Natchez Burning (32 page)

“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 sunlight 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.”

“They did. Recognize anybody else?”

I study the photo more closely. “Yeah … me.”

“What?”
Henry leans down over the photo.

I point to a little towheaded boy with a flattop, talking to two other kids. “That’s me, right there. Age five. And that kid is Jackie Steele. He pitched for my Dixie Youth baseball team a few years later. Dad took me to this rally when I was a kid. I didn’t realize it was this one until now. All I really remember is that the horses were wearing robes and hoods, like the people. They reminded me of the horses in
Ivanhoe
.”

“Why would he take you to that rally?”

“I think he wanted to show me history while it was happening, even if it was terrible. Do you believe there was more to it?”

Henry stands with his hands on his hips, looking like a man who just climbed out of a ditch after digging for twelve hours straight. “I don’t know, Penn. This is a rough group he’s talking to. But I’ll tell you this. These sons of bitches here”—he sweeps his hand to his right, taking in a row of photos on the wall that looks like a mug book of convicts culled from 1950s-vintage chain gangs—“they murdered the man who was more of a father to me than my own blood. They burned him alive. These same bastards would love to send your daddy to Parchman for killing an old woman that they did terrible things to—
terrible
things—and almost certainly killed last night.” He fixes me with a single-minded stare. “I mean to take them down, Penn. I mean to make them pay.” Henry’s jaw quivers from the force of his passion. “If it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’ll make them face their just punishment.”

“I believe you, Henry. Why are you showing me all this?”

The reporter wipes a tear from the corner of his eye. “If you stay to hear the rest, you’ll understand. I think I’ve been on my own too long. People are dying so fast … too fast. I don’t know who I can trust, or whose life I can justify putting in danger. These are some bad boys. There’s young ones involved, too. I called you because I know you’ve been in this kind of scrape before. You’ve got connections I don’t. You’ve fought the FBI before, and won. You can keep them off my back while I walk the last mile of this thing. But more than that, you’ve got a stake in this. One way or another, your father is involved in every important murder case I’ve been working these past years.”

“What?” I break in, another chill racing along my skin.

Henry nods soberly. “And Dr. Cage has consistently refused to let me interview him. Your daddy knows things about this time, Penn. Things he’s afraid to talk about. And I imagine some of them have to do with Viola.” Henry waves his hand around the room again, taking in the artifacts of a more troubled decade. “This is our legacy, brother. It’s not easy for me to do, but I’m asking for your help.”

I lay my hand on his shoulder and squeeze tight. “I’m with you, bud. Tell me what you know.”

SNAKE KNOX AND
Sonny Thornfield stood beneath a leafless oak, dripping cold water from a brief shower they’d endured with the grim silence of old soldiers. The pin oak stood beside a gravel drive that led to the house where Glenn Morehouse was dying. Sonny wore a camouflaged nylon shoulder pack slung across his chest. Snake’s hands were empty, but he had a pistol tucked in his waistband at the small of his back. They’d driven in from the dirt road back by the levee, then parked behind the trees and walked in, so that no one would see their truck. For twenty-five minutes they’d been waiting for a signal that had not come. The porch light of the solitary house should have gone dark long ago.

“What the hell?” Sonny whispered. “We’re gonna have dogs barking in a minute.”

“That’s why I brought my pistol,” Snake said.

“You fire that hogleg, they’ll hear it all the way to Frogmore.”

Sonny wondered what a passerby would think if he saw two white men in their seventies standing under a tree after an icy rain, not even smoking cigarettes. Of course, there were no passersby out here. Even if there were, he supposed nobody would think twice about two old men standing by the road. Once you passed seventy, no one really saw you unless you put yourself in their way. This rankled Snake, especially where women were concerned, but Sonny didn’t mind. He liked anonymity.

“You think the dumb slut forgot?” Snake asked, pointing toward the lone yellow porch light of the small ranch-style house.

“Not Wilma. Maybe Glenn won’t take his pill or something.”

Snake hiked up his jacket collar to dry his neck. “This is bullshit. Let’s just go in there and do it.”