Natchez Burning (41 page)

We’ll see about that.
“Aren’t you an attorney yourself?” I call.

“Not like you. I didn’t go to a high-dollar law school with a world-class library and scouts from the big firms waiting for the graduates. I went to a night school, the kind ‘real’ lawyers joke about. Until I hand them their asses in court, that is. I’ve been scrapping out a living since the day I was born, Mayor. I’ve seen things white-shoe lawyers like you can’t even imagine. So don’t be thinkin’ we’ve got anything in common. Just remember what I told you: your daddy’s going down—all the way down—like he should have done a long time ago.”

This guy just lost his mother, I remind myself, but she was terminally ill for nearly a year. His fury is clearly based on a perception of insult much older than that. Could he have some idea that he was likely conceived during his mother’s rape by Mississippi rednecks?

“What do you really know about my father?” I ask.

The eyes narrow to slits. “More than you, I’ll bet. I know what my mama knew. Your daddy might have shut her up last night, but I’m still vertical.” Turner thumps his big chest with his fist. “I’m the chicken come home to roost, brother, the cat that got thrown in the river but finds his way back home. I’m the
avenging motherfucking angel.
A
black
angel! Men reap what they sow, Mr. Mayor. You’ll find out the details when reaping time comes.”

“When will that be?”

The low thunder rolls in his chest again. “When the judge and jury are listening. When all the cameras are switched on, and the lights are shining bright as noontime.” Turner jams his truck into gear with a lurch. “You take care now.”

The big wheels spin with a scream that makes me shudder, and the truck reverses up Washington Street to the intersection, where Turner executes a stunt maneuver that spins his vehicle 180 degrees. Gunning the engine, he fishtails up Washington, narrowly missing sedans parked on both sides of the crape myrtle–lined street. I stare after the pickup, recalling a night two months ago when a man far more frightening than Lincoln Turner ambushed me on my porch. But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

HENRY SEXTON’S GIRLFRIEND
lived in a leafy neighborhood near the western end of one of the two bridges spanning the Mississippi River from Vidalia, Louisiana, to Natchez. As per Penn’s instructions, Henry had gone straight there and loaded her shotgun, then waited for a retired cop that Penn had hired to pick up Henry’s mother and deliver her to Sherry’s house. He’d told Penn that the two women had never gotten along and never would, but Penn had persuaded him that twelve hours of constant fighting between Sherry and his mother would be preferable to both of them being killed. Of course, Henry had the much harder job of making the women understand what was at stake—without sending them into total panic.

Sherry cottoned on pretty quick. She’d always insisted that Henry was courting disaster by probing old Klan murders, and she’d often tried to dissuade him from pursuing potentially dangerous leads. His mother, on the other hand, believed that since nothing had happened to Henry up to now, nothing was likely to in the future. The white-haired old lady perched in a club chair in Sherry’s den like a dowager countess being forced to accept the hospitality of a peasant, while Sherry made futile offers of coffee, biscuits, fried chicken, and even banana nut bread.

“For the life of me,” sniffed Mrs. Sexton, “I don’t see how someone expects to host
anybody
without a drop of sherry in the house. No pun intended.”

Henry announced that he was running over to McDonough’s package store to buy a bottle of Dry Sack, but James Ervin, the heavy-jowled old cop that Penn had hired to watch over them, told him they’d better make do with what they had. After Henry got his mother to accept some Chardonnay, Ervin led him and Sherry into the guest room to give them a quiet refresher course on handling her shotgun. Unlike 98 percent of the boys he’d grown up with, Henry had little experience with guns, but the 12-gauge Ithaca was pretty simple to operate, and after some dry-firing, he felt he could repel an intruder if necessary. The wisest course in that circumstance, Ervin suggested in a kindly voice, would probably be to let Sherry handle the shotgun.

Once the ladies had settled into an uncomfortable truce, Henry retreated to the kitchen, took out his Moleskine notebook, and pretended to work on an article at the Formica-topped table. The fact was, he could barely keep his thoughts in any kind of order. The knowledge that Glenn Morehouse now lay on a slab in the hospital morgue, after they’d talked intimately only hours ago, was disorienting enough; but to be nearly certain that his interview had triggered the old man’s murder had given Henry a far more visceral appreciation of the dangers of his quest.

While Sherry guessed answers on a game show in the den, he opened his briefcase and removed an envelope containing several photographs. One was the original photo of Tom Cage with Brody Royal and his cronies in the fishing boat. But another Henry had decided against showing Penn, at the last moment. He slid it out now, keeping one corner under a page in his notebook so that he could easily cover it if someone entered the kitchen.

This photo showed a blurry image of Henry himself, shot with a telephoto lens as he walked out of the Ferriday Walmart. A rifle scope reticle had been perfectly superimposed over his face, with a bull’s-eye on his forehead. He’d received this photo in the mail, and he’d duly turned it over to the FBI, but the Bureau had been unable to trace it. All they could verify was that it had been mailed from Omaha, Nebraska, which Henry could see from the postmark. What Henry didn’t tell the FBI was that he’d spent the week prior to receiving this threatening photo in New Orleans, investigating the real estate dealings between Brody Royal and Carlos Marcello. The old Mafia boss had died in 1993, long after Alzheimer’s claimed his mind, but the MarYal Corporation still had extensive holdings in New Orleans and South Florida. Throughout his investigations of the Double Eagles, Henry had ignored all threats. But investigating Brody Royal and his ties to the Mafia was apparently different, and something had told him he ought to back off, at least for the time being.

“Baby?” Sherry said softly from behind him.

Henry started at the sound of her voice, but it was too late to hide the picture. Sherry already knew about it, anyway. He jerked when she laid her hand on his shoulder. A working nurse, Sherry had an amazingly gentle touch, but tonight Henry was as jumpy as he’d ever been in his life.

“Did you show Penn Cage that picture?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I got it months ago, and nothing’s happened since.”

“Nothing quite as bad, you mean.”

He turned in his chair and squeezed her hand. “Look, Mama won’t have to be here more than a couple of days, if that.”

“Oh, I’m fine with her,” Sherry said with sincerity. “She’s your mother, and she’s welcome. I only hope she doesn’t try to make it as hard on Jamie as she does on me.”

Jamie was Sherry’s fifteen-year-old son.

“She likes Jamie,” Henry assured her, hoping he was right.

“Mmm.” Sherry poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table, her gaze as penetrating as any he’d ever faced. “If this situation is so dangerous, why haven’t you called the sheriff’s department?”

“Because I’m not sure we can trust them.”

Fresh concern furrowed her brow. “What about the FBI, then?”

“I am going to call them tonight. But I don’t expect they’ll send anyone to protect us.”

“They might, if you told them everything you know.”

Henry stared at her, then slowly shook his head. “I can’t do that, babe.”

“Why not? Because you want an exclusive story?”

“No. Because they never tell me a damn thing, yet they expect me to give them everything I’ve spent my life uncovering. I’m doing their jobs for them, and—by God, it’s just not right.”

Sherry stared into her coffee cup for a while, then laid a hand on his forearm and squeezed it softly. “What if you get hurt because of that stubbornness of yours? That’s not right, either. I love you, and I need you.”

Henry acknowledged her concern with a nod, but he knew he wouldn’t change his mind. “That’s a risk I’ve taken from the beginning. It’s just something I’ve got to do.”

“What if Jamie gets hurt, Henry? What then? These men you write about have used
bombs
. They’ve shot blindly into houses. I remember that stuff from when I was a little girl.”

They’ve done a lot worse than that,
he thought
.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sher. But even if I gave everything to the FBI, they wouldn’t send us a protective detail tonight. That’s not how they work.”

“So it’s you against the world?”

“No. I have Penn Cage helping me now.”

She made a sour face. “Oh, Penn Cage. What can he do?”

“Penn knows a lot of people. When he tried the Del Payton case, he fought the director of the FBI, and he won.”

Sherry lowered her voice to a whisper. “Then why does he send one old colored man to guard us when people are dying left and right? He’s rich—he can afford to get you a real bodyguard. I’m sorry, Henry, but how do you know he’s not trying to steal your story for that Caitlin Masters he lives with?”

Henry shook his head resentfully. “He’s not doing that. Penn’s just trying to help his father.”

“Who may have murdered one of his own patients, according to the reports I heard at the hospital. His own nurse!”

“You know better than that. You’re talking about Tom Cage, for God’s sake.”

Sherry laid a hand over one of his. “All I know is, they’re from the high side of the river. They’ve got money. They’re different from us, and I don’t think you can afford to—”

“I get the message,” Henry snapped, pulling his hand from beneath hers. “But I believe they’re honorable men, as honorable as any I’ve ever known, and I trust them.”

She shrugged to show how little appreciated she felt. “Well, I hope you’re right. That’s all I can say.”

“Time will tell. I need to get back to work. I’ve got some calls to make.”

Sherry huffed and went back to check on his mother.

Henry slid the original photo of the four men in the stern of the fishing boat out of the envelope. He’d studied this image for countless hours, and he’d gleaned a lot from it. What most struck him was how profoundly Brody Royal dominated the group. Dr. Cage and Claude Devereux were highly intelligent men, even brilliant, while Presley possessed animal cleverness. Yet Royal’s eyes held an awareness of the other men, and of the camera, that the others’ eyes did not. And while Ray Presley was feared by all who knew him (and was known to be a killer), it was Royal who exuded the aura of a predator. The hawklike face with its gray eyes and proud beak of a nose made a statement, but there was more to his charisma than this. An invisible field seemed to surround the older man, creating a buffer zone that the others would not enter. This deference might have been due to Royal’s wealth, of course, but on balance Henry didn’t assign much weight to that. It was more that in any group of men, a natural hierarchy always established itself, and in this one—despite the presence of some very strong personalities—Brody Royal sat atop the ziggurat.

Henry slid the photo aside and rubbed his forehead. He’d revealed far more to Penn tonight than he’d originally intended, but he hadn’t told him everything. The rifle scope photo was one omission. Another was the story of Brody Royal’s daughter, Katy, the girl who’d triggered the deaths of Pooky Wilson and Albert Norris, by inviting Pooky to cross a line that meant death to him but not to her.
Not to imply that the girl didn’t suffer,
Henry thought. Because she had—terribly. After Pooky vanished, Katy Royal had gone a little crazy, by all reports, so crazy that her father had forcibly committed her to a private sanitarium in Texas. The Borgen Institute no longer existed, but after dozens of phone calls, Henry had managed to track down a nurse who’d worked there during the sixties and seventies.

He soon learned that electroshock therapy had been a staple of treatment for Dr. Wilhelm Borgen, who’d founded the hospital. Five minutes’ research told Henry that “electroshock therapy” could mean a lot of different things, so he’d called the nurse back with specific questions. All her answers were discouraging. By the 1960s ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, had begun to move away from the bilateral sine-wave method that caused so many terrible side effects, but when Katy Royal resided at the Borgen Institute, they had yet to embrace any of those advances. And while informed consent was today a prerequisite of ECT, at the Borgen Institute prior to 1971, patients were routinely administered electroshock therapy against their will. The side effects of such treatment ran the gamut from broken bones to long-term cognitive degradation and even amnesia.

Four days ago, Henry had seen the results firsthand. After years of fruitless attempts to get past Katy’s husband and interview her about Pooky Wilson, Henry had done something he almost never did: scheduled an interview under false pretenses. Under the pretext of doing a human interest story on breeding bichons frises (Katy’s main hobby), Henry had visited Mrs. Regan at home while her husband was at work. After making her comfortable with some puffball questions, he’d segued into her childhood in Ferriday. At first Katy spoke glowingly of those years, as most adults tended to do of rural childhoods. But when Henry brought up Albert Norris, a glaze had come over the woman’s face. When he pushed on and mentioned the name Pooky Wilson, Katy denied any knowledge about the boy. At first Henry had been sure she was hiding something. After all, following her return from Texas, her father had married Katy off to Randall Regan, the brutal roughneck who had chauffeured his boss away from the Albert Norris murder scene. One of Regan’s jobs had been to insulate Katy from reporters like himself. But when she insisted that she recalled nothing about either Pooky or Albert Norris, Henry began to wonder whether the doctors at the Borgen Institute had turned those sections of her memory to mush. When he left the house, Mrs. Regan had politely thanked him for coming and invited him to return anytime he wished. Henry felt so guilty about what he’d done that he actually went back to the office and wrote a story about Katy Regan and her dogs.