The cab kept heading west down a twisting lane of asphalt, through stands of hardwoods and pines and farmland. I appreciated the fact that the driver stayed silent. The last thing I needed right now was a chatty Cathy.
Florida wasn’t so flat here. There were actually hills, the highway rolling in spots. No palm trees or beaches in sight. Just dense pine forests and verdant thickets that occasionally gave way to agricultural fields. I had no idea who I was heading to see, only that Bruce Lael had wanted me to make the journey. I wondered what it took to live with the fact that you’d participated in the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The man had been a son, husband, father, minister, activist, Nobel laureate, icon. He helped change the face of America, leaving a mark on the entire world. Imagine what more he could have accomplished if he’d lived. No wonder Lael was tormented. But what about Foster? Was he equally tormented? Or had his involvement been something else entirely, something more selfish that he did not want revealed to anyone.
Especially to his daughter.
All good questions.
The cab drove into Starke, a tiny town among a sea of trees, home to about five thousand people. Lots of gas stations, fast-food places, billboards, and power poles. Everything about the place yearned back to a time before tourism became the state’s number one industry. No flashy neon or high-rises, just quaint and walkable. The address I had was Greek to both me and the driver, so we made a stop at a 7-Eleven and learned directions. We found the house a few miles outside the town limits on a rural, two-lane blacktop, not far from the state prison. I paid the fare and climbed from the cab into the afternoon’s humid gloom.
A dirt lane led from the highway about fifty yards through palmetto spikes and scrub trees to a white brick house with reddish-brown shutters. The drowsy caw of a crow offered me a greeting. No name appeared on the mailbox, only an innocuous route number. I opened the box and was pleased to see envelopes addressed to either Cecelia or Cie Heath.
Apparently I was at the right place.
I walked ahead, following a low chain-length fence hidden under a bank of honeysuckle.
The crack of gunfire broke the silence.
A bullet plucked at the ground to my right, scaring the crap out of me. I stopped, a hard knot of apprehension knotting my muscles.
“Who are you?” a woman’s voice called out.
I stood there, with the backpack in one hand, focusing on the house and an open window under the front porch.
“I came to speak with you. Bruce Lael sent me.”
“You have a name?”
“Cotton Malone.”
“Walk down the drive. Real slow. And keep those hands where I can see them.”
I did as ordered, realizing that I’d been shot at more during the past twenty-four hours than ever in my entire life.
“Are you Cecilia Heath?”
“I prefer Cie,” she said, pronouncing her name See. “Why are you here?”
I came close to the porch steps and could see the rifle barrel in the half-opened window.
“Stop there.”
“Bruce Lael is dead,” I told her.
No reply.
So I drove the point home.
“Tom Oliver blew him up with a car bomb.”
Still silence.
But the rifle disappeared.
Then a small, sparrow-sized woman emerged into the porch shade, the screen door banging back on its hinges. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, mouth wide, face slightly squared off, her cheekbones framed by an unruly mass of gray-brown hair. She held the rifle angled down, her face and eyes as flat, dark, and expressionless as stone. I stood in the afternoon sun, watching her.
“How did you know Lael?”
“We were married fifteen years.”
“Do you know Tom Oliver?”
She nodded.
“I was his secretary, for nearly thirty.”
She invited me inside where the air was thick with the waft of nicotine. She did not relinquish the rifle. I could tell she was wary of my presence. I told her again who I was, who I worked for, and why I was there. Her last name was different, so I asked, “You and Lael were divorced?”
“For a long time. My second husband died a few years ago.”
“Lael wanted me to come find you. Do you know why?”
“What’s in that backpack?”
“Classified files from Cuba that detail an operation called Bishop’s Pawn.”
She smirked. “Those are two words I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“Did you work for Oliver when it happened?”
She nodded, but studied me with a calculated gaze. This woman had apparently been a career civil servant. I decided to play a hunch and found a few of the memos that had been sent from Washington back to the field and showed them to her.
Her perusal was short.
“I typed those,” she said.
“You must have typed tens of thousands of things. How do those stick with you?”
“You don’t forget plotting to kill the greatest civil rights leader in the country.”
Hearing that admission shocked me. Everyone else had beat around the bush. Not this woman. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”
She shook her head. “Because when it happened I was a racist and a bigot. I hated every colored person in this country. My boss, and his boss, hated them, too.”
She glanced back at the memos in her hand.
“The summer of ’67 was full of race riots. So many people died. Black militants were on the rise, antiwar protestors were everywhere. We believed communists were behind it all. Who else could it be? Martin Luther King took his marching orders straight from the Kremlin. It made sense. Sure. Why not? Part of a national fear that people today just don’t understand. Back then, most of the country believed we had to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. When King publicly came out in ’67 against the Vietnam War, that made him even more of a danger. Mainstream white America became terrified of King. So when Hoover decided to kill him, I frankly could not have cared less. Good riddance.”
But I sensed something in her. “That’s not you anymore, is it?”
“A little, maybe. I’m still no flaming liberal. But I’m not a racist or a bigot anymore. Thirty years teaches you how wrong you can be. What did King himself say? The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. He was right.”
“And yet you’ve still stayed silent?”
“What am I supposed to do?” Her voice rose. “Nobody would believe a thing I said.” She motioned to the memos. “You’re the only one with written proof. What are you going to do?”
“Are you willing to come forward now?”
“And do what?”
“Corroborate what’s in these files. Like you just said, you typed some of them.”
“What are you, some kind of lawyer?”
“Not today.” I recalled what Oliver himself had told me about compartmentalizing, and how no one knew it all but him. “How did you know what happened? Oliver surely didn’t include you in the loop on the main goal.”
She tossed me a glance as she considered the obvious strain of incredulity in my voice.
“No, he didn’t tell me a thing,” she said.
I was puzzled.
Then I heard movement from another room and someone entered the den.
“I told her,” Bruce Lael said.
Chapter Thirty-nine
I came to my feet from the chair. “You look good for a guy torched in a car bomb.”
“Your visit interrupted my diversion,” Lael said.
“A bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
“I actually got the idea from Oliver himself. He paid me a visit a few days ago. He and I have never seen eye-to-eye. He told me that it would be a shame if my car exploded one day, with me in it. So I decided, what the hell, why not?”
“And the point?”
“It draws a lot of attention, which will slow him down and give me time to disappear from both him—” He paused. “—and your subpoenas.”
“I’m going with him,” Cie said. “Tom Oliver is not going to let this lie. Valdez has opened a firestorm, aggravated by you.”
“I’m glad to see you got my message,” Lael said. “I was wondering if it struck home.”
“Contrary to what you called me, I’m not some dumb-ass rookie.”
“You keep telling yourself that. Confidence is good in the field. You’re going to need it.”