Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

“You a goddamn liar,” he says. “I shoulda known a white boy wouldn’t go against his own in the end. You been dicking that Marston bitch all along. You in with ’em all the way.” He shakes his head as though at his own stupidity. “Setting up to get the nigger. Like always.”

“Ike, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m setting up to get Leo Marston, and I’m going to use Ray Presley to do it. If I can find him. Dwight Stone and Ray Presley are going to send that bastard to the extermination chamber at Parchman.”

But Ike isn’t listening. At the word Presley, his eyes glaze over with blind rage. “That fucking Presley… he told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me what? Talk to me, Ike! Something’s been eating you up since we started this. What is it?”

He bites his lip and presses the gun harder against my forehead. Then suddenly he lets it drop to his side. “I didn’t know what I was doing, man,” he says in a desolate voice. “Hadn’t been back in the World but three months. Couldn’t get no kind of job. I applied with the police three times. They wouldn’t even talk to me. Had all the Negro cops they needed, they said. Didn’t have but three. Same with the sheriff. I’d done more police work in Saigon than them motherfuckers done their whole lives, and they wouldn’t even give me a chance.”

I’m more confused than I’ve been since the start of this mess, but I’m not about to interrupt him.

“What else could I do, man?” he almost wails. “Wasn’t gonna go on no welfare! I had to deal.” He slaps at a mosquito on his sweating face. “Presley got me on a traffic stop. Just speeding, but he pulled his weapon and made me open my trunk. He found half a pound of white lady. Illegal search if I ever saw one, but you think that mattered back then? In them days he coulda sent me to Parchman for fifty years behind that much heroin.”

A dark perception is blooming in the corner of my brain. A fetid, cloying orchid of a thought. “What did he want you to do, Ike?”

“Don’t play that shit! You already know!”

The pain in his eyes is terrible to behold. I hold up both my hands. “I know what you tell me. That’s all.”

“What you think happened, man? Motherfucker put it to me right there on the side of the road. Said he had somebody needed killing. Said I’d been killing for Uncle for two years, what was one more? I knew what one more was. But what could I do, man? He had me. I didn’t want to die on Parchman Farm. Presley took my dope and told me if I tried to back out, he’d plant it on me and bust me all over again.”

“He wanted you to kill Del Payton?”

“What you think I been saying?”

The nausea of a roller coaster that hurtles in only one direction-down-sweeps over me as the whole sick plan falls together in my head.

“You asked Presley to get the C-4, didn’t you?”

He stares at me with strangled emotion. “Presley wanted the car blown up. I didn’t know nothing about dynamite, but I’d worked with C-4 in ’Nam. I told him if he could get me some plastic, I could do the job.”

“Jesus, Ike. Did you know Del?”

“No. He was ten years older than me. Grew up out to Pine Ridge.”

“Did you know about his civil rights work?”

“Hell, no. I thought he was dicking a white woman or something. Didn’t matter, though. I was so fucked up, I didn’t know nothing ’bout nothing.”

“Ike, listen… what you did was terrible, but-”

“Don’t you judge me!” he cries, the whites of his eyes making him look wild in the dark. “Don’t you cast no stone! I been torturing myself thirty years. After I realized the work Del was doing, I just about went crazy. The whole town was marching for him. I wanted to scream out what I’d done, what Presley made me do. But I didn’t have the guts. I couldn’t face my own sin.”

The diabolical irony of Ray Presley’s plan leaves me cold. He actually blackmailed a black man into committing a civil rights murder. He and Marston must have laughed for weeks over that one. They’ve been laughing for thirty years.

“Does Stone know this? Or does he really believe Presley killed Payton?”

“Stone? ’Course he knows. He came to see me back then. He had the whole thing dogged out.”

“Why didn’t he arrest you? Why didn’t he tell me about you?”

Ike seems only partially aware of what I’m saying. “I don’t know why. He was different, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this at the start?”

“What could I tell you, man? I knew what I’d done. I knew about Presley. But that’s all. I knew what happened, but I didn’t know why. And that was the only way you were gonna get Marston.”

“But how did you know Marston was involved? Did Presley tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me shit. A year after it happened, somebody called me on the phone. Wouldn’t say nothing. I was about to hang up when they started playing this tape. It was Marston and Presley, talking about Del being killed. Talking about me. I figured it was Stone. Had to be.”

Stone must have called and played Ike Ransom the copy he’d made of the evidence tape he’d sent to J. Edgar Hoover. And his reason, I suspect, was a dark one. “Thirty years, Ike. Thirty years. Couldn’t you figure a way to trade what you knew for immunity, or-”

“Who was I gonna go to, man?” Spittle flies from his mouth. “The FBI already knew what had gone down. And they didn’t arrest nobody! A few years later I tried to find Stone, but the Bureau had fired his ass. Portman was a U.S. attorney, and I knew better than to trust that Yankee piece of shit. And Marston was on the state supreme court! What’s a drunk nigger cop from Mississippi gonna do against people swingin’ that kind of weight? You tell me.”

“Then why tell me? Why try at all after thirty years?”

His broad shoulders sag as though under a great weight, and he speaks toward the floor. “I didn’t have no choice. It ate at me so long… I thought it would get better over time, but it got worse. A few months back, I found myself going to church. Not wanting to… needing to. You know? Being raised Catholic, I guess. Don’t matter if you stop goin’. You can give up on God, but it don’t matter. ’Cause He don’t give up on you.”

The tortured paths this man has pushed himself down are beyond any imagining. “Ike, you came to me knowing you could go to jail for the rest of your life. That you could be executed. That means a lot. And I’ve figured a way to turn Presley against Marston. If you’ll get on that witness stand tomorrow and tell the truth-”

“Is Stone gonna testify?”

“Yes.”

“Is he here in town?”

This isn’t the time to lie. “No. But he’s on his way here. Some people tried to kill us last night. Portman’s guys probably. We got split up.”

Ike starts pacing back and forth, patting the Sig-Sauer against his leg. “But he’s alive?”

“You can’t let your decision be based on what Stone does. This thing’s eating you alive because you know you did wrong. Terrible wrong. It’s got nothing to do with you or me. You owe it to Althea Payton to tell the truth. You owe it to Del. You owe it to yourself, man.”

“I don’t owe nobody but God!” The Sig jerks up again, aimed at my chest now. “You don’t know how close it’s been. At first I thought maybe you could nail Marston without me having to go down. But that was stupid. Crazy. The closer you got to the truth, the more I saw I was gonna have to pay the piper, no matter what. One night I got so drunk I thought about killing you, just to stop it all. That night you left the newspaper by yourself… I was right behind you.”

My heart feels like a ball of lead.