Only the Wicked (3 page)

“I know who Spears is, mister,” Dellums interjected. “He lives up the block from me on Stanford.”

A middle-aged woman in a jean skirt entered, and Price moved from around the counter to assist her.

Dellums regarded Monk and Carson with a fixed interest. “I've seen you in here a time or two,” he shook a finger at Carson. “How come y'all're looking for Marshall?”

Monk and Carson exchanged a feeble look and Carson spoke. “He just died, wasn't an hour ago it happened in the barber shop me and him go to.”

Dellums lowered his head and shook it from side to side. “Son of a gun, son of a gun,” he repeated, then blew his nose on his handkerchief.

“We're sorry to tell you like this, Mr. Dellums,” Monk offered quietly. “Do you know if he had any family? Anybody we should call to let them know what's happened?”

The older man took out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from a breast pocket. He didn't put them on, but handled them like prayer beads as he spoke. “There's one family member, I think. But I don't know how to contact her. We weren't the best of friends, you understand, but I've known him for quite a while, I guess you could say.”

“Did you know he played in the Negro Leagues?” Monk asked, aware he was digressing, yet eager to know something more about Spears.

“Oh yeah,” Dellums beamed, “he was very proud of his scrapbook.” The old man composed himself and put the glasses back in his pocket. “If you want, I can show you where he lived.”

The trio got to the duplex on Stanford in the 5300 block in less than ten minutes. Like a lot of Los Angeles' plaster-and-wood duplexes, it had a square front and was long down the sides. Running below the roof line was a wide arabesque of acanthus scrolls and swags. The building's only other nod to style were the doors, which were rounded on the top and recessed in the doorways. The small overgrown lawn was choked with alligator weeds and was bifurcated by a segmented walkway. A looming maple tree took up most of the space on the left area of grass, and there was a child's wagon upended on the right-hand side. A high shrub ran perpendicular to the duplex on one side, separating the place from a two-story house.

“He lived in that one,” Dellums pointed at a black security screen on the right side of the common porch.

“Ain't there something about using a dead man's keys?” Carson mumbled.

“Don't make this harder than it needs to be, Abe,” Monk chided. He got the security door open on his second try and then got them through the inner door. The room beyond was spacious, and light came in through the clean front windows. There was a couch underneath the windows, and two mismatched end tables in opposite corners. An ancient floor lamp in a third corner had a crooked shade perched on it at an angle. There was a coffee table with a scarred top in front of the couch. A copy of a recent
Ebony
lay open upon its surface.

Spears' apartment looked comfortable. It was a home waiting for its occupant to return. Monk knew the other two felt as uneasy as he did as they stood there, uncertain of what to do next.

“Let's close the door at least,” Carson said. “Just our luck the cops will roll by and we'd have a hell of a thing to explain.”

Dellums eased the door shut. “I been in here plenty of times, but it feels funny now.”

“I'm sure,” Monk said. “But we should try to find a number for a relative if we can.”

An open archway let into a dining room with a built-in sideboard and drawers. To the left of the sideboard was a doorway presumably leading to the bathroom and back bedroom. On the sideboard were a stack of magazines. The dining room also contained a drop-leaf table in the center that had four chairs placed around it. Two of the chairs matched. In one of the walls of that room, there was another open archway.

Carson peered at a poster taped to the wall near him. “What's with this?”

“Yeah, he got that the other week,” Dellums said.

The poster depicted an attractive black woman with streaming bejeweled braids in a tight, short skirt, her legs wrapped around a giant can of a malt liquor. It was a brand sold exclusively east of La Brea, in the 'hood, the ghetto delight of eight-ballers and shot-callers.

“She's the relative I mentioned,” Dellums illuminated. “That's why he put it up.”

“You got a name for her?” Monk inquired, anxious to look around and get out.

“Well,” Dellums mused, scratching at his chest. “I met her over here once, and he's mentioned her name a couple of three times and all.”

Monk squinted at Carson as the old fella worked up to giving them a complete answer.

“See, he called her name, but it wasn't normal. It was like, oh, you know that tall black-haired woman who's Italian or something? She goes by one name like that singer, the one who plays in movies. Always dressing kinda loose, even though she must be over fifty by now.”

Carson grinned and said, “I'm going to start looking around.” He walked toward the sideboard, leaving Monk to play
Jeopardy!
with Dellums.

“You mean like Madonna or Cher?” Monk hazarded.

“Right,” Dellums snapped his fingers. “This child got a name like that. Yeah, she's some kind of Hollywood model.”

“Maybe we'll find a phone book,” Monk said, touching the old man's arm as he moved past him.

In one of the drawers Monk found several paper bags folded over and kept shut with rubber bands. The bags each contained a wealth of receipts from the grocery store, drugstore, and so on. There didn't seem to be any particular order by dates, as the receipts went back past the last two decades.

Monk crouched down to a lower drawer under the yellow-and-white tile counter. A throb lanced his lower leg, and he winced, sinking to a knee. It had been more than nine months since he'd been shot in the Rancho Tajuata Housing Projects. A burst of high-velocity slugs had shattered part of his tibia and his leg had required reconstructive surgery. The case had started with the firebombing murder of several members of an immigrant family, and ended with him and Lt. Marasco Seguin of the LAPD fighting for their lives in an abandoned part of the projects.

He was in good condition for a man his age, and had healed satisfactorily. But, as the doctor indicated, the two areas on his torso from previous gun wounds years earlier, and a calcified lump behind his ear from one beating or another, there was a cumulative effect of violence to the body. Pro football and hockey players, boxers with their
dementia pugilistica
, and street fighters after enough brawls, suffered such effects. There was only so much resiliency to the flesh, the doctor had warned Monk. The older you got, the more knocks you took, it added up. And there were the psychological ramifications, too.

Monk focused and got the drawer open and looked through its contents.

“Spears had more receipts in this drawer, too.” Carson held up several more packets where he leaned over the sideboard. He turned and straightened. “Why in the hell did he keep all these? I keep mine for taxes, but I bunch them by year. And I sure don't have them going back all those years like he's got. And some are from out of state.”

“What if he got audited once and swore it wouldn't happen to him again?” Monk was looking through more drawers in the kitchen, occasionally massaging his lower leg.

“Mr. Dellums, any idea on that?” Carson asked.

Dellums was standing in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, watching the two intrude in his friend's home. “Not a one, really. Marshall wasn't the most talkative of sorts.”

“That's for damn sure,” Monk said. “Did Mr. Spears work for the railroad?” he asked Dellums, stepping into the dining room.

“Yes, but me and him mostly talked about baseball, Doan's pills, and argued about what was the best way to change a sink trap.” A rueful look crossed the old man's face, the significance of the loss of his companion coming on him in increments, deepening his melancholy.

“We'll find something,” Monk said, trying for a reassuring tone.

Back in the kitchen, in a drawer underneath the counter he found some tools, a potholder and electrical tape. No phone book. He looked about and spotted a phone attached to the wall in the breakfast nook. Scribbled on the wall next to the phone were several telephone numbers. Monk got a piece of paper and recorded the numbers.

“Hey, anybody look in the closet?”

“Not yet,” Carson replied to Dellums.

“I think that's where he kept one of his scrapbooks.” The older man crossed to a closet along the northern wall of the dining room. He opened the door, revealing a compact cubicle.

Two suits and several white shirts hung on a wooden rod spanning the length of the small space. On a shelf above the clothes was a large cardboard box. A green BEKINS logo was stenciled on its side.

Dellums started moving the box off the shelf and Carson came over to help him. They got it out and the carpenter put it on the dining room table. Among the items in the box were two photo albums containing old newspaper clippings and original shots.

There was one sepia-toned picture with a ruffled edge that got their attention. In it stood a man in a Homestead Grays' uniform and cap, dark piping running down his half-sleeves, a bat cocked back waiting for the pitch, the muscles rigid on his exposed forearm. He had one of his feet slightly off the ground, as his body leaned back just so.

It was evident from the picture the stadium was small since large poplar trees could be seen behind the stands. The audience behind the ballplayer had their mouths closed, quiet with anticipation. They, like the batter, were black.

“That's Marshall in 'forty-six,” Dellums said, tapping the image.

Monk catalogued the blurry features in the photo and tried to reconcile them with the old man who used to hover near broadcast baseball games like he was waiting for winning lottery numbers to be announced.

“Goddamn if that ain't something,” Carson admired.

“He played for the Birmingham Black Barons and the Cuban X Giants, too,” Dellums recounted. “But he always said of the three teams he played for, he liked being on the Grays the best.”

They leafed through the rest of the photo album, attempting to outguess each other as to which black baseball player they were viewing.

“Sam Bankhead, player manager until the Grays went bust in nineteen-fifty, I think,” Dellums recited, as they came upon a particular photo.

“That's Cool Papa Bell,” Carson said with conviction, jabbing his finger on a brittle newspaper clip.

“I can read too, Abe,” Monk chortled. There was another newspaper clipping about the Kansas City Monarchs and the piece included a photo of Bell, complete with identifying caption, showing some rookies how to steal a base.

The three remained hunched over the album until they got to the end. The trio had been lost in the faces, and the suggested stories, of men whose lives of triumph and sacrifice and disappointment were overwhelming.

Carson opened the second album.

“We better get back to work,” Monk reminded the two.

“There'll be time to look through this stuff later.”

“Okay,” Carson replied reluctantly. He stacked the second album on the first and lovingly put the two in the center of the table.

“Look at this,” Dellums said, pulling out a framed photograph of more baseball players. The group was posed in the outfield of a large stadium. Their uniforms were crisp and each had a large five-pointed star over the left breasts of their long-sleeved shirts. The words TOWNE AVENUE were reversed out in the center of the stars.

“The Towne Avenue All-Stars at Wrigley Field,” Dellums provided.

Marshall Spears was easily identifiable in a hound's-tooth suit, standing to one side of a group of younger men. The cut of the suit and flare of his hat set the era of the photograph as somewhere in the late 'fifties. Next to Spears was another black man in a zigzag-patterned sport coat and open collar. On the opposite end of where the team either stood or crouched, were two more men in suits. One white, the other black.

“Did he ever tell you who these other men in the suits were?” Monk pointed at the All-Stars photo while addressing Dellums.

At some point Dellums had put his glasses on and he shifted the heavy frame on his face as he answered. “The man standing next to Marshall was Harvey Lyle, a numbers man.”

“Yeah?” Carson exclaimed.

“Oh certainly. Fellas who operated on the tougher side of life were quite prevalent in Negro sports. Who else had the cash?” Dellums pushed his glasses on the bridge of his nose with an index finger. “If I'm not mistaken, I seem to remember one of his girlfriends was conking his hair one time, and deliberately poured the chemicals into his eyes. Half-blind, he stumbled out into the middle of Hoover waving his switchblade, trying to kill her. She then ran him down in his own powder-blue-and-white Mercury Montclair. That girl didn't stop driving until she got back to Galveston.”

“So he was the team's backer?” Monk asked, attempting to get Dellums back on track.

“Along with that man.” Dellums pointed at the white man on the other end. “That's Ardmore Antony. He had a club on Towne Avenue called The Nile. I think it stopped operating sometime around 'sixty-nine or 'seventy. But in its day, that was one of the spots, I'll tell you. I was in there one night and Dorothy Dandridge came in. Now you got all them young things these days shaking their rump and what-not on them videos, but Dorothy was class, man. She was one beautiful woman, in here,” he put a hand to his chest. “But what white movie boss was going to let a black woman, who should have been as famous as Elizabeth Taylor or Jean Harlow, get the kind of roles she deserved?” He touched his frames again, holding his head at an angle.

Carson's eyes twinkled at Monk as the two listened to the old man go on about the actress whose life had imploded. Dandridge was a woman driven by talent and ambition, only to be stymied in her career by the racism at work in Hollywood's apothecaries of fantasy. Color, it seemed, was just too real for the studios to deal with.