Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  If any of these scenarios occurred, then Dad knows he’s innocent of Viola’s murder. But knowing him as I do, that awareness—in those circumstances—would probably cause him to behave just as he has since he learned of his potential prosecution for murder. For if Dad really believes that Lincoln is his son, then his guilt over failing that son for four decades would make him all too willing to take the fall for Lincoln, regardless of the cost to himself.

  But . . .

  There would be no fall to take, had not Lincoln pushed Shad Johnson to press murder charges. And if Lincoln actually killed his mother, why would he risk pressing the DA to punish my father?

  “Oh, no,” I whisper, certain I’ve found the truth at last. “Because he’ll risk almost anything to punish his father.”

  I can’t imagine a purer, more righteous anger than that of a son who helped his mother to die after a life ruined by a man who’d refused to marry her or acknowledge him. The situation must have been tempting for a lawyer. If Lincoln knew Dad had been in Cora’s house before him, he would have instantly seen how easily Dad could be framed for his mother’s death. The necessary props for the deception were ready to hand: the syringe with Dad’s fingerprints, the vial of morphine prescribed by the man Lincoln longed to punish. And Cora Revels probably told Lincoln about the euthanasia pact between Dad and Viola. If fate handed Lincoln a chance like that—a chance to make “his father” pay for a lifetime of neglect—would he refuse? I doubt it.

  This scenario easily explains Lincoln’s behavior. But does it explain Dad’s? His refusal to say what happened in Cora’s house that night? Holding his silence in the face of deputies handcuffing him and leading him to court? Silence in the face of indictment for murder? Yes, yes, and yes. In the mind of a guilt-ridden father, all these acts must have seemed noble efforts to protect the son he’d failed throughout his life.

  But jumping bail?

  This takes me a little longer, but at last the answer comes. So long as Dad remained silent while awaiting trial—and so long as I and others protested his innocence—people might continue to investigate Viola’s death. Friends like Jewel Washington might have gone back over the crime scene, or probed more deeply into Lincoln’s whereabouts on the night of her death. They might have asked, as I did, why Lincoln hadn’t been in Natchez for the past month while his mother slipped inexorably toward death. But by jumping bail, Dad swept all those possibilities off the table. From the moment his flight became public, every cop, lawyer, and average citizen would view him as a killer trying to escape punishment.

  I can’t begin to guess what Dad was doing with Sonny Thornfield last night at the Ferriday hospital. Maybe he wasn’t there with Thornfield at all. Maybe he had coronary symptoms himself, and stopped to get a nurse or doc he knew to provide him some meds or do an EKG. Hell, maybe he was meeting Drew there. Whatever his reason, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that every cop in Mississippi and Louisiana is chasing the wrong man. And now I know who the right man is. There’s just one little problem—

  Proof.

  Could anyone other than my father prove that Lincoln euthanized his mother? Lincoln has a perfectly defensible reason for his fingerprints to be all over Cora Revels’s house. Even if they’re on the medicine vials and the syringe, that only proves he handled those items at some point—after the fact, he would argue. Worst of all, the case is being handled by a hostile DA and sheriff who’ll ignore any evidence I present them, short of a videotape showing someone other than Dad killing Viola.

  With that thought, I recall the missing tape from the camcorder Henry left in Viola’s sickroom. The hard drive attached to Henry’s camera showed only Viola’s death throes, not what precipitated them. But according to Henry, what triggered that hard drive to start recording was the mini-DV tape in the camera running out. And that tape was supposedly missing when the deputies arrived at the scene. Who took it? When I questioned Dad in his office on Monday evening, I got the feeling he might have taken it. But what if Lincoln removed that tape before the deputies arrived? Could that tape show Viola’s actual murder? And if so, does it still exist?

  Before I can second-guess myself, I speed-dial Quentin Avery’s house in Jefferson County, thirty miles north of here. I’m not going to ask Quentin if Dad and Walt are hiding out there—as badly as I’d like to. No one answers my call, just as they haven’t for the past two days. But this time, when the beep of the answering machine sounds, I leave a message.

  “Quentin, it’s Penn. I just spoke to Lincoln Turner, and my worldview changed radically. I think you probably know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you need to catch up in a hurry. If you don’t call me back in ten minutes, I’m going to drive up there and tell the police I’m worried you’ve had a heart attack. That’ll—”

  “Hold on, Penn,” says a female voice. “This is Doris. Quentin’s right here.”

  “Thanks. I’m sorry to make threats, but things are pretty serious down here.”

  “They’re serious up here, too, but here he is.”

  After several clicks and grunts, Quentin says, “Telling me you’d call the police was a veiled threat against my weed stash, boy. Don’t think I don’t know that.”

  “Lincoln Turner just told me Dad is his father.”

  Quentin is silent for several seconds. “And that surprised you?”

  “Are you telling me it’s true?”

  “I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But it doesn’t surprise me that he said it. Hell, a blind mule could see that boy’s game from twelve rows away.”

  “Quentin, what are you talking about?”

  “Why wouldn’t Viola tell that boy Tom was his father? Beats the hell out of telling him he was fathered by some booger-eating Ku Klux Klansman.”

  “You’re deflecting, Quentin. I’m asking you what’s true. Has Dad ever told you he had an illegitimate son?”

  “That’s privileged information, as you well know. But I’ll tell you anyway. Hell, no.”

  “Lincoln offered to take a DNA test.”

  “Well, it may come to that. But that’s not the primary issue right now.”

  “What is?”

  “I would have said the trial, until I heard about the dead state trooper and the APB.”

  At this, I fall silent. Quentin doesn’t sound like a lawyer hiding his client from the police, but he’s a subtle character. “And . . .?”

  “I wish Tom had come to me rather than go running off with Walt Garrity. But I don’t control the man.”

  If Dad and Walt are hiding out at Quentin’s isolated compound, then Quentin is a consummate actor. He is, says a voice in my mind. There’s no one better.

  “How about we get back to Lincoln for a minute?” I quickly summarize my deductions since leaving the CC’s Rhythm Club, culminating with my theory that Dad is protecting Lincoln, who probably killed his mother. Quentin listens in surprising silence. “Well, what do you think?” I ask.

  “That all makes sense, I’m sorry to say. Covering for Lincoln sounds exactly like Tom. Sacrificing himself out of guilt, I mean. He’d probably do that on Viola’s word alone, without even checking to make sure the boy was his.”

  “But he hasn’t said anything to you along these lines?”

  “No. But I can imagine what you’re thinking now. You figure that if you can prove Lincoln killed Viola, your father’s home free.”

  “If I can get him into protective custody before some gung ho cop shoots him.”

  “You’re wrong, Penn. Think about it. So long as Tom is willing to get up on a witness stand and say that he killed Viola, you’ve got no play. If your father wants to go to jail for someone, he’s going to jail.”

  This stark truth silences me like news of a death. After several stunned seconds, I say, “He’ll be lucky to make jail, Quentin.”

  “Well . . . if Walt Garrity’s with him, he just might be okay. And don’t assume you’re right about Lincoln. Those damned Double Eagles may well h
ave killed Viola. Don’t give up on that angle yet.”

  “If they did, how do you explain Dad’s behavior?”

  “I can’t. But your father’s no fool. Keep using that brain of yours, and maybe you’ll get to the bottom of this. I’ve got to go. Doris has got to give me my medicine.”

  As the old lawyer hangs up, I hear him say, “What the hell is Tom thinking?”

  When the connection dies, a smothering solitude closes around me. In five minutes I’ll be sitting in a room watching six yellow-dog Democrats and six Fox News–addicted Republicans argue about the prospect of rebuilding the second-largest slave market in America. This notion is almost unbearable, yet I must bear it, for I set the process in motion. The best thing I can do now is make use of my last minutes of freedom.

  While I can’t prove or disprove Lincoln’s paternity on my own, I can try to find out whether he was in Natchez at the time of his mother’s death. Chief Logan has access to all kinds of digital records, and what he can’t find out, John Kaiser can. As my Audi skids onto Highway 61, I call up Chief Logan on my cell phone.

  “How’d it go at CC’s?” he asks by way of greeting. “You’re still breathing, obviously. Is Turner?”

  “You sound nervous, Don.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Billy Byrd paid us a visit, and he almost got stomped for his trouble. Everything’s cool now, but I need another favor.”

  “Your wish is my command,” he says sourly.

  CHAPTER 74

  CAITLIN PUT DOWN her office telephone and sat motionless, save for her finger rubbing her upper lip. Penn had just called her with a new theory of Viola Turner’s murder, this one generated by a face-to-face meeting with Lincoln Turner. She’d been so shocked to learn that Penn had met with Lincoln that she’d had difficulty concentrating on what he was saying. But after a couple of minutes, she got it. While the logic of the theory made sense, she disagreed with the assumption upon which the whole concept rested: that Tom was Lincoln Turner’s father. She’d begun offering objections, but Penn hadn’t wanted to hear them. He was late for a joint meeting that he claimed he couldn’t afford to miss. Caitlin had hung up with a sour taste in her mouth and resentment in her heart.

  Turning away from the phone, she picked up one of Henry Sexton’s old Moleskines and thought over all she had read in the past hour. Getting these notebooks was like being given the key to a hidden library, one in which the secret histories of Natchez and Concordia Parish had been recorded by a monk working in fanatical solitude. They weren’t merely a record of Henry’s work, but quasi-journalistic diaries containing sketches, theories, meditations on life, guitar tablature, even snatches of poetry and song lyrics. And out of all the tales Henry had so meticulously documented, one shone like a beacon: the reporter’s personal stake in the solution of the crimes he sought to solve.

  Caitlin’s heart skipped when four black-and-white photographs dropped out of the back of the journal in her hand. The first showed an African-American girl of extraordinary beauty sitting on a piano bench, her back to a Baldwin piano. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but her eyes held the self-possession of a woman ten years older. There was an ethereal quality about her, yet Caitlin could see from the shape of her neck and collarbones that she was no delicate flower. Turning over the photo, Caitlin read: Swan, 1964, written lightly in pencil.

  The second photo showed the same girl standing next to a skinny white boy with a nervous grin on his pimpled face, hands locked in front of him as though he were afraid of what he might do with them if they got loose. Henry, Caitlin thought with a pang of guilt. Henry at fourteen. My God. And now he’s lying over in that hospital, stabbed and beaten half to death.

  A heartbreaking passage in one notebook had described a Saturday afternoon when Henry had walked into Albert’s store and found Swan and Jimmy Revels making love in the back room. Though Henry desperately loved Swan, she had loved the heroic and gifted young leader whom Henry himself had looked up to as a kind of demigod. On that terrible day, Henry had sprinted all the way home, his youth pouring out of him in the tears he shed along the way.

  Still thinking about Penn’s call, Caitlin picked up the third photo from her desk. It showed Albert Norris leaning against a pickup truck with a piano loaded in its bed. He was a strong, dignified-looking man with a smile of greeting on his face, though Caitlin thought his eyes seemed slightly veiled, like those of a sage accustomed to concealing his wisdom.

  “You poor man,” she murmured, recalling that Norris had served as a cook in the navy during World War II. “Why didn’t you go north after the war?”

  The man in the snapshot didn’t answer. History remained unalterable: Albert Norris had stayed in the South and done about as well as a black man could in the town where he was born—until the night he was burned alive. Caitlin’s black hair fell across the photograph. She brushed it back, then slid the photo aside.

  The last picture showed four teenage boys playing instruments in what must have been the interior of Norris’s Music Emporium. Two guitarists stood up front: one white, the other black. The pimply white boy was Henry Sexton, staring in awe at the left hand of the black guitarist, who was more pretty than handsome. With his head thrown back and his eyes closed, he looked like a young Jimi Hendrix effortlessly channeling the muses through his fingertips. Jimmy Revels, Caitlin guessed. Behind and between the two guitarists, a shirtless, muscular black man with brilliant white teeth pounded blue-glitter drums. Luther Davis. And to the drummer’s left, almost out of the frame, stood a skinny black boy with a huge Fender bass hanging from one lopsided shoulder.

  “Pooky Wilson,” she said aloud. “My God.”

  To look at the pure joy captured in this image, and then be forced to associate it with words like flayed and crucified, made her skin clammy with revulsion. This world of music and friendship—an oasis in a desert of hatred and mistrust—had been utterly obliterated by the rage of one man, Brody Royal. Not only had all three black boys in this picture been tortured, murdered, and mutilated, but the building itself had been burned to the ground, and its owner immolated. Why was anyone surprised that Henry Sexton had spent decades in his quest to gain justice for these people?

  Reaching into her bottom drawer, she took out the snapshot of Tom Cage in the back of the fishing boat with Brody Royal, Claude Devereux, and Ray Presley. What in God’s name are you doing with these assholes? she wondered. Strangely energized, she snatched up a pen and scrawled a list of leads on her notepad:

  • The Jericho Hole (Kaiser has monopoly)

  • The Bone Tree (Start tomorrow?)

  • Pooky’s “Huggy Bear” (No clue to ID. Publish plea to come forward?)

  • Albert’s ledgers (No clue to location)

  • Brody Royal (Too dangerous to approach)

  • Claude Devereux (Too smart/attorney)

  • Randall Regan (Brutal rapist, killer)

  • Katy Royal Regan (Penn would freak. Henry, too.)

  One scan of this list made the truth painfully obvious: Only one avenue of investigation was practical in her existing time frame. Katy Royal. But following that avenue could be dangerous, if Randall Regan discovered she’d made contact with his wife. Interviewing Katy today would surely damage Caitlin’s relationship with Penn, and possibly with Henry as well. Could she justify doing that? That’s not the question, she thought. Penn didn’t even lift the phone to tell me he was meeting Lincoln Turner at a juke club out in the boonies. The question is, can I bear to publish this story tomorrow without adding one iota of original information to it? Can I be merely a mouthpiece for Henry Sexton, however noble that might be?

  “That’s not even the question,” she said aloud. “The question is, can I get to Katy Royal in the next hour without her husband finding out about it?”

  Going back over her conversations with Penn, Caitlin realized that she’d only promised to hold off publishing anything about Brody Royal until midnight tonight. Te
chnically, she wouldn’t be breaking her word by simply investigating him. She knew what Penn would say about this Clintonian parsing of language, but right now, his only interest was saving his father from being shot by police. Caitlin wanted the same thing, of course, but she didn’t want only that. It wasn’t even within her power to help Tom get to safety. And now that the terrifying scope of Brody Royal’s and the Double Eagles’ crimes had been revealed, she couldn’t simply turn away. This was the kind of story she’d originally moved south to cover. Never mind that the old Savage South of her mother’s imagination no longer existed; the Double Eagles were still alive—as was Brody Royal—and they’d already proved they would kill to remain free. A bloody wake of violence trailed back through history behind those old men, and the families they had wounded suffered to this day. If Caitlin had a chance to bring peace and justice to those families by succeeding where Henry had failed, how could Penn expect her to turn away? Besides, she thought with a bracing thrill, Penn will be stuck in that meeting for at least two hours.

  As a sop to Penn, she dialed Mercy Hospital and asked for Henry Sexton’s room. A few moments later, Sherry Harden came on the line.

  “Sherry, this is Caitlin Masters. Is Henry doing any better?”

  “Nobody knows,” Sherry said curtly. “He’s sleeping. He’s been out for most of the day.”

  “I’m sorry. I was hoping to verify something about the story he wants me to publish tomorrow. I need to know if he tried to reinterview someone who refused to tell him anything the first time.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t wake him up for that. You’ll just have to do the best you can. And please don’t call back. The phone disturbs him.”

  Sherry hung up.

  Thank you very much, Caitlin thought with perverse satisfaction. Now Penn couldn’t argue that she’d tried to circumvent Henry.