Only the Wicked

by Gary Phillips

  Her husband motioned for her to continue. She started again, “So of course she and Ava got to talking to them about how interesting that they were friends, did they know about the campaign, stuff like that.”

  “What do you mean ‘of course’?” he asked.

  She moved her shoulders. “Ava’s mother had some relatives in Akron, that’s what Sharon wrote in parentheses here.”

  Her husband didn’t hide his blank expression.

  “It was something they sort of had in common,” she elucidated. “I gathered from what she wrote, Ava had initiated the conversation with the two.”

  Her husband yawned. “These two college boys become involved in Creel’s mayoral race? Did Sharon go out with one of these dudes?”

  “I don’t know,” Lindsey Allen admitted. “Sharon calls the white one by his nickname, Rusty, so you might assume she was interested in him, but who really knows?”

  “You gonna call the couple?”

  “They’re not a couple, exactly. But yes, I’ll give them a call tomorrow with this tidbit.”

  “Could be useful,” Terry Allen speculated. “A white and black pal’n around together in the early ’seventies, maybe a set-up to lure the girls in or something.”

  His wife raised doubtful eyebrows and turned off the nightlight.

  “Mom, Jarred won’t turn his radio off,” their daughter yelled five minutes later.

  “Shut up,” their son warned his sister.

  “You go see about them,” his wife said to her husband.

  “It’s not my turn,” he said, but was already putting his feet on the floor.

  Chapter 20

  Monk left Mercury Cartage with his letter pack and drove until he found the rib joint he’d eaten at the other day. He ordered food and a beer, and sat at the same corner table, the sun beaming directly on him. He opened his pack and took out the background papers sent to him overnight from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

  The Center, founded by white Southerner Morris Dees—an attorney who first made money selling birthday cakes through the mail in college—was a research and legal facility dedicated to an aggressive defense of civil rights. The organization had successfully sued Klan Klaverns and skinhead groups, and produced various publications, including the Intelligence Report magazine. The publication was a roundup of hate groups, examining their activities and the forces behind them.

  He’d requested information on Tigbee and his foundation before leaving L.A. through Kodama, a contributor to the Center for more than a decade. Now he sat and sipped and read through the information. Some of it was compiled from what public records existed on the Merit Foundation, which was a family foundation, and so was not required to divulge assets and what groups they’d funded.

  But the Center had done a great deal of detective work over the years on the Merit Foundation. Backtracking through the records of various organizations and charities which the Center concluded might have received Merit monies—organizations such as political campaigns and charities required by law to disclose their funding sources—they had amassed a comprehensive list of possible and certain recipients.

  As Embara had told him, Merit gave money to Mississippi public schools and private ones, to homeless shelters, literacy programs, and other venues to advance the public good. There were also grants to several out-of-state groups Monk didn’t recognize. But the groups were broken down by ideology on an annotated sheet. Not surprisingly, they were either religious conservative or right wing, like the group of zero-population advocates who blamed America’s pollution on unchecked immigration.

  Of much more interest was a reprinted article from the Public Eye, a newsletter put out by a left-wing think tank in Massachusetts that monitored the right. The piece listed Merit’s current and past board members. Among the names were a couple of black conservatives with national profiles, a politically narrow Latina Judge Kodama had debated once, and several CEOs of intermediate and large corporations.

  Monk ate and continued perusing the material. Another reprinted piece written some years ago, by the truck-pulling aficionado Todd McClendon, was an interview and profile of Tigbee. His picture, taken in 1991, was of a stern-looking man with a lean face, a prow of a nose, and close-cropped hair. He was sitting in a padded chair, and behind him was a window overlooking downtown Oxford, Mississippi. Accidentally, Monk dripped barbecue sauce from his beans on the photocopy. He blotted it with his napkin.

  The piece revealed something of Tigbee’s philosophy. McClendon had asked him pointedly about Creel and the Citizens League’s possible involvement in Creel’s trial. Tigbee point blank said the League, which he characterized as having been well-intentioned, but admittedly some of its less involved members may have committed some excesses, had no knowledge or connection to the incident. He maintained that Creel was guilty, having been convicted by a jury. An all-white jury, McClendon pointed out.

  Tigbee replied that it was a black man who testified for the prosecution, someone who was himself a civil rights activist. Monk felt bile mixing with his meal and had to halt his study and eating. He sat back, letting the sun beat on his face, the brew soaking his brain, until his stomach settled. He’d have to take the quisling nature of his cousin less personally, he knew that. He wasn’t sure when or if he could.

  The piece stated that Tigbee had been married twice, and had three children, all grown. Looking back through the material again, he noted there was a Cullen Tigbee on the Merit board, but he couldn’t tell what relationship he had to Manse. He finished his lunch and made some calls from a pay phone using his phone card.

  “Only thing I got from Lindsey Allen was the first name, Rusty, of that white kid Sharon might’ve been seein’,” Grant said over the wire, after recounting what Lindsey Allen had told him earlier.

  “And my mother’s fine, right Dex?”

  “What, you got short-term memory loss? How often I gotta tell you Nona’s just swell? She’s at work, and I got one of the guards, a guy who used to be with the sheriffs, escorting your mother to her car in the parking structure. I didn’t start doing this yesterday, youngster.”

  “Being thorough, Lord Peter, just being thorough.”

  “Checking how I tie my saddle’s more like it.”

  “Whatever.” Monk filled him in on who he’d talked to and where he’d been. “It don’t look like much to show, Dex. I called Tigbee back this morning and he was out, but once I see him, I guess that’s it.”

  Grant breathed on the other end. “What do you think about this Rusty lead?”

  A splash of sauce was drying on Monk’s shirt and he picked at it. “I could spend another month down here trying to question every cat named Rusty or some sumbitch who knew a Rusty.”

  “Or find his black friend. These two could have been plants by the Citizens League,” Grant surmised.

  “But the only two who met them that night, who knew what either of them looked like, are dead. At least the two we know about.”

  “Maybe this black one turned up in something else like your cousin. You know, he might have testified in some other trial or some such.”

  Monk bounced his head side to side briefly. “I’ll bite, Dex. I will look into that.”

  Grant said excitedly, “Hey, Tigbee contacted you after you saw the senator’s wife.”

  “Yeah, I been running that around in my head, too. Looks like the Bodar residence is a house divided.”

  “Unless Bodar’s hiding out ’cause Tigbee threatened him or his wife,” Grant commented.

  “Either way, I’d like some ammo when I go to see the man. But looks like I’m going to enter the tiger’s lair butt naked. But go I must.” Monk had a sudden thought. “What about his family? I’ve found the high and mighty especially don’t like to be shamed by the doings of their progeny or wives. You said he was married twice.”

  “I know one son is named Cullen. And the second wife is named Harper, I mean that’s her first name.” />
  “No way.”

  “Way.” Grant shot back. “Harper Jenny McBride was her maiden name; she was ten years his junior. It seems Tigbee had three children altogether, one by the first wife, Dolly Lee, and two by Harper. But let me see what else I can find out. Give me the name of the researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center and I’ll talk with this McClendon fella you said wrote this piece,” Grant said.

  Monk consulted his steno pad and gave Grant the numbers. “Tell you what, ‘cause I’m the paranoid type, if you find out anything, call me at the motel and say something about my Ford.”

  “You think your room’s bugged?”

  “Tigbee had it done in the old days, and for all I know he might actually own the place. Fax any info to your girl smiley at Mercury Cartage. Push come to shove, I’ll call her from somewhere if I can’t get back up here to Memphis.”

  “I got a story to tell you about her sometime.”

  “I’m sure. Tell Mom hi. Odessa been around?”

  “Came over night before last.” The old pro could hear it between the spaces of the question. “Why?”

  If there had been bruises, he knew Grant would have said so. Unless his sister had pleaded with him not to. “Nothing. I’m out.”

  “What is that, hip talk?”

  Monk hung up and decided not to call Tigbee back until tomorrow. He didn’t think Dex would find anything that soon, but figured that would give him another day until he had to see him.

  With nothing particular to do, Monk decided to take the bus tour offered in town. The tour took you to Sun Studios, then to where Stax Records had been, WDIA radio, and other points of interest in the city’s musical history. Monk had carefully salted away his Otis Redding Stax albums in the bedroom closet at home. The superstar R&B artist’s rough-hewn voice and command of lyrics was a direct lineage to Patton’s unpolished, driving style. And Carla Thomas’ “Time is on My Side” still gave him a warm memory of the garage party where he first heard the song, and had his first slow dance with Tina Chalmers.

  Later, at night, he sat on the enclosed porch with Malus Locke, the farmer who rented out the land his mother owned in Mound Bayou. The town had been settled after slavery. In a reverse of the usual white municipalities practices, the officials of Mound Bayou had turned down federal aid in the old days so as to not be forced to meet Washington’s standards of integration, and thus keep the city’s political infrastructure black.

  Monk sat in a decrepit metal tube chair with a folded blanket for padding, Locke in his hickory rocker. The farmer was in his sixties, and wore thick lenses. He was black with Chinese mixed in on his father’s side of the family. Several African-Americans with Chinese descent could be found in various parts of Mississippi, a reminder of the days of railroad expansion and the import of cheap Asian labor. At their feet between them was an open bottle of Ballantine’s scotch whiskey, the only liquor Locke drank. The market he traded at in Shelby ordered it specially for him from Jackson.

  “How were those pork chops, brother Monk?” In his pressed blue khakis and short-sleeved shirt he sipped from a red plastic cup. A pale yellow porch light caused more shadow than clarity for the two sitting figures. Locke called people brother not in the black bonding sense, but as in all men were brothers in the eyes of God. He’d been a deacon ever since Monk could remember, at the Mount Olive Holy Redeemer Church.

  “Too good,” he admitted guiltily, pork being one of the things he was supposed to be eliminating from his diet. But damned if no sooner had he walked in the house when the irresistible smell of the smothered chops, simmering in brown gravy and onions, hadn’t triggered forbidden desires in him. Add the mashed potatoes and fried okra Locke’s grown daughter had prepared, he knew he had to get in a double workout at the Tiger’s Den when he got back home.

  “That’s okay you had three,” the older man said by way of a dispensation for gluttony. “I won’t tell ’em up there in California where you got to be chawing down on them sprouts and what y’all call them cubes they make from soybeans?”

  “Tofu,” Monk said, smiling and enjoying his own scotch. “But I ain’t big on that jive.”

  “Good to hear it, brother Monk.” The rocker creaked and a lightning bug landed on the porch screen, flashing some insect code in its rear end for the benefit of the human onlookers. “Got a cigar if you’d like.”

  Well, no sense tiptoeing into vice’s embrace. “Sure, if you’re having one.”

  “I’m a pipe man myself, but I can blame you for my smoking to my daughter,” he said, getting up. Locke went inside and returned shortly with the goods. He eased the screen and front door open, moving quietly for a man his age. His small movements were meant not to arouse the suspicions of his daughter. The farmer handed Monk a cigar, which he was surprised to see was a decent Robusto. He also gave him a book of matches.

  “I get a few in with my orders of scotch,” Locke answered Monk’s unspoken question. He sat down and began packing his pipe from a worn tobacco pouch.

  The men lit up and smoked for awhile, the cicadas’ hind legs rubbing and humming in the fields beyond the porch. “You do all right with your detective work?” Locke eventually asked. His head was momentarily shrouded in blue smoke, as if he were a super-natural being come to puzzle mortals with riddles.

  “Some years good, some years so-so, money-wise.”

  “But you satisfied with it, ain’t you? It’s what you want to do, right?”

  Monk took the cup away from his mouth. “I wouldn’t know what else to do, Malus.”

  “You choose it, or it choose you?” Creak, creak.

  Monk laughed. “I answered her call.”

  The older man didn’t respond, there was only the sound of him drawing in on his pipe like a well-oiled respirator running in a small, closed-off room. Finally he said, “You makin’ headway in this thing about your cousin?”

  “Not especially,” he said frankly. Again silence, and Monk figured what little image the man had of him as a PI had been shattered.

  “You say something at dinner about going to see Tigbee?” Locke asked after a few moments. He was fooling with his pipe, which had gone out.

  “Yes sir, big daddy himself.”

  Locke got his pipe relit and puffed into the air. “He’s a slick old boy, but I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Interestin’ enough, I have. He gave some of the farmers around here a hand when the big frost hit in ’ninety-two, wipin’ out portions of a lot of good crops.”

  Monk puffed too. “That include you?”

  “Yeah, but I made sure it was a loan, brother Monk. I’ll be payin’ it off next winter, God help the rhubarb to rise.” They both laughed softly, several lightning bugs zipping by the porch’s screen.

  “He’s a respected man around here, by blacks and whites?”

  “We ain’t all book learned, brother Monk, but that don’t mean we got amnesia. There’s plenty know his past. But he wasn’t the first one, you know, like George Wallace did later on, who ain’t changed a few spots.” He let that linger, then added cogently, “Or at least the leopard appeared to.” Creak, creak.

  Monk stated, “This money must have come from something other than his foundation.”

  “That’s right. Tigbee set up a kind of relief fund with some other business fellas,” Locke said. “But his son administered it through another branch of that foundation of his.”

  “His son Cullen?”

  “Yeah, that’s the second oldest. He was a starting forward at Mississippi Valley State.”

  Because Grant had made him itch about the family’s affairs, maybe Locke could scratch the curiosity. “The other two children also involved in Tigbee’s businesses?”

  “The youngest son, Daniel, I believe has some kind of TV station he owns down in Florida.”

  “Seed money from dad?”

  “Believe so.”

  “And the third one, that be the ol
dest daughter?”

  “What you on to?” A defensive tone had suddenly risen up in him as if Monk were probing an open wound with tweezers.

  “Don’t know until I get there, brother Locke.”

  Locke rocked, holding the cup in his hand on the armrest. “You know the Lord don’t tolerate a gossip.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to speak out of turn.”

  They smoked and drank a piece.

  “The oldest is in fact a daughter, Merrill,” Locke said from around the stem of his pipe.

  “But she didn’t stay close to her father?”

  In the weak light, Monk watched Locke tap the bowl of his pipe against the leg of the rocker. “From all accounts she was very much her mother’s daughter.”

  Now Monk was following. “The first wife.”

  “Dolly Lee,” Locke provided. “She left Tigbee.”

  “How you come by all this, brother Locke?”

  Locke rocked and puffed on his pipe. “Mind you, you got me gossipin’ like some ol’ hen at a beauty parlor.”

  Monk toked on his cigar. “This is helpful information. This isn’t just idle chatter to amuse the devil. You’re helping me with my case.” That might not be quite accurate, but he wouldn’t lose too much sleep over small inaccuracies.

  Locke weighed his guest’s comments and took a sip from his glass. “Seems like it was a member of the church, a rightful sister who used to clean the Tigbee house from way back. Seems like she got to tellin’ the missus had left with the young daughter back in ’fifty-two or so.” He rocked some more and the country noises blanketed both of them.

  “This sister say where Dolly and the daughter lit out to?” Monk ventured after a fashion.

  “Yep,” Locke drew out, then rocked some more.

  Monk puffed and listened to the night.

  “Ohio it was, Youngstown, Akron, may have even been Yella Springs. I can’t rightly recall now exactly where. Someplace she had relations. I believe this church woman I’m speakin’ of over-heard one day as the missus was on the phone. ’Course that good sister went to meet the Lord in ’sixty-nine, so’s she ain’t around for you to cross examine.” His easy laugh originated in his throat and stayed there.