Natchez Burning (36 page)

“Wait!” Wilma cried from the doorway. “They’re sending an ambulance anyway, just to be sure. It’s already on the way.”

Fear bloomed in Sonny’s chest, and his mouth went dry.

“You son of a bitch,” Snake said, looking like he wanted to stab Morehouse in the heart. “Give me that syringe, Son.”

“Will it kill him in time?”

“If you’d hurry up it will!”

As Sonny reached for the syringe, Morehouse yanked both arms up off the mattress with such power that Sonny’s head crashed into Snake’s. It was all Sonny could do to cling to the big wrist.

“Watch out!” he cried, stunned by the strength flowing through Morehouse’s arm. His old comrade’s eyes were nearly white with panic, like the eyes of a coyote trying to rip itself out of a trap.

“This ain’t gonna work!” Sonny shouted, as Morehouse slung him against the bedside table with almost superhuman strength. The impact knocked the syringe to the floor. “What do we do?”

“I heard a siren!” Wilma shouted. “Jesus,
do
something!”

“You’ve gotta do it, Willy!” Snake told her. “Grab that syringe and shoot it into the port!”

Wilma had gone white. “I can’t do that!”

“It’s got to be done, and we ain’t got enough hands.”

Morehouse howled like a senseless brute with no power of speech. He had become fear incarnate. Wilma stood shaking like a child pushed beyond its limits. Sonny heard the siren now; its distant scream turned his bladder to stone.

“Do it!” Snake roared at Wilma. “Do it now, or we’re all going to jail!”

Morehouse was still fighting, but Sonny felt the great strength waning at last. Wilma’s eyes sought him out, silently asking permission for this act of blood betrayal. Sonny had done many things he regretted, and this might be the worst sin of all, but they had no choice anymore. As Snake cursed and Morehouse bellowed like a steer going to slaughter, Sonny nodded.

Wilma closed her eyes, her lips moving in silence. Then she picked up the syringe off the floor and moved quickly to the far side of the bed.

“Don’t fight me, Glenn,” she said softly. “It’s time to go see Mama.”

I’M NO STRANGER
to perverse crimes, but Henry’s tale of Brody Royal’s revenge on two female whistle-blowers has sickened me.

“Royal’s son-in-law forced one woman to kill the other?” I ask in disbelief. “And then he killed the other one anyway?”

“He had Snake kill her. That’s the story I got today. And I believe it.”

I gulp the rest of my bourbon and hold out my cup for a refill. “You hate him, don’t you? Royal, I mean.”

“Yessir, I do.”

Henry’s hatred for Brody Royal is obviously proportional to his love for the Norris family, but I don’t have time to plumb that connection now. “There’s no way my father was friends with a man who could do that,” I tell him. “No way.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Henry says, but he sounds less than sure.

“My daughter’s going to be wondering where I am. Tell me about the Revels case. No offense, but I came to find out about Viola Turner. I came to help my father.”

“I know. And though I don’t quite understand how yet, I believe that whatever saves your father is going to be what destroys Brody Royal.”

This idea has an appealing symmetry, but I have yet to be convinced. “Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. Go.”

“Jimmy and Luther were last seen in Natchez, Mississippi, on March twenty-seventh, 1968. After that, they dropped off the planet. Two months earlier, they’d gotten into a brawl with three Double Eagles at a whites-only drive-in that resulted in a highway chase and a fight on the road. Shots were fired, but no one sought treatment at any area hospital. I suspect your father may have patched them up, but I can’t prove that. The FBI never classified these cases as murders, because they had no bodies. But everyone knew they’d been killed by the Double Eagles. I always assumed Jimmy was the main target, because he was a civil rights activist. He’d worked hard to register black voters, he played a role in the Natchez boycott, he led marches, and he played music at civil rights rallies.”

“Why did people assume the Double Eagles killed them, rather than the Klan? Because of the brawl?”

“Mostly. After the brawl, Jimmy and Luther went into hiding at a place called Freewoods, a kind of outlaw sanctuary. Nobody knew where they were. When the Eagles couldn’t locate those boys after six weeks, they decided to rape Viola.”

“To draw Jimmy out of hiding.”

“Exactly. The rumor started spreading on March twenty-seventh. I wasn’t sure it was more than a rumor until today. My Eagle source confirmed it.”

“So how were you
wrong
about the Revels case?”

Henry’s basset hound expression returns. “I was wrong about the most critical part—the motive behind it.
Jimmy Revels wasn’t the real target
.”

“Who was?”

Henry takes a long pull of coffee. “Hold on to your ass, bubba. The target was Robert Kennedy.”

I set down my cup and stare at him in shock. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Are you familiar with the Ben Chester White case?”

“I think so. Three Klansmen murdered a harmless old black man in the Homochitto National Forest.”

“Do you remember their motive?”

My mind races back through endless case summaries. “The Klansmen asked the old man to help them find a lost dog. But …” The answer hits me like an unexpected blow. “They wanted to lure Martin Luther King to Natchez. To assassinate him.”

Henry’s cheeks have flushed red, and not from the whiskey. “They weren’t the only guys to have that idea.”

“But
Robert Kennedy
? Why would the Eagles want him dead?”

“The Double Eagles didn’t initiate the operation.”

“Who did? Brody Royal?”

Henry shakes his head. “Someone who hated Bobby Kennedy more than anyone on earth, and that’s saying something. Can you guess? This guy was the last son of a bitch you wanted to be on the bad side of.”

“Enough with the games, Henry. Who was it?”

“Carlos Marcello.”

The Little Sicilian. Mafia boss of New Orleans from the fifties through the seventies.
“Ray Presley used to work as a bagman for Marcello while he was a cop in New Orleans. Was Presley Marcello’s connection to the Double Eagles?”

“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.”