Bad Night Is Falling Read Online Free Page B

down.
    â€œHow ’bout a little change, trooper?”
    He dug out some coins and plopped them in the cup. “There you go.”
    The man mumbled something while he jingled the cup, staring intently at the contents as if he were a sage rolling the bones. He started to walk away, looking up at the warm, clear sky. As Monk started the car he noticed that the man was talking to himself.
    â€œBad night is falling,” Monk thought he heard the man say as he drove off.

Three
    â€œT hat was the going-away dinner they had for me. Gilbert Lindsey himself handed me the certificate.” Henry Cady beamed, touching a corner of the framed photo. In the shot, an obviously pleased Cady stood alongside the diminutive Lindsey, the late councilman who had represented the district of L.A. he’d called “the Mighty Ninth.”
    Lindsey had been the first black member of the L.A. City Council. He had been appointed to fill a vacant seat in January of 1963. He’d worked his way up from janitor in the Department of Water and Power to aide to the late liberal white County Supervisor, Kenneth Hahn. Hahn had attended Thomas Jefferson High School. The same school Monk had, decades later.
    Next to that photo was another one of a younger Cady without glasses, in creased khaki pants and shirt standing at the apex of an inverted V of men dressed similarly. The other men, all black save for a couple of Latinos, were in squatting positions and some had floor buffers before them. A small metal caption read: C ITY H ALL J ANITORS , A UGUST 1965.
    â€œThis couldn’t have been taken during the riots,” Monk observed. Everybody in the picture looked relaxed.
    â€œThat was taken on the sixth, a Friday. Five days before everything happened on the following Wednesday,” Cady said offhandedly, clearly having repeated the date often to visitors. “Man, we didn’t get back to work for damn near a month after the streets blew up.”
    â€œI was too young then to understand the cryptic smile on my dad’s face,” Monk said, reminiscing for no one’s benefit save his own.
    Cady was still examining the photo taken in the basement of City Hall. “Worked thirty-two years there. Made swing shift supervisor and was five times the shop steward for my local.”
    â€œSEIU?” Monk asked.
    â€œYep,” the older man replied, finally turning from the past. “You’d be hard-pressed to believe it, Ivan, but in them days the Taj wasn’t such a bad place to live. Had us barbeques in the common area on Saturdays, women and kids got in their finest to go to church on Sundays. None of this knockin’ people in the head by young men with pants down around their cracks and can’t spell cat.”
    The two were standing in the spacious living room of Cady’s townhouse unit. Being one of the veteran tenants had its perks even in the Rancho Tajuata. The apartment had two levels and a separate kitchen, not a kitchenette like so many of the other apartments Monk knew.
    â€œCome on, take a load off.” Cady indicated a chair as he eased his thin frame with its slight paunch into a worn and cracked leather lounger. The thing seemed to form around him like an organic exoskeleton. The chair stood at an angle facing a late-model color TV set. A VCR sat on top of the TV, perpetually blinking 12:00.
    â€œI was hoping you might introduce me around to some of the residents, Henry,” Monk said. “Not necessarily the ones living near the Cruzados, but the ones who knew them.”
    â€œYou know there’s been two LAPD detectives prowling around here already.”
    â€œIs one of them a sharp-dressed Chicano with a Zapata mustache?” Monk indicated either side of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger crooked in a crescent.
    â€œNope, I Spy team. And naturally the black one is even more of an asshole than the white one. Gotta do more shit to keep his job,” Cady