“You’re wrong, Penn. Think about it. So long as Tom is willing to get up on a witness stand and say that he killed Viola, you’ve got no play. If your father wants to go to jail for someone, he’s going to jail.”
This stark truth silences me like news of a death. After several stunned seconds, I say, “He’ll be lucky to make jail, Quentin.”
“Well … if Walt Garrity’s with him, he just might be okay. And don’t assume you’re right about Lincoln. Those damned Double Eagles may well have killed Viola. Don’t give up on that angle yet.”
“If they did, how do you explain Dad’s behavior?”
“I can’t. But your father’s no fool. Keep using that brain of yours, and maybe you’ll get to the bottom of this. I’ve got to go. Doris has got to give me my medicine.”
As the old lawyer hangs up, I hear him say, “What the hell is Tom thinking?”
When the connection dies, a smothering solitude closes around me. In five minutes I’ll be sitting in a room watching six yellow-dog Democrats and six Fox News–addicted Republicans argue about the prospect of rebuilding the second-largest slave market in America. This notion is almost unbearable, yet I must bear it, for I set the process in motion. The best thing I can do now is make use of my last minutes of freedom.
While I can’t prove or disprove Lincoln’s paternity on my own, I can try to find out whether he was in Natchez at the time of his mother’s death. Chief Logan has access to all kinds of digital records, and what he can’t find out, John Kaiser can. As my Audi skids onto Highway 61, I call up Chief Logan on my cell phone.
“How’d it go at CC’s?” he asks by way of greeting. “You’re still breathing, obviously. Is Turner?”
“You sound nervous, Don.”
“You could say that.”
“Billy Byrd paid us a visit, and he almost got stomped for his trouble. Everything’s cool now, but I need another favor.”
“Your wish is my command,” he says sourly.
CHAPTER 74
CAITLIN PUT DOWN her office telephone and sat motionless, save for her finger rubbing her upper lip. Penn had just called her with a new theory of Viola Turner’s murder, this one generated by a face-to-face meeting with Lincoln Turner. She’d been so shocked to learn that Penn had met with Lincoln that she’d had difficulty concentrating on what he was saying. But after a couple of minutes, she got it. While the logic of the theory made sense, she disagreed with the assumption upon which the whole concept rested: that Tom was Lincoln Turner’s father. She’d begun offering objections, but Penn hadn’t wanted to hear them. He was late for a joint meeting that he claimed he couldn’t afford to miss. Caitlin had hung up with a sour taste in her mouth and resentment in her heart.
Turning away from the phone, she picked up one of Henry Sexton’s old Moleskines and thought over all she had read in the past hour. Getting these notebooks was like being given the key to a hidden library, one in which the secret histories of Natchez and Concordia Parish had been recorded by a monk working in fanatical solitude. They weren’t merely a record of Henry’s work, but quasi-journalistic diaries containing sketches, theories, meditations on life, guitar tablature, even snatches of poetry and song lyrics. And out of all the tales Henry had so meticulously documented, one shone like a beacon: the reporter’s personal stake in the solution of the crimes he sought to solve.
Caitlin’s heart skipped when four black-and-white photographs dropped out of the back of the journal in her hand. The first showed an African-American girl of extraordinary beauty sitting on a piano bench, her back to a Baldwin piano. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but her eyes held the self-possession of a woman ten years older. There was an ethereal quality about her, yet Caitlin could see from the shape of her neck and collarbones that she was no delicate flower. Turning over the photo, Caitlin read: Swan, 1964, written lightly in pencil.
The second photo showed the same girl standing next to a skinny white boy with a nervous grin on his pimpled face, hands locked in front of him as though he were afraid of what he might do with them if they got loose. Henry, Caitlin thought with a pang of guilt. Henry at fourteen. My God. And now he’s lying over in that hospital, stabbed and beaten half to death.
A heartbreaking passage in one notebook had described a Saturday afternoon when Henry had walked into Albert’s store and found Swan and Jimmy Revels making love in the back room. Though Henry desperately loved Swan, she had loved the heroic and gifted young leader whom Henry himself had looked up to as a kind of demigod. On that terrible day, Henry had sprinted all the way home, his youth pouring out of him in the tears he shed along the way.
Still thinking about Penn’s call, Caitlin picked up the third photo from her desk. It showed Albert Norris leaning against a pickup truck with a piano loaded in its bed. He was a strong, dignified-looking man with a smile of greeting on his face, though Caitlin thought his eyes seemed slightly veiled, like those of a sage accustomed to concealing his wisdom.
“You poor man,” she murmured, recalling that Norris had served as a cook in the navy during World War II. “Why didn’t you go north after the war?”