“You got something?” Sean says without preamble.
“Sean, I know him! Knew him, I mean.”
“Who?”
“Malik.”
“What?”
“Only his name wasn’t Malik then. It was Gentry. He was on the faculty at UMC in Jackson when I was there. He had hair then, but it’s the same guy. I couldn’t forget those eyes. He knew that professor I had the affair with. He actually hit on me a few times. I mean—”
“Okay, okay. You need to get—”
“I know. I’ll leave as soon as I can get out of here. I should be there in three hours.”
“Don’t wait for anything, Cat. The task force is going to want to talk to you bad.”
The calm I experienced in the pool has fled me. I can hardly keep a logical thought in my head. “Sean, what does this mean? How could this be?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to call John Kaiser. You call me when you get on the road. We’ll figure it out.”
Though I’m alone in the room, I nod thankfully. “I will. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye, babe. Hang tough. We’ll get this straight.”
I put down the phone and gather the sheets from the fax tray. There are three now. As I turn toward the study door, it suddenly opens as though of its own volition.
Towering in the doorway is my grandfather, Dr. William Kirkland, his angular face lined with care. His pale blue eyes survey me from head to toe, then take in the room.
“Hello, Catherine,” he says, his voice deep and precisely measured. “What are you doing in here?”
“I needed your fax machine, Grandpapa. I was just about to head back to New Orleans.”
A shorter man in his thirties peers around my grandfather’s broad frame. Billy Neal, the unpleasant driver Pearlie complained about. His eyes flick up and down my body, making private judgments that produce a smirk. Grandpapa gently but forcefully pushes his driver backward, then walks into the library and closes the door. He’s wearing a white linen jacket and a necktie. On the island he dresses like a laborer, but in town he is unfailingly formal.
“I’m sure you don’t want to leave before we’ve had a chance to visit,” he says.
“It’s pretty urgent. A murder case.”
He smiles knowingly. “If it was that urgent, you wouldn’t be in Natchez in the first place, would you? Unless someone was murdered here while I was gone?”
I shake my head.
“That’s a relief. Though I can think of a few locals I wouldn’t mind seeing hurried along to their final reward.” He walks to the sideboard. “Sit down, Catherine. What are you drinking?”
“Nothing.”
He raises a curious eyebrow.
“I really have to go.”
“Your mother told me you found some blood in your old bedroom.”
“That’s right. I found it by accident, but it’s definitely blood.”
He pours himself a neat Scotch. “Human?”
“I don’t know yet.” I glance longingly at the door.
Grandpapa removes his jacket, revealing a tailored dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Even at his advanced age, he has the corded forearms of a man who’s worked all his life with his hands. “But you’re assuming that it is.”
“Why do you say that? I never assume anything.”
“I say that because you look agitated.”
“It’s not the blood. It’s the murder case in New Orleans.”
He hangs his jacket on a rack in the corner. “Are you being completely truthful about that? I just spoke to your mother. I know how much the loss of your father hurt you, how it’s haunted you. Please sit down, Catherine. We should talk about your concerns.”
I look down at the faxed pages in my hands. The hypnotic eyes of Nathan Malik stare up at me, prodding me to leave for New Orleans. But then an image of glowing footprints comes into my mind—one tiny and bare, the other made by a boot. A work boot, maybe, or a hunting boot. The NOMURS killings have a claim on me, but I cannot leave Malmaison without knowing more about those footprints.
I take a deep breath and force myself to sit.
Chapter
11
My grandfather sits in a leather club chair and regards me with interest. He’s an imposing figure, and he knows it. William Kirkland looks the way people want their surgeons to look: confident, commanding, untroubled by doubt. Like he could operate ankle-deep in blood and only get calmer as the situation deteriorated. God endowed my grandfather with that magical combination of brains, brawn, and luck that no amount of poverty could hold in check, and his personal history is the stuff of legend.
Born into the hard-shell Baptist farmland of east Texas, he survived a car crash that killed his parents while they were traveling to his baptism. Taken in by his widowed grandfather, he grew into a boy who worked from “can see to can’t see” in the summers and in the winters managed to score so highly in school that he attracted the attention of his principal. After receiving a full athletic scholarship to Texas A&M, he lied about his age and enlisted in the marines at seventeen. Twelve weeks later, Private Kirkland was on his way to the Pacific islands, where he won a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts as he fought his bloody way toward Japan. He recovered from his wounds, then used the GI Bill to graduate from A&M, where he won a scholarship to Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. There, he met my grandmother, the demure princess of Tulane’s sister college, H. Sophie Newcomb.
A Presbyterian and a pauper, my grandfather was initially regarded with suspicion by the Catholic patriarch of the DeSalle family. But by sheer force of personality, he won over his future father-in-law and married Catherine Poitiers DeSalle without changing his religion. They had two daughters before he finished his medical training, yet still he managed to win top honors during his surgical residency. In 1956 he moved his young family to his wife’s hometown—Natchez—and joined the practice of a prominent local surgeon. The future seemed set in stone, which, as a believer in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, suited my grandfather just fine.
Then his wife’s father died. With no male heir to take over the DeSalle family’s extensive farming and business interests, my grandfather began to oversee those operations. He showed the same aptitude for business that he had for everything else, and before long he’d enlarged the family holdings by 30 percent. Surgery soon became almost a hobby, and he began to move in more rarefied business circles. Yet he never left his rural past behind. He can still split a fifth of cheap bourbon with a group of field hands without their guessing he’s the man who pays their wages. He runs the DeSalle empire—his family included—like a feudal lord, but without sons or grandsons to carry on his legacy, the weight of his frustrated dynastic ambitions has devolved onto me.
“Where have you been?” I ask, having endured all the silent scrutiny I can stand.
“Washington,” he replies. “Department of the Interior.”
The candid answer surprises me. “I thought that was a big secret.”
He sips judiciously from his Scotch. “To some people it is. But unlike your mother and her sister, you know how to keep a secret.”
I feel my cheeks flush. My status as my grandfather’s favorite has always been more of a burden than a blessing, and it frequently causes jealousy in my mother and aunt.
“I want to show you something, Catherine. Something no one else has seen outside Atlanta.”
He stands and goes to a large gun safe built into the wall, which he unlocks with precise twirls of the combination lock. I feel a great urgency to get to New Orleans, but if I want to find out anything about the night my father died, I’ll have to humor my grandfather for a few minutes. Grandpapa Kirkland doesn’t hand out anything for free, especially information. He’s a quid pro quo man. This for that, I recite, mentally translating the Latin he insisted I study in school.
As he works at something in the safe, I recall what Michael Wells said about how strong Grandpapa seems. Most men ag
e first in their shoulders and chests, their muscle mass waning as their middles thicken, the bones slowly becoming brittle like those of their wives. But my grandfather has somehow retained the shape of men twenty-five years his junior. He’s a member of that rare brotherhood that seems to age at half the rate of mortal men—epic figures like Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.
Instead of the priceless antique or musket I expect him to bring out of the gun safe, he produces a large architectural model. It looks like a hotel, with two grand wings framing a central section done in the Greek Revival style so common to the antebellum homes of Natchez.
“What’s that?” I ask, as he carries the model to a poker table in the corner.
“Maison DeSalle,” he says with pride.
“Maison DeSalle?” That’s the name of my mother’s interior design business. I walk over to the table. “That looks way too big to be a new building for Mom’s store.”
He chuckles with rich amusement. “You’re right. I just liked the name. This Maison DeSalle is a hotel and casino complex. A resort.”
“Why are we looking at it?”
Grandpapa sweeps his arm over the model like a railroad baron taking in a map of the continent. “Sixteen months from now, this will be standing in downtown Natchez, overlooking the Mississippi River.”
I blink in disbelief. By law, every Mississippi casino—even the Vegas-style palaces on the Gulf Coast—has to be built on some kind of floating platform. Natchez has its own riverboat casino permanently docked at the bottom of Silver Street. “How can that be? Doesn’t state law restrict gambling to casinos on water?”
He smiles slyly. Michael Wells was right: my grandfather knows something no one else does. “There’s a loophole in the law.”
“Which is…?”
“Indian gaming licenses.”
“You mean reservation gaming, like in Louisiana?”
“Louisiana and about twenty other states. We have one in Mississippi already, up at Philadelphia. Silver Star, it’s called.”
“But there’s no reservation in Natchez.”
Grandpapa’s smile becomes triumphant. “There soon will be.”
“But we don’t have any Native Americans here.”
“Who do you think gave this town its name, Catherine?”
“The Natchez Indians,” I snap. “But they were massacred by the French in 1730. Slaughtered down to the last infant.”
“Not true, my dear. Some escaped.” He runs his long fingers along the roof of one of the model’s wings, then caresses the casino’s central section. “I’ve spent the last four years tracking down their descendants and paying for DNA tests to prove their lineage. I think it would interest you. We’re using three-hundred-year-old teeth to get the baseline DNA.”
I’m too stunned to speak.
“Impressed?” he asks.
I shake my head in bewilderment. “Where did the survivors escape to?”
“Some vanished into the Louisiana swamps. Others went north to Arkansas. Some got as far as Florida. A few were sold into slavery in Haiti. The survivors mostly assimilated into other Indian tribes, but that doesn’t affect my venture. If the federal government certifies their descendants as an authentic Indian nation, every law that applies to the Cherokee or the Apache will apply to the descendants of the Natchez.”
“How many of these people are there?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven? Is that enough?”
He taps the model with finality. “Absolutely. Tribes have been certified with fewer members than that. You see, the fact that there are so few left isn’t the Indians’ fault. It’s the government’s.”
“The French government, in this case,” I say drily. “And by the way, they’re called Native Americans now.”
He snorts. “I don’t care what they call themselves. But I know what they mean to this town. Salvation.”
“That’s why you’re doing this? To save the town?”
“You know me well, Catherine. I’ll grant you, the cash flow from this operation could run twenty million a month. But no matter what you may think, that’s not my reason for doing this.”
I don’t want to listen to one of my grandfather’s righteous rationalizations for his ambition. “Twenty million a month? Where will the people come from? The gamblers, I mean. The nearest commercial airport is ninety miles away, and we still have no four-lane highway from it.”
“I’m buying the local airport.”
“What?”
He laughs. “Privatizing it, actually. I’ve already got a charter airline committed to coming here.”
“Why would the county let you do that?”
“I’ve promised to bring in ongoing commercial service.”
“It’s like Field of Dreams, isn’t it? You believe that if you build it, they will come.”
He fixes me with a pragmatist’s glare. “Yes, but this isn’t a dream of foolish sentimentality. People want glamour and stars, and I’ll give them that. The high rollers will fly into the cotton capital of the Old South on a Learjet and live Gone With the Wind for three days at a time. But that’s all window dressing. What they really come for is the age-old dream of getting something for nothing. Of walking in paupers and walking out kings.”
“That’s an empty dream. Because the house always wins in the end.”
Now his smile shows pure satisfaction. “You’re right. And this time we’re the house, my dear. But unlike that abomination floating under the bluff, which fleeces local citizens of their Social Security checks and sends the profits directly to Las Vegas, Maison DeSalle will keep its profits right here in Natchez. I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of this town. A state-of-the-art industrial park will be first. Then—”
“What about the Indians?” I ask bluntly.
The cool blue eyes lock onto mine, silently chastising me. Grandpapa has grown unused to interruptions in my absence. “I thought you said they were Native Americans now.”
“I thought you might answer my question.”
“Those eleven Indians will become some of the richest people in Mississippi. Naturally, I’ll receive fair compensation for spearheading the venture and laying out the initial capital.”
I see it now. My grandfather will be hailed as the savior of Natchez. Yet despite the stated nobility of his goal, I feel uneasy at the way he’s going about it. “Can anything go wrong at this point?”
“Oh, something can always go wrong. Every old soldier knows that. But my Washington contacts tell me that federal certification of the Natchez Nation should come within seven days.”
I walk away from the poker table, my eyes on a bottle of Absolut on the sideboard.
“Sure you don’t want a drink?” he asks.
I close my eyes. I’d hoped to wean myself off the Valium today, but I’m going to need one for the drive to New Orleans. “Positive.”
He takes a last look at his model, then carries it back to the gun safe. While his back is turned, I take a pill from my pocket and dry-swallow it. By the time my grandfather returns to his chair, the Valium is in my stomach.
“Tell me about the night my father died.”
Grandpapa’s eyelids seem to grow heavy. “I’ve told you that story at least a dozen times.”
“Humor me. Tell me once more.”
“You’re thinking about that blood you found.” He lifts his Scotch and takes another swallow. “It was late. I was reading here in the library. Your grandmother was upstairs with abdominal pain. Pearlie was with her. I heard a noise behind the house. A metallic sound. A prowler had knocked over a metal drum on the patio in the rose garden.”
“Did you see that happen?”
“Of course not. I found the drum when I went outside.”
“Were you armed?”
“Yes. I took a Smith and Wesson .38 out with me.”
“What was in the drum?”
“Pesticide for the roses. It was a heavy drum, so I figured a deer had got s
pooked while eating the roses and knocked it down.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
He shrugs. “I thought I could deal with it myself. Your father was standing outside your house. I thought he’d left for the island, but he’d been down in the barn, working on one of his sculptures. He’d heard something, too. Luke was holding the old Remington rifle he brought back from Vietnam.”
“The one that hung over our fireplace?”
“That’s right. The 700.”
“So he went into the slave quarters to get that?”
“Apparently so.”
“And then?”
“We separated. I went to look behind Pearlie’s house, while Luke circled around yours. I was on the far side of Pearlie’s house when I heard the shot. I raced around to the garden and found Luke lying dead. Shot in the chest.”
“Are you sure he was dead then? Did you check his pulse?”
“I spent a year in combat in the Pacific, Catherine. I know a gunshot death when I see it.” His voice has the kind of edge that closes further questions in that line.
“Did you see the prowler?”
“You know I did.”
“Please just tell me what you saw.”
“A man running through the trees toward Brookwood.”
“Did you chase him?”
“No. I ran into your house to make sure you and Gwen were all right.”
I try to picture this scene. “Were we?”
“Your mother was asleep, but you weren’t in your bed.”
“What did you do?”
He closes his eyes in recollection. “The telephone rang. It was Pearlie, calling from the main house. She and your grandmother were in a panic. She asked if you were all right. I said you were, but at that point I didn’t know.”
“Did you tell her to call the police?”
“She’d already called them.”
“What happened then?”