The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  In this place all things happened at once. Caitlin was as dead as the young GIs who had perished in the ambulance after running the Gauntlet south of Chosin Reservoir, and Tom was as responsible for one death as for the others. In truth, he was more responsible for what had happened to Caitlin, because if he had made different choices, he might have prevented that. The boys in the ambulance would have died anyway. Caitlin lingered in his mind because he had lied to her. The night she’d come to him at Quentin’s house, she’d asked him many questions. One was about the Kennedy assassination, and Tom had claimed he knew nothing.

  That was a lie.

  It hadn’t bothered him to tell it at the time, because he’d told himself he was doing it for Caitlin’s good, as he had so many other times on behalf of others. That was how it went with lies of omission: you could always rationalize staying silent when to speak would cause pain or injury. But now that Caitlin was dead, Tom would never be able to tell her the truth.

  Perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing, said a voice he knew too well.

  It was the voice of self-preservation. He had made friends with that voice over the decades. The last time he had resisted it was 1990, the year he’d last seen Carlos Marcello. Tom had nearly fainted when the Mafia boss summoned him. He’d had no direct contact with Marcello for at least twenty years and had not even treated any of his soldiers for a decade.

  The summons had been delivered by Ray Presley, of course, the former Natchez police detective who’d once worked as a New Orleans cop on the Marcello payroll. Ray had stopped by the office late one Friday, as he sometimes did, and told Tom that “the Little Man” wanted to see him at his Metairie home. So much time had passed since the bad old days that Tom had actually tried to beg off, but Presley had only laughed and said he would pick Tom up on Sunday morning.

  During the drive down to New Orleans, Ray explained that the don had not been doing well since his release from a Rochester, Minnesota, prison hospital the previous year. While in the maximum-security prison in Texarkana, Marcello had suffered a series of strokes, and “someone” had arranged for his BRILAB conviction to be overturned, allowing him to return home. Originally, many had assumed that the “strokes” were simply a scam to spring the don from prison, but Ray had heard that Marcello’s health was truly declining. Now Carlos himself had apparently asked to see the “jail doc” from the parish prison, and someone close to him had remembered the doctor from Natchez.

  Tom tried to hide his anxiety during the drive, but Ray Presley had the predator’s instinct for weakness, and he sensed Tom’s discomfiture. Over the years Tom had come to an uncomfortable truce with his conscience over his relationship with Marcello. In a perfect world, he would have had nothing to do with the Mafia kingpin. But when that kingpin provided the umbrella of protection that kept Viola Turner alive, Tom had little choice but to bow to his wishes.

  The hardest thing to grasp was how tiny turns of fate resulted in inextricably complex relationships. Tom had entered his externship at the Orleans Parish Prison with the dewy eyes of a schoolboy. Still only a medical student, he’d done his best every day, treating cops and criminals alike with equal courtesy. Tom had always been that way: he’d treat a black sharecropper just as he would have treated the Prince of Wales. But in the Orleans Parish Prison, his attitude marked him as different. His dedication was noticed by guards and cons alike, the difference being that cons—or the men behind them—came from a culture that believed strongly in rewarding good turns. It was this informal system, which in Louisiana had been a way of life for centuries, that resulted in Tom being sold a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Ford for three hundred dollars cash.

  A bookie named Cookie Pistolet had been serving a thirty-day stretch in the Orleans Parish Prison for beating his wife. Tom had been treating Cookie’s gout. Pistolet was apparently a man of some stature in the Marcello organization, because he received daily deliveries of food and liquor, not to mention a regular envelope filled with various papers and receipts, which he worked on far into the night—with police assistance when necessary. Tom had never seen anything like this, but it was the way of the world in New Orleans, so he turned a blind eye.

  Twenty days into Cookie’s sentence, the godfather himself had showed up to visit his subordinate. Marcello had apparently been suffering from a wracking cough that had prevented him from sleeping for nearly a month. His doctors had diagnosed bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics, but they hadn’t helped. When Cookie discovered this, he praised Tom to the skies and sent a guard in search of the “jail doctor.” Tom soon found himself being led before the real ruler of the State of Louisiana, where he was asked to “take a look at” the don’s chest.

  After examining the short but powerfully built Marcello, Tom had questioned the don about his symptoms. Half a dozen questions convinced Tom that the godfather was suffering an acid-reflux cough, a condition likely exacerbated by Marcello’s late-night consumption of acidic Italian-Creole cuisine. The don had brushed off Tom’s diagnosis as “old-women’s talk” and departed the prison. But one week later, a smiling stranger had shown up and handed Tom a set of keys to the prettiest 1957 Ford Fairlane he’d ever seen. Apparently Marcello had grown so frustrated at losing sleep to his cough that he’d tried Tom’s advice and avoided eating sauces and spices after 8 P.M. After five days of this discipline, the cough had subsided.

  Naturally, Marcello had wanted to thank the man who’d relieved his discomfort. Through the prison grapevine, Carlos discovered that Tom and Peggy had no working vehicle: their twelve-year-old truck had been sitting dead in front of their apartment for the past three months. The don’s answer to this problem was the Fairlane, which could be Tom’s for a little more than one-tenth of the sticker price. Tom had tried to resist the gift, but one older cop whom he trusted had advised him that refusing gifts from the godfather of New Orleans was the surest road to ill health that a man could take. So Tom had withdrawn most of his nest egg from savings, paid the three hundred dollars, and accepted a bill of sale from a grinning young Italian who was surely a Mafia foot soldier. Then he’d concocted a story for Peggy that his wife, thankfully, had never analyzed too closely. After all, her daily grind involved trudging through torrents of French Quarter rain to ride the ferry over to the West Bank to teach English to immigrant grade-school kids. The car literally transformed her life for the better.

  From this humble beginning had grown an unwanted relationship that ultimately provided Tom with the godlike power of saving Viola Turner’s life nine years later, when the worst Ku Klux Klan offshoot in the South wanted her dead. Carlos had been all too happy to accommodate the doctor who had cured his cough, especially when the favor was as trivial as safeguarding the life of a colored woman in Chicago. Of course, Carlos had not accommodated Tom gratis. Since he was doing a favor, he required a favor in return, and that favor turned out to be covert medical treatment for his men during any emergencies that might occur “in Tom’s neighborhood.” Tom had been in no position to refuse these terms. And both he and Carlos had lived up to their word for the next twenty-five years, though thankfully the burden had lessened for them both as time passed.

  But the connection had never been forgotten. That’s what had placed him in the passenger seat of Ray Presley’s truck in 1990 as it turned into a secluded section of Old Metairie, Louisiana, and then into the driveway of the white marble home of Carlos Marcello.

  Despite what Ray had told him, Tom expected to find an older version of the saturnine boss he had met back in 1959. But the don he viewed on that day was a man beset by Alzheimer’s disease and fast regressing toward infancy. Tom had no idea why he’d been summoned, unless someone in the family had decided to humor a casual whim of the old boss.

  Marcello’s disease, combined with the sequelae of several strokes, had left him unable to care for himself. A team of nurses tended him around the clock, and with more than thirty years of medical practice behind him, Tom knew that the deathwatch had
begun. He’d been as kind as he could be to the family, then made his exit as rapidly as possible. He never found out whether Marcello himself had requested his presence, and the question would vex him greatly. Because thirty seconds after he left the godfather’s sickroom, he realized that the shield that had protected Viola since 1968 would soon crumble into dust.

  As soon as he got back into Presley’s truck, he asked Ray what would happen when Carlos died. “Is it like a royal succession? Will his oldest son take over, or one of his brothers?”

  “Neither,” Ray said. “They’ve already lost most of what they had. Frank Carraci and Nick Karno have controlled the French Quarter for a while now. But Carlos always knew his brothers could never hold his empire together without him. So he made sure that when the time came, the family would be legit enough to make it without the old part of the business. And they are. They own more land than the goddamn Catholic Church, and they’ve got all kinds of other businesses. So Carlos is going to do something not many mob bosses get to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Die free in his bed. And his brothers are gonna do the same. His kids, too. See? He was always smarter than the other bosses.”

  Tom found no comfort in this. He’d hoped that the business would be passed down to a son or brother who would honor the don’s old commitments, including the protection of Viola Turner, but this was apparently not to be.

  “All the new players have been trying to carve pieces off the carcass. The Asians, the Jamaicans, the Russians . . . there’s always a free-for-all for a couple of years, till things settle out. Lots of blood, lots of payback.”

  Tom wanted to ask whether there might be any way to extend the protection of Viola, but he didn’t want to start Ray thinking about her. Because that would give the crooked cop leverage he might try to exploit in the future.

  A few miles passed in silence. All Tom wanted now was to get home as soon as possible, and home still lay nearly three hours up the Mississippi River.

  “It’s fuckin’ hard to believe,” Ray said suddenly, “you know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That lump of cauliflower we saw back there was about the most powerful boss who ever lived. To think he changed history like he did . . . changed the whole world. And now he ain’t no better than some gomer in a nursing home. Needs to be diapered like a damn baby.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tom asked.

  “What do you mean?” Ray asked.

  “You said he ‘changed the whole world.’”

  “What did you think I meant?” Ray asked, cutting his eyes at Tom. “I’m talking about Kennedy.”

  “Kennedy?” Tom asked. “What Kennedy?”

  “John Kennedy. Who else?”

  “What about him?”

  Presley drew back his head as if Tom were trying to play him. “Come on,” he said. “I know you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What the Little Man did back in ’63.”

  “I don’t know. Spit it out, Ray. What are you saying?”

  “Shit. Don’t give me that. I know you know.”

  “I don’t know anything. Why don’t you spell it out for me?”

  Presley snorted and drove another mile. Then he said, “Carlos killed Kennedy, Doc. You know that. Why’re you making me say it?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Am I fuckin’ serious? Sure he did.”

  “Carlos himself?” Tom asked incredulously.

  “Himself? That’s like asking if Patton kicked the Germans’ asses himself. ’Course not. Carlos didn’t kill anybody himself, not after about 1955, anyway. Unless he finished somebody off for the fun of it out at Churchill Farms.”

  “Then who did it?”

  “Shit,” Ray said, laughing uncomfortably. “I know you’re fucking with me now.”

  “The hell I am!” Tom said angrily.

  “Okay, then, okay. Play your games. I’ve said too much anyway. The Little Man ain’t dead yet, and he’s got damned big ears. Always has.”

  “Ray. Are you telling me you know who assassinated President Kennedy?”

  Presley turned to him then, peering deep into Tom’s eyes. “You know, too,” he said. “Unless you’re a lot dumber than I think you are.”

  Tom shook his head. “How could I know?”

  But Presley just looked straight down the highway. “If you want to know the answer to that, think about who you knew who had the balls, the brains, and the talent to kill a protected president. That’s gotta be a pretty short list.”

  Tom stared back at Ray for a long time, but he asked no more questions, nor did he think too hard along the lines Ray had suggested. Some deep part of him had already realized he might not want to know the answer.

  Two nights later, despite his best efforts to distract himself, Tom had come awake in the middle of the night with an image of Frank Knox in his head. Of all the men he knew—or had known—Frank was the one with “the balls, the brains, and the talent” required to kill a president. A few minutes later, Tom’s heart nearly seized in his chest when he remembered Knox asking a favor of him the first year that he’d joined Dr. Lucas’s Natchez practice. There’d been a story about a woman, a mistress threatening to ruin his marriage. Frank had told Tom he desperately needed to be excused from work for several days to calm the woman down. Tom might have balked at such a request from just any patient, but on more than one occasion Frank had mentioned training Cuban troops at a Marcello-owned camp in South Louisiana. Frank’s connection to the Little Man had been enough to tip the scale. Tom wasn’t sure about the exact dates, but an awful feeling in the pit of his stomach told him that the time frame would match John Kennedy’s rendezvous with death in Dallas.

  While Peggy snored, he’d put on his clothes, retrieved a flashlight, and climbed up to his attic to go through his old Triton Battery records. A steady current of fear ran through him as he breathed suffocating dust and flipped through yellowed files, but the thing he feared most he did not find. Frank Knox’s health file was not among his records.

  Tom didn’t sleep much after that night. He worried constantly about Viola in Chicago, and also about the favor he’d done for Frank back in ’63. He lost weight, hair, and his peace of mind. Peggy begged him to have one of his partners check his health, but Tom knew the source of his problem. What he didn’t know was what to do about it. Eventually, he crafted a request based on fabricated medical grounds, which he sent to the Triton Battery Corporation. Tom claimed to need information on Frank Knox’s medical history, in order to better treat one of his descendants. Though the Triton company had recently been sold, a clerk responded to Tom a month later, telling him that he’d been unable to locate Knox’s medical record. Tom initially felt relief, but then a second missive from the helpful clerk arrived, informing him that the bulk of Knox’s personnel file had been transferred to the FBI in 1965 and had never been returned to the company. The clerk forwarded a few photocopied sheets covering Frank’s employment from 1965 until his death in ’68, but this chronicle of suicidal alcoholism held no interest for Tom. The relevant year’s record was in the hands of the FBI, and this sent his paranoia into overdrive.

  The first Saturday after receiving this letter, he drove down to the clinic’s rented storeroom, rolled up his sleeves, and began tearing through every box of extant medical records. It took him six hours, but he finally found the answer he had both sought and feared. It waited in a bellied old box containing the medical records of deceased patients from 1968. There, in the file of Frank Knox, was a notation in Tom’s scrawled hand recording a visit by Frank on November 18, 1963, during which Tom had ordered Knox to stay home from work for five days. The medical reason: chronic hepatitis. Tom sat alone in the storeroom, his heart pounding, his blurred eyes skimming the final page of Knox’s file, where he’d recorded Frank’s “accidental” death by industrial mishap. As terrible as that lie had always seemed, it paled in comparison to the implication
of freeing Frank Knox from work during the week of the Kennedy assassination.

  Tom returned home that evening a changed man. He had satisfied his curiosity, but the price had been a piece of his soul. He told no one about his discovery. After all, Carlos Marcello was still alive, and the FBI already had its own copy of Frank Knox’s absentee record. Though Tom lived in constant dread of being contacted by the Bureau about Frank, he never was. And while he half expected to receive tragic news about Viola any day, he never did. Eventually, the demands of his practice and the passage of time drove his anxiety into the background, and three years passed before he was forced to confront his fears once more.

  On March 3, 1993, Carlos Marcello finally died.

  Naturally, the first Tom heard of it was when his nurse ushered Ray Presley into his office at the end of a workday. The rawboned former detective held a brown paper bag in his hands. In that bag was a bottle of expensive bourbon, which Ray took out, set on Tom’s desk, and said, “The king is dead. Long live the king.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tom asked.

  “The Little Man passed.”

  A cold shudder went through Tom: it was fear that Viola’s days were now numbered—possibly in single digits.

  Ray opened the bourbon and poured shots, and Tom drank three in a row. After Ray waxed poetic for a few minutes about the old days in New Orleans, he fell silent and looked into Tom’s eyes. Then he asked whether Tom was still confused about who’d killed JFK.

  Tom shook his head and said, “Frank, right?”

  “Good old Frank,” Ray confirmed, nodding.

  “So what happens now?” Tom asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . Frank’s been dead for a quarter century. Now Marcello’s dead. Kennedy’s been dead thirty years. Are you going to carry the secret to the grave? Or are you going to do something else with it?”

  Presley’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Like what?”