Only the Wicked

by Gary Phillips

  He also leafed through a few books on the Delta blues, but could find no reference for Patton’s “Killin’ Blues.” Although he did come across a passage stating the actual count of songs recorded by Patton would vary from list to list. The writer suggested Patton, like several blues artists, may have secreted away some of his songs like one would deposit money in a bank, thereby to have something of value in case hard times hit.

  Monk dropped by the Mayfair market on Hyperion on the way home and bought food for dinner. He arrived to an empty house and prepared a supper of potato and fish cakes and grilled portobello mushroom salad with corn muffins. Fleetingly, he’d considered getting a bottle of wine, but its myriad variances were lost on him. He could make a decent choice when it came to brew, and had done so. He’d chosen Saparro Black, and was enjoying one while at the stove when Kodama came in.

  “Darling.” She put an arm around his neck, smooching him loudly.

  “Baby, baby.” He plopped his freshly patted fish cakes into the hot oil.

  Kodama wore a knee-length red Chanel skirt and matching tunic with black matte buttons. She undid the top buttons on the blouse and got a beer for herself from the refrigerator. She sat at the table in the breakfast nook, examining one of Creel’s books.

  “This what everything’s about?” She opened the collection of essays, reading the introduction by the late radical defense lawyer William Kunstler, whose funeral she’d attended in New York at the Riverside Church.

  He flipped the sizzling patties over, savoring the smell. Monk told her about the clipping Dellums had brought him that morning. “My cousin seems to have spent his last few years either trying to reconcile his cowardice, or looking for some evidence that he did what was right for the cause.” He shook a fist in the air in a quick power to the people.

  Kodama crossed her shapely legs, her hand supporting her chin as she gazed at him.

  Monk removed the fish cakes with a spatula and lifted them onto doubled-up paper towels. The rest of the food was already on the table and he transferred the patties onto plates. The phone rang.

  Kodama got up and plucked the handset from the wall phone. “Yes … Oh, hi, Dex … Uh-huh. Listen tough guy, you caught us as we were just sitting down to eat … Of course Ivan cooked. What do you mean by that? … Sure … Yeah, I’ll have him call you after dinner.”

  They ate and Kodama read Kunstler’s foreword aloud. She bit off a corner of a muffin, and said, “Listen to what Bill wrote here, ‘I stand firm in my belief of Damon’s innocence. Let me be perfectly clear, the testimony of Kennesaw Riles was spurious from beginning to end.”’ She looked at Monk for a reaction, then resumed, ‘“I am assured by parties who will never enter a court of law who the guilty bastards are. Who it is who impeded Damon Creel that evening, and who it is, who’s still alive, still running the show from his mansion in the woods, who calls the shots, so to speak.”’

  Monk thoughtfully chewed on a thick slice of mushroom. “You implying we should try to contact ol’ Bill through one of those psychic hotlines and see if he’ll come clean?”

  “What if the murder is somehow tied to something that’s happening now with Creel’s case?”

  Monk swallowed. “I checked. His last bid for a new trial was turned down three years ago.”

  “But there’s an active defense committee in Atlanta. And Creel remains on Amnesty International’s list of political prisoners.” She sopped up salad dressing with a piece of her muffin. “Anyway, aren’t you burning up with the need for retribution for your cousin’s murder?” She ate her dripping muffin with relish.

  Monk made fitful gestures with his hands. “I wasn’t close to him, Jill, so honestly, it doesn’t make me angry that he was murdered. I don’t have an emotional connection to the man. But he was family, even though he deserved to be an outcast. He was a sell-out, and I despise people like that. I can see rolling over on your friends if your children are threatened, something like that. But to be one of those who was, apparently, willing to be used as a tool by racists to hold us back …” Monk went silent, smoldering.

  “Yet you still feel the need to find out who killed him?”

  “Maybe I feel sorry for him.”

  “Maybe.” She winked at him.

  Over coffee the phone rang again and Monk picked it up.

  “Ivan, it’s me, man, Marasco,” Seguin said after Monk spoke.

  “Yo, what it is, what it could be.” That room in the Rancho where the fire and bullets had stormed materialized in his head at the sound of his friend’s voice.

  “All of the above,” the Detective Lieutenant joked hollowly. “I didn’t catch you during dinner, did I?”

  “Just finishing.”

  “Yeah, same here.” There was a quiet each let drag on.

  “You been watching any of the women’s basketball games?”

  “I watched a little of the Sparks game the other night.”

  Kodama started to clear the plates. She smoothed her hand on the side of his head as she walked past.

  “I had to work a double that night. Had a stabbing over in a bar in Pico Union. Seems some companeros who had split off into two different Central American organizations still patronized the same watering hole. They then get into a disagreement over the direction the immigrant rights struggle should be taking. Add some Pacificos and Negra Medallos, and the old bit about booze and politics proves itself right every time.”

  “I’m hip. How’re the kids?”

  The cop didn’t answer right away, and Monk imagined Seguin was back in that dark room, the heat and fear swarming over him, like it had Monk. “Frank and schoolwork are like strangers sometimes,” he answered without emotion. “I swear man, me and Gina must be arguing about this boy every third night. Why the hell pay for a Catholic school education when the boy could be getting his C’s and D’s for free at a public school?”

  Monk dabbed at a damp spot on his temple with a paper napkin. “Maybe it’s not just him that’s got you bugged.” The clamminess on his forehead wouldn’t go away.

  “Good thing Juliana is the smart one,” Seguin went on like he hadn’t heard. “I don’t know what we’d do if both of them were mess-ups.”

  There was a rustle of cellophane and Monk could tell Seguin was shaking out a cigarette. He had always been a light smoker, mostly when he worked. The last few times they’d talked on the phone—they hadn’t seen each other in person for at least a month and a half—Monk could tell Sequin had been smoking heavily. “You going to take the captain’s exam?” He didn’t know why he blurted it out. Seguin had been a lieutenant for eight, nine years now. His close rate was above average and he was respected by those under him. The first month after the shootout, studying up for the captaincy had been his constant topic of conversation. In subsequent months, his interests in doing so varied from high to low.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet, Ivan.”

  “Thought you wanted that desk duty in your advancing years.”

  Seguin laughed gruffly. “Look, I called to see if you’re free for a Dodger game tomorrow afternoon. I’m using some of my comp time.”

  Monk was inclined to say no. The momentum of the case was beginning to gather, and you had to let it roll along to see where it took you. Conversely, he would like to see his friend. Not that he figured they’d get into a psychoanalytical session among the bleachers, but a couple of Dodger dogs and beer, and smoggy sun just might be a poor man’s rejuvenation formula. “Okay if I ask Dex to come along?”

  “Sure,” Seguin replied vigorously. “I haven’t seen him since I don’t know when. Fact, I might ask Juliana. It’s some kinda school-free-day for her class. Why don’t you ask that hulk of a nephew of yours to come, too?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll meet you guys at the stadium around noon, okay?”

  They said their goodbyes and Monk leaned back in the bench seat of the breakfast nook. His face felt numb.

  “How’s Marasco?” Kodam
a asked. She was loading a large clear glass bowl into the dishwasher.

  “Same, I think.” He touched his face to reassure himself it was still attached to his head.

  Kodama stood over him. “How’re you?”

  “Most days all right.” He reached out for her arm, which felt warm and reassuringly alive.

  “What about nights? I watched you last week, Wednesday, it was. You woke up ’round two thirty and went downstairs.” Concern colored her voice and softened her eyes. She bent down, holding onto his knee.

  “It comes and goes, that’s all.”

  “You want to see Melissa again?”

  Dr. Melissa Nankawa Hirsch, therapist, was a college friend of Kodama’s. She was a tall, round-shouldered woman who favored metal bracelets and necklaces of various designs. She maintained an impenetrable countenance, yet balanced it with the right amount of understanding in her comments and observations. She had listened and had been useful in helping Monk gain a perspective on what had happened to him. That beyond the obvious threat of death and its import, she wanted him to wrestle with “what did his choice of profession say about him” as a person.

  “Arrested development,” Monk blurted.

  “Huh?”

  “What your buddy inferred in one of our sessions. Maybe the reason I like running around, skulking in the shadows and getting sucker-punched by hardheads all the time is ’cause I’m a big kid who likes to still play war.”

  “Are you?” she smiled.

  “Probably.” He kissed her.

  They went into the den and each had a neat glass of Johnnie Walker Black. They watched some TV and Kodama fell asleep halfway into an episode of ER. Monk turned off the set and read some of Creel’s biography. After some time he too got drowsy, and dosed off, after finishing a passage in which Creel wrote about a confrontation with some crackers outside a store in Tunica.

  In his half-sleep he was on the steps of that store, mosquitoes buzzing around him. One of the good ol’ boys had made a crude joke and the others were laughing. Over this one’s shoulder, through the ripped screen of the store’s door, he could see his mother. She had a finger to her mouth signaling for him to be quiet, as she spiked each of the good ol’ boys’ RC Colas with some liquid from a vial.

  Chapter 8

  “Nuts, get ’em red hot, nuts, nuts.”

  Dexter Grant held up a hand and the wiry vendor with the beak nose and bowlegs pitched a bag to the retired cop. He caught the bag in his left, and passed a dollar along through the crowd.

  “Thank you my wise connoisseur,” the vendor replied, continuing to rattle his sales call up and down the section.

  “Chan Ho Park looks good today,” Coleman Monk Gardner said. He propped one of his size-fifteen Grant Hill Filas on the back of the empty seat in front of him. He was dressed in stovepipe straight black jeans and a white T-shirt hung loose over his developed upper body. “That boy’s smokin’.” He unwrapped and nearly inserted half his extra-long Dodger dog, sopping with relish and onions, in his mouth, all the while never taking his eyes off the field.

  “Wow, Coleman, didn’t you just eat one?” asked an awed Juliana Seguin. She was twelve, with a gap in her front teeth and her lustrous hair braided down the back. She wore a Dodger base-ball cap and designer label overalls. Her parents allowed her to wear fingernail polish but no lipstick. The color she had on today was a purplish black called Civilization Decay.

  “He’s got to eat like that to keep the blood circulating in those gunboats of his.” Grant opened a shell between his teeth, pointing at the young man’s over-sized shoes.

  The Braves’ batter got a hit and the ball went high and midway toward left field. Karros snatched it down and threw the runner out at second, ending the fifth inning. Ripples of applause erupted from the crowd. As the giant screen instantly showed the play again, a couple a few rows down from Monk in matching Teamster windbreakers high-fived each other.

  “So you said your cousin knew Ardmore Antony?” Grant plopped in more peanuts.

  “Yeah, they were kinda chummin’ it up at the wake,” Monk said. “The wife seemed put off by Kennesaw. Now I know that was because of what he’d done down south. But he seemed sincere in wanting to talk with Kennesaw.

  Grudzielanek from the Dodgers was at bat.

  Grant slowly chewed his peanuts on one side of his jaw. “Back in my time, you’d hear a few stories about Antony. He had this club over on Slauson, right?”

  “Yeah, the Nile,” Monk confirmed. “He and another cat named Harvey Lyle, a numbers man, bankrolled the baseball team my cousin coached.”

  Grant shook his head in ascent. “That fits. I know the club was raided a couple of times for operating numbers out the back. I also know it was a place to see and be seen like Hill’s Hideaway and Tommy Tucker’s Playroom were in their time.”

  “Dang, y’all going back beyond old school to the olden days,” Monk’s nephew commented, flabbergasted.

  Juliana giggled.

  “Even I’ve heard tales of the Nile,” Marasco Seguin piped in.

  “Ardmore also had a record label for awhile.”

  Grudzielanek got a hit and got on first.

  “I know,” Monk added. “He recorded local doo-wop and R-and-B acts under the Garden of Wonder name. Hell, I have a few of those forty-fives. Apparently that’s how he met his wife Clara. And I’ve come across rumors of him ripping off some of his acts, but that’s all it’s been, random talk.” He worked his hand like it was a spastic claw, dismissing such conjecture.

  Grant scratched at his whiskers. His experienced face was topped with silver-gray hair, a little long along the nape of his neck as it always was. Together with his saddle-tramp build and gruff voice, there wasn’t a week went by he didn’t get stopped in the street-people sure he was the wraith of the returned Brian Keith. One night in the Satellite, having a beer with Monk, he told one inebriated chap he was the actor and had come back to get some residuals owed him by a producer.

  “It might behoove you, old son, to do a little prowling around and see if you can find one of those artists he recorded. All of ’em can’t be dead yet.”

  The Braves’ pitcher struck out Beltre and a groan went up from their section.

  Monk asked seriously, “Is the Ancient One suggesting Mr. Antony might have a hand in my cousin’s death?”

  “If my fevered brain doesn’t deceive, I do seem to remember an incident his wife was involved in.”

  “Rat poison. A lover of hers,” Seguin commented. “That’s the story I heard at a barbecue last year at Sergeant Silva’s house. His dad had been in the department, and he was telling us about his old man’s days on the force.” Seguin turned at the sound of a crack of a bat. He turned back as the man got tagged out. “That bit about Clara and the rat poison was one of the cases he worked.”

  “She stand trial?” Monk asked.

  “No,” Seguin drawled, recreating that period in his head. “I can’t recall how it was resolved, only that he said a lot of people thought she’d done the deed.”

  “Was Roberts there at this barbeque?”

  “He sure was, home savings.”

  Monk said, “Now ain’t that sweet.”

  “I’ll find out more if you want me to,” Grant offered.

  “I’d appreciate that, Dex.” He settled back in his seat. “Say, youngster, how are you and that history study buddy of yours doing these days?” He winked at Seguin.

  His nephew gulped down a quantity of his soda. “We kinda had a falling out.”

  “Not over a pregnancy, I hope,” Grant whispered too loud to Monk.

  “Naw, ain’t nothing like that,” Coleman protested. “Safety first, safety always.”

  “Safe about what?” Juliana wanted to know.

  Monk and Grant looked whimsically at Seguin. The Dodgers got a man on second in the top of the sixth.

  “He means when you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you tell them to put on their seatbelt like we always d
o, dear,” Seguin answered, absently pulling on his mustache.

  Grant said to the teenager, “You’re studying computers?”

  “Actually, designing software for games and doing animation. I want to try to go to Cal Arts maybe next year.”

  “What about basketball?” Seguin asked. “You were alternate All-City last season.”

  Coleman mumbled a non-committal sound somewhere between a growl and a huff of air.

  “That’s the school Disney gets its animation talent from, isn’t it?” Monk asked.

  “Some, yeah.”

  “Expensive, isn’t it?” Monk also asked.

  The younger man twitched his head and shoulders. “It ain’t like going to Southwest junior College, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “They have scholarships?” Monk knew what his sister made as a public high school teacher. Plus she had a mortgage and car payments to meet. He also knew what he could afford to contribute toward his nephew’s goal.

  The Dodgers took the field without scoring.

  “Sure, but everybody and his brother are trying to get in that bad rascal. Half the students at the place come from out of town, even from other countries, too.”

  “We’ll work on it, if you really want it, Coleman,” Monk said emphatically.

  The teenager shifted his head to look at his uncle but said nothing.

  “Dad, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Seguin, who was savoring a now-warm beer, let out an exasperated grunt. “Aw, honey.”

  “I’ll take her. Old folks and youngins got something else in common besides a love of Nick at Night.” Grant made an excessive amount of groans rising from his seat. He led Seguin’s daughter down the steps as the Braves got a man on first. Grant cracked peanuts for her as they descended.

  “You don’t think Grandma did this dude in, do you?”

  Monk’s nephew commented as he watched the field.

  “He was our cousin; naturally I don’t think she did him in. And”—he hit Coleman lightly with his rolled-up program—“would I admit that in front of a cop?”