by Greg Iles
“Is that all?”
“What you mean?”
“Did you know John Portman was here in 1968?”
“John who?”
I hesitate before answering. I have a feeling Ike knows exactly who I’m talking about. “The director of the FBI,” I say, watching him.
He accelerates and whips around the car ahead of us, but I can’t tell whether he did it to buy time or not.
“What you mean, he was here?”
“It was his first year as an FBI agent. He was working the Payton case with Stone.”
Ike shrugs. “That’s the first I heard of it. But I told you to stay away from the FBI, didn’t I? You can’t trust no Feds, man.”
“Never mind. Look, I’ve thought of a way to go after Marston. But it’s risky. I’ve got to know more than I know now. You understand? You’ve got to give me something more.”
“Like what?”
“How about some evidence?”
“Shit, man, if I had evidence, I’d get that motherfucker my own self. Finding evidence is your job.”
“Why do you think he was behind Del’s murder?”
“I just know, okay?”
“It’s not okay, damn it. It doesn’t make sense. Why would Marston want Del Payton dead?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to find out.”
My father’s original doubts about Ike’s motives are coming back to me. “Why do you hate Marston so much, Ike?”
He turns to me, his eyes smoldering. “I done told you once. It’s personal.”
“That’s not good enough anymore.”
“Fuck you, then!”
I say nothing for the next mile. Ike’s respiration is heavy and erratic, as though so much energy is consumed by his anger that he has to remind himself to breathe.
“Were you and Ray Presley cops at the same time?”
He keeps his eyes on the road. “Presley was in Parchman when I joined the force. But I knew that motherfucker later on. We were like two bad dogs on a street. We always stayed on different sides. Still do.”
“Well, somebody just tried to kill him.”
An eerie stillness comes over Ike. Then he turns his head toward me, and the intensity in his eyes is frightening. “Tried to kill him how?”
“Poison.”
“Take more than poison to kill that bastard.”
“I think Presley planted the bomb that killed Del Payton.”
Ike rolls his tongue around his cheek, his eyes moving on and off me. “Why you think that?”
“I’ve got reasons. What do you think?”
“I think all the evidence in the world against Ray Presley ain’t gonna get you no closer to Marston.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause Presley don’t know shit about the reason. You got to find the why of it.”
“Take me back to my car. You want me to fight your battles for you, but you don’t give me shit for help.”
He spins the wheel and turns the cruiser back toward Wal-Mart, his anger making his knuckles pale. “Marston fucked up my family,” he says through clenched teeth. “Fucked up my whole life. That’s all I’m gonna tell you. It’s got nothing to do with Del Payton, but I knew you could bring Marston down behind the Payton thing. That’s why I went that way. I want that bastard destroyed. In public. That’s what’ll hurt him the most. If it wasn’t for that, I’d have killed his ass a long time ago.”
I settle back on the seat and let my eyes go out of focus, which turns the oncoming headlights into slow white meteors. “Ike… I want you to swear on the soul of your mother that Marston ordered Del Payton’s death.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “On the soul of my mother. If it wasn’t for Leo Marston, Del Payton would be alive today.”
I guess that’s all the certainty I’m going to get.
When I get home, Caitlin’s Miata is parked in the driveway. She is standing in the garage, talking to Officer Ervin.
“What’s the matter?” I ask as she walks out to meet me.
“Dwight Stone just called me at the newspaper. He thinks his phone is tapped. He gave me the number of a pay phone and told me to get you to call him back. He said you should use a pay phone too. One far from your house.”
“Let’s go.”
I drive us up to the bypass, then north to Highway 61. There’s a pay phone at a convenience store, but I go a little farther to a grocery store parking lot, where there won’t be so much noise. Caitlin stands beside me as I dial the number.
“Yes?” Stone says in a gruff voice.
“It’s Penn Cage.”
“Listen to me, Cage. My phone is tapped. So are the phones at your father’s house and medical office. Probably the lines at the newspaper as well. You should also assume physical surveillance. I’m being watched right now.”
“Jesus. Someone just tried to kill Ray Presley.”
Caitlin tenses beside me, but I ignore her.
“How?” asks Stone.
“Poisoned his IV bag. He had a coronary, but he’s still ambulatory and mad as hell.”
Stone says nothing, but I can sense the conflict raging within him. “I know you worked with Portman on the Payton case in sixty-eight,” I tell him. “Why did you lie about that?”
“I was trying to protect people.”
“Who?”
“You, for one. Others too.”
“Well, I took your advice. I talked to the eyewitnesses, and I’ve placed Presley at the crime scene.”
“And?”
“I want Leo Marston, not Presley.”
“Squeeze Presley.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
Stone laughs softly. “Ray’s not very squeezable, is he? Son of a bitch tried to kill us on the highway to Jackson.”
“You’re the agent who got shot at on Highway 61?”
“Portman and me, if you can believe it. The world would be a lot nicer place if Presley had hit Portman that day.”
“Why? Goddamn it, what’s the big secret? What was so terrible that Hoover had to bury it under a national security seal? What’s Portman hiding? What could still scare you after thirty years?”
“Do you really expect me to answer that?”
“You’re damn right I do. It’s time you listened to your conscience, Stone.”
“Don’t preach to me, son. You haven’t earned the right.”
“If Ray Presley shot at you, why didn’t he go to jail for it?”
“He did.”
“Presley went to Parchman for drug trafficking. That’s a state prison.”
“Justice doesn’t always happen in a straight line. You should know that.”
I grip the phone with exasperation. “I’ve thought of a way to go after Marston without Presley’s help, but it’s a gamble. A big one. I can’t afford to be wrong.”
“What are you asking me, counselor?”
“Am I wrong about Leo Marston being behind the murder of Del Payton?”
Just as I decide Stone is not going to answer, he says, “You’re not wrong.”
A wave of triumph surges through me.
“But that doesn’t mean there’s evidence lying around waiting to be picked up,” he adds. “I don’t know how much I’d gamble on being able to prove it.”
“Did you prove it in sixty-eight?”
“Yes.”
“Then why wasn’t the son of a bitch prosecuted?”
“Oldest reason in the world. You just be damn sure about every step you take. This road doesn’t end where you think it does.”
“Hold on. Why are you willing to warn me, but not to help me?”
“I thought I just did. Good hunting, counselor.”
When I hang up, Caitlin grabs my arm, her eyes furious. “Why didn’t you tell me someone tried to kill Presley?”
“No one knew but my father, and he asked me not to tell.”
She takes a deep breath and expels it slowly. “What did Stone say?”
I glance around
the dark parking lot, searching for suspicious vehicles. Would I even see surveillance if it was there? Surely the FBI is better than that. I pull Caitlin to me and put my mouth to her ear. She stiffens.
“What are you doing?”
“Stone says we’re probably under surveillance. Act like we’re lovers.”
After a moment her arms slip around me and her breasts flatten against my chest, but her eyes are anything but romantic.
“We’ve got to go with my slander plan,” I whisper. “We don’t have time for anything else, and the more public this is, the safer we are.”
She slides her cheek past mine and answers in my ear. “I won’t do that. Don’t ask me to.”
“It’s the only way.”
She pulls away from me, her eyes bright. “Take me back to my car.”
“You told me you wanted to shake up your father’s business.”
“Not like that. I have no right to put him in jeopardy that way.”
We get into the car, and I cross the highway to 61 South. “You think Marston’s going to stand on ethics?” I ask her. “He’d kill us in a second if he thought he had to.”
She turns to me with a defiant look. “As far as I know, the worst thing Leo Marston has ever done is sabotage your love life. And that’s not against the law.”
“The danger is real, Caitlin.”
“Give me a break. Nobody killed Woodward and Bernstein.”
“They weren’t working in Mississippi.”
CHAPTER 25
Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.
And yet… today I am granted such a chance.
Livy Marston does not call as she promised she would. She shows up at our front door at nine a.m. wearing faded Levi’s and a white blouse tied at the waist, sapphire earrings one shade darker than her eyes, a silk scarf in her hair. On the street behind her, a midnight blue Fiat Spyder convertible idles like a resting cat.
“I’m kidnapping you,” she says. “If it’s all right with Annie.”
It takes a moment to center myself in the present. “Kidnaping me to where?”
She smiles. “It’s a surprise. If you thought about it, you’d know. But don’t think. Today is a right-brain day.”
Five minutes after I clear it with Mom and Annie, I’m clinging to the passenger door of the Spyder as Livy races up the highway, cutting in and out of traffic like a Grand Prix driver. She borrowed the car from a friend of her mother’s, and we both know why. Our senior year in high school, after she received some honor or other, Livy was given a Fiat convertible much like this one by her father. The night they brought it back from the dealership in New Orleans, she and I drove across half the state with the top down, drinking beer and reveling in the promise of futures unbound by visible limits. We spent many of our best moments in that car, and she has apparently decided to relive some of them. I’ve fantasized about scenes like this more than once, but there is something eerie about tearing up the sun-drenched highway toward the edge of town twenty years after we did it the first time, and in the same car.
As the Spyder crosses the westbound bridge into Louisiana, Maude Marston’s words echo in my mind: You ruined my daughter’s life, you bastard. I want to ask Livy outright what her mother was referring to, but Livy always had a way of being elliptical where serious matters were concerned.
“What did you mean, today is a right-brain day?” I ask.
She laughs. “I mean today everything is off limits.” Her voice has deepened slightly over the years. “Everything except experience.”
“Livy, I have some questions.”
“You mean like why are my husband and I separated? Why did you and I really split up in college? Why did my father try to destroy yours?”
“Yes. Little things like that.”
“We’ll get to all that. I have questions too. But first we give ourselves a little of the past. A little innocence.” She grants me a brilliant smile. “We owe ourselves that.”
At the foot of the bridge she pulls into the parking lot of the liquor store we patronized during high school. Joking that it’s finally legal for us to shop here, she goes inside and returns with two chilled bottles of Pouilly Fuisse. Handing them to me, she takes a small ice chest from the trunk and sets it on the backseat. Inside, I see French bread, cheese, grapes, peeled shrimp, and chocolate chip cookies.
She crosses the four-lane and whips the Spyder onto Deer Park Road, the same route I drove yesterday with Frank Jones. Only Livy takes the gently curving blacktop at ninety miles per hour. She was always an excellent driver, aggressive but in control. When the road jumps onto the levee, she has to slow to seventy, but the wind still whips through our hair, keeping the sun from frying us. I serve her wine in a styrofoam cup, and when she drinks, the wine clings to the same fine golden down that dusted her upper lip when she was seventeen. But she is not seventeen now. And the questions hanging between us cannot be ignored.
She pulls a pair of Ray-Bans down from the visor and slips them on, snapping me straight back to Sarah’s funeral. I didn’t notice Livy at the church service, but later, at the graveside, I saw her standing at the edge of the crowd, a hauntingly beautiful apparition in a black dress and sunglasses, unmistakable even after twenty years.
“It meant a lot that you came to the funeral,” I say above the whine of the engine. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more than say hello.”
She shakes her head and touches my arm. “I had to come. And I didn’t expect any more than that.”
At the end of the levee she stops, and we switch seats for the return leg. Somewhere in the middle of the empty cotton fields, she intertwines the fingers of her left hand in my right. I don’t look at her, but I feel a sudden tingling, as though I’ve put my hand through a portal in time and felt a charge of energy pour through. On some level, acceding to this intimacy seems a betrayal of myself, but it also presages a deeper connection, one that might lead to meaningful conversation, so I leave my hand in hers.
As we climb the eastbound bridge, the Cecil B. De Mille panorama of Natchez rises above us as it did yesterday when I crossed the bridge with Frank Jones. The whole grand stage seems laid out with such dramatic intent that I ask myself the question Caitlin asked at our first meeting: why haven’t I written about this place?
“What are you thinking?” Livy asks.
“I thought questions were prohibited.”
She ignores this remark. “I was thinking about this place. The town. The fact that it is a place, with a unique identity. Atlanta is so sterile that I literally can’t stand being in it sometimes.”
“I’ve felt the same thing in Houston.”
Looking up from the bridge, I see Natchez as the tourist sees it: the high bluff where sun-worshiping Natchez Indians massacred the French soldiers of Fort Rosalie in 1729; where Aaron Burr was arrested as a traitor and set free to the cheers of crowds; where an African prince labored twenty years as a slave; where Jefferson Davis wedded Varina Howell in the halcyon
days before the Civil War. But I see so much more. I see the city Livy Marston captivated with a beauty and poise not seen since P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind down the river in 1851. I see the thin edge of a universe of vibrant life and mysterious death, of shadowy secrets and bright facades, and of races inextricably bound by blood and tears, geography and religion, and above all, time.
“This is a good place to be from,” I murmur.
“Could you ever live here again?” Livy asks in a strange voice.
I sense a deeper question beneath the one she’s asked. “I don’t know. Could you?”
She doesn’t take her eyes from the bluff. From this place she left to conquer the world. How does it look to her now?
“Not while my parents are alive,” she says, so softly that I’m not sure she knows she spoke aloud.
Before I can ponder what she meant, she turns to me, her eyes languid, and says, “Let’s go to the Cold Hole.”
The tingling in my hand spreads up my arm and across my neck and shoulders. The Cold Hole. One mile from the spot where my father and I sank the pistol I bought from Ray Presley-in the midst of that slimy, sulfurous swamp-a cold spring bubbles up through the green water, creating a pool as clear as Arctic snowmelt. It is the pool from my dream, the one I had the night Ike Ransom first told me about Leo Marston’s involvement in the Payton murder. The woman in my dream was Livy Marston, and she sits beside me now, asking me to take her to that pool. Only in the dream she had something to tell me. Today she says the past is off limits.
Her presumption offends me. The Cold Hole was the geographic center of our intimate life, the name alone a talisman of spiritual and sexual exploration. Does she really believe that the passage of twenty years has somehow deactivated the mines that lie between us? Surely not. But perhaps she feels that in that hidden place, surrounded by our secret past, we can speak of things too painful to broach anywhere else. If that’s what it takes to get her to solve the riddle of our truncated history, I’m willing. As I point the Spyder south and let the motor out, she lays her head back on the seat and smiles into the sky.
This is not the first time since my father’s trial that Livy has tried to bridge the gulf it opened between us. Three years after she disappeared from Natchez, she was asked to be Queen of the Confederate Pageant, the apogee of social recognition by old Natchez standards. She was at UVA then, and everyone who was anyone waited on pins and needles to see whether she would accept. No one had ever declined the invitation to be queen, but all her life Livy had vowed that, if asked, she would be the first. That she would be asked was never in doubt. Her grandmother had been queen in the nineteen-thirties, her mother in the fifties, and if Livy accepted, she would be the first third-generation queen in history. Yet for years she had denigrated the Confederate Pageant (the nightly highlight of the pilgrimage to Natchez’s antebellum mansions) as a hobby for garden club ladies with nothing better to do, a celebration of the Old South without a trace of irony or racial awareness. A lot of “new Natchez” people thought she was mostly right, and she earned points with them for flouting tradition. So, in the spring of my junior year, when it was announced to great fanfare that Livy Marston had agreed to sacrifice two weeks of college to serve as queen, I was stunned. For nine nights she would preside over the very pageant she had scorned, playing a generic Scarlett O’Hara for those Yankees and Europeans who journeyed thousands of miles to see the Old South reincarnated. This was vintage Livy Marston, the girl who liked to have things both ways.
