Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  Walt drove with a plastic Coke cup between his legs, while Tom munched on a Wendy’s cheeseburger in the passenger seat. Every now and then Walt’s police scanner chattered—too low for Tom to make out the messages, but Walt apparently missed nothing. The codes meant nothing to Tom anyway, except for a few he remembered from his days staffing the St. Catherine’s ER.

  “Food all right?” Walt asked.

  “Good,” Tom said, reaching for iced tea to wash down his cheeseburger. “Peggy would kill me if she knew I was eating this.”

  Walt gave an obligatory chuckle. Then his voice dropped, and he said, “I know you don’t like lying to your boy.”

  “It’s better this way,” Tom said, trying to believe it. “Penn’s got too much weighing on him already. And I don’t want him worrying Quentin to death.”

  “Does that old lawyer know how to keep his mouth shut?”

  Tom nodded. “When Quentin Avery goes to his grave, a lot of people will rest easier.”

  “From what you said, it doesn’t sound like that’ll be a very long trip.”

  Tom looked out at what remained of the little town of Washington, which had been the capital of the Mississippi Territory until 1802. “None of us knows the length of that trip, do we?”

  Walt slowed and began a careful U-turn near the entrance to Jefferson Military College, where John James Audubon had once taught as a professor. “Some are closer than others. A grunt walking through a minefield is likely to buy it a lot sooner than a Remington Raider.”

  “Remington Raider” was what they’d called rear-echelon typists in Korea. Tom tapped the window absently, his mind on other things. He’d missed a house call earlier that day, on one of his favorite patients, an elderly woman dying of emphysema. “Brother, at this age we’re all in the minefield.”

  “Speak for yourself. I intend to be keeping Carmelita just as happy ten years from now as I am today.”

  Tom watched his breath fog the window glass. He hoped his friend would be that lucky. He’d watched so many friends and patients die over the past ten years that life seemed the most fragile and tenuous state imaginable. Korea had taught him that lesson early, but somehow he’d blinded himself to it in the intervening years. You basically had to, to function in the world. But the steadily lengthening list of the dead—Viola’s only the latest name to be added—had forced him to confront the fact that he had little time left himself. That was tough enough from an existential perspective; but to have his perception of his whole history shattered, and with it his legacy, as had happened in the past two days, had pushed him into uncharted territory. Tom had never felt so alone and isolated.

  Jumping bail on a murder charge was probably the most extreme action he had taken in his life. Had he followed the mildly restrictive terms of his bail, he would have been entitled to the presumption of innocence by all men and women of goodwill. But now he was a fugitive, his flight a tacit admission of guilt. Any cop who recognized him could use deadly force to take him into custody, and if he died in the process, no one would ask too many questions. Tom had actually been counting on that. But that didn’t make the reality easier. Walt Garrity was risking his life at this moment. Tom had already let so many people down, Viola and Peggy first among them. Penn, after that. But there were others, and the tragedy was that he might never be able to explain his behavior to them.

  “Screw this,” Walt muttered. “I’m going to plant that tracker when we make this next pass. You keep lookout.”

  A ripple of fear went through Tom’s chest. “Are you sure?”

  “Hell, yeah. Those two are in there digging into a couple of T-bones, not watching the parking lot.”

  This time, when they reached the steak house, Walt turned into the big lot and parked two spaces away from Sonny Thornfield’s pickup.

  Tom popped a nitro under his tongue, hoping to head off his angina.

  “Two minutes,” Walt said, holding the magnetized device in his hand. “I’m gonna wire this baby into his electrical system, just like the other one. We’re not gonna risk having dead batteries when it comes to the action. If you see those assholes coming out of the restaurant, start the engine. I’ll hear it.”

  Tom started to warn his friend to be careful, but Walt had already left the van.

  CHAPTER 42

  PYTHIA NOLAN’S PALATIAL antebellum mansion stands on eighty-eight forested acres in the middle of Natchez. Called “Corinth,” it’s one of the few great houses still in the hands of the family that built it. As a rule, I don’t like Greek Revival mansions—especially the local variety, bland boxes with columned porticos—but Corinth was built on the scale of an authentic Greek temple, and its craftsmanship is beyond replication in our era.

  The estate’s wrought-iron gate stands twelve feet tall and is usually closed, but today I find it open, with Darius Stone, Pithy’s driver, waiting for me in a fifteen-year-old Bentley. After I drive through, Darius closes the gate and follows me up the paved private road to the house. The driveway is probably half a mile long, and it winds through acres of oak and elm trees bearded with Spanish moss. Half a dozen Hollywood production companies have begged to use Corinth in their films, but Pithy has never allowed it.

  As the mansion comes into sight, I see Xerxes, Darius’s aptly named son, operating a truck-mounted auger near a line of shrubs. His dark muscles ripple in the fading light, but because of the roar of the tool’s motor, he doesn’t look up until I’m almost past him. Recognizing me, he waves, then goes back to work.

  Flora Adams awaits me at the front door. One of the few maids in town who still wear a uniform, Flora has the imperious manner of an exiled queen. She’s always driven a Lincoln Town Car—one that belongs to her, not her employer—and her three sons all graduated from college, courtesy of Pithy Nolan. Flora also owns a fine two-story house in town, which Pithy gave her twenty years ago. After Pithy fell ill, Flora chose to live in Corinth’s renovated slave quarters for convenience’s sake.

  “She said bring you right up,” Flora says, holding open the door. “She’s had a rough couple of days. She misses Dr. Cage something terrible. I believe she misses you, too, though she’d never admit it.”

  As Flora leads me to the grand staircase, I recall a story my mother told me about Pithy Nolan. Pithy achieved fame—or infamy, depending on one’s prejudices—in the late 1960s, during a historic Garden Club meeting. The issue in question was whether to terminate the practice of serving refreshments during the annual Spring Pilgrimage tours, since new federal laws would allow “people of color” to actually tour the great southern mansions—homes they had previously been allowed in only as slaves or paid servants. Carried to its logical conclusion, this practice might result in southern ladies of good family actually waiting upon “Negroes” at table. (“Oh, the horror!”) This discussion, prickly at first, quickly became heated, with the majority clamoring to do away with refreshments altogether. After twenty minutes of squabbling, Pythia Nolan stood up and cleared her throat.

  As a “homeowner,” she enjoyed special status in the Garden Club. But unlike many homeowners who were “house poor,” Pithy Nolan still had wads of cash. And not only did she own one of the city’s crown jewels, but she also had an impeccably blue bloodline dating back to the Revolutionary War. Pithy was a past president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a summa cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr, and the widow of a war hero. Furthermore, she had the brass of any five ladies present. So when Pithy Nolan cleared her throat, the room fell silent.

  She cast her icy gaze about the room and said, “Heaven spare us from all this jabbering. There’s not one woman here who hasn’t served her own maid supper a hundred times, waited on her hand and foot, and eaten from the same set of utensils. The refreshment service brings much-needed money to this club. So put an end to all this hysteria and move on to something that actually matters. I’m starving.”

  The tinkle of a china cup boomed like a thunderclap in the silence that followed
Pithy’s radical statement of the obvious. But sixty seconds later, the assembled ladies voted in a landslide to continue the refreshment service, regardless of who might show up. On the outcome of such quotidian skirmishes hinges the march of Progress. Pithy Nolan did more for racial equality that day than a hundred CORE workers marching the streets of Natchez could have managed in a month.

  Now, forty years later, she lies in her upstairs bedroom, chained to the oxygen tank that gives only partial relief from her advanced emphysema. Facing imminent death, Pithy finally quit smoking her beloved cigarettes last year. According to Dad, it was Flora who finally cut her off, enduring repeated firings during the process. Pithy eventually rehired her, of course, being unable to subsist without Flora’s ministrations.

  I remind myself not to look shocked when Flora opens the bedroom door. Pithy has a regal bearing, even in her sickbed, but she looks much thinner than when I last saw her, and her eyes are frighteningly hollow.

  “It’s not you I want to see,” she says in a weak voice. “It’s your father. But come closer. Let’s see if you’ve aged as much as I have.”

  Tensing my stomach against the sickroom smells, I move to Pithy’s bedside. Flora motions me to the chair she sits in throughout the day. Half a crocheted comforter lies draped over the table beside it, a gleaming blue needle left in the yarn. Near Pithy’s bed, a heavy funk of old urine, flatulence, and medicinal creams simmers beneath a welcome breath of fresh eucalyptus. Then I see crushed leaves scattered on her bedside tables.

  “Don’t stand on ceremony!” she says. “Take a seat. You’ve always been a gentleman, even if you don’t know when to stop writing.”

  “Pithy, I—”

  “Water under the bridge. Tell me where my doctor is. I’ll tell you every secret I know for ten milligrams of cortisone.”

  I can’t help but smile. Dad has probably injected Pithy’s arthritic joints with ten times the legal limit of steroids over the years. Today her skin—which in the oil portrait downstairs glows like fresh cream—looks as thin and fragile as rice paper. Her brilliant blue eyes are clouded, and they look wet, as though someone just administered eyedrops.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Dad is,” I confess. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Well, you must think I can help, or you wouldn’t be here. Start talking. I’ll need to get back on my oxygen soon.”

  “Dad’s in trouble, Pithy.”

  “I’ve heard some things. Enough trouble to postpone a wedding?”

  I can’t help but smile again. “You heard that, too?”

  She rolls her eyes. Pithy’s telephone is her lifeline to the world, and even in her present condition she doesn’t miss much. “You go on and marry that girl, even if she is half a Yankee. She’s got spunk, and you’ve dawdled long enough.”

  “I’m going to. Postponing the ceremony was Caitlin’s idea.”

  “Well, don’t let her get away. You’re ten years older than she is. Remember the old adage: ‘Don’t keep a girl guessing too long, or she’ll find the answer somewhere else.’ ”

  Flora chuckles behind me. “Sho’ will.”

  “Bring Penn a cold drink, Flo. I think we still have one or two cans of Tab down in the icebox. And bring me some sherry to go with this nasty ginger tea.”

  “All right.”

  As Flora’s steps fade, I say, “They indicted him, Pithy. For murder.”

  “I heard. But darling, there’s a world of difference between that and being convicted. Some of the best people have been indicted for one thing or another. And anyone worth knowing has been arrested at least once.”

  “Have you?”

  She vouchsafes me a smile. “What Mardi Gras anecdote is complete without a night in jail?” Pithy fans her face with her hand. “Enough repartee. What do I know that you don’t?”

  “Tell me about Brody Royal.”

  Pithy inclines her head slightly, and I can almost see the flash of synapses behind her eyes. “What do you want to know?”

  There’s no point trying to hide anything from this woman, and I haven’t got time anyway. “Brody almost certainly killed some people a while back, mostly black men. Albert Norris and Pooky Wilson to start. He also ordered the deaths of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. Probably Dr. Leland Robb, too, which caused the deaths of three other innocent people.”

  My bald assertion has managed to impress a woman not easily shocked. “Well, well,” she trills. “You said a mouthful there. If Brody Royal did all that, why didn’t the high sheriff hang him in the courthouse square? Why is he roaming free?”

  “That’s what I’ve come to find out.”

  “Dear me. Sooner or later, everything comes to the surface, doesn’t it?”

  “Talk to me, Pithy. Please. And don’t hold anything back.”

  Without my saying it, she knows that her answers will somehow bear on my father’s fate. “Most people think Brody came from wealth,” she begins. “Nothing could be further from the truth. His father was a storekeeper and bootlegger in St. Bernard Parish. When Stanley Duchaine and his banker friends dynamited the levee in 1927 to save New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes were wiped out. Brody’s father lost everything. He—and eventually Brody—rebuilt his business from nothing, and they didn’t worry about which side of the law they were on. They were in thick with those Italians who ended up running the city.”

  “The Marcello family?”

  “That’s right. The ones who put the slot machines into Concordia Parish when Huey Long was governor, then later when Noah Cross was sheriff. My husband despised Brody, for getting his mob connections to fix it so he could avoid military service during the war. Anyway, Brody did a little bit of everything until 1948, when he struck oil near Natchez. One of the biggest early fields, I believe, and it’s still producing. That staked him, and he never looked back. Before you could shake a stick at a snake, he owned a bank, an insurance company, and thousands of acres of timber.”

  “You sure know a lot about him.”

  She gives me a secretive smile. “Brody courted me for a while. Although pursued might be a better word.”

  “What?”

  “He and I are exactly the same age. The year I was queen of the Confederate Pageant, Brody tried everything he could to get me to marry him. But I’d just lost my husband to the war, and I was no fool. I saw what he was after.”

  “What? Sex?”

  “Lord, no. He got that from half the floozies on both sides of the river. Brody wanted respectability. My family was everything his wasn’t. He’d never forgotten where he came from, and he never wanted anyone to be above him again. He hated those haughty New Orleans bankers who’d ruined his father, and he’d made up his mind to become one of them. The biggest of them. And he’s done it, though it took decades. He got his revenge, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of the richest of those New Orleans moneymen was originally from Natchez. His daughter Catherine spent a lot of time here as a child. Cathy was in my court when I was queen, and once Brody found out who she was, he went after her with a vengeance—literally. She didn’t know enough to see through his charm. She married him—pregnant—and her father nearly disowned her for it.”

  “That was Brody’s revenge?”

  “Only the beginning, I’m afraid. Marrying Catherine opened the doors that had always been shut to him, doors no amount of money could open. The right Mardi Gras krewe, the Yacht Club, the second-best gentlemen’s club. And once he had that . . . Brody didn’t need her anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “A lot of private suffering, I know. Some of it terrible, if rumor can be believed. In the end, Cathy drowned in her own bathtub. That was, oh . . . 1962. Her blood alcohol level was off the chart, so nobody looked too deeply into it. But her father was still alive, and I imagine he knew the truth. Brody had been cheating on Cathy from the beginning. That was no secret. And he’d got control of quite a bit of the fami
ly money by managing their investments. In the end, he virtually broke the father.”

  “It sounds like The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “Not far from it. Revenge never brought Brody happiness, though. Nothing could. He’s gotten steadily richer, but his family . . .”

  “What?”

  “The sons are lazy. They’re from his second marriage. The daughter was his hope, I think. Katy was a pretty thing, and all the local beaux chased her. But something happened after her mother’s death. Katy disappeared, and everyone assumed she’d gotten pregnant. Back in those days, they sent girls to relatives to have the babies. But it turned out that Brody had committed her to an asylum in Texas. A private sanatorium—very tony, but still. A year later, Katy came back without any baby. If there ever was one, I suppose it was given up for adoption.”

  “What about abortion?”

  “Very difficult in those days, dear. Anyway, Brody married Katy to one of his workmen, an awful Black Irishman. A jumped-up roughneck, basically.” Pithy shook her head with poignant sadness. “I don’t know what they did to that girl in Texas, but all her spark was gone. And with that chapter closed, Brody turned his hand to making money again.”

  “Until he married Dr. Robb’s wife in 1970.”

  The old woman gives me a sharp look. “Something tells me that for once, you know more than I do about something.”

  “I’m pretty sure Brody arranged for that plane to go down.”

  “Because he wanted to marry Sue Robb?”

  “That was probably half the reason,” I tell her. “But Dr. Robb also knew about earlier murders Brody had committed.”