The Quiet Game (13 page)

The man behind the wheel is black.

He is fifty yards past me when both front windows of the BMW explode
out of their frames, shattering into a thousand pieces. I whip my head to the right, trying to shield my eyes. My eardrums throb from sudden depressurization, and I instinctively slam on the brakes. As the back end of the car skids around, something hammers my door, sending a shock wave up my left thigh. The car comes to rest facing the right shoulder, blocking both lanes of the road. In the silence of the dead engine, the reality of my situation hits me.

Someone is shooting at me.

Frantically cranking the car, I notice the brake lights of the sheriff’s cruiser glowing red at the bottom of the hill, a hundred yards away.

It’s just sitting there.

As my engine catches, two bullets smash through the rear windshield, turning it to starred chaos. I throw the BMW into gear, stomp the accelerator, whip around, and start down the hill. Before I’ve gone thirty yards, the sheriff’s cruiser pulls onto the highway and races off toward town.

“Stop!”
I shout, honking my horn.
“Stop, goddamn it!”

But he doesn’t stop. The rifle must have made a tremendous noise, though I don’t remember hearing it. Maybe the exploding glass distracted me. But the black deputy in the cruiser
must
have heard it. Unless the weapon was silenced. This thought is too chilling to dwell on for long, since silenced weapons are much rarer in life than in movies, and indicate a high level of determination on the part of the shooter. But if the deputy didn’t hear the shots, why did he stop so long? There was no traffic at the intersection. For a moment I wonder if he could have fired the shots himself, but physics rules that out. The first bullet came through the driver’s window, while the deputy was fifty yards in front of me. The last two smashed the back windshield after the skid exposed it to the same side of the road.

My heart still tripping like an air hammer, I turn onto Highway 61, grab the cell phone, and dial 911. Before the first ring fades, I click End. Anything I say on a cell phone could be all over town within hours. The odds of catching the shooter are zero by now, and my father’s blackmail situation makes me more than a little reluctant to bring the police into our lives at this point.

Shad Johnson’s words echo in my head like a prophecy:
A while back, some black kids started shooting at white people’s cars. Killed a father of three.
But this shooting was not random. This morning’s newspaper article upset a lot of people—white people exclusively, I would have thought, until Shad Johnson disabused me of that notion. What the hell is going on? Johnson warns me that my family is in danger but gives no specifics, and ten minutes later I’m shot at on the highway?
After
being followed by a black deputy who doesn’t stop to check out the shooting?

Whoever was behind that rifle meant to kill me. But I can do nothing
about it now. I’m less than a mile from my parents’ house, and my priority is clear: within an hour I will be talking to the district attorney about my father’s involvement in a murder case, and deciding how best to sting Ray Presley, a known killer.

“Tom Cage, you dog! I can’t believe you came!”

In small towns the most beautiful women are married, and Lucy Perry proves the rule. Ten years younger than her husband—the surgeon hosting the party—Lucy has large brown eyes and a high-maintenance muscularity shown to perfection in a black silk dress that drapes just below her shapely knees. She also has suspiciously high cleavage for a forty-year-old mother of three, which I know she is, having been given a social update by my father on the way over to the party. Lucy uses the sorority squeal mode of greeting, which is always a danger in Mississippi. She flashes one of the brightest smiles I’ve seen off a magazine cover and throws her arm around my father.

“I’m here for the free liquor,” Dad says. “Not for Wiley Warren to pick my pocket.”

Lucy has a contagious laugh, and Dad has drawn it out. He’s one of the few people honest enough to use the mayor’s nickname within earshot of the man himself. Now Lucy looks at me as though she’s just set eyes on me.

“So
this
is the famous author.”

I offer my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Perry.”

“Mrs. Perry? For God’s sake,
Lucy
.” She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she’s been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture. “I’ve
forbidden
anyone to mention that awful newspaper story. No one believes anything they read in the
Examiner
anyway.”

The house is full of people, and it’s some house. Though not one of Natchez’s premier mansions, it would easily fetch nine or ten million dollars in Los Angeles. A brass plaque announces that it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The interior has been meticulously restored at a cost of countless gall bladders and appendices. A wide hallway bisects the ground floor, with arched doorways leading to capacious rooms on both sides. Of the fifty or so faces in the hallway I recognize about a quarter. People I went to school with, friends of my parents, a half dozen doctors I know. I give a broad wave to cover the group. Many nod or smile in acknowledgment, but no one approaches.
Caitlin Masters’s article has done its work. I stick close to Dad as we work our way toward the bar table at the end of the hall.

As Shad Johnson predicted, the only black faces in the house belong to white-jacketed bartenders and maids, who circulate with heaping platters of hors d’oeuvres.

“Bourbon and water, Roosevelt,” Dad tells the bartender. “Easy on the water. Penn?”

“Gin and tonic.”

The bartender grins. “Good to see you, Dr. Cage.”

Dad and I jump as a boom rattles the windowpanes behind the bar table. Terror grips me until a trombone, trumpet, and double bass join the thundering drum kit and reorient me to normalcy. A black Dixieland jazz band is performing on the patio. There are no dancers. It’s too damned hot to dance on a patio. It’s too damned hot to be playing music out there too, but Lucy and her hubby aren’t worried about the musicians.

Dad squeezes my arm and leans toward me. “Think they were gunning for you again?”

I try to laugh it off, but both of us are nervous as cats. He agreed with my decision not to report the shooting to the police, but he insisted on bringing a pistol to the party. He’s wearing it in an ankle holster.

I turn and pan the hall again. At the far end, beyond the talking heads, Lucy Perry opens the front door and pulls a young woman inside. I feel a little jolt when I recognize Caitlin Masters. She’s wearing a strapless jade dress with sandals, and her black hair is swept up from her neck. As she steps aside for Lucy to close the door, I spy the rebellious flash of a gold anklet above one sandal. How do I feel about her? Angry that she printed something I considered off the record. But I can’t help admiring her for shaking up our complacent town a little.

A blustering male voice pulls my attention to the staircase, where Wiley Warren stands dispensing political wisdom to seven or eight smiling listeners. Warren is a natural bullshitter, an ex-jock with enough brains to indulge his prodigious appetites within a younger group that admires his excesses and keeps his secrets like JFK’s press corps. Dad says he’s done a fairly good job as mayor, but nothing he’s accomplished thus far would compare to getting the BASF plant, a deal which would secure his political future.

“The reason Shad Johnson isn’t making race an issue,” Warren crows, “is that he’s damn near white as I am.”

This is vintage Wiley. The crowd chuckles encouragement.

“Ol’ Shadrach went off to prep school with the Yankees when he was eleven, and didn’t come back till he was forty and ready to run for mayor. He’s no more a representative of his people than Bryant Gumbel!”

“Who
does
he represent?” someone calls.

“Himself, of course.”

“So he’s just like you,” says a gastroenterologist whose name I can’t recall.

Warren laughs louder than anyone, tacitly admitting the self-interest that drives all politicians and which Southern voters prefer to see in the open rather than cloaked in hypocrisy. Brutal honesty in such matters is part of the mayor’s charm.

I am about to go in search of Austin Mackey, the district attorney, when I spot him at the edge of the group listening to the mayor. He motions for me to follow him to some chairs in an empty corner. Mackey was a year ahead of me in school from kindergarten through college. A perennial middle-of-the-class kid, he managed to make most athletic teams but never the first string. His grades were unremarkable, and I’m pretty sure he chose Ole Miss Law School so he wouldn’t have to pass the bar exam in order to practice in Mississippi, a rule they changed the year after he went into practice.

“Any particular reason you came home and shat in our little sandbox?” he asks as we sit.

This is not a fortuitous beginning. “Good to see you again, Austin.”

“Skip the sentiment, Cage.” He keeps his eyes on the mayor.

Watching Austin Mackey play the tough throws me a little. But Natchez is his legal fiefdom now, and if he chooses to behave like George Raft in a bad film noir, he can.

“Look, Austin, about that article. Caitlin Masters didn’t exactly—”

“Earth to Cage, give me a fucking break. By now every jig in this town is bitching about how Austin Mackey never lifted a finger to help Mrs. Payton find out who killed her poor baby.”

I don’t know how to segue from this to warm reminiscences of our shared history. Mackey seems to have forgotten we have one. “I just mentioned the Payton case as an example of a local mystery. Because it was an unsolved murder.”

Mackey’s eyes glint with superiority. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The FBI worked the Payton case. You think they tanked it? Just because no one went to jail for that particular crime doesn’t mean the perp didn’t go down for something.”

“If that’s the case, why not tell the family? Give them some peace.”

“I can’t tell them what I don’t know for sure. Listen, when I ran for D.A., I knew the blacks might ask me about past civil rights cases. So I asked the Bureau for their files on the Payton murder. I was assistant D.A. then, and I requisitioned them in the name of the office.”

“And?”

“They said that unless we’d developed a suspect and had new evidence, they wouldn’t be showing our office any files.”

“Why would they say that?”

“Can I read the mind of J. Edgar Hoover?”

“Hoover? He’s been dead twenty-five years.”

“Well, his spirit’s alive and well. Hoover made the final decisions on the disposition of those civil rights cases. And he worked them hard, especially the murders up in Neshoba County. But it’s no secret that his personal agenda had nothing to do with advancing civil rights. He hated Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. Cases like Payton’s were nothing to him but chips in a political game.”

“What about your office file?”

“There isn’t one. No one was ever charged with the crime.”

“Have you looked?”

“I don’t need to.” He finally meets my eyes. “Let’s get this straight right now. Unless you’re the attorney of record for a member of the Payton family, you’ll receive zero assistance from my office. And since you’re not licensed in this state, that pretty much settles things.”

Actually, I am licensed to practice in Mississippi, but I see no reason to point this out now. And though my combative instincts urge me to tell Mackey that a single phone call could secure my position as attorney for the Payton family, concern for my father stops me.

“You really get to me, Cage,” Mackey goes on before I can change the subject. “Mr. St. Stephens, law review at Texas, big-time author. You’ve got nothing better to do than come back here and make your old schoolmates look like assholes?”

Bitterness and envy literally crackle off the man. I am so surprised that I can do little but apologize. “That wasn’t my intention, Austin.”

“I’d hate to see what would happen if you really meant some harm.”

“What would you say if I told you I was shot at by a sniper less than an hour ago?”

His head snaps up. “Were you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you report it?”

“Not yet.”

His eyes are like signs reading,
Thank God for small favors.
“Where did this happen?”

“The black section, Linda Lee Drive.”

“What the hell were you doing over there?”

“Shad Johnson wanted to talk to me.”

“Jesus.” The muscles in Mackey’s jaw tighten. “What did he say?”

“He warned me off the Payton case.”

An ironic smile. “Shad’s no fool. The election’s five weeks off, and the polls have him and Warren neck and neck.”

“That’s all you have to say about an attempt on my life?”

“You’re back in Mississippi, bubba. You piss people off, they’re going to hit back. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious which side you’re on.”