Natchez Burning (20 page)

“You know what?” he said, closing his notebook and stuffing it into his back pocket. “I figure you need me a lot more than I need you. I’m going to walk out of this room and go back to work. I’m going to solve these cases one way or another, with or without you. And when spring comes, I’ll smell the flowers and hug my lady and know I’m doing the best I can. But you … you’re going to sit in this room and rot until they box you up with your sins and bury you. And from the looks of things, that won’t be very long.”

Henry walked to the door, then turned back and looked at the old man. Morehouse was straining to rise from his chair.

“Wait!” he yelled. “Wait, you son of a bitch!”

Henry felt he was standing on the threshold between life and death. Despite the old man’s fury, he could not lift himself out of the chair. While Morehouse sputtered and cursed, Henry walked out into the cold winter light and shut the door behind him.

FLAT ON HIS
back beneath a 1998 Camaro, Sonny Thornfield cursed his cell phone, then slid his creeper from beneath the car and dug the phone out of his pocket. The caller ID read
DUKE WILLIAMS.
Duke Williams was dead—had been for five years—but his wife wasn’t. Sandra kept her dead husband’s name on the phone listing so that burglars wouldn’t target her. Sonny used to stop by Duke’s house on occasion to comfort his widow, back when the doctor let him take Viagra. Sonny still took the drug on special occasions, but Sandra Williams didn’t rate the risk of death. Her only real utility now was that she lived at the turn that led to Wilma Deen’s house.

“Hey, Sandy,” Sonny said, grimacing at the leaky ceiling of his automotive shop.

“Hey, Son,” she almost cooed. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No problem, girl. Always glad to hear from you.”

“I think I saw something you might be interested in.”

“What’s that?”

“About an hour ago, Wilma left her house. I was out mulching my zinnia beds, and she spoke to me as she passed. Said she was headed to Tallulah on some errand for Glenn. After she left, as I was going back into my house, another vehicle came up the road—headed in, not out. I figured it was probably a sitter coming to stay with Glenn. But when it got closer, I recognized it. The owner goes to the same church I do.”

“Who was it, Sandy?”

“That reporter for the
Beacon
—Henry Sexton.”

Sonny rolled off the creeper and sat up with a grunt. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. I shielded my eyes as he passed, and I saw his mustache and goatee. It was Henry, all right.”

Sonny’s chest had gone tight. “Is he still down there?”

“Mm-hm. I walked out to my mailbox, and I could just see the tail end of his Explorer sticking out from behind Wilma’s house. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but Snake told me to keep an eye out for anything funny down there. I tried to call Snake, but he didn’t answer, so I figured I’d best call you.”

“You did right, hon.” Sonny steeled himself against the pain in his arthritic knees, then struggled to his feet. “We won’t forget you.”

He could almost hear Sandra blush. “Aw, ya’ll don’t need to do anything for me. I’m glad to help. I know Glenn’s getting pretty close to the end, and he might not be quite right in his mind, you know?”

“That I do. You call me back when Sexton leaves, and double-check to be sure it was him. Okay?”

“Will do, Sonny. I got nothing else to occupy me.”

Sonny ignored the hint. “Thanks, Sandy.” He clicked
END,
then speed-dialed Snake. After five rings, he expected to get voice mail, but then Snake picked up.

“What’s up?” he asked in a sleepy croak.

“Did Sandra Williams just call you?”

“Hell, yeah. I’m still half asleep. I didn’t have the patience to listen to her bitch about the pickaninnies from that apartment complex walking across her property to get to the Walmart.”

“That wasn’t why she called. I think we got trouble, pard. Sandy says Henry Sexton is down at Wilma’s talking to Glenn, and Wilma’s not there.”

“
Shit
. Right now?”

“Yep. What you got on tap?”

“I’m supposed to fly down to Baton Rouge and make a pickup.”

Snake was referring to a bulk load of ether in transit from Mexico, something Sonny didn’t like moving in his cars. “I’m in the middle of work myself. Just had two cars delivered from auction.”

Snake grunted to acknowledge that he understood Sonny’s actual meaning.

“But I think we’d better go see Billy Knox,” Sonny added. “Don’t you?”

Snake didn’t answer. Sonny knew his old comrade hated taking problems to his son, but that was the procedure, and Sonny hoped Snake wouldn’t buck it. Glenn Morehouse knew enough to blow a lot more than Double Eagles out of the water. “Snake?” he said hesitantly.

“I’m thinking.”

Sonny looked over at the Camaro. When Sandra called, he’d been trying to open a hidden compartment that concealed two pounds of ephedrine. He’d already retrieved two pounds from behind the coolant reservoir, but the jerry-rigged compartment welded above the exhaust pipe was proving troublesome. He’d ripped his right thumbnail down to the quick, and it hurt like hell. He put it in his mouth and sucked it. “Come on, Snake. We gotta do it.”

“Is Sexton still at Wilma’s house?”

“Sandra says yeah. She’s going to call me when he leaves.”

“Goddamn it. I’d like to go take care of that fucker now, before anybody else gets into it. We should’ve silenced him a month after they diagnosed him. Would have been a mercy.”

Sonny gritted his teeth and tried to sound diplomatic. “You know that’s not gonna fly. It’s been a big enough day already.”

“I know … I know. All right, Billy’s down at Fort Knox. I’ll pick you up in my truck and we’ll head to Mississippi.”

“Fort Knox” was Snake’s nickname for Valhalla, the hunting camp that had been in his family for decades. Brody Royal preferred the formal name, but Snake liked reminding people that his family held the deed on all that acreage, regardless of who had paid for it.

“Give me thirty minutes,” Sonny said. “I need to secure these cars.”

“Works for me. Out.”

Sonny pocketed his cell phone, then looked down at his mechanic’s creeper with almost spousal resentment. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his belly. He’d had it for some time now. It had started just before Viola came back from Chicago.
And look what came of that,
he thought.
Now Glenn’s talking?
Jesus.
Trying to keep the past buried was like trying to stop kudzu from growing. Short of pouring gasoline on the ground and killing the earth itself, you couldn’t do it. Which is exactly what Snake would argue in half an hour.

“Screw this load,” Sonny cursed, kicking the creeper across the floor.

Picking up the tightly packed Ziplocs of ephedrine, he walked into the front office to get some coffee. Bucky Jarrett, an old Double Eagle who worked as his sales manager, looked up from his ten-year-old computer when Sonny dropped the bags on his desk.

“Everything copacetic, boss?” Jarrett slid the Ziplocs into his bottom drawer with a practiced motion.

Sonny shook his head, looking through the broad display window at his little empire of secondhand cars. Just beyond his lot lay Highway 84, thick with midday traffic. A few miles down the road, on the other side of the asphalt, Glenn Morehouse was probably spilling his guts to a reporter. And not just any reporter, either—

“A little short on weight this trip?” Bucky asked.

“I’m having trouble opening the chassis safe.”

“Those tamale-heads prob’ly used an air driver to seal it.”

“Yep,” Sonny agreed. “You been to see Morehouse in a while, Buck?”

“Uh … about two Sundays back, I think. Something wrong?”

“How did he seem? Solid?”

Jarrett took a few moments to answer. “Well … he cried a bit.”

Sonny looked back at his manager.
“Cried?”

“When he talked about when we was kids and stuff, you know. Shit, he’s dying, man.”

“Do you trust him, Bucky?”

Jarrett looked perplexed. “With what?”

“To go quietly, like a man.”

Jarrett’s eyes bugged. “Shit, Sonny. Don’t say that. We got problems with Glenn?”

Sonny clicked his tongue. “We might.”

Bucky looked like a tax cheater who’d just opened an audit notice from the IRS. He got up and started rubbing the back of his neck. Getting out from under the Camaro had calmed Sonny a little, and he realized he ought to go back and get the rest of the ephedrine. He didn’t need that sitting around the shop while things were popping like this. Bucky could lock up for half an hour and run the stuff out to the warehouse.

“Sonny?” Jarrett asked nervously.

“Yeah?”

“Just before you came in, I heard that old nurse of Dr. Cage’s died this morning. Viola something-or-other. Del Richards over at the sheriff’s department told me about it.”

“Yeah?” Sonny looked back toward the highway. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“Hell, I didn’t even know she was in town. Did you?”

“Can’t say I did.”

“Del also said he heard Sheriff Byrd say Dr. Cage killed her. Put her out of her misery, like. Don’t that beat all?”

Sonny clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “Well … Dr. Cage always went his own way. I always liked that about him.”

HENRY SEXTON STOOD
in the yard of Wilma Deen’s house, watching a sparrow trying to stuff itself into a martin house mounted on a pole. He’d walked out of Glenn Morehouse’s sickroom with every intention of getting into his SUV and driving away, but once the wind hit his face, he’d felt his rage drain away, leaving behind only a sense of failure. For ten years he’d been working to find a source inside the Double Eagle group. But now that he had one, he’d flung a bunch of righteous bullshit in the man’s face and stormed out.
What did I expect?
he asked himself.
A signed confession with a bow on top?
Glenn Morehouse had nothing to look forward to but more suffering followed by death, and Henry had only come here to plunder the dark cave of his conscience. What was more natural than for the old man to gain some pleasure at his expense?

Henry wished he still smoked cigarettes. Fifty yards up the gravel road, a fat black Labrador retriever trudged toward the highway. Beyond the dog, Henry saw movement near the house that stood at the highway turn—Wilma Deen’s nearest neighbor. When he focused, though, he lost the impression. After a few seconds of staring, he felt like a deer trying to spot a careful hunter. With four backward steps he carried himself out of sight of the distant house.

What was I thinking?
he wondered. Because of his personal obsession with Albert Norris, he’d barely flipped a page in the Eagles’ catalog of crime. He hadn’t asked about Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis, or even Joe Louis Lewis, the busboy who’d disappeared without a trace. Maybe one or more of those boys was who Morehouse had seen flayed or crucified. Above all, Henry had blown his chance to question Morehouse about Viola Turner’s death. Surely he owed his best efforts to Jimmy Revels and Tom Cage, and to all the families who had never learned the fate of their loved ones? He glanced at the clock on his cell phone. Wilma Deen would return in twenty-five minutes, thirty at the outside. Yet if he walked back into the house now, Morehouse was as likely to curse him as tell him anything further.

Stay or go?
he wondered, looking back at his Explorer.

As though in answer, his cell phone rang. The caller ID said
G. MOREHOUSE.
“Hello?”

“You feel better, asshole?” growled the old man.

“Not really.”

“Did you expect me to spill my guts to you the first time we talked? That how it usually goes in your interviews?”

“Not always.”

The silence stretched for a bit. Then Morehouse said, “You really don’t know what you’re dealing with, Henry. Brody Royal didn’t start out rich. His daddy was a bootlegger in St. Bernard Parish, and a partner with the Little Man before he ever took over New Orleans.”

“The Little Man?” Henry echoed, confused.

“Carlos Marcello, boss of the New Orleans syndicate. Carlos and Brody were in on all kinds of deals together later on. Real estate mostly, but other shit, too. Back in sixty-one, the CIA kidnapped Carlos and flew him down to Central America. They strapped a parachute on him and forced him to jump from the plane at night. That was Bobby Kennedy’s idea of a joke. Didn’t matter. Two weeks later, Carlos was back in New Orleans. Brody paid the Little Man’s hotel bill the whole time he was down there, then helped to fly him back north. That’s the kind of crowd Brody Royal ran with, okay? Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, those guys. In 1960, Carlos and Brody gave Richard Nixon close to a million bucks through Hoffa and the Teamsters, trying to beat John Kennedy. That’s who you’re messing with, Henry. That’s who you want to go after with your little pissant newspaper.”

Henry looked up the long gravel road that led to Highway 84. The black Lab was gone. “All that was a long time ago, Glenn. And Marcello’s dead.”

“
Brody
ain’t dead. And I’ll tell you something that
wasn’t
so long ago. You remember when they jailed the state insurance commissioner a couple years back?”

Henry knew the case well. “Ed Schott? Sure. They found two hundred grand in cash in a deep freeze in his storeroom.”

“Right. The state claimed that Royal Insurance was paying Schott to rig a state contract. But no company employee was ever indicted.”

“A key witness disappeared,” Henry said in a casual voice. “Or something.”

“Two witnesses. Both women. Do you know who the president of Royal Insurance is?”

“One of Royal’s sons, right?”

“Yep. But the CFO is Royal’s son-in-law, Randall Regan.”

Henry knew all about Regan, who had blocked every attempt Henry had made to interview his wife, Katy. “I’ve seen him around.”

“You know Randall wasn’t no real husband to Brody’s daughter. He’s a watchdog, bought and paid for. He married her less than a year after Pooky Wilson disappeared, after she got back from the sanitarium in Texas. Randall’s job was to look after Katy, but he also ran the crooked side of Royal Insurance. About three years back, Randall and Brody were working a sweet deal to rig a state contract—the same kind of deal Governor Edwards went to jail for. The only problem was, Randall was dicking two gals who worked in the office. One was an accountant, married with kids—the other a divorced secretary with a kid. After a while, these two gals figured out Randall was screwing ’em both. So the accountant decided they’d not only get even with him, but get rich doing it. She called some federal whistle-blower line, something the government set up after the Enron mess. You get huge rewards for ratting out corrupt companies now. So, the feds met these gals, but instead of busting Royal Insurance outright, they left the gals in place and ordered them to steal computer files and such. They even wired them up some days, trying to record conversations.”