Dark End of the Street - v4 (37 page)

“Fuck you,” he said, moving on to a bicep machine for preacher curls. He bent over the bench, almost in a prayerlike pose, and muscled up a bar attached to a pulley system.

“What did Eddie Porter do? Find out about your deal with Ransom?”

He ignored me. I looked around the mirrored room.

U had wandered off. He was talking to the two meatheads. I thought I overheard him giving tips on how to bench more. One of the boys was smiling.

Cook took another sip of water.

“If you’d been straight with me, Loretta wouldn’t have been shot.”

The intensity in his face broke away. His jaw fell slack.

“No one told you?” I asked. “Didn’t figure you to be a true friend of hers anyway.”

Then the son of a bitch really snapped.

I could tell he’d been trying to keep it in. Red-faced and breathing deep lungfuls of air. But after I said “true friend,” his arms darted out and yanked me into a headlock and began pounding me in the face. He only got off two quick jabs to my cheek and forehead before I pulled my head out and twisted his arm behind his back.

He fell to his knees with a high-pitched scream.

The meatheads ran to him.

But U had drawn a gun and yelled for them to stay. It was the type of command you’d give a dog.

They stayed. Cook buckled with intense pain. I wanted to hold him there forever.

“COOL IT,” I said. I spoke as pleasantly as I could to a man I’d brought to his knees with pain. I twisted his arm an inch higher behind his back.

“You motherfucker,” Cook screamed. “Don’t you ever say that, you goddamned cocksucker. Come into my house? I’ll kill your ass.”

I pulled his arm even higher, heard a slight crack, and then let his arm relax about two inches. He grunted; I let him go. He almost fell on his face, but caught himself with the other arm and used the preacher machine to stand.

“They shot her in the chest and left her bleeding on the floor of JoJo’s bar. Nice people. Even set fire to the business that JoJo had run for thirty-five years, man. You know what that means? You know what kind of sweat and patience and hard work that takes? She had to lie on the ground of the bar and watch their whole life burn around her while she waited to either bleed to death or catch on fire. Yeah, Cook, you’re a great friend to her.”

He closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, catching his breath and rotating his arm in its socket.

U walked over and turned off the boombox. He told the men to sit down but one still tried to get to Cook.

“Sit down!” Cook yelled.

We were all quiet for several moments. I think Cook wanted to cry, if he’d had any soul or conscience left. But the only emotion he seemed to possess in grief was shutting his damned mouth.

The wind battered the wall of glass and the sky became dark for a few moments. Then the room became light again, bright yellow beams streaking across the tops of trees lining the Bluffs.

“You come with me,” Cook said, pointing outside. “They stay.”

I followed him to the deck, hanging stilt-legged off the side of the house. The view made my stomach jump a little as the wind loosely blew the tops of the trees and my hair. I put my hands in my pockets and stayed silent. Most of the time when you wanted information, it was best to shut up.

Out in the natural light, Cook looked much older than I thought. Small lines had formed above his upper lip and loose folds of skin fell over his eyelids.

“Eddie Porter was a great friend,” he said, his hands on the railing as he looked down at the river passing in muddy, swirling circles. “I tried to help him even after I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Eddie Porter stole two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from Bluff City.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, his voice more twangy than usual. Less controlled. “It wasn’t my money, it was Ransom’s. He floated me for the studio and for an Ampex recorder when I got started. He sometimes used us to run through some cash. He never took anything we made, only got back what he’d given. . . . Porter took it all.”

“So why did he kill Clyde’s wife?”

“Eddie was in love with Mary. Ransom knew it.” Cook wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Killing him would be too easy. He wanted Eddie to watch Mary hurt for a while.”

“Jesus,” I said. “So, if Clyde was there, why didn’t they kill him, too?”

“Ransom didn’t know he was there. Clyde was hiding in some old car outside. Clyde told me about seeing it. I told him to keep quiet, but he’d repeat the story to anyone who’d listen. When Ransom heard about it, he said he was going to go put a bullet in Clyde that night. But I begged him. I begged that hick bastard to leave my friend alone. I told him about Clyde’s mind problems and how he was living on the street now. I said he’d be dead in a couple weeks, and I really believed it. I don’t think Ransom showed him mercy, I just think he couldn’t find him. When Clyde reappeared five years later, everything was buried.”

“And Clyde was lost.”

“At first, he lived on the street because he wanted to. Didn’t want to face nothin’. Then everyone blamed him for Mary’s death. Everyone thought he’d killed both of them because of the affair. He was an outcast among musicians who loved Eddie and the whole damned black community in Memphis. Shelters even turned him away ’cause they thought he was a killer. I heard one story about Clyde trying to sleep in a church basement one Christmas and the preacher dragging him out into the cold by his bare feet.”

“So why now?” I asked. “Why would Ransom send men to look for Clyde and to mess with Loretta in New Orleans?”

“No, sir,” Cook said, as one of his girls came out and handed him a zip-up workout jacket. He slid into it and dabbed his face again with a towel. “Listen, Nick. I don’t really give a fuck about you. All right? But Loretta wouldn’t want you dead. So go back to New Orleans.”

“Will you answer one last question?”

“Your five minutes are long gone.”

“Listen to me,” I said, getting closer to Cook and smelling his vitamin-fused breath and dried sweat. I watched his eyes flicker with a recognition that the balcony may not have been the best place to take me. His fear made me a little uncomfortable. “I will call up Levi Ransom today and I’ll tell him you told me a great story about his life in Memphis music and how you were planning on having lunch with the district attorney next week. I’ll tell him what a nice place you have here and how he’s just a twisted hick who needs you to run his money. Fair enough? Or you want to keep going?”

He looked back through the glass to the other side, to his television room and his curvy houseworkers and sunken pit complete with stone fireplace. Storm clouds were beginning to gather to the north and sootlike black clouds inched toward a white sun.

“She used to cook for me,” Cook said. Sounded as if he was out of breath. Tired.

I sat down and checked my pockets for cigarettes. Old habit.

“Greens. Black-eyed peas and fried chicken that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. Why do you think she did that for me? No one ever treated me like that. I’d been on my own since I was fifteen. This was after she could have left my ass and signed with Stax or Hi or anyone she wanted. Why did she do that?”

“Who was the kid with Ransom? Tell me and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again.”

“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” he said and smiled. He gave a short laugh that I could tell was rare. “But that’s the question. That’s what you’ve been looking for ever since you came to Memphis, even before you started hassling me.”

I rubbed my hands together. My skin was chapped. I wanted to leave Memphis. I was beginning to hate being here. But where would I go now?

“Didn’t have to look too hard, Big Chief.”

I watched his craggy face. I said: “Kid’s name was Judas.”

“Yeah, I know his name. Spoiled punk who wanted to piss off his daddy and thought he was gangster at seventeen. Ran errands for Ransom at his pool hall on Beale after he’d been kicked out of some Nashville prep school.”

“Still around?”

“Oh, yes,” Cook said, smiling. “Might even be our next governor.”

I felt a knot form in my throat and a rush of adrenaline heat my blood. My mouth opened a little, feeling dry, and I watched Cook’s eyes for a hint that this was a joke.

“Now let me ask you a question, Travers,” Cook said. He took off his weathered weight belt, the sun extinguishing on the horizon. “How hard would it be for a U.S. senator to make some nasty crime in the black section of Memphis go away? A U.S. fucking senator. This was ‘sixty-eight. Right? Not too many P.C. cops. Most probably swallowed everything that fucker said about segregation.”

I was half-listening now. My mind already speeding ahead. I felt like I was barely holding on to the edge of the stilted balcony. I could imagine the wood tearing loose from the house and tumbling down the hill and into the water.

“Two dead blacks,” Cook said, now lecturing. “A murder that everyone believed was a domestic thing. Wouldn’t take too much to disappear.”

I thought about the Sons of the South and Abby’s father. An old cop like Raymond L. Jenkins would’ve been the only one who could’ve kept an original file, no names blacked out. A blackmail scheme set in motion by a bitter old bastard and only furthered by a misguided Oxford attorney. They could’ve easily changed the election.

“Russell’s been chained to him ever since,” Cook said. “Now Ransom is just calling in his chips.”

“So Russell flips his stance on gambling?” I asked, looking down at the riverfront and some old tourist paddle wheelers tying up for the storm. “He’ll allow it down there?”

Cook watched me and shook his head. “Now why would the Dixie Mafia invest all that money in Tunica if Memphis wasn’t that far behind?”

I felt a spot of rain on my cheek. The wind began to blow harder.

I understood why Cook lived on the Bluffs.

JUDE RUSSELL DIDN’T want him here. He hated every time that son of a bitch ever tried to make contact. The last time he’d seen him was about a week ago when Ole Miss was playing Auburn and Ransom had shown up at a party thrown by the CEO of a company that made kitchen appliances. He stood there and ate fried chicken and drank whiskey with one of his whores like he belonged among them. But Levi Ransom would never belong. He had the stink of gutter trash that seeped from his pores like urine and testosterone. No matter how many millions he stole or killed for, Ransom would always be that yellow-toothed hood that for some twisted reason he’d found so damned appealing when he was a teenager. How stupid could a boy be? He’d alienated everyone who’d tried to help him, thought his daddy was the Antichrist and his mother a babbling drunk. But Levi Ransom, with his greased ducktail and hot-rodded Mustang, was about the coolest thing he’d ever known.

At sixteen, he’d met Ransom at this little pool hall down on Beale. He’d liked the street before it had changed. Blues. Beer. Good dope. Women. Ransom knew every darkened corner of the street. He’d buy him pitchers of beer and let him play pool for free and get women to do things to him that he’d never imagined in the bedroom of his Germantown mansion.

He’d walk over to Russell stretched over the cigarette-burned felt of a pool table and stick two fingers under his nose. He’d point to some teenager, drunk or stoned, leaning against the old brick wall of the bar, and let him know it was his turn. Ransom was like that. He tried to make you think he shared it all.

Russell didn’t have too many friends. How could you when you changed boarding schools about every month and most people only wanted to talk about your daddy? Ransom was twenty-five and had a look like he’d been around the world a dozen times and was not too impressed with what he saw. He’d brag about setting fire to a courthouse in south Mississippi when he was fourteen by using a cigarette and pack of matches. He said he’d killed thirteen men, two of them with a buck knife, for not paying their debts.

Most of all, when he was drunk, he’d brag about being part of an organization out of Biloxi. He said he’d gotten in good because his granddaddy had ties with a man who owned a club down there. Said when he got kicked out of the service, he started running poker and blackjack tables for the man. And pretty soon, Ransom said, he was involved in more complicated games like turning out little girls and using them to bait businessmen. He said a pack of Polaroids could net you a mighty nice return.

He called his pool hall on Beale just a little starter kit. Said it was an office for much bigger things that were happening. But he never did explain what those things were until the night of Russell’s seventeenth birthday when they sat loaded up on Falstaff outside a little grocery in south Memphis. Ransom handed him a .45 and told him to go in and get back some change.

Funny how one moment can change your life forever. He should have walked away. He should’ve understood that Ransom was only using him the way he’d used the little girls he’d turned out. But he didn’t. He only thought of a daddy who returned to Memphis from D.C. to talk about the safety of keeping blacks in their place and a mother who had her maid drop off a birthday cake while she drove to Florida with the church deacon.

Russell knew that .45 felt good that night. Felt so good he’d even smacked the head of the fat-ass clerk who’d laughed at him when he asked him to empty the drawer into a paper sack.

Ransom had called that night his baptism. And anytime that he tried to resist the jobs, usually only when he was sober, Ransom would smile at him like he’d been there himself and laugh. “We ain’t like other people, you and me. We are takers.”

The money didn’t mean shit. But the you and me part meant everything.

They probably robbed twenty-five stores over the summer of ‘sixty-eight while the world fretted over Kennedy and King, men who later became his heroes.

He never knew how much they got. Never really asked. He’d blow almost the whole thing at strip clubs and on whiskey and weed.

He might have stayed in it forever if he hadn’t begged Ransom to take him along that night around Christmas. He’d shown up at the pool hall, pissed off at his parents for having some big party that spilled into his bedroom where he’d found some old gray-headed woman looking through his record collection and making fun of the singers’ clothes. She said Mick Jagger looked like a girl and dropped the record on the floor like it was infested with bugs.