Natchez Burning (12 page)

“Wait! That timing’s a problem for me. I’ve got a critical meeting in two hours. Surely we can talk later this afternoon? I can’t see how I can possibly help you, anyway.”

“Sheriff’s detectives discovered a camcorder at the murder scene, Mr. Sexton. It’s marked ‘Property of the
Concordia
Beacon
.’ Did you leave that in Mrs. Turner’s sickroom?”

“Uh … yes, sir.”

“That’s one of several things we need to speak about. Should there have been a tape in that camcorder?”

“I would think so, yes.”

“Well, there wasn’t. Nor anywhere else in the house. The camcorder was lying on the floor, and someone had knocked over the tripod. The remote control was found in the dead woman’s bed, however.”

Henry looked at his watch. Natchez was twelve miles away, just over the Mississippi River. “How long will I need to be there?”

“We should be able to finish in half an hour.”

Henry blew out a rush of air and rubbed his graying goatee. “Okay. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. But I’m leaving a half hour after that. That’s nonnegotiable.”

“Don’t be late. And don’t speak to anyone about this. It’s a very sensitive case.”

Henry cursed and hung up, wishing he’d never answered in the first place.
Why today, of all days?
In two hours, the first Double Eagle in history to grant an interview to a reporter was going to go on the record about the group’s crimes. It had taken Henry weeks to set up the conversation, which would be held in secret. He couldn’t risk losing this chance. If Viola Turner had indeed been murdered, then today’s interview was even more critical than before.

“What’s the matter, Henry?” asked Dwayne Dillard, the sports editor. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“It’s nothing,” he lied, his mind only half under conscious direction.

Glancing around the small newsroom, Henry stood, grabbed his coat off the back of his chair, then hurried out to his Ford Explorer. He couldn’t possibly sit waiting in this building for half an hour with so much happening. Having no idea where he was going, he backed into First Street, then headed into Ferriday proper. Little Walter was blowing blues harp on the CD player, wailing with a passion born just fifty miles from Ferriday, in Rapides Parish. Henry sang a couple of lines with the song. He wasn’t even thinking, really, just following the half-shuttered streets of his decaying town.

One way or another, Henry had been hunting the Double Eagle group for more than thirty years. His ex-wife claimed that his obsession had cost him their marriage, and she was probably right, yet Henry had refused to abandon his quest. For the past five years, in the pages of the little weekly newspaper he’d once delivered from a bicycle as a boy, he had been publishing stories about the group he considered the deadliest domestic terror cell in American history. And people were starting to pay attention. Henry’s successes had embarrassed certain government agencies—the FBI, for example—and they had let him know it. Along with Jerry Mitchell of the
Jackson Clarion-Ledger,
Henry had pushed the Bureau into belatedly forming a cold case squad to revisit unsolved murders from the civil rights era. But though the FBI had infinitely more investigative resources than he, Henry always seemed to stay ahead of them.

The Double Eagle group was a textbook example. Founded in 1964, the Eagles were an ultrasecret splinter cell of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By Henry’s reckoning, they had murdered more than a dozen people, yet they’d evaded capture by the Justice Department at a time when the FBI had saturated the entire Mississippi Klan structure with informants. In forty-one years, only a few members’ names had been discovered, and none had been confirmed. No Double Eagle had ever been convicted of a race-related crime, and some had even worked as law enforcement officers. Henry had repeatedly tried to interview reputed members, but they’d always answered with silence or defiance. When he doggedly persisted in his investigations, Henry found himself ostracized by all kinds of people—some racists, others regular citizens who resented him “stirring up the past for no good reason.”

One burly redneck had sucker-punched him in the local Winn-Dixie and had to be pulled off Henry by a brave stock boy. But now—after years of painstaking work to separate truth from legend—Henry had finally done the impossible: he had persuaded a Double Eagle to go on the record. At eleven o’clock this morning, he would meet a seventy-seven-year-old man named Glenn Morehouse. And if Morehouse lived up to his promise—made in the shadow of terminal cancer—he would become the first Double Eagle to break his vow of silence and confess to hate crimes that included assault, arson, rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.

Like most of his violent brethren, Glenn Morehouse had been raised in a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist church. Branded on his heart was the certainty that when you died, your soul either flew up to heaven or sank into hell. And by that reckoning, no man could get into heaven without first confessing his sins and honestly repenting them. Henry didn’t care what had prompted Morehouse to open up; he only wanted to be there when the truth poured out. For if a Double Eagle ever really told the truth, a dozen murders might be solved in a single hour, a dozen families granted peace after decades of misery.

Since confirming the secret interview at dawn, Henry had been unable to contain himself. Sitting at his desk this morning, the slightest noise in the newspaper office had made him jump. The shocking call about Viola Turner had been the last straw. Before he could even begin to grasp the implications of the old nurse’s death, Henry found himself parking before an empty lot that was the barren touchstone of his past, and also of the Albert Norris case.

The weed-choked lot lay between two abandoned buildings on Third Street. Forty-one years ago, Norris’s Music Emporium had stood on this hallowed piece of dirt, beating like the secret heart of Henry’s hometown. Now empty bottles, paper cups, used condoms, and cigarette packs lay among the dying johnsongrass that covered the mud where Albert Norris’s “pickin’ porch” had once stood.

As a boy, Henry had first gone into Albert’s shop because his mother played a little piano, enough to perform at church or for the Christmas show at the grade school where she taught. Henry’s father was a traveling salesman, and rarely home. When he was, he seemed angry, as though he couldn’t wait to leave again. He finally died in a car crash in Lawton, Oklahoma, when Henry was seventeen, but by then he was little more than a bad memory. Throughout Henry’s boyhood, though, his father had always been out there, like a storm that might blow through town at any time. Albert Norris’s store became an escape from all that, and more. It was a magic portal into the mysteries of the universe—not made-up mysteries like the ones his friends read about in books or watched at the Arcade theater, but
real
ones. Secrets so potent that they changed your life irrevocably the moment you were initiated into them.

A month ago, Henry had dug up an old photograph that showed the store during its heyday. He’d been stunned by how small it looked in comparison to the image in his mind. Held off the ground by pyramid-shaped concrete blocks, the Emporium was actually a converted residence built of unpainted cypress and weathered by decades of sun. Albert had cut a big display window into the front wall to show off the pianos and organs he kept in stock.

One of the store’s secrets was that it wasn’t merely a building, but a musical instrument in its own right, a sound chamber tuned by an accident of construction and played by whoever happened to be jamming inside it: sometimes a leathery old blues shouter thrashing a twangy imitation Stratocaster, other times a first-class pickup band—four or five gifted guys shaking the building with a transformative beat that boomed across the road and out into the little town amid the cotton fields. Often those pickup bands had included Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Pooky Wilson, and other local masters of their craft. But the music that people most remembered was Albert himself alone at the piano, playing after hours. That sound was so mournful and exquisitely pure that everyone who lived or worked within earshot—white or black—had asked Albert to leave his doors and windows open when he played. That was Henry’s first encounter with the paradox of how music that sounded so sad could lift the soul like nothing else in the world.

The two years he’d spent in and out of Albert’s store were the most vivid of Henry’s life. Nothing that happened to him afterward ever touched the live-wire euphoria he’d felt within the vibrating walls of that building, or the longing he’d suffered when he was trapped somewhere else, thinking about getting back to it.

Most of the musicians who came through Albert’s store were fast-aging boys who would still be boys when they found their graves. Albert himself was a wise man of fifty who’d never let the world beat his dreams out of him. His eyes were deep brown pools set in a darker brown face, and his hands, unlike those of the other black men Henry knew, weren’t cracked and broken from backbreaking labor, but soft and long-fingered, like the hands of a surgeon or a classical violinist.

Albert was so well liked in the community that during the nineteen years since the Japanese surrender, a practice unheard-of almost anywhere else in the South had become the norm there. Albert not only served white customers, but white women—white
women
were known to browse his store’s extensive library of sheet music—white women
alone,
with Albert the only other person present. Henry’s mother had told him this was highly unusual, but she herself bought hymn music in Albert’s store. Moreover, in those days, every family that could afford one had a piano in the parlor, and Albert had traveled the parish tuning the instruments for five dollars less than the white tuner charged. Apparently, the white husbands’ racism didn’t extend to paying extra to have a white man tune their pianos.

Henry’s secret odyssey through Albert’s store had begun with piano lessons, first with the proprietor, but later with Albert’s daughter Swan, who’d been named after a black opera singer from Natchez. Born a slave in 1824, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had traveled to London and sung for the queen in Buckingham Palace, where opera enthusiasts christened her the Black Swan. Albert Norris had known all about the Black Swan, of course. Swan’s mother had tried to call her Elizabeth, but the child had such beauty and grace that no one ever called her anything but Swan. Like her father, Swan was a musical prodigy, and by seventeen she was handling the majority of Albert’s lessons.

One of Swan’s pupils was a gangly white fourteen-year-old named Henry Sexton. Despite Albert’s strong improvisational style, as a teacher he was a stickler for theory. Henry sometimes felt more bullied by Albert in the teaching room than he did by the redneck coaches on the football field at Ferriday Junior High. But Swan was different. She might run him through a few scales at the beginning of each lesson, but this bored her, and she only did it to please her father. She delighted in teaching Henry to play the songs he really wanted to learn, hits he’d heard on the radio, mostly. Henry lived for the hour he spent with the older girl every Thursday afternoon, confined in the eight-by-ten room with a Baldwin upright and a scent so primally feminine that he could hardly think of anything else.

A narrow vertical window had been set in the door of the teaching room, and Henry had cursed it a thousand times. Albert used the window to keep an eye on Swan when she was teaching boys. Since the store was elevated off the ground, the floorboards always creaked, and Henry used those creaks as a Distant Early Warning System to keep track of Albert’s movements. The problem was, some customer was usually playing a piano in the main room, and this masked the sound of Albert’s walk. Bass guitars were even worse. To Henry’s everlasting gratitude, Albert sometimes taught piano in the display room at the same time Swan was teaching him. And it was one of these afternoons that Swan had given Henry the greatest shock, and the greatest gift, of his life.

He’d been trying to copy her technique on Bach, which was torture when 95 percent of his concentration was on the shapely thigh of the beautiful girl sitting hip to hip with him. He was also praying she wouldn’t notice the taut little tent in his lap, which had become a regular feature of the lessons, and which Henry simply could not control. As he struggled to keep his left hand in rhythm, Swan’s hand settled on that tent as softly as a butterfly. Then she began to rub it.

“Keep playing,” she whispered.

Henry stopped anyway, his heart and lungs expanding like balloons hooked to a high-pressure cylinder.

“Go
on,
” Swan urged, her big eyes flashing, “or I’ll have to quit.”

Sweat poured off Henry’s face. He banged his left hand down on the keyboard, and Swan rubbed harder beneath it. Less than a minute later Henry shivered and began to smack the keys like a man with stumps for fingers—but he kept playing. Swan kissed his cheek and said, “Maybe now you can concentrate,
boy
.”

After this lesson, Henry ran home and washed his pants in the Whirlpool before his mother could get home from her second job at the church. Then he’d prayed eighteen hours a day for his next lesson to arrive.

When the next Thursday came, Swan made him wait almost the whole hour before doing anything other than what Henry’s mother was paying her to do. But fifty minutes into the lesson, Elizabeth Swan Norris got up and moved to Henry’s right side, which was not her usual place, then took his right hand and guided it under her dress. Henry gulped when he felt what awaited his fingers. Her wetness confused and terrified him. Still, he let her move his fingers in circles over the hard little berry between her legs while she played piano with her left hand. When Swan finally shuddered against him, the music stopped. When her father looked into the window a few seconds later, he saw two kids on the piano bench and four hands on the keyboard. He did not see that two of the hands were wet.

“Don’t you go falling in love with me,” Swan warned Henry that day. “If you start talking foolishness, I’ll stop these lessons. You hear?”