The Quiet Game

by Greg Iles

  A few miles before I reach town, I call Sam Jacobs at work, tell him my family might be in danger, and ask for his help. Jacobs is thirty-eight years old, with a wife and two kids, but by the time I arrive at the Prentiss Motel, he is parked outside with a .357 Magnum sitting on the front seat of his Hummer. When I see that, I know I am looking at the Jewish boy who discovered the list of Klansmen and White Citizens’ Council members in his father’s attic with me twenty-five years ago.

  With Sam beside me, I inform the three remaining Argus security men that their services are no longer required. It’s an awkward moment, but they say little and leave the motel with expressionless faces. I’m tempted to tell them to pass a message to their boss when they get back to Houston—that he should look forward to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit—but I don’t want to do anything that might hurt Daniel Kelly in the future.

  My parents are stunned by my action, but as soon as I explain what Kelly told me, my father gets on the phone and speaks to two patients of his—avid hunters—and they promise to arrive within the hour, loaded for bear. Dad then makes my day by informing me that while I was in Crested Butte, he finally persuaded Betty Lou Beckham to take the witness stand tomorrow and tell the jury that she saw Ray Presley in the Triton Battery parking lot only seconds after Del Payton died.

  What we need now is a new place to stay, a secure location, and it’s my mother who solves this problem. When our house burned, a friend of Mom’s offered us rooms in her bed-and-breakfast, which occupies the slave quarters of her home, Aquitaine, a massive Greek Revival mansion completed in 1843. Not wanting to impose on her friend’s hospitality, Mom declined. But these are special circumstances, and the fall Pilgrimage has just ended, so our staying there won’t cost the chatelaine her peak season fees. One phone call secures us lodgings in the slave quarters of Aquitaine.

  Since the fire destroyed most of our things, moving from the motel to the mansion is relatively painless. The two-story slave quarters was sited across the ornamental gardens from the main house, which occupies most of a city block on the north side of town, near Stanton Hall. Once we’re settled in our rooms, I order out for pizza and spend the forty-minute wait playing with Annie in the garden. She dances around the rim of the central fountain like a gymnast, oblivious to the anxiety mounting in the adults as the hours tick down to tomorrow’s trial. That she does not pick up on our feelings shows me just how far she has come in her journey from the hypersensitive state that followed Sarah’s death.

  After devouring my share of pizza, I deal with the messages that came in while I was in Crested Butte. Althea Payton called several times, but the most persistent caller was Ike Ransom. Dad says Ike is desperate to talk to me, and that he sounded both angry and afraid during their conservations. I call Althea and give her an encouraging update, editing the violence into a less frightening picture. Nevertheless, she tells me that Del Jr. wants to help me any way he can, and that she’s going to send him over to “help keep the no-goods away” until the trial. In less than an hour, Del arrives carrying a sawed-off shotgun, and takes up a post on the balcony of the slave quarters, overlooking the street.

  Which leaves me Ike.

  I am not particularly anxious to talk to him after the way he acted at Ruby’s funeral. Whatever the source of his hatred for Leo Marston, it has pushed him into unstable territory. Ike clearly has both a drug and alcohol problem, and since he is unwilling or unable to provide me with any facts that will help prove Marston guilty of murder in a court of law, I see no urgent need to call him.

  I call Ray Presley instead. Dwight Stone’s revelation that Marston gave up Presley to the Feds as part of his deal with J. Edgar Hoover was music to my “lawyer’s ear.” Presley considers Leo Marston his friend, and loyalty is the supreme virtue to men of Presley’s ilk. But if Ray was to learn that the five years he spent in Parchman were courtesy of Leo Marston, his attitude toward the judge might change fast. But whether he will or not remains a mystery, because Presley doesn’t answer his phone.

  I am working up the courage to call Livy when the telephone rings in my room. Somehow Ike Ransom has discovered that we’ve moved to Aquitaine, and he wants to see me. He got my phone number from the main house. I start to beg off, but he stops me cold. He has, he says, what we’ve been looking for since day one. Hard evidence linking Leo Marston to Payton’s murder. He will say no more, and he refuses to come to the B&B. He insists on a face-to-face meeting and says I must come alone. When I ask why, he tells me that no one can know he is the source for what he’s about to tell me.

  “Where do you want to meet?” I ask, recalling the feeling of being shot at in the warehouse by the river and not liking it too much.

  “You’re three blocks away from it,” he replies.

  “Where are you talking about?”

  “The old pecan-shelling plant.”

  An image of a hulking brown brick building where I sold the pecans I collected as a boy comes into my mind. It is set right on the edge of the bluff, and as Ike said, it’s only three blocks west of where I am now.

  “What about the surveillance on me here?”

  “Slip out the back alley on foot. They lookin’ for that BMW. Or you could send your Jew buddy out first in the BMW, then come on in that Maxima your mama got.”

  It’s nearly dark, and I want to refuse, largely out of fear. But Ike is offering something of which I have precious little: hard evidence. Dwight Stone’s testimony could be powerful, but without his FBI files to back him up, it will be his word against Marston’s (and Portman’s too, if the FBI director decides to honor my subpoena). Hard evidence is worth a three-block trip.

  “When?” I ask.

  “Thirty minutes. The place is an equipment-storage yard now. Drive around to the left side of the building. The chain on the gate’ll be cut.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I hang up and speak to Sam Jacobs on the balcony, and Sam declares himself ready to draw off the surveillance long enough to get me clear of Aquitaine.

  The old pecan-shelling plant stands on prime real estate in Natchez’s old warehouse district, a sort of no-man’s-land between the town proper and a sleepy residential area filled with Victorian gems. It has an unobstructed view of the river, and one day will probably be the site of a luxury hotel. At the moment it is an eerily lighted compound surrounded by a high fence and razor wire, with the rigid arms of great cranes jutting against the night sky.

  As Ike promised, the chained gate on the left side of the building has been cut open. I nose the Maxima through it without getting out, and negotiate my way through backhoes, draglines, and D-9 bulldozers parked like Patton’s army marshaling for a campaign. I can’t see the river, but forty yards to my left, the bluff drops away to a vast dark sky, leaving the impression that I’m driving along the edge of a mountain.

  Out of the blackness to my right, a pink and blue light bar strobes like a carnival, then vanishes. I slow nearly to a stop, trying to place the location of Ike’s cruiser.

  There.

  I turn right and idle toward the main building. As the black silhouette looms over me, the lights flash again. In their light I see that Ike has opened the old truck door of the plant and is parked in it. As I approach, he starts his engine and pulls forward, leaving me plenty of room to pull inside the building. I park the Maxima beside his cruiser and shut off the engine. Kelly’s Browning is in the glove box, but I don’t want to cause any kind of reflex reaction in Ike, especially if he’s wired on speed.

  Ike is standing by my passenger door, between his car and mine. I get out and walk around the trunk of the Maxima, extending my hand to shake his.

  “What have you got, Ike?”

  He holds out his hand, but instead of shaking he grabs my wrist and jerks me to my knees on the concrete floor. As I try to look up, something slams into the top of my skull. The blow drives every thought out of my head, leaving only white noise. My first coherent perception is of something cold a
nd hard pressed against my hairline.

  “That’s a gun,” he says. “Don’t fucking move.”

  The terror generated by the gun barrel is absolute, paralyzing. If any muscle in my body is moving, it’s the sphincter of my bladder. “Ike? What the hell are you doing?”

  His breath is ragged above me, like a sick animal’s.

  “Ike?”

  “Where the fuck you been?” he shouts, and the reek of cheap whiskey rolls over me like steam. “Answer me, goddamn it!”

  “Ike, what’s wrong? Let’s talk face to face, man.”

  “I said, where the fuck have you been?”

  “Colorado! I went back to see Stone.”

  “I knew it! You sneaky son of a bitch. You been holding out the whole time. What that motherfucker tell you?”

  “He told me what we want to know. He told me what happened here in sixty-eight. I’ve got Marston nailed, man.”

  He twists around me and jabs the gun into my cervical spine. “What did Stone say happened?”

  “He told me why Marston wanted Payton dead. It was a land deal . . . Marston stood to make a lot of money off some land, but he had to make an example of a black union worker first. He paid Presley to do it for him. Presley chose Payton.”

  “Bullshit!” Another fog of whiskey blows over me.

  “What do you mean, bullshit?”

  “Don’t lie to me, goddamn it! Don’t you lie!”

  He jerks back the slide on the gun, and everything inside me goes into free fall. My thoughts, my courage, my blood pressure. “Ike, please . . . I’ve got a little girl, man. Just tell me what the problem is and—”

  The gun barrel rakes around my neck, under my jaw, up my right cheek to my eye. All I can see now is the taut belly of Ike’s brown uniform.

  “Get up,” he says coldly. “Get up!”

  The gun barrel stays screwed into my eye socket as I rise, but my terror abates slightly. The prospect of dying on my knees was as debasing as it was frightening.

  Ike’s gun is shaking. As he pulls it out of my eye socket and lays the barrel against my forehead, I see his eyes, bloodshot and jerky, the eyes of a man in agony.

  “You a goddamn liar,” he says. “I shoulda known a white boy wouldn’t go against his own in the end. You been dicking that Marston bitch all along. You in with ’em all the way.” He shakes his head as though at his own stupidity. “Setting up to get the nigger. Like always.”

  “Ike, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m setting up to get Leo Marston, and I’m going to use Ray Presley to do it. If I can find him. Dwight Stone and Ray Presley are going to send that bastard to the extermination chamber at Parchman.”

  But Ike isn’t listening. At the word Presley, his eyes glaze over with blind rage. “That fucking Presley . . . he told you, didn’t he?”

  “Told me what? Talk to me, Ike! Something’s been eating you up since we started this. What is it?”

  He bites his lip and presses the gun harder against my forehead. Then suddenly he lets it drop to his side. “I didn’t know what I was doing, man,” he says in a desolate voice. “Hadn’t been back in the World but three months. Couldn’t get no kind of job. I applied with the police three times. They wouldn’t even talk to me. Had all the Negro cops they needed, they said. Didn’t have but three. Same with the sheriff. I’d done more police work in Saigon than them motherfuckers done their whole lives, and they wouldn’t even give me a chance.”

  I’m more confused than I’ve been since the start of this mess, but I’m not about to interrupt him.

  “What else could I do, man?” he almost wails. “Wasn’t gonna go on no welfare! I had to deal.” He slaps at a mosquito on his sweating face. “Presley got me on a traffic stop. Just speeding, but he pulled his weapon and made me open my trunk. He found half a pound of white lady. Illegal search if I ever saw one, but you think that mattered back then? In them days he coulda sent me to Parchman for fifty years behind that much heroin.”

  A dark perception is blooming in the corner of my brain. A fetid, cloying orchid of a thought. “What did he want you to do, Ike?”

  “Don’t play that shit! You already know!”

  The pain in his eyes is terrible to behold. I hold up both my hands. “I know what you tell me. That’s all.”

  “What you think happened, man? Motherfucker put it to me right there on the side of the road. Said he had somebody needed killing. Said I’d been killing for Uncle for two years, what was one more? I knew what one more was. But what could I do, man? He had me. I didn’t want to die on Parchman Farm. Presley took my dope and told me if I tried to back out, he’d plant it on me and bust me all over again.”

  “He wanted you to kill Del Payton?”

  “What you think I been saying?”

  The nausea of a roller coaster that hurtles in only one direction—down—sweeps over me as the whole sick plan falls together in my head.

  “You asked Presley to get the C-4, didn’t you?”

  He stares at me with strangled emotion. “Presley wanted the car blown up. I didn’t know nothing about dynamite, but I’d worked with C-4 in ’Nam. I told him if he could get me some plastic, I could do the job.”

  “Jesus, Ike. Did you know Del?”

  “No. He was ten years older than me. Grew up out to Pine Ridge.”

  “Did you know about his civil rights work?”

  “Hell, no. I thought he was dicking a white woman or something. Didn’t matter, though. I was so fucked up, I didn’t know nothing ’bout nothing.”

  “Ike, listen . . . what you did was terrible, but—”

  “Don’t you judge me!” he cries, the whites of his eyes making him look wild in the dark. “Don’t you cast no stone! I been torturing myself thirty years. After I realized the work Del was doing, I just about went crazy. The whole town was marching for him. I wanted to scream out what I’d done, what Presley made me do. But I didn’t have the guts. I couldn’t face my own sin.”

  The diabolical irony of Ray Presley’s plan leaves me cold. He actually blackmailed a black man into committing a civil rights murder. He and Marston must have laughed for weeks over that one. They’ve been laughing for thirty years.

  “Does Stone know this? Or does he really believe Presley killed Payton?”

  “Stone? ’Course he knows. He came to see me back then. He had the whole thing dogged out.”

  “Why didn’t he arrest you? Why didn’t he tell me about you?”

  Ike seems only partially aware of what I’m saying. “I don’t know why. He was different, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this at the start?”

  “What could I tell you, man? I knew what I’d done. I knew about Presley. But that’s all. I knew what happened, but I didn’t know why. And that was the only way you were gonna get Marston.”

  “But how did you know Marston was involved? Did Presley tell you?”

  “He didn’t tell me shit. A year after it happened, somebody called me on the phone. Wouldn’t say nothing. I was about to hang up when they started playing this tape. It was Marston and Presley, talking about Del being killed. Talking about me. I figured it was Stone. Had to be.”

  Stone must have called and played Ike Ransom the copy he’d made of the evidence tape he’d sent to J. Edgar Hoover. And his reason, I suspect, was a dark one. “Thirty years, Ike. Thirty years. Couldn’t you figure a way to trade what you knew for immunity, or—”

  “Who was I gonna go to, man?” Spittle flies from his mouth. “The FBI already knew what had gone down. And they didn’t arrest nobody! A few years later I tried to find Stone, but the Bureau had fired his ass. Portman was a U.S. attorney, and I knew better than to trust that Yankee piece of shit. And Marston was on the state supreme court! What’s a drunk nigger cop from Mississippi gonna do against people swingin’ that kind of weight? You tell me.”

  “Then why tell me? Why try at all after thirty years?”

  His broad shoulders sag as
though under a great weight, and he speaks toward the floor. “I didn’t have no choice. It ate at me so long . . . I thought it would get better over time, but it got worse. A few months back, I found myself going to church. Not wanting to . . . needing to. You know? Being raised Catholic, I guess. Don’t matter if you stop goin’. You can give up on God, but it don’t matter. ’Cause He don’t give up on you.”

  The tortured paths this man has pushed himself down are beyond any imagining. “Ike, you came to me knowing you could go to jail for the rest of your life. That you could be executed. That means a lot. And I’ve figured a way to turn Presley against Marston. If you’ll get on that witness stand tomorrow and tell the truth—”

  “Is Stone gonna testify?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he here in town?”

  This isn’t the time to lie. “No. But he’s on his way here. Some people tried to kill us last night. Portman’s guys probably. We got split up.”

  Ike starts pacing back and forth, patting the Sig-Sauer against his leg. “But he’s alive?”

  “You can’t let your decision be based on what Stone does. This thing’s eating you alive because you know you did wrong. Terrible wrong. It’s got nothing to do with you or me. You owe it to Althea Payton to tell the truth. You owe it to Del. You owe it to yourself, man.”

  “I don’t owe nobody but God!” The Sig jerks up again, aimed at my chest now. “You don’t know how close it’s been. At first I thought maybe you could nail Marston without me having to go down. But that was stupid. Crazy. The closer you got to the truth, the more I saw I was gonna have to pay the piper, no matter what. One night I got so drunk I thought about killing you, just to stop it all. That night you left the newspaper by yourself . . . I was right behind you.”