by Greg Iles
He chuckles, then stands and runs his fingers through my hair, following the line of my skull. He sticks a finger in each of my ears. “Sorry, but the transmitters are damnably small these days.”
“Now that we’ve got that over with,” I say, pulling on my pants, “let’s hear what really happened in Natchez in 1968.”
“How far have you gotten on your own?”
“I’ve got Presley nailed down for the actual murder. My witnesses are Frank Jones, his ex-wife, and Betty Lou Beckham. An ATF bomb expert will confirm C-4 as the explosive, proving Presley planted evidence at the scene. And one of the Fort Polk thieves will put stolen military C-4 in Presley’s hands.”
Stone smiles. “So, you got my fax.”
“Thanks.”
“How do you link Presley to Marston?”
“You.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I hope you’ve got something else.”
“Well… I did have an FBI agent trying to copy your original report for me. But he was arrested yesterday.”
Stone gives a somber nod. “I heard.”
Of course. His daughter told him.
“So,” he says. “Marston orders Presley to do the hit. That’s how you see it?”
“Well… there’s Portman, of course. But I don’t know what his role was. Are there more people involved?”
“Conspiracies are always complicated. But in this case, Presley and Marston make a nice package, so why complicate it? Of course, you don’t even have Marston yet.”
“But you did.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how.”
He picks up the cordless phone again, presses a button, listens, then hangs up and begins speaking to me in a low, clear voice, his right hand thumbing the gun in his lap.
“First of all, Portman wasn’t my partner. Hoover foisted him on me, fresh out of Yale Law and the Academy. His father was a Wall Street lawyer with Washington connections. He thought the Bureau would be a good political incubator for his son. Like military service without the risk. So pal Edgar throws the kid into a high-profile assignment, safely under the wing of veteran agent Dwight Stone.”
Stone stops speaking for a few moments and simply listens. I hear only the crackle of the fire and, perhaps, the rush of the swollen Slate behind the cabin.
“Portman didn’t give a shit about the Payton case,” he says finally. “All he cared about was kissing ass and getting promoted to the Puzzle Palace.”
“But you cared. Althea Payton told me you did.”
He nods thoughtfully. “Cage, in all the mountains of shit, sometimes one case gets to you. You know? For me, it was that one. Payton was a good guy who basically minded his own business and tried to better his lot in life. And he got killed for it. When I found out he’d served in Korea, it got personal. I’d known some black noncoms over there, and they were okay. Payton survived Chosin Reservoir only to get blown to shit by some gutless rednecks in his home town.” Stone slaps the cordless phone against his thigh with a percussive pop. “Man, I wanted to nail those sons of bitches.
“My first steps were the same ones you’ve been taking. Frank Jones, his wife, then Betty Lou Jackson. Beckham now, I guess. Betty Lou knew something, but she wouldn’t talk. Then Portman and me got shot at out on Highway 61. Hoover got irritated after that incident. Scumbags shooting at the FBI and getting away with it didn’t fit his PR plan. He authorized a lot more money and muscle. I cracked Betty Lou, and that put Presley at the scene. Portman and I braced Presley at home, and he told us to stick it. That bastard didn’t rattle easy, I’ll give him that. Even when we got the Fork Polk thieves to admit selling him the C-4, Presley told us to go to hell.
“We put on the full-court press. On my request, Hoover authorized illegal wiretaps on Presley’s home, plus all the nearby pay phones. We bribed local Klansmen, but they couldn’t find out a thing about Payton’s death. Whoever killed Payton had acted without Klan authority. We put intermittent surveillance on Presley, tight enough to annoy him but loose enough for him to shake. After a week he called Leo Marston from a pay phone near his house.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing incriminating. Said he wanted to talk, somewhere private. Marston was the D.A. then, of course. Nothing illegal about wanting to talk to the district attorney. I thought Presley might be trying to cut a deal with the state authorities to avoid any sort of federal prosecution. The Klan had a lot of influence in Parchman in those days, and they could have assured him an easy stretch. They also had influence over pardons.”
“But making a deal wasn’t Presley’s style.”
“No,” Stone agrees. “Anyway, the second Hoover heard Leo Marston’s name in connection with the case, the whole case changed. The director assumed personal control.”
“Why?”
“Hoover was a creature of politics. He demanded total control over every case that involved anyone who could do him good or harm down the road.”
“What happened next?”
“We did a black bag job on Marston’s mansion. Bugged it top to bottom. Phones, the house, the garden, gazebo, the works. It was a beautiful job.”
“You and Portman?”
“Hell, no. Henry Bookbinder and me. The technology was primitive, but Henry was an artist with it, God rest his soul.”
“What did you pick up?”
Stone smiles with satisfaction. “The mother lode. One day Presley drove up to the mansion and knocked on the door. Then he and the judge went out to the gazebo and had a long chat. They said enough in thirty minutes to put Marston in the gas chamber.”
I hear a faint ringing in my ears. “Jesus. What did they say?”
Stone shakes his head. “You haven’t got anywhere on a motive for Marston?”
“That’s been my problem all along. I know Leo secretly owned some property that an out-of-town company was thinking of buying. There was some kind of race angle to that. Labor problems. Beyond that, I don’t have anything.”
“You were right on target, and you didn’t know it. It was a carpet company from Georgia. Zebulon Hickson, the owner, was about a mile to the right of Attila the Hun. He thought slavery was the finest and most misunderstood institution this country ever had. When he opened new factories, he went into communities where what he called ‘the nigger problem’ didn’t exist. Of course, by 1968 towns like that were hard to find. Especially along the Mississippi River, which was where he wanted to be.
“Leo Marston stood to make a lot of money off that land. But the labor situation wasn’t as stable as Hickson wanted it. Blacks were using the unions to push into white jobs. Hickson had the idea that if an example was made, it would calm the blacks down. Apparently he’d done this somewhere in Georgia, and it had worked.”
Marston’s plan seems so obvious now. All it takes is a few facts.
“I honestly doubt Marston ever thought it would work,” muses Stone. “He was too smart for that. But he didn’t care whether it worked. He just wanted to sell Hickson his land.”
“So, he went to Ray Presley,” I fill in. “He said, ‘We need to make an example of somebody.’ ”
“You got it. Marston didn’t care who died. It was just business.”
“Why didn’t he use the local Klan? Put a word into the right ear and let the Klan take care of Payton? Why use a cop?”
“Marston was the D.A. He knew the Klan was riddled with federal informants. He wanted zero risk of the murder being traced back to him. He also despised the White Citizens’ Council. He called them illiterate Baptist sons of bitches several times on the phone.”
“But he trusted Presley.”
“Yes. And he was right to. It’s ironic as hell, really.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see in a minute. So, Presley chose Del Payton as the victim. Why, I don’t know. He was in charge of voter-registration drives for the local NAACP, but he was a quiet guy. Had a nice house and a pretty wife. Saved his money. He had a nicer h
ouse than Presley did, really. That by itself could have been the reason. Anyway, Zeb Hickson was all set to announce his plans for a Natchez carpet factory-”
“But you had Marston by the short hairs.”
“Yep.”
“But you didn’t make any arrests.”
Stone sighs deeply. “Right.”
“Why not?”
“As soon as Hoover heard the tape of Marston and Presley, he ordered me to forward every case note, transcript, surveillance report, witness interview, photograph, and audiotape to Washington. After he reviewed all that, he scheduled a visit to the Jackson field office. Good PR for the troops, he said. But the real reason for that trip was to meet Leo Marston.”
The ringing in my head is an alarm bell now. “About what?”
“Politics. Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s assistant, made the call. I still had the wiretap running, and I heard it. Marston thought he was going up to Jackson for a pat on the back for his performance as D.A. When he got there, Edgar read him the riot act, then laid the classic Hoover pitch on him.”
“Which was?”
“Work for me, or endure the punishment you so richly deserve for your sins.”
“Work for him how?”
A cynical smile thins Stone’s lips. “This is where it gets interesting. And dirty. Del Payton died in May 1968, five weeks after Martin Luther King. What else was going on then?”
“The Vietnam War?”
He waves his hand dismissively. “The presidential primaries. Bobby Kennedy had jumped into the race as soon as Eugene McCarthy proved LBJ was vulnerable. After Kennedy came in, Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for reelection. Del Payton was killed on the day Bobby won the Nebraska primary, and he’d won Indiana the week before. Kennedy was shaping up as the likely Democratic candidate in November.”
“I’m not following you. What’s the connection?”
“Hoover, Cage. Compared to the presidential race, Hoover didn’t give a damn what happened to some black factory worker in Mississippi. Why? Because the FBI director has always served at the pleasure of the President. Hoover had been director since 1924, and he meant to stay director until he died. Two of his least favorite people in the world were Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. King’s assassination had thrilled him, literally. But Bobby’s presidential campaign was giving him ulcers. Can you guess what Hoover’s mission in life was in 1968?”
“Not to kill Robert Kennedy?”
“No, no. Forget that crap. He wanted to put Richard Nixon in office. And he was willing to do whatever was required to accomplish that. Hoover and Nixon went way back, to the 1960 election when Nixon lost to JFK. Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, had treated Hoover like shit when he was attorney general. So, in May 1968 Nixon is making sober speeches about law and order to middle America, while Bobby Kennedy runs from ghetto to college campus preaching about racial equality, poverty in Mississippi, the evils of the Vietnam War, and reaching out to the Soviet Union.”
“I still don’t see the relevance to Del Payton.”
Stone looks exasperated by my slowness. “The relevance is to Leo Marston. And more important, to his father. Leo’s father was a major Mississippi power broker, a former state attorney general, just like Leo turned out to be. He was close friends with Big Jim Eastland, a well-known segregationist, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and J. Edgar Hoover’s number one cheerleader on Capitol Hill.”
At last the picture is coming clear.
“The sixty-eight presidential election was the second closest in history, Cage, after Nixon and JFK in 1960. In sixty-eight Nixon won by less than one percent of the vote. That’s how close it was in November. Back in May, when Del Payton was murdered, anything was possible. Mississippi was a Democratic state, but it voted strangely in presidential elections. In 1960 her electors didn’t vote for JFK or Nixon, but some guy named Byrd. In sixty-four they voted for Goldwater. In 1968 they were leaning toward-”
“Wallace,” I finish. “George Wallace.”
Stone nods. “The racist firecracker from Alabama. Wallace was running as an Independent. Leo and his father were Democrats, but they thought Bobby Kennedy was a communist. Wallace was too racist for them, and more important, they didn’t think he could win. So, they cast their lot with Nixon. Old man Marston was doing all he could to sway the movers and shakers in Mississippi to forget Wallace and vote Republican.”
“Jesus.”
“You see it now? Into this mess rides Special Agent Dwight Stone, telling J. Edgar Hoover that the son of one of Nixon’s biggest supporters is responsible for a race murder in Mississippi. Did that make the director happy? No, sir. Do you think Hoover wanted to tell his buddy Senator Eastland that the son of an old crony was going to jail for killing a nigger who got out of line? No, sir. And the thought of what Bobby Kennedy would do with that information was enough to give Hoover a heart attack. So… what do you think Hoover said to Leo at that meeting in Jackson?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sonny boy, you fucked up. You had the right idea, but you got caught. It’s just a good thing you got caught by my people, or life would be getting very uncomfortable right now. In fact, it still could. Then Hoover talked to Leo’s papa. It’s a lot like The Godfather. Nothing formal, but everything understood. Fealty. Absolute loyalty.” Stone modulates his voice into a scratchy Marlon Brando impersonation: “‘Someday, I may ask you to perform a difficult service, but until that day, accept this favor as a gift.’ From that day forward, Hoover owned the Marston family. All their influence, everything.”
“Hoover buried your evidence?”
“All of it. Leo went back to his job and his future. The Payton investigation was allowed to die. Only Ray Presley paid a price.”
“Presley?”
“He’d shot at us on the highway, remember? Hoover wouldn’t let that pass. It was part of the price he demanded from Marston. Presley had to go down for something. Didn’t matter what.”
“Marston gave him up?”
“Didn’t even hesitate. Presley had a dozen sidelines for making money. His police job was just a fulcrum for the rest of it. He fenced stuff, collected protection money-”
“And sold dope.”
“Right. Amphetamines mostly, for truckers. Interstate transportation of federally regulated narcotics. Marston gave us everything we needed to nail him, and we fed it to the state police. They busted him on possession with intent to distribute. I showed up at the arrest, just so Presley would know it was payback.”
“Did he find out it was Marston who gave him up?”
“Not as far as I know. That’s the irony. Marston was right to trust Presley, but Presley was a fool to trust Marston. Presley’s like a dog that way.”
“A pit bull maybe.”
Stone goes through his little phone ritual again.
“You waiting for a call?”
“No.” He picks up his pistol, stands, and walks back to the front window.
“They still out there?”
“Still there.”
“So, the national security seal was completely bogus?”
Stone chuckles dryly. “Completely. Think about the Payton case. The Bureau had been tasked with destroying violent opposition to civil rights in the South. Instead, Hoover purposefully protected a race murderer for his own political ends. Normally, he would have added the Payton evidence to his personal files. The infamous blackmail files. But Payton’s file was too big for that. We had agents in Natchez generating reams of useless crap. The national security seal was an impenetrable shield.”
“Do you think the audiotape of Marston and Presley is still with the main file?”
“I doubt it. That was the critical evidence. It was probably taken to Hoover’s home when he died, with the other blackmail material. Shelves of books have been written about what might have happened to that stuff. You’ll never find that tape.”
“So, Marston’s motive was just-”
“Mo
ney,” Stone finishes. “Greed. Bastards like him only care about one thing: grabbing everything within their reach. They think every dollar they get takes them one step closer to immortality, and every person they step on puts them one step above everyone else. I don’t think other people really exist for people like Marston. They’re just a means to an end.”
Including his daughter, I think with a shiver. “When you had the bugs in his mansion,” I say hesitantly, “did you ever pick up anything… unsavory?”
“Murder is pretty unsavory.”
“I’m talking about sexual stuff.”
“We heard him banging his wife’s best friend one day.”
“I’m talking about abuse. Child abuse.”
He turns away from the window and looks at me. “No. I had a daughter myself. If I’d heard anything like that, I would have gone in there and thrashed him within an inch of his life.” The corner of Stone’s mouth twitches. “The mikes were only in for a couple of weeks, though. And I can’t remember if Henry covered the little girl’s room.”
I force myself to push Livy from my mind. “I need you to tell this story to a jury.”
“It’ll never happen, son.”
“I think it will. I know about your daughter.”
In the midst of turning back to the window, he whips his whole head toward me, his eyes burning with anger.
I hold up both hands. “I’m just telling you I know she’s what’s been keeping you from helping me.”
“Then you know it’s pointless to ask me to testify.”
“Is it? I talked to her today, and she thinks different.”
Stone takes a step toward me. “You talked to my daughter today?”
“Yes. Caitlin Masters found her for me.”
“You idiot. If you’ve put her life in danger-”
“She’s all right! She’s fine. And she agrees with me. Portman started playing carrot and stick with her days ago. I didn’t even have to tell her you could bring him down. She knew.”
“You had no right to put her in jeopardy, Cage.”
“I want justice. That’s all.”
“You want revenge.”
