocaine from a dealer, in kilos, and then turns it into rocks.

"But his dealer's only going to sell powder in significant quantities. So there's economic pressure for Payton to keep selling enough rocks to buy the next batch of powder, even if he has to sell them on consignment.

"He sells through a franchise of twenty or so street dealers—juveniles, people someone vouches for, anyone he thinks he can trust at all. That insulates him from the danger of hanging out on the corner drinking beer and mingling with the crackheads, maybe getting killed for the rocks or cash in his pocket." Minnehan tugged his Notre Dame sweatshirt down over the small protuberance of his belly. "You can sell a dozen rocks for maybe one fifty. Payton will want the money up-front. But if someone says he's short till Monday, and Payton's under pressure, he'll maybe have to trust him. For that you need muscle, a collector. Just what Rennell was born for."

Listening, Monk felt a weary familiarity, the inevitable arc in the lives of the two boys who had grown up across from Flora Lewis. Crack was the first business kids learned in the Bayview. It is tough to sell powder cocaine on the street—the customers are cynical, and can't be sure what they're getting isn't cut with sugar or salt. But any twelve-year-old can take powder, combine it with baking soda and water, then cook it into rocks a buyer can sample and know—from the first rush hitting his bloodstream—that it's the real deal. And so kids become both dealers and users—smoking crack for pleasure, dispensing crack for business, and trading crack for sex for the rest of what is likely to be their very brief lives.

"Payton have a girl?" Monk asked.

"Nice-looking boy like that? Always. Plenty of coke whores to go around, even if you look like a fucking gargoyle. Some of these sweet young things would suck the chrome off a trailer hitch."

"So what they need with a nine-year-old Cambodian girl?"

Minnehan shrugged. " 'Cause this whole fucking place is depraved, with a capital D. No rules, no limits, no respect for life or anything which might grow up to have a pussy. Add the crazy sexual rush which comes from smoking crack and see if guys like Payton and Rennell bother with these fine distinctions."

The mention of Rennell reminded Monk that he had not seen the man who, if Flora Lewis was right, had led Thuy Sen to her death. "Show me Rennell," he directed.

Minnehan jabbed at a picture. "Right here. Piss-poor protoplasm for sure."

Monk took it in. Not much to see, he thought—a round, expressionless face, eyes even deader than normal.

"Let's run 'em in," he said. "Both of them."