Only the Wicked (20 page)

“No,” Embara corrected, “the Foundation has given money to inner city public schools and private ones too.” She made a face and Monk didn't know how to interpret the expression. “By trade he's a structural engineer. His name came up during Damon's trial. But that's all it did, come up.”

“So he still wields considerable power.”

“In a quiet way,
Señor
Monk,
a quiet way. This is the modern age after all.” She glanced at a clock set in a brass cathedral arch on a marble pedestal. “You know about Nixon's Southern Strategy, his plan of splintering off Dixiecrats through racialized appeal and patronage?”

Monk indicated he did.

“Okay, Nixon knew Tigbee, had met with him and other southern leaders over a period of time to devise and carry out this realignment of electoral power. Men who Nixon knew could get the votes together in their counties and districts.”

“Tigbee having plausible deniability concerning the more nefarious doings of the Citizens League,” he observed.

“Yes, Tigbee's always managed to maintain an arm's length from the League in public much like P.W. Botha did with his security forces that engaged in political assassinations during apartheid in South Africa,” Embara said. “And peep this,” she added, “the feeling among some in the know is that Nixon got the idea for his covert operations against his real and imagined enemies, the breakins, wiretapping, Plumbers Squad, and so on from Tigbee.”

Monk was floored. “You mean he and ol' Manse were sitting around jawing one night and Tigbee suggests …” He let the rest go unsaid but implied.

“Exactly, taking lessons from what the Citizens League had been doing for years against uppity blacks, outside agitators and soft-headed whites. Look, I have to get ready for the bowing and scraping I gotta do for this guy who might shake loose some bank for us.”

“I'm really glad you could spare the time.” Monk got up. “Say, you ever hear anything about Hiram Bodar in all this?”

Embara was looking for something on her desk. “I know he initially campaigned as a Gingrichite Republican who wasn't squeamish to talk about race.”

“Think his principles are what led to his accident?”

“Could be.” She found the notes she'd been hunting for. “You might want to talk to that editor—what was his name—from the Mississippi paper?”

“McClendon.” Monk told her he'd retrieved some of his articles on-line and that he intended to talk with Bodar. He thanked her again, picked up the list, and left the studios. Not too far west was the Formosa Café. The landmark was a stop for Gen-X and Y-ers and some old-school screenwriters and character actors. Also in the mix were the kind of people who could drop into a joint a little past two in the afternoon and slide into a booth in the back: those who seemed to have no set job, but always enough money to be going out.

The rear portion of the bar and grill had originally been a Red Car, one of the trolleys of the Pacific Electric Line whose tracks back then were the inter-urban line crisscrossing the city like Martian canals.

Monk ordered a Bud, some vegetable fried rice and a plate of popcorn fried shrimp. In the old days, food was not why you came to the Formosa. The quality of the chow then was fair at best; you came for the ambiance. The pictures of the old-time stars along the walls; the cracked carmine leather of the booths; the long, scarred bar, and those who lurched up to it had made the grub's ingestion passable. But the menu had been upgraded for the less hardy.

Dexter Grant had introduced Monk to the Formosa, and the bartender in the bow tie, who mixed his drinks adroitly all the while telling you a story about the days of L.A. when orange groves outnumbered people. The bartender had passed on some ten years ago, walking home one night as he'd done for more than forty years. He got to the top of the steps to his apartment on Fuller, breathed his last gasp into the early morning air, and sank down, holding the rail. The cops found him like that, his one hand frozen like statuary on the peeling paint of the wooden railing, in a kneeling position.

Silently Monk saluted the man. He hoisted his glass of beer to the photo of the guru of bartending residing over the window where he sat. The bartender's crooked smile hinted but did not reveal the grand joke only he knew the punch line to. Paying his bill, Monk wondered when it would be his time to find out the answer for himself.

“Everything cool?” Kodama was eating a double cone of Tahitian Guava and Rocky Road.

Monk was hanging up the receiver at the pay phone. “Yeah, she's got a male nurse who's going to follow her home and see her inside.”

The couple strolled again along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The walking thoroughfare was a post-industrial marketplace with a virtual reality store, sunglasses shops, record stores, bookshops, coffeehouses, toy emporium, movie palaces and an omnipresent Disney store.

“Look, the killer knows you're stirring up shit, he's not going to take another run at her now.” She put an arm around his waist, tugging him. “Plus, Nona's got that Beretta of yours you insisted she carry.”

“And she knows how and where to shoot it.” Monk clasped her hand and brought the cone up to his own mouth. He took a big bite, chewed, then swallowed the lump of creamy goo.

Kodama winced. “You're the only person I know who never gets those headaches from cold stuff. Why the heck is that?”

They got closer to the Midnight Special bookstore.

“Fumes from old carburetors have given me certain powers.”

They looked at various books displayed on a long shelf in the plateglass window. One row contained copies of a book Monk had a particular interest in,
City of Promise: How Los Angeles Destroyed Public Housing.
“Now in trade paper,” he said admiringly. The book was authored by Fletcher Wilkinson.

Kodama peered closer, holding her cone close to the glass. “Have you talked to Fletcher recently?”

“No, I should give him a buzz, though.” Wilkinson had been in the city's housing department decades ago. He'd been run out for his left-wing ideas like integration and providing decent housing to low income and working families. He'd also been instrumental in Monk solving the murder that led to the shoot-out in the Rancho Tajuata Housing Projects.

“Shall we browse, my love?”

“Just let me finish this,” Kodama said.

By the time Kodama was done with her cone a sax player and a violinist had set up in front of the bookstore. As was the custom along the Promenade, various street musicians and performers did their thing at all hours to earn a few dollars from passersby.

The musical duo were doing a melodic version of “Stella by Starlight” as Monk and Kodama entered the store.

Chapter 12

An elliptical pane of leaded glass was set above center in the front door. The house the door was attached to was a modified '30s-era Hansel and Gretel design set at the crest of a sloping, sparkling green lawn. Monk parked his Ford and got out, proud it had only taken him three false turns to find the place among the convoluted streets of Baldwin Hills.

The homes of Baldwin Hills were strewn up and down land rising between Coliseum Street on the north, and Stocker to the south. La Brea Avenue, which ran north/south, was the main drag bifurcating the mostly black middle-class area. The Hills had been named for E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin, an Irish immigrant who'd come to LA. during the real estate boom in the 1880s. He had a yen to make money and his fame.

Lucky was known to have an eye for younger women, fast horses, and throughout his life was involved in a series of financial and morally suspect escapades. Yet he died very solvent in 1909, after settling not only the section of town bearing his name, but also Santa Anita, and naturally, its racetrack.

No doubt Lucky's ghost smiled as dozens of automated oil pumps these days worked continuously in fenced-off lots near Stocker. The land Baldwin developed was still producing the black gold as if fossil fuels would never run out.

Second-tier entertainers, upper-level city bureaucrats, and some music people claimed residence in the hills on streets with names such as Don Lorenzo, Don Quixote and Don Zarembo. In 1985, a massive fire had wiped out more than fifty homes, and before that, there had been a bad flood when the hills' concrete reservoir had burst in the '60s.

If there was something symbolic about both flame and water having wrought destruction in Baldwin Hills, some biblical sign the homeowners were meant to have heeded, they apparently had not. Or at least chose not to. For Baldwin Hills was still a place one could find the strivers, the strata of black folk one also found in nearby Windsor Hills and Ladera Heights, who asked for no hand out, worked hard at their jobs, and kept their wet bars well stocked with premium liquor.

Not too far down below in the flatlands, Monk glimpsed the contours of the jungle. Coliseum Street sliced through this compact area of low- to moderate-rent apartment buildings landscaped with overgrown shrubs, wildly sprouting rubber plants, and towering eucalyptus trees. When he was a kid, he and his friends thought the place was called the jungle by whites because it was an all-black enclave. As it turned out the area had gotten the nickname when it was still white because of the amount of topiary.

Monk ruminated on the intricacies of Los Angeles' demarcations as he strode up the walk to the door with its unblinking single orb. Next door a woman in a shapeless housedress was on her knees digging at a brick-lined flower bed running along the base of her home. She pushed back the floppy brim of her sunhat at the sound of his footsteps.

Monk knew she was giving him the once-over through her shades, what with him dressed in off-white jeans, striped shirt with sleeves rolled up and scuffed Timberlines. She also shot a glance at his restored '64. Had one of the graspers from the crowded apartments down below dared to journey beyond his station? Monk smiled.

She turned her head back toward her zinnias and marigolds, the trowel in her hand moving listlessly. She appeared to be deep in thought as Monk rang the bell.

“Yes?” came the question from the indistinct shadow beyond the opaque glass.

Monk told her his name and why he had come.

“Really?” the woman said as she opened the door. She was somewhere in her mid-fifties and her dark brown hair was cut close and straight to her roundish face. She wore a loose silk T and a blue and orange print skirt. “A real live private eye?”

He could tell his outfit didn't fit the expected image. “I can show you my ID if you like.”

“Oh, I believe you.” She stepped back. “Gome on, we're in here.”

He followed her through a deeply carpeted foyer past a flag-stone fireplace and a big-screen TV set diagonally from it. “Okay, ladies, clean up your language, there's a man in the house,” the woman joked.

Monk could hear hearty laughter and the unmistakable slap of cards on a table top. He came around a corner to see an enclosed patio where three other women were playing bid whist.

“Uptown, girl,” one of them said, tossing down a seven of hearts. She glanced at Monk.

“How'd you find me?” Clara Antony asked pleasantly.

Grant had found out her haunts. “Denise Rutledge's sister-in-law knows somebody I know.” That was more or less accurate.

She nodded appreciatively. “You want to play a hand?”

The owner of the house touched Monk's arm. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“He's a beer man, Jeri.” The woman who said it was about Monk's complexion, wearing a red sweater top, matching pumps, and had on too much blue eyeliner. Her hair was coiffured in layers and he could tell she worked out regularly. She kept her eyes on the only man in the room as she laid down a three of clubs.

“I'm fine, thanks.” He wasn't sure whether he should sit or stand. He didn't want to seem awkward.

Clara Antony explained who Monk was. “And what can I help you with today?” She indicated a couch set in front of a sliding-glass door. Beyond it an old golden retriever lounged and scratched.

Monk sat down, suddenly wishing he had accepted the beverage as it would give him something to do with his hands. All the women were now sitting at the table, looking at him. They were all middle-aged black women dressed casually but expensively. They gave him the impression of having reached a certain station in life but they were not “siddidy” about it, as his mother would say.

“Normally I don't bust in on people like this,” he began.

The one in blue eyeliner said, “You look like the kind that busts 'em up regularly, sugar.”

Clara Antony gave her a look but said nothing, then glanced at the hand she held. “Who bid five?”

“It's just that I'm on short time and need to get as much done as I can in the next coupla days before I light out.”

“Down to the Delta,” the former singer guessed.

Monk confirmed that and told her about the attack on his mother. He was careful not to draw too fine a line between the last time he'd seen Clara Antony and the assault. His moving about town, dropping the news he was going to Mississippi, was a way to see if he could draw the killer and/or his partner to him. He wished Jill would pack that Smith & Wesson .38 she had, given all the attacks on the women around him.

“Like I said, I may be a little rude here, Clara, but I wanted to ask you a few things away from your husband.”

Blue Eyeliner made a face. And a serious-looking woman in over-sized glasses opened her eyes wide.

“Ardmore may have had his rough edges, Ivan, but he wouldn't truck with anything like murder.” She crossed her legs, her fingers pushing several of her cards face down on the table. “The club game in those days wasn't for the fainthearted. I'm not saying he was always a gentleman. But—” she shook her head as a way of completing her sentence. “And he's too old to be jumping ladies in their driveways.”