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 smiles. “Not if you practiced. We should do this again. You can be deep background on Southern crime and psychology.”
I start to decline, then surprise myself by saying, “I might be able to help you with that.”
Her eyes sparkle with pleasure. “I’ll call you. And I’m sorry again about the airplane. Tell Annie I said hello.”
She holds out her hand and I take it, not thinking anything of it and so being all the more surprised by the shock I feel. When our eyes meet, we recognize something in each other that neither expects and both quickly look away from.
“The story will probably run Wednesday in the Southern Life section,” she says in a flustered voice, and awkwardly releases my hand. “I’ll mail some copies to your parents. I’m sure your mom still clips everything about you.”
“Absolutely.”
Caitlin Masters looks at me once more, then turns and walks quickly to a green Miata parked across the street with its top down. I am acutely aware of her physical presence, even across the street, and inexplicably glad that she suggested another lunch. With that gladness comes a rush of guilt so strong that it nauseates me. Seven months ago I was standing at my wife’s deathbed, then her coffin. Seven seconds ago I felt something for another woman. This small and natural response causes me more guilt than sleeping with a woman out of physical necessity—which I have not yet done. Because what I felt was more than physical. A glacier consumes whole forests by inches. As small as it was, that glimmer of feeling is absolute proof that someone else will one day occupy the place Sarah held in my life.
I feel like a traitor.
My father wakes me by slapping a newspaper against my forehead. After I rub the sleep from my eyes, I see my own face staring up from the front page of the Natchez Examiner, above the fold. They’ve scanned my most recent author photo and blown it up to “this man assassinated the president” size. The headline reads: PRODIGAL SON RETURNS HOME.
“The goddamn phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” Dad growls. “Everybody wants to know why my son is disparaging his hometown.”
Beneath the author photo is a montage of smaller shots, like a family album: me as a lanky kid with Dad’s arm around my shoulders, printed in a Father’s Day issue in 1968; as a high school baseball player; as the flag runner in the annual Confederate pageant; my Ole Miss graduation photo. I quickly scan the columns, recognizing most of what I said yesterday, laid out in surprisingly faithful prose.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “What’s wrong with this?”
“Have you been in Houston so long you’ve forgotten how things are here? Bill Humphreys said you set back thirty years of good race relations.”
“I didn’t say anything you haven’t said a hundred times in our kitchen.”
“The newspaper isn’t our kitchen!”
“Come on, Dad. This is nothing.”
He shakes his head in amazement. “Turn the page, hotshot. You’ll see something.”
When I turn the page, my breath catches in my throat.
The banner headline reads: 30 YEARS LATER “RACIST COWARDS” STILL WALK STREETS. My stomach flips over. Underneath the headline is a photo of a scorched Ford Fairlane with a blackened corpse seated behind the wheel. That picture never ran in the Natchez Examiner in 1968. Caitlin Masters must have dug up an old crime-scene photo somewhere.
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“Harvey Byrd at the Chamber of Commerce thinks you may have single-handedly sabotaged the chemical-plant deal.”
“Let me read the thing, okay?”
Dad plants himself in the corner, his arms folded.
The story opens like a true-crime novel.
On May 14, 1968, Frank Jones, a scheduling clerk at the Triton Battery plant, walked out to his car in the middle of the third shift to run an errand. Before he could start his engine, he heard a boom “like an artillery piece,” and a blackwall tire slammed into his windshield. Thirty yards away, a black man named Delano Payton sat burning to death. Jones was the sole eyewitness to the worst race crime in the history of this city, in which a combat veteran of the Korean War was murdered to prevent his being promoted to a “white-only” job. No one was ever arrested for the crime, and many in the black community believe that law enforcement officials of the period gave less than their full efforts to the case. Best-selling author and Natchez native Penn Cage characterized the killers of Delano Payton as “racist cowards,” and stated that justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968.
Former police chief Hiram Wilkes contended that leads were nonexistent at the time, and said that despite exhaustive efforts by law enforcement, and a $15,000 reward offered by Payton’s national labor union, no suspects were turned up. The FBI was called in to work the case but had no more success than local police. Former Natchez police officer Ray Presley, who assisted on the case in the spring of 1968, stated, “It was a tough murder case, and the FBI got in the way more than they helped, which was par for them in those days—”
I reread the last sentence, my heartbeat accelerating. I had no idea Ray Presley was involved in the Payton case. I want to ask my father about him, but with the blackmail issue—and my mother’s suspicions about Presley—hanging like a cloud between us, I don’t.
“You’ve been dealing with the media for twelve years,” Dad grumbles. “That publisher must have shown you a little leg and puréed your brain. I’ve seen her around town. Face like a model, tits like two puppies in a sack. I know what happened. It took her about five seconds to get Penn Cage at his most sanctimonious.” He grabs the newspaper out of my hands and wads it into a ball. “Did you have to dredge up the goddamn Payton case?”
“I just mentioned it, for God’s sake. I thought we were off the record.”
“She obviously didn’t.”
I
