Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

Forrest looked over at Cherie’s breasts, which hung heavily over the sheet. She was watching him like an expectant hunting dog. “You mean you think Snake had the right idea.”

  “Maybe so, yeah. I don’t want to wake up and see our names splashed across the front page of the newspaper.”

  “The Beacon’s only published once a week, and the next edition’s three days from now. So stay cool. I’ll think about this and get back to you.”

  “Okay, but the Natchez Examiner runs every goddamned day. And Penn Cage’s girlfriend would love to run with a story like this. There’s no telling how much Glenn Morehouse told Sexton, or what Sexton told Cage tonight.”

  Cherie reached out toward Forrest’s belt again, but he slapped her hand away. He never worried about Henry Sexton, because he’d had a state police tech specialist plant a monitoring program in the Beacon’s intranet that gave him access to every story being drafted at the newspaper, often days before publication. That tech had also installed a keystroke recorder in Henry’s home computer, one that secretly transmitted everything Henry had typed in the past twenty-four hours to another cop who sifted through the reports every day. But Billy was right: Henry’s involvement with Penn Cage had opened a conduit to his girlfriend, and Forrest had no mechanism in place to monitor her.

  “What’s the mayor’s family situation?” he asked.

  “You remember his old man, Doc Cage. The mother’s still alive, and Penn’s sister lives in England.”

  “Kids?”

  “One girl, about twelve, I guess. And I think he’s engaged to the Masters girl.”

  Forrest smiled with satisfaction. “Plenty of pressure points, then. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Please don’t take all night, cuz. I need to make some decisions.”

  “I hear you. Did you get that Buffett show arranged?”

  “No. His management’s squeezing me hard on the money, and my plate’s a little full right now anyway.”

  “It’s your birthday, man. Chill. I’ll chip in a quarter of the fee.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Talk to you later, Parrothead.”

  Forrest ended the call and slid his phone back into his pocket.

  As he stared at Cherie’s breasts with renewed interest, she said, “Did I tell you I saw your wife at Esplanade mall the other day?”

  Ice instantly coated Forrest’s heart. He picked up his coat from the chair, knowing she hadn’t finished with this subject.

  “She looks a lot better than you told me,” Cherie went on. “I was downright jealous.” She gave him a chiding look. “I couldn’t help wondering what she would do if she knew what we get up to over here.”

  The ice on Forrest’s heart climbed up his throat. How can these bitches be so goddamned stupid? Like possums running toward a spotlight on a varmint rifle …

  Cherie gave him a girlish come-hither look, then spoke in a teasing singsong: “Come on and stay. I’ll give you what you’re always begging for.”

  Forrest stepped closer to the bed. He knew some truly kinky women down in New Orleans, but nothing could compare to a housewife so bored she would scratch scars into her arms to keep from going out of her mind every day. “Next time,” he said. “Alphonse is waiting for me.”

  “Oh, screw that ugly Redbone,” Cherie said, and then she giggled. “On second thought, you couldn’t pay me to screw him.”

  Forrest didn’t laugh. He took her by the wrist and squeezed hard enough to make her wince. “Next time I may bring Alphonse in here to take a turn. And he won’t be paying you. You think about that while I’m gone.”

  Cherie looked at him as though he’d broken some unspoken rule. “You don’t mean that, Forrest.”

  He walked to the door, opened it, and looked back with utter seriousness. “Alphonse, come in here a second.”

  Cherie Delaune’s face drained of blood. She’d had no idea that Ozan had been sitting out in the trailer’s den, waiting to run interference if her husband showed up. But when the big Redbone walked through the door, she understood quick enough. If Ricky had come home while she was doing Forrest, he probably would have died in front of his own television.

  “Ya’ll get out of here,” Cherie said in a small voice. “This ain’t funny.”

  Ozan laughed, his copper-colored face alight with anticipation.

  “You sure you don’t want to take a turn, Al?” Forrest said. “She’s all ready for you. And we can spare twenty minutes.”

  Like a cornered animal, Cherie Delaune searched desperately for an exit, but both men were blocking the only door.

  “Ya’ll can’t make me do this!” she cried, pulling the covers over herself.

  “No?” said Forrest. “Who you gonna tell?”

  “I didn’t mean what I said about your wife, Forrest.”

  Ozan walked toward the bed.

  “Get away from me!” Cherie shouted. “I ain’t no whore! Forrest!”

  But Forrest was already in the hall, headed toward the trailer’s kitchen, a wicked smile on his face.

  He took a jug of milk from the refrigerator, then sat down on a cheap sofa, laid his pistol beside him, and thought about Penn Cage and his family.

  CHAPTER 29

  CAITLIN AND I are lying in the claw-foot tub in my bathroom, steam filling the air and fogging the mirrors. The tub is wide enough that she can lie nestled in my left arm, her cheek on my shoulder. The only light comes from a lamp in the corner, throwing strange shadows across the walls and the hardwood floor. Annie has been asleep for an hour, so we decided to risk a bath. Prior to our engagement, Caitlin never spent a whole night here; she was always gone by the time Annie awakened. Now she occasionally stays until morning. Often, though, she leaves after making love, to work late at the paper or simply to pay her staff a visit as the next day’s stories start going up on the website and the print edition gets put to bed.

  “How are you going to cover Dad’s arrest?” I ask. “If it happens.”

  She takes her time answering. “We’ll have to print it in the police record section. But other than that, I don’t think we’ll do anything.”

  “That will probably upset a lot of people. Even if Shad doesn’t press for coverage—”

  “He’d better not press for anything. I’ll publish that dogfighting snapshot so fast he won’t have time to get dressed before splitting town.”

  I run the fingers of my right hand through her damp hair. “I’m just saying that Viola’s son is likely to make a stink, if his intention is to make it as hard on Dad as he can. Not to mention some black community leaders, and my political enemies among the whites. You won’t be able to keep it out of the paper altogether.”

  “Let me ask you something,” she says in a tone that makes me catch my breath. “Do you think Tom slept with Viola back in the day or not?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “How attractive was she?”

  “In my memory, she was pretty.”

  “One to ten.”

  “Uh … eight? Maybe nine.”

  “Plus the forbidden-fruit thing, you can’t ignore that.”

  “Well … I’ll find out tonight.”

  “You’d better assume it’s true, no matter what he says.”

  “Why? This is Dad we’re talking about.”

  “Yes, but until a DNA test proves otherwise, Shad is going to proceed as though it’s true. I think he must believe it; otherwise he wouldn’t risk you destroying his career.”

  “I know.”

  “If Tom is arrested, will the judge set bail? Do you know which judge it will be?”

  “The initial appearance will be before the Justice Court judge, since Viola died in the county. That’s Charlie Noyes. Charlie won’t see Dad as a flight risk, and he’ll be skeptical about the crime, so I’m hoping for a decently low bond. Also, Shad promised try to arrange the timing of the arrest so that if the judge does set bail, we can process Dad through the system without him actually having to spend
time in a cell.”

  “Thank God. With all the drugs he needs just to keep going, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with him spending even an hour in jail.”

  “Imagine him spending years in one.”

  “I can’t. Annie’s right. That simply cannot happen.”

  “If he doesn’t start talking to me tonight, it could.”

  “We need more hot,” Caitlin says, extending one toned leg and turning the hot water tap with her toes. “Can you imagine any reason other than this paternity thing to explain Tom circling the wagons without you?”

  “All I can work out is that he’s protecting someone. That’s all he’s ever tried to do, so why should he change now? The other option is that the Double Eagles have threatened our lives. The family, I mean. Possibly even Annie. You know Dad would take a bullet to protect her.”

  “Any of you,” she says, squeezing my hand. “That’s why we have to protect him. Even from himself. As much as I love Tom, he has one major flaw. He’s from the Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway school.”

  “He’s a stoic, all right. But that may not be the whole explanation. I know he has some secrets. There are definitely chapters of his life he’s never told me about.”

  “Like?”

  “Korea, for one. I know he was wounded there, but I don’t know how. I know he has a couple of medals, but only because my mother told me. Dad seems almost ashamed of them.”

  “Didn’t he save Walt Garrity’s life over there?”

  “Yes, and Walt saved his. But they’ve never told anyone how that happened—not even my mother.”

  “That’s definitely weird.” Caitlin lifts her leg again, then hooks her big toe around the lever and pulls the tap closed. “I can’t stop thinking about Tom and Viola. Your mom certainly never gave me the idea that Tom ever cheated on her.”

  “She wouldn’t, even if he had and she knew about it.”

  “Oh, she’d know,” Caitlin said with certainty. “Peggy is smarter than all of us.”

  This is a truth known only to our family, but none of us doubts it.

  Caitlin runs her fingernails along my forearm. “If this somehow went as far as a trial, would you really not defend him?”

  “Absolutely not. I’ve been thinking about Quentin Avery.”

  She looks up in surprise. “The civil rights lawyer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t he die?”

  “No. He just lost his other leg. Diabetes.”

  “Christ, that’s an epidemic down here. Surely he must be retired?”

  “Quentin lost his legs, Caitlin, not his brain. But he is retired, as a matter of fact.”

  “How old is he?”

  “A little older than Dad, probably. Dad’s been his personal physician for most of his life. If Quentin Avery would come out of retirement to defend anybody, it would be Dad.”

  “I’ve heard some mixed things about Quentin over the years.”

  “You could say the same about me. Quentin is my first choice, hands down.”

  A black Mississippian who left his native state in the early 1950s to go to law school, Quentin Avery fought on the front lines of the civil rights movement, wherever those lines happened to be. More than once, he tried landmark cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and won. In the latter part of his career, Quentin drew criticism for taking on lucrative plaintiffs’ cases, but even then he always did a certain amount of pro bono work for the cause.

  Caitlin rises into a sitting position, then slides to the other end of tub, so that she’s facing me, her breasts half submerged in the water. Intuition tells me she’s about to probe me about Henry Sexton’s work. I need to distract her. As casually as possible, I say, “Didn’t you tell me the other day that you were late for your period?”

  She waves her hand as if dismissing the most trivial of issues. “Oh, you know me. Too much exercise, probably. I’ll get it this week.”

  My digression has thrown her off balance, but only for a few seconds. She jabs my chest with her toes and says, “I know you made Henry a promise, but you need to give me something to work on. There’s no way I can sleep after what’s happened. Give me some way to help Tom.”

  “I wish I could. But I really need to go see him now.”

  “What about Annie? I was planning to go back to the paper.”

  “What for? It would really help me if you stayed with her. Just for an hour. I could take her with me, but Mom’s probably already in bed.”

  Caitlin doesn’t even try to hide her frustration. “I’ll stay. But if you find out about the paternity thing, you’ve got to tell me the answer. You didn’t promise Henry anything about that.”

  “I know. You’re right.” I touch her knee and squeeze gently. “But there’s something you need to know.”

  Fear flickers in her eyes. “You don’t think Tom killed her?”

  “No. But I honestly don’t know. Dad might well have had a euthanasia pact with Viola.”

  Caitlin fans steam away from her face like a garden-club matron at a summer tea. “Come on, out with it.”

  “He helped Sarah at the end.”

  Caitlin looks toward the ceiling and closes her eyes. Then she says, “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  Taking my hand, she squeezes softly. “Yes.”

  “Sarah’s breast cancer was particularly aggressive. We were living in Houston then, so she got cutting-edge care, but it wasn’t enough. She had a lot of mets—that’s metastases. Her brain, her bones. Intractable pain. She fought hard, but in some ways that was as much a curse as a blessing. The harder she fought, the worse it got. Her parents had been living with us, but even that got too hard. Her father had to move to a hotel nearby. He couldn’t take the strain. At the end, the doctors couldn’t control the pain without knocking her out. Sarah wanted to be at home with Annie, and she wanted to be conscious.”

  I pause for a moment, trying to come to grips with the memory. It’s one I don’t allow out of my subconscious very often.

  “Was Tom treating her also?”

  “Not up to that point. But when things reached that pass, Dad drove out from Natchez with a black bag. He talked to Sarah’s doctors, then got rid of the nurses we had working at the house. From that point on, he and Mom and Sarah’s mother took care of her. I don’t know how he did it, but Dad managed to give Sarah extended lucid periods without pain. She spent almost every minute of that time with Annie.”

  “And you,” Caitlin says softly.

  I nod, trying to finish the story without remembering too vividly, or even fully engaging with my thoughts. “That lasted about three days. Then one night, Dad came in and relieved me from my shift beside Sarah’s bed. I went out to the couch and fell asleep. He woke me about five hours later.”

  “She was gone?”

  I nod again. “He just squeezed my shoulder and said, ‘She was a trouper, son.’” My voice cracks, and I take a moment to regain my composure. “I can’t tell you what that means when Dad says that about somebody. He’s seen a lot of death.”

  “Oh, Penn … I’m sorry it was so bad.”

  “It’s over now. Long over.”

  “Not really. It never will be, not completely. I’m just glad Annie wasn’t old enough to know how bad it really was.”

  “Me, too. The treatments are a lot better now, just seven years later.”

  “Are you positive Tom helped her at the end?”

  I shrug. “He never said he did. But looking back … yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Did her parents know?”

  “Her mother did. But all she ever said was that Sarah was lucky to have Dad treating her at the end.”

  “They were right.”

  “I hope she still feels that way. Because a trial like this will drag a magnifying glass over Dad’s entire career.”

  “Oh, God.” Caitlin’s green eyes fix me with laserlike intensity. “You’ve got to kill this thi
ng in the cradle, Penn. I’m dead serious. Your father won’t survive this kind of stress.”

  “I’m working on it. But I don’t think there’s any way to prevent an arrest tomorrow.”

  She raises her eyebrows like a schoolteacher silently reprimanding a student.

  “You’re thinking about the photo. The nuclear option.”

  “I’m thinking about survival,” she says.

  “Let’s wait and see what Dad says tonight. An arrest isn’t the end of the world. The charge is more important. I already let Shad know the stakes, and I think he got the message.”

  Caitlin makes it clear that this answer doesn’t satisfy her. Suddenly the heat is too much for me. “I need to get out.”

  “Me, too,” she says, almost in surrender.

  She waits for me to stand and then pull her to her feet, which is our habit. Afterward, we hug for a few moments, but soon the chill is too much. Lifting towels off a nearby chair, we dry off in front of the gas heater.

  “Stop staring at my butt,” she says, whipping her towel behind her to block my view. “As soon as you get back from your parents’, I’m going back to work. And I’m going to search all my databases while you’re gone. Isn’t there something you can give me to work on that might help Tom? You know what I can do, Penn. Exploit me, for God’s sake.”

  As I close my eyes in forbearance, a little voice says, You’d better use every resource you have on this. Even if I give Caitlin nothing, she’ll be an expert on the Double Eagle group within two hours. Taking hold of her shoulders, I look hard into her eyes.

  “I’m going to give you two names. Don’t ask me any questions. Not whether they have any relation to each other, or even to these cases. But if you can find out everything there is to know about them—without them knowing you’re digging—it will be a big help.”

  She smiles with her eyes. “Deal.”

  “The first is Brody Royal. The second is Forrest Knox.”

  She’s already committed the names to memory. “That’s it?”

  I nod. “Go do your thing. And stay below the radar. This case is more dangerous than you know.”

  “Have these guys really threatened your family?”