Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  “You’re a disgrace to this office. That’s what you are.”

  But Shad has regained his unruffled mien. “I know it’s a shock to find out that we’re back on a level playing field, but that’s politics, isn’t it? Change is the only constant.”

  Byrd snickers, then says, “Your daddy shoulda wore a rubber when he screwed that hot chocolate back in the day.”

  A white-hot flash of anger almost causes me to whirl and hit him, but at the last second I compose myself and turn to leave. As I near the door, the sound of Byrd’s smug laughter stops me in my tracks. I turn back to him and speak with utter contempt.

  “You wife-beating son of a bitch. Jack Kilgard was right. Come the next election, you’re going to be looking for a job.”

  Byrd’s eyes glint in his pocked face. “Maybe. But either way, your daddy’s gonna be rotting on Parchman Farm. He’s gonna die there, with all the …” The sheriff searches for a word, then falls silent.

  “All the what, Billy? Go ahead and finish, so your partner can hear you. ‘With all the niggers he loves so much.’ That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it? Your mind’s like a neon sign, man. You fat fuck.”

  Byrd’s face twitches. Then he drops his right hand to the butt of the pistol in his belt.

  “No!” Shad cries, jumping up and interposing himself between us. “Penn, get the hell out of here!”

  Shaking with rage, I back slowly toward the door, my eyes on Shad. “What’s driving you, Shad? This asshole has to stop himself saying ‘nigger’ ten times a day, if he bothers at all, and you’ve climbed into bed with him!”

  Shad gives me his Mona Lisa smile. “Politics and bedfellows, my brother. Sometimes I’m amazed myself.”

  I stab my right forefinger at Billy, and though I say nothing, the subtext is clear to two Mississippi boys.

  In a voice laced with malice, he says, “You better pray your daddy’s bail ain’t revoked. And you’d better make sure he don’t break one condition of his bond. If he does, I’ll own his ass until the last day of trial. And I can make it mighty rough on a prisoner in my jail. Think about that tonight when you’re laid up with your dyke girlfriend, trying to get to sleep.”

  The prospect of my father in this man’s custody sends a shudder down my back, and Billy Byrd doesn’t miss it. He smiles like an arrogant prizefighter first sensing fear in his opponent.

  “Don’t forget your picture,” Shad says brightly, walking to his desk and retrieving the printout, which he holds out to me.

  “Keep it. Put it on your Wall of Respect, since you’re so proud of it.”

  My right hand tingles as I grasp the doorknob, and something makes me turn to the DA one last time. “Stop this while you can, Shad. Before it gets so big you can’t stop it.”

  Almost imperceptibly, the district attorney shakes his head.

  “Hubris, Shad. Remember the word?”

  Like a black Leonard Nimoy, he raises one chiding eyebrow. “That’s a question better asked of your father, I think. Don’t you?”

  CHAPTER 40

  BACK ON THE STREET, the full import of what happened in Shad Johnson’s office finally sinks in. For a few seconds I think I might actually vomit. I’ve been through many tense confrontations in my career, but not with my father’s life hanging in the balance.

  “This thing’s going to trial,” I murmur. “Christ.”

  Until a couple of minutes ago, I believed that the photo of Shad torturing that pit bull was my weapon of last resort, like Israel’s nuclear stockpile. Now I’ve opened my arsenal and found my plutonium replaced with baking powder. The realization that nothing can hinder Shad from going after my father with maximum intensity—from exploiting every sordid detail of this situation in the media—is almost paralyzing.

  “Afternoon, Mayor,” says a lawyer’s secretary, hurrying past, her coat wrapped tight against the wind.

  The temperature is dropping fast. To avoid further human interaction, I back into a recessed doorway and gaze at the wall of the sheriff’s office and jail, whose high slit-windows give it the look of a Stalinist prison. Huddling in the nook while people stride past, I try to get my bearings and make a plan.

  Nothing comes to me.

  Taking out my cell phone, I dial Quentin Avery’s house in Jefferson County. His cell phone rings eight times, and then a sterile female voice informs me that the AT&T customer I’ve called has not set up his voice mail. “Of course he hasn’t. He’s a fucking fossil.”

  Slowly it comes to me that in this town that once nurtured me—the town that, in theory, I rule—I have no power to alter the course of events. Mayor Penn Cage. What a joke. The title is meaningless. My Mississippi law license grants me more power than my political office. As I consider heading to the City Hall parking lot for my car, one of Billy Byrd’s growled taunts comes back to me with cutting power: Your daddy shoulda wore a rubber when he screwed that hot chocolate back in the day.

  Why do so many people seem ready to assume that my father and Viola were lovers? I’m almost certain that Shad painted this scenario for the grand jury this afternoon, and their true bill proves they believed it. Last night, even Caitlin told me I should assume that Dad had made love with Viola, given her beauty and the closeness of their work relationship.

  Am I the only fool involved in this mess?

  For the first time since Shad called me with the news of Viola’s death, I feel utterly directionless—a ship without a rudder. Stranger still, I feel a temporal dislocation that’s almost dizzying. Some passing pedestrians clutch Christmas packages in their hands, but that makes no sense. Caitlin and I were supposed to be married on Christmas Eve, which can’t be many days from now, yet the idea seems absurd. I don’t even have a firm grip on the year. The last definite event in my mind is Hurricane Katrina, which must have been … four months ago? Everything since seems a blur, with my father’s face at the center of it. Leaning out of the doorway, I blink against the chill wind, and whatever grip I still had on the present falls way.

  I am eight years old. My father has dropped me off at the hospital to visit a friend who broke both his legs in a motorcycle accident. Dad promises to return by 9:30 P.M., when visiting hours are over. If I’m late, he says, walk outside and wait under the light pole by the flower bed in front of the hospital. I do what I can to amuse my friend, who’s in constant agony from the traction cables attached to pins through his femurs, and I silently resolve never to get on a motorcycle. At nine thirty, the nurses tell me I have to go.

  As instructed, I take the elevator down and walk out into the humid night, then make my way down to the empty flower bed. An hour passes. Dad doesn’t come for me. I have no change for a pay phone. The hospital doors are locked. Standing under the humming streetlight, I watch the cars roar past; I’m fighting tears, afraid to do anything, until my father finally drives up sometime after eleven. He tells me he’s been on a house call (his all-purpose answer for every late arrival, one that is never questioned). For some reason, though, I don’t believe him this time. Something in his voice, or maybe his averted eyes, tells me that he’s lying. This realization terrifies me. From this moment forward, some part of me knows I cannot completely trust my father. I know only this: My mother would never have left me alone beside the highway with no idea where to go or what to do.

  As the years passed, no similar incident occurred, yet this one stayed with me. Something about that night opened the door to a darkness that less fortunate children lived with every day and night: the horror of abandonment. And now … thirty-seven years later, the terror of that night has returned with paralyzing intensity. Though all the years since have reinforced the belief that my father is the paragon of virtue everyone believes he is, my certainty about that deception remains clear. Why did he lie that night? Where had he been?

  “I was eight,” I murmur, rubbing my arms to stay warm. “That means it was 1968. Spring or summer of sixty-eight.”

  The year Viola Turner left Natch
ez, I realize. What month did she leave? April? Yes … soon after Martin Luther King was killed.

  My mind returns to the friend who broke his legs on the motorcycle. He lives on the West Coast now; I haven’t seen him for years. Surely he would remember when he was hurt, and how long he was in the hospital. That accident changed his life. But do I really need to call him? One thing I remember for sure: his stay in the hospital caused him to miss weeks of school. So it wasn’t summertime. Nor was it cold outside, while I waited for my dad. It had to be … spring. The spring of 1968.

  “Jesus,” I whisper, realizing what this might mean.

  Last night Dad denied the possibility that he could be Lincoln Turner’s father. I took this denial as an assertion that he’d never slept with Viola. But was it? He also told me that his only connection to Brody Royal had been incidental, and that the photo of them together had been a fluke.

  “What if he was lying?” I murmur. “And not just about Viola, but all of it? About Royal, Leland Robb … all of it?”

  The wind snatches away my words, but not before they open a chasm at my feet. I feel that if I take one step forward, I’ll tumble into a blackness that has no bottom. What now? Should I track down my father and try to shake the truth out of him? What would be the point? If he lied last night, he’ll only lie again today. I could question my mother, but that would only rip open a chasm at her feet, and force her to ponder the possibility that her life isn’t what she’s always believed it to be. I can hardly imagine a more painful or pointless course of action.

  As I stand frozen in the doorway, another voice rises in my mind. It’s not mine, or my father’s, or any other that I’ve heard in a long time. This voice is soft and feminine, yet filled with conviction. It belongs to my wife, Sarah, dead seven years now. She has spoken to me only in times of great travail, and then almost too softly to hear. But tonight her words come clear to me: If you want the truth … you know what to do.

  “I don’t,” I say to the empty street, wondering if I’m going mad.

  Do what you do best, she says.

  “What’s that?” I mutter.

  Solve the crime.

  AROUND THE BLOCK FROM Shad’s office, in the City Hall parking lot, I climb into my Audi and start the engine, my heart pounding from the run from Shad’s office. All the way around the block, my wife’s voice echoed like a mantra in my head: Solve the crime, solve the crime …

  The preliminary autopsy report Jewel Washington passed to me (in violation of the law) lies on the passenger seat beside me. I analyzed hundreds of such documents during my years as an assistant DA, but right now I can’t bring myself to wade through a pathologist’s report. That work is more suited to the deep of the night, when no interruptions will break my concentration. Besides, that report can only tell me so much. Without access to the crime scene evidence—all of it—I can only make deductions based on part of the picture, and that’s asking for trouble. Beyond this, all my instinct tells me that Viola’s murder won’t be solved by deconstructing the crime, Sherlock Holmes–style. In fact, I believe I already know who actually robbed Viola of her last few days of life. According to Henry Sexton, Glenn Morehouse believed that his Double Eagle comrades murdered Viola, to bury her knowledge about the murders of her brother and Luther Davis. But the murder of Jimmy Revels was actually ordered by Brody Royal, in an effort carry out the will of Carlos Marcello, who wanted Bobby Kennedy dead before he could be elected president. Though that plot was ultimately aborted—due to the accidental death of Frank Knox—Jimmy and Luther were killed and “disappeared” to obliterate all trace of the plan. How much could Viola have known about any of that? According to Morehouse, Viola was held prisoner in the machine shop where and while her brother and Luther were tortured, but by then the RFK hit had been canceled. Is it possible that Snake Knox and his buddies—knowing they were about to kill Jimmy, Luther, and Viola—spoke freely about Royal and Marcello’s planned operation in front of their prisoners?

  No. If they had, they’d never have let Viola live, no matter what my father promised them in return.

  As I ponder this paradox, I realize how little the Double Eagles interest me. Their motive for murder was one-dimensional. There’s no mystery in atavistic racism. But the Double Eagles almost never operated autonomously. Even before Frank Knox died, they took their cues from Brody Royal. It was Brody who wanted Pooky Wilson dead (for consorting with his daughter), and Brody who authorized killing Albert Norris. It was Brody Royal who lifted Frank Knox out of his drunken grief to try to lure Bobby Kennedy into Carlos Marcello’s sights, and Royal who ordered Snake Knox to make sure Dr. Leland Robb’s plane never reached its destination three years later.

  “Goddamn it,” I whisper. “Royal is the key.”

  The only real mystery in all this is my father’s stubborn silence. He hasn’t spoken one word about Viola’s death, and he’s flatly denied an intimate relationship with her. To my amazement, he seems as opaque as Brody Royal to me now. All my life, my father has seemed a model of virtue and humility, yet today a childhood memory returned to whisper that he’s also a liar. Caitlin spent most of last night and half of today researching Royal, yet she discovered nothing incriminating on the multimillionaire (who Henry insists is a homicidal monster). How can I resolve these contradictions? If Royal is the sadistic sociopath Henry Sexton believes he is, how could he have concealed it for so long? And if my father isn’t the medical version of Atticus Finch that we all believe him to be … then what is he?

  To answer these questions, I need the kind of source that Caitlin couldn’t access with all the power of her father’s media empire, that the police couldn’t match with all their informants and all the information petrifying in dusty file rooms across Mississippi and Louisiana. I need information that lives not on hard disks in remote servers, but in the soft tissue of aging human brains.

  And one brain in particular.

  Putting the Audi in gear, I back out of my parking space and pull into Commerce Street, driving almost in a trance. A few hours ago, Caitlin said something that’s resonated ever since: “There’s a secret history here …” That phrase always makes me think of Donna Tartt, the Mississippi-born writer, though that title originated with Procopius and his exposé of the crimes of the emperor Justinian. Every small town has its historia arcana, and in Natchez, our secret historian is a woman whom few people have seen in the past ten years. A fabled recluse, she lives with her three servants in one of the finest antebellum mansions in the city. Her name is Pythia Nolan—“Pithy” to her friends—and she’s probably one of the few Natchezians who could read Procopius in the original Attic Greek.

  Born into one of Natchez’s oldest families, Pithy was widowed in 1943, when her husband was shot down over the Pacific. She never remarried, but she lived a full and varied life, and as a result knows everything about anyone who matters in Mississippi over the age of forty, and most things about their offspring. I’ve used Pithy as a secret source for three of my novels, and her disguised anecdotes invariably delight or shock my readers, even those on the other side of the world. As per our agreement, her name has never appeared on my acknowledgments pages, a distinction that some locals point to with pride. Pithy operated by some personal code that I suspect made her an instrument of karma. Through what she revealed through me, she dispensed a sort of stealth justice, even if the only people who recognized themselves were those who had committed the sins for which she believed they should pay.

  About a year ago, to my dismay, Pithy stopped taking my phone calls. She claimed that I hadn’t sufficiently disguised information she’d given me for my last book. No amount of apology or obeisance has proved sufficient to reopen the gates of her famed mansion to me, but today I must risk rejection once more. For no one is more likely to know what secrets lie behind the public faces of Brody Royal and Tom Cage.

  Pithy is probably older than Royal, and while her wealth may not be as liquid, the widowed belle probably owns more
land than the Louisiana magnate. She was my father’s first patient when he moved to Natchez (as she never tires of reminding him), and Dad continues to make regular house calls at her mansion, though he’s almost as sick as she is. I say “almost” because Pithy is dying of emphysema. She coped well with the disease for some years, but over the past six months she’s deteriorated rapidly, or so Dad tells me.

  Dialing her number from the contacts list on my phone, I wait two rings; then a rich African-American voice, says, “Mrs. Nolan’s residence.”

  That voice belongs to Flora Adams, Pithy’s maid since 1956, and the daughter of her mother’s maid.

  “Flora, this is Penn Cage. I need to talk to Pithy, in person if you think she’ll see me. It’s very important.”

  “Mayor, if you’d called yesterday, you wouldn’t have stood a chance. But if talking to you can speed up Dr. Cage coming back out here, you’ve got a magic key to her sickroom.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m coming to see her about. Dad’s in trouble, and I think Pithy may be able to help get him out of it.”

  “Come on, then. Doc Cage was s’posed to see Miss Pithy today, but he didn’t show up. She’s about to die for one of his cortisone shots.”

  “I’ll be out front in five minutes.”

  “I’ll have Darius open the gate.”

  Flipping the S4 into Tiptronic mode, I roar down Homochitto Street and blow through the yellow light onto Lower Woodville Road, which blurs into background as I drive. How small and helpless Henry Sexton must have felt all these years, pursuing Brody Royal—a multimillionaire who counts senators, governors, judges, and business magnates among his close friends. A man who could with impunity order the murders of two federal witnesses and go on as though nothing had happened. If any man in this area is untouchable, it’s Brody Royal. Yet the despair I felt in the doorway outside Shad’s office has faded. If Shad told me the truth up in his office—if Dad’s bail won’t likely be revoked until Judge Elder returns next Monday—then I have six days to prove that someone else killed Viola, or at least to raise reasonable doubt. And if anyone can illuminate the hidden chapters of my town’s history, it’s the old woman dying in regal splendor in her cloistered mansion, the keeper of our collective secrets …