“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?”
“Who was the kid with Ransom? Tell me and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again.”
“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” he said and smiled. He gave a short laugh that I could tell was rare. “But that’s the question. That’s what you’ve been looking for ever since you came to Memphis, even before you started hassling me.”
I rubbed my hands together. My skin was chapped. I wanted to leave Memphis. I was beginning to hate being here. But where would I go now?
“Didn’t have to look too hard, Big Chief.”
I watched his craggy face. I said: “Kid’s name was Judas.”
“Yeah, I know his name. Spoiled punk who wanted to piss off his daddy and thought he was gangster at seventeen. Ran errands for Ransom at his pool hall on Beale after he’d been kicked out of some Nashville prep school.”
“Still around?”
“Oh, yes,” Cook said, smiling. “Might even be our next governor.”
I felt a knot form in my throat and a rush of adrenaline heat my blood. My mouth opened a little, feeling dry, and I watched Cook’s eyes for a hint that this was a joke.
“Now let me ask you a question, Travers,” Cook said. He took off his weathered weight belt, the sun extinguishing on the horizon. “How hard would it be for a U.S. senator to make some nasty crime in the black section of Memphis go away? A U.S. fucking senator. This was ‘sixty-eight. Right? Not too many P.C. cops. Most probably swallowed everything that fucker said about segregation.”
I was half-listening now. My mind already speeding ahead. I felt like I was barely holding on to the edge of the stilted balcony. I could imagine the wood tearing loose from the house and tumbling down the hill and into the water.
“Two dead blacks,” Cook said, now lecturing. “A murder that everyone believed was a domestic thing. Wouldn’t take too much to disappear.”
I thought about the Sons of the South and Abby’s father. An old cop like Raymond L. Jenkins would’ve been the only one who could’ve kept an original file, no names blacked out. A blackmail scheme set in motion by a bitter old bastard and only furthered by a misguided Oxford attorney. They could’ve easily changed the election.
“Russell’s been chained to him ever since,” Cook said. “Now Ransom is just calling in his chips.”
“So Russell flips his stance on gambling?” I asked, looking down at the riverfront and some old tourist paddle wheelers tying up for the storm. “He’ll allow it down there?”
Cook watched me and shook his head. “Now why would the Dixie Mafia invest all that money in Tunica if Memphis wasn’t that far behind?”
I felt a spot of rain on my cheek. The wind began to blow harder.
I understood why Cook lived on the Bluffs.
Chapter 57
Jude Russell didn’t want him here. He hated every time that son of a bitch ever tried to make contact. The last time he’d seen him was about a week ago when Ole Miss was playing Auburn and Ransom had shown up at a party thrown by the CEO of a company that made kitchen appliances. He stood there and ate fried chicken and drank whiskey with one of his whores like he belonged among them. But Levi Ransom would never belong. He had the stink of gutter trash that seeped from his pores like urine and testosterone. No matter how many millions he stole or killed for, Ransom would always be that yellow-toothed hood that for some twisted reason he’d found so damned appealing when he was a teenager. How stupid could a boy be? He’d alienated everyone who’d tried to help him, thought his daddy was the Antichrist and his mother a babbling drunk. But Levi Ransom, with his greased ducktail and hot-rodded Mustang, was about the coolest thing he’d ever known.
At sixteen, he’d met Ransom at this little pool hall down on Beale. He’d liked the street before it had changed. Blues. Beer. Good dope. Women. Ransom knew every darkened corner of the street. He’d buy him pitchers of beer and let him play pool for free and get women to do things to him that he’d never imagined in the bedroom of his Germantown mansion.
He’d walk over to Russell stretched over the cigarette-burned felt of a pool table and stick two fingers under his nose. He’d point to some teenager, drunk or stoned, leaning against the old brick wall of the bar, and let him know it was his turn. Ransom was like that. He tried to make you think he shared it all.
Russell didn’t have too many friends. How could you when you changed boarding schools about every month and most people only wanted to talk about your daddy? Ransom was twenty-five and had a look like he’d been around the world a dozen times and was not too impressed with what he saw. He’d brag about setting fire to a courthouse in south Mississippi when he was fourteen by using a cigarette and pack of matches. He said he’d killed thirteen men, two of them with a buck knife, for not paying their debts.
Most of all, when he was drunk, he’d brag about being part of an organization out of Biloxi. He said he’d gotten in good because his granddaddy had ties with a man who owned a club down there. Said when he got kicked out of the service, he started running poker and blackjack tables for the man. And pretty soon, Ransom said, he was involved in more complicated games like turning out little girls and using them to bait businessmen. He said a pack of Polaroids could net you a mighty nice return.