Only the Wicked Page 19

  “And that would be?”

  “Ava and I were, ah, well you understand this was the era in which women felt liberated, indeed compelled, to discuss sexual matters.”

  “Don’t be shy now, doc, we got wires between us.” And your kids and husband and my old lady who can bust a cap in my ass, he didn’t add.

  “I’m not being coy, I just don’t want you to picture me as one of your skank chippies.”

  “Can we quit digressing?”

  “I make you stutter?”

  “The conversation.” He didn’t sound as professional as he wanted, or needed to be. What? Did he have a sign tattooed on his forehead, Committed Man, Let’s Mess With Him? Or maybe he was leaking psychic come-ons.

  “Hey, you fall in a vat of chitlins?” Jones kidded. “You there?”

  “Jet lag.”

  “So you say. So yes, Ava and I were comparing the sexual athleticism of our respective lovers at the time, Damon for her and a rather spry fellow for me, when Sharon came up.”

  “Her being the retiring sort.” He wondered who was the spry chap, but refrained from pursuing that particular inquiry.

  “That’s right, since it was known the permissiveness index seldom had her included in that curve.”

  “But this time was different?” Monk asked.

  “I want to say this right,” Jones let out an amount of air. “But I’ve been trying to reconstruct Ava’s words since it came back into my head. Unfortunately, I was drinking wine and toking on some weed when I was on the phone with her.”

  Impatience gnawed at him. “The gist, Helena, was Sharon seeing some good ol’ boy? Or one of the campaign workers?”

  “What I remember,” she responded, her classroom demeanor apparent, “was Ava and me cackling about why men didn’t go down unless you berated them. I mean if you told a guy you were going to give him a blow job at two-oh-five on the dot, then he’d race five miles driving backward the wrong way down a one-way street to get mere on time.”

  “Okay,” he drew out.

  The smile was in her voice as she spoke. “And Ava saying that Sharon was content to have this dude slip a hand up her dress and rub her thigh.”

  “Who?” Monk shouted as another tour bus belched past him.

  “I’m sorry, Ivan, I really don’t recall exactly. I have the impression it was a Southerner though; that was an aspect both of them found interesting.”

  “College boy?”

  “Could be, but that’s reaching for tadpoles in a muddy lake. Isn’t there anyone left around there who could answer that?”

  From the way Creel had talked, it didn’t seem he knew about Sharon’s beau. “Maybe Ava was high and she was only referring to an incident in a bar and not some steady guy.”

  “Maybe,” Jones allowed.

  “Anybody you can think of from the old college days might have been buddies with her besides Ava?”

  Quiet, then Jones said, “I wish I could tell you, but she was one of those who was always around, but not making much of an impression, like an extra on a TV show.”

  “That’s rough, doc,” he responded. “Did Ava take a liking to her, or did Sharon just attach herself?”

  “No, no it was genuine. Ava didn’t have any siblings and sorta saw Sharon as the younger sister, show her the world thing.”

  “Sharon was younger?” A kid walked by him bouncing a basketball and rhyming a rap song.

  “Yeah, she’d graduated high school at sixteen, which only added to her feeling awkward.” Another drag of silence ensued where no words were spoken. “Does any of this help?”

  “Damned if I know, Helena. Thanks for your time.”

  “Bring me back some crayfish.”

  “On it.” Monk stood at the pay phone for a few moments after he hung the handset up. He wanted to talk to Hiram Bodar, the state senator who apparently, according to the voice of the honey-dripping woman in the state capitol who answered his call in Bodar’s office, was still away recuperating. Healing from his car accident or hiding out? He got back in his car and was going to head back into Mississippi, then decided to turn around and catch some blues on Beale Street.

  Around two the next morning, he was on Highway 61 driving back into the Delta. He’d called Kodama from a place called the Alphonse Club earlier, and told her how much he was already missing her. Monk had a couple of beers and listened to a band whose idea of blues was loud licks and a screeching harmonica.

  Leaving the mainstream section of Beale Street, he’d wandered into a hole-in-the-wall joint where the windows were grimy and the chairs were lopsided. This band, however, played some down-home gut-bucket blues. The woman singer, thin as a clump of reeds, had mastered renditions that tickled the tailbone and blew smoke across your soul.

  He knew he shouldn’t have had those Wild Turkeys on ice, but what was the blues without whiskey, he’d reasoned stupidly, the cold wind numbing his face. Not having a supply of Vitamin B with him to cut the hangover he knew he was going to have, he’d powered down the window so as not to get too warm or comfortable, and therefore drowsy, on the way back to his room. A headache was already festering somewhere behind his left eye, but he managed to get back to the A-Model Lodge without running into a pole or wiping out a litter of raccoons. Monk got to his door and absently pulled off two messages that were taped to the panel. Inside, sitting on the bed, Monk was pleased to read that Todd McClendon had called him back and had left a number.

  The second message, again in the feminine script of the manager, simply read: Welcome to Mississippi Mr. Monk At first glance he assumed the message was from her, he fantasized a sweet, innocent flirtation. Then he looked at the note closer. She’d taken a message. The caller had said those words and left no name.

  He was tired and drunk and his come down from his drinking should have zonked him out. But the “welcome” message had set him on alert. He dozed, snapping awake off and on for hours, propped up in bed in his clothes and shoes. The package from Mercury Cartage was open, his father’s gun at the ready next to him on the bedspread. He was happy Grant had also sent a box of Hansen shells with the shipment.

  Chapter 15

  “Judge Jarius Malachi Forrest was hard but fair, at least to white defendants. Black men coming before him, that was a different story, yessir. The judge was the condemnor, the embodiment of the unforgiving hand of the state exacting every bit, and more, from the brawn and sweat of poor colored boys he’d put on the chain gang for years on end for such heinous misdeeds as being drunk in public or late on their sharecropper’s rental.”

  Todd McClendon was short and stout and solid. He had the body of a college wrestler. He had large hands, and deep-set eyes that held steady on you like a doctor observing suicidal patients. He was dressed in light-blue, pressed jeans, linen coat and overrun loafers. The lower part of his face was tinged with bluish shadow.

  Somebody whooped, and Monk clamped his teeth.

  “And God forbid it be a real crime like theft against a white merchant or the soiling of southern womanhood, well, white southern womanhood,” McClendon said dramatically, making his eyebrows go up and down.

  A gleaming white monster truck rolled over a black Falcon stationwagon, and the crowd yelled with great pleasure.

  “Or should Forrest hear of some miscarriage of justice in a fellow jurist’s court, then the judge would round up a few bailiffs, a shoemaker or two, and let righteousness be served at the end of a rope and tree limb.”

  Monk’s throbbing hangover, and the lack of continuous sleep, had made for a joyless, and long, afternoon drive to the meet with McClendon at Smith-Wills Stadium on Lakeview in Jackson, the largest city and capital of Mississippi. Numerous confederate battle flags were being waved around, and more than one set of blue eyes had fixed on Monk as he’d found McClendon at a prearranged spot They’d entered the Harkins Sisters Truck and Tractor Demolition Derby Spectacular as it ramped up full tilt.

  There was beer flowing and whooping and holler
ing as everybody’s favorite driver named Clint or Bobby Lee ground up passenger cars underneath their two-story tires. This was goddamn redneck heaven.

  “This Forrest related to the ex-Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest who militarized the Klan to use them to halt Reconstruction?” Monk was surprised that question had managed to form in his troubled brain.

  “Possibly, or at least the judge encouraged such thinking.” McClendon spooned up more of his red beans and rice. The concession stands offered the tasty fare in wide-mouthed Styrofoam cups, along with catfish and home fries, collards and red-eye gravy and ham, and hot dogs and hamburgers.

  Monk was earnestly working on some catfish doused in hot sauce. “Was this judge in the Klan, too?”

  “Yes, a Grand Wizard,” McClendon confirmed.

  A woman in a nylon windbreaker, her dirty blond hair piled high, went past them toward the aisle, bumping Monk’s knees. She didn’t say anything and Monk glared at her, chewing.

  “The myth goes that Forrest disappeared in the woods off the Natchez Trace, leading men and hounds chasing an escaped convict.”

  Monk ate and waited.

  McClendon delivered his punch line. “The real story is Jarius Forrest died in a sanitarium in Chattanooga blind and half mad from untreated syphilis in the fall of nineteen thirty-three. His idea of rehabilitation for young ladies picked up for solicitin’ or vagrancy also had to do with him gettin’ out from behind the bench. In this regard, and this only, he did not discriminate between black nor white.” McClendon finished his snack.

  “An activist jurist,” Monk saluted the memory of Jarius Malachi Forrest with a tip of his cup of water. “So Forrest’s exploits are glorified, and Malachi becomes a ghost—no, make that a spook story—to keep the superstitious darkies in line.”

  Out on the dirt floor of the stadium, a souped-up tractor, its silver mufflers looking as if designed by the late great comic book artist Jack Kirby, spewed nitro flame into the air. The thing reared up on its hind wheels, and the driver waved his Stetson over his head as his mechanical steed did wheelies. The crowd went nuts.

  “Exactly,” McClendon concurred. “If a black man were to get off, even if the evidence was overwhelmingly in his favor, well sir, maybe the Hand of Malachi had to come down and maybe that poor soul would find himself disemboweled, his bloated corpse floating down the Yazoo. Better yet, the supposed male-factor might disappear altogether, the more to heighten the reputation of the cornpone avenger of white rights.” McClendon dabbed at gravy on his chin. “As it says in Malachi, Chapter Three in the Bible, ‘And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be the swift witness.’”

  The nitro-burning tractor took off from a ramp, and landed on a row of Japanese cars. Again, there was the vigorous waving of confederate flags and a general cacophony of giddiness.

  “And Manse Tigbee and his Southern Citizens League kept this legend alive?”

  “And thus we come to Hiram Bodar, the new breed of deep-fried Republican, fiscal conservative, racial healer.”

  The woman in the windbreaker returned, holding a large cup of beer. She went past the two, spilling some on Monk’s leg. She went on.

  McClendon noticed, holding the rim of his cup to his mouth. As Monk smoldered, he proceeded. “At first it was just a story about Bodar’s crack-up on the highway. I assigned a reporter who regularly covers political stuff here in Jackson. But this woman, Selma Portofino, has got the nose, you see? She’d no sooner filed her first report, when she got word that Bodar had been seen doing the ogle eyes in a Memphis restaurant in the company of a redhead—his wife is brunette.”

  “In her follow-up piece,” Monk began, using his paper napkin to wipe the sweat, produced by the hot sauce and remnants of alcohol, from his forehead. “She hinted maybe the heretofore straight-arrow senator was waxing his shaft in another quill.”

  “We like a salacious story as much as the next province, Mr. Monk. Really, we went with that slant on the story because it was a way to keep it alive, and not incidentally build circulation, I’m not too proud to admit. But more than that, it was the extra information Selma had.”

  Monk nodded in ascent. “The identity of the woman.”

  Two Peterbilt cabs were growling, churning up waves of earth while the vehicles played chicken with one another down on the track.

  “The big payoff being the woman was the daughter of Wallace Burchett, a hardcore member of the Citizens League.”

  Monk told him about seeing the odd interview with him in Embara’s film.

  McClendon took a breath. “Did you know he was rumored to have done killings on orders of the League’s inner council? That in effect he was one of the ones chosen to be Malachi?”

  Monk’s jaw dropped partially open.

  McClendon threw his empty containers down on the concrete riser, and laced his fingers before him. The stadium lights sprang on as evening overtook the festivities.

  “Several years ago, the files of the supposedly defunct and various Citizens Leagues were released from Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. It made national news.”

  “Oh, I know,” Monk agreed.

  “Well, you probably know the one here in the Magnolia State was the originator, and the headquarters for the various branches. Like”—McClendon used his hands, one as if it were holding a globe, the other circling over the imaginary sphere—like here was the boss of bosses, and the others were the lieutenants.”

  “The underbosses,” Monk amended, to better fit the analogy.

  “Absolutely,” McClendon said, pointing at him emphatically. “The Citizens Leagues have been compared to buttoned-down Klansmen, and there’s some truth to that. But the Leagues, that is to say the inner council, the leadership, was always about the future, not about bringing back some lost white paradise that didn’t exist anyway.”

  Monk was feeling better and feeling scared. “This is what Bodar was trying to get at?”

  “In a way,” McClendon yawned. “Excuse me, I’ve been doing some copyediting and clean-up work for a corporate website designer over in Canton. After all, I gotta keep up my end of the mortgage.”

  “No need to apologize for that.”

  “You’re all right, Monk. Anyway, like any clandestine organization, like any outfit that had burrowed deep in the political and social structure, the Citizens League had strategized plans for the long term.”

  Monk saw where McClendon was heading. “The files were released, after much wrangling. And more than thirty years after the little girls were bombed in the Birmingham church, and Schwerner, Goodmen and Chaney were murdered leaving the Philadelphia jail. Those files were made public.”

  “Conveniently found under the floorboards of a rickety smokehouse over in Wiggins, and then some more contributed by retired businessmen. These papers detailed illegal electronic surveillance, beatings, character assassination campaigns, even named some sell-out Uncle Toms, who for money, did their bidding. Our own version of the East German Stasi.”

  Nausea made saliva gather in Monk’s mouth as he thought about his cousin. “But there must be other files that reveal who carried out the sanctioned hits ordered by the inner council.”

  A Mack cab with three engines mounted over the rear wheels was dragging a large cage on wheels. Inside the cage, buxom, bikini-clad young women gyrated. Some waved U.S. flags, and others the stars and bars.

  “These files named who in local and state, and sometimes even federal authority, looked the other way, or obfuscated the investigation. Don’t forget that old queen Hoover had a pathological hatred for King and anything smacking of black self-determination. The FBI down here wasn’t nothin’ but some regular fellers from ’round here who knew how to knot their ties properly.”

  “This what you were getting close to before the publisher canned you? That you were on to actually producing these secret files?”

  McClendon squinted into the artificial lights. “We looked for Burchett’s daughter, Nanc
y, once we got onto her. She used to have a typing service she ran over in Brownsville for something like ten years. A week after the accident, she was nowhere to be found.”

  “Killed?”

  “Or running scared, what happened to Bodar a warning to git and stay git, man.”

  The truck and its cargo of busty bevies had made its last circuit, and now another customized tractor spewed chunks of stadium floor and bleated thunderously as it roared into view. A glass-walled tank of sharks had been brought in and twin thin metal planks were now being placed parallel across the tank. A ramp was pulled into position to allow the tractor to get up to the planks.

  “That’s the hombre I gotta interview.” McClendon pointed at the souped-up tractor, then removed his press pass from a rear pocket and put the laminated card on its chain around his sweaty neck. “Pickin’ up some extra scratch from Babes & Rigs magazine.” He assessed the look on Monk’s face. “You’d be surprised at the size of their readership.”

  “You got any pull with Bodar or his wife?”

  “‘Fraid not. We tried for weeks to get him to talk, but no go. The missus, Cassie Bodar nee Ibers, and me went to the same high school, but that didn’t get me anywhere either.” McClendon stood up. “You goin’ out there?”

  “I’ll take a run at ’em. Can you give me the address?”

  McClendon did and Monk walked with him out of the bleachers and down toward the rear of the stadium. The driver was adeptly maneuvering his tractor over the sharks, screeching and belching smoke and fire. People were yelling and the stomping of their boot heels all over the place was like listening to a stampede of bison.

  “Well, I wish you luck, and hope you can shake something loose. If you do, remember me for the book rights when you walk out arm-in-arm with Creel.”

  “You got it, Todd.” He shook the man’s hand and made his way to the exit. Three good-sized men in Ts and open shirts were talking near a display of various tractor- and truck-pulling paraphernalia. The three bunched together as he got nearer, and Monk flexed his shoulders, refusing to slow his gait in the least.