Henry wished he still smoked cigarettes. Fifty yards up the gravel road, a fat black Labrador retriever trudged toward the highway. Beyond the dog, Henry saw movement near the house that stood at the highway turn—Wilma Deen’s nearest neighbor. When he focused, though, he lost the impression. After a few seconds of staring, he felt like a deer trying to spot a careful hunter. With four backward steps he carried himself out of sight of the distant house.
What was I thinking? he wondered. Because of his personal obsession with Albert Norris, he’d barely flipped a page in the Eagles’ catalog of crime. He hadn’t asked about Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis, or even Joe Louis Lewis, the busboy who’d disappeared without a trace. Maybe one or more of those boys was who Morehouse had seen flayed or crucified. Above all, Henry had blown his chance to question Morehouse about Viola Turner’s death. Surely he owed his best efforts to Jimmy Revels and Tom Cage, and to all the families who had never learned the fate of their loved ones? He glanced at the clock on his cell phone. Wilma Deen would return in twenty-five minutes, thirty at the outside. Yet if he walked back into the house now, Morehouse was as likely to curse him as tell him anything further.
Stay or go? he wondered, looking back at his Explorer.
As though in answer, his cell phone rang. The caller ID said G. MOREHOUSE. “Hello?”
“You feel better, asshole?” growled the old man.
“Not really.”
“Did you expect me to spill my guts to you the first time we talked? That how it usually goes in your interviews?”
“Not always.”
The silence stretched for a bit. Then Morehouse said, “You really don’t know what you’re dealing with, Henry. Brody Royal didn’t start out rich. His daddy was a bootlegger in St. Bernard Parish, and a partner with the Little Man before he ever took over New Orleans.”
“The Little Man?” Henry echoed, confused.
“Carlos Marcello, boss of the New Orleans syndicate. Carlos and Brody were in on all kinds of deals together later on. Real estate mostly, but other shit, too. Back in sixty-one, the CIA kidnapped Carlos and flew him down to Central America. They strapped a parachute on him and forced him to jump from the plane at night. That was Bobby Kennedy’s idea of a joke. Didn’t matter. Two weeks later, Carlos was back in New Orleans. Brody paid the Little Man’s hotel bill the whole time he was down there, then helped to fly him back north. That’s the kind of crowd Brody Royal ran with, okay? Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, those guys. In 1960, Carlos and Brody gave Richard Nixon close to a million bucks through Hoffa and the Teamsters, trying to beat John Kennedy. That’s who you’re messing with, Henry. That’s who you want to go after with your little pissant newspaper.”
Henry looked up the long gravel road that led to Highway 84. The black Lab was gone. “All that was a long time ago, Glenn. And Marcello’s dead.”
“Brody ain’t dead. And I’ll tell you something that wasn’t so long ago. You remember when they jailed the state insurance commissioner a couple years back?”
Henry knew the case well. “Ed Schott? Sure. They found two hundred grand in cash in a deep freeze in his storeroom.”
“Right. The state claimed that Royal Insurance was paying Schott to rig a state contract. But no company employee was ever indicted.”
“A key witness disappeared,” Henry said in a casual voice. “Or something.”
“Two witnesses. Both women. Do you know who the president of Royal Insurance is?”
“One of Royal’s sons, right?”
“Yep. But the CFO is Royal’s son-in-law, Randall Regan.”
Henry knew all about Regan, who had blocked every attempt Henry had made to interview his wife, Katy. “I’ve seen him around.”
“You know Randall wasn’t no real husband to Brody’s daughter. He’s a watchdog, bought and paid for. He married her less than a year after Pooky Wilson disappeared, after she got back from the sanitarium in Texas. Randall’s job was to look after Katy, but he also ran the crooked side of Royal Insurance. About three years back, Randall and Brody were working a sweet deal to rig a state contract—the same kind of deal Governor Edwards went to jail for. The only problem was, Randall was dicking two gals who worked in the office. One was an accountant, married with kids—the other a divorced secretary with a kid. After a while, these two gals figured out Randall was screwing ’em both. So the accountant decided they’d not only get even with him, but get rich doing it. She called some federal whistle-blower line, something the government set up after the Enron mess. You get huge rewards for ratting out corrupt companies now. So, the feds met these gals, but instead of busting Royal Insurance outright, they left the gals in place and ordered them to steal computer files and such. They even wired them up some days, trying to record conversations.”
“Go on,” Henry said, wishing to God he could tape the cell conversation.
“Around this time, Forrest Knox got wind that Ed Schott was being investigated on the sly.”
“Frank Knox’s son?”
“That’s right. Forrest is a CIB officer in the state police. So Forrest looks into it, finds out about the girls, and passes the word to Brody.”
“Oh, God. What did Brody do?”
Morehouse took several wheezing breaths. “One day those gals left work for lunch and didn’t come back. Snake and Sonny hogtied ’em, hustled ’em into a Cessna, and flew ’em down to a hunting camp in South Louisiana, close to where Frank used to train Cubans in sixty-one. Brody and Randall were waiting. Claude Devereux was down there, too, for the legal end of things. Those gals started screaming and sobbing the second they saw Randall and the old man, because they thought they knew what was coming. But they didn’t have a clue, son.”