by Greg Iles
“May I ask you one more question?”
He stands and stretches his back muscles. “What is it?”
“Do you remember a cop named Ray Presley?”
Just before Stone’s eyes glass over, I glimpse an anger even more personal than that which I have seen to this point.
“I remember him,” he says in a flat voice.
“Do you think the police made an honest attempt to investigate the case?”
“That’s two questions.” Stone turns to Annie, who’s now touching a clay pot that looks like Pueblo work. “How’d you like that hot chocolate, little darling?”
“Mmmm. It was great!”
He walks to the door, leaving us little choice but to follow. I take Annie’s hand and lead her after him.
“Sorry you folks had to come all this way for nothing,” he says, opening the door to the dark vista of Gothic Mountain rising above the mesa. “Rain coming. That’s October for you.”
We’re on the porch now. The sibilant sound of the Slate beckons from the edges of the cabin.
“I don’t think it was for nothing,” Caitlin says, turning to Stone with a look of absolute frankness. “I think something evil happened in Natchez in 1968. I think you know what it was. I realize we sort of ambushed you here, and I apologize for that. But we want justice for Del Payton. I think you do too.” She takes a card from her pocket and passes it to Stone. “You’re going to do a lot of thinking after we leave. You can reach us at this number.”
His jaw tightens as he examines the card. “You’re a goddamn reporter?”
“A publisher. An honest one.”
He looks at me, his eyes brimming with outrage.
“She won’t print a word you said,” I assure him. “She won’t even print your name. She prints nothing at all until this whole mess is resolved.”
Stone shifts his gaze to Caitlin.
“I want the truth,” she says. “The truth, and justice. Nothing else. Thank you for your time, Agent Stone.”
As we walk to the Cherokee, he stands in his doorway looking-for the first time since we’ve seen him-a little unsure of himself. It strikes me that he liked Caitlin using his old rank. Despite all his deep-rooted anger, Stone is still proud to have been an FBI agent.
Unlocking the door, I hear the scuff of boots behind me. Stone has come down off the porch. He puts his right arm on my shoulder in a fatherly way and looks into my eyes.
“You’ve got too much to lose to dig into this mess, son. The world has already changed too much for it to make any difference.”
“I don’t agree.”
A strange recognition lights his eyes, and I am suddenly sure that in me he sees a shadow of the man he was years ago. “I’d like to give you one more quote,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”
“Whatever.”
“The hour of justice does not strike on the dials of this world.”
I look away from his sad eyes, wondering what could possibly have driven a man of his strength and experience into such a miasma of defeatism. “No offense, Agent Stone, but I think you’ve been doing too much reading and not enough soul-searching.”
To my surprise, this does not anger him. He squeezes my shoulder. “You have more illusions than you think. I wish you luck.”
“I wouldn’t need it if you’d tell me what you know.”
He shakes his head and takes a step back. “Whatever you do, you send that little girl someplace safe before you take another step. You hear?”
“That I’ll do.”
As he retreats to his porch, I buckle Annie into her safety seat and join Caitlin in the front. She looks at me with fire in her eyes.
“Did you catch what he said inside?”
“About Payton’s murder not being about civil rights?”
“No. When you asked him if he had any personal notes he kept from his superiors.”
Stone is still watching us from the porch.
“He said if we wanted to learn what he did, we should do what he did.”
She nods excitedly. “Talk to the eyewitnesses, right? That was the first thing he said. He looked at you real hard. Remember?”
“Yes. Like he was trying to communicate something nonverbally. Do you know what it was?”
She gives me an almost taunting smile. “Talk to the eyewitnesses.”
“What is it, for God’s sake?”
“Penn… he used the plural. According to all accounts, there was only one eyewitness to the Payton bombing.”
She’s right. Frank Jones, the scheduling clerk. Had Dwight Stone tried to tell me-without telling me-that there was more than one witness in the Triton parking lot on the day Del Payton died?
“I told you I was good at this,” she says, smiling with triumph. “Let’s get out of here.”
I start the Cherokee and wheel it around until we’re pointed back toward the jeep track. “What did you think of Stone?”
“I think he’s scared.”
“Me too.”
We spent the night in Gunnison. We might have rushed and made our flight, but none of us really wanted to race back to the heat of Mississippi. We took a suite at the Best Western and ate a long meal in a local steak house. Caitlin and I tried to list every possible reason Del Payton could have been murdered besides civil rights work, but Annie didn’t cooperate with this effort, which made it virtually impossible.
Back in the suite, we rented The Parent Trap on the in-house movie channel and watched it from the big bed. Annie lay between Caitlin and me, facing the TV, while we leaned back against the headboard, the pillows from both beds padding our backs. When Annie allowed it, which wasn’t often, we speculated about Stone and his cryptic statements. But watching TV with a four-year-old means watching it.
Lying in bed with Annie and Caitlin catapulted me back to a time so innocent and wonderful that I could hardly bear to think about it. Before Sarah got sick. Before the hospitals. Just us and our baby, laid up on Sunday mornings watching Barney with no fear of the future. When our biggest problem was deciding where we wanted to go for dinner.
When The Parent Trap ended, Annie said she wanted another movie. As I punched in the code for Beauty and the Beast and Caitlin called room service for ice cream, I wondered if Annie was experiencing the same memories I was, or at least the safe warm feeling she once knew with her mother and me. I thought perhaps she was, because two minutes after she finished her ice cream, she began snoring at the foot of the bed.
With this background of Disney music and snores, Caitlin asked me about Sarah. I sat silent for a while, but Caitlin didn’t apologize or ask if I was all right. When she interviewed me, I had told her this subject was off limits. But that interview seemed a long time ago. As I sat there watching Belle confront her beast, I felt Caitlin’s hand close around mine, tentative at first, then firm and warm. After a few moments I looked over at her. She gave me a smile that asked nothing, assumed nothing. A sense of pure goodness flowed from her.
Sarah would like this woman, I thought. For the first time since the previous day, the ghost of Livy Marston receded in my mind. I began to speak, and I did not stop until I had told Caitlin all of it, the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the beginning and the end. She asked to see a picture of Sarah, and I showed her the snapshot I carry in my wallet. It could have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t. Caitlin made it natural.
After I put the picture away, I tried to be as natural as she but found it impossible. The sadness that had been accreting in my soul for the past seven months began to break loose, and I found myself doing what I never allowed myself to do in front of Annie. I remember Caitlin holding my head against her breast, speaking soft words that escape me now. I must have fallen asleep that way, for I awakened to find light streaming through the curtains and Annie lying beside me, with no idea how we got beneath the covers. Caitlin was not in the bed, but she had taken good care of us before she left it.
CHAPTER 23
&n
bsp; When we reached Natchez the next afternoon, I found a fax waiting for me on my parents’ kitchen table. It had been sent to my father’s office just before lunch. There was no originating number at the head of the page, but the fax itself was a copy of a newspaper story clipped from the Leesville Daily Leader. Leesville, Louisiana, is a community located next to Fort Polk, a huge army training base, and a hundred and fifty miles from Natchez. Above the article was a copy of the paper’s masthead, and it showed the date as May 19, 1968. Five days after Del Payton died.
The article recounted the capture of two men-a supply sergeant and a civilian-who one month previous had stolen armaments from a military arsenal at Fort Polk. While the troops were on maneuvers and the marching band was parading around the base in full dress uniforms, these two enterprising souls had filled a two-ton truck with M-16s, Claymore mines, hand grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive, then had driven off the base and sold most of the ordnance piecemeal throughout the southeast. The civilian half of this duo was named Lester Hinson. I noticed because his name had been circled, probably by whoever sent the fax.
There was also a note for me to call Althea Payton at St. Catherine’s hospital. I tried, but someone in the nursery told me she couldn’t come to the phone. I called Caitlin at the newspaper, explained the mystery fax, and gave her Lester Hinson’s name so she could begin tracing him. She asked if I thought Dwight Stone had sent the fax. My guess was Peter Lutjens, but I didn’t say his name on the telephone. I did make a mental note to call him again and make a pitch for him to take a run at Payton’s FBI file before he woke up in North Dakota. Caitlin asked if I’d gotten started doing what Stone had told me to do: talk to the eyewitnesses of the Payton bombing. She recalled from her research that Frank Jones-the “sole” witness to the bombing-worked as a salesman at the local Pontiac dealership. Jones didn’t know it yet, but he was about to take me for a test drive.
***
The Pontiac dealership is festooned with balloons and strips of colored foil, but the only customers are clustered around the service bay. The salesmen hover in a loose knot inside the air-conditioned showroom, watching for customers through the huge glass window like predators scanning a drought-burned plain. The sight of my father’s BMW 740i brings them all to their feet, albeit with feigned aloofness. They probably know the car on sight, but hope that old Doc Cage has temporarily taken leave of his senses and decided to buy American for once.
After parking at the end of the main display line, I make a show of looking at price stickers as I walk toward the showroom door. I search the salesmen’s faces through the glass, gambling that the oldest will be Frank Jones. It stands to reason, although in a tough economy retirees might be working jobs like this to supplement their Social Security. When I open the door, everyone is suddenly busy, as though I’ve blundered into a Labor Day blowout sale.
I nod to the nearest salesman, then walk over to a Trans-Am sitting on the display floor and study the price sticker. Twenty seconds of silence is all it takes.
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” A head has suddenly materialized from behind a wooden partition near the back wall. “You want two, or just the one?”
The face on the head is over seventy, and it splits into the forced grin of a man who always supplies the laughs for his own jokes. He comes out from behind the partition, right hand extended in greeting, revealing a baby blue polyester sports coat over a blue plaid shirt and brown tie.
“Frank Jones, sales manager!” he barks, pumping my hand. “What can we do you for today?”
“I want to take a test drive.”
“That’s why we’re here. Which car?”
I drop the flat of my hand on the roof of the Trans-Am. “How about this one?”
“You bet.” He looks vaguely to his left. “Open the big door, Jimmy Mac.”
“Sure,” says a young salesman by the window. “Can I talk to you a second first?”
“I got a customer here, son.”
Jones has the gleam of money in his eye. He hasn’t yet spotted the BMW, and he seems to have sized me up as an all-cash type. I sit in the passenger seat as he guides the Trans-Am out of the showroom and stops so we can trade seats. Once behind the wheel, I adjust the seat for my longer frame, then pull out to the edge of the highway.
“That looks like Doc Cage’s car,” he says, finally noticing the BMW.
“It is.” I merge into traffic, make a U-turn, and head for the Mississippi River bridge. “I’m driving it.”
He looks at me and starts to speak but doesn’t.
“I’m Penn Cage.”
“Shit. You’re the book writer.” He stares straight through the windshield for half a minute, then turns to me. “Did you say all that crap they printed in the paper?”
“Some of it. They didn’t exactly stick to what I said.”
Jones snorts. “Don’t I know it. You can’t trust a damn thing you read in that rag. They did the same to me back in sixty-eight.”
“About your account of the bombing?”
“Not so much that. It was the little things. Hell, they misspelled my name. How the hell can you misspell Jones? By God, that takes some doing.”
When we top the hill that runs down to the cut in the bluff, I remember that there are two bridges spanning the Mississippi now. Throughout my childhood there was only one, and I can’t seem to keep the new one in my mind. As the Trans-Am ramps onto the main span of the westbound bridge, the mile-wide tide of brown river opens seventy feet below us. The vistas to the north and south look much as they did to Sam Clemens a hundred years ago: muddy water swollen into the forest and sandbars on both banks, pale blue sky blanked out at the center by a relentless sun. Ahead of us, Vidalia, Louisiana, is laid out like a toy town behind its levee, some buildings no higher than the river itself, the personification of provisional existence.
“You want to ask me about that killing, don’t you? Hell, I’ve told the story a thousand times. A dozen times a day since that article ran.”
“Did the police question you a lot about what you saw?”
Jones squints, his rather dull version of a cagey look. “Everybody questioned me a lot. I was the only person who saw that Fairlane blow.”
This isn’t the time to contradict him. “Did you get the feeling the police really wanted to solve the case?”
“What do you mean?”
I let the silence speak for me.
He licks his lips and looks out his window. “You writing a book about this?”
“No.”
“Well, if you was… it seems like my story might be pretty valuable to you.”
“I’m not. I just want to know about the police. Do you remember who investigated the case?”
“Henry Creel and Ronnie Temple. And you’re goddamn right they tried to solve it. Those guys had a hundred-percent clearance rate back then.”
“They must be the only detectives in the world with that record.”
“These days maybe. Back then they didn’t have the goddamn ACLU breathing down their necks.”
“But they didn’t solve the case.”
Jones rolls down the window and spits into the wind. “Somebody killed a nigger. Case closed.”
“What do you know about Ray Presley?”
“Enough not to say a word about him.”
I turn onto Deer Park Road, which follows the river south on the Louisiana side. Soon we’re driving past cotton and soybean fields, the levee on our left, the monotony broken only by shotgun churches, house trailers, and tar-paper shacks.
“You seem to know a lot about Creel and Temple.”
“Creel was my wife’s cousin.”
“Was?”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease, over to Shreveport. Temple’s dead too. Heart attack.”
I swing the car up onto the road that runs atop the levee. Between the levee and the river lie the perpetually flooded “borrow pits” created by the dredging that built the levee. The blackwater pits teem with
catfish, crawfish, gar, water moccasins, alligators, abandoned cars, and the occasional corpse.
“Good fishing down there this month,” Jones offers.
“Do you think Payton was killed for doing civil rights work?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know nothing from civil rights work. He was stirring up a pile of shit, I know that. He used the national union to get himself promoted to quality-control inspector, which was a white job up till then. That pissed off a lot of people. Then he started bucking for injection-mold foreman. What the hell did he expect? Wasn’t nobody out there gonna tolerate a nigger foreman in sixty-eight. Next thing they’d be wanting the front office. Too far, too fast. It’s that simple.”
“Did the Klan kill him?”
Jones’s cheeks redden. “I don’t know nothing about no Klan. Payton just pissed off too many people. Anybody coulda killed him.” He snaps his fingers nervously. “Turn this damn thing around. I gotta get back to work.”
“I noticed you guys were pretty busy.”
“Kiss my sanctified ass.”
He turns on the radio, selects a country station, and adjusts the volume so that further conversation will be impossible. I make a U-turn and head back toward the twin bridges. A couple of minutes later, he surprises me by yelling over the roar of the stereo: “I can’t stand this shit!”
“What?” I ask, turning down the volume.
“All this happy-ass, fake-rock, slicky-boy country shit. They don’t play nothing good no more.”
“What’s good? Hank Williams?”
“Hank’s all right, sure. But Jim Reeves, boy, that’s the prime stuff.”
I almost laugh. I’m no Jim Reeves fan, but whatever differences separate me from this redneck, he and I are bound together by manner, rites, and traditions imprinted deep beneath the skin. That’s why Caitlin’s newspaper story didn’t stop him from talking to me. I am white and Mississippi-born, and at bottom Jones perceives me as a member of his tribe. I wonder how wrong he is. If push comes to shove, and I’m forced to choose between white and black, will I realize there is no choice at all?
