Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

With this background of Disney music and snores, Caitlin asked me about Sarah. I sat silent for a while, but Caitlin didn’t apologize or ask if I was all right. When she interviewed me, I had told her this subject was off limits. But that interview seemed a long time ago. As I sat there watching Belle confront her beast, I felt Caitlin’s hand close around mine, tentative at first, then firm and warm. After a few moments I looked over at her. She gave me a smile that asked nothing, assumed nothing. A sense of pure goodness flowed from her.

Sarah would like this woman, I thought. For the first time since the previous day, the ghost of Livy Marston receded in my mind. I began to speak, and I did not stop until I had told Caitlin all of it, the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the beginning and the end. She asked to see a picture of Sarah, and I showed her the snapshot I carry in my wallet. It could have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t. Caitlin made it natural.

After I put the picture away, I tried to be as natural as she but found it impossible. The sadness that had been accreting in my soul for the past seven months began to break loose, and I found myself doing what I never allowed myself to do in front of Annie. I remember Caitlin holding my head against her breast, speaking soft words that escape me now. I must have fallen asleep that way, for I awakened to find light streaming through the curtains and Annie lying beside me, with no idea how we got beneath the covers. Caitlin was not in the bed, but she had taken good care of us before she left it.

When we reached Natchez the next afternoon, I found a fax waiting for me on my parents’ kitchen table. It had been sent to my father’s office just before lunch. There was no originating number at the head of the page, but the fax itself was a copy of a newspaper story clipped from the Leesville Daily Leader. Leesville, Louisiana, is a community located next to Fort Polk, a huge army training base, and a hundred and fifty miles from Natchez. Above the article was a copy of the paper’s masthead, and it showed the date as May 19, 1968. Five days after Del Payton died.

The article recounted the capture of two men-a supply sergeant and a civilian-who one month previous had stolen armaments from a military arsenal at Fort Polk. While the troops were on maneuvers and the marching band was parading around the base in full dress uniforms, these two enterprising souls had filled a two-ton truck with M-16s, Claymore mines, hand grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive, then had driven off the base and sold most of the ordnance piecemeal throughout the southeast. The civilian half of this duo was named Lester Hinson. I noticed because his name had been circled, probably by whoever sent the fax.

There was also a note for me to call Althea Payton at St. Catherine’s hospital. I tried, but someone in the nursery told me she couldn’t come to the phone. I called Caitlin at the newspaper, explained the mystery fax, and gave her Lester Hinson’s name so she could begin tracing him. She asked if I thought Dwight Stone had sent the fax. My guess was Peter Lutjens, but I didn’t say his name on the telephone. I did make a mental note to call him again and make a pitch for him to take a run at Payton’s FBI file before he woke up in North Dakota. Caitlin asked if I’d gotten started doing what Stone had told me to do: talk to the eyewitnesses of the Payton bombing. She recalled from her research that Frank Jones-the “sole” witness to the bombing-worked as a salesman at the local Pontiac dealership. Jones didn’t know it yet, but he was about to take me for a test drive.

The Pontiac dealership is festooned with balloons and strips of colored foil, but the only customers are clustered around the service bay. The salesmen hover in a loose knot inside the air-conditioned showroom, watching for customers through the huge glass window like predators scanning a drought-burned plain. The sight of my father’s BMW 740i brings them all to their feet, albeit with feigned aloofness. They probably know the car on sight, but hope that old Doc Cage has temporarily taken leave of his senses and decided to buy American for once.

After parking at the end of the main display line, I make a show of looking at price stickers as I walk toward the showroom door. I search the salesmen’s faces through the glass, gambling that the oldest will be Frank Jones. It stands to reason, although in a tough economy retirees might be working jobs like this to supplement their Social Security. When I open the door, everyone is suddenly busy, as though I’ve blundered into a Labor Day blowout sale.

I nod to the nearest salesman, then walk over to a Trans-Am sitting on the display floor and study the price sticker. Twenty seconds of silence is all it takes.

“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” A head has suddenly materialized from behind a wooden partition near the back wall. “You want two, or just the one?”

The face on the head is over seventy, and it splits into the forced grin of a man who always supplies the laughs for his own jokes. He comes out from behind the partition, right hand extended in greeting, revealing a baby blue polyester sports coat over a blue plaid shirt and brown tie.

“Frank Jones, sales manager!” he barks, pumping my hand. “What can we do you for today?”

“I want to take a test drive.”

“That’s why we’re here. Which car?”

I drop the flat of my hand on the roof of the Trans-Am. “How about this one?”

“You bet.” He looks vaguely to his left. “Open the big door, Jimmy Mac.”

“Sure,” says a young salesman by the window. “Can I talk to you a second first?”

“I got a customer here, son.”

Jones has the gleam of money in his eye. He hasn’t yet spotted the BMW, and he seems to have sized me up as an all-cash type. I sit in the passenger seat as he guides the Trans-Am out of the showroom and stops so we can trade seats. Once behind the wheel, I adjust the seat for my longer frame, then pull out to the edge of the highway.

“That looks like Doc Cage’s car,” he says, finally noticing the BMW.

“It is.” I merge into traffic, make a U-turn, and head for the Mississippi River bridge. “I’m driving it.”

He looks at me and starts to speak but doesn’t.

“I’m Penn Cage.”

“Shit. You’re the book writer.” He stares straight through the windshield for half a minute, then turns to me. “Did you say all that crap they printed in the paper?”

“Some of it. They didn’t exactly stick to what I said.”

Jones snorts. “Don’t I know it. You can’t trust a damn thing you read in that rag. They did the same to me back in sixty-eight.”

“About your account of the bombing?”

“Not so much that. It was the little things. Hell, they misspelled my name. How the hell can you misspell Jones? By God, that takes some doing.”

When we top the hill that runs down to the cut in the bluff, I remember that there are two bridges spanning the Mississippi now. Throughout my childhood there was only one, and I can’t seem to keep the new one in my mind. As the Trans-Am ramps onto the main span of the westbound bridge, the mile-wide tide of brown river opens seventy feet below us. The vistas to the north and south look much as they did to Sam Clemens a hundred years ago: muddy water swollen into the forest and sandbars on both banks, pale blue sky blanked out at the center by a relentless sun. Ahead of us, Vidalia, Louisiana, is laid out like a toy town behind its levee, some buildings no higher than the river itself, the personification of provisional existence.

“You want to ask me about that killing, don’t you? Hell, I’ve told the story a thousand times. A dozen times a day since that article ran.”