Sinbad Willis was not talented in anything but was exceptionally bad at lying and John saw right through him, but of course had no idea why his mother was dead.

At Loretta’s funeral, in the Lawrence J. Finley AME Church, a drunken street man talked to John from behind. John could smell the sickly sweet, stale stench of alcohol without even turning around. “Boy, your mama was bound to get it,” the man said. “And she got it. Was just a matter of time. Your daddy, he seen too much. She had to know what he seen. So, they had to kill her.” When John finally turned around, the man was gone, only his aroma cloud lingered.

Weeks later, John found his mother’s diaries. He had never known she kept them. Much of it was details of business, fairly graphic detail that made her business concerns all too clear to John. The prostitutes were all unnamed, called the Samples, referred to by numbers, never by names; however, the clients were all named, often with brief histories or descriptions of their professions, families, idiosyncrasies. It was a particular entry dated April 4 that caught his eye:

This morning Milton came to the school all scared. He said he’d seen a policeman talking to a White man holding a rifle bag across the street from the Lorraine. I asked him why it mattered. Then he didn’t come home.

It’s about eight o’clock. Neighbor Ginny came by. She was crying. Now I’m crying. She told me that Dr. King was shot, killed right here in Memphis. And I don’t know where Milton is. It’s not like him to be so late. I’m so upset and scared that I worry I’ll lose the baby.

Loretta didn’t lose the baby, but Milton never came home. He didn’t show up for his job as an elevator maintenance inspector. No one saw him until his empty light-skinned hand was seen reaching from a mound of refuse at the landfill.

Seventeen-year-old John Sill became convinced that Sinbad Willis had murdered his father. And now he had also murdered his mother. He really had no idea what was true, but he was smart, angry, and armed with a book full of prominent names. He also had a fortune, his mother’s clubs being successful and her investments proving varied and imaginative. She owned many shares of IBM and many more of a company called Apple, Inc. John Sill studied the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He read the accepted story of the movements of James Earl Ray. He studied the rise of Sinbad Willis from beat walker to chief of police. He did all this while learning to run his mother’s businesses. He sold the Mother F to B.B. King, who changed the name to B.B.‘s, which made a lot of sense. He took the money from the sale and gave it all to the “Samples,” hoping they would leave the “life.” He did not have much faith in that happening, as they all had names like Cinnamon, Destiny, and Diamond. He held out hope for Ruby. As he became more and more comfortable as a businessman, one with substantial negative information concerning town and state leaders, and more powerful as a public figure in Memphis, he grew more and more bitter about the circumstances surrounding his parents’ deaths.