by Greg Iles
We all nod with enthusiasm, doing our best to foster a casual atmosphere. Blacks visiting socially in white homes—and vice versa—is still as rare as snowfall in Natchez, but this is not the reason for the general discomfort.
“Mr. Cage,” Althea says, focusing her liquid brown eyes on me, “we really appreciate you speaking out like you did in the paper.”
“Please call me Penn,” I implore her, embarrassed by thanks for a few lines tossed off without any real feeling for the victims of the crime.
“Mr. Penn,” says Georgia Payton, “ain’t no white man in thirty years said what you said in the paper today. My boy was kilt outside his job in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and all the po-lices did was sweep it under the rug.”
Her statement hangs suspended in crystalline silence. I sense my father’s reflexive desire to answer her charge, to try to mitigate the behavior of the law enforcement figures of the period. But the murder remains unsolved, and he has no idea what efforts were made to solve it, if any, or how sincere they might have been. Althea Payton looks momentarily disconcerted by her mother-in-law’s frankness, but then her eyes fill with calm resolution.
“Are you still a lawyer, Mr. Cage?” she asks. “I mean, I know you’re a writer now. Can you still practice law?”
I incline my head. “I’m still a member of the bar.”
“What that mean?” asks Georgia.
“I can still practice law, ma’am.”
“Then we wants to hire you.”
“For what?”
“I think I know,” Dad says.
“To find out who murdered my baby,” the old woman says. “The po-lice don’t want to do it. FBI don’t want to. The county lawyer neither.”
“The district attorney,” Althea corrects her.
“You’ve spoken to the district attorney about this?”
Althea nods. “Several times. He has no interest in the case.”
Dad emits a sigh easily interpreted as, Big surprise.
“We hired us a detective too,” Georgia says. “I even wrote to that man on Unsolved Mysteries, that good-looking white man from that old gangster TV show.”
“Robert Stack?” asks my mother.
“Yes,” Althea confirms. “We got back one letter from the show’s producer expressing interest, but after that nothing.”
“What about this detective?” I ask. “What happened with him?”
“We hired a man from Jackson first. He poked around downtown for an afternoon, then told us there was nothing to find.”
“White man,” Georgia barks. “A no-good.”
“Then we hired a detective from Chicago,” Althea says in a tense voice. “He flew down and spent a week in the Eola Hotel—”
“Colored man,” the old woman cuts in. “A no-count no-good. He stole all our money and went back to Chicago.”
“He was very expensive,” Althea concedes. “And he said the same thing the first detective told us. The pertinent records had been destroyed and there was nothing to find.”
“NAACP say the same thing,” Georgia adds with venom. “They don’t care about my baby none. He wasn’t a big enough name. They cry about Martin and Medgar every year, got white folks makin’ movies about Medgar. But my baby Del in the ground and nobody care. Nobody.”
“Except you,” Althea says quietly. “When I walked out in my driveway this morning and picked up that paper—when I read what you said—I cried. I cried like I haven’t cried in thirty years.”
Dad raises his eyebrows and sends me one of his telepathic messages: You opened your damn mouth. See what it’s got you.
“I still gots some money, Mr. Penn,” Georgia says, clutching at a black vinyl handbag the size of a small suitcase.
I envision a tidal wave of one-dollar bills spilling out of the purse, like money at a crack bust, but Mrs. Payton has clutched the bag only to emphasize her statement. I cannot let this go any further.
“Ladies, I appreciate your thanks, but I don’t deserve them. As I said in the paper, I’m here for a vacation. I’m no longer involved in any criminal matters. What happened to your husband and son was a terrible tragedy, but I suspect that what the detectives told you is true. This crime happened thirty years ago. Nowadays, if the police don’t solve a homicide in the first forty-eight hours, they know they probably never will.”
“But sometimes they do,” Althea says doggedly. “I’ve read about murder cases that were solved years after the fact.”
“That’s true, but it’s rare. In all my years with the Houston D.A.’s office, we only had a couple of cases like that.”
“But you had them.”
“Yes. But what we had more of—a hundred times more of—was distraught relatives pleading with us to reopen old cases. Murder is a terrible thing, and no one knows that better than you. The repercussions reverberate through generations.”
“But there’s no statue of limitations on murder. Is there?”
Statue of limitations. I see no point in correcting her grammar; I’ve heard attorneys make the same mistake. Like congressmen referring to nucular war. “Everything hinges on evidence,” I explain. “Has any new evidence come to light?”
Her desolate look is answer enough.
“That’s what we were hoping you could do,” Althea says. “Look back over what the police did. Maybe they missed something. Maybe they buried something. I read in a book that sixty percent of the Natchez police force was Klan back then. God knows what they did or didn’t do. You might even get a book out of it. There’s a lot nobody knows about those times. About what Del was doing for his people.”
I fight the urge to glance at my parents for assistance. “I’m actually in the middle of a book now, and I’m behind. I—”
“I’ve read your books,” Althea breaks in. “All of them. In paperback, of course. I read them on the late shift, when the babies are resting well.”
I never know what to say in these moments. If you say, Did you like them? you’re putting the person on the spot. But what else can you say?
“I liked the first one the best,” Althea offers. “I liked the others too, but I couldn’t help feeling. . . .”
“Be honest,” I urge her, dreading what will follow.
“I always felt that your gift was bigger than the stories you were telling. I don’t mean to be critical. But that first book was so real. I just think if you really understood what happened to Del, you’d have a story that would take all the gift you have to tell it.”
Her words are like salt on my soul. “I truly wish I could help you. But I can’t. If some new evidence were to come to light, the district attorney would be the proper man to see.” I look at my father. “Is Austin Mackey still the D.A. here?”
He nods warily.
“I went to school with Mr. Mackey. He’s a good man. I could—”
“He nothing but a politician!” scoffs Georgia Payton.
The old woman gets slowly to her feet, using her huge handbag as a counterweight. “He don’t care none. We come here ’cause we thought you did. But maybe you don’t. Maybe you was talking free in the paper ’cause you been gone so long you ain’t worried ’bout what people thinks around here. I told Althea, you must be like your daddy, a hardworking man with a good heart. But maybe I told her wrong.”
I flush again, suddenly certain that the men of the Payton family are intimately familiar with the guilt trip as a motivational tool.
Althea stands more slowly than her mother-in-law, as though lifting the weight of thirty years of grief. This time when she speaks, she looks only at the floor.
“I loved my husband,” she says softly. “After he was killed, I never remarried. I never even went with another man. I raised my boy the best I could and tried to go on. I don’t say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way. You know that, Dr. Cage. The world’s full of misery. But my Del got took before his time.” Her lower lip is quivering; she bites it to keep her composure. “He wante
d us to wait to have children. So we’d be able to give them the things they needed. Del said our people hurt themselves by having too many children too quick. We just had one before he died. Del was a good boy who grew into a good man, and he never got to see his own baby grow up.”
The mournful undertone in her voice pierces my heart. All I can see is Sarah lying in her casket at age thirty-seven, her future ripped away like a cruel mirage. Althea Payton breaks the image by reaching into her purse and taking out a folded piece of paper, which she hands to me. I have little choice but to unfold it.
It’s a death certificate.
“When the ambulance men got to Del, he was already burned up. But they couldn’t get him out of the seat. The springs from the seat had blown up through his thighs and pinned him there. That’s why he couldn’t get out, even though he was still alive after that bomb went off.”
I stare at the brittle yellowed paper, a simple form dated 5-14-68.
“Look in the middle,” Althea says. “Under cause of death.”
I push down a hot wave of nausea. Thirty years ago, on the line beside the printed words CAUSE OF DEATH, some callous or easily cowed bureaucrat had scrawled the word Accidental.
“As long as I live and breathe,” Althea whispers, “I’ll do what I can to find out the truth.”
I want to speak, to try to communicate the empathy I feel, but I don’t. Sarah’s death taught me this. In the face of grief, words have no power.
I watch the Payton women follow my mother into the hall. I hear Georgia repeat her compliment about the fine house my mother keeps, then the soft shutting of the front door. I sit on the sofa where Althea sat. The cushion is still warm. My mother’s slippers hiss across the slate floor of the foyer, the sound like a nun moving through a convent.
“The neighbors are standing out in their yards,” she says.
Wondering at the sight of black people who aren’t yard men or maids, I reflect. And tomorrow the maids and the yard men will return, while the two Mrs. Paytons sit or work in silent grief, mourning a man whose murder caused no more ripples than a stone dropped into a pond.
“I know that was hard,” my father says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “But you did the right thing.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“That boy’s long dead and gone. Nothing anybody can do will help him now. But it could hurt a lot of people. Those two poor women. The town. Your mother. You and Annie most of all. You did the right thing, son.”
I look up at my father, searching for the man Georgia Payton said he is.
“You did,” my mother insists. “Don’t dwell on it. Go wake Annie up. I’m going to make French toast.”
CHAPTER 7
The couch in my father’s medical office has heard many terrible truths: revelations by the doctor (you’re sick; you’re dying; they couldn’t get it all), confessions by the patient (my husband beats me; my father raped me; I want to die), but always—always—truths about the patient.
Today the truth about the doctor will be told.
I can imagine no other reason for the sudden summons to his office. It requires a conscious effort to control my anxiety as I sit on that worn leather couch, waiting for him to finish with his last patient of the day.
After the Payton women left our house this morning, Dad took his old pickup truck to work so that Annie and I would have the BMW. Having no desire to endure the glares of the local citizenry, I spent the morning in the pool with Annie, marveling at how well she moved in the water and fighting a losing battle to keep her skin covered with sun block. Mom and I had tuna sandwiches for lunch, Annie a bowl of SpaghettiOs. When the two of them drove downtown to buy Annie new shoes, I retired to the library and read T. Harry Williams’s Huey Long on the sofa until I fell asleep.
The telephone woke me at four-thirty p.m. I hated to chance answering it myself, but I thought it might be my mother.
“Penn?” said my father. “Can you drop by my office about five? Alone?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I think it’s time we had a talk.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’ll see you at five.”
I went to the bathroom and showered off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Dad’s office is only a couple of miles from the house, so I read another twenty minutes in Huey Long. When I fell asleep, the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking from the “imperial klonvocation” in Atlanta, had just announced that he was going to Louisiana to campaign against Huey because of his pro-Negro policies. The Kingfish stormed into the press gallery of the state senate while the legislature was in session and announced that if that “Imperial bastard” crossed the Louisiana state line, he would shortly depart “with his toes turned up.” The Klan leader wisely elected not to test the Kingfish’s sincerity. As humorous as it seemed in retrospect, Long could all too easily have backed up his threat. I could see how dictatorial power might be an asset in solving sticky problems like racism. Of course, that road also leads to the crematorium ovens.
When I got to my father’s office building, I used his private door. I’d known Anna, his chief nurse—an attractive black woman—for most of my life, but I was too curious to spend even ten minutes reminiscing about old times. I sat on the couch opposite his desk and waited in the lingering haze of cigar smoke.
During his first fifteen years in Natchez, Dad practiced in a sprawling downtown house. This was the era of separate waiting rooms for “colored” and white, but his only nod to this convention was a flimsy wooden partition set up in the middle of the room. On any day you could find whole families—white and black—camped out in that great room, kids playing on the floor, parents eating from bag lunches and waiting to see the doctor on a first-come, first-served basis. His new office, convenient to both hospitals and sterile as a hypodermic needle, runs like any other doctor’s—almost. He has rigidly scheduled appointments, a gleaming laboratory, and modern X-ray facilities, but he still routinely brings everything to a standstill by spending whatever time he feels a patient needs for examination, commiseration, or just plain conversation.
At last his strong baritone filters around the door. The volume tells me he is bidding farewell to a geriatric patient. Old people comprise the bulk of his practice now, as his “patient base” has aged with him. Anna leans in and gives me a smile, then closes the door behind Dad. He squeezes my shoulder as he walks past and sits in the big chair behind his desk.
This is how I picture him in memory: white lab coat, stethoscope hanging loosely around his neck, ensconced behind mountains of incomplete medical records, drug samples, and junk mail. He reaches into a small refrigerator behind his desk and takes out a Dr Pepper, which he offers to me. When I decline, he pops the top and takes a long pull from it, his eyes watering from the sudden shot of carbonation.
“I’m in a bad spot, Penn,” he says in a frank voice. “I apologize for being an ass the other night. It’s not easy for a father to admit weakness to his son.”
I nod awkwardly, imagining a future when I am certain to fall short of Annie’s idealized image of me. “Dad, there’s nothing you can tell me that will change my opinion of you. Just tell me what’s going on so we can deal with it.”
He clearly doubts my statement, but he’s made up his mind to talk. “Twenty-five years ago,” he says, “your Aunt Ellen got into some trouble.”
My mind is spinning. When he said “twenty-five years ago,” I thought he was going to start talking about Del Payton. But Payton was killed thirty years ago. The shift to my mother’s younger sister, Ellen, throws me completely.
“She was divorced and living in Mobile, Alabama. Ellen was about your age now, I guess. Dating a guy there. He was a year or two younger than she was. Name was Hillman. Don Hillman. Your mother and I didn’t know it at the time—at least I didn’t—but Hillman was abusing Ellen. Beating her, controlling every word and action. Your mother finally
convinced her that the relationship was going to end badly no matter what she did, and Ellen tried to break it off. Hillman didn’t take it well. I advised Ellen to go to the police. Then I found out Hillman was the brother of a cop over in Mobile. A detective. This was 1973. Nobody’d heard of stalking laws.”
“I hope you brought her here.”
“Of course. She stayed with us for a summer. You remember, don’t you?”
I do. For most of one summer our hall bathroom became an exotic world of hanging stockings, lacy underwear, cut-glass perfume bottles, and blue Noxema jars.
“Hillman called the house a few times after the breakup. Late, drunk out of his mind and railing, or else hanging up. One night when he didn’t hang up, I told him if he came to Natchez making trouble, he’d be a long time getting back to Mobile. The calls stopped. After a while Ellen wanted her own place, so I rented her an apartment at the Windsor Arms and got her a job at the Jeff Davis.”
He takes another slug of Dr Pepper. “As soon as she got her own place, strange things started happening. Slashed tires, eggs on her door, more juvenile crap. One morning she found her cat at her door with its throat cut. I called the Natchez police, but they couldn’t find Hillman anywhere in town.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “Then he raped her.”
A shudder of horror accompanies my amazement. Families are mazes of secrets, and none of us ever knows them all.
“Hillman was waiting inside her apartment when she got home from a date. He beat the hell out of her, raped her, sodomized her. Then he disappeared. Ellen was too shaken up to swear out charges. I had to sedate her. I got the Natchez D.A. to call the Mobile D.A. and make a lot of noise, but Ellen would have been a shaky witness at best, even if I could have gotten her to press charges. And Hillman’s brother was a cop, remember? The Mobile D.A. didn’t sound excited about making trouble for him.”
I nod in sympathy. The old-timers in Houston told me a thousand times how tough it was to get rape convictions before feminists changed public perception of the crime. And the cop angle was a serious complication. Nothing is more incestuous than Southern law enforcement. Everything is personal relationships.
