“I know it, bud. But I don’t know how I can help you. John Kaiser ain’t gonna tell me shit about that kind of thing. She’s in the hands of Uncle Sam now.”
Snake made a fist and squeezed it tight. As much as he’d wanted to cut the cord with the VK, he was going to need them still. “Okay. Tell me about Tom Cage, then.”
“What about him?”
“I heard his lawyer said today they’re gonna make a fight of it.”
“Sure sounded like it to me. But they got their asses handed to them all day long in court. If the jury could have voted right after that air force major spit on Dr. Cage, he’d already be in the bus headed for Parchman.”
“Yeah, but that’s not when they vote.”
“I don’t think it matters, buddy. That Avery’s been acting like he’s gone senile.”
“‘Acting’ is right,” Snake muttered. “Quentin Avery is the craftiest spade you ever come across in your life. You can bank on that.”
“Well . . . what do you need from me?”
Snake closed his eyes and made a command decision. “Tell me about Dr. Cage’s jail routine.”
“Ohhhh, shit now. Come on. Don’t go there. We got media from all over the world in town!”
Snake winced and spat into the river. “Start talking, Billy boy.”
As the sheriff reluctantly complied, Snake turned and walked up into the dark trees between the river and Rodney. A cloud of mosquitoes instantly swarmed his head. He cursed and swatted until they were a bloody paste on his cheek and forearms. He had no intention of becoming one of the ghosts of this forgotten town.
Chapter 44
An hour after nightfall, we finally caught a break. The one-sided nature of today’s courtroom action had an unintended consequence: after seeing how badly things were going for my father, Reverend John Baldwin and his son Reverend Richard, whom Serenity and I visited on her first full day in Natchez, knocked at my front door and asked to see us. With them they carried something Henry Sexton would have seen as the holy grail of local journalism: two photocopied pages from the journals of Albert Norris.
According to Henry, Norris’s journals disappeared from his music store on the night it was burned by the Double Eagles. Some investigators had even theorized that Norris had been murdered over the journals themselves. A set of accounting ledgers, these apocryphal volumes supposedly contained records of all the trysts Albert had arranged over the years between mixed-race couples, as well as records of bootlegging sales, loans, and many other activities that fell on the wrong side of the law. Henry had once told me that anyone in possession of those ledgers would never have to worry about money again, so valuable would they be as a blackmail tool.
Tonight I learned that Reverend Baldwin personally salvaged those ledgers from Albert’s floor safe on the night he was burned out. Baldwin had served with Albert in the Deacons for Defense, and he knew his friend wouldn’t have wanted those records to fall into the wrong hands—especially those of the KKK or the Double Eagles, where knowledge of interracial relationships would likely have resulted in reprisal murders. For this reason, too, Baldwin did not risk bringing the journals to my house, but only two photocopied pages.
“We’ve been attending the trial, you see,” the elder Reverend Baldwin explained. “And it’s pretty clear to me that Judge Elder is biased toward the prosecution.”
“Quentin Avery believes the same thing.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s fair to your father. And I don’t think it’s accidental.”
“What makes you say that?”
That was when Baldwin brought out the photocopied pages. And what they showed was that in 1954, a black woman named Fannie Elder had been secretly meeting a white man with whom she was sexually involved. Most times she met him in his office, but a few times she met him in the back of Albert’s store. When I saw the man’s name, I was speechless for a few seconds. When I finally found my voice, I said:
“That son of a bitch?”
Reverend Baldwin nodded and said, “Is Judge Joe Elder’s real father.”
The man whose name was written in Albert Norris’s book was Claude Devereux. Claude Devereux, the Cajun lawyer who had defended both Ku Klux Klansmen and Double Eagles during the worst years of the 1960s. Claude Devereux, the lawyer to whom Albert Norris’s doctor had confided Albert’s dying accusation against Brody Royal, and who had then betrayed that information to Royal, resulting in the murder of that doctor by Snake Knox. Claude Devereux, the lawyer in a photograph with my father, Brody Royal, and Ray Presley during a deep-sea fishing excursion with a Frenchman who likely had been involved in the assassination of John Kennedy. The lawyer who three months ago fled the country to escape RICO charges stemming from his illegal business activities with Brody Royal, and for criminal acts committed on behalf of the Knox family.
“Does Judge Elder know this?” I asked.
“He does,” said Reverend Baldwin. “And I believe that’s the reason for his bias against your father. When he thinks about your father and Viola, he sees Claude Devereux and his mother.”
I thanked both men profusely, as did Serenity, and then we led them back to their car. I found that I was shaking with excitement, if only because the revelation that those ledgers still exist would have been such a triumph for both Henry and Caitlin.
“What do you want to do with this?” Serenity asked.
“We have to take it to Quentin. Joe Elder clerked for him. He’ll know how to handle it.”
“I guess we made a good impression when we went to see the Revs,” Tee said.
“I think we can chalk this windfall up to you.”
She grinned then. “I’ll take that. I only wish my efforts in the redneck quarter had been as effective.”
Less than five minutes later, we discovered that they had been. Before we could leave the house to visit Quentin at Edelweiss, my cell phone rang. The caller was Deke Devine. The younger son of Double Eagle Will Devine—the son named after a Mercury astronaut—Deke told me that he and his mother wanted to speak with me privately about a possible deal for his father. Will Senior, he said, would not leave the house because he believed that he—like every other surviving Double Eagle—was being watched by members of the VK motorcycle club. When I asked how we could meet, Deke told me that he and his mother would drive up my street—Washington Street—in one hour in a Winnebago motor home. He would stop at the corner of Washington and Union long enough for me to climb inside. When the meeting was over, he would return me home. I didn’t like the sound of it, but Devine said those were the only circumstances under which his mother would meet me. I told him to be at that corner in one hour, and I would hear what he had to say.
“Why is everybody helping us all of a sudden?” I asked the air.