“Sounds like quite a character.”
“That’s what I gather.”
“Do you have any photographs?”
“No, I’ve never even seen one. I have no idea what he looks like.”
“How about your parents? Are they still—”
She shook her head. “They’re both dead,” she said. “Car accident.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
She accepted Rick’s sympathy with a sad smile. “Thanks.” She sipped her coffee. “Oh, I didn’t write this down,” she said, tipping her cup toward the form. “I think he worked in radio for a time. You know how they used to do live music broadcasts from stations? My mom said he’d been the host on one of those, sort of like the King Biscuit Time they do up in Helena, Arkansas, that kind of thing.”
“Where was this?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It could have been in Greenwood or Memphis for all I know. Like I said, this is stuff my mom used to tell me when I was young.” She finished her coffee and set the cup on Rick’s desk. “That’s all I can think of.”
“Tell me about this phone call you got. You didn’t recognize the voice?”
Lollie shrugged. “No, just some man. Black, I think.” She got out of the chair and went to the wall where Rick had several framed newspaper articles about the case he had solved in McRae. “Only thing I’m sure of is, it wasn’t anyone I know.”
“And he asked for your grandfather?”
“Yeah, said he was trying to find Tucker Woolfolk. When I asked who was calling, the man hung up.”
“Can you think of anything else? Did he have brothers or sisters?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, moving from one article to the next.
“How about his wife?”
She looked over her shoulder at Rick. “My grandmother? That’s who I was named after. But I don’t know anything about her, not even her maiden name. I think she died pretty young.” Lollie pointed to a photo of Rick in one of the articles. In it, he had peeled back the gauze to show the twelve-gauge wound on his neck. “What’s it like to get shot?”
Rick struck a nonchalant pose, his hand casually touching the scar. “Let’s just say it hurts more than a paper cut on the tongue.”
She laughed at that and said, “I bet it does.”
There was an awkward silence before Rick said, “Now, the only thing left to discuss is the matter of my retainer.”
“Of course.” Lollie crossed to Rick’s desk and opened her purse. She was about to reach in, then paused. She looked at him and said, “Did you know your grandparents, Mr. Shannon?”
He figured she was angling for a sentimentality discount. “I knew two of the four.”
“I didn’t know any of mine,” Lollie said. “But I’d like to. I don’t have any other family left.” She pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to Rick. “I hope this will be enough to get started.”
Rick casually looked inside. It was five hundred dollars.
4
RICK SHOWED UP at the vet’s office with the most expensive cat carrier they’d ever seen. It had a fleece-lined, battery-powered heating pad on the bottom.
The vet gave Rick a sack full of eardrops, eyedrops, pills, ointments, and nutritional supplements. Then she handed him a pack of tissues and said, “He has sneezing fits.”
“Fits?” Rick looked at the small ball of orange fur. “How much snot could he produce?”
“You’ll be surprised.”
Rick put Crusty in the carrier and took him out to his truck. He set him on the front seat while he looked through the boxes of pet stuff in the back. There was a top-of-the-line kitty condo, two scratching posts, an automated kitty-litter box, and assorted furry toys. He found the seat-belt adaptor for the carrier, secured it in the passenger seat, then headed for the station.
He turned on the radio. “That’s the Sippie Wallace classic ‘Mighty Tight Woman,’ from Bonnie Raitt’s first album. I’m Mike Rushing, and you’re listening to WVBR-FM, classic rock from the banks of the big river.” Rushing was Rick’s boss as well as the station owner. He was an aging hippie who’d inherited some money in the late sixties and opened a record store in Jackson. Parlayed that into half a dozen stores around the state, then sold before file swapping killed the retail record business; walked away with a bundle. He moved to Vicksburg, bought the radio station, and did the three-to-eight shift.
WVBR held one of the oldest radio licenses in the state, still broadcasting from the original building out on Porters Chapel Road. It was a small, quasi-Mission-style building, an irregular cube, almost windowless, sitting on the edge of a field near some woods on the outskirts of town. The entire building was a cozy eight hundred square feet, but what it lacked in size it made up for in character. The studio had a lived-in, communal funkiness. The walls were papered with backstage passes, classic album artwork, and old head-shop posters of Dylan, Hendrix, Easy Rider, and R. Crumb’s doo-dah man truckin’ down the road. The transmitter tower was in the field next to the station.
Rick parked in front of the studio. “We’re here,” he said to Crusty. “You ready to rock and roll?” The kitty raised his head slightly and opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything. “Oh, that’s right,” Rick said. “It’s time for food or medicine or something.” He looked at the instructions. “Well, soon. Just hang in there.” Rick got out of the truck and stretched. The nearby woods were pulsing with cicadas. He looked up at the stars and saw the flashing red lights at the top of the station’s antennae and thought about what he might play first on tonight’s show. Cat Stevens? Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys?
He opened the passenger door and undid the seat belt. Crusty made a feeble mewling noise when Rick picked up the carrier. He looked inside. Crusty was curled up on the pad, barely moving. As he headed for the building, Rick worried that the little guy might not make it.
He walked into the studio just as Mike said, “That’s Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band with ‘Half Moon’ on WVBR. Rick Shannon’s next, redefining classic rock, so stay tuned.” He went into a commercial break and pulled off his headphones. He pointed at the cat carrier and said, “What’s that?”
“My new life partner,” Rick said. “Crusty Boogers.” He spoke to the cat. “Crusty, this is my boss.”
Mike looked inside the carrier. “She seems a little young to be in a relationship.”
“It’s a he.”
He looked at Rick, eyebrows arched. “Sorry, I didn’t know you went that way.”
“Hey, I saw a man having sex with a dog the other day. I’ve got pictures if you want to see.”
“Maybe another time,” Mike said as he put his headphones on and waited for the spot break to end. “That does it for me,” he said. “I’ll be back tomorrow, but for now, I’m leaving you with ‘Questions 67 and 68.’ Here’s CTA on VBR.” He pulled off his headphones and said, “Just a thought, but if you open with ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 and 35,’ you can go into a whole numbers set.”
Rick mulled it over for a moment, then said, “Paul Simon. ‘Fifty Ways to Lose Your Lover.’”
“‘Hey Nineteen.’ Steely Dan.”
Rick snapped his finger. “Oh! I was going to say ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’ ”
“Ewww, clever boy. How about ′19th Nervous Breakdown’?”
“‘Rude Awakening #2.’”
“Don’t know it.”
“Creedence.”
“Oh. Then back to Chicago for ‘25 or 6 to 4.’”
Rick held up his hands to surrender. “I’m opening with something for Crusty.”
“Lemme guess.” Mike gathered his things and cleared out from behind the board. “ ‘Cat Scratch Fever?’ ”
“Cats hate Ted Nugent. Everybody knows that.” Rick sat down behind the console and pulled the computer keyboard close. The studio equipment was mostly digital. Mike had stored a vast library of classic rock on the hard drives and if you knew what you were doin
g, you could almost program your entire show in forty-five minutes. Rick tapped out Elton John’s name and scrolled down the song list, then made a selection.
Coming up on the top of the hour, Rick cleared his throat, opened his mike, and said, “This is WVBR-FM, Vicksburg. Classic rock for kitties.” He went into “Honky Cat” by Elton John.
“Very nice,” Mike said. “Have a good show. See you tomorrow.”
As Elton sang about quitting those days and his redneck ways, Rick pulled out the instructions for Crusty. Ointment in the eyes, drops in the ears, a handful of pills down the hatch chased with a syringe of sticky kitty formula. When he finished, Crusty was lying in Rick’s lap, feeble and pathetic. Rick cued up an Otis Redding song, then went to a commercial.
After the spot set, Rick opened his mike and said, “Well, friends, I’ve got some news to share with y’all. And it’s good news, I think, and it’s this: I have adopted. That’s right, there’s a new member in the Shannon family and I’ve got him here with me in the studio. Now I know what a lot of you must be thinking. That Rick Shannon’s not exactly what you’d call prime parent material. And if that’s what you are thinking, you’ll be relieved to know that I’ve adopted a child of the feline persuasion. Weighing in at two pounds and one ounce, with a nice head of striped orange hair, I’d like you-all to meet Crusty Boogers.” Rick gently lifted Crusty to the mike, hoping he might meow. Instead he started sneezing like a machine gun. “Whoa!” Strands of stringy opaque mucus shot out of the tiny nostrils in every direction. “Eww! Not on the mixing board! No, no, no!” Rick had never seen anything like it. “My shirt!” Crusty must have sneezed twenty times in five seconds before running out of gas, dazed and exhausted. Rick laid him back on the heated pad in the carrier. There was a moment of dead air before he said, “Boy oh boy.”
“Well,” Rick said. “There’s a waxy cat goober dangling from the microphone like a hanged man.” He paused. “I’m not sure I can describe it any better than that, and why would you want me to?” He wiped it off with a tissue. “Suffice it to say, Crusty’s boogers aren’t always crusty. The vet says it’s a viral problem in the sinuses that triggers a bacteriological problem that triggers all the, uh, what’ll we call it? All the discharge. Well, anyway, I better start cleaning this up. Meantime, let’s dedicate this next one to the sickest little kitty in show business. Here’s ‘Mr. Pitiful’ on WVBR-FM.”
GOING INTO THE last hour of his shift, the phones got quiet and Crusty fell asleep without any further sneezing attacks. Rick had requests for a couple of lengthy tracks, so he cued them up, starting with Boz Scaggs’s version of “Loan Me a Dime.” He figured it was a good opportunity to start looking for Tucker Woolfolk.
In his brief time as a PI, Rick had learned that most of his work, at least in the preliminary stages, would be done sitting down. The databases that are at the core of every conspiracy nut’s nightmares are gold mines for private investigators. If you exist in real life, you exist in a database somewhere. If you’re looking for someone as old as Tucker Woolfolk, the best place to start might be the Social Security Death Master File. If he found Mr. Woolfolk there, he’d save himself a lot of time and increase his average per-hour pay. Unfortunately, the death master file database isn’t perfect, being largely incomplete for the years prior to 1980. Another pitfall was having to know the exact name under which the subject was listed in the system. Was it Tucker A. Woolfolk, or maybe H. Tucker Woolfolk? Lollie hadn’t listed any initials one way or another. Rick tried several variations but didn’t get any hits. It was tempting to think this meant the man was alive and well and living somewhere, but it was just as likely that he’d died before 1980 or that he had a middle name Rick didn’t know about.
Just for grins, Rick did a multiple-engine search on the last name. This was usually a waste of time unless the name was extremely uncommon. Sure enough, “Woolfolk” generated nearly 53,000 results. Rick glanced at the first fifty but the answer wasn’t there.
The request line started to blink, so he picked it up. “VBR.”
“‘TVC 15,’ ‘Eight Days a Week, ’‘Five to One,’ and ‘905.’”
Rick laughed and said, “Oh, hey, Mike. You’re still working on that number set?”
“Yeah, once I get started on these things …”
“Let’s see, ‘TVC 15’ is Bowie, ‘Eight Days a Week’ is Beatles. What were the other two?”
“Doors and the Who.”
“Hey, listen,” Rick said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I did a sort of impromptu pitch tonight to raise money for the local animal shelter.”
“No, I heard that. It was good. I’ll contact them tomorrow and set up something formal.” He paused a moment before he said, “ ‘Horse With No Name.’ ”
“Okay, uh, ‘Wild Dogs,’ Tommy Bolin.”
“‘Diamond Dogs,’ Bowie.”
“Pink Floyd’s Animals. That’s ‘Pigs on the Wing’ and ‘Sheep.’ ”
“ ‘Birds,’ Neil Young.”
“Stones, ‘Monkey Man.’ ”
“Get back to work.”
“Right. See ya.”
As he hung up, Rick thought of another song for the number set, a classic. His favorite version was by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. “Riot in Cell Block #9.” This, in turn, reminded Rick that the next place to look for Tucker Woolfolk was prison. Based on Lollie’s description of her grandfather as a con man, it didn’t seem like too big a stretch. Rick logged on to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Web site and did a series of searches but came up empty again. It was possible, if Woolfolk was incarcerated, that he was in a state or county lockup. Rick took a few minutes to run the name through a few of the Mississippi correctional institutions, but he came up empty.
As midnight approached, Rick figured he’d operate under the assumption that Tucker Woolfolk was out there somewhere. And with that in mind, Rick selected his last song for the night, Edgar Winter’s White Trash doing “Still Alive and Well.”
THIS WAS A first for Rick. Every time he’d looked for someone, he’d found them in one or more of the traditional databases. But not Tucker Woolfolk. Rick’s best guess was that he was missing part of the man’s name. He’d call Lollie tomorrow and see if she had any ideas on that.
As he drove home with Crusty asleep in his carrier, Rick started thinking about what Lollie had said about her grandfather being a snake-oil salesman traveling with shows in the south. It seemed a safe assumption that much had been written on the subject and now Rick was going to have to dig through all that. He didn’t know if there were any statistics to back him up but, based on his experience, he figured Mississippi had a higher ratio of historians per capita than most states. You couldn’t swing a dead catfish in Warren County without hitting somebody who claimed to be an expert on the Civil War, or civil rights, the blues, the boll weevil, or anything else having to do with the Magnolia State. Some were apologists for terrible things that had happened, while others seemed bent on demonizing aspects of the culture that were largely benign. But one thing was certain, there was no shortage of people interested in the state’s past, ranging from cockeyed hobbyists to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss.
Rick suspected someone out there was an expert on the traveling shows that used to crisscross the south. And if Tucker Woolfolk had been associated with them, maybe there was some mention of him in somebody’s thesis.
He got back to the Vicksburg around twelve-thirty. He gave Crusty his last feeding and tried putting him to bed in his new kitty condo, but Crusty wouldn’t have anything to do with it, preferring instead the carrier’s heated pad. Rick grabbed a beer and his cigar box. He loaded his pipe, took a hit, then got online and started poking around. As expected, the history of minstrel and medicine shows was well documented. Both had roots in European traditions dating back hundreds of years. In the U.S. they were traced from as early as 1820 to as late as the 1950s.
If Tucker Woolfolk was in his early seventies, he’d
have been old enough to see the last of the minstrel shows that had lingered in the south long after they’d died off in the rest of the country. And if he’d been a theater manager of some sort, as Lollie said, he might even have promoted shows such as the Silas Green Minstrels out of New Orleans, the Cavalcade from Mobile, Alabama, or the Vernon Brothers from Macon, Georgia, as they passed through Mississippi. These troupes of string bands, singers, acrobats, and dancers were, in some instances, whites performing in black face. But there were also all-black troupes owned by black entrepreneurs and, in time, there were even some integrated shows.
It occurred to Rick that in their own way, these traveling companies foreshadowed radio and television, each troupe a different channel to divert you from your troubles. This was especially true of the medicine shows that, like the modern infomercial, used entertainment and celebrities to gather a crowd before selling magic elixirs. Click, Sammy Green’s Minstrel Show, click, the Darktown Scandals Revue, click, the Jay C. Lintler Mighty Minstrel Show, and dozens more.
Rick came across one particular production that caught his eye. He noticed it for two reasons. First because it was based out of Port Gibson, Mississippi, in whose jail Rick had enjoyed a night of hospitality, and second because the name sounded familiar. F. S. Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels was a traveling show that, at one time or another, featured many of the great entertainers of the century. Legendary performers such as W. C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton, and Dizzy Gillespie performed with F.S. Wolcott’s show, as did Rufus Thomas, the R&B great out of Memphis who was a comedian with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the mid-1930s. Rick knew Rufus Thomas not from the minstrel stage, but from radio in the 1960s and ′70s, when he had big hits with “Walking the Dog” and “Do the Funky Chicken.”
Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5) Page 4