Natchez Burning (90 page)

“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 have 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.

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. Technically, 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.

She saved her open computer files in an encrypted format, then logged into a White Pages website and typed
Katy Royal Regan
in the search field. The search engine instantly kicked back
Randall and Katy Regan, 18 Royal Road, Lake Concordia, Louisiana
. She memorized the address and scrawled the phone number on a Post-it, then typed in
Royal Insurance Company, Vidalia, Louisiana
. Adding this phone number to the Post-it, she made a quick plan.

Lake Concordia was ten miles from the
Examiner
offices. She could call Royal Insurance on her way to Louisiana, and with any luck verify Randall Regan’s presence at his office. If he wasn’t there, she’d have to find a way to make sure he wasn’t home with his wife. But given what she’d learned about that relationship, Caitlin felt confident that home was the last place Randall Regan would be. With adrenaline pumping through her like fuel, she stuck the Post-it to her Treo, dropped a Sony tape recorder into her purse (next to her pistol), and headed for the front door.

CAITLIN KNEW SHE
was risking her life to interview Katy Royal Regan. To minimize that risk, while driving over the bridge to Louisiana, she’d called Royal Insurance and asked for Randall Regan. When the receptionist asked for her name, Caitlin answered that she was Special Agent Glass of the FBI. When Regan came on the line, speaking like he had a bad case of laryngitis, she informed him that an FBI search team would arrive at Royal Insurance in thirty minutes with a warrant, and that he should be prepared to produce all files pertaining to the state insurance fraud case of 2003. If Regan had any trouble remembering which case that was, she said, it was the one in which two female employees who had given evidence to federal agents had disappeared. Before Regan could do anything but curse, she’d hung up.

As for Katy Regan, Caitlin had reluctantly decided on an ambush interview. According to Henry’s notes, the woman hadn’t been upset by his questions about Pooky Wilson during his interview, and she’d been gracious to Henry throughout. But when he’d called back two days ago, she’d angrily rebuffed him. Caitlin wasn’t going to risk spooking her quarry before getting inside her house.

Dusk was falling by the time Caitlin reached Lake Concordia, and the first thing she saw was a line of houses decorated with Christmas lights. None could compete with the Regan home for gaudy splendor. Every surface of the house had been lined with colored bulbs, and the yard boasted at least six inflatable displays, one depicting Santa landing in a helicopter. Caitlin called the house immediately, identified herself, then told Mrs. Regan that the
Examiner
was doing a lifestyle story on Christmas displays. Could she possibly stop by for ten minutes to discuss Mrs. Regan’s decorative sense? When Katy agreed, Caitlin hung up before the woman could change her mind. Five minutes later, she presented herself at the front door, which had been covered with red foil wrap.

The interior of the Regan home looked like a photo spread out of
Southern Living
magazine—French country fireplaces, contemporary furniture, and three antlered deer staring down from the living room walls. Katy herself looked like a Stepford wife of indeterminate age. Caitlin knew from research that Brody Royal’s daughter was fifty-nine, but Katy already had the scared-cat face of the plastic surgery addict. When she answered the door, her eyes had a glaze that Caitlin read as the result of a couple of gin-and-tonics. Her polite drawl had the beginnings of a slur, as well. Caitlin hoped the alcohol might loosen the woman’s tongue.