I forgot all about the fax. “I’m sorry about that. Where is it now?”
He takes a folded piece of fax paper from his pocket. “What’s it about? This list?”
“Those are FBI agents who worked out of the Jackson field office in 1968. Did you see the name Stone on it?”
He unfolds the paper and scans it, then shakes his head. “No Stone. Where’d you get that name?”
“Althea Payton remembered a sympathetic FBI man.”
“And the visit to Willie Pinder?”
“Pinder had the original police file on the Payton murder. He stole it when he lost his job as chief. I bought it from him.”
My father looks out over the dark water. Already the ranks of cypress trunks screen us from anyone on shore. “I know what I said yesterday. About how justice needs to be done. God knows black people have had a shitty deal for a long time. I saw things growing up in Louisiana that I’d never want to say out loud. I understand why your blood is up. You and Althea Payton have experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. Losing a spouse, I mean. But I don’t think you fully appreciate the danger of what you’re doing.”
“I think I do. Everybody I talk to tells me to watch my back.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m going to be candid, son. You’re not my main concern here. If a man wants to risk his life for something noble, that’s his lookout. But Annie’s life is something else.”
The undercurrent of fear in his voice gives me pause. “Do you really think whoever killed Payton would hurt Annie or Mom?”
“Anybody who’ll hide in the shadows and bomb a man is capable of anything. They’re scum. Dogs. And they have the dog’s pack mentality.” He gives me the cold eye. “You’ve already been shot at. You put these people at risk for the death house at Parchman, they’ll come for you the way they’re surest to get you. And that’s through your family.”
“Who is this ‘they’ you’re talking about? Do you have any idea?”
My father sighs and looks at the bottom of the boat, then picks up a red and white plastic fishing bob and starts working the line mechanism with his thumb. “Natchez is a good town. I’ve practiced here thirty-five years, and I know. But towns are like people. Even the best of us has dark places in his soul. Fears, prejudices, appetites. The capacity for sin, I suppose. Whoever’s behind this Payton business is an expression of that. It could be some white-trash asshole, or our next-door neighbor. The point is, you’ll never see them coming.”
“Dad, if you’ll listen to me for one minute, I think you’ll understand why I have to do this.”
“Nothing to do out here but listen.”
“Do you know a deputy named Ike Ransom?”
“Sure. Ike the Spike. I treated his mother for years.”
“He followed me home last night after the party. He wants Payton’s killer punished. And he knows who it is.”
“Why doesn’t he do something about it, then? He was a cop for twenty years.”
“He’s scared.”
Dad shakes his head wearily. “Over the years at least three men I know of have claimed they killed Delano Payton. Drunk rednecks like to take credit for that kind of thing. Ransom probably overheard something like that and believed it. Who does he say did it?”
“Leo Marston.”
Dad’s mouth drops open. “Leo Marston? That’s crazy. Marston’s a lot of things, but he’s no racist.”
“That’s what I thought too. But how do you know he’s not?”
“Well… I’ve seen pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy, for one thing. With Charles and Medgar Evers too. I think I even saw a shot of him with Martin Luther King.”
“How do you know that wasn’t just public relations?”
“In the sixties? A white man posing with the Evers boys and King?” Dad shakes his head again. “Is Livy Marston a racist?”
“No. But that doesn’t prove anything.”
“Sure it does. Apples don’t fall far from the tree.” He draws thoughtfully on his cigar. “Ike Ransom’s a bad alcoholic, son. Has been for years. I think he’s playing you. He knows Marston hurt our family, so that makes Marston the best way to suck you into the Payton case. He figures once you’re into it, you’ll go for the throat of whoever turns out to be guilty. That’s what the blacks in this town want, and I don’t blame them.”
“I don’t think blacks want that at all. Shad Johnson sure doesn’t. They want that new chemical plant in here as much as anybody. I can’t believe you’re defending Marston.”
He slaps himself like a madman as a horsefly the size of a small fighter plane attacks him, refusing to give quarter. Fearing that this battle will overturn the boat, I scramble forward and smash the insect against his shoulder.
“Thanks,” he mutters. “I’m not defending that bastard. But Leo Marston destroys people. He doesn’t murder them.”
“You’re thinking in a business context. What if it was personal? Maybe Payton and Marston had business dealings of some kind. Or maybe Payton was in a position to know something about Marston’s personal affairs.”
He dismisses this with a flip of his hand. “No way, no how. Different universes.”
“Ike’s anger felt personal to me. He hates Marston.”
“That’s a big club. Look, for all we know, Marston sent Ike Ransom’s brother to jail. He could have any kind of grudge against Marston, and we wouldn’t know it.”
“But if Marston’s not involved in the Payton case, how would putting me on it hurt Marston? You see? You can’t have it both ways.”
He groans in exasperation.
“You’re looking for logic,” I continue. “But Marston went after you for malpractice in 1979, and we never learned why. Motives aren’t always obvious.”
Now he’s listening.
“Leo Marston was D.A. when Payton was killed. I think that’s how he’s tied into it. When Willie Pinder became police chief, he started looking into Payton’s murder. Very quietly, using only black officers. But before he got far, somebody warned him off the case.”
“Who?”
“Ray Presley.”
Dad tosses his cigar into the water, where it hisses and sputters out. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Ray told Willie that he’d tried to solve the case in sixty-eight, but that he’d been warned off too. He wouldn’t say by whom, but it was enough to scare him off.”
“That would take some doing.”
“That’s what Willie said. He dropped it. Didn’t Presley do a lot of work for Marston in the seventies?”
“I believe he did.”
“Think about it. We’ve got Ray Presley, a blatant racist, investigating a politically sensitive race murder while Leo Marston is D.A. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that Marston could have committed criminal acts under those circumstances.”
“But why? That’s what I can’t see.”
“I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t the statute of limitations have run out on anything short of murder?”
“That’s right. Anything short of murder.”
He looks like a sculpture in the bow of the boat, frozen in contemplation. We’re two hundred yards from shore now, far enough that even a severe drought would be unlikely to uncover the swamp bottom. Even if it did, there would only be the cement-filled pail lying in the baking mud among the dead fish and loggerhead turtles. A lost anchor. Nothing else.
I lift the long pole out of the water and lay it along the gunwale of the boat. Dad starts to get up, but I motion for him to stay seated. The last thing we need is to capsize in water teeming with water moccasins, and perhaps even alligators.
I drag the heavy bucket toward the stern and lift it onto my seat, then sit beside it, flex my arms, and roll it
