Only the Wicked Page 18

  Chapter 14

  Damon Creel had lost some of his hair since he was last seen in Embara’s documentary. His shoulders were squarish, and his midriff was thick, but solid. He wore a gray shirt, the flaps of which were buttoned over the twin breast pockets. His blue khakis were shapeless, the bottoms cresting worn work boots. He and Monk walked in the small peach orchard behind the Unicor wire-harness and aircraft-assembly building, as they talked.

  Unicor was the federal prison industries program for the Bureau of Prisons. The enterprise was mandated to make a profit, and it was doing quite well, never at a loss for idle hands. Inmate labor in public and private prisons earned more than two billion dollars a year, and Unicor was carving out a sizeable niche of those monies along with private firms such as Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America.

  In the age of punishment, the idea was that convicts could serve a useful and thrifty purpose by undercutting the wages a local worker might get on the outside in offering services such as airline reservations, manufacturing steel security doors and making mezzanine systems. In this advanced stage of capitalism, a sound work ethic was no doubt instilled in men doing long years for ounces of crack, interstate flight, or bank robbery.

  Creel was a shift foreman, and his lunch time had been moved around so he could have this meeting.

  “I guess it’d be fitting for the legend if I was mellow and philosophical about being shut down for more than twenty-seven years.” Creel stopped, leaning his back on a slim peach tree, his hands in his pockets. Since meeting him ten minutes ago, he’d only taken one of his hands out to shake Monk’s. He wore rimless glasses, his eyes alive with inquisitiveness, yet his voice was prison-guarded, betraying little in the way of emotion.

  “But that would make you a goddamn fool,” Monk finished.

  Creel nodded his head quickly. “You’re on your J. Everybody’s read my bio, a lot less bothered with my collection of essays.” He looked up into the tree’s boughs. “So you think I had your cousin snuffed from inside?” He reached up and plucked a peach free.

  “I don’t, not really. But aside from hating him, I was hoping there was something in both of your pasts I could use now.”

  Creel examined the peach and carefully placed it in the crook of the tree. He then put his hands back in his pockets. “I wasn’t sleeping with his wife, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Together, they moved off at a diagonal out of the orchard and toward an area where several guards congregated. There were ten redwood picnic benches on a cement pad, and a bunch of Millington’s prisoners sat and talked.

  Monk resumed, “Something’s been stirred up by Marshall Spears’ death.”

  “You mean the wrath of Malachi?” Creel asked.

  “That still going around?”

  “Naturally; we talking about Mississippi, man. Her public schools are still considered the worst in the country. And you been through Tunica, seen all those casinos? The school system there is seen as one of the worst in the state. In nineteen ninety-five, Tunica’s school district ranked one-fifty-two out of one hundred and fifty-three in a statewide literacy exam. Illiteracy’s very high among the black population of the city.” Creel shoved his hands deeper in his pockets, like he needed to keep them in check.

  “Hey man, you gonna tighten me up on mat legal brief thang, right?” Another man in gray and blue, his hair braided in cornrows, asked, moving past both men.

  “Most definitely,” Creel answered. He inclined his head back toward a building and Monk walked alongside him. “The casinos, along with catfish and cotton and soybeans, are the economic engines of the state. Management of the casinos hinted that the local black population was only prepared for low-level jobs in their industry, that positions such as dealer are not possible, given the lack of math and reading skills.

  “There’s been an ongoing fight by black parents to get the casinos to allocate reasonable portions of their revenues for the school system. There had been a suit to force the casinos to pony up more to the local economy. But that action ran up against the desires of the majority white county board of supervisors who wanted the casinos to invest in the infrastructure, and thereby be able to attract more businesses. And modern Mississippi was once again engaged in a fight of who got what resources, and when did they get them.”

  They stood in front of another unmarked brown brick building. “Another Unicor enterprise,” Creel said sardonically, jerking his head at the structure. “PC repair.”

  “Ain’t that something,” Monk commiserated.

  “What you want to know about Ava, man?” Creel leaned against the brick wall. “I know that’s what you really want to find out about.”

  “Among other things.”

  Creel laughed, scratching the back of his head on the brick. “The eternal seeker. What happens when all truths are told, Monk?”

  “Peace or chaos.”

  “You could write one of those self-help books for prisoners with thinking like that.”

  “You the one who brought Ava up,” Monk emphasized.

  “Indeed,” Creel said, looking off. “You wasn’t in the service, were you?”

  Monk told him about bombing out in college football, being a bounty hunter and then signing onto the merchant marines.

  Creel took a hand out of his pocket and undid one of the flaps on his shirt pocket. He didn’t take anything out of the pocket, and returned his hand to his pants pocket. “Yeah, everybody’s been through some kinda fire fight, I guess.”

  “That go for Ava, too?”

  “She wanted to burn down the walls, man. The walls I saw out there in white soldiers’ eyes while we were out on patrol. The walls that been holding black folks back here since before Reconstruction. She was real, man.”

  “And you came to save us?”

  “Naw, Monk, I don’t have some black messiah jones. I came to do my part like Ava did and hundreds of others, black and white.”

  “And Sharon?”

  “She was here ’cause of Ava, whose passion for justice was enough, at least for awhile, to carry her friend along too.”

  “Until …” Monk prompted.

  “Until Sharon saw the honkies down here wasn’t playin’. That they weren’t about to hand over local power, no matter how symbolic, to a bunch of burr heads.”

  Monk knew from Creel’s book his campaign office for mayor had been shot into more than once, and several of the volunteers were run off the road and beaten up. “So she wanted out?”

  “And others, too.” Creel straightened up. “But I didn’t do it, I couldn’t kill Ava, and damn sure wouldn’t have killed Sharon. You read my book?”

  “The live version is always so much better.”

  Creel was quiet so long Monk assumed the meeting was over.

  “I was driving to the Mason Lodge in Mound Bayou from Memphis. I had a ’sixty-three Falcon I’d bought in Long Beach when I’d been discharged. I was on my way to see the Delta Dukes, this blues an’ rock band, to line them up for a benefit concert for the campaign.

  “The Falcon had been running funny that day, but like who had time to fix it with all the other stuff that had to be dealt with? Anyway, somewhere out around Gator, the damn thing quits. Now you understand, Monk, this is in the day before call boxes, and cell phones, let alone some Dixie matron stopping to help a black man stuck out on the highway.”

  “The prosecutor claimed your unaccounted time was a convenient cover to commit the murders.”

  “And your cousin testified I’d given him the knife.”

  “A knife the state never produced.” Creel’s face was blank. “You and Ava had been at the Crystal Spur Motel that afternoon?”

  “No. We had on previous occasions, so it wasn’t no big secret. Everybody around the campaign knew we was getting it on. Which meant the Citizens League knew, too.”

  “And you finally saw the crack in your distributor cap?” Monk went on, rec
alling the passages from Creel’s book.

  “I didn’t have a flashlight, but I had taken off the air cleaner housing, and some of the sparkplug wires and whatnot. I was using the glove compartment light to examine the items and spotted the crack. I did have some electrical tape, so I taped it up so the rotor wouldn’t short out and I was off.”

  “How come your lawyer didn’t present the cap as evidence?”

  “The judge wouldn’t allow it.”

  Monk asked, “Who could have lured Ava and Sharon to that motel? Was Sharon seeing anyone?”

  The question caused Creel to narrow his eyes, taking his hands out of his pockets. “Like they came because they knew someone?”

  Monk said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the murders. In your book, you said the motel’s manager and co-owner, Charlie Crowther, testified he didn’t hear or see anything. Neither you nor anybody else.”

  “He was a boozer,” Creel added curtly, “he’d be passed out half the time you’d come to the front desk, have to pound on it to wake his sorry ass up. He died years ago from a spongy liver.”

  “He could have been lying,” Monk pointed out.

  “Me and Bernie discussed that, but what was the use? Crowther’s dead and his widow lives in a old folk’s home in Athens. And in them days, if you was white and wanted to keep your business going, you didn’t fuck with the Citizens League.”

  “But let’s say both things are true,” Monk went on, absorbed with his own theories. “Crowther’s sleeping the sleep only Jack Daniel’s can provide. I bet once or twice you or Ava grabbed a key out of a slot without waking him.” Creel nodded in ascent. “Charlie’s out, the murderer, who knows his habits, shows up and grabs a key. He then calls the girls from the room—there’s phones in them?”

  “Nowadays. Then it was a pay phone in the rear of the courtyard.”

  “Okay, he buzzes them, saying he has important information to relay to them about the Citizens League. Information he will only tell one of them, and the other brings her girlfriend for protection.”

  “And one man knifes both of them. That’s OJ action, Monk,” Creel commented sarcastically.

  “There’s an accomplice,” Monk surmised.

  “Then that could mean your cousin was in on this from the beginning,” the prisoner observed without rancor. He shrugged his shoulders with his hands in his pockets. “But so what? There are several scenarios we could create, but what good does it do me?”

  “Hiram Bodar was involved in a supposed accident. Has he talked to you?”

  “Not directly. One of his staffers called me and he asked me the questions you’re asking.”

  Neither man commented for several moments. Creel checked his watch. “Gotta be back in a few.”

  “Did you know Marshall Spears?” The picture from the safe-deposit box hovered in Monk’s mind.

  “Yeah,” he acknowledged warmly. “He was kind of a local hero, what with his baseball career. When he came down here, he worked as a distributor and spokesman for Red Devil Soda Water in the black sections in the tri-state area. That’s actually why he’d come south. The job had come about because the Red Devil owner had remembered Mr. Spears from the old days and wanted to boost his Negro sales.”

  Creel started walking back to his job. “Marshall helped organize, Monk. He could carry sensitive messages to local SCLC or NAACP chapters, words not meant for phones that may have been tapped, because he was naturally on the road for his job. Plus, when things heated up after Freedom Summer, he got bolder like a lot of folks, and helped put together meetings in local churches, American Legion Halls, jukes, whatever.”

  “Jukes?”

  “That’s where the colored folks be, man.”

  “He and Kennesaw get along?”

  Creel put a hand to his jaw, smiling ruefully. “You should know Mr. Spears had a long affair with Kennesaw’s wife.”

  Now it was Monk’s turn to blink. “Kennesaw know?”

  “He must have after awhile, you just kinda get hip, right? But dig, Monk, your cuz was no Ozzie Nelson. He ran his wife’s family insurance business, and worked the field, just to keep limber, right,” Creel winked, “making those policy calls on grieving young things or middle-aged sisters whose husbands just lost an arm in the saw mill, or holding hands and quoting the Psalms with left-alone housewives with long-hauling husbands.”

  They’d arrived back at the Unicor wire-harness building. Several men, black and white, filed inside.

  “Husband and wife each knew the other was foolin’ around—”

  “And it got to be convenient, I guess. My dad played a couple of years with the Towne Avenue All-Stars. When I got down here, it was Marshall Spears who showed me what’s what.” Creel looked over his shoulder. “I better get back in. I get a little slack ‘cause of my notoriety, but I don’t try to abuse it, dig?”

  “Of course.” Monk shook Creel’s hand. He wanted to tell him something might break, that some kind of justice might finally be delivered to this man who’d been waiting more than twenty-seven years for a re-trial on a suspect conviction. That the system didn’t always grind up the outspoken. But they both knew that’d be like wishing on a star in a heaven where the lights were going out, one by one.

  As Creel walked off, Monk asked again, “Did Sharon have any boyfriends down here?”

  He paused, hands in his pockets, turning in profile on his heel. “She was a Plain Jane, bro’, living wallpaper, dig? Really, she existed in Ava’s shadow. If she had one, I didn’t know about it.” He stopped again. “I suppose she would have come into her own though, had she lived.”

  “I’ll try to see you before I leave,” Monk promised.

  Creel waved back and returned to his shift working for the prison industrial corporation.

  Monk went south back into Memphis to pick up his gun at an express office. Grant had phoned him early in the morning, and given him the location. He missed the place twice as he drove by. The business was on Walker Avenue, a street of packed-in shops and bars not far from the Liberty Bowl Stadium. It was the address Grant had given him for Mercury Cartage. Over the door was their logo, a faded rendition of Flash from the the Golden Age of comic books. His lightning bolts jutted proudly from his doughboy-style helmet as he ran with a large package under his arm. The art was flaking off the transom above the entrance, but the Flash’s broad smile was still discernible.

  Unlike its global competitor, FedEx, Mercury Cartage did not go in for the slick image. The interior of the storefront had cheap wood paneling, a wooden counter painted industrial white, and a thrift-store coffee table for decor. There were no chairs for sitting.

  Monk came up to an older white woman in a photographer’s vest and flower print shirt standing behind the counter. She wore half glasses and was earnestly leafing through a copy of Playgirl.

  “I’m here to pick up a package sent by Dexter Grant.”

  The woman kept perusing the magazine. She paused on an upshot featuring the thighs of some young stud from a daytime soap.

  “Excuse me—” he began again.

  She held up a hand, absorbed in studying the lad’s form. “Hold your horses, trooper.” She put a subscription postcard on the page to mark her place, closed it gently, and left the counter. She went through a wooden door behind her that rattled on its hinges, its ancient glass doorknob nearly falling off. She returned momentarily with a squarish package wrapped in ordinary brown paper. She placed the box on the counter and returned to her lusting.

  “Want to see some ID?” he goaded her.

  “You want me to remember your face?” She managed to turn to the next page.

  Monk exited and drove around, debating whether to hang around Memphis and get lunch, or head on back into Mississippi. As of yet, he’d not been able to speak with Todd McClendon, the former editor of the Clarion-Ledger. The woman who answered the phone at his home had been evasive as to where and when McClendon might be around, but she had taken his number. He stopp
ed and called the man’s home in Jackson again, but got no answer, not even a machine.

  Getting gas at a BP station near the highway, he spotted a rib shack across the way. After parking on the eatery’s lot, Monk ordered fried turkey, barbeque sauce on the side, beans, corn on the cob, and a bottle of beer. He ate and reviewed his notes.

  There was information on everyone in this case, this bifurcated case, except Sharon Aikens. As Creel had said, she existed as an extension of Ava. She was always the one who got less ink in the news accounts of the murders. Why was that? he wondered, dipping a piece of turkey in his sauce. In the articles he’d found on-line, he remembered a profile of Ava Green from The Progressive, and there had been a mention of Alkens, but what had it said?

  He shook his head and had another beer. Then, feeling lazy and sleepy, he dialed Delilah from a pay phone using his calling card.

  “Hey, D.,” he said once they’d taken care of pleasantries, “at the donut shop I’ve got a file of stuff I found on-line about the Creel campaign and trial.”

  “Yeah,” she said expectantly.

  “Would you look up what’s there on Sharon Aikens? She was at Brandeis, too. I want you to give that stuff to Dex.”

  “Why not the whole file?” she suggested.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” A bus cruised by the rib joint. Painted on its side were the words Graceland Tours. In the windows, Monk could see some of the people admiring the gewgaws they’d bought at their sequined ashram. One child, about ten or so, held up an Elvis doll in a sequined outfit and shook it at Monk, smiling eerily. He couldn’t tell if it was meant as good or bad juju.

  They said their goodbyes and Monk dialed his mother’s house. He got her answering machine and left a message for Grant to see if he could track down any of Sharon Aikens’ family or friends. Next he called Dr. Jones and found her during office hours at UCLA.

  “Hercule, ’zup, cutie pie?”

  “You and Ava ever talk about Sharon Aikens’ love life?” He covered his ear as several semis roared past on the highway.

  “Funny you should bring that up, slick,” Helena Jones said, a seriousness working its way into her light tone. “I was thinking about that after we talked. Seems to me Ava and I were joking over the phone about a month before the murder and she said this cryptic comment concerning Sharon.”