murder. Nor would I ask my brother to compromise himself by participating in a cover-up of any kind. I’d be very interested in knowing how you came to make these accusations.”
“I had a visit this morning from Vincent Benedetti.”
Jackson froze and cast his brother a cold look. “Here? He’s here?”
“That explains a lot,” Harris said grimly.
“Explains what?” Jo asked.
“What did Benedetti say?” Harris pressed her.
Jo eyed them both. For brothers, they were not much alike. Harris was small, dark, broad in the features of his face. Jackson was tall, light as a chamois cloth, and as smooth. But then, they’d had different fathers. However, they were both the same in how they regarded her, with eagerness and concern.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Jo told them. “You tell me why you’re here, and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Harris gave his brother a quick shake of his head. But Nathan Jackson said, “I don’t think we have much choice, Booker. Ms. O’Connor, I’ll put a condition on this. What I tell you doesn’t leave this room. I’ll be perfectly candid, but I want your promise-your word-that you’ll keep this information confidential.”
“I don’t think I can agree to that.”
“The lives of people we both care about are at stake here,” Jackson said. “For you, your husband.”
“And for you?” she asked.
Jackson collected himself before he spoke, as if he’d been holding this in for a long time. “My daughter. Shiloh.”
“Your daughter?” Jo knew surprise lit her face like a flare, but the statement caught her so off guard.
The sky had darkened more. Against the bedroom windows, the drizzle began to mix with flakes of snow. Harris turned on a lamp on the stand beside the bed.
Nathan Jackson settled his cigar in an ashtray on the stand by the bed and offered Jo a photograph from his wallet. The photo was old but protected by a vinyl cover.
“It’s the only picture of Marais and me together. That was in the old days before she was famous and we both had to be so careful about everything.”
They were young and smiling. Marais Grand wore a white summer dress. Her long black hair hung over her right shoulder in a single braid. Her skin looked deeply tanned, but Jo guessed it was the evening light and Marais’s Ojibwe heritage. They stood in front of a white picket fence. Beyond that, a cypress tree partially blocked a dark blue ocean descending into night. They were holding hands.
“When was it taken?”
“The summer of 1970. I met her at a fund-raising rally for Angela Davis. We ran into each other at a lot of gatherings like that. I’d be there to speak, Marais to sing. The difference in us was that I believed in what I was saying.”
Harris made a sound like a blast of steam from a broken pipe. He didn’t bother to hide the derisive look on his face. “Cut the bullshit, Nathan. No voters here.”
Jackson went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “Marais, she’d sing anything people wanted to hear. Just so they’d listen and remember her. My God, she was good. And so beautiful. And so damn certain she was going to make it. I’m not sure I’ve ever known any body who had a better sense of exactly what they wanted.”
“That’s when you were lovers?”
“The first time.” Jackson took the photo back. He squinted at it as if he were trying to read the faded etching on a gravestone. “We went separate ways after that. Marais got an offer in Vegas along with Willie Raye, whom she’d hooked up with professionally. I defended the Watts Eight, and that was my ticket up.” He put the photo back into his wallet.
“I didn’t see her again until the Williams Commission hearings three or four years later. She came to see me because her name was on the witness list and I was chief counsel for the commission. She was worried that if she testified it would ruin a television deal in the works for her and Arkansas Willie. She asked me to take her name off the list.”
“And you did,” Jo said.
He nodded, with a faint smile. “The commission was bogus anyway. Congressman James Jay Williams’s version of the McCarthy hearings. Made him famous for a while. And gave me a foothold in politics. Marais and I became lovers again, briefly and very secretly. Then she told me she was pregnant. But she didn’t want anything from me. She told me she was leaving for Nashville to film her television show and that she was going to marry Arkansas Willie so the baby would have a name. She asked me if I minded. What was I going to say? To marry her was out of the question. We were going in such different directions. And to make public our liaison in that way and at that time would have ruined me. I said I didn’t mind. Didn’t mind,” he said with loathing. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He rolled the cigar between his fingers, studying the long ash, shaking his head faintly. “She was true to her word. She never asked me for anything. But she sent me pictures of little Shiloh once in a while. Here. This was the first. In over twenty years, it’s never left my person.”
He took out another photograph protected in clear vinyl. Shiloh at eighteen months in a white dress in a photographer’s studio. Jo had seen one exactly like it before in the trembling hands of Vincent Benedetti. She turned it over. The words on the back were in the same handwriting as those that had appeared on the photo in Benedetti’s possession.
Nathan-she barrels around like a fullback, knocking over everything. She has your nose and intelligence. My skin. My mother’s eyes. Marais.
“Shortly before her murder,” Jackson went on, “Marais moved to Palm Springs. She was tired of television and eager to do something different. I think she and Willie Raye were ready to call it quits. They’d played out the charade of their marriage long enough for both of them. Marais wanted to embark on a new enterprise. A recording company. She was smart. She’d investigated the angles and knew there were lots of incentives in California for minority businesses, many of them programs I’d championed. She came to see me. Told me she was prepared to do whatever was necessary to make sure she qualified. She didn’t need to do anything and she knew it. She was just testing. She brought Shiloh. It was the first time I’d ever seen my daughter, ever touched her hand. You can’t imagine what that felt like.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“It was as if from the moment Marais let me know that Shiloh was born and I couldn’t share that, I’d been living with a shattered heart. But suddenly all the pieces had been brought back together. I’d have done anything Marais asked just to be able to be with Shiloh again. Then Marais was murdered.”
“Why didn’t you come forward about your relationship to Shiloh?”
“I was afraid. It was a very confusing time.”
“And you were on a political express that might have been derailed,” Jo said.
“I know it sounds callous. I had Dwight Sloane assigned to the case. Dwight and I go way back to the old days in Watts. Practically like brothers. And I pulled a lot of strings to get Booker assigned by the Bureau. Because of Benedetti’s suspected ties to organized crime, they were willing to come in under the RICO statute. I had to know what was going on.”
“What was going on?” She looked directly at Harris.
“A lengthy, ultimately fruitless investigation,” Harris said.
“It was Benedetti,” Jackson insisted. “We just couldn’t prove it.”
“His motive?” Jo asked.
“They’d been lovers once. He wanted to start again. She told me she’d borrowed a hefty sum from him to start Ozark Records and he’d indicated he’d be willing to accept sex in lieu of interest. She wanted it strictly business. They argued-in public, in front of witnesses-the day before she was killed. Her murder was a hit, Ms. O’Connor. And it was Benedetti who arranged it. We just weren’t able to prove anything. If Benedetti’s here now, it’s to silence Shiloh, to keep whatever she remembers about that night from being told.”
Jo said, “The men who are here with you, they were all involved in the original investigation. Why are they here now?”
“They know the case. They owe me favors, and I wanted this done quietly. As soon as the tabloids get hold of this information, every lunatic this side of the Atlantic will be here trying to spot Shiloh. We hoped to do it so that Benedetti wouldn’t know either. I guess we blew that.
“If Benedetti’s men are out there, your husband, the boy, the others, they’re all in danger.” He held out his
