Only the Wicked Page 8

  He got to Spears’ house on Stanford in less than half an hour, the Hollywood and Harbor freeways postcard-perfect in their light traffic. It was only early hours like this on a Saturday or Sunday where one could effortlessly navigate the massive moving infrastructure of cars and trucks on LA. freeways.

  The freeways were a conduit to the myriad neighborhoods jig-sawing the greater Los Angeles area. There were eighty-eight incorporated cities in the county, and hundreds more enclaves distinct from one another in character and karma. Silverlake, with its funky tchotchke shops and markets whose isles brimmed with fresh tabouli and feta cheese, seemed remote from South Central’s carnecerias selling carne asada. But such food items were symbolic of the cultural diversity, and separation, of the town.

  As he’d suspected, Spears’ duplex had been broken into. A rear window on the side of the house, next to the high shrub, had had its bars pried out of the wood. The window’s sash, apparendy unlocked, had been lifted and the killer had gained entry. The bars had been bent back into position, so as not to make it so obvious to a casual observer.

  Monk used his keys and entered. The rooms were in order: No drawers had been dumped and left upended, nor was there overturned chairs or ripped-up upholstery. But the place had been searched. The killer was an efficient, tidy bastard, he reflected.

  Fortunately, when he’d picked up Mr. Dellums last Sunday and dropped him off, he had stopped here and taken the Bekins box of photo albums and clippings—including Spears’ file on Damon Creel—from the closet. It was his way of keeping the items safe, seemingly the only thing of sentimental value in the duplex. Knowing he had to leave town to finish up a case—and Sikkuh said she would be going away, too—Monk had wanted to make sure he didn’t leave the stuff in the empty apartment.

  He let himself out and debated knocking on the door of the two-story house on the other side of the shrub. It wasn’t yet eight-thirty. No, he reasoned, he’d come back and complete that task later and then call Roberts. Driving back home, he wondered if Dellums had mentioned the box to Roberts. If so, he’d better say something. Not that Roberts could make much of a claim on the contents as material evidence. The cop might even rationalize the break-in as unconnected, but he doubted the burly detective would. He sure didn’t.

  Kodama made a breakfast of scrambled eggs, salsa, cinnamon-raisin English muffins and marguez sausages. Monk topped it off with coffee and two large glasses of orange juice, his appetite increasing as the case took on added dimensions for him.

  Afterward, they lounged around the house, reading and skimming various articles in the LA. Weekly, the Sentinel, and the LA. and New York Times. A little after eleven, they took a shower together. They made love on the unmade bed, their slick bodies dampening the peach-colored sheets.

  Still later, Monk went back to Stanford to talk with whoever he could find at the house next door to Spears’ place.

  “No, no,” the middle-aged Latina said, standing on the porch. Monk had interrupted her sweeping the steps. “I only saw you come by last Sunday and use the keys you had, Mr. Monk. Sundays is when I sit in the front room and have my tea.”

  “Nothing else, huh, Mrs. Robalos?” He stood on the walk-way, the sun shining through the big maple on Spears’ yard promised another sweaty day.

  “No, I’m sorry.” She made an expert twist with her wrist and deftly piled her grit on the top step right at its edge. “See, I cook and clean in a couple of houses up in Brentwood. Sometimes I don’t get home until eight at night.”

  Monk got the dust pan and placed it in position for her. “Thanks.” She swept her dirt into the pan. “Now maybe my son or daughter heard something, but neither one of them is here now. They’re teenagers, you know.” The statement covered a plethora of unfathomable behaviors.

  “If you could ask them, I’d appreciate it, Mrs. Robalos.” He thought it best he not insist he do the questioning. She was a woman of responsibility, and would interpret such a move by him as crowding her territory. The house was her sanctuary against the petty caprice he imagined she regularly put up with dealing with westside folks’ demands.

  “Sure,” she smiled. She put his card in the pocket of her housedress. He left as she used the hose to water down the just-swept porch.

  Not finding Dellums at home, he swung by Lordain’s Hardware. There he found the old gent engaged in a discussion of Kennesaw Riles’ recent departure from this oh-so-imperfect world.

  “This here is his cousin,” Dellums introduced him to the man he’d been talking to. “He’s a sure nuff private eye just like on TV.”

  The man he’d addressed, a lanky sort with an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, looked at Monk dubiously.

  “Got a minute, Mr. Dellums?” Monk touched the retired refrigeration mechanic on the elbow.

  “Sure. Did that cop come by to see you?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Yeah, that Roberts said he knew you.” Dellums wandered over to a spot by some buckets of plaster set against a wall. “So you looking into who killed your cousin?”

  “Exactly. Did you see him at all this past week? Before you found him, I mean.”

  “I talked to him real quick-like on Wednesday over the phone, just like I told your friend Detective Roberts.”

  “How was he then? Was he still going on about something bein’ after him and whatnot?”

  Dellums rubbed a callused hand across his deeply lined brow. He tilted his head in close to Monk’s. “I know it sounds like a bunch of spirit-talk my granny used to spout, but there’s something to it, I tell you for sure, Ivan. My granny used to see the ghost of the slave-owner who owned her folks come around the house on holidays. She got me to spread blood and urine on them steps now and then to ward off the evil voodoo.”

  Dellums stared at Monk expectantly.

  “You ain’t saying that’s what got Kennesaw, are you, Mr. Dellums? He was purposely given more than his normal dose of his heart medicine. And you’re the one who pointed out his fire box was missing.”

  “Uh-huh, I’m aware of that. I’m just saying there are more things to what he was going on about than sometimes we can make out on this earth.”

  “I can’t hunt ghosts, Mr. Dellums. It’s the wrong we do to each other keeps my hands full.”

  “Only the wicked, huh?”

  Monk liked the old man and clasped him on the shoulder, smiling.

  “He sounded like he wanted to get tilings settled, you know?” Dellums hooked his thumbs beneath his suspenders. “He said he was waiting for you to get back into town so he could talk with you.”

  A stab of disappointment went through Monk.

  “That Saturday when you dropped us off, he was talking about his testifying in that trial down south. About why he’d done it not for himself but for the good of the Negro community. It wasn’t the liquor talking. I feel it was what was in his soul. What he was hearing was Charlie Patton’s wail haunting him.” Dellums paused, assessing his own words. “I ain’t saying what he did, or at least what they say he did, was right. But in the short time I knew him, I can say he wasn’t without some hurts of his own.”

  “Maybe they were of his own making,” Monk ventured.

  Dellums slid his thumbs up and down behind the suspenders, his eyes focused far away.

  “When you went over there on Thursday, was that for a specific reason?”

  Dellums refocused. “Nothing, really. We were gonna watch the Angels on TV together.” The thumbs worked the leather straps of his suspenders again. “He did say he’d been talking things out.” Dellums sucked in a cheek. “I’m not always on top of stuff like this, but it seemed to me he was a lonely man, Ivan. I know he wanted to patch things up with your mother.”

  “When he said talking things out, did he mean with you?”

  Dellums stuck his hands in his pockets. “No, not me. He kinda laughed when he said it though, like it was a joke only to himself. I figured if he wanted to talk we’d do it over a couple of Budweisers
and the baseball game.” Dellums grinned, showing whitened dentures. “Maybe he meant he’d been conversin’ with Patton’s spook.”

  “Could be,” Monk said. “You see anything that morning you found him? Something that you may not have thought about before, but now with what you know strikes you as odd?”

  Dellums jingled change in his pants. “Like I told Roberts, I got there, and the screen door was shut, but not locked. The front door was shut, but I got the man who lives in the apartment next to Kennesaw to help me jimmy the door open with a screwdriver. We went inside and found him there in the bathroom. I remember thinking it was funny to me that all the plates and glasses were clean in the kitchen.”

  “Like he hadn’t done them,” Monk remarked. The Saturday before, he’d noticed a pile of unwashed plates in the sink.

  “The place looked neater, too,” Dellums offered. “But we got busy with calling the paramedics. It’s just now as you ask me that I recollect back on it.”

  “Like somebody had cleaned up for him?” Monk wondered. “Could be he had somebody come in now and then. Or he cleaned up once a month.”

  Dellums nodded his head up and down.

  “But you immediately looked under the bed.”

  “Something about how he was …” Dellums made a futile gesture, unable or unwilling to articulate the rest. He pulled in his bottom lip, biting it gently with his upper teeth. He pointed a finger at Monk and was about to speak when the man he’d been talking with came over.

  “You gonna jaw all day with Magnum there, or we gonna play us some dominoes?” He scratched at his tumbleweed of a beard, shifting from foot to foot.

  “Okay, okay.” Dellums started to move off. “I’ll talk to you later, Ivan.”

  “Sure, thanks, Mr. Dellums.”

  Monk left and called the photo agency from his donut shop. It was the only number he had to try to reach Sikkuh, Spears’ great-niece. He got a machine. He wanted to tell her about the murder and break-in, and discuss what to do with her Uncle Marsh’s artifacts. He called Abe Carson, but he was out, too. He took the file out of the box, and this time, carefully read the clippings Spears had gathered about the Creel case, in particular, the portions that talked about how Kennesaw Riles testified that Damon Creel had come to him, giving him the knife he’d killed Ava Green and Sharon Aikens with in a motel room in Memphis. A knife that he claimed he’d thrown off the docks into the Mississippi River outside Dixonville, Mississippi. Creel, it was pointed out, had been having an affair with Ava Green.

  The testimony and miscegenation was enough for an all-white jury to assure conviction. Creel was convicted of second-degree murder of the two girls from Brandeis. The two young women had come down south to help in Creel’s campaign for mayor. Their summer of justice became their season of death. The piece went on to mention that though it was never proven, the talk was that Riles had been pressured, some said, by the Southern Citizens League to testify. None of the clippings contained any direct quotes from his cousin.

  There was also an interview with Bernie Descanso, a criminal defense attorney known for taking cases challenging law enforcement misconduct. He was in L.A, and for the last ten years had been heading the attempts to get Creel a new trial. Monk knew the man slightly.

  Another article mentioned Malachi, but not the book of the Bible. It seemed to be a legend in the Delta, dating back several decades. Malachi was the swift and unseen hand of white justice that would come out of nowhere to smite down the colored boy who was uppity or would dare lay his hands on white womanhood.

  Monk finished reading through the file and closed up. He drove home, thinking about the past and how his cousin’s had finally caught up to him. And how his ballplayer’s legs must have been too far gone for him to cut and run, dodging responsibility as he’d done for the years since he’d testified.

  Chapter 7

  “Mr. Dellums, I’m surprised to see you here,” Monk said to him as he sat in the rotunda after entering the area via the stairwell. The older man sat on a lone tube chair, drop cloths and plastic tarps at his feet. The rotunda was part of a suite of offices Monk shared with an architectural and rehab firm called Ross and Hendricks, two women partners.

  The duo had convinced him to go for a re-designing of the place, and there were now sections of wall and the stacked about. Delilah Carnes, the admin assistant he also shared with the two, had her work space moved into what had been the copier and storeroom down the hall. At the moment, she was standing in the doorway to the room, leaning against the jamb.

  These days Delilah favored head scarves and retro bell bottoms. The new look was due to her taking twenty pounds off her formerly large, but well-defined frame. She had a swatch book in her hands.

  “I think I like the burnt bronze for trim.” She waved the rectangle of color at Monk.

  “Whatever you like. Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Dellums?”

  “No thanks. I stopped drinking the stuff before I retired.”

  “Come on in and take a load off.” Monk poured himself some coffee. The carafe and coffee-maker rested temporarily on a pallet of glass bricks.

  The older man got up and followed Monk into his inner office. Dellums walked around, assessing the various photographs Monk had along the walls. “You were in the merchants, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Monk hung up his sport coat on his artifact of a coat rack.

  “Where was this taken?” Dellums pointed at a black-and-white on the wall of some dark men sitting and laughing in an open-air café made of corrugated metal. They drank from small, yellow ceramic cups.

  “Blufields in Nicaragua.”

  “These cats look like blacks or half-breeds.”

  “They are mixed. Blufields, like a lot of places in Latin America, has a history of African settlement.”

  The older man kept looking at the picture. “I sure wish I’d done more traveling. That’s the problem with our people. We don’t know how strong our line is. Wine heads on the corner just think their genes only go back to when their people came up from Georgia.”

  Monk sat behind his desk, stirring his coffee. “I was a ship’s engineer.”

  “No joke,” Dellums said, finally turning from the photo. He touched some carved letters in Tagalog that meant “Luck is Found” mounted over the filing cabinet in one corner. Monk kept the thing empty save for back issues of Popular Science and the Atlantic Monthly.

  “Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Dellums?”

  The old man eased onto one of Monk’s Eastlake chairs. He glanced at the Javanese-batik-covered couch set perpendicular to his Colonial desk. “You got some interesting ideas on decorating.”

  Monk scratched an index finger on the side of his goatee. “The old lady helps me out.”

  Monk knew Dellums was tempted to ask if she were black, but he probably reached his own conclusion.

  “I came over this morning ’cause I didn’t want to try and tell you this the next time you dropped by to see me at Lordain’s.” He scooted the Eastlake closer as he talked. Then he got out his wallet and removed from the cracked billfold a cut-out newspaper article. “When I looked under the bed and saw the fire box gone, this was sticking up in the slats of Kennesaw’s bed. See, I’d gotten flat and just happened to look up and spot it.”

  Monk unfolded and read the section. The piece was bylined AP, and related the near-fatal auto accident of Hiram Bodar, a state senator from Mississippi. “The paper’s not brittle, so this is a recent clipping,” Monk mused aloud.

  “I thought it best not to go blabbing in front of them fellas down there. Some of them got loose gums worse than church women.”

  “You don’t believe any of them had anything to do with my cousin’s death?” The idea of a plumber being the killer almost made him chuckle. Except who better to do the deed man someone used to working mediodically? He had more coffee to calm down.

  “Not really, but why not be careful?”

  “True, true,” Monk responded
absently, reading more of the article. Apparently the alcohol level in Bodar’s blood qualified as being over the legal limit. “And”—he read silently—“they say here he was alleged to have been returning from a lunch with a woman in Memphis who was not his wife. An assignation is alleged.”

  “I read that three times. Are they saying he was screwing around?” Dellums asked, running his tongue over his front teeth.

  “Oh certainly.” Monk flipped the article over and read part of a story about a sniper killing in Belfast. “Can I hold onto this?” He waved the piece.

  “That’s why I brought it, brother. I ain’t looking at this advanced stage to be playing Nick Carter.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re in no danger.”

  “Fine.” He got up and so did Monk. “Oh, your friend called me yesterday.”

  “Roberts, on Sunday?” Monk asked.

  “He wanted to know if I’d seen a tan-and-yellow Grand Am near Kennesaw’s house. I told him no, but he wouldn’t tell me why.”

  Monk’s mother drove such a car. The sleepy-eyed sonofabitch was still working his theory about her. “Cops are always asking something. I’m glad you got this to me. Did you mention the clipping to Roberts?”

  The old man batted the air with the back of his hand. “Naw. See, I stuck the thing in my pocket, and forgot it was there. Guess I was more shook than I knew. Then when I realized later I had it, I was scared that cop might think I was holding out. You seemed to be the best one to tell.”

  “We’ll keep it between us for now.” Monk walked him to the door, then headed over to Eso Won bookstore on La Brea near Coliseum.

  Inside, the store’s co-owner, James Fugate, was delightfully telling someone on the phone that a recently lauded book was absolute dribble. Monk bought a copy of Creel’s collection of essays, Slipping into the Abyss, and a biography tided Damon Creel, Last Round for Justice.