by Greg Iles
The Scotch has soured in my stomach. “Now that I’m older, I know that kid’s parents made a conscious decision to do something very hard. Something my parents wouldn’t do. They risked their child’s education, maybe even his life, put him into a situation where it would be almost impossible for him to learn because of the pressure. They did that because somebody had to do it. When I think of that kid, I don’t feel very good. Because exclusion is the worst thing for a child. It’s a kind of violence. And the effects last a long time. I think maybe Noble Jackson is part of the reason I’m doing this.”
“What happened to him? Where’d he end up?”
“I have no idea. I’ve often wondered. Wherever he is, I’ll bet he got the hell out of the South as soon as he could.”
We return to our drinks, both lost in our own thoughts. As the bartender returns to refill his glass, Kelly says, “Got a phone book, chief?”
The bartender turns around and takes one from beneath the telephone. The Natchez phone book is only a half-inch thick, including the yellow pages. Kelly flips through it, then runs his finger down a page. “Here’s your man. Noble Jackson.”
A strange tightness constricts my chest. “That’s probably his father.”
“Let me borrow that phone,” Kelly says to the bartender.
“Local call?”
“You bet.” Kelly takes the phone and dials the number, watching me in the mirror. “Hello, I’m calling for Noble. . . . It is? This is Sergeant Kelly, Noble. Daniel Kelly . . . You don’t recognize my voice? From Bragg? . . . Fort Bragg. I’m trying to track down some members of our old unit. . . . You’re kidding me, right? . . . Never been in the service? You’re shining me, man. Well, Noble always said he was going to get out of Mississippi as soon as he could. . . . Yeah? How old are you? . . . Well, that’s the right age. What you do for a living? . . . Ha. Noble sure didn’t know nothing about engines. You married? . . . No kidding. Man, I’m sorry I bothered you. My mistake all the way. You have a good Sunday, chief.”
Kelly hangs up, and the bartender puts the phone back in front of the mirror.
“Noble Jackson works as a mechanic for Goodyear. He’s thirty-eight years old, married with four kids, and he’s lived in Natchez his whole life. He sounds happier about it than a lot of people would be.”
This knowledge, mundane as it sounds, somehow eases my grief over Ruby. “Kelly, you’re a funny guy.”
His eyes twinkle. “That has been said.”
He looks past me, and I hear the restaurant door open behind me. His expression tells me that whoever came in is a woman, an attractive one. I find myself hoping it’s Caitlin.
“Female inbound on your six,” he says. “You know her?”
I rotate my stool and watch a tanned brunette walk toward me. It’s Jenny, the waitress. She’s wearing black jeans and a T-shirt that says LILITH FAIR. Her dark hair is swept back from her neck, and her large brown eyes are shining. She gives me a shy wave as she reaches us.
“Jenny, this is Daniel Kelly.”
She smiles and shakes Kelly’s hand, then looks back at me. “I’m surprised to see you here. Isn’t the funeral today?”
“We just came from there.”
“Oh. Um, could I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
She looks furtively at Kelly. “Alone, I mean?”
Kelly starts to slide off his stool, but Jenny takes his arm and holds him there. “I didn’t mean for you to leave.”
“How about one of those booths?” I suggest.
“Well . . . I was hoping you’d come upstairs. To my apartment. Just for a minute.”
My mental alarm is ringing now, soft but steady. Even modest fame can attract some strange people and propositions, and legal complications often follow. Caitlin pegged Jenny as having a fixation on me the first time she saw her. Maybe she’s right.
“It’s practically deserted in here,” I say. “Let’s just grab a booth.”
Jenny suddenly looks on the verge of tears. “It’s nothing weird, I promise. It’s . . . personal. It has to do with what you’re working on. Your case.”
Curiosity muffles the alarm in my head. “The Payton case? What do you know about that?”
She glances at the bartender, who’s totaling numbers on a calculator a few feet away. “It has to do with the Marston family.”
I’m convinced. “Okay. Upstairs it is. Have another on me, Kelly.”
“Glad to, boss. Keep your pants on.”
Jenny leads me to the rear of the restaurant, where a spiral staircase winds up to the second floor. We pass some long tables set up for a party, then climb a short flight of stairs to a small landing and a red door. Jenny takes a key from her pocket, opens the door, and waits for me to go through.
Her apartment is as spartan as the cell of a lifer. You could bounce a quarter off the bed, and the linens are surprisingly masculine. A tall set of shelves stands against the wall to my right, and it’s filled from top to bottom with books. Literary novels mostly, though the familiar spines of my books are among them, along with Martin Cruz Smith, Donna Tartt, and Peter Hoeg. There’s no television, but a boom box sits beside the bed, an Indigo Girls concert flyer tacked to the wall above it. Caitlin’s suspicion that Jenny has a crush on me is looking less accurate by the second.
With careful steps Jenny crosses the room to the far corner, where a microwave oven and coffeemaker stand on a table beside a lavatory. She pours water from a Kentwood bottle into the coffee carafe, then from the carafe to the coffeemaker. Her back is to me, but she appears to be concentrating on her movements.
“Is green tea okay?” she asks.
“It’s fine.”
A spoon jangles loudly in a cup. Jenny’s hands are shaking.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She nods quickly, still facing away from me. “Just nervous.”
“How do you know the Marston family? Are you originally from Natchez?”
“No.” She turns and faces me, revealing the anxiety in her eyes. I have a sudden intuition that she’s about to tell me Leo Marston forced her to commit some sexual act, or perhaps got her pregnant. She’s far too young for him, but if an impoverished killer like Ray Presley can rob the cradle, why can’t Leo Marston?
“But you know the Marstons,” I press her.
“I know Olivia.”
Olivia. “Does Livy have something to do with the Payton case?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jenny, why don’t you just tell me what you know? Start at the beginning, and let me decide how important it is.”
She shakes her head. “You’ve got the wrong idea. I mean—I misled you a little. This isn’t about your case.”
My alarm is ringing again, full volume now. “Then what’s it about?”
“This is so hard for me.” She wrings her hands and looks at the ceiling, then focuses her glistening eyes on mine. “I think—I mean, I’m pretty sure—Mr. Cage, I’m pretty sure you’re my father.”
CHAPTER 33
I’m pretty sure you’re my father.
Jenny’s words hang in the air like ozone after a lightning strike. My discomfort escalates to panic in a fraction of a second. This is the root of the strange fascination Caitlin picked up that first night. It’s something I’ve heard about my whole life, orphaned or adopted children convincing themselves that the father who abandoned them is some famous man.
“Look, miss—” I grope for her last name, then realize I never knew it.
“Doe,” she says. “Isn’t that pathetic? That’s my last name. Jennifer Doe. It’s on my birth certificate.”
I’m backing toward the door, which leads to the stairs and the second floor and the spiral staircase and the restaurant and sanity. “I think we’d better go back down.”
She holds up her hands in supplication, pleading for my attention. “I don’t want anything from you. And I’m not crazy. Please believe me. I’m scared to death right now. I’m so s
cared. I just want to know who I am!”
Hot, clear water bubbles out of the coffeemaker, for tea that will never be made.
“I can’t help you with that question, Jenny.”
“If you’d listen to me for two minutes, you’ll know you can.”
My hand is on the doorknob.
“Livy Marston is my mother!”
This stops me.
“I was born in February of 1979.”
My brain is working backward to the point of conception. February, January, December—oh hell, just go back twelve months and add three. If Jenny is telling the truth, she was conceived in May of 1978. The month Livy and I graduated high school.
“My birth certificate proves it,” she says in a defensive voice.
I drop my hand from the knob. “Let me see.”
She goes to the bookshelf, takes down my second novel, and opens it to the flyleaf. From there she removes a white sheet of paper, which she holds out to me. I don’t look at her face as I reach for it. If I did, I know I would be searching for similarities to my own.
The birth certificate looks authentic. Issued by the state of Louisiana, the city of New Orleans. The child’s name is listed as Jennifer Doe. What nearly stops my heart is what is printed on the line for Mother. Right there in black and white is the name Olivia Linsford Marston.
The line beside Father is blank.
“Jesus God,” I murmur.
“It was a privately arranged adoption,” Jenny says. “Set up before I was ever born. The adopting parents wanted the name Jennifer on the birth certificate.”
My heart is skipping beats.
She rushes on, her voice shaky. “I didn’t know any of this until a year ago. I spent most of my life in foster homes. I wanted to know where I’d come from. Who my birth parents were. I didn’t have anybody—”
“Jenny, slow down.” I hold up my hands. “I’m going to listen, okay? Just calm down and tell me your story.”
She looks frozen, like a strip of film stopped in mid-motion. The relief in her eyes is heartbreaking. If she wasn’t so caught up in her own emotions, she might realize that after seeing that birth certificate, it would take a winch to pull me out of her apartment. Already thoughts that haven’t meshed for twenty years are falling into place. Livy was pregnant our senior year. Or the summer following it, rather. And she carried the child to term. That is why she disappeared. I guess the assumptions I made about female reproductive biology in 1978 were about as accurate as my judgments of Livy’s true nature.
“Pour the tea,” I say dazedly. “That’ll calm you down.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Okay . . . you said you wanted to find out who your birth parents were. How did you go about doing that?”
“Well, like I said, it was a private adoption, which is big business in Louisiana, if you don’t know. It took a lot of work, but I finally learned the name of the lawyer who handled the adoption. Clayton Lacour, from New Orleans. I did some checking on him, and I found out he was well connected. Mafia connected. I was afraid that if I just walked in and asked, Lacour wouldn’t tell me anything about my birth parents. All the law required was that he ask my mother whether or not she wanted to be found by me. And I was pretty sure that whoever she was, she wouldn’t be too happy about me showing up on her doorstep after twenty years.”
Jenny’s voice is leveling out; the act of telling her story has distracted her from the fears bubbling inside her.
“I’d been around a little. I knew the street. So instead of marching in and asking my questions, I applied for a job at Lacour’s office. P.A., gofer, answering the phone, whatever. I dressed like a college girl—a loose one—and I made sure Lacour saw me when I went in. He practically licked me from head to toe. Took me into his office for a personal interview and hired me on the spot.”
Jenny would have made a good D.A.’s investigator.
“It was a race between finding out what I wanted to know and Lacour getting up the nerve to jump me right there in the office. Whenever I was alone, I’d search the place. I brought my lunch every day, told them I was dieting. File room, computers, his personal cabinets, closets, everything. A lot of the stuff had combination locks. It took five weeks to find out where everything was, and another week to copy it all.”
“What did you find?”
“Lacour handled a lot of adoptions. All privately arranged, always white babies. And for real money. Thirty-five thousand dollars changed hands when I was adopted. You believe that? I went through all his records and finally found the Jennifer Doe birth certificate. I’d always been called Jenny, every home I went to. So I copied the file and studied it at home. I found out I’d been adopted on the day I was born, by a childless rich couple from New Orleans. Lacour had made notes in the file. He thought the couple was trying save their marriage by adopting a baby. He turned out to be right. They divorced when I was two, and neither one wanted custody. I went into the state system. I was adopted by another family, but . . .” Her eyes glaze to opacity as she trails off. “I don’t really want to go into that. It was . . . an abuse situation. I ended up in the foster care system, and that’s where I stayed until I was eighteen.”
She doesn’t have to go into it. As a young assistant district attorney in Houston, I handled cases arising out of foster care that are still burned into my heart.
“All that mattered,” she says, “was that the file contained the name of my birth mother. Olivia Marston. It also contained the name of another lawyer, the one who’d brought me to Lacour’s attention.”
“Leo Marston,” I say softly.
“Yes. Judge Marston and Clayton Lacour went way back. They’d done a lot of deals together. Oil leases, real estate, you name it. What had happened was obvious. Marston’s daughter got pregnant when she was eighteen, and he arranged to get rid of the baby for her. I was that baby. What I couldn’t figure out is why she didn’t just have an abortion.”
“The Marstons are big Catholics.”
Jenny gives me the jaded stare of a runaway who has seen it all. “What’s your point?”
She’s right, of course. Livy’s sister had an abortion when she was in college.
“What did you do after you found that out?”
“I quit Lacour. But before I did, I stole everything pertaining to Marston. Most of it was files. The rest were tapes.”
“Tapes?”
“Lacour taped everything. He was connected, like I said. And totally paranoid. He’d worked for the Marcello family when he was younger. Carlos Marcello, the Mob guy? Anyway, he saved these phone tapes just like files. Sometimes when he was drinking, he’d talk about his ‘insurance.’ That was the tapes. There were twelve tapes coded for Marston’s name. I took them all on the day I split.”
“What did Lacour say about you quitting?”
“I didn’t stick around to talk. I’m sure he thought I left because he couldn’t keep his hands off me. I’d used a fake name, so he couldn’t trace me. He’s bound to have noticed the missing files, but so what? I stole some other files related to Judge Marston just to confuse the trail.”
“What did you do next?”
“I went to Atlanta to find my mother.”
“And?”
“She refused to see me.”
“At all?”
“When I called her at home, she hung up on me. So, one day at her office, I sort of ambushed her. It’s a big law firm. She was so afraid I’d make a scene that she took me into her private office. Acted like I was a client. She told me she didn’t want anything to do with me. She had no interest in my life, nothing. She wrote me a check for twenty-five thousand dollars and told me to go away.”
Jenny is crying now, but she wipes away the tears with fierce determination. “She broke my heart that day. I’d been through a lot in my life. I thought I was tough. But to have the woman who’d given birth to me offer me money to disappear . . . to pretend that I’d never even been born. I just couldn’
t stand it.”
She closes her eyes, takes a very deep breath, and holds it.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I suggest.
She expels the air in a long, steady exhalation. “No, this is better. Really.”
“What did you do next?”
“I tore up her check. I probably should have kept it, because I really needed the money. But I couldn’t. I tore it up and asked her to tell me my father’s name. She turned white, Mr. Cage. That question scared her to death. I begged her to tell me, but she wouldn’t. I told her I would never do anything to hurt her, and asked her to please reconsider. Then I left.”
“I’m so sorry, Jenny.”
“After that I got stoned for about three weeks. From the file, I worked out that my mother must have gotten pregnant at the end of her senior year of high school. Which meant she was probably living here at the time, right? And her father still lived here. I figured if I hung around here awhile, I might be able to find out who she was dating back then. Maybe figure out my birth father that way. So I got on a Trailways and came to Natchez. When I got here, I found out Livy Marston was practically a celebrity. Everybody remembered her. They talked about her like she was like a princess or something.”
“She was, in a way. Did you tell anybody that she was your mother?”
“No. I played it very cool. I’d hear people talking about her sometimes, waiting tables or hanging out, and I’d ask about her. It didn’t take long to find out that you were her boyfriend during her senior year. I even saw an old yearbook with a picture of you together. And you were a celebrity. I mean, you are. A real one. It freaked me out, honestly. I knew so many foster kids who made up those kinds of fantasies. But this fantasy was real.”
