Dark End of the Street - v4

by Ace Atkins

Dang. People was livin’ out here in some kind of wildness. Houses slapped together out of rotten wood and old tin. Parts of trailers and shacks mashed together like somethin’ out of his aunt’s National Geographic magazines. One house was even built around an old car like that was some kind of bedroom. Made the place where he’d grown up in Hollywood seem like the Peabody.

  All the shacks sank beneath the level of the road in these little gulleys. Smoke and small fires from oil drums kicked up into the cold, ole gray day. Gray and brown. Nothin’ else. Streams of smoke seeped out of the back of hot-rodded nigra rides.

  Jon nodded. Yeah, he understood. “In the Ghetto.” He hummed the song a little bit.

  “You all right?” Ransom asked. “Seem a little jumpy.”

  “Just a mite excited.”

  “You seen the papers?”

  “Don’t believe in ’em.”

  “Said they found Miss Perfect at Libertyland,” Ransom said. “That where you left her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s a public place, kid.”

  “Said make it random.”

  Ransom didn’t seem too pleased with the words comin’ from him, so Jon added a bit. “She was given’ me T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Ma’ boy. Ma’ boy. Was she ever.”

  “What about leavin’ prints?”

  “Don’t have none,” Jon said. “I don’t exist.”

  Ransom didn’t say nothin’ as they rounded a corner onto a one-lane road and stopped in front a long green shack with a screened-in porch. A skinny black man that Jon had seen with Ransom at the casino was cooking out on a pit made from an oil drum. Guess that’s what all these people were doin’, livin’ off the casinos.

  Man gave a toothless smile as they passed.

  Jon followed Ransom into the porch where he saw a white man, lookin’ young and kind of muscled, in a tan sheriff’s outfit. At first Jon thought about boltin’ for the front door but eased back a bit when he seen the man give Ransom a real good handshake.

  “Jon, this is Sheriff Beckum. Wanted y’all to talk.”

  Jon took a seat in an old schoolhouse chair. Orange plastic and dirty as hell.

  “Everything goin’ ‘right?” Beckum asked.

  “Up twelve points in the polls,” he said. “And that’s in Nashville.”

  “I guess ole Tunica was just too small for you,” Beckum said. The sheriff sat in an old chair, too. But his was wood and looked like it’d been sittin’ around since the beginning of time. He took a cigar from Ransom and lit it with a lot of satisfaction.

  Ransom didn’t offer Jon nothin’.

  Dang sittin’ down was about to drive Jon crazy. His leg felt like it was gonna explode. He had so much energy. So much dang vitamins in his system that he wanted to jump through that ole rusted screen and fly to the moon.

  “Jon, you listenin’?” Ransom asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I said when Travers was up here last, he came with a black fella,” Beckum said. “Some bondsman, bounty hunter type named Davis.”

  The sheriff started laughin’ up a mess when he said it. Thought it was funny that a nigra could ever work as such. Jon didn’t think that was funny. Black Elvis was one of the finest men he’d ever known.

  “Travers will be with him,” Ransom said. “Can you do it, Jon?”

  Jon smelled the magnolias on his scarf again. He felt a stirring down between his legs.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “All three this time. The black man, Travers, and the girl.”

  Jon nodded and kept chewing on his gum, thinkin’ about the sweetness of it all.

  Ransom laughed and punched Beckum in the shoulder. “He likes ’em sweet and young.”

  At that, Jon stood and walked back outside. His mind and legs just atinglin’ and buzzin’. Memphis was waitin’.

  Chapter 55

  THE ELECTION SURROUNDED us. Everywhere U and I drove, we saw huge posters, cardboard signs, and billboards for Elias “Honor for Our State” Nix and Jude “Commitment to Our Future” Russell. The election was next week and all the white noise of signs and radio ads and television interviews made my head throb and my eyes feel raw. I kept thinking about the night before and those crazed rednecks at the compound, that rebel flag waving obscenely by Nix’s true office, and the men who’d wanted to kill us. I wondered how a man with such a polluted mind could’ve ever reached such a level. I couldn’t even contemplate that he was being seriously considered for such an important office. Then, I remembered Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott.

  U turned on Riverside Drive and wound up a twisting hill to the Bluffs overlooking the city. I remembered from my history classes how the early frontiersmen and Indians used the Bluffs for protection against flooding and attacks, even recalling how the French governor of Louisiana had tried to overrun the Chickasaw back in the seventeen hundreds and had his ass handed to him.

  As U drove closer to the address we had for Bobby Lee Cook, my stomach twisted and my head pounded more, knowing the only one who could help us hated me beyond words.

  “Remind me to stop pissing off people,” I said, watching the front of his truck hugging the road, passing million-dollar houses with wrought-iron security gates.

  “It’s a talent,” U said. “You’re too good at it.”

  At the peak of the Bluffs, U pulled in front of a Mediterranean Revival number with lots of stucco and a red barrel-tiled roof. Two vans and Cook’s Cadillac was parked outside. U pulled in, close to the front door, and shut off his engine.

  “You want to do this alone?” he asked.

  “Could use someone to watch my ass.”

  U pulled off his shades. “Cool. Didn’t want to have to tell Abby and her mean-ass cousin how you got it shot off.”

  Two girls in sweaty long-sleeve T-shirts and jeans were pulling weeds by a wide marble staircase flanked by squatty palm trees. One was blond, her hair up in a bun, no makeup. The other had red hair pulled into a ponytail and extremely long legs. They were both dirty and grass-stained but I knew from one glance they worked for Cook.

  The women were used to spinning on brass poles in air-conditioning, swindling old men into having ten-dollar drinks, and telling tales to customers about dreams they’d never had. I had to laugh. Cook had them doing real work.

  We rang the bell and within a minute, the lithe bartender I’d met at the Golden Lotus, the one with short brown hair and a nice stomach, opened the door. She had on an apron and was drying her hands on a towel. I’d really hoped all these women would’ve been hanging out by his pool in bikinis. Not doing manual labor.

  “Cowboy,” she said, a tight smile in the corner of her mouth.

  “Howdy,” I said. “Cook home?”

  She looked over at U and then back at me.

  “Don’t make trouble here. He has people, too, you know.”

  “No trouble.”

  “Just a friendly warning,” she said, tossing the towel over her shoulder and hooking her thumbs into belt loops along her small waist.

  “Appreciated.”

  She told us to wait in the foyer. We did.

  A massive chandelier dripped down from a high ceiling. Big marble statues of naked women eating grapes stood out from the garish red walls. The foyer spread in to an open living room with a sunken pit like the Beatles’s pad in HELP! Zebra- and Cheetah-printed furniture. Class with a capital K.

  U nudged me and I looked by a coat rack near the door. In a glass case for all visitors to see, stood three large trophies celebrating second, third, and fifth place in local bodybuilding championships for men over fifty.

  I said, “Always wanted to be Mr. Senior Mid-South.”

  “Me, too,” U said. “What’s that say, Airport Holiday Inn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “First class, brother.”

  Glass walls covered the entire back half of the house as if it had been built in a cutaway to show the interior. Outside, ther
e was a small wooden deck with iron chairs and a table with a Cinzano umbrella. No women. Damn it.

  Wind from the Mississippi made knocking sounds against the huge sheet of glass, and outside I could see small, immature pines bending.

  A door opened from the southern edge of the house and I heard some awful post-Eagles, Don Henley music blasting from a far room. “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.”

  Two more young women followed him, both looking tired as hell, as he began pointing to the black granite floor. “Mr. Clean. All over. Watch the carpets. Don’t even think about getting them wet.”

  They nodded but made faces at his back as he passed.

  Cook wore tight bicycle shorts, circa nineteen eighty-seven, and this bizarre satin tank top that was just plain disturbing. It really didn’t qualify as a shirt since it darted below his nipples and lotion-tanned chest.

  He fluffed up the spikes on his gray head and crossed his arms over his chest in order to make his balloon-sized biceps even larger. A massive leather weight belt covered most of his stomach.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  He walked ahead, back to the weight room, with the bad music blaring, and I looked at U and shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give us six. . . . Six would be nice.”

  He’d filled the room with rows of chrome Nautilus equipment and several racks of free weights. A back wall of windows overlooked the river, but the others were covered in mirrors. A beefy guy in a Golden Lotus T-shirt lay sprawled on a weight bench while being spotted by a guy who, although bald, could’ve been his twin. The same tanned hide and veined puffy look of a steroid addict.

  “Man, this is a hell of a lot better than Saints camp,” U said. “Remember?”

  “You mean the junkyard? Hell, yes. Had to drive through all those wrecked cars just to get to practice.”

  “You come here to swap little tales, or to talk?” Cook said, sitting his Spandexed ass on a Nautilus machine and working out his neck in a perpetual nod.

  “Don’t,” U said, waiting for me to drive a truck through his comment. “Fight it.”

  The beefy man benching re-racked the weight with a clanging thud and grunted as if someone had just stepped on his crotch. I wanted to tell him that 315 pounds didn’t really call for a show. But I stayed with U’s plan, holding more comments inside.

  Then I decided to get right to it. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were working with Levi Ransom?”

  Cook kept nodding yes, until he gave a big grunt, and cranked out a last rep on the machine.

  He wiped off his face with a towel and took a sip from a bottle of Evian.

  “We’ve been through this. Door is back the way you came.”

  “I saw the police report on Mary James and Eddie Porter. Levi Ransom killed them. You were washing money for the Dixie Mafia. What happened, Cook, needed a favor? You needed to flex a little and prove you were a badass?”

  “Fuck you,” he said, moving on to a bicep machine for preacher curls. He bent over the bench, almost in a prayerlike pose, and muscled up a bar attached to a pulley system.

  “What did Eddie Porter do? Find out about your deal with Ransom?”

  He ignored me. I looked around the mirrored room.

  U had wandered off. He was talking to the two meatheads. I thought I overheard him giving tips on how to bench more. One of the boys was smiling.

  Cook took another sip of water.

  “If you’d been straight with me, Loretta wouldn’t have been shot.”

  The intensity in his face broke away. His jaw fell slack.

  “No one told you?” I asked. “Didn’t figure you to be a true friend of hers anyway.”

  Then the son of a bitch really snapped.

  I could tell he’d been trying to keep it in. Red-faced and breathing deep lungfuls of air. But after I said “true friend,” his arms darted out and yanked me into a headlock and began pounding me in the face. He only got off two quick jabs to my cheek and forehead before I pulled my head out and twisted his arm behind his back.

  He fell to his knees with a high-pitched scream.

  The meatheads ran to him.

  But U had drawn a gun and yelled for them to stay. It was the type of command you’d give a dog.

  They stayed. Cook buckled with intense pain. I wanted to hold him there forever.

  Chapter 56

  “COOL IT,” I said. I spoke as pleasantly as I could to a man I’d brought to his knees with pain. I twisted his arm an inch higher behind his back.

  “You motherfucker,” Cook screamed. “Don’t you ever say that, you goddamned cocksucker. Come into my house? I’ll kill your ass.”

  I pulled his arm even higher, heard a slight crack, and then let his arm relax about two inches. He grunted; I let him go. He almost fell on his face, but caught himself with the other arm and used the preacher machine to stand.

  “They shot her in the chest and left her bleeding on the floor of JoJo’s bar. Nice people. Even set fire to the business that JoJo had run for thirty-five years, man. You know what that means? You know what kind of sweat and patience and hard work that takes? She had to lie on the ground of the bar and watch their whole life burn around her while she waited to either bleed to death or catch on fire. Yeah, Cook, you’re a great friend to her.”

  He closed his eyes and stood there for a moment, catching his breath and rotating his arm in its socket.

  U walked over and turned off the boombox. He told the men to sit down but one still tried to get to Cook.

  “Sit down!” Cook yelled.

  We were all quiet for several moments. I think Cook wanted to cry, if he’d had any soul or conscience left. But the only emotion he seemed to possess in grief was shutting his damned mouth.

  The wind battered the wall of glass and the sky became dark for a few moments. Then the room became light again, bright yellow beams streaking across the tops of trees lining the Bluffs.

  “You come with me,” Cook said, pointing outside. “They stay.”

  I followed him to the deck, hanging stilt-legged off the side of the house. The view made my stomach jump a little as the wind loosely blew the tops of the trees and my hair. I put my hands in my pockets and stayed silent. Most of the time when you wanted information, it was best to shut up.

  Out in the natural light, Cook looked much older than I thought. Small lines had formed above his upper lip and loose folds of skin fell over his eyelids.

  “Eddie Porter was a great friend,” he said, his hands on the railing as he looked down at the river passing in muddy, swirling circles. “I tried to help him even after I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Eddie Porter stole two hundred and seventy thousand dollars from Bluff City.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, his voice more twangy than usual. Less controlled. “It wasn’t my money, it was Ransom’s. He floated me for the studio and for an Ampex recorder when I got started. He sometimes used us to run through some cash. He never took anything we made, only got back what he’d given. . . . Porter took it all.”

  “So why did he kill Clyde’s wife?”

  “Eddie was in love with Mary. Ransom knew it.” Cook wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Killing him would be too easy. He wanted Eddie to watch Mary hurt for a while.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “So, if Clyde was there, why didn’t they kill him, too?”

  “Ransom didn’t know he was there. Clyde was hiding in some old car outside. Clyde told me about seeing it. I told him to keep quiet, but he’d repeat the story to anyone who’d listen. When Ransom heard about it, he said he was going to go put a bullet in Clyde that night. But I begged him. I begged that hick bastard to leave my friend alone. I told him about Clyde’s mind problems and how he was living on the street now. I said he’d be dead in a couple weeks, and I really believed it. I don’t think Ransom showed him mercy, I just think he couldn’t find him. When Clyde reappeared five years later, everything was buried.”<
br />
  “And Clyde was lost.”

  “At first, he lived on the street because he wanted to. Didn’t want to face nothin’. Then everyone blamed him for Mary’s death. Everyone thought he’d killed both of them because of the affair. He was an outcast among musicians who loved Eddie and the whole damned black community in Memphis. Shelters even turned him away ’cause they thought he was a killer. I heard one story about Clyde trying to sleep in a church basement one Christmas and the preacher dragging him out into the cold by his bare feet.”

  “So why now?” I asked. “Why would Ransom send men to look for Clyde and to mess with Loretta in New Orleans?”

  “No, sir,” Cook said, as one of his girls came out and handed him a zip-up workout jacket. He slid into it and dabbed his face again with a towel. “Listen, Nick. I don’t really give a fuck about you. All right? But Loretta wouldn’t want you dead. So go back to New Orleans.”

  “Will you answer one last question?”

  “Your five minutes are long gone.”

  “Listen to me,” I said, getting closer to Cook and smelling his vitamin-fused breath and dried sweat. I watched his eyes flicker with a recognition that the balcony may not have been the best place to take me. His fear made me a little uncomfortable. “I will call up Levi Ransom today and I’ll tell him you told me a great story about his life in Memphis music and how you were planning on having lunch with the district attorney next week. I’ll tell him what a nice place you have here and how he’s just a twisted hick who needs you to run his money. Fair enough? Or you want to keep going?”

  He looked back through the glass to the other side, to his television room and his curvy houseworkers and sunken pit complete with stone fireplace. Storm clouds were beginning to gather to the north and sootlike black clouds inched toward a white sun.

  “She used to cook for me,” Cook said. Sounded as if he was out of breath. Tired.

  I sat down and checked my pockets for cigarettes. Old habit.

  “Greens. Black-eyed peas and fried chicken that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. Why do you think she did that for me? No one ever treated me like that. I’d been on my own since I was fifteen. This was after she could have left my ass and signed with Stax or Hi or anyone she wanted. Why did she do that?”