Henry didn’t like this, but he decided to go with the flow and return to Snake later. “As best I can tell, the Eagles killed between eleven and fifteen people over the years.”
“I don’t honestly know. I know about my squad, plus some of the bigger operations by the others.”
“Who did your squad kill?” Henry asked in a neutral voice.
Morehouse closed his eyes and breathed in and out several times. “The first hit I was in charge of was an FBI informant who worked with us at Triton Battery.”
Henry felt the thrill he’d felt as a boy in a freezing duck blind when the first mallards came in over the tree line. “Are you talking about Jerry Dugan?”
Morehouse’s left cheek twitched. “That’s right. Dropped him in a tank of sulfuric acid. The foreman wrote ‘accidental fall’ on the incident report, but that guardrail was four feet high. Jerry needed a little help getting over it.”
Henry had seen Dugan’s name in FBI 302s that he’d obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau had never been positive that Dugan’s death was a homicide. The Natchez police had ruled it an industrial accident. Now, with no more than a facial tic, Glenn Morehouse had not only confirmed the murder but also taken responsibility for it. Two murders solved in as many minutes.
“We didn’t even want to kill Jerry,” Morehouse went on. “We growed up with him, and Frank liked him feeding the Bureau stuff on the regular Klan. But Jerry overheard something about the Metcalfe operation, just a couple of days before we was scheduled to go, so that was that. We had to act quick.”
Henry’s heart thudded. The Metcalfe operation? “Are you talking about George Metcalfe? The president of the Natchez NAACP?”
“That’s right.”
“You guys planted the bomb in Metcalfe’s Chevrolet?”
Morehouse nodded as though confirming some trivial fact.
Henry swallowed and tried to figure the best way forward. “But Metcalfe didn’t die. Did the bomb malfunction or something?”
Morehouse shook his head. “We never meant to kill him. If we had, we’d have placed the bomb right under the dashboard instead of under the hood.”
“Well … what was your motive in that case? To scare Metcalfe? To scare the black population? Or the national NAACP leadership?”
The old man gave Henry a coy smile. “Never you mind, right now. Maybe we’ll cover that in our next meeting.”
Again Henry hesitated. His usual tactic with hostile sources was to get them into a rhythm of answering questions. The questions themselves weren’t critical; it was the give-and-take that counted. Because sources were quick to identify what you most wanted to know, and often held back that information, attempting to use it as currency (or sometimes just out of spite), Henry usually buried his critical queries in a litany of less important ones. But given Morehouse’s almost casual confessions, he felt tempted to go straight to the case that meant the most to him. And yet … if he somehow let Morehouse see how deeply he cared about Albert Norris, he’d be giving the Double Eagle control over the interview, and that chance he would not take.
“On Valentine’s Day in 1964,” he said, “a man named Albert Whitley was abducted from the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company and horsewhipped.”
“Shit, Henry. A whippin’s small potatoes. Too small for us.”
Henry noted this in his Moleskine. “Two weeks later, a black employee of the International Paper Company was shot to death in his car with a machine gun. Were future Double Eagle men involved in that?”
Morehouse made a face as though he’d eaten something bitter. “You’re talkin’ about Clifton Walker, out on Poor House Road. Flashy nigger. A coupla them shooters eventually wound up in the group, yeah.”
A fillip of excitement went up Henry’s spine, but he patiently noted the answer in his book. Then, without the slightest change in tone, he said, “Five months later, on July eighteenth, Albert Norris’s music store was burned to the ground with Norris inside during the attack. He died four days later from his burns. Was that a Double Eagle operation?”
The old man sucked his teeth and studied Henry in silence.
Henry wondered whether his voice had given him away. He did not fidget. He did not breathe. He gave up nothing.
At length, the former Klansman nodded thoughtfully. “That was a damn shame, there. Albert was a good nigger. A mighty good nigger.”
Henry waited, hoping Morehouse would elaborate. But the old man held his silence.
“No mainstream Klan group ever claimed responsibility for Norris,” Henry went on. “The FBI thinks the killers used a flamethrower that night. A flamethrower is a pretty exotic weapon, but I’m guessing some World War Two vets might have been able to get hold of one.”
The sickly eye regarded Henry with an expression akin to disappointment. “Shit, man. With all the Cuban exiles training in Louisiana back then, my mama could have bought a flamethrower at a garage sale.”
Henry wondered why the old man was reluctant to claim responsibility for the Norris attack after he’d been so forthcoming about the other killings. He decided to try a different tack. “The day after the store was burned, an employee of Norris’s—a young black man named Pooky Wilson—disappeared.”
Morehouse shrugged. “I always thought Wilson robbed his boss’s store, then set it on fire and hightailed it out of town. Standard procedure for jungle bunnies. Especially hophead musicians. He’s prob’ly livin’ on welfare in L.A. right now, with ten kids suckin’ on the government tit.”