by Greg Iles
“You hadn’t committed any crime until you kept Presley’s confession from the police.”
“Listen, damn it! Ray must have seen how he upset me. Because twenty minutes after he walked out, he came back and handed me a zipper pouch. Inside it was a pistol I’d lent him about six months before, a forty-five.”
My heart slaps against my chest wall. “He killed Hillman with that pistol?”
“No. But he was always borrowing things from me back then. Guns, books, my Nikon for a stakeout, that kind of thing. You know I can’t say no to anybody. Anyhow, I’d lent him another pistol about a year before, a little featherweight thirty-eight. So, when he handed me the forty-five, I asked about the thirty-eight.” Dad takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “He told me it had been stolen.”
I close my eyes as though to shield myself from what is coming.
“He told me not to worry about it, that he’d get me another thirty-eight. But he was really telling me that reporting the murder wasn’t an option. He’d killed Hillman with my thirty-eight, and he still had the gun. If I tried to report him, he could tell the police that I’d asked him to commit the crime and had given him the gun to do it.”
“How soon did he start blackmailing you?”
“He didn’t mention it again for twenty-five years.”
“What?”
“He had no intention of blackmailing me, Penn. Ray Presley idolized me back then. Still does, I think. But last year he got prostate cancer, and he doesn’t have health insurance. He needed money, so he started getting it wherever he could. For all I know, he’s blackmailing ten other people besides me. The point is, he had me over a barrel. I couldn’t see any option but to pay him.”
“Why didn’t you call me when he first came to you?”
“Do you really have to ask? I was ashamed. Because of me, a man was murdered.”
“You had nothing to do with that! You didn’t solicit the thing, for God’s sake. You couldn’t know Presley would kill the guy.”
Dad dismisses this rationalization with a wave of his hand. “Do you remember Becket?”
“The movie or the historical archbishop?”
“The movie. After Becket makes his moral stand against King Henry, the king is alone in the palace with his nobles. These so-called nobles are a nasty bunch, greedy, violent, and drunk. And though King Henry loves Becket, he says out loud: ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ And of course they do. They go to Canterbury and murder him with swords.”
Sometimes I wish my father had less rigorous moral standards.
“Henry knew what he was saying, Penn. He knew the company he was in. And that made him guilty of murder. That’s why he submitted to the lashing by Becket’s monks.”
“You’re not a king. You couldn’t know what Presley would do.”
Dad is too wracked by guilt for me to get through to him. “I’ve spent years thinking about this. I didn’t know Presley would kill the man, but when he asked for the name, I knew he might do something. I’d treated his parents for free, and he felt indebted to me. He’d just gotten out of prison. From the moment I told Presley that name, Hillman was bound to get hurt, maybe killed. There’s no getting around that.”
I know what it has cost my father to admit this. He may even be right. But that’s not my primary concern at this point. “That’s not how the law would see it. Technically, your only crime was accessory after the fact. And the statute of limitations ran out on that in
1975.”
“What about the gun?”
“That’s another story. If Presley will lie to the D.A. and say you asked him to kill Hillman, and that you gave him the gun-and if he still has the gun-that adds up to capital murder. It puts you in line for what I’ve got to witness in two days. Lethal injection.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Why did you decide to tell me this today?”
“You want to find out who killed Del Payton. I know you do, and you’re right. Maybe you even have an obligation to do it. But the road to Payton’s killers runs right through Ray Presley, because he worked on the case. I knew you’d eventually go see him, and if you did, you’d probably find out about this. He might even hit you up for money. I wanted you to hear the truth from me.”
“The hell with Del Payton. There’s only one thing to do.”
“What?”
“Go to the D.A. before Presley can. Tomorrow morning we’re going to walk in there, tell the whole story, and demand that Presley be arrested for murder and extortion.”
Dad raises both hands like a supplicant. “I’ve thought of doing that a hundred times. But why should the D.A. believe me?”
I think of Austin Mackey, district attorney and former schoolmate of mine. Not my first choice for a sympathetic confessor, but we go back a lot of years. “The D.A. has a lot of discretion in a case like this. And it’s possible we could sting Presley. Wire you before meeting with him. Videotape a blackmail payment.”
“You’re underestimating Ray. Since he started this, he’s talked and acted as though we were partners from the beginning.”
“Damn.”
“Mackey would probably insist that you drop the Payton business, Penn.”
“I dropped it the second you told me about this. We don’t have any options. We’ve got to come clean, and Mackey’s the man we have to see.”
Dad seems to sag behind his desk. “If that’s what you think, I’m prepared to do it. It’ll be a relief, no matter what happens. But even if Mackey decided not to prosecute, wouldn’t I still be subject to prosecution in Alabama?”
He has a point. “Yes. Anywhere that an element of the crime took place. But I can get Mackey to talk to the Mobile D.A. for us.”
“Hillman’s brother still lives in Mobile. The cop. I checked two months ago.”
Wonderful. Even if Mackey does his best to convince the Mobile D.A. to lay off, my father’s life will be in the hands of the Alabama authorities. And that comes pretty close to unacceptable risk. That’s why Dad has not come forward before now.
“Presley has cancer,” I say, thinking aloud. “How long does he have to live?”
Dad shrugs. “His oncologist thought he’d be dead before now. But he’s still ambulatory. Ray is one tough son of a bitch. One of those I always say is too damn stubborn to die. He could live another year.”
“A year isn’t so long. We could keep paying him till he dies. Pay his medical bills.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing so far. It’s getting damned expensive.”
“How much have you paid him?”
“A hundred and sixteen thousand dollars to date.”
I shake my head, still unable to believe the situation. “Over how long?”
“Seven or eight months. But he wants more. He’s talking about needing to provide for his kids now.”
“That’s the way it is with blackmail. It never stops. There’s no guarantee it would stop with his death. He could give the gun to one of his kids. He could leave documentary evidence. A videotape, for example. A dying declaration. You know, ‘I’ve got cancer, and I’ve got something to get off my chest before I stand before my maker.’ That kind of thing is taken very seriously by the courts.”
My father has turned pale. “Good God.”
“That leaves us only one option.”
Something in my voice must have sounded more sinister than I intended, because Dad’s eyes are wide with shock. “You don’t mean kill him?”
“God, no. I just told you his death wasn’t necessarily a solution.”
Relief washes over his face.
“Everything depends on that gun.”
“What are you suggesting? That we steal it?”
“No. We buy it.”
Dad shakes his head. “Ray will never sell it.”
“Everybody has a price. And we know Presley needs money.”
“You just said it could be a meal ticket for his kids for years.”
A spark of hope has entered Dad’s eyes, but fear still masks it, dull and gray and alien to my image of him. “Buying evidence with intent to… to destroy it,” he says. “What kind of crime is that?”
“It’s a felony. Major-league.”
“You can’t do it, Penn.”
His hands are shaking. This thing has been eating at him every day for twenty-five years. Long before Presley’s blackmail began. God, how he must have sweated during the malpractice trial, worrying that Leo Marston would learn about Hillman’s murder from Presley, his paid lackey. I saw this situation a hundred times as a prosecutor. A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life. Seeing my father in this trap unnerves me. And yet, to get him out of it, I am contemplating committing a felony myself.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “We’ve got to take the high road.”
“Talk to Mackey?”
“Yes. But I want to feel him out first. I’ll call him tonight. Maybe stop by his house.”
“He won’t be home. There’s a party tonight, a fund-raiser for Wiley Warren.” Riley Warren-nickname “Wiley”-is the incumbent mayor. “Your mother and I were invited, but we weren’t going to go.”
“Mackey will be there?”
“He’s a big supporter of Warren’s. You’re invited, by the way.”
“By you?”
“No. By Don Perry, the surgeon hosting the party. He stopped me at the hospital after lunch and asked me to bring you along.”
“Why would he do that? Especially after the story in the paper?”
“Why do you think? It’s a fund-raising party, and he thinks you’re loaded.”
“That’s it, then. I’ll talk to Mackey there. If he sounds amenable, I’ll set up a formal meeting, and we’ll figure a way to sting Presley.”
Dad lays his hands on his desk to steady them. “I can’t believe it. After all this time… to finally do something about it.”
“We’ve got to do something about it. Life’s too short to live like this.”
He closes his eyes, then opens them and stands up. “I feel bad about the Paytons. I feel like we’re buying me out of trouble by burying the truth about Del.”
This is true enough. But weighed against my father’s freedom, Del Payton means nothing to me. Blood is a hell of a lot thicker than sympathy. “You can’t carry that around on your shoulders.”
“Back during the sixties,” he says, hanging his stethoscope on a coat rack, “I was tempted to ask some of those Northern college kids over to the house. Give them some decent food, a little encouragement. But I never did. I knew what the risks were, and I was afraid to take them.”
“You had a wife and two kids. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I don’t. But Del Payton had a wife and child too.”
“Mom told me you patched up two civil rights workers from Homewood after the doctor over there refused to do it. They were beaten half to death, she said.”
He looks disgusted. “I did take the Hippocratic oath, goddamn it.”
“I guess that Homewood doctor forgot it.”
Anger and shame fill his eyes. “It wasn’t enough. What I did was not enough.”
I stand and take my keys out of my pocket. “Nobody white did enough. Payton’s killers will pay sooner or later. It just won’t be me who makes them do it.”
Dad takes off his lab coat and hangs it on the rack. “If you don’t, Penn, I don’t think anybody else will.”
“So be it.”
CHAPTER 8
Dad and I are dressing for the Perry party-me in a sport jacket borrowed from his closet-when the phone rings beside his bed. He reaches for it without looking, the movement as automatic as scratching an itch.
“Dr. Cage,” he says, waiting for a description of symptoms or a plea for narcotics. His face goes slack, and he presses the phone against his undershirt. “It’s Shad Johnson.”
“Who’s that?”
“The black candidate for mayor.”
“What does he want?”
“You. Want me to say you’re not here?”
I reach for the receiver. “This is Penn Cage.”
“Well, well,” says a precise male voice in the middle register, a voice more white than black. “The prodigal son himself.”
I don’t know how to respond. Then a fragment of Dad’s thumbnail sketch of local politics comes to me: Shad Johnson moved home to Natchez from Chicago specifically to run for mayor. “I hear the same could be said of you, Mr. Johnson.”
He laughs. “Call me Shad.”
“How can I help you, Shad?”
“I’d like you to come see me for a few minutes. I’d come to you, but you might not want the neighbors thinking we’re any closer than we are. News travels fast in this town. Like those Payton women coming to see you this morning.”
A wave of heat rolls up the back of my neck. “I have no intention of getting involved in local politics, Mr. Johnson.”
“You got involved the second you talked to the newspaper about Del Payton.”
“Consider me uninvolved.”
“I’d like nothing better. But we still need to talk.”
“We’re talking now.”
“Face to face. I’m over at my campaign headquarters. You’re not afraid to come to the north side of town, are you?”
“No.” My father is straining hard to hear both sides of the conversation. “But I’ve got to be somewhere in an hour.”
“Not that fund-raiser for Wiley Warren, I hope?”
Shad Johnson obviously has the town wired. I’m about to beg off when he says, “You and your family are in danger.”
I fight the impulse to overreact. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
“Give me your address.”
“Martin Luther King Drive. It’s a storefront setup, in a little strip mall.”
“Where’s Martin Luther King Drive?”
“Pine Street,” Dad says, looking concerned.
“That old shopping center by the Brick House?” I ask, recalling a shadowy cinder-block bar I went to once with two black guys I spent a summer laying sewer pipe with.
“That’s right. But it’s not the Brick House anymore, just like it’s not Pine Street anymore. Times change, counselor. You on your way?”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
“What the hell did he want?” Dad asks, taking the phone from me and hanging it up.
“He said our family’s in danger.”
“What?”
I tie my tie and walk to the bedroom door. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. We’ll make the party in plenty of time.”
He gives me his trademark stern-father look. “You’d better take a pistol with you.”
The north side looks nicer than it did when I was a boy. Back then it was a warren of shotgun shacks and dilapidated houses separated by vacant lots and condemned buildings, their walls patched with tin or even cardboard. Juke clubs operated out of private houses surrounded by men drinking from paper bags, and paint-and-body shops sagged amid herds of junk cars, looking like sets for The Road Warrior. Now there are rows of well-kept houses, a sparkling video store, a state-of-the-art Texaco station, good streetlights, smooth roads.
I swing into the parking lot of the strip mall and scan the storefronts: a styling salon, a fish market,
an NAACP voter-registration center, a Sno-Cone stand thronged by black kids, and one newly painted front hung with a bright banner that reads, SHAD
JOHNSON-THE FUTURE IS NOW.
An open-air barbecue pit built from a sawn-in-half fifty-five-gallon drum smokes like a barn fire outside the NAACP center, sending the aroma of chicken and pork ribs into the air. A knot of middle-aged black men stands around the pit drinking Colt .45 from quart bottles. They fall silent and watch with sullen suspicion as I get out of the BMW and approach Johnson’s building. I nod to them and go inside.
A skinny young man wearing a three-piece suit that must be smothering him sits behind a metal desk, talking on a telephone. Behind the desk stands a wall-to-wall partition of whitewashed plywood with a closed door set in it. The young man looks up and motions me toward a battered church pew. I nod but remain standing, studying the partition, which is plastered with posters exhorting the public to vote for Shad Johnson. Half show him wearing a dark suit and sitting behind a large desk, a model of conservatism and rectitude; the other half show a much younger-looking Johnson sporting a Malcolm X-style goatee and handing out pamphlets to teenagers on an urban playground. It isn’t hard to guess which posters hang in which parts of town.
A voice rises over the partition. It has anger in it, but anger communicated with the perfect diction of a BBC news reader. As I try to get a fix on the words, the young assistant hangs up and disappears through the door. He returns almost instantly and signals me to follow him.
My first impression of Shad Johnson is of a man in motion. Before I can adequately focus on the figure sitting behind the desk, he is rising and coming around it, right hand extended. A few inches shorter than I, Johnson carries himself with the brash assurance of a personal-injury lawyer. He is light-skinned-not to a degree that would hurt him with the majority of black voters, but light enough that certain whites can reassure themselves about his achievements and aspirations by noting the presence of Caucasian blood. He shakes my hand with a natural politician’s grip, firm and confident and augmented by a megawatt of eye contact.
“I’m glad you came,” he says in a measured tenor. “Take a seat.”