Only the Wicked Page 15

  “But you wouldn’t say he had an insatiable sexual appetite, would you?” Monk left it to her to add or defer information on the topic.

  “Should I feel a need to defend him?” She kept working the gears.

  “Just understand him. I’m going to try to talk to Creel when I get down there.”

  “Damon liked the center ring and what came with it. In that regard he’s no different than many of those throwing stones at the system from the left and right in the name of being the vanguard. Those who always manage to get their names in the papers.”

  “Your film implied that, but also balanced it with his sincerity for the movement.”

  “As I hoped it would.” She finally set aside the gears. “I think Damon’s a for-real hope-to-die revolutionary who wants to alter the nature of power in this country.”

  “But you assess him honestly,” Monk admired. “Faults and plusses.”

  “And I firmly believe then and now that he was rail-roaded into prison. Damon admitted in court seeing Ava Green earlier that evening. Hell, we all knew they were getting it on.”

  “According to his book his car broke down on the way back from Memphis to Mound Bayou,” Monk filled in. “By the time he got it going and got to his destination, the two young girls had been slaughtered.”

  “But the breakdown is a big gap in his time. It is an unaccounted whereabouts.”

  “That and the testimony of my cousin.” Monk got depressed.

  She clasped a hand around the bracelet on her wrist, the harsh light of her office giving her skin a sheen like burnished copper. “I want you to see this,” she said firmly. “I was going to use this in the documentary, but, well, you’ll see.” She wheeled in a monitor and commercial deck on a cart from another room and searched for a 3/4" tape among a stack of them on a bookshelf. She found what she was looking for and popped it in the machine.

  The tape fuzzed for a few moments then there was a pixilated face of a man in short sleeves. He was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair and he was fidgeting: his leg pumped up and down, his shoe arched upward, his butt perched on the edge of the seat.

  “Oh, wait a minute.” Embara, who was standing next to the set, stopped the tape and fast-forwarded it. “This was the version I’d messed with. Let me get to the original.” She got to the appropriate place on the counter, and set the tape to play again. She sat down at her desk. Monk had edged his chair closer.

  The initial scene was the same except the pixilation affect was absent. The subject was an older white man in clip-on suspenders and a straw, snap-brim hat. He had a lean sagging face, vestiges of its once rugged good looks hinted at beneath the myriad lines. His nose had a groove of a scar along the length of the bridge. The old wound was purple with age, and broken blood vessels rivered on either side of it.

  “The Citizens League wasn’t a bunch of night riders swilling hooch, running around excited to kick some Jew’s ass.” He whipped his face toward some unknown source, then back to the camera. “We were the thin white line of Anglo-Saxon culture against the disorder being rent upon us by them professional coons and their benefactors, the liberal she-he’s running those foundations in New York City.”

  “Were you the one interviewing him?” Monk asked.

  She indicated she had. “Wallace Burchett was not given to immodesty.” Embara put a finger to her lips.

  “We had served in the Big One and in Korea. We had seen what the Red Chinese had done to brainwash American prisoners of war, and how they wanted to take away our free thought. We weren’t brownshirts, no sir.

  “But then we get back here and you got all that race mixing music with them pedophiles Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. Juke songs right out of joints with nigger tunes and dago singers was being played by blossoming white girls right here in Decatur, goddamnit.” He gyrated on the seat, his shallow cheeks puffing.

  “Decatur, Mississippi,” Embara illuminated.

  Burchett’s head was hanging low, moving from side to side. He talked down toward his shoes. The camera pulled back to accommodate his pose as he went on. “It was about your whole god-fearin’ way of life could be ripe for spoilage if those Castroites had their way.

  “And they say we were wrong, that we went too far. Just look at the evidence. What was Cambodia? What in the name of sanity was Rwanda or Kosovo? And now, Jesus and the blood of Christ, Hong Kong belongs to the Reds, good Lord amighty.” He waved an arm in the air as if he were a referee trying vainly to call foul.

  Burchett’s voice was steady, clear. Yet both his legs were going up and down now, and a desperation had crept into the corners of his pupils, which had constricted. “You asked me about certain activities I don’t rightly think a young gal like you should be pursuing.” There was a jump in the tape and then Burchett was speaking again.

  “Yeah, yes, I’ve heard that plenty of times.” He wiped at his brow with his palm, which was suddenly glistening with perspiration. He upset his hat and it fell to the floor. He leaned down to retrieve it and stopped to look halfway up at Embara, who was out of the shot. “You expect me to tell you how we arranged the removal of no-goods like them two in that pickup truck over in Yazoo City?”

  Embara remarked, sotto voce, “You mean the murders of Yost and Hiller in the fall of nineteen sixty-six?”

  Monk remembered the crime. Yost, a white high school teacher from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Hiller, a young black man from Biloxi, Mississippi, had been doing voter registration. They’d been forced into the woods by Klansmen or cops, what difference did it make since they never got out again?

  “Yost was disemboweled, Hiller had his penis severed and stuffed in his mouth. And both had their heads caved in with sledge hammers.” Monk had a cold fascination for Burchett.

  “Here,” Embara said, pointing at the monitor as the Citizens Leaguer continued telling his tales.

  “That Riles loved money and pussy, shit, what nigger doesn’t?” He leered at where Monk presumed Embara sat. “Some white fellas too, I guess you could say.” There was another jump cut and now Burchett was erect in the chair as if he were bound with invisible chains. His arms were tight against his body, his neck pulled in as if to ward off blows, his hat pushed far back on the top of his head.

  “He loved his money, but he wanted his pride, too. That Riles had the right idea, yes sir. He knew the coloreds had to bide their time and be patient; they couldn’t rush things and get all out of sorts like they had no sense.”

  Monk was angry at the way Burchett referred to his cousin, and angry his cousin had been so weak.

  Burchett was now jerking his body about in a violent fashion. Since the interview had begun, these movements had been slight, and had continued building into exaggerated spasms. His hat remained on his head.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Watch.”

  Burchett launched himself out of the chair, the camera losing him momentarily. The camera operator found him rolling and writhing on the floor. “Malachi knows as did Riles, turning in that rabble rouser. Ye must tithe to Malachi, ye must make amends sometimes in blood.”

  The old man, who’d had his arms outspread, slapped them against his sides again. He gurgled and snaked himself along the floor like a circus geek. The camera was now behind him, recording his antics from a low angle. “Those girls were needed for the work ahead for they chose to stand on the border of wickedness.”

  Embara shut the tape off. Neither said anything for several moments. Monk was taking time to consider the import of the man’s words—or ravings.

  “So what was the deal with Burchett?” He knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “He had lung cancer and was taking powdered morphine sulfate. Don’t ask me how he got hold of it, ‘cause I don’t know. For a chaser he was apparently also imbibing some backwoods moonshine.”

  “How in hell did he get up in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” she commiserated. “Burchett died five months a
fter I taped this interview with him. Initially I was going to include him in the documentary, what with his inferences to Damon being set up.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “How would it be?” She tucked in her lips and widened her eyes. “I run this segment where he’s talking about Malachi and the girls having to be sacrificed. Granted, he’s scooting around like a goddamn slinky, but I hoped to account for that in the narration. Yet the more I wanted to do it, the more I hit the wall.”

  “Nobody would cooperate,” Monk noted.

  “He has a daughter, Nancy, but I couldn’t locate her.”

  “And who would believe a dying man’s rantings on his homemade anesthetizing cocktail?”

  “Right. Even though supposedly the files of the League have been made public, there’s a lot of talk down there that that was more a publicity stunt than anything. That some things, the real dirt, were kept secret.”

  “The League kept double sets of files? One different from the other?”

  “Something like that,” Embara said.

  A young woman in a Speedo cycling outfit entered without knocking. “Hey, Harlen moved the meet up to three if you can make it.” She handed a set of stapled pages to Embara. “Here’s the list you asked for.”

  “You know he’s always doing that kind of shit. Gotta be the cock of the walk.”

  “Yakkity yak, and blah,” the other woman responded, rotating her hand in circles.

  “Fine, fine,” Embara conceded, knocking against her gear apparatus with the back of her hand lightly. The woman left, leaving the door partially open.

  Embara leaned forward on the table, dangling the papers. “Here’s my list of former Damon Creel Defense Committee members I assembled for the film. Some may have moved on since then.” She set the list down. “See, I think the League couldn’t help but let some of its files come out.” She made concise movements with her hand as a professor might illustrating a point for a student. “It’s not like this stuff hadn’t been leaking out for some time in memoirs of civil rights people and so forth.”

  Monk stroked the sides of his goatee between thumb and index finger. “But like the CIA, you allow some bloodletting to appease the hounds, meanwhile the dirty work goes on. You’re not suggesting the League is still in existence? They were officially de-funded in nineteen seventy-four.” It sounded naive as soon as it left his mouth.

  “There’s a kind of Delta Godfather down there, Manse Tigbee. He’s got farm land and textile mills all over the place, freighters on the docks in Biloxi, and his catfish farms sell to restaurants as far away as France. He also runs a philanthropic venture called the Merit Foundation.”

  “Meaning he finds merit in white projects?”

  “No,” Embara corrected, “the Foundation has given money to inner city public schools and private ones too.” She made a face and Monk didn’t know how to interpret the expression. “By trade he’s a structural engineer. His name came up during Damon’s trial. But that’s all it did, come up.”

  “So he still wields considerable power.”

  “In a quiet way, Señor Monk, a quiet way. This is the modern age after all.” She glanced at a clock set in a brass cathedral arch on a marble pedestal. “You know about Nixon’s Southern Strategy, his plan of splintering off Dixiecrats through racialized appeal and patronage?”

  Monk indicated he did.

  “Okay, Nixon knew Tigbee, had met with him and other southern leaders over a period of time to devise and carry out this realignment of electoral power. Men who Nixon knew could get the votes together in their counties and districts.”

  “Tigbee having plausible deniability concerning the more nefarious doings of the Citizens League,” he observed.

  “Yes, Tigbee’s always managed to maintain an arm’s length from the League in public much like P.W. Botha did with his security forces that engaged in political assassinations during apartheid in South Africa,” Embara said. “And peep this,” she added, “the feeling among some in the know is that Nixon got the idea for his covert operations against his real and imagined enemies, the breakins, wiretapping, Plumbers Squad, and so on from Tigbee.”

  Monk was floored. “You mean he and ol’ Manse were sitting around jawing one night and Tigbee suggests …” He let the rest go unsaid but implied.

  “Exactly, taking lessons from what the Citizens League had been doing for years against uppity blacks, outside agitators and soft-headed whites. Look, I have to get ready for the bowing and scraping I gotta do for this guy who might shake loose some bank for us.”

  “I’m really glad you could spare the time.” Monk got up. “Say, you ever hear anything about Hiram Bodar in all this?”

  Embara was looking for something on her desk. “I know he initially campaigned as a Gingrichite Republican who wasn’t squeamish to talk about race.”

  “Think his principles are what led to his accident?”

  “Could be.” She found the notes she’d been hunting for. “You might want to talk to that editor—what was his name—from the Mississippi paper?”

  “McClendon.” Monk told her he’d retrieved some of his articles on-line and that he intended to talk with Bodar. He thanked her again, picked up the list, and left the studios. Not too far west was the Formosa Café. The landmark was a stop for Gen-X and Y-ers and some old-school screenwriters and character actors. Also in the mix were the kind of people who could drop into a joint a little past two in the afternoon and slide into a booth in the back: those who seemed to have no set job, but always enough money to be going out.

  The rear portion of the bar and grill had originally been a Red Car, one of the trolleys of the Pacific Electric Line whose tracks back then were the inter-urban line crisscrossing the city like Martian canals.

  Monk ordered a Bud, some vegetable fried rice and a plate of popcorn fried shrimp. In the old days, food was not why you came to the Formosa. The quality of the chow then was fair at best; you came for the ambiance. The pictures of the old-time stars along the walls; the cracked carmine leather of the booths; the long, scarred bar, and those who lurched up to it had made the grub’s ingestion passable. But the menu had been upgraded for the less hardy.

  Dexter Grant had introduced Monk to the Formosa, and the bartender in the bow tie, who mixed his drinks adroitly all the while telling you a story about the days of L.A. when orange groves outnumbered people. The bartender had passed on some ten years ago, walking home one night as he’d done for more than forty years. He got to the top of the steps to his apartment on Fuller, breathed his last gasp into the early morning air, and sank down, holding the rail. The cops found him like that, his one hand frozen like statuary on the peeling paint of the wooden railing, in a kneeling position.

  Silently Monk saluted the man. He hoisted his glass of beer to the photo of the guru of bartending residing over the window where he sat. The bartender’s crooked smile hinted but did not reveal the grand joke only he knew the punch line to. Paying his bill, Monk wondered when it would be his time to find out the answer for himself.

  “Everything cool?” Kodama was eating a double cone of Tahitian Guava and Rocky Road.

  Monk was hanging up the receiver at the pay phone. “Yeah, she’s got a male nurse who’s going to follow her home and see her inside.”

  The couple strolled again along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The walking thoroughfare was a post-industrial marketplace with a virtual reality store, sunglasses shops, record stores, bookshops, coffeehouses, toy emporium, movie palaces and an omnipresent Disney store.

  “Look, the killer knows you’re stirring up shit, he’s not going to take another run at her now.” She put an arm around his waist, tugging him. “Plus, Nona’s got that Beretta of yours you insisted she carry.”

  “And she knows how and where to shoot it.” Monk clasped her hand and brought the cone up to his own mouth. He took a big bite, chewed, then swallowed the lump of creamy goo.

  Kodama winced. “
You’re the only person I know who never gets those headaches from cold stuff. Why the heck is that?”

  They got closer to the Midnight Special bookstore.

  “Fumes from old carburetors have given me certain powers.”

  They looked at various books displayed on a long shelf in the plateglass window. One row contained copies of a book Monk had a particular interest in, City of Promise: How Los Angeles Destroyed Public Housing. “Now in trade paper,” he said admiringly. The book was authored by Fletcher Wilkinson.

  Kodama peered closer, holding her cone close to the glass. “Have you talked to Fletcher recently?”

  “No, I should give him a buzz, though.” Wilkinson had been in the city’s housing department decades ago. He’d been run out for his left-wing ideas like integration and providing decent housing to low income and working families. He’d also been instrumental in Monk solving the murder that led to the shoot-out in the Rancho Tajuata Housing Projects.

  “Shall we browse, my love?”

  “Just let me finish this,” Kodama said.

  By the time Kodama was done with her cone a sax player and a violinist had set up in front of the bookstore. As was the custom along the Promenade, various street musicians and performers did their thing at all hours to earn a few dollars from passersby.

  The musical duo were doing a melodic version of “Stella by Starlight” as Monk and Kodama entered the store.

  Chapter 12

  An elliptical pane of leaded glass was set above center in the front door. The house the door was attached to was a modified ’30s-era Hansel and Gretel design set at the crest of a sloping, sparkling green lawn. Monk parked his Ford and got out, proud it had only taken him three false turns to find the place among the convoluted streets of Baldwin Hills.

  The homes of Baldwin Hills were strewn up and down land rising between Coliseum Street on the north, and Stocker to the south. La Brea Avenue, which ran north/south, was the main drag bifurcating the mostly black middle-class area. The Hills had been named for E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin, an Irish immigrant who’d come to LA. during the real estate boom in the 1880s. He had a yen to make money and his fame.