Only the Wicked (26 page)

“I understand they got divorced not too long afterward,” Grant put in.

“How did you locate me?” Allen asked in a collected voice. She'd reconstructed her professional demeanor, and easily modulated her words.

“I've been finding one person or another, in a fancy house or a cheap back room for more than fifty years, Ms. Allen,” Grant answered wearily. He turned his head toward Nona Monk, a thin smile compressing his lips. “Good, solid citizens like you, who pay their taxes, and join their neighborhood watch, send their twins to private school, always leave a friend in one place, a satisfied client in another, you're easy to find. And once we found out you had a real estate license, we traced you to when you lived in Chicago, and started from there with a forwarding address search at the post office.”

Allen leaned forward. “I can see it in your face, and hear it in your voice. Kansas or Oklahoma, right?”

“An oil lease Daddy went bust on in Oklahoma,” Grant admitted. “You went to live with your mother after the divorce in Madison, Wisconsin.”

She sat back. “Yes, Mom's side of the family was from there, some had even worked in the LaFolette administration.”

“Dexter had an uncle who was an organizer for the Wobblies,” Nona Monk mentioned. “We came here to fill in some background on your sister, Lindsey.”

“I know,” she shook her head, “Sharon has become the footnote to the story of firebrand Green, the white Angela Davis who came out of the ferment of Marcuse and Markowitz. But to me she's still the smart-ass sister who tortured me to learn long division, and who took me to see
I, Monster and Planet of Vampires
because I begged her to.” She stared beyond the room, then adjusted her vision back to the present. “And stayed up with me that night until I could get to sleep.”

Grant asked, “Did your mother or father ever mention anyone she was seeing during the Creel campaign?”

Allen batted her lashes like she'd taken a blow on the nose. “When I was fifteen, Mom and Dad and I had the big talk, the one we'd been dancing around for several years. We talked about the summer before Sharon left for college, how they were so proud because she'd gotten a partial scholarship because of her grades.”

“Had your parents gone to college?” Nona Monk asked, crossing her own legs.

“Dad, some on the GI Bill; Mom was a bookkeeper. We were all rooting for Sharon.”

Grant was antsy, he wanted something to happen, to get something out of his long drive up north to Monterey. “We now know Ava's mother, Sara, died a few years ago and her father is retired, living somewhere in Spain.” At least that's what Grant had been able to determine. “But I haven't been able to run him down there.”

“He was an academic,” Allen verified. “I think he taught at Antioch in Yellow Springs. His specialty was Marxist economics, I think. I remember reading that Sharon had been very impressed about that.”

“You mean your sister kept a diary from that time?” Nona Monk's excitement was obvious.

“Yes,” Allen hesitated, “but there's nothing in them that can help you.”

Grant pounced. “How do you know, Ms. Allen? When's the last time you gave them a careful reading? Five, ten years ago?” A sound made them turn their heads. A couple and their two small children stood at the door. Tentatively, the adults stepped into the room, the kids hugging their legs. Sharon Aikens' sister looked relieved. She started to speak but Grant cut her off.

“If we could just look through the diaries …”

All three were now on their feet.

“When we finally got her things back, there were pages missing from the last one, Mr. Grant. The authorities in Jackson said it had probably been Creel, trying to cover his tracks.”

“Do you think he killed your sister?” Nona Monk put a hand on the other woman's arm.

Casually, Allen picked up a set-up page for the new hopefuls. “I've stopped trying to answer that question.”

“But my son hasn't,” Nona Monk implored. “How about you re-read what's left of that diary, with the eyes of someone who's older than the last time you read those passages. Maybe you'll see something differently this time.”

“You folks start looking around,” she said to the couple, “I'll catch up in a minute.” Allen began to move away. “I won't promise anything. Sometimes it's best not to walk too often past the headstones.”

“I understand, Lindsey, yet don't the dead deserve an answer, the knowledge that the ones who did her harm pay for their misdeeds?” Nona Monk handed her one of her cards from Cedars. “This has my work number and pager. Call me, okay?”

She took the card without committing herself to any future course of action and went to show the house to the newcomers. The sounds of the children giggling and running around could be heard from upstairs. Grant and Monk's mother left, a wind bracing them as they walked back to his car.

“How about we go check out that new John Steinbeck Center over in Salinas?” Grant asked, getting in behind the wheel. “Last time I was up here it was just a room devoted to him at the local library.”

“Sure, but let's get some late breakfast or early lunch first, this detective stuff gets a girl hungry.”

Driving off, Grant nodded appreciatively at his passenger. “You did good back there, Nona. If I'd been alone, I'd have probably raised her hackles and she'da froze me out. I think she'll call.”

Nona slumped in the seat, suddenly looking her age. “I was being real with her, Dexter. I feel,” she searched for the word, “obliged. Kennesaw wasn't my responsibility; he was his own grown man and made his own decisions for whatever reasons. Yet I feel the damage he did is somehow my responsibility to atone for. If Damon Creel is guilty, then, fine. But this hanging in the air, it's every black person's business … it could be that, it could be this.” She made gestures. “Look, there're enough people around tearing down the good that was done in the civil rights movement, hijacking King's words to suit their purposes as they go about getting rid of any of the gains.” She scratched at the scalp beneath her short hair. “Shit, ain't it about our turn to kick some cracker ass?”

“Amen, sister.”

“Shut up and drive, Dexter.”

“Yessum, Miss Monk.”

Chapter 17

Monk was in someone else's body and he couldn't make it respond to his commands. The hands fluttered when he badly needed them to ball into a fist His legs jerked spasmodically when in fact he wanted them to swing out and over the cot filled with bramble onto the floor. He came fully awake and realized he was having another post-traumatic attack. Only this bout had blended with the last stages of a nightmare. And he was having difficulty deciphering his present reality beyond his psychological state. Whose bed was he in? And why was it so fucking hot?

He glanced around the room, locking on an indiscernible object located on the wall. He stared hard at the thing, trying to adjust his eyes in the velvety darkness. Leaks of light like inert gas hung below the crack of the door and halo'ed around the curtained window. As if he were an amnesiac, or a visitor stranded on this planet Monk searched for the names of the other items in the black room.

A mosquito landed on his sweating bare chest and he slapped at the insect on automatic response. The creature took off, buzzing around his left ear, taunting him with its superior mobility. There was a creak on the walkway outside, and his consciousness dropped fully back into his body, his skin alert like an organic sensor net. He was in the A-Model Motor Lodge, and he was slick from disorientation and heat.

The gun? Where had he put his .45? He scrambled and plucked it out from beneath the mattress near where his head had rested. Another creak. He got out of bed—was he naked? He felt downward with his left hand and tugged on the stretchy material of his sweat pants. That's good, he'd hate to be laid out in the local funeral parlor bare-assed. His mother would be chagrined.

Monk had his ear to the door, his eyelids nearly shut so as not to distract his sense of hearing. There was some rustling and the clink of metal. He twisted and yanked on the knob, and it wouldn't give. His breathing stopped, and he assumed someone was holding the knob on the other side in big corded hands that would soon be locked around his neck. He tugged on the knob again, hard. It finally occurred to him in a bolt of clarity to unlock the damn thing. With measured movement, he undid the tab, the anxiety pumping his heart starting to subside.

“Hi,” the woman said. She was the one he'd seen going off to gamble when he'd first arrived at the motel. Now she stood at the door to Number 15, her key in the lock. Her potato sack of a purse was draped across her like a bandoleer. Apparently she'd just returned from another battle of lone woman versus the dreaded gambling empire. The green-blooded octopus that at first caressed and soothed you with its embrace, but invariably drew you closer and closer, until it devoured you whole, waiting for the next morsel to temporarily satisfy its hunger.

“Hey,” Monk answered, the .45 down at his side, hopefully obscured in the low wattage of the red lights hanging over the covered walkway. “Have any luck tonight?”

“Okay,” she said, getting her door open. She started across the threshold, then paused. “You some kind of salesman?”

“I go from door to door, but too often find the occupant running out the back.” Out on the highway, a late model car—was it a Sable?—turned into the courtyard, the cone of its lights illuminating both of them. The car completed its U-turn and drove off in the opposite direction.

“Well, goodnight.” He closed the door on her quizzical frown. He stood against the inner door, reassembling his mind. The thing on the wall was that damned cavorting catfish. His mental state was better but now his lower leg, the one that had been shot, was hurting again. Great. He prowled the room, massaging his thigh. Eventually he clicked on the TV, and sat on the bed, his leg lying flat on the covers. On screen a preacher in a lightning blue jacket with rings on each hand and a tsunami of white hair, tearfully cajoled his audience to seek the counsel of Jesus, the greatest prosecutor of evil in the universe. The devil—and by inference, the criminal lawyers who served as his minions—was the source of all mendacity and afflictions.

Monk fitfully found his way back to sleep, the muscles in his lower leg finally subsiding to a rhythmic throbbing; a lullaby of pain. Half awake, in his head he could hear the telegenic holy man screaming that Jesus was going to present a bill, and too many would not be able to afford the payment.

A dark-skinned Jesus answered the door to the house in the valley of sorrow as an exhausted Monk knocked. The Lord was holding a photo of Monk's cousin in blackface, with wide white lips. God's son laughed at the joke. He had real nice teeth.

Chapter 18

“You got to get from 'round here, mister.”

“How about Mrs. Bodar, she available to see me?”

“Mister,” the housekeeper said, grinding her teeth, “you don't listen too good. Mr. Bodar is recuperating and Mrs. Bodar has things that need takin' care of.” She was a good-sized woman whose arms were more muscle than flab. Her biceps were pronounced as she stood in the foyer, hands on hips. “How in hell did you get this address?” she fumed.

“I'm all the way from L.A.,” Monk said, trying to make it sound bright and cheery as if he was delivering a million dollar check.

“I don't give a hoot if you took the express from Timbuktu, mister. The Bodars ain't seeing no reporters today.”

“I'm looking for a killer, not writing a story.”

She looked him up and down with a steady gaze. Momentarily, she announced her findings. “Man, you ain't no policeman, you ain't law of no kind.”

He liked her. “How do you know that?”

“You miss the mirror this morning?”

Monk had been looking around the entranceway. The house was not the stereotypical plantation colonial affair he expected a Mississippi state senator, a senator with old familial ties in the state, to own. It was more Renaissance Revival in appearance, with quoins going up the corners of its two stories, and pedimented heads over the windows.

“I'll only come back.”

“I'll get you arrested,” she promised, what little tolerance she had for him having dissipated. “We don't play around with snoops in Vicksburg.”

“Would you tell Mrs. Bodar that I'm the cousin of Kennesaw Riles, and that he was murdered in Los Angeles.”

The housekeeper, who'd been holding a dishtowel, began to knot the cloth in both of her capable hands. “You is Riles' kin? For real?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She looked off toward the staircase, then at the front door. “You hold on.” She didn't take the stairs, but went through a walnut swing door that led to some other part of the house.

He came in and stood in the entranceway, looking around. On a circular Chippendale table there was a vase sprouting morning glories and violets, a Merit Foundation annual report next to it. Black-and-white Nike running shoes, fresh red clay crusted around the soles, sat on a step of the stone composition stairs leading to the second floor. In the dining room, he could see an oil painting of a patriarch in a suit with wide lapels. His hands clutched small globes at the end of the arms of the ornate chair he sat in. The expression captured on his face suggested only he knew how to get things done.

Soon, a smallish woman with wide hips in a plum-colored sweat top with a C
AMPBELL
C
OLLEGE
logo on it and faded jeans came back through the swing door. Displeasure was plain on Cassie Bodar's face.

“Will you please get out of here?” She pointed toward the front door.

“I'd just like to know if your husband had been in contact with my cousin prior to, or after his accident.” He was well aware he was a stranger, a smart-ass black man from out of town refusing to leave the house of a white woman well connected in Mississippi's social and political circles.