Natchez Burning

  “Swan,” he whispered, wishing it was still 1964.

  CHAPTER 7

  SNAKE KNOX STOOD on the tarmac of Concordia Parish Airport and watched Brody Royal’s Avanti turboprop scream down out of the gray sky. The fastest private plane of its kind in the world, the $5 million Avanti was one of the quietest aircraft you could buy—on the inside—but to anyone watching it take off or land, it sounded like the devil’s fingernails raked over a chalkboard. Touchdown looked a little rough by Snake’s standards, but as a crop duster he would likely have found fault with the technique of anyone short of a Blue Angel.

  As the Avanti taxied toward the terminal, Snake saw Brody Royal himself at the controls. The old multimillionaire had lost his license due to some deficit on the flight physical, but since his son-in-law was licensed, Royal simply had the younger man perform the takeoffs, then took over the controls and did the flying himself, even the landings back in Concordia Parish.

  An hour earlier, Royal’s maid had informed Snake that the businessman had made yet another trip to New Orleans. Brody Royal had been flying back and forth three or four times per week ever since Hurricane Katrina, and he sure as hell wasn’t delivering relief supplies. There had to be money in it—big money—or Brody wouldn’t be wasting his time or fuel. Snake gazed covetously at the Italian-built jet with the royal blue R on its tail fin and ROYAL OIL emblazoned aft of the seventh window, just above the low-mass wing with its backward-facing pusher props. A machine like that got Snake’s blood going quicker than any woman these days. There were women in every damned honky-tonk in America; there were only one hundred Avantis in the whole world.

  When the plane stopped, its front door opened and two men with AR-15s slung over their shoulders came down the steps. The chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans had long since been tamped down, but Royal owned a lot of property in the Lower Ninth Ward, and he apparently figured he needed armed security on whatever business he’d been conducting.

  After the guards came Randall Regan, Royal’s son-in-law, a rawboned, humorless man with the face of a prison guard (which was what he was, in a way, but that was another story). At last the man himself exited the plane: Brody Royal, five feet ten and whipcord-trim, moving with speed and assurance despite his advanced age. His thick silver hair fluttered in the wind as he moved toward the shelter of the terminal with his overcoat folded over his arm. His hawklike face had deep-set eyes that almost never ceased motion, and he caught sight of Snake even before his guards did. When Snake raised his hand in greeting, both guards moved toward him, but Royal called out that Snake was a friend.

  Snake lit a Winston and waited for Royal to join him in the lee of the terminal building, watching the businessman’s eyes for signs of irritation at his unexpected visit. Royal might be one of the two or three richest men in the state, but thirty-seven years ago, Snake had killed four people at his command, and at this very airport. To Snake’s way of thinking, that gave him special access. He saw only frank curiosity in Royal’s eyes as the man stepped under the metal awning.

  “Surprised to see you out here this time of year,” Royal commented, not offering his hand. “What’s going on?”

  “I thought we might have a word, sir. A quiet word.”

  “Of course. Well?”

  “You may have heard that Glenn Morehouse is dying?”

  Royal nodded once.

  “Glenn’s living out at his sister’s place. I’ve been by there a few times, just to visit, and … well, I got a funny feeling. Glenn’s all the time reading Henry Sexton’s newspaper stories about the Double Eagles and talking about the old times—and not in a good way, either. He’s done got religion. Born again.”

  Royal’s eyes had clouded at the mention of Henry Sexton. “Born again, you say? That’s never good.”

  “No, sir. And his sister, Wilma—she’s a good girl, old school—Wilma says Glenn made some suspicious phone calls last week when she was out of the room.”

  Royal watched an airport attendant chock the Avanti’s wheels. “You think your old comrade in arms is thinking about clearing his conscience before he meets his maker?”

  “I’d hate to think so, sir. But if you ask me straight out … that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Morehouse was one of the original Eagles, wasn’t he?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hard to believe he’d turn traitor.”

  “The fear of death does funny things to people, I find.”

  “Religion does, too. Have you spoken to Billy or Forrest about this?”

  “Yessir. But they don’t seem too concerned about it. At least not enough to do anything ahead of time.”

  Deeper consternation creased Royal’s face. “I see. And you thought …?”

  “I just figured you ought to be made aware of the possibility. Considering …” Considering our shared history, Snake finished silently. “If you wait till the levee breaks, the whole damn Corps of Engineers can’t hold back the flood.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Royal clapped Snake on the shoulder. “You did the right thing coming to me. I’ll think about it. Now, I need to get to my bank. There’s a lot going on in New Orleans just now.”

  Snake shook his head in admiration. When Brody Royal said “my bank,” he meant it in the literal sense. He owned the motherfucker. The Royal Cotton Bank.

  “Things are moving fast in the wake of the storm,” Royal said. “It’s a hell of a mess down there, but there’s also a lot of opportunity. The nigras have finally scrambled out of there like rats from a flooded basement, and the old-money boys were caught flat-footed. It’s like 1927 in reverse.”

  Snake wondered how old Brody Royal could have been during the 1927 flood. Just a baby, surely. “I know if anybody can turn a profit out of that bitch Katrina, it’ll be you.”

  Royal looked offended by the coarse language, but then he grinned and slapped Snake on the back. “You’re a good man, Knox, like your brother was. Frank was hard. Nobody to cross.”

  “That’s a fact, sir.”

  “Let’s keep this visit to ourselves. If anyone questions you, you asked whether I knew of any crop-dusting work over in the western parishes. Meanwhile, keep me apprised of any developments regarding Morehouse, and also what Forrest is thinking. Do you have any problem with that?”

  “No, sir. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Good man.” Royal glanced down the flight line, toward the ragged crop dusters of Knox’s Flying Service. “I noticed the other day that your Pawnee sounds past due for an overhaul.”

  “She is getting a little loose in the joints, all right.”

  “Have the mechanic put her on his schedule. On my tab.”

  “I appreciate it, sir.”

  “An ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure.”

  “You said it.”

  Royal signaled to the men with the rifles, then made his way toward a blue Range Rover parked in the general aviation lot.

  CHAPTER 8

  HENRY SEXTON DROVE toward the twin bridges that crossed the Mississippi River at Natchez, a sense of dread perched like a crow on his shoulder. For so many years he’d been investigating on his own, a solitary fisherman dropping his lines into backwaters long abandoned by others. But all the while, time and mortality had been working like rust at the bottom of his boat, eating away at the craft that supported his quest for justice. Witnesses died or fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease; hidden evidence sank deeper into the mud below the dark water. Viola Turner was only the latest to die without revealing what she knew.

  A month ago, the retired nurse had appeared to Henry like an angel, returning from Chicago after decades away, knowing death was close and struggling with some secret she’d held inside since she left. Henry’s most precious hope was that Viola knew the fates of her brother, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis. He’d interviewed her twice, and though she hadn’t yet built up enough trust in him to speak with complete candor, he’d sensed that Viola was approaching a majo
r revelation. That was why he’d left a voice recorder with her after his first visit, and a camcorder on a tripod after the second. If the mood to talk struck her at 4 A.M., Henry wanted whatever Viola said preserved for the record. Now she was dead, and if the tape from that camcorder was missing, then he had to wonder whether the old nurse had actually used the machine and paid for that act with her life. A wave of nausea hit Henry as he realized that meeting with him might have caused Viola’s death.

  Her sudden passing was like a replay of another death just five days ago. The two murder cases that most obsessed Henry were those of Albert Norris, the music store owner, and Pooky Wilson, a young musician who’d worked for Albert. Henry had always believed Pooky was murdered for sleeping with the daughter of one of the richest men in Louisiana, a white girl named Katy Royal. Albert had almost certainly died for trying to protect his young employee. Quite a few people in the know had accepted this scenario, even at the time, but Henry had never been able to prove it.

  Then seven days ago, Pooky’s aged mother had sent word for Henry to come to her hospital bed. Barely able to speak, the desperately ill woman had told him that, after forty-one years of frightened silence, one of her son’s boyhood friends had appeared at her bedside and revealed something he’d kept locked in his heart since he was sixteen. Pooky had not only been sleeping with Katy Royal, this friend confirmed, but he had been hiding in Albert’s store on the afternoon that Brody Royal and Frank Knox came in and threatened the shop owner’s life. Later that night, drawn by the sound of an explosion, this same friend had seen three men leap from the window of Norris’s burning store. Two had joined another man, then jumped into a pickup and fled the scene. But the third man had calmly walked to a shiny new car driven by a man the boy recognized as Randall Regan, a brutal roughneck who worked for Brody Royal. At that moment the boy had realized that the third man was Brody Royal himself.

  Henry had waited all his life for a source like this. But while Mrs. Wilson had freely given him this information, she’d refused to give up the name of the mysterious witness who’d supplied it. She had wept upon learning the reason for her son’s death, and the boy witness—now grown—had hugged her and begged her forgiveness. Then he’d begged her to keep his name secret until he found the courage to tell his story to the FBI. Mrs. Wilson had agreed, and she would not break a sacred promise, especially when she lay on St. Peter’s doorstep. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was dead. Cardiac arrest secondary to renal failure, her doctor said. Henry hadn’t suspected foul play—not then. But the deaths sure seemed to be piling up. And despite spending much of every day since then hunting for the mystery witness he’d dubbed “Huggy Bear,” Henry had so far failed to find him.

  He looked down and realized his hands were shaking. If Viola had truly been murdered, then the cases he’d worked alone for so long were about to explode into the spotlight. The FBI agents who always pestered him to share his hard-earned knowledge would seize control of the investigation and subpoena everything he had. No longer would he be the lone crusader for justice, battling federal apathy as well as evil. Of course, he’d always claimed that he wanted help. He’d pounded on a hundred bureaucratic desks and begged for it. But while he appreciated dedicated college interns and priority treatment for his Freedom of Information Act requests, in reality he had no desire to deal with ego-driven DAs and career-driven FBI agents. Not yet, anyway. Truth be told, Henry wanted to break these cases on his own terms. He wanted to piece together the missing facts like a jigsaw puzzle, then lay out the sequence of crimes like God looking at history, and only then turn the final picture over to the FBI and the public. He hadn’t felt that way in the beginning, but the Bureau had treated him shabbily, and their lack of respect had stung him.

  He thought again about the missing videotape Shad Johnson had mentioned. What if Viola’s secrets had not gone to the grave with her? As Henry neared the Mississippi River, he wondered whether some frightened old Double Eagle with blood on his hands had dumped that tape into the muddy river sometime before dawn. Henry could readily name a couple of cold bastards who wouldn’t have had any qualms about killing Viola to keep the past buried.

  “Please don’t dump that tape,” he whispered. “Keep it as a trophy, you sons of bitches.”

  It would be a stupid thing to do, but Henry had known killers to do dumber things.

  As he started up the eastbound span that arched over the red-tinged river, he saw the spire of St. Mary’s cathedral standing stark against the clouds. The sight lifted his heart. From this view, Natchez appeared to be the mythical City on the Hill. Sited on a high bluff over the river, the three-hundred-year-old town dominated the landscape for miles around, its churches taller than every other building but one. Natchez occupied the only such high point between Missouri and the Gulf of Mexico, and its citizens had egos to match it—or that’s what you believed when you grew up on the Louisiana side of the river. Living in the shadow of that bluff, Henry had felt a mixture of jealousy and resentment toward the people in the antebellum mansions across the water. He just knew that the folks on that hill believed they were better than he was. And from an economic perspective, they always had been.

  The cotton barons of the nineteenth century—the “nabobs of Natchez”—had grown most of their crops on the Louisiana side of the river, but they lived on the bluff at Natchez, in palaces that would shame a sultan. High above the yellow fever and the riffraff that plagued the flatboat port at Under-the-Hill, they hunted fox, raced Thoroughbreds, and hosted glittering soirées while only a mile across the river the poor working sods tried to scratch out a living on the margins of the floodplain. The Civil War had taken the nabobs down a few pegs, but not to rock bottom, since the city had surrendered without a shot, dodging Sherman’s fury and remaining structurally intact. Several lean decades had followed the war, but during the Great Depression, a few wily old belles had restored their mansions, put together an annual Spring Pilgrimage, and started fleecing the Yankees and Europeans who traveled south to gawk at plantation palaces that dwarfed Tara from Gone with the Wind. Then, around 1940, some lucky redneck struck oil, and within ten years the city was rolling in cash again, selling black gold instead of white and lording it over every town for miles around. This second wave of wealth had brought Brody Royal his fortune, or the seed of it anyway. In the decades afterward, Royal had wisely diversified into a half-dozen other businesses that allowed him to ride out the oil bust of the 1980s like a southern John D. Rockefeller.

  As if summoned by Henry’s thoughts, an oil field service truck bearing the blue legend ROYAL OIL roared out of his blind spot and passed him, headed east toward Natchez.

  “I’m coming for you, you bastard,” Henry muttered, looking at his watch again and thinking of his upcoming interview. He could not afford to waste time with Shad Johnson.

  Henry’s tires thumped as his Explorer rolled off the bridge, and he prepared to turn left, into the old downtown. It was during the fifties, he reflected, that a nasty streak of racism had taken root in Natchez. The seeds of that sentiment had come from outside the town proper. Though Natchez had been the slaveholding capital of the South, its leaders were Anglophiles who sympathized with the Union cause. Even those who didn’t were wealthy aristocrats who’d educated their sons in the Ivy League and sent their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Their descendants had a far more enlightened view of race relations than most Mississippians. But by the 1950s, large numbers of poor whites had been brought in to work in the town’s new manufacturing plants, and with them came the extreme and sometimes violent prejudice of the working class. Hailing from places like Liberty, Mississippi, and Monroe, Louisiana—hard-shell Baptist country—these descendants of the archetypal Confederate foot soldier were the disaffected ranks that Klan recruiters found ready for action when the Negro started trying to achieve equal rights in the workplace. Men like Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and Glenn Morehouse—guys who weren’t afraid to get
their hands bloody while carrying out the will of the White Citizens’ Council members who preferred the status quo but wouldn’t risk their liberty or good name to maintain it.

  Thankfully, things had changed since those days. Two years ago, the citizens of Natchez had elected Penn Cage mayor, and the former lawyer and author had worked hard to heal the wounds that remained in the city’s body politic. Cage’s election victory had surprised some, but not Henry. The author had a half a century of goodwill to cash in on—not his own, but that of his father, a beloved physician who’d always treated blacks just as he had whites. That goodwill bought the son more than a third of the black vote on election day, even with Penn running against a black candidate—Shadrach Johnson, the very man Henry was now headed to see.

  Henry parked his Explorer in the shadow of the incongruously modern sheriff’s department building, retrieved his briefcase from the trunk, and walked across the street toward the DA’s office. Adjacent to City Hall and the courthouse, the DA’s building seemed to crouch under the slit windows of the sheriff’s department and the county jail. As Henry trotted up the stairs, his sense of dread intensified. Shad Johnson was a politician with his eye on the main chance. He would undoubtedly ask Henry some pointed questions, and Henry didn’t want to say any more than the law required. It would be good practice for dealing with the FBI later in the day, as he would almost surely be required to do.