Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  “No.” Henry takes a piece of paper from the table and hands it to me. It seems to be a real estate deed for a Metairie, Louisiana, motel, titled in the name MarYal Corporation. “MarYal?” I ask. “Marcello-Royal?”

  Henry smiles. “Their relationship dated back to Royal’s days as a bootlegger in St. Bernard Parish. Marcello was clawing his way to the top of the New Orleans underworld at that time, and he was tight with Royal’s old man. Once Brody struck it rich in oil, he got into quite a few real estate deals with Carlos. Marcello sometimes used the Double Eagles as muscle in Florida deals. And listen to this: three years before he founded the Double Eagles, Frank Knox worked as a combat arms instructor at a South Louisiana training camp for Cuban cadres going into the Bay of Pigs. Carlos was helping to fund that camp. Frank was officially listed on the JMWAVE, Operation Mongoose payroll.”

  “I wish I could say this sounds nuts, Henry. But it sounds all too familiar to an ex-prosecutor from Texas. So . . . Jimmy Revels was bait for Robert Kennedy. Obviously the RFK plan went ass-over-teakettle somehow. What went down?”

  “Carlos’s motive for killing Bobby wasn’t just business. Bobby had aggressively pursued the mob since the mid-fifties, at a time when J. Edgar Hoover said there was no organized crime in America. As attorney general for his brother, Bobby went into high gear. Even JFK thought he was a zealot.”

  Henry’s story is old news to me. “It’s no secret that the Mafia wanted Bobby Kennedy dead. Carlos Marcello was named by the House Select Committee on Assassinations as one of the men most likely to be involved in the conspiracy to assassinate JFK, along with Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana. Two witnesses verified that while Carlos wanted Bobby dead, he said, ‘If you cut off a dog’s tail, he’ll keep biting you, but if you cut off its head . . . no more.’ ”

  “You knew all that?” Henry asks. “I had to look it up.”

  “A steady parade of JFK crackpots visited my office in Houston. Finish your story.”

  “JFK was killed in November 1963. By sixty-four, Bobby was out on his ass. LBJ hated him. Bobby ran for senator in New York and won, no big deal. But in March of 1968, Eugene McCarthy entered a primary against LBJ and damn near won. There was blood in the water. Everybody knew Johnson was vulnerable because of Vietnam. Four days later, on March sixteenth, Bobby announced he was running for president. Can you imagine how Carlos Marcello reacted when he heard that?”

  “He probably shot a hole in his TV, Elvis-style.”

  Henry can barely contain his excitement. “Carlos vowed RFK would never be president. Then he talked to his old buddy Brody Royal. I can just hear the classic Sicilian line: Will someone take this stone from my shoe? According to my source, Marcello was thinking of a patsy setup, like with Oswald. But Frank Knox had been thinking about this kind of hit ever since he founded the Double Eagles. When Brody told Frank what Carlos wanted, Frank said instead of an individual patsy like Oswald, a collective one would work better. The Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, for example. The Ben Chester White case was a perfect setup for it. Those idiots had just chosen the wrong victim, a harmless handyman. Frank knew that if they killed the right black man, Bobby Kennedy would come back to Mississippi to make a campaign speech and commiserate with the widow. Bobby had just visited the Mississippi Delta on his poverty tour the year before.”

  This wakes me up. “What made Jimmy Revels the right black man? He was only about twenty-five, wasn’t he?”

  “Twenty-six.” Henry gives me a strange smile. “Listen to this. Even though Jimmy and Luther had been in hiding, from the day RFK announced his candidacy, those two had been crisscrossing the state, tirelessly persuading black Mississippi voters to register to vote. He used the chance of voting for John Kennedy’s brother as inspiration, and it was working. Mississippi blacks hadn’t forgotten Bobby holding those sick and starving Delta babies in his lap. Penn, one hour ago, an old NAACP officer informed me that in late March of sixty-eight—probably Monday the twenty-fifth—Bobby Kennedy placed a personal call to the Jackson headquarters of the NAACP and spoke to Jimmy Revels to thank him for his work. They talked for two and a half minutes.”

  This I believe. “Henry, when George Metcalfe survived that Klan bomb in 1965, Bobby Kennedy called the Jefferson Davis Hospital in Natchez to talk to Metcalfe personally. I know that because my father was his doctor, and he heard one side of the conversation.”

  Henry shakes his head in amazement. “And the hits just keep on comin’. By the way, that was no Klan bomb. The Double Eagles planted that bomb in Metcalfe’s car, and they weren’t even trying to kill him. They were trying to wound him and lure Martin Luther King down here.”

  It takes me a second to remember to breathe. “To assassinate him?”

  Henry nods, his eyes bright with excitement. “That was the template for the later attempt with Kennedy. Only King didn’t come here. If he had, he’d have died three years earlier than he did.”

  “Shit, Henry. Run the timeline on the RFK operation.”

  “It’s early sixty-eight. Jimmy and Luther brawl with the Eagles on February seventh. They go into hiding at Freewoods. Kennedy announces for president on March sixteenth. Jimmy and Luther start crisscrossing the state in secret, speaking to blacks in their homes and churches. Kennedy calls Jimmy to thank him on the twenty-fifth. When Frank Knox hears about this, he picks Jimmy as their victim. Viola is gang-raped the night of March twenty-sixth. The rumor starts to spread. Within twenty-four hours, Jimmy and Luther were seen in Natchez and Concordia Parish, cruising the parking lots of joints like Mildred’s and the Emerald Isle. This was a Wednesday night. That night they vanished for good—just like Pooky Wilson and Joe Louis Lewis before them.”

  “If the goal was to lure RFK to Mississippi,” I reason, “I’d expect some kind of semi-public atrocity, like a lynching or a bombing.”

  Henry nods, his face taut. “I think that was the plan. They were probably surprised to have gotten Jimmy and Luther so fast. I’ll bet Frank meant to hold them over the weekend, then kill them Sunday, so that the murders would make the network news on Monday. But fate dealt a joker out of the deck. The day after Jimmy and Luther disappeared was the day a pallet of batteries fell on Frank Knox. I think he was probably drunk when it happened. Jimmy and Luther were being held captive at a machine shop out in the county. Frank had only gone in to work to keep up appearances. Coworkers took him to your father’s office, and that’s where he died.”

  A tingling sensation runs along my forearms, then settles in my palms.

  Henry’s eyes radiate almost electric energy. “Instant karma, man. Frank Knox died while being treated by your father and Viola Turner—a woman he’d raped only two days earlier. What are the odds of that?”

  “A billion to one. Are you positive about this? Dad’s never mentioned any of it to me.”

  Henry’s ominous look returns. “Viola was your father’s trauma nurse. She always assisted him in his surgery. And get this: nobody can remember seeing Viola in Natchez after the day Frank died. They figured she split town with her brother and Luther, or else split after they were killed. Weeks later, Viola was found in Chicago, alone. Jimmy and Luther were never seen again.”

  “Where had she been in the meantime?”

  “Nobody knows. It was a blank spot in her life, and she refused to fill it during our interviews. The FBI worked Jimmy’s and Luther’s disappearances pretty hard, but on April fourth Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Then on May fourteenth—”

  “Del Payton was murdered with a truck bomb,” I finish. “And that consumed whatever local FBI resources were still in town.”

  “Exactly. What would become your most famous case thirty years later grabbed all the headlines. After that, Jimmy and Luther were virtually forgotten. No one found any bodies, and the Bureau only located Viola much later.”

  “What about the plan to lure Kennedy down here?”

  “I think Brody Royal scrapped it after Frank died. He didn’t trust S
nake to carry out an operation of that magnitude, or keep his mouth shut if he did. Brody ordered Snake to kill Jimmy, Luther, and Viola, and make sure their bodies would never be found, no matter how hard the FBI might search for them.”

  “Then how the hell did Viola survive?”

  “According to my Eagle source, Ray Presley and your father saved her.”

  My frustration is compounding every minute. “How the hell could they have done that?”

  “I don’t know. Remember the machine shop? Snake went nuts when his brother died. He started torturing those boys out of grief. At some point they kidnapped Viola again and brought her out there, and she was brutalized some more. I’m afraid even Jimmy might have been molested. But that was probably trivial compared to his ultimate fate.”

  “How the hell could Viola escape? You think Ray got her out?”

  “My source didn’t give me the details of that. We got cut off. And since Ray is dead, probably no one but your father and the Double Eagles know the answer.”

  I take another drink of bourbon, but I can hardly taste it. My mind is well and truly blown. “Two things I don’t understand. One, if all this happened the way you said, then Viola knew enough to send serious criminals to the gas chamber. Why would she keep her mouth shut, after they’d killed her brother? The Bureau had agents in Natchez in 1968. Why didn’t she talk to them?”

  Henry sighs. “That’s like asking why a Sioux squaw didn’t go the U.S. Cavalry for help in 1880, after white settlers had terrorized her and killed her family. Viola knew exactly what Snake Knox and his buddies were capable of, and she knew the FBI couldn’t protect her from them.”

  “They killed her brother, Henry. They gang-raped her. Do you really believe she would have kept quiet about that?”

  The reporter’s eyes smolder with an emotion I can’t quite read. “Maybe. By the time the Eagles found her in Chicago, she was pregnant. What if they threatened her child? Her brother was already dead. Would a mother risk her infant’s life to put her trust in white men who’d failed to convict the Klan in almost every single murder case in Mississippi up to that time?”

  Henry has a point. “But if the kid was a result of the gang rape?”

  The reporter shrugs. “We don’t know enough to guess, Penn. What’s your second objection?”

  “If Brody scrapped the RFK assassination plan, how did he square it with Marcello? Godfathers don’t generally take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  “My source didn’t tell me. Maybe Brody told him straight: ‘Without Frank Knox in charge, we can’t take the risk.’ But the timeline suggests another answer. Del Payton was blown up just weeks after Revels and Davis disappeared, right? What if I told you that Brody Royal and Judge Leo Marston were occasional business partners back in the sixties?”

  “I picture two rattlesnakes in a sack.” Leo Marston is the father of a woman I once thought I would marry. He now resides in Parchman Penitentiary.

  “Brody and Leo lived on opposite sides of the river, but they had greed in common. Brody was far wealthier than Marston, but Leo had more political clout. He also had the blood pedigree that Royal didn’t. Leo invested in quite a few Royal Oil wells, and he made some real money. I think they were pretty tight.”

  “Del Payton was murdered to intimidate black union members,” I think aloud. “You’re thinking Brody Royal had advance knowledge through Leo that a crime like that was about to happen? If he did, he could cancel the Revels hit and claim Del Payton had been killed to lure Kennedy down here.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And three weeks after Payton died, Sirhan Sirhan made the whole question moot. Any real chance of another Kennedy taking the White House died at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.”

  Henry looks pleased that his story led me to the same conclusion.

  “The Viola angle still doesn’t play,” I argue. “From what you’ve told me, Brody Royal is a monster. Even if Viola didn’t know about his involvement in all this, the Double Eagles did. If Viola was a threat to the Eagles, then she was a threat to Brody Royal through them. I can’t believe anything would have stopped Royal from killing her.”

  Henry taps the photo of my father in the boat with Brody Royal. “Which brings us right back here. Maybe your father pledged something in exchange for Viola’s life. Maybe he guaranteed her silence. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “I will,” I mutter, trying not to give rein to the anger I feel at Dad’s silence earlier today. “You said the FBI found Viola in Chicago?”

  “One agent questioned her. I’ve got his 302 in my files. According to him, Viola believed Jimmy and Luther had been murdered, but she offered no proof. The agent noted that she behaved like someone in shock, or perhaps even sedated by drugs. He also noted that she was pregnant.”

  I lean back and consider this. “Given all you’ve told me, it’s pretty hard to believe that Viola had the nerve to come back here, even to die.”

  “I think she knew she could trust your father to give her a painless death. To her, that was worth the risk of retaliation by the Eagles. It’s about as sad as anything I ever heard.”

  “But she didn’t get a painless death,” I point out. “And that’s how I know my father didn’t kill her. We’ve got to explain all this to Shad, Henry.”

  Henry’s skepticism is plain. “Without proof?”

  “We have to get him proof. A statement from your Double Eagle source. Did you tape any of the stuff he said today?”

  The reporter shakes his head. “I took good notes.”

  “Christ, man. You should have taped the bastard on the sly. That may have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

  “No. He wants to talk to me again.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as he can get his sister to leave the house again.”

  I stand and pace around the table, trying to control my anxiety. What I would give to be a prosecutor again, with subpoena power. A suffocating sense of foreboding has taken hold of me. “How careful were you today, Henry? Where did you interview this guy?”

  “At his sister’s home. He sent her out of town on an errand. It’s a pretty isolated place. He doesn’t think the Eagles are onto him, but they’ve clearly cut him out of the loop on sensitive stuff. I think it’s going to be fine, Penn. He—”

  A loud, old-fashioned ringing stops Henry in midsentence. He digs for an office phone buried under some loose papers. “That’s probably Sherry, my girlfriend. I’m way late getting home.” He lifts the black receiver to his ear. “Concordia Beacon . . . Oh, hey, Lou Ann.” Henry covers the mouthpiece with his hand and looks up at me. “It’s Mrs. Whittington, the lady you met when you came in.”

  My mind is ranging through all Henry told me, searching for moral pressure points that might induce my father to open up to me before tomorrow.

  “When?” Henry asks in a shocked voice. “Just now? . . . Who told you that?” He fishes a cell phone from his front pocket and checks its LCD. “I had my ringer off. Damn it!”

  I give the reporter an inquisitive look, but he turns away to concentrate on the conversation. “What do they think happened? . . . Okay, do me a favor and call Sherry back. Tell her I’m with a source and I’ll call her as soon as I can. . . . Thanks, Lou Ann. . . . I know. . . . I sure will. . . . You, too. Bye.”

  When he turns back to me, Henry looks five years older than he did only a minute ago. “That was about my Eagle source. Paramedics just brought him in to the Mercy Hospital emergency room. He was DOA.”

  A blast of neurochemicals blanks my mind. Where before I had anxious thoughts, only fear courses now. “Henry, Viola Turner and your secret source just died within twelve hours of each other. What do you think that says about your future?”

  The reporter blinks as though he doesn’t quite comprehend my point.

  “Do you have a gun here?” I ask.

  “A gun? No. I’ve never carried one.”

  “You’re working day and night
to send ex–Ku Klux Klansmen to Angola, and you don’t carry a gun? Angola is filled with pissed-off black convicts. Those old white men would kill almost anybody to stay out of there.”

  Henry shrugs, looking dazed. “My girlfriend carries a pistol, and my mother keeps a shotgun at her house. The PBS guys making the film about me think I’m nuts for not carrying a gun. Do you carry one?”

  “I’m licensed, but I don’t have one on me now. Not in the car, either.”

  A stubborn defiance creeps into the reporter’s eyes. “I promised myself when I started that I wasn’t going to change my way of living because of these lowlifes. The fact that I’ve pursued these cases without fear, publishing things as I go, living unafraid . . . that makes a statement. Even to scum like Snake Knox and Brody Royal. It says that I know what I’m doing is right, and what they did was wrong.”

  While Henry preaches, I move to the war room’s metal door and lock it. The Beacon stands on the very edge of town, across the road from an empty cotton field. “We need to get out of here. Does that phone still have a dial tone?”

  “The office phone?”

  “The landline! Check it.”

  Henry lifts the black phone from its hook and puts it to his ear, then nods with relief.

  “Dial 911 and ask for Sheriff Dennis.”

  The reporter looks uncomfortable. “Walker Dennis isn’t exactly a fan of mine.”

  “I’ll do the talking.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “SLOW DOWN, GODDAMN IT!” Snake ordered. “Ain’t nobody chasing us.”

  Sonny Thornfield eased off the gas as he approached the shore of Old River, where he maintained a fishing camp that almost no one in the world knew he owned. Though it stood only a few miles from where Glenn Morehouse had died, no one could find them here in ten years of searching.

  The clammy sweat of panic still soaked Sonny’s shirt, which made it miserable inside his coat. He and Snake had been only halfway to the tree line behind Wilma’s house when the ambulance came barreling up the gravel road, red lights flashing. Sonny worried that in the chaos of the death scene, Wilma might break down and tell the paramedics everything. Snake disagreed.