Excitement and awe fill her eyes. “Are you serious? Did the Examiner cover the murder?”
“I don’t know. I was eight years old then. I do know Dan Rather came down with a half dozen network correspondents. The FBI was up in arms, and two of their agents were shot at on the road between here and Jackson.”
“Why was Payton murdered?”
“He was about to be hired for a job that until then had been held exclusively by whites.”
“The police must have had some idea who did it.”
“Everybody knew who did it. Racist cowards motivated by the tacit encouragement of white leaders who knew better. A year before, they bombed another black guy at the same plant, but he survived. My father treated him. This guy was on the hospital phone with Bobby Kennedy every day, had guards all around his room, the works.”
“This is great stuff. My aunt went to school with Bobby.”
Her self-centered dilettantism finally puts me over the edge. “Caitlin, you’re so transparent. You want to hear the same thing every other Northern journalist wants to hear: that the Klan is alive and well, that the South is as Gothic and demonic as it ever was. Terrible things did happen here in the sixties, and people who knew better turned a blind eye. As a boy I watched the Klan march robed on horseback right out there on Main Street. City police directed traffic for them. But that has nothing to do with Natchez as it is today.”
“How can you say that?”
“You want to assign guilt? The Examiner printed the time of that Klan march but refused to print the time or location of a single civil rights meeting. Is the Examiner the same newspaper it was then?”
She ignores the question. “Why haven’t I heard people talking about the Payton case before? Even the African Americans don’t talk about it.”
“Because if you live here, you want to make the best life you can. Stirring up the past doesn’t help anybody.”
“But cases like this are being reopened every day, right here in Mississippi. The Byron de la Beckwith case. The retrial of Sam Bowers, the Klan Wizard from Laurel. You must know that the state recently opened the secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission?”
“So?”
“The Sovereignty Commission was like a racist KGB. They kept files not only on African Americans but on hundreds of whites suspected of liberal sympathies.”
“So?”
Caitlin looks at me in bewilderment. “So? Newsweek just ran a big piece on it, and Peter Jennings’s people have been calling around the state, trolling for stories. The Payton case could be reopened at any time.”
“Glad to hear it. Justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968, but this isn’t some old trial with an all-white hung jury. This is an unsolved murder. A capital murder. No defendant. No suspects, as far as I know. No crime scene. Old or dead witnesses—”
“Nobody said winning a Pulitzer is easy.”
A light clicks on in my head. “Ah. That’s the plan? Winning a Pulitzer before you’re thirty?”
She gives me a sly smile. “Before I’m twenty-nine. That’s the plan.”
“God help this town.”
Her laugh is full and throaty, one I’d expect from an older woman. “Did you know that some of the Sovereignty Commission files are going to remain sealed?”
“No.”
“Forty-two of them. Some of them on major politicians. I heard Trent Lott’s was one of them, but that turned out to be wrong.”
“That’s no surprise. A lot of the most sensitive files were destroyed years ago.”
“Why haven’t you explored any of this in your novels?”
“A sense of loyalty to the place that bore me, I suppose. A lot of people would have to die before I could write a book like that.”
“So, until then you write fluff and take the easy money?”
“I don’t write fluff.”
She holds up her hands in contrition. “I know. I did a Nexis search on you. Publishers Weekly named False Witness the fourth-best legal thriller ever written.”
“After what?”
“Anatomy of a Murder, The Caine Mutiny, and Presumed Innocent.”
“That’s pretty good company,” I murmur, painfully aware that False Witness was four books ago.
“Yes, but it just seems so obvious that you should be writing about all this. Write what you know! You know?”
Caitlin picks up the check and walks over to the cash register, her movements fluid and graceful despite the phenomenal energy that animates her. The restaurant is empty now but for the cashier and our waitress, who chooses this moment to come forward with her copy of False Witness. I take the book, open it to the flyleaf, and accept the pen she offers.
“Would you like me to personalize it?”
“Wow, that would be great. Um, to Jenny. That’s me.”
“No last name?”
“Just Jenny would be cool.”
I write: Jenny, I enjoyed meeting you. Penn Cage.
She blushes as she takes back the book, then glances at Caitlin, who stands waiting for me. “I’d love to talk to you sometime,” she says in a quavering voice. “Ask you some questions, maybe.”
I recognize the nervous tones of an aspiring writer. “I’ll be in again. A friend of mine owns the place.”
“Wow, okay. Thanks.”
I join Caitlin as she walks out onto the brightly lit street.
“Did you get enough for your piece?”
“More than enough.” She tucks her copy of False Witness under one arm and buttons her jacket. “AP will probably pick it up, and it’ll be reprinted all over the South. They like fluff as much as anybody.”
I sigh wearily.
“I’m joking, Penn. God, take it easy, would you?”
“I guess I’m a little tense.”
“A little?” She takes False Witness in both hands, then bends at the waist and touches the book flat against the sidewalk, displaying a limberness that makes my back hurt and draws looks from several passersby. “Mmm, I needed that.”
“If I tried that, they’d hear tendons popping across the river.”
She
