Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

“First of all, Portman wasn’t my partner. Hoover foisted him on me, fresh out of Yale Law and the Academy. His father was a Wall Street lawyer with Washington connections. He thought the Bureau would be a good political incubator for his son. Like military service without the risk. So pal Edgar throws the kid into a high-profile assignment, safely under the wing of veteran agent Dwight Stone.”

Stone stops speaking for a few moments and simply listens. I hear only the crackle of the fire and, perhaps, the rush of the swollen Slate behind the cabin.

“Portman didn’t give a shit about the Payton case,” he says finally. “All he cared about was kissing ass and getting promoted to the Puzzle Palace.”

“But you cared. Althea Payton told me you did.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Cage, in all the mountains of shit, sometimes one case gets to you. You know? For me, it was that one. Payton was a good guy who basically minded his own business and tried to better his lot in life. And he got killed for it. When I found out he’d served in Korea, it got personal. I’d known some black noncoms over there, and they were okay. Payton survived Chosin Reservoir only to get blown to shit by some gutless rednecks in his home town.” Stone slaps the cordless phone against his thigh with a percussive pop. “Man, I wanted to nail those sons of bitches.

“My first steps were the same ones you’ve been taking. Frank Jones, his wife, then Betty Lou Jackson. Beckham now, I guess. Betty Lou knew something, but she wouldn’t talk. Then Portman and me got shot at out on Highway 61. Hoover got irritated after that incident. Scumbags shooting at the FBI and getting away with it didn’t fit his PR plan. He authorized a lot more money and muscle. I cracked Betty Lou, and that put Presley at the scene. Portman and I braced Presley at home, and he told us to stick it. That bastard didn’t rattle easy, I’ll give him that. Even when we got the Fork Polk thieves to admit selling him the C-4, Presley told us to go to hell.

“We put on the full-court press. On my request, Hoover authorized illegal wiretaps on Presley’s home, plus all the nearby pay phones. We bribed local Klansmen, but they couldn’t find out a thing about Payton’s death. Whoever killed Payton had acted without Klan authority. We put intermittent surveillance on Presley, tight enough to annoy him but loose enough for him to shake. After a week he called Leo Marston from a pay phone near his house.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing incriminating. Said he wanted to talk, somewhere private. Marston was the D.A. then, of course. Nothing illegal about wanting to talk to the district attorney. I thought Presley might be trying to cut a deal with the state authorities to avoid any sort of federal prosecution. The Klan had a lot of influence in Parchman in those days, and they could have assured him an easy stretch. They also had influence over pardons.”

“But making a deal wasn’t Presley’s style.”

“No,” Stone agrees. “Anyway, the second Hoover heard Leo Marston’s name in connection with the case, the whole case changed. The director assumed personal control.”

“Why?”

“Hoover was a creature of politics. He demanded total control over every case that involved anyone who could do him good or harm down the road.”

“What happened next?”

“We did a black bag job on Marston’s mansion. Bugged it top to bottom. Phones, the house, the garden, gazebo, the works. It was a beautiful job.”

“You and Portman?”

“Hell, no. Henry Bookbinder and me. The technology was primitive, but Henry was an artist with it, God rest his soul.”

“What did you pick up?”

Stone smiles with satisfaction. “The mother lode. One day Presley drove up to the mansion and knocked on the door. Then he and the judge went out to the gazebo and had a long chat. They said enough in thirty minutes to put Marston in the gas chamber.”

I hear a faint ringing in my ears. “Jesus. What did they say?”

Stone shakes his head. “You haven’t got anywhere on a motive for Marston?”

“That’s been my problem all along. I know Leo secretly owned some property that an out-of-town company was thinking of buying. There was some kind of race angle to that. Labor problems. Beyond that, I don’t have anything.”

“You were right on target, and you didn’t know it. It was a carpet company from Georgia. Zebulon Hickson, the owner, was about a mile to the right of Attila the Hun. He thought slavery was the finest and most misunderstood institution this country ever had. When he opened new factories, he went into communities where what he called ‘the nigger problem’ didn’t exist. Of course, by 1968 towns like that were hard to find. Especially along the Mississippi River, which was where he wanted to be.

“Leo Marston stood to make a lot of money off that land. But the labor situation wasn’t as stable as Hickson wanted it. Blacks were using the unions to push into white jobs. Hickson had the idea that if an example was made, it would calm the blacks down. Apparently he’d done this somewhere in Georgia, and it had worked.”

Marston’s plan seems so obvious now. All it takes is a few facts.

“I honestly doubt Marston ever thought it would work,” muses Stone. “He was too smart for that. But he didn’t care whether it worked. He just wanted to sell Hickson his land.”

“So, he went to Ray Presley,” I fill in. “He said, ‘We need to make an example of somebody.’ ”

“You got it. Marston didn’t care who died. It was just business.”

“Why didn’t he use the local Klan? Put a word into the right ear and let the Klan take care of Payton? Why use a cop?”

“Marston was the D.A. He knew the Klan was riddled with federal informants. He wanted zero risk of the murder being traced back to him. He also despised the White Citizens’ Council. He called them illiterate Baptist sons of bitches several times on the phone.”

“But he trusted Presley.”

“Yes. And he was right to. It’s ironic as hell, really.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see in a minute. So, Presley chose Del Payton as the victim. Why, I don’t know. He was in charge of voter-registration drives for the local NAACP, but he was a quiet guy. Had a nice house and a pretty wife. Saved his money. He had a nicer house than Presley did, really. That by itself could have been the reason. Anyway, Zeb Hickson was all set to announce his plans for a Natchez carpet factory-”

“But you had Marston by the short hairs.”

“Yep.”

“But you didn’t make any arrests.”

Stone sighs deeply. “Right.”

“Why not?”

“As soon as Hoover heard the tape of Marston and Presley, he ordered me to forward every case note, transcript, surveillance report, witness interview, photograph, and audiotape to Washington. After he reviewed all that, he scheduled a visit to the Jackson field office. Good PR for the troops, he said. But the real reason for that trip was to meet Leo Marston.”

The ringing in my head is an alarm bell now. “About what?”

“Politics. Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s assistant, made the call. I still had the wiretap running, and I heard it. Marston thought he was going up to Jackson for a pat on the back for his performance as D.A. When he got there, Edgar read him the riot act, then laid the classic Hoover pitch on him.”

“Which was?”

“Work for me, or endure the punishment you so richly deserve for your sins.”

“Work for him how?”

A cynical smile thins Stone’s lips. “This is where it gets interesting. And dirty. Del Payton died in May 1968, five weeks after Martin Luther King. What else was going on then?”

“The Vietnam War?”