Natchez Burning

  “And you think burning the goddamn Beacon is going to help your cause?” Forrest asked. “That fire was like a Jumbotron screaming, This reporter’s on the right track! Brody, before that fire I had a direct digital line into Sexton’s computers. I saw everything that fool was going to publish, days before it appeared. You’ve destroyed all that. Worse, Randall’s rookie crew failed to finish Henry off. Now we have no way of knowing what he’s telling the FBI.”

  Royal lifted the glass of single malt whisky Claude had poured him earlier and drank it off neat. Then he spoke with an unnerving precision that silenced even Forrest Knox, his eyes never leaving Knox’s face.

  “You don’t know as much as you think you do, Lieutenant. For instance, are you aware that Sexton interviewed my daughter, Katy, at her home only one week ago?”

  Forrest blinked but said nothing.

  “He arranged the interview under false pretenses, then questioned her about that young nigger Wilson, and Albert Norris.”

  Forrest looked intrigued. “What did he ask her, exactly?”

  “Enough to upset her greatly. My daughter is fragile, Lieutenant. I’m not sure what she remembers about that period, but I do know that further questioning of that kind could dredge up information that none of us wants exposed.”

  Forrest nodded slowly. “I see. Well, I can pay you back for that tidbit. A week ago, some nigger showed up at the deathbed of Pooky Wilson’s mother. He knows all about what you and Daddy did back in sixty-four. In fact, he saw you and Daddy jump from Norris’s store window, and he saw Randall drive you away.”

  Claude felt his stomach tighten. This was the first he’d heard of such a potentially devastating witness.

  “Sexton’s been looking all over for him,” Forrest went on, “only he doesn’t know the man’s name. The mama died before he could get it out of her. But now that you’ve cut off my line into the Beacon, we won’t even know if Henry finds him.”

  “All the more reason to deal with the problem at its source!” Royal leaned over his desk, his face darkening with passion. “Do you remember being three years old, boy?”

  Forrest looked perplexed by this question.

  “I do,” Brody said. “It was 1927, and my mama was standing on tiptoe, holding me over her head while the floodwater rose up to her mouth, then her nose. My daddy was diving down to try to find an axe to hack through the roof. If he hadn’t found it, we’d all have died that day.”

  Claude Devereux knew this story well, but few others did. Claude also knew the full extent of his richest client’s ambitions. He wondered whether Brody was finally going to reveal his plans to Forrest Knox.

  “My daddy owned two stores,” Brody went on, speaking softly. “He sold bootleg whisky on the side, and he used the profits to buy land. We lived in St. Bernard Parish. In 1927, as the floodwater came downriver, the bankers who controlled New Orleans started to panic. In the end, they hijacked the government in Baton Rouge and extorted permission to dynamite the levee that protected our parish.” Brody nodded, his eyes focused on some faraway scene and time. “They dynamited for three straight days. Everything we had went underwater. When the water finally went down, months later, we’d been wiped out. The stores were gone, and three feet of mud covered the land.”

  Brody blinked once, which emphasized the stillness of his aquiline features. “Those bankers had promised full reparations before the dynamiting, but they lied. They left us in the mud to rot. Our total compensation, according to those bastards, was twelve dollars and fifty cents. Twelve-fifty for everything we owned. That’s when Daddy started bootlegging full-time. He got in with Carlos Marcello, and he never looked back. Along with Huey Long’s people, they put slot machines into every parish in this state. In the end, my daddy made back all his money and more. Far more. So did I. But every goddamned day, I thought about the bastards who’d done that to us. And ever since that day, I’ve worked to destroy them.”

  Forrest nodded but did not speak, obviously sensing that he would gain nothing by interrupting Brody. Claude also figured Knox knew that information was power, and knowing Brody’s deepest motives might well come in handy someday.

  “One of the highest and mightiest of those New Orleans bankers was originally from Natchez,” Brody said. “Twenty years after the flood, I married his daughter. She got me what money couldn’t: social position. Fifteen years after that, she climbed into the bathtub drunk, and I held her head under the water until she stopped breathing.”

  Claude nearly swallowed his tongue when he heard this admission. Forrest and Randall Regan kept poker faces, but Alphonse Ozan actually smiled. Brody pushed on like he didn’t give a damn who heard him. “By that time I was managing a lot of her daddy’s money. With the stroke of a pen, I cut him out of more than half of it the next day, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He wanted his daughter buried in New Orleans. I didn’t care where they put her, but I told him I wanted to take care of the funeral expenses.” Brody took another sip of scotch. “I sent him a check for twelve dollars and fifty cents.”

  No one in the room made a sound.

  “I’m a gambler,” Brody told Forrest. “But as a general rule, I only bet on sure things. I’m going to tell you about the biggest bet I ever made.”

  “What’s that?” asked Forrest.

  “Everybody’s always known that if a hurricane ever hit New Orleans head-on, the city would be wiped out. The whole damn town is nothing but a big bowl sitting below sea level—a bowl of filth waiting for a purging flood. Even the people who lived there knew it. But they just kept the party going, and pretended it would never happen. They formed levee boards, and the politicians swept the money under the table as fast as it came in. Everybody got their cut, even me. But I was laughing the whole time. Because I knew their luck couldn’t hold. I bought low-lying land and insured the hell out of whatever was on it. St. Bernard Parish, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, Navarre, Gentilly, even Gert Town. The city dodged Betsy, then Camille, and four or five other near misses over the years. But I kept buying. Tulane/Gravier, New Orleans East … because their luck had to run out someday. It was simple probability. The only question was, would I live to see it?” Brody smiled for the first time tonight, and his triumph was terrible to see. “Well, I have. At first I thought Katrina was going to be another close call. But then the corruption and the bad engineering and the laissez-faire bullshit tipped the balance. The levees broke, and God swept that city clean like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Brody laughed with deep satisfaction. “I can’t tell you how I felt watching that water rise on television. Every extra foot put millions more into my pocket. Three months ago I started getting my settlement checks, and it’s more money than you’ll ever see in your life. But that’s just lagniappe. The real payoff hasn’t even started yet! Because the old city’s gone now. The municipal whorehouse that all those decadent old Catholic hypocrites loved to call ‘the city that care forgot’ is dead, and rotting as we speak. A new city will rise in its place, and it’s going to be different.”

  Brody took another pull of scotch, his eyes glinting. “You know what killed New Orleans? Not the housing projects or the welfare niggers or even the flood. Those rich bankers did it, with their exclusive clubs and krewes and secret societies. Every time a major corporation moved in there, those arrogant bastards refused to let the officers into the circle. They thought their Gilded Age was going to go on forever. They strangled that city. They married among themselves and shut everybody else out, until all the money and business in the South went to Atlanta and Houston and Birmingham and Nashville. And now their idiot descendants sit down there, eating étouffée in their seersucker suits while their trust funds dribble down to nothing. Katrina was just the final shock. The purge. The future belongs to me.”

  To Claude Devereux’s surprise, Brody got to his feet and pointed at Forrest Knox with a steady hand. “I’ve been waiting fifty years for this day, boy. And if you think I’m going to let some bleedin
g-heart reporter screw it up, you need brain surgery. The sooner Henry Sexton and his files cease to exist, the better off we’ll all be. I make no apologies for my actions or Randall’s. I’ll do as I see fit, and you won’t say a word. Your job is to clean up the mess. Is that clear?”

  Forrest stiffened and started to speak, but before he could, Royal added, “I know how bad you want to take over the state police. And you know I can blackball you from that post with one phone call.”

  Forrest paled, but he held his tongue.

  “Now,” said Brody, taking his seat again, “I believe we’re finished.”

  Behind him, Randall Regan gestured toward the door.

  Instead of leaving, Forrest stepped forward and lifted a letter opener from the old man’s desk, then held it up in the light. The little knife had a dark leather handle and an ivory-colored blade, and Claude shuddered when he recognized it.

  “My daddy made this for you,” Forrest said. “He tanned the skin, just like he did the skins of those Japs on the islands back in forty-five. He carved this bone handle, too. He told me it came from that Wilson boy’s arm. The skin came from his cock.”

  Royal nodded, his expression curious but unafraid.

  Forrest dropped the letter opener on the green felt, then laid both hands on the desk and leaned so far over it that Royal must have felt his breath. “That nigger still fucked your daughter, Brody. What you did afterwards don’t mean nothing. You hear me? You weren’t paying attention when it mattered. Sitting behind a desk for forty years opening letters with a dickskin isn’t the proper training for dealing with me. I may not be quite as mean as my daddy was, but I’m smarter. That can be good or bad for you. Take your pick. But if you cross me again—if I have to come back here like this again—it’ll be the last time.”

  The old man’s head quivered with rage, but it was his son-in-law who stepped forward, reaching for the desk drawer that held Brody’s pistol.

  “And you,” Forrest said, pointing at Regan, who stopped cold. “If you don’t leave the operations side to the professionals, I’ll have Alphonse come back and make a trophy out of your dick—if there’s enough down there to work with.”

  Randall Regan’s face went scarlet, then white. He lunged for the gun drawer, but Forrest only turned on his heel and walked past his Redbone bodyguard, who had already drawn a pistol from his ankle holster.

  “Open casket or closed?” Ozan said, a smug grin on his lips. “You got a preference?”

  CHAPTER 58

  LESS THAN FIVE miles from Brody Royal’s lake house, Caitlin Masters stood outside the smoking ruin of the Concordia Beacon and watched a fire inspector work his way through the building with a high-powered flashlight. Jamie Lewis was sitting in his car, talking on the phone to one of their reporters back at the Examiner. She and Jamie had already interviewed every cop and fireman on the scene, and everyone agreed it was arson. Several firemen had reported the smell of tar, which none recalled having encountered in a long time, except at buildings with tarred roofs, which the Beacon had not had.

  While waiting for the fire crew to leave (so that she could search the building), Caitlin had been discreetly searching the area outside, particularly the ground near where Henry had been attacked. Now that Jamie was occupied in the car, she bent over the soot-covered parking lot and switched on her Palm Treo, using it as a flashlight. The glow of the screen was dim, but she didn’t want to risk using the penlight in her purse.

  After two or three minutes of searching, she was ready to give up. But just then, something glinted in the soot. Sweeping her gaze in a semicircle, and seeing no one nearby, she reached down and pulled up what appeared to be a small notebook. She brushed off the soot and saw that it was a Moleskine. The cover looked slightly charred, but inside it, between the cover and the first notebook page, she found two photographs. One showed four men in the stern of a fishing boat. The other showed Henry Sexton’s face. It had obviously been shot from a distance with a telephoto lens. Caitlin blinked and turned the photo toward the taillights of a nearby truck that had been left idling. Then she froze.

  Someone had superimposed a rifle scope over Henry’s face.

  Sliding that photo aside, she peered at the men in the fishing boat. After a few seconds, her pulse began to race. One of the men in the boat was Tom Cage. Another looked a lot like … Ray Presley. Had Caitlin not spent all day researching the names Penn gave her last night, she wouldn’t have recognized the other two men. But now she placed them as easily as she might have a schoolmate from years ago. The man who appeared to be talking in the photograph was a local attorney, Claude Devereux. The man who looked like Charlton Heston was Brody Royal.

  “Jamie!” she called, hurrying to the car and dropping into the passenger seat. “Get this thing in gear!”

  “I thought you wanted to search the place.”

  “I just did,” she said, slamming her door. “Get us back to the paper.”

  WEDNESDAY

  CHAPTER 59

  CAITLIN ROLLED OVER and shut off her phone alarm, then sat up on the side of the bed. The back of her head pounded dully, probably from too much or too little caffeine. Her body clock had been scrambled over the past two nights. The first edition of today’s Examiner lay on her bedside table, where she’d dropped it three hours ago, after driving home from the office to grab some sleep in her own bed. Atop the paper lay Henry Sexton’s charred Moleskine notebook, and beside that the shocking snapshots she’d discovered inside it. She still couldn’t believe the fishing boat photo. The idea that her future father-in-law had been a friend of Brody Royal during the 1960s seemed impossible. She hoped Henry had improved enough overnight for her to question him about the photos (if she could somehow circumvent his girlfriend). But where Henry’s notebook was concerned, the photos had been only been the tip of the iceberg.

  After skimming through the Moleskine on her way back to the Examiner, Caitlin had sequestered herself in her office and read deep into the night, growing more excited—and angrier—with every page she turned. The salvaged notebook contained Henry’s notes from his past four weeks’ work, including the interviews with Pooky Wilson’s mother and Glenn Morehouse, as well as a brief summary of his “war room” conversation with Penn. By the time she read the final entry, Caitlin had a much better idea of how much Penn had kept from her—not only Monday night, but all of last night as well—even after the attack on Henry, and finding out that the reporter had intended to come to work for her.

  Monday night, Penn had hinted at unspeakable crimes by telling her about the gang rape of Viola Turner. But Henry’s notebook revealed that Viola’s rape—like the murder of her brother—had merely been part of a larger scheme to lure Robert Kennedy to Natchez for a planned assassination. Glenn Morehouse’s description of the perverse murder of two female whistle-blowers from Royal Insurance had nauseated Caitlin, and left her shivering with anger. That was exactly the kind of story she lived for, and Penn knew it. The police and FBI had clearly failed in their duty to unravel the Royal Insurance scam and punish the killers. Why, then, hadn’t Penn given her the chance to start on that case last night? Granted, his promise to Henry had precluded him from telling her everything, at least on Monday night. But as soon as Lou Ann Whittington confirmed that Henry had meant to come work for Caitlin, Penn had lost any justification for keeping Henry’s work product from her.

  Reaching down to the floor, she fished a bottle of Advil from her purse and dry-swallowed two pills, then bit a NoDoz in half and tried to swallow one jagged, bitter fragment. It refused to go down. Grimacing, she grabbed what remained of last night’s Mountain Dew and washed down the pill. After the liquid settled in her stomach, she pushed herself up off the bed and padded into the bathroom, where she froze on the oval rug.

  A Clearblue Easy box sat like a silent reprimand on the counter beside the commode. She’d bought the test at Walgreens a week ago, and she’d been riding around with the thing in her car ever since. This morning,
as she pulled into her driveway, the box had fallen out of its bag, so she’d carried it inside with the intention of removing that bit of stress from her life before beginning what was bound to be an epic couple of weeks.

  With only mild apprehension, she peeled the cellophane wrapper off the testing stick, held the stick between her thighs, and forced herself to relax. After three seconds, she pulled the stick from her urine stream, set it on the counter, and turned the hot water knob in the shower. As she waited for the blessed heat to come down the pipe, she turned to the mirror, took in a deep breath, and raised her arms above her head for a forward fold. After holding that position for sixty seconds, she stepped back into plank position. When she reached the down dog position, she held that until she was sure three minutes had passed, then got to her feet and looked down at the testing stick on the counter. An unexpected tightness in her chest surprised her, but she shook it off, then picked up the stick and squinted at it. The word PREGNANT shone up at her in baby blue, like a mocking Hallmark card.

  “Of course,” she said. “A week before my wedding. Fuck.”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get pregnant—she did. But yesterday she’d postponed her wedding, which would make the timing of this pregnancy a lot more obvious to the curious busybodies that abounded in her adopted hometown. But there was more to it than this, if Caitlin was honest with herself.

  At thirty-five, she didn’t have a lot of time to burn before getting pregnant. Yet she wanted two or three years of married life before taking on the burden of caring for an infant. After all, she already had Annie in the picture. More disturbing still, the arrival of a child would mark the true end of her all-in approach to journalism. Last night she’d slept only three hours, and she might well be awake for another twenty-four, given what today might bring. A baby could cause the same kind of sleep deprivation, but any positive results of that would accrue to her child, not to her. Selfish thoughts, perhaps, but Caitlin saw no point in pretending she had more maternal instinct than she did. Given her druthers, she’d be overjoyed to deliver a four-year-old child who could be dealt with like an adult.