“Sir?” said one of his agents from the study door. “Somebody to see you.”
“Who is it?”
Before the agent could answer, a trim man wearing the uniform of the Louisiana State Police walked into the study. For a second Kaiser thought Forrest Knox had decided to show up and make a turf battle of it, but then he saw gray hair, deep wrinkles, and heavy black bags like bruises beneath the man’s eyes.
“I’m Colonel Griffith Mackiever,” said the newcomer. “Superintendent of the Louisiana State Police.”
“You’re out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?”
“Technically, yes.”
Kaiser got up and shook Mackiever’s hand. “How can I help you, Colonel?”
“I’m hoping we can help each other. I’m here to talk to you about Forrest Knox.”
CHAPTER 79
TOM WASN’T SLEEPING but floating in a fog of oxycodone and Ativan. His limbs felt no contact with the bedclothes, and only the pulsing memory of his shoulder wound kept him from sinking into oblivion. A few minutes ago his mind had cleared enough for him to see Walt sleeping beside him on a cot, as he had half a century ago in Korea. But Tom’s mind had now turned inward, slipping beneath the surface, into a layer of awareness where time had no meaning.
In this place all things happened at once. Caitlin was as dead as the young GIs who had perished in the ambulance after running the Gauntlet south of Chosin Reservoir, and Tom was as responsible for one death as for the others. In truth, he was more responsible for what had happened to Caitlin, because if he had made different choices, he might have prevented that. The boys in the ambulance would have died anyway. Caitlin lingered in his mind because he had lied to her. The night she’d come to him at Quentin’s house, she’d asked him many questions. One was about the Kennedy assassination, and Tom had claimed he knew nothing.
That was a lie.
It hadn’t bothered him to tell it at the time, because he’d told himself he was doing it for Caitlin’s good, as he had so many other times on behalf of others. That was how it went with lies of omission: you could always rationalize staying silent when to speak would cause pain or injury. But now that Caitlin was dead, Tom would never be able to tell her the truth.
Perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing, said a voice he knew too well.
It was the voice of self-preservation. He had made friends with that voice over the decades. The last time he had resisted it was 1990, the year he’d last seen Carlos Marcello. Tom had nearly fainted when the Mafia boss summoned him. He’d had no direct contact with Marcello for at least twenty years and had not even treated any of his soldiers for a decade.
The summons had been delivered by Ray Presley, of course, the former Natchez police detective who’d once worked as a New Orleans cop on the Marcello payroll. Ray had stopped by the office late one Friday, as he sometimes did, and told Tom that “the Little Man” wanted to see him at his Metairie home. So much time had passed since the bad old days that Tom had actually tried to beg off, but Presley had only laughed and said he would pick Tom up on Sunday morning.
During the drive down to New Orleans, Ray explained that the don had not been doing well since his release from a Rochester, Minnesota, prison hospital the previous year. While in the maximum-security prison in Texarkana, Marcello had suffered a series of strokes, and “someone” had arranged for his BRILAB conviction to be overturned, allowing him to return home. Originally, many had assumed that the “strokes” were simply a scam to spring the don from prison, but Ray had heard that Marcello’s health was truly declining. Now Carlos himself had apparently asked to see the “jail doc” from the parish prison, and someone close to him had remembered the doctor from Natchez.
Tom tried to hide his anxiety during the drive, but Ray Presley had the predator’s instinct for weakness, and he sensed Tom’s discomfiture. Over the years Tom had come to an uncomfortable truce with his conscience over his relationship with Marcello. In a perfect world, he would have had nothing to do with the Mafia kingpin. But when that kingpin provided the umbrella of protection that kept Viola Turner alive, Tom had little choice but to bow to his wishes.
The hardest thing to grasp was how tiny turns of fate resulted in inextricably complex relationships. Tom had entered his externship at the Orleans Parish Prison with the dewy eyes of a schoolboy. Still only a medical student, he’d done his best every day, treating cops and criminals alike with equal courtesy. Tom had always been that way: he’d treat a black sharecropper just as he would have treated the Prince of Wales. But in the Orleans Parish Prison, his attitude marked him as different. His dedication was noticed by guards and cons alike, the difference being that cons—or the men behind them—came from a culture that believed strongly in rewarding good turns. It was this informal system, which in Louisiana had been a way of life for centuries, that resulted in Tom being sold a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Ford for three hundred dollars cash.