Natchez Burning (37 page)

“What about the plan to lure Kennedy down here?”

“I think Brody Royal scrapped it after Frank died. He didn’t trust Snake to carry out an operation of that magnitude, or keep his mouth shut if he did. Brody ordered Snake to kill Jimmy, Luther, and Viola, and make sure their bodies would never be found, no matter how hard the FBI might search for them.”

“Then how the hell did Viola survive?”

“According to my Eagle source, Ray Presley and your father saved her.”

My frustration is compounding every minute. “How the hell could they have done that?”

“I don’t know. Remember the machine shop? Snake went nuts when his brother died. He started torturing those boys out of grief. At some point they kidnapped Viola again and brought her out there, and she was brutalized some more. I’m afraid even Jimmy might have been molested. But that was probably trivial compared to his ultimate fate.”

“How the hell could Viola escape? You think Ray got her out?”

“My source didn’t give me the details of that. We got cut off. And since Ray is dead, probably no one but your father and the Double Eagles know the answer.”

I take another drink of bourbon, but I can hardly taste it. My mind is well and truly blown. “Two things I don’t understand. One, if all this happened the way you said, then Viola knew enough to send serious criminals to the gas chamber. Why would she keep her mouth shut, after they’d killed her brother? The Bureau had agents in Natchez in 1968. Why didn’t she talk to them?”

Henry sighs. “That’s like asking why a Sioux squaw didn’t go the U.S. Cavalry for help in 1880, after white settlers had terrorized her and killed her family. Viola knew exactly what Snake Knox and his buddies were capable of, and she knew the FBI couldn’t protect her from them.”

“They killed her brother, Henry. They gang-raped her. Do you really believe she would have kept quiet about that?”

The reporter’s eyes smolder with an emotion I can’t quite read. “Maybe. By the time the Eagles found her in Chicago, she was pregnant. What if they threatened her child? Her brother was already dead. Would a mother risk her infant’s life to put her trust in white men who’d failed to convict the Klan in almost every single murder case in Mississippi up to that time?”

Henry has a point. “But if the kid was a result of the gang rape?”

The reporter shrugs. “We don’t know enough to guess, Penn. What’s your second objection?”

“If Brody scrapped the RFK assassination plan, how did he square it with Marcello? Godfathers don’t generally take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“My source didn’t tell me. Maybe Brody told him straight: ‘Without Frank Knox in charge, we can’t take the risk.’ But the timeline suggests another answer. Del Payton was blown up just weeks after Revels and Davis disappeared, right? What if I told you that Brody Royal and Judge Leo Marston were occasional business partners back in the sixties?”

“I picture two rattlesnakes in a sack.” Leo Marston is the father of a woman I once thought I would marry. He now resides in Parchman Penitentiary.

“Brody and Leo lived on opposite sides of the river, but they had greed in common. Brody was far wealthier than Marston, but Leo had more political clout. He also had the blood pedigree that Royal didn’t. Leo invested in quite a few Royal Oil wells, and he made some real money. I think they were pretty tight.”

“Del Payton was murdered to intimidate black union members,” I think aloud. “You’re thinking Brody Royal had advance knowledge through Leo that a crime like that was about to happen? If he did, he could cancel the Revels hit and claim Del Payton had been killed to lure Kennedy down here.”

“Exactly.”

“And three weeks after Payton died, Sirhan Sirhan made the whole question moot. Any real chance of another Kennedy taking the White House died at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.”

Henry looks pleased that his story led me to the same conclusion.

“The Viola angle still doesn’t play,” I argue. “From what you’ve told me, Brody Royal is a monster. Even if Viola didn’t know about his involvement in all this, the Double Eagles did. If Viola was a threat to the Eagles, then she was a threat to Brody Royal through them. I can’t believe anything would have stopped Royal from killing her.”

Henry taps the photo of my father in the boat with Brody Royal. “Which brings us right back here. Maybe your father pledged something in exchange for Viola’s life. Maybe he guaranteed her silence. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

“I will,” I mutter, trying not to give rein to the anger I feel at Dad’s silence earlier today. “You said the FBI found Viola in Chicago?”

“One agent questioned her. I’ve got his 302 in my files. According to him, Viola believed Jimmy and Luther had been murdered, but she offered no proof. The agent noted that she behaved like someone in shock, or perhaps even sedated by drugs. He also noted that she was pregnant.”

I lean back and consider this. “Given all you’ve told me, it’s pretty hard to believe that Viola had the nerve to come back here, even to die.”

“I think she knew she could trust your father to give her a painless death. To her, that was worth the risk of retaliation by the Eagles. It’s about as sad as anything I ever heard.”

“But she didn’t get a painless death,” I point out. “And that’s how I know my father didn’t kill her. We’ve
got
to explain all this to Shad, Henry.”

Henry’s skepticism is plain. “Without proof?”

“We have to get him proof. A statement from your Double Eagle source. Did you tape
any
of the stuff he said today?”

The reporter shakes his head. “I took good notes.”

“Christ, man. You should have taped the bastard on the sly. That may have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

“No. He wants to talk to me again.”

“When?”

“As soon as he can get his sister to leave the house again.”

I stand and pace around the table, trying to control my anxiety. What I would give to be a prosecutor again, with subpoena power. A suffocating sense of foreboding has taken hold of me. “How careful were you today, Henry? Where did you interview this guy?”

“At his sister’s home. He sent her out of town on an errand. It’s a pretty isolated place. He doesn’t think the Eagles are onto him, but they’ve clearly cut him out of the loop on sensitive stuff. I think it’s going to be fine, Penn. He—”

A loud, old-fashioned ringing stops Henry in midsentence. He digs for an office phone buried under some loose papers. “That’s probably Sherry, my girlfriend. I’m way late getting home.” He lifts the black receiver to his ear. “
Concordia Beacon
… Oh, hey, Lou Ann.” Henry covers the mouthpiece with his hand and looks up at me. “It’s Mrs. Whittington, the lady you met when you came in.”

My mind is ranging through all Henry told me, searching for moral pressure points that might induce my father to open up to me before tomorrow.

“When?” Henry asks in a shocked voice. “Just now? … Who told you that?” He fishes a cell phone from his front pocket and checks its LCD. “I had my ringer off. Damn it!”

I give the reporter an inquisitive look, but he turns away to concentrate on the conversation. “What do they think happened? … Okay, do me a favor and call Sherry back. Tell her I’m with a source and I’ll call her as soon as I can … Thanks, Lou Ann … I know … I sure will … You, too. Bye.”

When he turns back to me, Henry looks five years older than he did only a minute ago. “That was about my Eagle source. Paramedics just brought him in to the Mercy Hospital emergency room. He was DOA.”

A blast of neurochemicals blanks my mind. Where before I had anxious thoughts, only fear courses now. “Henry, Viola Turner and your secret source just died within twelve hours of each other. What do you think that says about your future?”

The reporter blinks as though he doesn’t quite comprehend my point.

“Do you have a gun here?” I ask.

“A gun? No. I’ve never carried one.”

“You’re working day and night to send ex–Ku Klux Klansmen to Angola, and you don’t carry a gun? Angola is filled with pissed-off black convicts. Those old white men would kill almost anybody to stay out of there.”

Henry shrugs, looking dazed. “My girlfriend carries a pistol, and my mother keeps a shotgun at her house. The PBS guys making the film about me think I’m nuts for not carrying a gun. Do you carry one?”

“I’m licensed, but I don’t have one on me now. Not in the car, either.”

A stubborn defiance creeps into the reporter’s eyes. “I promised myself when I started that I wasn’t going to change my way of living because of these lowlifes. The fact that I’ve pursued these cases without fear, publishing things as I go, living unafraid … that makes a statement. Even to scum like Snake Knox and Brody Royal. It says that I know what I’m doing is right, and what they did was wrong.”

While Henry preaches, I move to the war room’s metal door and lock it. The
Beacon
stands on the very edge of town, across the road from an empty cotton field. “We need to get out of here. Does that phone still have a dial tone?”

“The office phone?”

“The landline! Check it.”

Henry lifts the black phone from its hook and puts it to his ear, then nods with relief.

“Dial 911 and ask for Sheriff Dennis.”

The reporter looks uncomfortable. “Walker Dennis isn’t exactly a fan of mine.”

“I’ll do the talking.”

“SLOW DOWN, GODDAMN IT!”
Snake ordered. “Ain’t nobody chasing us.”

Sonny Thornfield eased off the gas as he approached the shore of Old River, where he maintained a fishing camp that almost no one in the world knew he owned. Though it stood only a few miles from where Glenn Morehouse had died, no one could find them here in ten years of searching.

The clammy sweat of panic still soaked Sonny’s shirt, which made it miserable inside his coat. He and Snake had been only halfway to the tree line behind Wilma’s house when the ambulance came barreling up the gravel road, red lights flashing. Sonny worried that in the chaos of the death scene, Wilma might break down and tell the paramedics everything. Snake disagreed.

“She handled it pretty good, I thought,” he said. “Wilma’s a tough old girl. You wouldn’t think it to look at her now, but she was a fine-lookin’ thing back in her day.”

“I remember,” Sonny said dully. “I can still see her in her bathing suit out by Lake Bruin.”

Snake grunted. “She was a decent piece of ass, in a pinch.”

“I never got to find out.”

“You’re about the only one.” Snake stuffed his hands into his pockets and sucked at the cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“I wish I hadn’t seen Glenn that way,” Sonny said, peering into the darkness to the left of his headlights. All the camp houses here were built on thirty-foot stilts to escape the perennial flooding from the backwaters of the Mississippi.

“Yeah,” Snake said, toying with his heater vent. “But damn, he fought like a demon at the end, didn’t he? Sumbitch picked me right up off the floor!”

Sonny tried to suppress the awful memory. “Remember back in the summer of sixty-four, when we tested that C-4 during those family picnics?”

Snake laughed. “Hell, yeah! I’d wrap that Primacord around a stump and cut the top right off, like slicing sausage for jambalaya. The kids loved it.”

“Glenn loved that even more than they did. He was like a kid himself.”

Snake nodded in the dashboard light. “He always was the weakest of us, though. But he’s gone now. Best forgotten.”

Sonny wished this were possible. All he could see was his old friend’s last moments on earth. After his sister injected the PICC line’s port with fentanyl, Snake and Sonny had held the emaciated giant down for another twenty seconds. Then his arms had gone limp, and he’d sagged back against the mattress, breathing only once every fifteen seconds or so.

“Can he hear me?” Wilma had asked in a cracked voice.

Snake leaned over their old comrade, then stuck a finger under his jaw. “If you’ve got anything to tell him, you better say it quick.”

She shoved Sonny out of the way, then climbed onto the bed and lay beside her brother. Cradling Glenn’s head against her breasts, she began to sing, so softly that Sonny couldn’t recognize the tune. He thought it might be a hymn, but the more he heard, the more it sounded like a children’s song. Snake was shouting from the door that they should go, but Sonny couldn’t pull himself away.

“Get out,” Wilma said coldly. “Get out, you bastards.”

After a last look at the eerie tableau, Sonny bolted and followed Snake through the back door at a run. He could still hear the screen door slam in the night, its screeching spring like the howl of a tortured soul.

“Looks like the water’s rising,” Snake said, staring out over the moonlit backwater. “Temperature’s dropping, too. Might be good fishing tomorrow.”

Sonny had always known he was different from Snake, but in that moment he wanted to leap from the truck and run until he’d forever separated himself from this man who had led him into so much violence. But it was far too late for that. He was bound inextricably to Snake, as surely as to his own blood.

“Might be,” Sonny said, his throat parched with fear. “Maybe we’ll go out early.”

HENRY SEXTON AND
I sit locked in his war room, waiting for an escort from the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office. It took me a couple of minutes to reach Sheriff Dennis, who sounded as amazed as the 911 operator to get a call from the mayor of Natchez. I said nothing to him about the possible murder of one of Henry’s sources, but I did tell him I was concerned for Henry’s safety. The sheriff agreed to send a cruiser around to escort us home within ten minutes.

“They really killed him, didn’t they?” Henry says in a dazed voice.

“I’d say so. After decades of silence, this guy decides to open up to a reporter investigating unsolved murders in which he was involved. Then he dies that very night?”

“His cancer was terminal,” Henry says halfheartedly. “Maybe the stress of today pushed him into some fatal event. I mean—”