“He probably shot a hole in his TV, Elvis-style.”
Henry can barely contain his excitement. “Carlos vowed RFK would never be president. Then he talked to his old buddy Brody Royal. I can just hear the classic Sicilian line: Will someone take this stone from my shoe? According to my source, Marcello was thinking of a patsy setup, like with Oswald. But Frank Knox had been thinking about this kind of hit ever since he founded the Double Eagles. When Brody told Frank what Carlos wanted, Frank said instead of an individual patsy like Oswald, a collective one would work better. The Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, for example. The Ben Chester White case was a perfect setup for it. Those idiots had just chosen the wrong victim, a harmless handyman. Frank knew that if they killed the right black man, Bobby Kennedy would come back to Mississippi to make a campaign speech and commiserate with the widow. Bobby had just visited the Mississippi Delta on his poverty tour the year before.”
This wakes me up. “What made Jimmy Revels the right black man? He was only about twenty-five, wasn’t he?”
“Twenty-six.” Henry gives me a strange smile. “Listen to this. Even though Jimmy and Luther had been in hiding, from the day RFK announced his candidacy, those two had been crisscrossing the state, tirelessly persuading black Mississippi voters to register to vote. He used the chance of voting for John Kennedy’s brother as inspiration, and it was working. Mississippi blacks hadn’t forgotten Bobby holding those sick and starving Delta babies in his lap. Penn, one hour ago, an old NAACP officer informed me that in late March of sixty-eight—probably Monday the twenty-fifth—Bobby Kennedy placed a personal call to the Jackson headquarters of the NAACP and spoke to Jimmy Revels to thank him for his work. They talked for two and a half minutes.”
This I believe. “Henry, when George Metcalfe survived that Klan bomb in 1965, Bobby Kennedy called the Jefferson Davis Hospital in Natchez to talk to Metcalfe personally. I know that because my father was his doctor, and he heard one side of the conversation.”
Henry shakes his head in amazement. “And the hits just keep on comin’. By the way, that was no Klan bomb. The Double Eagles planted that bomb in Metcalfe’s car, and they weren’t even trying to kill him. They were trying to wound him and lure Martin Luther King down here.”
It takes me a second to remember to breathe. “To assassinate him?”
Henry nods, his eyes bright with excitement. “That was the template for the later attempt with Kennedy. Only King didn’t come here. If he had, he’d have died three years earlier than he did.”
“Shit, Henry. Run the timeline on the RFK operation.”
“It’s early sixty-eight. Jimmy and Luther brawl with the Eagles on February seventh. They go into hiding at Freewoods. Kennedy announces for president on March sixteenth. Jimmy and Luther start crisscrossing the state in secret, speaking to blacks in their homes and churches. Kennedy calls Jimmy to thank him on the twenty-fifth. When Frank Knox hears about this, he picks Jimmy as their victim. Viola is gang-raped the night of March twenty-sixth. The rumor starts to spread. Within twenty-four hours, Jimmy and Luther were seen in Natchez and Concordia Parish, cruising the parking lots of joints like Mildred’s and the Emerald Isle. This was a Wednesday night. That night they vanished for good—just like Pooky Wilson and Joe Louis Lewis before them.”
“If the goal was to lure RFK to Mississippi,” I reason, “I’d expect some kind of semi-public atrocity, like a lynching or a bombing.”
Henry nods, his face taut. “I think that was the plan. They were probably surprised to have gotten Jimmy and Luther so fast. I’ll bet Frank meant to hold them over the weekend, then kill them Sunday, so that the murders would make the network news on Monday. But fate dealt a joker out of the deck. The day after Jimmy and Luther disappeared was the day a pallet of batteries fell on Frank Knox. I think he was probably drunk when it happened. Jimmy and Luther were being held captive at a machine shop out in the county. Frank had only gone in to work to keep up appearances. Coworkers took him to your father’s office, and that’s where he died.”
A tingling sensation runs along my forearms, then settles in my palms.
Henry’s eyes radiate almost electric energy. “Instant karma, man. Frank Knox died while being treated by your father and Viola Turner—a woman he’d raped only two days earlier. What are the odds of that?”
“A billion to one. Are you positive about this? Dad’s never mentioned any of it to me.”
Henry’s ominous look returns. “Viola was your father’s trauma nurse. She always assisted him in his surgery. And get this: nobody can remember seeing Viola in Natchez after the day Frank died. They figured she split town with her brother and Luther, or else split after they were killed. Weeks later, Viola was found in Chicago, alone. Jimmy and Luther were never seen again.”
“Where had she been in the meantime?”
“Nobody knows. It was a blank spot in her life, and she refused to fill it during our interviews. The FBI worked Jimmy’s and Luther’s disappearances pretty hard, but on April fourth Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Then on May fourteenth—”
“Del Payton was murdered with a truck bomb,” I finish. “And that consumed whatever local FBI resources were still in town.”
“Exactly. What would become your most famous case thirty years later grabbed all the headlines. After that, Jimmy and Luther were virtually forgotten. No one found any bodies, and the Bureau only located Viola much later.”
“What about the plan to lure Kennedy down here?”