The Quiet Game (17 page)

“This is about
you
, Penn Cage.” He spears me with a chilling stare. “And unfinished business.”

Unfinished business? A needle of fear pushes through my gut. Could he be talking about Ray Presley? Could he know something about what happened in Mobile in 1973? “Do you know a man named Ray Presley, Deputy?”

His jaw muscles flex into knots. “I know that motherfucker.”

“Does this have anything to do with him?”

“It might. You just be out here when I get back.”

He presses the accelerator, spinning me away from the car. After regaining my balance, I watch the cruiser disappear, then walk back to the driver’s window of the Hummer.

“What the hell was that about?” Sam asks.

“How many black sheriff’s deputies are there?”

“Nine or ten, I think. That was one of them?”

“Yeah. Fiftyish, but tough. Bald-headed.”

“Had to be Ike Ransom. You know him.”

“I do?”

“Ike the Spike. Remember?”

I do remember. Ike “the Spike” Ransom was a legendary football star at Thompson, the black high school, in the mid-sixties. He was so good that his exploits were trumpeted in the pages of the
Examiner
despite his skin color, and the records he set had held until Sam and I played ball ten years later.

“What the hell did Ike Ransom want here?” Sam asks.

“Same as everybody else. Warned me off the Payton case. I can’t believe Ike the Spike is a deputy. I figured he played pro football or something.”

Sam shrugs. “He was a cop first. After he put in his twenty there, he went to the sheriff’s department. He’s a bad son of a bitch, Penn. Even the blacks don’t like him.”

“What do you mean? He was a hero.”

“Ransom was one of the first black cops. I heard those guys had to prove they’d be tough on their own people to keep their jobs. Some people say Ransom was worse than white cops.”

“Great.”

Sam cranks the Hummer. “Forget Del Payton. Take care of your own. And if somebody fucks with you, give me a call. I can still pull your slack if you need me.”

I squeeze his shoulder. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks.”

He backs out of the driveway and roars away, the echoes reverberating off the houses on the silent street.

I walk into the garage and lean against the trunk of my mother’s Maxima. The high whistling
cheeep
of crickets rises to a manic drone, overpowering the buzz of the streetlight overhead and giving me a strange sense of peace. Our street looks almost exactly as it did thirty-five years ago, when we moved in. A few houses have changed color, some trees have disappeared, others have grown. But for the most part it’s the same.

In the corner of our yard stands a huge oak. When I was a boy, a wisteria vine grew around its trunk, spiraling around and around until it reached the high branches. My friends and I used to splay our bare feet on that vine, spread our arms wide around the trunk, and see how high we could work our way up and around the tree before we fell. I never won those contests; I had too much imagination to successfully block out my fear. Back then the vine was the thickness of a boy’s wrist. Now it’s thicker than my thigh and looks as though it will soon strangle the old oak like a boa constrictor.

The drone of an engine cuts through the hot night air. As promised, Ike the Spike’s cruiser turns the corner and rolls to a stop at the end of our driveway.

I push off the Maxima and walk toward the street.

The inside of the cruiser smells like a black man sweating. I know the odor from summer jobs digging ditches and riding in trucks with men who gave off a different scent than I did—no worse but harder somehow, distinctive enough for me to know it forever. I pull the door shut, closing myself into an oppressive square completed by the dashboard, a wire mesh screen, and Deputy Ike Ransom.

“Let’s take a ride,” he says.

“How about you tell me what I’m doing here?”

“You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff’s department was doing at your folks’ house?”

I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. “How do I know you’re not in with whoever shot at me tonight?”

“If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now.”

This is easy enough to believe. “Okay. Ride.”

Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.

“What’s this about, Ike?”

He glances at me. “You know me?”

“My friend did. What’s the big secret?”

“It’s about Del Payton.”

“I told you I didn’t want to hear about that.”

“It’s about you and Del both.”

“Me and Del? I was only eight years old when the guy died.”

He looks at me again, the yellow sclera of his eyes washed white by oncoming headlights. “He didn’t
die
, college boy. He was murdered. There’s a difference. You and him tied together, though. Ain’t no doubt about that.”

“How do you figure that?”

“First tell me why you said what you said in the paper.”

“I was talking through my hat. I wasn’t thinking.”

“That newspaper bitch didn’t pick Del’s name out of the blue.”

“I mentioned him.”

“There you go.”

I sigh in frustration. “I’m lost, Ike.”

“That’s for damn sure. Can’t you see? Del died thirty years ago and nobody paid for it. His soul ain’t never been at rest. It’s been wandering ’round here all this time, looking for peace. But it can’t
get
no peace. Not while his killers walk free.”

Maybe Ike the Spike is some kind of religious nut.

“Now, here you come, thirty years later, and in one day you got more people talking about Del’s killing than they was the day he died.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“
That
don’t matter. Don’t you see? What goes around comes around! You just an instrument. An instrument of a higher power.”

“I’m a guy with a big mouth. I’m not an instrument of anything.”

Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. “You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one.”

He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.

“Where are we going? The river?”

“Battery plant.”

“The battery plant? What for?”

“Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market’s down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours.”

There are few lights on this road. Beneath the sulfurous odor of the paper mill drifts the thick, ripe smell of kudzu, sweetened by a breath of honeysuckle. The river is only six hundred yards away, and just a few feet below our present elevation.

The dark skeleton of the Triton Battery plant materializes to our right as Ike turns onto Gate Street, then right again into a parking lot lighted by the pink glow of mercury vapor. The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman rail cars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. The last I heard, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European manufacturers.

Ike stops the cruiser on the far side of the parking lot. We’re sitting on an acre of gravel packed into dirt by years of hard use, bordered on three sides
by trees and unkempt grass. The west side faces the main gate of the battery plant, with Gate Street running between. I used to bring girls out here in high school.

“Is this where Del Payton died?”

“This it,” Ransom says. “Come on.”

“Where?”

He laughs harshly. “You a nervous son of a bitch, ain’t you? Come on.”

I get out of the cruiser and follow him across the gravel. A massive old pecan tree grows out of a clump of grass at the center of the lot. The spaces in its shade are probably coveted by everyone who uses the lot.

Ransom stops ten yards short of the tree, his back to me.

“Thirty years,” he says. “Thirty years ago Del Payton parked his Fairlane right in this spot. When he came out of the plant, the bomb was in his car.” He half turns to me and spits on the gravel. “I seen car bombs go off, man. It’s a motherfucker. That fire burned forty minutes before they got it out. Del was sitting behind the wheel all that time.”

I stand silent in the buzzing of the lights, wondering where Ike Ransom has seen car bombs go off. He squats on his haunches and picks up a piece of gravel.

“A man’s soul left this earth right here.”

I walk a few steps closer. “Look, Ike . . . I know what happened that night. And I’m damn sorry it did. But I don’t see any connection to me.”

He stands and points at me, his black eyes smoldering. “I’m gonna say two words, college boy. After that you gonna be in this thing up to your neck.”

“Okay.”

“Leo Marston.”

He watches me as though waiting for me to guess a riddle.

“Leo Marston? I don’t get it. What—”

“Judge . . . Leo . . . Marston.”

My palms tingle. “Are you saying Marston was somehow involved in the Payton murder?”

“Involved?” Ike the Spike laughs quietly in the dark. “Oh, yeah.”

“That’s impossible. What could Leo Marston possibly have had to do with Del Payton?”

“He was D.A. back then, wasn’t he?”

My head is swimming. “Leo Marston was district attorney in 1968?”

“You didn’t know that? It was in the article this morning.”

I see my father jerking the paper from my hands and wadding it up. “I didn’t read the whole thing.”

“That wasn’t too smart, was it?”

“You’re saying Marston covered something up? Buried evidence while he was D.A.?”

Ike fires his rock across the street like a major league outfielder. It flies over the cyclone fence bordering the plant and strikes something metal, silencing the crickets for a few seconds. “I’m saying all these years that motherfucker been handing out jail time and making millions, he should have been rotting at Parchman Farm.”

A dark thrill ripples through my chest. “You’re saying Marston was involved in the actual
crime
?”

“I done said all I got to say.”

“You can’t drop a bomb like that and then shut up! How do you know any of this?”

“You a cop in this town for twenty years, even a black cop, you get to know some things.”

The hair on my arms is standing erect. I cannot interpret my emotions. Fear? Excitement? I walk the ten yards to the pecan tree, unzip my pants, and urinate on its trunk as I try to get my mind around what Ransom has told me.

“Shook you up, huh?” he says, laughing.

I zip up and turn back to him. “You’ve known for thirty years that Leo Marston was guilty of a felony and you’ve done nothing about it?”

“What says I knew for thirty years? I wasn’t on the job thirty years ago. What I’m gonna do anyway, man? A nigger cop on the bottle gonna go up against the judge? That’s why you here, man. Takes somebody like you to do it.”

“Like me?”

“You’re white, famous, and you make your money someplace else. They can’t hurt you much here.”

“Who’s they?”

“That’s what you got to find out.”

“Christ. Just tell me what you know. I’ll take it and run with it.”

Ike gives me a knowing smile. “You want Marston’s ass bad, don’t you?”

“Tell me, goddamn it!”

“That don’t play, college boy. You gotta work your way to it. Then you’ll understand.”

“Why tell me this, Ike?”

“Why me, Ike?”
he mocks in a woman’s voice. “Don’t play that shit with me! Everybody knows the judge went after your old man. Damn near got him too.”

This stings me to the quick. “That’s bullshit. My father was unanimously exonerated by a jury.”

“I ain’t talking ’bout that. I’m talking about
damage
. Doc Cage had a heart attack while he was waiting for that trial, didn’t he?”

I nod slowly.

“Hey, I love your daddy, man. He took care of me when I was a kid. Took care of my mama till she died. That’s why I’m telling you this. It’s what the hippies used to call karma. What goes around comes around. That’s what brought you back here. You the chicken coming home to roost. Right on Marston’s ass.”

“So give me what I need to nail him.”

Ike shakes his head. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I told you, it don’t play that way. I can point you in the right direction. But that’s it.”