Zion

by Dayne Sherman

  She gathered her purse from the floor beside her chair and stood abruptly, staring the marshal in the face. She was tall and fine-looking, somewhat intimidating and intense. “If you don’t bring these men to justice, then I’ll go visit Judge Parnell myself. You do recall his family estate burned? His grandson was killed. Me and the judge have a long friendship going way back. Do you hear me, lard ass? Don’t dare underestimate me. I’ll help clean your clock come election time. We’ll get somebody else elected in your place,” she said, a look of scorn on her face.

  “Lady, to start with, there’s nothing to investigate here. And if there was, you’d be the first one I’d need to interrogate and throw into a jail cell. That and I’m planning to retire from this office next year, so I don’t give a dog’s damn about the judge and his old money. I don’t have to deal with rich politicians or squirrelly women like you anymore. So please don’t let the front door hit you in the rear end, Mrs. Claiborne. But do try to have a real nice day,” he said.

  The woman shook her head in anger and hurried past the secretary and toward the door, her heels clicking on the terrazzo floor as she walked.

  “Marshal,” Rita Lott said as Charity left the building, “I don’t believe she left here happy.”

  Brownlow looked at his secretary from his office door. He seemed quizzical, one side of his mouth almost grinning. “No ma’am, I don’t reckon she was happy at all.”

  The rest of the afternoon, Brownlow and Mrs. Lott looked through the Ninth Ward Marshal’s Office general file and junk room, hunting for anything on Sara Hardin and Sloan Parnell. It was late May, humid beyond words and scorching hot. The file room and storage, mildewing in the back of the marshal’s headquarters, had no air conditioner. After a half an hour of moving boxes of Christmas decorations, a tinfoil Christmas tree, as well as various ephemera, they found the box of files from 1964. The two of them were perspiring. The marshal sweated profusely, almost unnaturally. He looked like a Hereford bull in the summer sun. His back tortured him to such a degree that he felt faint.

  “Marshal Brownlow,” Mrs. Lott said, “you’re lucky I don’t cuss.” She wiped her forehead with a napkin, a line of sweat and dirt at her hairline.

  “Your dedication is always appreciated,” he told her. He looked at her blue blouse, which was dusty, almost gray with grime. “Put a dollar or two extra in your check to dry clean your clothes.”

  “I will,” she said, not offering the slightest thank-you.

  The marshal stayed after closing time. At five o’clock Mrs. Lott left for the day. His old notes were written with a black fountain pen, and they jogged his memory well enough. But despite this reunion with the past, there were no real leads in the file. Nothing new. Police work was less advanced in 1964, he reasoned. The coroner’s report on Sloan Parnell said his neck was broken at the third cervical vertebra. No other trauma was visible except for what appeared to be a laceration on his face from tree limbs in the cow pasture, and a compound fracture on his upper arm, the bone struck through the skin. No other noticeable damages were noted.

  No matter how hard he tried, he did not understand this woman, Charity LeBlanc Claiborne. Why dredge this up? Why now?

  In his many years in office, even as a deputy marshal before being elected the marshal himself, he had known that guilt could work on someone’s insides. Under the pressure, people might make guilt-induced confessions. However, he didn’t see in Charity’s eyes an inclination toward guilt. Sins of the flesh were a matter of course for her, but a visit to a lawman to recall tales was not the typical outgrowth of her nature, especially with the implication that other people had done the crimes, and she was the innocent trigger to all of the death and destruction. This woman seemed like a special case all to herself, and her set of motives were all her own.

  Before him were the old files, mere scraps. But he needed to make something of them, so he continued studying them like a worn copy of the Bible. It occurred to him that his whole career was made up of such scraps, and with these scraps he fashioned a life’s work. From his experience as a peace officer, few people ever gave the whole truth and nothing but the truth—at least if they were somehow connected to a breach of the law. Even honest people offered only partial truth at such times. Many folks lied to him out of general principle even when they had no dog in the fight. He came to realize that obstruction of justice was routine, a way of doing business in Baxter Parish and elsewhere. There was an old principle that he learned early in his work: If folks are talking to the police, they’re guilty of lying until proven innocent. Nine times out of ten, the principle was gospel true, he thought. It was a shame, but that was all he had to work with. He had to make sense of things and do his job despite the common deception.

  The marshal placed the files in his top left desk drawer, the spot where he kept a pint bottle of gin to knock the edge off the occasional stress of his work, diabetes be damned. He locked the building and left into the late evening sun, traveling toward his home a mile away. But he changed his mind and turned around near the driveway and headed toward the interstate to leave the south end of the parish. He drove north to Pickleyville, a Winston cigarette dangling from his fingers, his hand resting on the patrol car door, the smoke trailing out of the cracked window.

  Then he turned off I-55 and headed east on Highway 190 toward Pickleyville. He drove to the new shopping center where Radio Shack sat in one corner of the new Town and Gown Shopping Plaza. He parked in the asphalt lot. The marshal felt tired from digging in the storage room files, from heaving box after box of cases long closed. When he got out of the patrol car, he dropped a spent cigarette on the ground and smeared it flat with a boot heel.

  Across the lot he saw a blue pickup truck squeal its tires like it was on a racetrack, careening onto 190. He reached for the car door as if to pursue the truck, but he immediately relented, reminding himself that this was not his jurisdiction. The ward he was duly elected to serve was several miles to the south.

  Brownlow walked into the store to buy a cassette tape recorder. The electronics clerk said a particular machine was a good one, the premium grade, a portable recorder. Normally, he would have sent his deputy, Freddy Wentworth, or Mrs. Lott to buy the item, but today he decided to take care of it himself, and had come up with a strategy on his own for dealing with Charity Claiborne’s little challenge, and he wanted to keep his plans as quiet as possible. He needed to get folks on tape immediately.

  He paid for the tape recorder with petty cash, just under one hundred dollars. He thanked the cashier and walked out of the store with the box under his arm. He placed an unlit cigarette in his lips as he went to the patrol car.

  But the hot parking lot seemed even warmer now than when he was working in the storage room fighting file boxes. The sun was lower. He knew it couldn’t be any hotter. Yet it felt like the kind of heat that will trick the eye, as if the asphalt was molten at a distance, mirage-like, and sweat gathered in his hair and neck and around his collar all of a sudden. He noticed that his shirt at the armpits was soaked. He began to feel nauseated, his throat thick. A hard panic engulfed him. Air was difficult to take into his mouth. He wanted to vomit or fall to the ground. He began staggering and almost lost control of the cardboard box under his arm. He dropped the unlit cigarette from his mouth, which hit the asphalt. He lumbered a few more steps to the car and placed the box haltingly on the roof. He grasped the car’s warm steel with both palms.

  Brownlow tried to breathe. He released his hands from the roof and fished for the car keys in his pocket, opening the driver’s side door, the backseat, and put the box inside. After he opened the front door and pulled himself inside the cab, he felt even more ill. He sat down hard in the seat and leaned out of the open door to the ground, vomiting violently, a projectile. The second volley of vomit caused vessels to burst in his right eye.

  “I think this is a good day to pass on,” he said out loud.

  Instead of dying, he had the presence of mind to
drive himself over to Dr. Dan Danly’s office. The doctor was about to retire after a day seeing patients. He was locking the glass doors to his office when he saw the marshal turn into the lot in front of the building. The marshal looked half dead, and the physician checked him as he sat in the patrol car in the parking lot. He called for an ambulance with the marshal’s police radio, knowing that the man was in the early stages of cardiac arrest.

  Ten minutes later, a pair of medics placed Brownlow into the ambulance and put an oxygen mask on his face. They transported him to the Ninth Ward Hospital Emergency Room where he was treated by the doctor on staff, his world uprooted and sprung like a giant oak tree caught in a tornado, the entire landscape a dark pall.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  James Luke Cate’s hair was black except for some distinguished hi-lights of silver around the edges close to his ears. He lived with his third wife in Natchez, Mississippi, on South Pearl Street. The house, built in 1852, was called the Slocum Cottage. It was named after his wife’s maternal ancestors. Natchez was a city on the east side of the Mississippi River, a notorious river town with a seedy reputation, a sordid past that never seemed to die.

  He had been away from Baxter Parish for almost a decade, ever since he left his first wife Nelda in the spring of 1965. He fled the parish and had almost no contact with anyone from the area since his departure. At first, he lived in the capital city of Baton Rouge, where he worked for the state highway department headquarters. He moved in with a wealthy woman from Baton Rouge, or “the red stick” as it is translated into English from the French.

  The woman was only one of the reasons for his departure from Nelda, and it didn’t take long for him to marry again. His second wife caught him with another woman from Natchez, and she divorced him, too. But not before he could steal an ample amount of her money. He took the money with him to Natchez and his new job as a civilian manager with the Army Corps of Engineers, working on the levees on the Mississippi River floodplain. His ex-wife’s assets left him a solid business stake, and his profitable holdings grew rapidly.

  In Natchez, he continued his love affair with the old money divorcee, Heloise Tartt. They married following a torrid romance. Her money did nothing less than compound his power and influence. His background in the military and years with the Louisiana highway department, followed by the job in the Army Corps of Engineers in Baton Rouge, not to mention his wife’s father, a scion of Natchez and the South, played heavily into his rapid advancement in the Vicksburg District of the Army Corps. His father-in-law lived in a mansion overlooking the river and was a banker, the son and grandson of Natchez and Vicksburg bankers. The family was prominent even before the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, a time when townspeople ate dogs, cats, and even rats to stay alive.

  Today, James Luke was fishing in the brown silt-filled Mississippi River, the water the color of worn saddle leather. He stood on the bow of the fiberglass boat and cast his lure into a bramble of treetops on the edge of the bluff. He’d caught three small bass and tossed each one back into the water, none of them worth keeping.

  He cast the stiff rod with a hard flick of his wrist, and the line lobbed out into the water about fifty feet. On the end of the line was a spinner bait with stainless steel hooks as sharp as a new razor. The bait fell into the bramble. He thought he’d gotten his lure stuck on a limb, so he began to troll over to the half-submerged treetop using his battery-powered electric motor. He jerked the rod a few more times. He felt the lure give way, and he started cranking the pricey Abu Garcia reel, the fastest model for sale at Downtown Natchez Sporting Goods.

  The line went as taut as a steel guitar string, and the rod bent. The fish took the line back toward the bramble. James Luke set the hook with a mighty jerk of the pole, and he was able to fight the big fish, pulling him from the bramble with his arms stressing the pole’s strength. He tugged on the rod with the bull bass on the other end of the line, fighting it, and twice the fish broke the water’s surface as if to spit the bait and treble hooks into James Luke’s eyes. But the barbed hooks held and the gear was strong and the line was kept tight through his determination and unfailing luck. James Luke finally got the big bass to the edge of the boat after about five minutes, and he reached into the brown Mississippi River water and lifted the lunker with his thumb in his mouth, an index finger under the lower jaw.

  He gave a successful smile when he held the largemouth bass at eye-level. He removed the hook with a pair of needle-nose pliers and placed the big fish into an ice chest. It weighed more than five pounds, the biggest bass he’d caught in the Mississippi River, not a true monster, but a fine one.

  He opened a second chest, ice covering Budweiser cans, a dozen of them. He’d drink all of them by dark. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and he lit a cigarette and embraced his first beer of the morning.

  Just a few miles away, North Natchez was a hilly slum out of sight, out of mind, an area practically nonexistent to the gentry and middle classes, a community east of the river’s bluffs where the elites—with their mythic pretense of Mississippi history—wouldn’t have to view it. It was a forlorn landscape of abject poverty. Despite the civil rights movement, nothing much had changed there since Reconstruction. James Luke thrived because of the stringent inequality and contradiction of Natchez and the surrounding areas. No group or individual was equal to the gentry class, to which his wife’s mother was heir. However, James Luke was getting ahead faster than almost any other man in Natchez, a far more rapid ascent than an outsider was allowed to make.

  Across the river from Natchez were the small Louisiana farm towns of Vidalia and Ferriday. Ferriday was the loathsome home place of the piano player Jerry Lee Lewis and the preacher Jimmy Swaggart. Mickey Gilley, the country singer, was actually from Natchez, but he had his musical roots in Ferriday. All three were cousins and professional musicians. In 1974, only Jerry Lee Lewis was a household name, though his two cousins were gaining in notoriety. Lewis ran off with his thirteen-year-old cousin and besmirched the disreputable town until he made it big banging on the piano and singing “Great Balls of Fire.”

  On both banks of the river, James Luke thrived. His father-in-law made the business go well, and his job with the Corps helped him peddle influence and grease the wheel for lucrative contracts, which gave him steady tax-free cash kickbacks. From concrete work to livestock grazing, there was money to be siphoned off the government and its business partners.

  He began making gains as a regional slumlord, buying up shotgun shacks in North Natchez and out in the country. These tarpaper and clapboard houses were mostly located in the black quarters. However, some were in white ghettos, and he’d started the first trailer park of any real size in North Natchez and filled it to capacity with hardly room to park a car between the mobile homes. These were hovels, tin shacks, most still on rubber tires, trailers with dented and gapped aluminum siding. He rented many of them from week to week—sometimes for cash, sometimes for drugs or stolen property, and sometimes for sex.

  The more money he made, the more he wanted. The more power he acquired, the more he sought. His father-in-law was impressed with his holdings and entrepreneurship, his innate friendship with capitalism. James Luke knew this by the way he carried on and on about his Louisiana son-in-law, bragging about his many acquisitions and profitable exploits.

  Recently, James Luke had become the freshman member of the board of directors of the Planter Class Bank in Natchez, the first non-native Mississippian to hold the post in anyone’s memory. He was also on the board of the Natchez Adams County Republican Party. In fact, the Party of Lincoln was rare in Natchez, but James Luke could see the future turning toward the GOP like a crystal ball, and he believed Mississippi whites were within a decade of going Republican en masse.

  He drove a 1973 Chevrolet Suburban four-wheel drive, a long-bodied truck that was can-like in its capacity, a panel truck that he used to carry workers who cut grass and did maintenance on his rental houses. Much of his
work in rentals was done while on the clock for the Army Corps. As a field supervisor with the Vicksburg District, James Luke had the freedom to come and go as he pleased, simply needing to tell the secretary that he was “in the field,” which could be anywhere in the large district. A low profile in the towns up and down the river was essential. When he wanted to do something truly nefarious, however, he had to be wary of onlookers and witnesses. He knew that in time his identity as a businessman and a Corps employee would cause public exposure. He was becoming more and more recognizable, and he knew it was a potential problem.

  During the afternoon following the fishing trip, once he’d put away his boat at his house, he drove across the big river bridge to a Louisiana duck hunting camp. It was a swampy area known only as “The Wash,” a lawless region of derelict Cajuns and poor blacks south of Vidalia that seemed stuck in some kind of historical malaise. The Wash was beginning to receive some of the South’s first shipments of cocaine, and James Luke was one of the chief financiers of its distribution along the Mississippi River. Likewise, he was setting up pot growers with seed and even lamps to raise it behind closed doors, such places as hay barns and homes and hot houses. One of his “associates,” as he often called the men he worked with in the drug trade, had put out over one thousand marijuana plants on a secluded Corps property across the river from Natchez. James Luke was just beginning his ascent as a drug lord, but he liked to think of himself as an entrepreneur and a business pioneer. He worked on the drug project like it was a full-time job, and he was getting ready to expand his business to other states.