“You want to destroy Leo Marston?” he asks, his eyes hard.
The name flows easily from his lips. He has thought about Marston since 1968. “Do you think that’s possible?”
“Put it this way. I think it’s a noble goal.”
Caitlin presses her knee hard against mine. I can feel her excitement, but I don’t look at her. It’s suddenly as clear to me as the mountain air outside Stone’s cabin: the man sitting across from us knows who killed Del Payton, and why, and probably why that knowledge was never made public.
“But it won’t be easy,” he adds.
“That’s what someone else told me.”
“Who?”
Stone is playing it so close to the vest that I decide to keep Ike Ransom’s name to myself. “You wouldn’t know him. He came along after your time. But he’s interested in the case, and he hates Leo Marston. What can you tell us about Marston’s involvement?”
“Nothing more than I have already.”
“Will you help us with this case?”
A deep conflict is playing itself out behind the old agent’s eyes, one only hinted at by the tension in his muscles and the tightness of his lips. “I can’t,” he says finally.
“Why not?”
“Because despite what you see here, I’m not alone in the world. There are people I care about. I’m thinking of getting married, believe it or not. And I won’t put innocent lives at risk for something that can’t make any difference now.”
“Do you really think there’s that much danger?” asks Caitlin.
Stone rakes a hand along his jaw. “Make no mistake about it. You are already swimming with sharks.”
His baleful eyes linger on mine, trying to impress his seriousness upon me. He reminds me of an old homicide cop I knew in Houston, a guy who’d been shot twice in the line of duty. When he told you to start worrying, it was time to put on the Kevlar.
“What about the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files?” Caitlin asks. “Payton’s is sealed. Do you think we could learn anything significant from it?”
“Those were state files. I never saw them.”
“The FBI file is sealed as well. Does that surprise you?”
He barks a laugh. “I’d be surprised if the damn thing exists at all.”
“It exists, all right,” I tell him. “Forty-four volumes. The question is, what’s in it?”
“Forty-three volumes of nothing, and my final report.”
“What was in your final report?”
He sighs and looks past us, to the front windows of his cabin. “I can’t tell you that.”
Caitlin glances at me, her lower lip pinned by her teeth, her gesture of concentration. “The file was ostensibly sealed for reasons of national security,” she says. “Can you give us any hint as to what the Payton case could have to do with national security?”
Stone taps his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. “Del Payton was killed five weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and three weeks before Robert Kennedy. Have you considered that?”
Caitlin and I share a look.
“Are you saying Payton’s death was somehow connected to those assassinations?” I ask.
“Kings climb to eminence over men’s graves, Mr. Cage.”
“Who said that?”
“A very wise man.”
“Who is the king you’re referring to?”
“I’m just quoting an old poet, son.”
“Last night I was threatened by the present director of the FBI. Why should John Portman be concerned with a thirty-year-old civil rights murder?”
“Why do you assume Payton’s death was a civil rights murder?”
At this echo of Ike Ransom, my heart twitches in my chest. “You’re saying it wasn’t?”
“I’m just thinking aloud.”
“Have you ever met Portman?” I ask, my pulse racing.
“I met him.” Stone’s distaste is plain. “He joined the Bureau a few years before I got out.”
“What did you think of him as an FBI agent?”
“He was a brown-nosing, manipulative, Ivy League rich boy with the moral sense of a cat. A good little German with obsessive ambition. After seven years in the field they promoted him to the Puzzle Palace.”
“The Puzzle Palace?” Caitlin asks.
“The Hoover Building. FBI Headquarters. The guys who work there call it SOG. For ‘Seat of Government.’ It’s the perfect environment for devious, back-stabbing sons of bitches. I apologize for the profanity. I forgot about your little girl.”
Annie didn’t hear him. She’s busy examining a rock collection displayed in a glass-box end table. If she had heard him, she would have yelled,
Mr. Stone said a bad word!
“Did you keep any personal notes from the Payton investigation?” I ask, recalling the habits of that cop Stone brought to mind a moment ago. “Something you didn’t turn in to your superiors, maybe?”
His gaze wanders to the rear window, where the stream rushes along the rocks. “You want to learn what I learned back in 1968?” He looks back at me, his eyes burning into mine as though striving to communicate something he cannot say aloud. “Do what I did. Talk to the eyewitnesses. Have you done that? Have you talked to the eyewitnesses?”
I admit that I haven’t.
“You didn’t convict Arthur Lee Hanratty by sitting in your office, did you? Pound the bricks. Talk to everybody who’ll talk and pressure those who won’t. That’s what we did back then. And we learned the truth.”
This statement hangs in the air like a volatile gas.
“Then why didn’t anyone go to jail?” Caitlin asks softly.
Stone’s jaw muscles clench in an effort to control his rage. “For the same reason this country is going to hell in a handbasket. And don’t ask me that again.”
“What was your partner’s name?”
“We didn’t have partners,” he says, his eyes still on me. “Not like
municipal police. I worked a lot with Henry Bookbinder. He died of cirrhosis back in seventy-four.”
“I know you’re fond of quotes. Have you heard this one? ‘You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.’ ”
Stone’s right hand squeezes into a fist. “I think your half hour’s up, pardner.”
“May I ask you one more question?”
He stands and stretches his back muscles. “What is it?”
“Do you remember a cop named Ray Presley?”
Just before Stone’s eyes glass over, I glimpse an anger even more personal than that which I have seen to this point.
“I remember him,” he says in a flat voice.
“Do you think the police made an honest attempt to investigate the case?”
“That’s two questions.” Stone turns to Annie, who’s now touching a clay pot that looks like Pueblo work. “How’d you like that hot chocolate, little darling?”
“Mmmm. It was great!”
He walks to the door, leaving us little choice but to follow. I take Annie’s hand and lead her after him.
“Sorry you folks had to come all this way for nothing,” he says, opening the door to the dark vista of Gothic Mountain rising above the mesa. “Rain coming. That’s October for you.”
We’re on the porch now. The sibilant sound of the Slate beckons from the edges of the cabin.
“I don’t think it was for nothing,” Caitlin says, turning to Stone with a look of absolute frankness. “I think something evil happened in Natchez in 1968. I think you know what it was. I realize we sort of ambushed you here, and I apologize for that. But we want justice for Del Payton. I think you do too.” She takes a card from her pocket and passes it to Stone. “You’re going to do a lot of thinking after we leave. You can reach us at this number.”
His jaw tightens as he examines the card. “You’re a goddamn reporter?”
“A publisher. An honest one.”
He looks at me, his eyes brimming with outrage.
“She won’t print a word you said,” I assure him. “She won’t even print your name. She prints nothing at all until this whole mess is resolved.”
Stone shifts his gaze to Caitlin.
“I want the truth,” she says. “The truth, and justice. Nothing else. Thank you for your time, Agent Stone.”
As we walk to the Cherokee, he stands in his doorway looking—for the first time since we’ve seen him—a little unsure of himself. It strikes me that he liked Caitlin using his old rank. Despite all his deep-rooted anger, Stone is still proud to have been an FBI agent.
Unlocking the door, I hear the scuff of boots behind me. Stone has come down off the porch. He puts his right arm on my shoulder in a fatherly way and looks into my eyes.
“You’ve got too much to lose to dig into this mess, son. The world has already changed too much for it to make any difference.”
“I don’t agree.”
A strange recognition lights his eyes, and I am suddenly sure that in me he sees a shadow of the man he was years ago. “I’d like to give you one more quote,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”
“Whatever.”
“The hour of justice does not strike on the dials of this world.”
I look away from his sad eyes, wondering what could possibly have driven a man of his strength and experience into such a miasma of defeatism. “No offense, Agent Stone, but I think you’ve been doing too much reading and not enough soul-searching.”
To my surprise, this does not anger him. He squeezes my shoulder. “You have more illusions than you think. I wish you luck.”
“I wouldn’t need it if you’d tell me what you know.”
He shakes his head and takes a step back. “Whatever you do, you send that little girl someplace safe before you take another step. You hear?”
“That I’ll do.”
As he retreats to his porch, I buckle Annie into her safety seat and join Caitlin in the front. She looks at me with fire in her eyes.
“Did you catch what he said inside?”
“About Payton’s murder not being about civil rights?”
“No. When you asked him if he had any personal notes he kept from his superiors.”
Stone is still watching us from the porch.
“He said if we wanted to learn what he did, we should do what he did.”
She nods excitedly. “Talk to the eyewitnesses, right? That was the first thing he said. He looked at you real hard. Remember?”
“Yes. Like he was trying to communicate something nonverbally. Do you know what it was?”
She gives me an almost taunting smile.
“Talk to the eyewitnesses.”
“What is it, for God’s sake?”
“Penn . . . he used the plural. According to all accounts, there was only one eyewitness to the Payton bombing.”
She’s right. Frank Jones, the scheduling clerk. Had Dwight Stone tried to tell me—without telling me—that there was more than one witness in the Triton parking lot on the day Del Payton died?
“I told you I was good at this,” she says, smiling with triumph. “Let’s get out of here.”
I start the Cherokee and wheel it around until we’re pointed back toward the jeep track. “What did you think of Stone?”
“I think he’s scared.”
“Me too.”
We spent the night in Gunnison. We might have rushed and made our flight, but none of us really wanted to race back to the heat of Mississippi. We took a suite at the Best Western and ate a long meal in a local steak house. Caitlin and I tried to list every possible reason Del Payton could have been murdered besides civil rights work, but Annie didn’t cooperate with this effort, which made it virtually impossible.
Back in the suite, we rented
The Parent Trap
on the in-house movie channel and watched it from the big bed. Annie lay between Caitlin and me, facing the TV, while we leaned back against the headboard, the pillows from both beds padding our backs. When Annie allowed it, which wasn’t often, we speculated about Stone and his cryptic statements. But watching TV with a four-year-old means
watching
it.
Lying in bed with Annie and Caitlin catapulted me back to a time so innocent and wonderful that I could hardly bear to think about it. Before Sarah got sick. Before the hospitals. Just us and our baby, laid up on Sunday mornings watching
Barney
with no fear of the future. When our biggest problem was deciding where we wanted to go for dinner.
When
The Parent Trap
ended, Annie said she wanted another movie. As I punched in the code for
Beauty and the Beast
and Caitlin called room service for ice cream, I wondered if Annie was experiencing the same memories I was, or at least the safe warm feeling she once knew with her mother and me. I thought perhaps she was, because two minutes after she finished her ice cream, she began snoring at the foot of the bed.
With this background of Disney music and snores, Caitlin asked me about Sarah. I sat silent for a while, but Caitlin didn’t apologize or ask if I was all right. When she interviewed me, I had told her this subject was off limits. But that interview seemed a long time ago. As I sat there watching Belle confront her beast, I felt Caitlin’s hand close around mine, tentative at first, then firm and warm. After a few moments I looked over at her. She gave me a smile that asked nothing, assumed nothing. A sense of pure goodness flowed from her.