Only the Wicked (28 page)

Bookending them were her parents, her father tall and lean in the saddle like one of those bronc busters on that old rerun show,
Gunsmoke.
Her mother looked uneasy on her mount, but her hands were relaxed, loose on reins entwined in her strong fingers.

She spent some time smiling at the snapshots of her big sister and her at the beach, the time she broke her arm or Sharon dressed up pretty for the prom. Lindsey Allen had those quiet moments of dread, as her own children began to sprout, realizing they had already formed their own ideas and interpretations of life independent of her or their father. You could see that individual thinking on her sister's face in the Grand Canyon photo.

Yet she knew, going back upstairs, holding onto several of her sister's diaries, psyches were made up of various components glommed from those who influenced us, positively and negatively. At certain stages of development we might consciously use the same phrases as a teacher we liked, or sit in a chair and cross our legs the way our mother did. But she also was sure there were some things one couldn't explain through social science.

She had seen characteristics in Sharon, her sister, that had been replicated in Sharon, her daughter. And the two had never met, at least on a physical plane.

It's not like she was a nut for that kind of mystical claptrap, although she did read a self-help or business motivational book occasionally. And there was a new book she'd been considering buying,
The Shackle of Dreams
, by one of those gurus of inner peace, a woman whose name she couldn't remember at the moment. A couple of people in the office had been raving about this woman's book and her tapes.

She got undressed, put on her night slip, brushed her teeth and gargled. In bed, she carefully read through the dairy Sharon kept when she'd been in Mississippi. Lindsey Allen couldn't remember the last time she'd read the dairy, but guessed it must have been when she'd been in college. Sharon's infatuation with Ava was evident in her writings. Her script was in blue pen, a feminine handwriting replete with large circles for dots over her I's.

Her sister recounted various activities of the Creel campaign, and her impressions of the then young revolutionary's reactions to the racist attacks in the press and by the business community. She also told of an incident where Creel stood down four whites who had cut the three of them off—Sharon, him and Ava—on a street in Memphis. Sharon observed in her diary that Creel seemed full of himself, but he was also brave and driven to make something better for black people; and that he knew he'd never be elected mayor, but the campaign served to highlight the enforced division between white and black voters in a South being dragged and brow-beaten to change.

There were several long and convoluted passages describing the relationship between Ava and Creel that only a nineteen-year-old girl from a proper home, yet hinting at her horniness, could produce. Lindsey Allen plumbed the writing for evidence that her sister was or wasn't a virgin, but there seemed to be no definitive writing on that personal aspect. She fingered the section where the missing pages had been torn out of the book. The time period in the book stopped two days before she was murdered.

The last full page recounted a long staff meeting where Creel shouted at Ava that maybe she ought to take her pale little dilettante ass back to mommy and daddy. What happened immediately after that outburst, if her sister had written about it, was now gone. The supposition could work toward his guilt, or she supposed his innocence since Creel's side would no doubt maintain the people who slaughtered the girls removed the pages to further incriminate him.

“Find out anytiiing new?” her husband asked her, settling in bed beside her.

“I got to know my sister again,” she said fondly.

Good,” her husband said, kissing her and rubbing a hand in the small of her back. “But nothing about, well, you know.”

Inspired by her journalistic archeology, and the answers that might be there, Lindsey Allen catalogued the material in her head. “She does mention she and Ava were out one night in Memphis' Pinch section and got to talking to two apparently prim young college men. What had prompted her to write about it was one was black, the other white. The black one was from out of state, Ohio, she wrote, ‘cause she overheard him talking about the Buckeyes with someone at the bar. The white one was a Mississippi boy.'”

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.