Sonny leaned closer.
Billy spat dip juice into an empty shot glass. “Henry’s in constant contact with the FBI. Field agents call him for regular updates on the stories he’s working. And the stories he’s working are your old glory cases. Albert Norris, Joe Louis Lewis, Jimmy and Luther. Now, that’s not the end of the world—not so far—but we don’t want the Bureau digging any deeper than they already have. Not while you’re on my payroll. And not when the attorney general’s putting eighty-year-old men away for murders that happened when I was in diapers.”
“Preacher Killen was a dumbass,” Snake grumbled. “That’s why Frank never brought him into the Eagles. Ernest Avants wasn’t much better. We got to shut Glenn up ASAP, Bill. And he’s not the only one. That goddamn reporter—”
Billy held up his hand to silence Snake. “Don’t even go there, Pop.”
Sonny said, “How do you know about Henry Sexton’s contacts with the FBI?”
Billy smiled. “That’s my business, Uncle Son. But take it as gospel.”
Billy wasn’t related to Sonny by blood, but Sonny appreciated the term of affection.
“As I was about to say,” Snake muttered with a glare at Sonny, “it ain’t only Glenn we need to take care of. It’s time to shut down Henry Sexton, too.”
Billy looked sharply at his father, but Snake pushed on regardless. “We shoulda done it five years back, before he printed half the shit he has already. And you know it, William.”
Billy laid his palms on the desk with restraint. “Are you going senile or what? The Beacon is a pissant weekly that people forget as soon as they wrap the garbage in it. But if you kill Henry Sexton, the goddamn lid will blow off this place. Penn Cage’s girlfriend will fill up the Natchez Examiner with Double Eagle stories. Then we’ll get Jerry Mitchell down from the Clarion-Ledger. That bastard got the Medgar Evers case reopened, and he’ll jump on your asses with both feet if you give him an excuse. We’ve got too much to hide for that!”
When Snake opened his mouth to argue, Billy rotated his chair and looked at the huge razorback mounted on a polished stand of swamp ash standing behind him. The kids in the family called it “Hogzilla.” His cousin Forrest had killed that hog; the spear he’d used still jutted from the monster’s back like the sword of a matador. The taxidermist had done a superb job: the hog’s eyes blazed, and its tusks gleamed like the deadly weapons they were. Billy often wondered at the courage it must have required to take on such an animal with only a spear and a horse. Seven hundred pounds of pissed-off razorback—
“Hey!” Snake barked. “You gonna just sit there with your back to us, like Elvis?”
After a deep breath, Billy turned, carefully spat tobacco juice into the shot glass, then looked up at his father with startling coldness. “Before we dispense with your insane proposition, I want to know something.” He jabbed a finger at his father. “And I want a straight answer.”
Snake regarded his son with some emotion between suspicion and malice, but Sonny nodded like a faithful lieutenant.
“When I heard Viola Turner died this morning, I thought of you first. So I made a couple of phone calls. And Sheriff Billy Byrd told me that Dr. Cage is going to be charged with that murder.”
Snake nodded, a little smugly, Billy thought. “That’s what we heard, too.”
“I know you guys went out to see Viola a couple weeks back. A friendly reminder, you said, that she needed to stay quiet until the end.”
“That’s right,” Sonny confirmed. “That’s all we done, Bill.”
Snake glared at his comrade.
Billy let the silence drag, but his father gave up nothing. “Be that as it may,” Billy went on, “I’m asking you two, here and now, did you kill that woman?”
Snake almost came up out of his chair. “You just said they’re charging Dr. Cage for murder! You think they’d do that for the hell of it?”
“They might do it for some reason of their own,” Billy said calmly. “That black DA hates Penn Cage. And Billy Byrd’s got no love for the doc. But you didn’t answer my question, Pop. Did you two have anything to do with that old woman’s death?”
Sonny started to speak, but Snake shushed him with a hiss.
“Talk to me, Uncle Sonny,” Billy commanded. “Don’t pay Daddy no mind. This is too important.”
“We’d been watching her some,” Sonny admitted. “And we might have done it, Bill. She talked to Henry a couple of times, you know. But he didn’t print anything about it, and you’d told me you had a way of knowing ahead of time if Henry was going to print anything too bad. So we laid off.”
Snake got to his feet, reached into his shirt, lifted a leather cord from around his neck, and dropped his JFK half dollar onto Billy’s desk. Billy saw the two familiar holes in the coin that had fascinated him since childhood. For Billy, the sharp, circular rim of that bullet hole in JFK’s pristine profile always evoked the horror of the Zapruder film.
“I’d have damn sure killed Viola,” Snake said, “if Dr. Cage hadn’t done it first. And I wouldn’t have asked your permission, neither. That’s Eagle business, and it’s got nothing to do with you.”
Billy shook his head wearily, wondering why his father hadn’t mellowed with age, like most older men he knew.
“That bitch made a promise,” Snake said, as if reciting holy writ. “She knew the penalty if she broke it, and she came back to Natchez anyway. She called down her own punishment, same as Glenn. They took the choice out of our hands.”
Billy leaned forward and flipped up the half dollar with a fingernail. “You’re damned lucky Dr. Cage did you that favor,” he said softly. “If he did.”