Only the Wicked

by Gary Phillips

  “The files speak for themselves,” Monk said, easing back into the chair.

  Tigbee uncrossed his leg, pivoting his body back and forth slightly on the chair’s ball bearings. “Know what they used to call the NAACP ’round here?”

  “Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons and Possums,” Monk said.

  “A man who knows something of history.” Tigbee nodded appreciatively, tapping his cigar this time against the ashtray’s rim. “You think us monsters, Mr. Monk?”

  “What does it matter what I think?”

  “Obviously something gets you going in the morning.”

  “Obviously.”

  Tigbee grinned, showing natural teeth. “I’m not looking for absolution; I don’t shirk from anything I’ve done in this life. Whatever it is, whatever you imagine I’ve done, the reality is it was done with good men with good intentions to keep this a good state.”

  “And whites should be on top because it’s the natural order of things.” Monk blew smoke.

  “The wheel always turns, Monk. Look at where we’re at these days. The Yellow Peril may not have happened as an outright invasion of planes and tanks, but you can’t tell me they ain’t anglin’ to get us by the short hairs. You know, just look at the place you come from.” He pointed with his hand holding the cigar, and he picked up his drink with the other. “Asians knocking blacks out of higher learnin’ faster’n a dog scratchin’ off a tick.”

  Did all of Tigbee’s similes revolve around canines? “So now it’s us against them?”

  Tigbee thumped Monk’s knee with his cigar hand, and leaned closer. “Black and white is the two sides of the equation, Monk, we made this country. More black folk are movin’ home, Monk. The African-American population in the South has steadily gone up in the last six, seven years. Now why is that?” The older man’s eyes twinkled; he had his answer: ‘“Cause up north and in the southwest the Mexicans and Central Americans are making more babies than you and me combined. By twenty-twenty, whites and blacks are gonna be strangers in their own land. Except here.” He pointed the cigar at the deck.

  “You can’t tell me that some black fellas standing out on corners looking for work—and I know more of them are, I read through ten papers each morning—don’t feel funny when the man pulls up in his car and hires the Mexican. He hires him ’cause he knows unlike the black man, the immigrant will work for less money, and longer hours. Work that should be going to us Americans.”

  “So this is a new day, when we can come together against our mutual Spanish-accented enemies.” Monk took a look toward the door but the latch wasn’t twisting. “What happens after the natural order of things are restored, Mr. Tigbee, does it go back to like it’s always been? Black man scrambling to get a little something from the white man whose reins of power we just helped him hold onto?”

  Monk knew this was a useless debate, but he couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t as if he and Tigbee would solve this country’s race problems, it wasn’t as if he and Tigbee were even dealing on the same level. Tigbee could call out the hard boys on him at anytime.

  Tigbee looked offended. “Against incredible odds, the black man has made many strides, Mr. Monk, you certainly know that. History is an inter-connected set of tracks upon which our train is forever barreling.”

  A new simile, Monk noted archly.

  Tigbee was still talking. “The civil rights movement didn’t start with Miss Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus in ’fifty-five.” He drank some more and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “And it ain’t like she was the first. Hell, there was a case in ’forty-five, back before I got out of the service, where a black woman named Sarah Mae Brown, who had some sand, got in the face of a bus driver right on the corner of Dexter and Lawrence and refused to budge and go to the back.”

  Tigbee leaned his rangy frame forward for emphasis. “And who inspired Miss Parks?” Now he was the teacher, testing the knowledge curve of his one, less-than-eager student.

  “She’d attended classes at the Highlander Institute in Tennessee.” Monk rewarded himself with a sip and a toke.

  “Where she’d met Septima Clark,” Tigbee added. “Who somebody ought to build a statue to. And it was fellas like E.D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who received his political education under that Randolph fella, who organized the Montgomery bus boycott coming offa Miss Parks’ arrest.”

  “So you know more than a whole lot of black kids coming up these days about the movement.” Trying to stay cool, Monk could nonetheless feel the edginess working its way into his voice. It bothered him this Mississippi mover wasn’t as one dimensional as he’d assumed.

  “Right,” Tigbee said, smiling and touching Monk’s knee again with the glass in his hand. “And we could go on talking about the ones who sacrificed much here in this state: T.B. Wilson who organized the National Progressive Voters League, or certainly, the Delta’s Amzlee Moore.”

  Monk knew about Moore from his teen years when his mother made sure his school work was supplemented with the books she had him and Odessa read. They had objected then, but he was glad now she had made them learn the “other” history. “He and Reverend T.R.M. Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in nineteen fifty-one. A counterpoint to the white Delta Council,” Monk said forcefully. “The same Council which had been the engine driving the attacks on returning black servicemen, some of whom were murdered. The good Christians were scared these brothers, who’d fought for freedom in foreign lands, might actually have the audacity to demand the same in their own country.” Monk made a tsk, tsk sound, loud and dramatic. “The same Council that was the basis for your Citizens League. Imagine that.”

  “We sometimes learn something from the past, Mr. Monk.” Tigbee was maintaining his layer of civility, but the comment had gotten to him. “The recording of history is the book of the tyrant, the future is the bible of the free.”

  “Melville, more or less,” Monk said, recognizing the para-phrasing.

  “You a man of the sea, Mr. Monk?”

  He realized Tigbee knew he’d been a ship’s engineer. “I served some time in the merchants.”

  “Grand, grand.” Tigbee spouted eagerly. “My oldest son served in the Navy.”

  It was an opening to bring up the daughter, but there’d be another opportunity. Monk merely nodded slightly.

  Tigbee tipped his glass up, then said, “I’m a man of progress, Mr. Monk. Now, understand, all things cannot be accomplished at the same time. Of course, our country finds itself at an exciting and dangerous juncture in her history.” He stood abruptly, going to one of the windows. “Not too far from here,” he began, pointing with his cigar in no particular direction, “the Germans have built a car plant. It means jobs for the area, sure. But what does that say about American workers when we’re considered cheaper labor than the goddamn krauts?”

  “The chickens always come home to roost.”

  Tigbee turned as if slapped. “What are you saying?” he sputtered excitedly. “You think somebody like Malcolm X had the answers? Or are you a Karl Marx man?”

  “I mean,” Monk said, taking the cigar out of his mouth, “that the interests of big business have always been the same. That blacks, whites, Asians … whoever, who have to hit that gig every day to survive so they can buy their kids food, have been divided since this country began—over language, over skin color, over the texture of hair and the thickness of lips. Over bullshit, Mr. Tigbee. Bullshit men like you perpetuate.”

  The Belle La Rouche shuddered on the river and a bottle of cognac slipped from the shelf on Tigbee’s bar and crashed to the deck.

  Monk went on. “More than fifty years ago the anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote that race was a social construct, not a biological reality.”

  Tigbee scoffed, “He was a Jew, you know. Changed his name from Aronberg. That’s how much he believed in his own theories.”

  Monk made a tick sound with his tongue. “I know. What I was going to say was that Mo
ntagu was right, of course, in the abstract. But we humans can’t get that high on the evolutionary plane. In the context of how we deal with each other, how we perceive each other, race certainly exists; it’s a tangible force in this country and the world. But the hell of it is, it ain’t the only thing keeping us apart. A guy working at one of those chain department stores here in the Delta has something in common with a Southeast Asian immigrant doing duty in a restaurant’s kitchen in Orange County. Only they can’t see it.”

  “That all-is-one crap was tried before, Mr. Monk, back before your time with the anarchist Wobblies and the communist-dominated Unemployed Councils that used to be ’round here in the ’thirties with all that Angelo Herndon stuff.” Tigbee sounded satisfied, as if the matter was settled.

  “That don’t mean they were bad ideas,” Monk remarked. “I never boogied to the Party’s beat, but goals like national health care, a decent wage for a decent day’s work, what the hell’s unAmerican about that?”

  “It’s how we get there,” Tigbee said tonelessly. “That’s what it’s always been about.”

  Monk was feeling frisky. “You mean get there at a proper pace.”

  “Look, we are at the barricades, and it’s going to be all of us working together, shoulder to the wheel to make us strong again.”

  Gravely, Monk asked, “The question is: Are your enemies mine?”

  “They ain’t your friends, Mr. Monk. That rainbow coalition shuck Reverend Jackson goes around getting money from guilty whites to give to his PUSH organization hasn’t materialized and it won’t. Multi-culturalism is a fraud, and you know it. The brown man don’t need you ‘cause he’s producing numbers faster than any of us. The yellow man thinks you’re lazy and stupid.” He swayed slightly in the seat, and Monk could see Burchett flopping out of his chair and squirming on the floor in the video.

  “Black and white,” Tigbee touched his fingers together.

  “We need each other, Mr. Monk, in these uncertain times.”

  There it was. Manse Tigbee, the power behind one of the most devious and powerful whites’ rights organizations of the civil rights era, a man who had reinvented himself as a genteel southern philanthropist, was the last true integrationist. He almost burst out laughing.

  “Mr. Tigbee,” Monk said, wishing to make himself clear and uncluttered in his response. “As long as we only talk about race, as long as we only point fingers and beat our chests saying we suffered the most or we deserve to be on top ‘cause God or genes intended it to be that way, then we ain’t getting anywhere. It’s about how we see the many get screwed by the few. And how racism keeps us apart from seeing where we might have some issues the same, like schools for our kids, good jobs, or bowling, for God’s sake.” Despite the circumstances, he laughed.

  He paused, the smoke from his cigar congealing around a portion of his face. Tigbee waited. “People are dying every day because of the skin we’re in or how somebody speaks, so I guess we’ll never get to that other discussion.” He puffed on the cigar a little longer and had another sip. A melancholy had suddenly descended on him.

  “You think your friend Damon Creel believes in this grand and glorious vision of yours?” Tigbee took a long pull on his Cohiba, which had burned halfway down, specks of ash like dirty snow flitting to the shiny deck.

  “The thing is, Mr. Tigbee, it’s not just me who sees an America like this. And I think that’s what’s got you worried.”

  Several degrees more of Tigbee’s civility slipped from behind his eyes. “What do you want, Monk? You want your name mentioned on the news at ten? You want money enough to buy a rack of suits and put away enough for retirement?”

  Monk put his drink down and left the cigar in the ashtray. “I’m not opposed to being comfortable. But like you said, it’s how ya get there, that’s the trick.”

  Muffled sounds of clinking glasses, and people laughing and talking came through the vent. It was as if he and the older man were spinning toward the stratosphere in a hermetically sealed chamber, the invitees and the ground crew celebrating a successful launch.

  Tigbee clasped his hands on his forearms and lowered his head as if in prayer. Finally he said, touching his lip briefly with his tongue, “I wish you luck, in whatever endeavor you might pursue.”

  “How about putting in a word with Cassie Bodar so I can speak to her husband?”

  Tigbee laughed softly as he stood. “One tries not to interject themselves in things best left to husband and wife.”

  Monk was also up. He retrieved his cigar, which had gone out. “I suppose.”

  Tigbee walked with Monk to the exit. “I need to go out and see a few people, but I’m a private man at heart.” The two stopped at the door. “You must have matters you’d want best kept alone.”

  “Only on Tuesdays. See you around, Mr. Tigbee.” Monk stepped back out and into a waiter carrying a tray of beer in highball glasses and a bowl of shelled pistachio nuts. Monk took some pistachios, and looking back, saluted Tigbee. Then he descended the stairs. The inference about the old rascal wanting to maintain his privacy wasn’t lost on him. Monk just didn’t give a damn.

  Chapter 22

  There was a message from Grant posing as a mechanic when Monk returned from his riverboat ride. The note stated the Galaxy needed a ring job. He’d crossed the highway and phoned him back from the Tornado Lounge and Game Parlor after laying a ten on the proprietor. What the ex-cop told him had made his heart thud against his breast bone and he refused the beer the lounge’s owner offered as a way of change for his money.

  After getting some initial information from Rook Securities via Coleman, Grant had flown the red-eye out to Akron. The city had remained the home of the half-sister of Dolly, the ex-Mrs. Tigbee. There, on microfiche, he’d found an obit for the half-sister, Edna, in the Akron Beacon Journal. Rook had supplied the information that she’d retired in 1974 after years as a records supervisor for the County Building and Safety Department.

  Edna Clavert Hayden had been something of a minor celebrity, too. For more than a decade she’d written a gardening column for a throw-away weekly. She’d died of pneumonia in the Silver Crest Rest Home on May 9,1991. The husband, Charles Hayden, was still alive, but pretty much out of it after three successive strokes.

  The same day, Grant paid a visit to the rest home claiming to be a long-out-of-touch relative and learned the name of the assistant director, a nurse, who’d since left, who used to be friends with the woman. Finding her by phone was not too hard. As a nurse she still did home care work from time to time, and had signed on with several nurse registries. Monk’s mother, back in LA, had helped with that task.

  Grant found the nurse, Shana Harvey, working as a shift supervisor of a home care business in the Detroit suburb of Beverly Hills. This after he’d first followed the lead back to southern California; the name of the town had confused him. From Harvey—he told her up-front why he was calling her—Grant got the information that Dolly Lee Clavert had re-married and moved away sometime in the early ’60s. Edna had been particularly talkative about the past and her family.

  Harvey also remembered Edna’s niece, Merrill, coming to visit shortly before Harvey herself had moved on. She didn’t remember much, though the niece had mentioned that Edna’s sister, her mother Dolly Lee, had passed on some time before. And no, she didn’t remember what city Merrill was visiting from, but she was a pleasant woman, Harvey mentioned. After Grant segued into a story or two about his days on the LAPD, Harvey loosened up.

  She did remember one additional fact: Merrill had flown in. And that the younger woman had mentioned there was snow already on the ground where she’d come from. It had been fall and cold, but there’d been no snow in Ohio yet, Harvey recalled.

  Working backward, Grant developed a profile of eastern states with snow in that year, in that month of mid-November. Then he set the Rook Security Agency in motion again to track down Merrill Sarah Tigbee through change-of-address cards, employment records, DNW re
cords, all the manner in which modern humans mark the compartments of their lives in the age of the number.

  But more importantly to Monk, along the way Dexter uncovered a new fact that gave the case a whole new spin. Grant hadn’t actually located Merill yet, but he didn’t have to. Not right then, anyway.

  Monk stood moving side to side in the just-breaking dawn morning of Vicksburg in his Levi’s 501 jeans, watch cap and buttoned-up jean jacket. He was glad he’d put on a sweater underneath too. A police car had glided past him and he walked along like he always took his constitutional this time every day, even though he must look like what they figured OJ was wearing that fateful night.

  Their stares said they didn’t quite buy it, and he assumed they’d roll back his way soon. But the man he’d come to see was coming from around the rear of his house. He was dressed in dark blue cotton sweat pants, a tri-colored nylon top, with a matching hooded sweatshirt underneath. The soles of his black-and-white Nikes sounded like the fingers of hands in wet rubber gloves tugging at each other as he trod over the dewy lawn. He had on the same pair of shoes Monk had noticed the other day on the steps. The shoes that were too big for Cassie Bodar’s smaller feet.

  “Senator Bodar, I’m Ivan Monk.” He’d fallen in step beside the man as he began his jog.

  “I was hopin’ you were a persistent reporter, or just an early-rising mugger,” he said adroitly. Bodar kept his knees moving, and Monk was hoping he wouldn’t take off. The senator was a tallish, solidly built man with a graceful build. If it got to be a foot race, Monk knew he’d lose. Good thing the lawmaker stopped.

  “I haven’t much to tell you, Mr. Monk.”

  “Then if you don’t mind, I’ll try a few theories on you.”

  A Corsica went past them and the driver honked. Bodar waved at the retreating vehicle. “Save it for the lecture hall, my friend.” He turned, preparing to take off.