Only the Wicked Read online

  He’d noticed the band on her finger. “I live with my”—he worked his hands—“well, whatever the word is these days.”

  “Children?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then you better get on it, huh?”

  “How about yours?”

  “Thirteen and ten. And you don’t know what it’s all about until those teen years hit, baby.” She had some of her coleslaw, her eyes gleaming mischievously.

  “When was the last time you’d talked to Ava?”

  “About a week before she was killed.” She must have said those same words several times over the years, but there was still emotion behind the repetition.

  “You think Creel did it?”

  “Which case you trying to solve?” She pulled the straw out of her glass and gulped down her soda. She wiped at her mouth with a paper napkin.

  “Did I hesitate too long in my answer?” Monk smiled.

  “What else you want to know about Ava?”

  “She ever mention that Creel was knocking her around, being abusive?”

  “No,” Jones opened her purse, looked inside, then closed it decidedly. “She knew enough to know it wasn’t Donna Reed time, dig? But he cared for her, was respectful and talked about strategy with her. She wasn’t just his squeeze.”

  He halted his fork midway to his mouth. “Any mention of threesomes?”

  “Uh-uh, no way with Ava, see?”

  “You ever meet her folks?”

  “No. We’d talked about me going out with her to Scarsdale, but I had to go home that January, and see about my ailing mother.”

  “That was the last you two actually saw each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn’t have an old number for her folks? And remember their names?”

  Jones made a motion with her fork like a conductor. “Oh, God, that’s been so long. But I think they’re still there.” She frowned, “Or maybe at least the father; seems I heard somehow they’d had a divorce. I don’t recall his name, his first name, I mean. But I think the mother’s name was Allison or something like that.” She ate some more, then said, “Hey, what kind of detective can’t use the phone book?”

  “I’m lazy.”

  “Like hell.”

  He grinned again. “I did call some Greens in upstate New York. People who’ve been bothered over the years by reporters and such. But no parent of Ava, at least no one who would admit that over the phone.”

  They finished their lunch and Monk walked with the professor out to the parking lot. She fetched the cigarette she’d been coveting out of her purse and cupped her hands to light it. A restored maroon 1947 Ford F-l pickup with hot pink fenders drove past them toward the exit, a drag queen with a beehive hairdo at the wheel. “Do you think you’ll find something out nobody else has in all this time?” She sucked on the cigarette like it was manna.

  “Think I’m that arrogant?”

  She touched his biceps. “I didn’t mean to make it sound like that, you brat. You know what I mean.” She looked into his face, the cigarette bobbing from her lip, movie-tough fashion.

  “Yeah, well,” he said dismissively. “If you could make a few calls to some of your old college friends, see if you can find a current number for one or both of Ava’s parents, I’d appreciate it.” He gave her one of his cards. “I’ll get the message if you leave it with Delilah.”

  “Sure, Nash Bridges.” She put the card in her purse. “So, do you want to know whether I think Creel did it or not?”

  “Tell me when I get back.” They shook hands and parted.

  From his office phone, Monk talked with several other former members of the Damon Creel Defense Committee scattered throughout the Southland and the nation. It was past seven-thirty when he finally got over to his mother’s house on Stanley. She hobbled about due to her recent assault.

  “Shouldn’t I go with you to Clarksdale?” Nona Monk asked.

  “You could be his back-up, Nona.” Dexter Grant was rummaging through one of the soft-sided bags he’d recently brought inside. “A mother-son detective thing, now we might be able to sell that to Showtime or HBO and get some money out of the deal.” He put bug eyes on Monk.

  Monk had his legs stretched out before him on the couch, his arms spread along the back. Kodama sat next to him, thumbing through the TV Guide.

  “No, Mom.” He smoldered Grant with a death stare.

  “But I know them folks down there, Ivan. Country people got their own ways of going about things, their own pace. You come there with that hurry up and do attitude, you liable to make ’em nervous or they’ll clam up ‘cause you come off like a slicker trying to be smarter than them.”

  “Your son’s the people’s servant, Nona; he’s always humble to the will of the masses.” Kodama kept reading listings in the Guide.

  “Say, baby,” Monk teased, “shouldn’t you have your glasses on to make out the small print?”

  She hit his leg and he chuckled.

  “Y’all makin’ sport of this, and this is serious,” his mother said. “That New South them crackers flouting ain’t nothing but window dressin’, baby. Look at all that craziness that’s been going on, that Satan-worshipping teenager who shot up his campus in Arkansas, and all those supposed suicides of black men in the jails down there.”

  “I don’t believe those incidents are related, Mom.” Since this business started, her Southern accent, which had never been that pronounced, had been getting thicker. A defensive mechanism, he figured, a psychological comfort in this time of stress.

  “I’m just saying I know you’re an operator, but Clarksdale, Mound Bayou, Shelby, and what have you are not your stompin’ grounds.”

  “I got it, Mom,” he rasped.

  Grant extracted his ancient Police Special revolver from his bag, and carried it into the bedroom he’d be using.

  Nona Monk tracked the ex-cop with an even look as he did so. “You just remember when to ease up, Ivan. Your father let too much eat at him, son.” She put her arms around herself. “Sometimes, you must let what can’t be changed go.”

  Ivan said, “I know, Mom.”

  ***

  Later, Monk and Kodama were in each other’s arms in their bed. Cassandra Wilson was singing “My Funny Valentine” on the radio.

  “You set the alarm?” He rubbed the small of her back.

  “Hmm,” she purred. “How are you getting your gun through the check on?”

  “That’s a surprising question coming from you, being an officer of the court.”

  “Don’t try to misdirect.”

  “Dex is sending it via express.”

  “Don’t they check that?”

  “Says he’s got it covered.”

  “I’m glad you both use your powers for good, and not for evil.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  They held onto each other as they slept.

  Chapter 13

  Monk dozed on the smooth Southwest flight to Memphis International Airport. Upon landing, he made a call to Bernie Desconso’s office, and was informed by one of the assistants the interview with Creel had been arranged for tomorrow. He rented a five-speed Dodge Ram 2500 ST pickup complete with a highway emergency kit in the rear bed. Monk briefly considered hanging around town, taking in some blues clubs on Beale Street later that night.

  Well, he concluded, there’d be time for that later. He headed south on Highway 61. As he crossed the state line into Mississippi, the scenery appeared more full and verdant.

  Monk drove past vast fields of soybeans, cotton and wheat, walnut trees and groves of pecan trees, maples and sweeping oaks. The land of the Natchez and Chickasaw was first plundered by the Spaniard Hernando De Soto in 1541. The conquistador demanded slave labor from his generous Chickasaw hosts, who promptly attacked the Spanish garrison in retaliation for De Soto’s bad manners. But ’Sippi wasn’t known for that battle. Indeed, the Magnolia State’s profile had nothing to do with the fight of the red man agains
t European colonizers. No, its legacy of black and white animus was forever burned into the nation’s, and the world’s, consciousness.

  The first African slaves were brought to Mississippi in 1720, long before Eli Whitney introduced his cotton gin in 1793. The machine sped up the process of separating the seeds from the cotton bolls. The slaves could now produce much more than their upkeep—slavery finally started to turn a profit.

  And so began the torturous existence between the races in this small state that even now seemed to not have been fully reconciled. But why should Mississippi be any different from the rest of the country? Sure, in the bad old days the folks up north could point to Mississippi and look down their noses at the rednecks and their backward ways and their efforts to halt the inevitable dynamics of history—that somehow those forces believed that through will and chicanery they could forestall social progress forever.

  As late as 1964, less man eight percent of the black population had been allowed to register to vote. Conversely, Mississippi was now home to the highest number of elected black officials than any other state. Maybe change was possible—at least on the surface.

  Outside Robinsonville, Monk spotted a white farmer in a cowboy hat riding a tractor, tilling an iron-rich patch of earth. The man tipped his hat as Monk drove past and he returned the gesture by touching his forehead. He chuckled to himself in the air-conditioned comfort of his cab, and passed the welcoming sign into Tunica.

  The last memory he had of the town from years ago was a visit he’d taken with his mother and father. Then it was only miles of flat land and sugar ditches undisturbed by anything more than a two-story structure. Now Tunica was a happening place with several casinos dotting the landscape. The buildings ranged from red-bricked structures with cheap awnings tacked on the fronts, to large structures built in what seemed to be giant Lego pieces fitted together. These structures squatted close to the roadside like fat, indolent spiders waiting for their next feeding.

  Monk went on into Clarksdale and pulled into the gravel lot of a small motel called the A-Model Lodge. The place was a one-story series of rectangular rooms with fake hitching posts spaced evenly along a wooden walkway beneath an overhanging roof. Red curtains hung in the windows. He went to the manager’s office, which was situated in one corner of the motel.

  “How long will you be staying with us, sir?” The young woman standing behind the counter was East Indian. She was dressed in form-fitting bicycle pants and a long-sleeve shirt, tail out.

  “I’m not sure, but at least a week.” He handed her his credit card as he began to fill out the registration.

  “Come to gamble?” She passed his card through her machine.

  “A little maybe. More than anything, I want to enjoy the sights.”

  “You might try the Nova Express Casino, they have a floor show of local talent. Me and my girlfriends like it okay.”

  “This local flavor include the blues?” He nudged the registration card toward her.

  “Naturally, show girls, too.” She read his card and smiled at a joke to herself. She picked up the form and his credit card slip and put it somewhere below the counter. “We ain’t got what you call room service ‘round here, but there’s some good eatin’ spots, though.”

  “You bring on that southern accent on all the out-of-towners?” He picked up his bags.

  “Only when I want to.” She produced a key with a bronze-colored tab attached to it. A gold numeral 17 gleamed dully on the fob. “Here you are.”

  Monk exited and made his way along the wooden walkway, which creaked. A white woman in a tube top, JC Penney Arizona jeans, with curlers in her hair, came out of number 15. She had a purse tucked under one arm like a running back and dark splotches were beneath her bleary, but expertly mascara’d eyes.

  She gave Monk a weak smile and he nodded going past her. Her footsteps pounded on the walk as she went away and Monk unlocked the door to 17. He let air in on a clean room of beige walls. In its center was a queen-sized bed with an aqua-and-black quilt. A peeling walnut desk and chair were in the corner. A so-so painting of a catfish, suspended in a void of bright orange, hung on one wall. The TV was on a cart, the top of the set crisscrossed with light chains, the links wrapped around the cart wheels.

  He put his bags on the floor and opened a built-in closet next to the tiny bathroom. There was a recent Newsweek and a brochure from the Nova Express Casino lying on top of the desk. Out of habit he opened the drawers, frowning at dried rat droppings in the lower left one. Hearing no scurrying in the walls, Monk took off his shoes and lay on his back on the bed.

  He napped and awoke to footsteps creaking along the walkway. He’d left the curtains open and felt embarrassed for sleeping in the daytime like a nursing home resident. The footsteps stopped before they got to his window, and he heard a door open and shut forcefully.

  Monk phoned Malus Locke’s house, the farmer who rented out his mother’s land over in Mound Bayou. He was informed by a woman’s voice her father was out and Monk left a message. Then he walked south of the motel and passed the famous crossroads where Highways 61 and 49 met. Residing at the four corners were a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, a power tool rental, a chain-linked lot and a coin laundry. This was where blues great Robert Johnson, who learned his initial licks from Charlie Patton, was to have sold his soul to Legba, the devil, so as to play his starvation box like no other.

  Of course, his mother had told him several times, the actual crossing of the highways in the ’30s was in a different location. But Clarksdale, like Robinsonville up the road, had a blues museum, so it was understandable if the town officials saw the need to be creative in their geography. After all, there was only so many blues tourist dollars to go around.

  He finally wound up walking along Sunflower Avenue that paralleled the Sunflower River. At various intervals along this stretch were metal signs on dark green poles. The stenciled messages warned the traveler that sight-seeing in certain parts of Clarksdale should be done with the same amount of care one would do in any big city. You’ve come a long way, baby, Monk reflected.

  At 3rd, he stopped in at Stackhouse Records, an emporium that any true aficionado had to visit to purchase a blues map and independently produced cassettes of local Delta artists. He was considering which Frank Frost tape to buy when he noticed a wooden crate on a counter near him. Stamped into its soft wood on one end were the words TIGBEE MILLS, ROBINSONVILLE. The crate was old, and filled with LPs in worn record jackets. He touched the letters on the crate as if to absorb some knowledge of the entity to which they belonged.

  Monk bought his tapes and got a hot beef sandwich and mustard potato salad at the Burnside Café a few doors down from JJ’s Social Club, which fronted the train tracks. The day was waning when Monk left the café and walked across the tracks, taking in the sights. The long shadows of approaching evening engulfed the buildings as he finally walked slowly back to the motel.

  A little later, he was enjoying a bottled beer at a corner table in a roadhouse pushed back on bleached gravel from Highway 61. The establishment was called the Tornado Lounge and Game Parlor, and currently both its pool tables were occupied. There was an empty parquet dance riser trimmed in duct tape, and the CD juke was playing a Ray Bailey number, “Blowing Satan’s Horn.”

  Men and women sat at the bar and the tables, talking and sipping beer; one cosmopolitan woman was drinking wine. Just as the steady chatter of the place wrapped comfortably around Monk’s psyche, another anxiety attack overtook him. He fought against a strong urge to shove his chair back, hoping the legs wouldn’t stop until it rammed against the wall.

  He hunched over his beer, protecting the brew as if it were liquid silver. His stomach felt like there were hooks latched onto the lining, and an abusive sprite was tugging on them while straddling his spine. The beer was becoming bile inside him and he could no longer discern or care what was playing on the juke.

  The apprehension was like warm hands on his heart and Monk con
sidered rushing out the door. He restrained himself, clutching the bottle before him like it was a life preserver, and he sucked the brew down, his forehead wet with the terrors.

  “Can I get you anything, shuga?”

  Monk couldn’t look up.

  “Hey, you been nippin’ at somethin’ other than beer, Mr. Big-and-rough-lookin’?”

  Monk tried to teleport the waitress away. “I’m all right,” he croaked, staring at the Budweiser label. He didn’t hear her foot-steps leave over the wailing of Johnny Shines, but he was aware he could once again distinguish the music from the conversing and movement of bodies in the club. It was as if Shines’ moanful inflections were a call pulling him back into the world of familiarity and relative safety.

  Monk was finally able to sit back in his chair, and let go of the bottle, his mooring. A young woman with Afro puffs in a pleated mini-skirt and platform shoes gyrated on the dance floor with a man in overalls and a canvas cap with a CAT logo on it He watched the couple move about for awhile, then examined the others in the place. There was a middle-aged woman in a loose vest leaning over the pool table to make her shot, and two men laughing and slapping each other’s shoulders at the bar. A smallish man in an out-of-date suit, the coat buttoned, entered through the front door.

  The newcomer walked directly to the bar, leaned on it and signaled for the bartender. He was noticeable for his preserved attire, and because he was the only white customer in the Tornado Lounge. He didn’t appear uncomfortable, and none of the other patrons seemed to take any particular notice of the man. His beer arrived and he turned, to lean and sip and watch. He undid the button on his coat.

  Monk had lost interest in his beer and rose. The man in the suit tipped the stem of his bottle at him slightly before quaffing an amount. Monk walked out into the humid night, the wetness under his arms and chest chilling him even though he wore a jean jacket. He was cold all the way back to his room.