Only the Wicked (19 page)

“And the killer will follow you? That seems pretty shaky to me, Ivan. Plus, how's he gonna know you left town?”

“'Cause if I bang enough bells down there he'll know.”

“And come after you 'cause he'll think you're on to something? Why wouldn't he just wait until you got back here to town with your whatzits?”

“Sikkuh,” he said patiently, “this thing might be information and not an object.”

She bobbed her head to an inaudible beat. “Something to prove this Creel's innocence.” She leaned to one side, hand under her chin, regarding him with amused interest. “But what you really want to be is the mack daddy player, the man who makes things happen.” She put a hand on his cheek. “You're so cute, Ivan Monk.”

“Damn, girl,” he admonished.

She laughed and slapped his arm. Leaving the bank she said, “Maybe you'll get lucky and find something out about Patton's record, too.”

“Maybe.” He got in his car and drove away.

The next day Monk went to see N'Kobari Embara at her office/workspace on the lot of the Las Palmas studios in Hollywood. The studio was a collection of large work areas rented out to concerns as diverse as prop shops to interactive game production. Each office was fronted with graying wood decks. The filmmaker was on the tall side, with frizzed-out hair and three wide silver bracelets along one muscular arm. Monk guessed she was about his age since there were bags under her eyes.

“I was down in Texas getting some information on this private prison company called Percival Facilities Management. They're looking to take business away from Unicor, the Bureau of Prisons' whacked-out labor scam.” She was fiddling with a camera mount. “Innocent sounding, aren't they?”

“Everybody's trying to make a buck.” Monk crossed his leg at a perpendicular angle to his knee.

She leaned the collapsed mount in a corner. “Uh-huh, taking federal dollars out of our pockets for doing the job of warehousing on the cheap. Symptomatic of the further abandonment of compassion and responsibility our politicians should be exercising.”

“I'm not arguing with you.”

She laughed heartily and lifted a pile of books and papers from one part of her desk to another to get a clearer look at her visitor. “You want to see what wasn't in the film?”

He uncrossed his legs. “It won't be sold to
Hard Copy
, N'Kobari.”

She vibrated an open palm in the air. “I know, I know. I called around about you. You'll be happy to hear some folks actually think you're a down brother even though you're a semi-cop.”

“What do the others say?”

Embara belted out another gust of her infectious laughter. “Could be I'll use that in the documentary I'll do one day on the capitalism and the underworld, and the role of the private eye who maneuvers in both arenas.” She picked up a set of inter-locking gears and sprockets and idly manipulated the device. “To get the first unstated question out of the box, yes, Damon Creel was having an affair with one of the white girls from Brandeis.” She stared straight at him, adroitly twisting and turning the gears as she spoke.

“But you wouldn't say he had an insatiable sexual appetite, would you?” Monk left it to her to add or defer information on the topic.

“Should I feel a need to defend him?” She kept working the gears.

“Just understand him. I'm going to try to talk to Creel when I get down there.”

“Damon liked the center ring and what came with it. In that regard he's no different than many of those throwing stones at the system from the left and right in the name of being the vanguard. Those who always manage to get their names in the papers.”

“Your film implied that, but also balanced it with his sincerity for the movement.”

“As I hoped it would.” She finally set aside the gears. “I think Damon's a for-real hope-to-die revolutionary who wants to alter the nature of power in this country.”

“But you assess him honestly,” Monk admired. “Faults and plusses.”

“And I firmly believe then and now that he was rail-roaded into prison. Damon admitted in court seeing Ava Green earlier that evening. Hell, we all knew they were getting it on.”

“According to his book his car broke down on the way back from Memphis to Mound Bayou,” Monk filled in. “By the time he got it going and got to his destination, the two young girls had been slaughtered.”

“But the breakdown is a big gap in his time. It is an unaccounted whereabouts.”

“That and the testimony of my cousin.” Monk got depressed.

She clasped a hand around the bracelet on her wrist, the harsh light of her office giving her skin a sheen like burnished copper. “I want you to see this,” she said firmly. “I was going to use this in the documentary, but, well, you'll see.” She wheeled in a monitor and commercial deck on a cart from another room and searched for a 3/4" tape among a stack of them on a bookshelf. She found what she was looking for and popped it in the machine.

The tape fuzzed for a few moments then there was a pixilated face of a man in short sleeves. He was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair and he was fidgeting: his leg pumped up and down, his shoe arched upward, his butt perched on the edge of the seat.

“Oh, wait a minute.” Embara, who was standing next to the set, stopped the tape and fast-forwarded it. “This was the version I'd messed with. Let me get to the original.” She got to the appropriate place on the counter, and set the tape to play again. She sat down at her desk. Monk had edged his chair closer.

The initial scene was the same except the pixilation affect was absent. The subject was an older white man in clip-on suspenders and a straw, snap-brim hat. He had a lean sagging face, vestiges of its once rugged good looks hinted at beneath the myriad lines. His nose had a groove of a scar along the length of the bridge. The old wound was purple with age, and broken blood vessels rivered on either side of it.

“The Citizens League wasn't a bunch of night riders swilling hooch, running around excited to kick some Jew's ass.” He whipped his face toward some unknown source, then back to the camera. “We were the thin white line of Anglo-Saxon culture against the disorder being rent upon us by them professional coons and their benefactors, the liberal she-he's running those foundations in New York City.”

“Were you the one interviewing him?” Monk asked.

She indicated she had. “Wallace Burchett was not given to immodesty.” Embara put a finger to her lips.

“We had served in the Big One and in Korea. We had seen what the Red Chinese had done to brainwash American prisoners of war, and how they wanted to take away our free thought. We weren't brownshirts, no sir.

“But then we get back here and you got all that race mixing music with them pedophiles Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. Juke songs right out of joints with nigger tunes and dago singers was being played by blossoming white girls right here in Decatur, goddamnit.” He gyrated on the seat, his shallow cheeks puffing.

“Decatur, Mississippi,” Embara illuminated.

Burchett's head was hanging low, moving from side to side. He talked down toward his shoes. The camera pulled back to accommodate his pose as he went on. “It was about your whole god-fearin' way of life could be ripe for spoilage if those Castroites had their way.

“And they say we were wrong, that we went too far. Just look at the evidence. What was Cambodia? What in the name of sanity was Rwanda or Kosovo? And now, Jesus and the blood of Christ, Hong Kong belongs to the Reds, good Lord amighty.” He waved an arm in the air as if he were a referee trying vainly to call foul.

Burchett's voice was steady, clear. Yet both his legs were going up and down now, and a desperation had crept into the corners of his pupils, which had constricted. “You asked me about certain activities I don't rightly think a young gal like you should be pursuing.” There was a jump in the tape and then Burchett was speaking again.

“Yeah, yes, I've heard that plenty of times.” He wiped at his brow with his palm, which was suddenly glistening with perspiration. He upset his hat and it fell to the floor. He leaned down to retrieve it and stopped to look halfway up at Embara, who was out of the shot. “You expect me to tell you how we arranged the removal of no-goods like them two in that pickup truck over in Yazoo City?”

Embara remarked,
sotto voce
, “You mean the murders of Yost and Hiller in the fall of nineteen sixty-six?”

Monk remembered the crime. Yost, a white high school teacher from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Hiller, a young black man from Biloxi, Mississippi, had been doing voter registration. They'd been forced into the woods by Klansmen or cops, what difference did it make since they never got out again?

“Yost was disemboweled, Hiller had his penis severed and stuffed in his mouth. And both had their heads caved in with sledge hammers.” Monk had a cold fascination for Burchett.

“Here,” Embara said, pointing at the monitor as the Citizens Leaguer continued telling his tales.

“That Riles loved money and pussy, shit, what nigger doesn't?” He leered at where Monk presumed Embara sat. “Some white fellas too, I guess you could say.” There was another jump cut and now Burchett was erect in the chair as if he were bound with invisible chains. His arms were tight against his body, his neck pulled in as if to ward off blows, his hat pushed far back on the top of his head.

“He loved his money, but he wanted his pride, too. That Riles had the right idea, yes sir. He knew the coloreds had to bide their time and be patient; they couldn't rush things and get all out of sorts like they had no sense.”

Monk was angry at the way Burchett referred to his cousin, and angry his cousin had been so weak.

Burchett was now jerking his body about in a violent fashion. Since the interview had begun, these movements had been slight, and had continued building into exaggerated spasms. His hat remained on his head.

“What's wrong with him?”

“Watch.”

Burchett launched himself out of the chair, the camera losing him momentarily. The camera operator found him rolling and writhing on the floor. “Malachi knows as did Riles, turning in that rabble rouser. Ye must tithe to Malachi, ye must make amends sometimes in blood.”

The old man, who'd had his arms outspread, slapped them against his sides again. He gurgled and snaked himself along the floor like a circus geek. The camera was now behind him, recording his antics from a low angle. “Those girls were needed for the work ahead for they chose to stand on the border of wickedness.”

Embara shut the tape off. Neither said anything for several moments. Monk was taking time to consider the import of the man's words—or ravings.

“So what was the deal with Burchett?” He knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

“He had lung cancer and was taking powdered morphine sulfate. Don't ask me how he got hold of it, ‘cause I don't know. For a chaser he was apparently also imbibing some backwoods moonshine.”

“How in hell did he get up in the morning?”

“Yeah,” she commiserated. “Burchett died five months after I taped this interview with him. Initially I was going to include him in the documentary, what with his inferences to Damon being set up.”

“What changed your mind?”

“How would it be?” She tucked in her lips and widened her eyes. “I run this segment where he's talking about Malachi and the girls having to be sacrificed. Granted, he's scooting around like a goddamn slinky, but I hoped to account for that in the narration. Yet the more I wanted to do it, the more I hit the wall.”

“Nobody would cooperate,” Monk noted.

“He has a daughter, Nancy, but I couldn't locate her.”

“And who would believe a dying man's rantings on his homemade anesthetizing cocktail?”

“Right. Even though supposedly the files of the League have been made public, there's a lot of talk down there that that was more a publicity stunt than anything. That some things, the real dirt, were kept secret.”

“The League kept double sets of files? One different from the other?”

“Something like that,” Embara said.

A young woman in a Speedo cycling outfit entered without knocking. “Hey, Harlen moved the meet up to three if you can make it.” She handed a set of stapled pages to Embara. “Here's the list you asked for.”

“You know he's always doing that kind of shit. Gotta be the cock of the walk.”

“Yakkity yak, and blah,” the other woman responded, rotating her hand in circles.

“Fine, fine,” Embara conceded, knocking against her gear apparatus with the back of her hand lightly. The woman left, leaving the door partially open.

Embara leaned forward on the table, dangling the papers. “Here's my list of former Damon Creel Defense Committee members I assembled for the film. Some may have moved on since then.” She set the list down. “See, I think the League couldn't help but let some of its files come out.” She made concise movements with her hand as a professor might illustrating a point for a student. “It's not like this stuff hadn't been leaking out for some time in memoirs of civil rights people and so forth.”

Monk stroked the sides of his goatee between thumb and index finger. “But like the CIA, you allow some bloodletting to appease the hounds, meanwhile the dirty work goes on. You're not suggesting the League is still in existence? They were officially de-funded in nineteen seventy-four.” It sounded naive as soon as it left his mouth.

“There's a kind of Delta Godfather down there, Manse Tigbee. He's got farm land and textile mills all over the place, freighters on the docks in Biloxi, and his catfish farms sell to restaurants as far away as France. He also runs a philanthropic venture called the Merit Foundation.”

“Meaning he finds merit in white projects?”