Natchez Burning

  “Henry, let me put your mind at rest about something. Caitlin Masters is no threat to you—not through me. She and I keep a high wall between our careers. We have to. You may find that difficult to believe, but as Natchez’s mayor and her one newspaper publisher, we’ve been through enough conflict-of-interest situations that we’ve learned to compartmentalize. And that arrangement has been tested, believe me. It’s caused serious stress in our relationship. But we’ve stuck to it. Nothing you tell me will get to Caitlin. Okay? Not without your permission.”

  Henry sighs with obvious relief. “I appreciate it.”

  “So, tell me why you called me.”

  Henry raises the National into playing position again, almost like it’s a shield. “Penn, do you believe your daddy killed Viola?”

  “Are we alone in this building?”

  “We are now.”

  “And we’re off the record?”

  “You’re not even here, brother.”

  “He might have, Henry. I don’t know. You saw the tape. We may have seen a botched attempt at euthanasia. An unexpected drug reaction. I can’t see my father screwing up such a thing, but he might cover for someone else who did. A family member, maybe. I just spent half an hour talking to Dad, and he stuck to the doctor-patient privilege pitch like the Maginot Line. What do you think happened?”

  “I think it was straight-up murder, and the Double Eagles did it.”

  This assertion hits me like cold water in the face. “The splinter group of the Klan you’ve written about?”

  Henry nods. “In 1968, the Double Eagles warned Viola that if she ever returned to Natchez, they’d kill her. They kidnapped and murdered her brother, Jimmy Revels, and I believe Viola saw enough to put some Eagles behind bars. She may even have seen them kill Jimmy, or Luther Davis.”

  “How do you know this? I’ve never read it in your stories.”

  “Viola told me about the old warning two weeks ago, but she wouldn’t go farther than that. But today, right after I talked to you, I interviewed the first Double Eagle ever to go on the record about any of their crimes. He’s positive that some of his old brothers killed Viola to fulfill that threat.”

  My breath comes a little shallower. “Does he know that for a fact?”

  “No. He’s out of the loop these days, as far as they’re concerned. But I believe he’s right.”

  “Do you have any evidence?”

  “Only circumstantial, I’m afraid. But that’ll change soon.”

  Not what I’d hoped for, but … “Who is this Double Eagle?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”

  Henry’s refusal hits me with delayed effect, like the pain of a puncture wound. “Are you serious? We need to get this guy in front of a district attorney. Or some FBI agents, at least.”

  “That’ll never happen. He only talked to me on the condition that I not print anything until after he’s dead—which from the looks of him won’t be long.”

  “Henry, Shad means to charge my father with murder tomorrow. First-degree murder.”

  “I was afraid of that. But you don’t have to worry. Your father’s innocent. There’s no way he’ll even go to trial for this crime. A week from now, I’ll have nailed the Eagles for it.”

  “A week in the county jail could easily kill my dad. Please tell me who this guy is. I’m a former prosecutor. I have a lot of experience persuading reluctant witnesses to turn state’s evidence.”

  “Maybe so. But you’re not the prosecutor here or across the river. You can’t offer immunity in exchange for testimony.”

  “A district attorney can.”

  “The DA hates your guts.”

  “Shad Johnson hates my guts. But what about the Concordia Parish DA?”

  Henry folds his arms over the face of his guitar and looks hard into my eyes. “No one can offer a man immunity against death. And death is the only thing motivating this source. Fear of Hell with a capital H.”

  Ever since I talked to Dad, the simmering anxiety in my chest has threatened to boil into panic. Henry’s refusal to confide in me isn’t helping matters. “Henry … with all due respect, are you being honest about your reason for holding back this witness? Are you afraid I’m going to tell Caitlin about him? Because I absolutely won’t do that.”

  “I believe you. But your sole priority right now is your father. You desperately want to save him. And I can’t risk you scaring off this source by trying to rush him. You might even accidentally expose him to the Eagles and get him killed. We can’t blow the chance to solve a dozen murder cases just to get your father clear of trouble a few days faster.”

  I have to admit that Henry is making sense. It’s not his fault that Dad won’t speak up in his own defense. But something about Henry’s thesis doesn’t make sense, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.

  “Did any of this come up with Shad today?”

  “I told him about the 1968 threat.”

  “How did he respond?”

  “Wasn’t interested. Shad said if the Eagles were still active, they’d have killed me a long time ago, not some old nurse who was already dying.”

  “That actually makes sense.”

  The reporter gives me a sour look. “Not really. Until about a month ago, I didn’t really know enough to hurt them. Not seriously. Unlike Viola Turner.”

  I grunt noncommittally.

  “I’ll tell you something Shad doesn’t know,” he says. “The Eagles are no stranger to drugs. I’d heard rumors, but today my source confirmed it. The Eagles are heavy into the crystal meth trade statewide. They could easily have gotten ahold of something that would kill Viola.”

  “Why haven’t you told Shad this?”

  “Because I promised I wouldn’t reveal anything my source told me until after he’s dead. And because he’d deny it, if I did.”

  “They’re into the drug trade now?”

  “Yes, with their sons. And they would be far more likely to make a mistake with them than your father.”

  The idea of the Double Eagles dabbling in the drug trade tickles something deep in my mind, but Henry’s mention of my father blanks out all intuition. The logical flaw in Henry’s theory of Viola’s murder is flashing like an electrical scoreboard behind my eyes.

  “Henry, we’re missing the forest here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the Double Eagles killed Viola, then why is my father acting the way he is? If he’s innocent … why is he acting guilty?”

  This stumps the reporter. He reaches out and gives one of the National’s tuning pegs a twist, then answers in a thoughtful voice. “What if the Eagles framed your father? They knew Dr. Cage was treating her, they saw a chance to blame him for their hit, and they seized their chance.”

  “Then why isn’t Dad screaming from the rooftops that he’s innocent?”

  Henry’s sad eyes move from the tuning pegs to my face. “They must have something on him. Something from the past that your father doesn’t want exposed.”

  “Something he’d go to prison over? No way.”

  Henry doesn’t look convinced. “Are you sure? Such things certainly exist, depending on a man’s concern over how people see him.”

  “What could be that bad, Henry?”

  The reporter clucks his tongue. “Let me tell you something my source said today. First, he inadvertently let slip that Viola had witnessed the torture of her brother and Luther Davis. When I asked why on earth the Eagles would have let her live after that, guess what he told me.”

  “No idea.”

  “‘If it hadn’t been for Ray Presley and Dr. Tom Cage, she wouldn’t have lived.’”

  A chill of presentiment races along my back and shoulders, and I can see Henry knows I know the significance of Presley’s name.

  “Ray was the dirtiest cop who ever set foot in Natchez,” he says, “and maybe even New Orleans. I know from your book that Presley was up to his neck in the Del Payton murder. And from oth
er sources, I’ve gathered that Presley had a long-standing relationship with your father, which has always puzzled me. I can’t imagine what that was based on.”

  My thoughts and memories swirl without coherence. Ray Presley was one of the worst human beings I’ve ever known, and I’ve met some deeply disturbed men in my career. Presley not only disgraced his badge and murdered men for money; he also raped my high school sweetheart, something I didn’t discover until almost twenty years after the fact.

  “Henry … I can’t give you details, but when I was a kid, a woman in our family was in real danger. This was in another state, and the police refused to help. In fact, they were part of the problem. In desperation, Dad turned to Ray Presley. Ray took care of the problem, but as you might guess, he went outside the law to do it. And he held that over my father’s head until his own death.”

  Henry thinks for a moment. “I see. Well … if your dad got Ray to help him in that case, then I guess he could have turned to Presley when Viola was in trouble. There’s no way Ray would have intervened to save Viola on his own hook.”

  “Would my dad really have gone that far to save Viola?”

  “She was his nurse for five years.”

  I give Henry a searching look. “And maybe more than that?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you’ve been thinking it. I have, too, ever since this morning.”

  Henry sighs and taps the shining metal face of the National. “Was Dr. Cage the straying kind?”

  “Not that I know of. But God knows every man’s capable of it, if the right temptation comes along.”

  “Granted. But even if he and Viola were lovers, I don’t see how it would alter cases. I think your father cared about Viola and wanted to protect her, whether he’d slept with her or not.”

  I can no longer keep my darkest fear buried in my brain. “It might alter cases quite a bit if it turns out that Dad fathered Viola’s child. That Lincoln Turner is his son. That might be a secret worth going to prison to keep hidden. In my father’s mind, anyway.”

  Henry sits as still as a stone Buddha, watching me cautiously. “Maybe,” he concedes finally. “But I’ve already gone down that road, and I don’t believe it. I do believe Lincoln Turner is the son of a white man—but not your father. I checked Lincoln’s age, and he was surely conceived around the time Viola left Natchez.”

  I’m actually trembling. “And?”

  “I staked out Shad Johnson’s office for a while this afternoon, and I got a good look at the man himself. Lincoln, I mean.”

  “Lincoln was at Shad’s office again?”

  “Yes. And he’s a very dark-skinned fellow. About three times as dark as Shad Johnson, I’d say, and twice as dark as his mother. Your father is Scots-English, a very light-skinned man.”

  “Is that scientific proof?”

  Henry looks at the floor, then seems to take some silent decision. “I want to show you something, Penn.” He looks up, his face vulnerable. “But before I do, I need one promise. I’ve worked too long and too hard on these cases to hand it all over to other people now.”

  “I know you have, Henry. Nothing you tell me will leave this building. And I expect the same discretion from you.”

  “That’s good enough for me.” Setting down the guitar and taking a set of keys from his desk drawer, he leads me down a narrow hallway to a metal door at the back of the building. He opens two locks, then pushes the door open with a screech and flips on a fluorescent light.

  Following him inside, I find a ten-by-twelve room whose walls are plastered with maps, photographs, a bulletin board, a whiteboard, and pushpins connecting various names, photos, and locations on the walls. Three worktables form a U with its open end facing the door, and the lower half of each wall seems to be braced with banker’s boxes spilling files. The room instantly hurls me back to the days when I was prosecuting capital murder cases in Houston. Our workrooms were larger than this, but the atmosphere was the same.

  “The nerve center of your investigations?”

  “Yep. Almost totally analog, I’m embarrassed to say.”

  “Nothing wrong with analog, buddy.”

  “An intern I had from Syracuse called this my war room. I call it the cooler, because it holds the cold cases from the last forty years. I’m working twelve unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and those are just the ones I’m sure were murder. The FBI would kill to see inside this room.”

  The first thing that really catches my eye is a poster advertising a Ku Klux Klan rally to be held at Liberty Park in Natchez, which was less than a mile from the house I grew up in.

  “As far as the paternity issue,” Henry says, “less than a week before Viola fled Natchez, she was gang-raped by several members of the Double Eagle group. I don’t know the etiquette of gang rape, but I’m guessing none of those bastards wore condoms. And if I had to guess who was there, I’d pick Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and the guy I interviewed this morning. I have pictures of all those men.”

  He takes my elbow and leads me to a rogues’ gallery tacked to the wall opposite us. “Here,” he says, tapping the black-and-white snaps with his right forefinger. “These four sterling citizens here. Tell me what you see.”

  My mind is too consumed by fear to make much of the faces. I see a blur of pale-skinned, hollow-eyed men of the kind you see in Civil War photographs. Except … one. One man is darker than his comrades—much darker—almost as though he has a deep tan or sunburn. But when I look closer, I see that the color is part of his biology, perhaps a sign of Creole or even Indian blood, like a Louisiana Redbone.

  “Who’s this?” I ask, touching the photo.

  “Walter Stillson ‘Sonny’ Thornfield. And in my opinion, Lincoln Turner’s father.”

  Despite the horror implied in this statement—for Viola, and for Lincoln, if he knows the truth—I feel a flood of relief. “Do you think Lincoln knows about his mother’s rape?”

  “I hope not. But even if he does, what bastard child doesn’t pray that he’s the son of the lord of the manor, and not a lowly peasant?”

  “So Lincoln may believe that my father is his father, even if he’s not.”

  “Yes. And that would certainly explain his level of anger, given the situation. I doubt any African-American mother would want to tell her son that he was fathered by a white-trash ex-Klansman who’d raped her. Much less, one of many. Especially since Viola got married soon after she arrived in Chicago—in the time-honored tradition of so many girls ‘in trouble’ during that era. Viola probably told Lincoln he was the son of her husband. At least for most of his life.”

  I remember my dad telling me about Viola marrying a con man in Chicago. “Well, somebody needs to tell Lincoln the truth, before he pushes this thing any further.”

  “Shad Johnson is the man pushing the murder investigation. Lincoln is just his excuse. It’s no secret Shad hates you, and your father has given him a golden opportunity for revenge.”

  Without warning, my view of the entire case makes a tectonic shift. “Holy Christ, Henry. Shad thinks Lincoln is my father’s son. If Lincoln told him that, Shad might easily believe Dad would kill Viola to keep it secret.”

  This realization stops Henry cold. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I’ve got to talk to Shad.”

  Henry holds up a warning hand. “Think hard before you do that. Come back over here and let me show you something.”

  He leads me back around the table to the poster advertising the Ku Klux Klan rally near my childhood home.

  “That was the biggest Klan rally ever held in the South,” he informs me. “Thirty-seven hundred people attended—men, women, and children.” He turns to his worktable, fishes through a stack of photographs, chooses two, and steps back toward me. “I was looking at these before I called you.”

  The photo on top is in color. It shows my father, aged about thirty-five, standing in front of a single-engine airplane in bright sunligh
t with a man a little older than he. Both men sport the long sideburns fashionable in the seventies.

  “Who’s that?” I ask. “He looks familiar.”

  “Dr. Leland Robb. He treated Albert Norris for the four days that he lay dying from his burns in 1964. He and your father were friends.”

  “I don’t really remember him.”

  “You were only nine years old when he died in a midair collision a few miles from here.”

  “Wait a minute! I remember that. I went out on a couple of dates with the daughter of the pilot who died in that crash. She never really got over that.”

  Henry nods soberly. “I’m not surprised. I believe Dr. Robb was murdered, Penn.”

  “What?”

  “Bear with me.” He slides the photo under the one beneath it. The second shot is black-and-white, and as soon as I comprehend what I’m seeing, the hair on my neck stands up. A rush of scents and images fills my brain: the smell of horses and barbecue and burning kerosene; clouds of pink cotton candy; wild-eyed men standing in the beds of pickup trucks, yelling about God’s wrath while women sell embroidered sheets from card tables nearby. In this photograph, my father is standing amid some Ku Klux Klansmen wearing white robes and hoods. Dad’s wearing street clothes, as is another man beside him, but everyone else in the photo, except the children, is dressed in full Klan regalia.

  “Where was this taken?” I whisper.

  “At the Klan rally advertised on that poster. Or just outside it. July 1965. This was shot by an FBI agent. Do you recognize anyone in the picture besides your father?”

  “The man standing with Dad looks like … holy shit. Ray Presley.”

  After an awkward silence, Henry says, “Ray was never in the Klan. He kept his hand in everything, though. This could have been a chance meeting.”

  “Who’s the Klansman talking to Dad?”

  “Frank Knox,” Henry says evenly. “The founder of the Double Eagle group.”

  My face feels numb. “Goddamn it, Henry. What is this?”

  “Frank Knox was a patient of your father’s. All the Double Eagles were.”

  “They must have worked at Armstrong Tire or Triton Battery.”