Conviction

by Richard North Patterson

  "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."

  FIVE

  ON THE WAY TO PICK UP PAYTON AND RENNELL, THEY CRUISED down what passed in Bayview for the business district, Third Street—do-shops, thrift shops, liquor stores, check-cashing businesses, barbecue and soul food restaurants, corner stores run by Arabs too smart to live there, made prosperous by the total absence of chain groceries. There was suffocating unemployment; most of those with straight jobs left the Bayview to work, and the most vigorous signs of economic life were the crack dealers loitering at the corner of Third and Palou. There was a culture of hanging out on the porches and front steps, as Flora Lewis said the Price brothers had done, or on the streets drinking beer, especially on warm nights, when it felt good to be outside, even if the streets became a nightmare after dark. The other hub of social life lay in a plentitude of black churches—when temporal life is so hard, Monk knew, the hope of a hereafter spent somewhere other than the Bayview holds a certain appeal.

  For sure it beat the public housing—Stalinist stucco complexes from the fifties and sixties, their street signs riddled with bullet holes, festering with crime and violence and living arrangements as mutable as the white powder mixed with baking soda. Not all of it was quite that grim: there were old Edwardians and Victorians amidst the plain one-story homes, and on sunny days, like this one, the streets sloping up and down the hills could present a sudden sweeping vista of the bay—dazzling, Monk felt certain, to the dockworkers who had come there from the rural South. But the residue of the shipping industry was a few shabby warehouses and this endless supply of young street hustlers on a treadmill to nowhere good and, perhaps even sadder to Monk, who dearly loved his own two daughters, young women with nowhere else to turn for love or solace. Too many of these stunted men had far too little of that to give—the subculture which had spawned the Price brothers ran on adrenaline, in a here and now that was brutal, direct, and violent, with no sense of consequence, no "friendships" but with the people they used, no family but the illegitimate kids they had left with girls more cunning than smart.

  Payton was twenty-two; Rennell barely eighteen. Monk already knew the rhythms of Payton's days and nights—constantly changing his meeting places; packing a gun or bringing along his brother for protection; searching for dealers among juveniles effectively immune from law enforcement, indifferent to the fact they might get killed; telling would-be snitches that he'd burn down their mamas' houses if anything in his life went bad; keeping cash under the bed or at some woman's or anywhere but a bank; stealing cars because he couldn't buy one, then beating the rap by saying he'd borrowed the car from some other dude without knowing it was stolen. The elements of a life built around loud music, sex, cars, and guns bought out of the back of a stranger's trunk, spent in a world where bus drivers cruising down Third Street called in robberies in progress, and the corner store sold glass pipes or one cigarette at a time so you could hollow it out to smoke a rock you'd just bought on the street. A life spent living—or dying—in the moment.

  At this particular moment, it was Payton Price's bad luck to be home.

  * * *

  The house was a shabby Victorian on Shafter Avenue owned by Payton's grandmother. He stood in the doorway, lean, well-muscled, and more handsome than his picture, with seen-it-all eyes which held surprising flecks of green and, in their absolute determination to give nothing, perhaps the faintest hint of fear.

  Blocking the door, he looked from Monk to Ainsworth to Monk again. "You got a warrant?" he demanded, hostility etched with disdain.

  Caught doing your home chemistry, Monk thought. "We just dropped by to talk."

  "What about?"

  "The Cambodian girl who washed up in the bay."

  A split-second glance at Ainsworth. "Don't know nothing about that," Payton said flatly.

  "Then there's no problem with talking to us, is there?"

  Payton turned his stare on Monk. "Only problem's my time you'd piss away."

  Monk held his gaze. "Then maybe we'll talk to your brother."

  This time Monk was certain he saw fear. After a moment, Payton shrugged. "Let's get this over with, man."

  "First," Monk answered, "you can tell me where to find Rennell."

  * * *

  They stuck Payton in a bare room with bare walls in the bowels of Robbery and Homicide, a videocam staring down from one corner and a tape recorder on the laminated table in front of him, the two cops letting him think for a while about the sullen hulk of the brother who waited in the interrogation room next door. Leaning forward on the table, Payton propped his chin on one cupped hand, elaborately bored. But his body was rigid; Monk sensed a perpetual vigilance, perhaps never more than now, though it was hard not to wonder when this man had last enjoyed a dreamless sleep.

  Monk slid a photo of Thuy Sen across the table. "Ever seen her?"

  Payton made a show of studying her face, his squint a parody of concentration. "Don't know," he said, pausing to gaze back up at Monk. "Pretty much all look alike, don't they?"

  Monk summoned a faint smile. "You see that many little Asian girls?"

  The glint of irony vanished. "Not saying I saw this one."

  Monk sat back, hands clasped behind his head. "I'm only asking," he said amiably, "because we hear she was at your house the day she disappeared."

  The incredulous smile this summoned did not change Payton's eyes. "That's bullshit."

  Monk appraised him. In a casual tone, Rollie Ainsworth interjected, "That's just what someone said."

  "Who?"

  Now it was Ainsworth's turn to smile. "Can't say. You know how it is."

  "Well, they're fucked up, man."

  "Because she wasn't there?" Monk asked. "Or wasn't there that day?"

  Payton sat up, folding his arms, glaring straight at Monk. "What would I want with some Asian kid not old enough to bleed?"

  That the disclaimer carried sexual overtones only fed Monk's suspicion: at his request, Liz Shelton had suppressed the sexual aspects of Thuy Sen's death. "What would anyone want with a nine-year-old girl? But someone did."

  "Not in my house," Payton answered with a trace of arrogance. "Got all the grown-up pussy I need, whenever I need it. For whatever I need."

  Monk gave him a slow-building smile. "Good for you, son," he answered in a tone of laconic amusement, and then placed one thick forefinger on the Asian girl's picture. "So this girl was never in your house."

  Payton paused briefly before answering with calm conviction, "If she was, man, I sure as hell didn't know about it."

  No, Monk thought, you're not stupid. Maybe just smart enough to fuck up. "Any idea where you were last Tuesday afternoon?"

  Silent, Payton gazed at the tape spinning on the table between them. "If I'd known it was so important," he said after a time, "maybe I'd have noticed."

  "We know you're a busy man," Ainsworth said in his most pleasant voice. "But please do take your time."

  Payton's face went blank again. "Don't have that much
time."

  "We're going to give you some," Monk assured him. "While we visit with your brother."

  For whatever reason, Monk sensed, this worried Payton more than what had gone before. "Rennell and me got to go," their quarry insisted.

  "We'll try to keep that in mind," Monk said. He did not wait for an answer.

  * * *

  Arms resting on the table, Rennell Price made the room seem smaller. His face was fleshy, his features flat and indistinct, as though nothing was quite in focus. There was a gap between his two front teeth, both stained a dull yellow, one edged with a bright gold crown. Unlike his brother, he stared at the girl's photograph with a stony blankness.

  "Remember her?" Monk asked.

  The silence stretched with no sign of an answer; again, unlike Payton, Rennell seemed indifferent to the impression he made on Monk and Ainsworth, or even to their presence. "Yeah," he finally said. "I think maybe I seen her."

  Monk reined in his surprise. "Where?"

  The same pause occurred, Monk was noting, before each answer—silence did not seem to trouble Rennell Price. "Maybe at a store."

  "What store?"

  Silence.

  "You don't remember?"

  Lazily, the big man shook his head. Though he no longer stared at the picture, he did not look up at Monk.

  More sharply, Ainsworth asked, "She ever at your house?"

  This time his silence was followed by a single stubborn word. "No."

  You, Monk decided, are the weak link. He could almost smell Payton's fear through the wall between them.

  Learning forward, Monk spoke quietly. "Because someone says you took her inside your house the day she disappeared."

  For the first time the dead zone which was Rennell Price's eyes showed defensiveness and a veiled hostility. "No way."

  "What about last Tuesday, Rennell?"

  "No."

  This time the monosyllable had come quickly, as did Monk's next question. "Where were you last Tuesday?"