The Quiet Game

"Son, this is Mrs. Payton." She gestures toward the elderly woman, then nods at her younger companion. "And this is Mrs. Payton also. They've come to thank you for what you said in this morning's paper."

I flush from my neck to the crown of my head. I can only be looking at the widow and mother of Delano Payton, the man bombed and burned to death in 1968. Barefoot and unshaven, I make a vain attempt to straighten my hair, then advance into the living room. Without rising, the elder Mrs. Payton enfolds my right hand in both of hers like a dowager empress. Her palms feel like fine sandpaper. The younger Mrs. Payton stands and shakes my hand with exaggerated formality. Her hand is moist and warm. Up close, she looks older than I first guessed, perhaps sixty-five. Because she has not gone to fat, she projects an aura of youth that her eyes cannot match.

"Althea works in the nursery at St. Catherine's Hospital," Dad informs me from the door. "I see her all the time. And I've treated Miss Georgia for thirty-five years now."

"Yo' daddy a good doctor," the elder Mrs. Payton says from the sofa, pointing a bony finger at me. "A good doctor."

My father has heard this ten thousand times, but he smiles graciously. "Thank you, Miss Georgia."

"I remember you makin' house calls late at night," Georgia Payton goes on, her voice reedy and difficult to follow as it jumps up and down the scale. "Givin' shots and deliverin' babies. Had you a spotlight back then to see the house numbers."

"And a pistol in my black bag," Dad adds, chuckling.

"Sho' did. I seen it once. You ever have to use it?"

"No, ma'am, thank God."

"Might have to one of these days, with all this crack in the streets. I told the pastor last Sunday, you want to find Satan, just pull up to one of them crack houses. Sheriff ought to burn ever' one to the ground."

We all nod with enthusiasm, doing our best to foster a casual atmosphere. Blacks visiting socially in white homes-and vice versa-is still as rare as snowfall in Natchez, but this is not the reason for the general discomfort.

"Mr. Cage," Althea says, focusing her liquid brown eyes on me, "we really appreciate you speaking out like you did in the paper."

"Please call me Penn," I implore her, embarrassed by thanks for a few lines tossed off without any real feeling for the victims of the crime.

"Mr. Penn," says Georgia Payton, "ain't no white man in thirty years said what you said in the paper today. My boy was kilt outside his job in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and all the po-lices did was sweep it under the rug."

Her statement hangs suspended in crystalline silence. I sense my father's reflexive desire to answer her charge, to try to mitigate the behavior of the law enforcement figures of the period. But the murder remains unsolved, and he has no idea what efforts were made to solve it, if any, or how sincere they might have been. Althea Payton looks momentarily disconcerted by her mother-in-law's frankness, but then her eyes fill with calm resolution.

"Are you still a lawyer, Mr. Cage?" she asks. "I mean, I know you're a writer now. Can you still practice law?"

I incline my head. "I'm still a member of the bar."

"What that mean?" asks Georgia.

"I can still practice law, ma'am."

"Then we wants to hire you."

"For what?"

"I think I know," Dad says.

"To find out who murdered my baby," the old woman says. "The po-lice don't want to do it. FBI don't want to. The county lawyer neither."

"The district attorney," Althea corrects her.

"You've spoken to the district attorney about this?"

Althea nods. "Several times. He has no interest in the case."

Dad emits a sigh easily interpreted as, Big surprise.

"We hired us a detective too," Georgia says. "I even wrote to that man on Unsolved Mysteries, that good-looking white man from that old gangster TV show."

"Robert Stack?" asks my mother.

"Yes," Althea confirms. "We got back one letter from the show's producer expressing interest, but after that nothing."

"What about this detective?" I ask. "What happened with him?"

"We hired a man from Jackson first. He poked around downtown for an afternoon, then told us there was nothing to find."

"White man," Georgia barks. "A no-good."

"Then we hired a detective from Chicago," Althea says in a tense voice. "He flew down and spent a week in the Eola Hotel-"

"Colored man," the old woman cuts in. "A no-count no-good. He stole all our money and went back to Chicago."

"He was very expensive," Althea concedes. "And he said the same thing the first detective told us. The pertinent records had been destroyed and there was nothing to find."

"NAACP say the same thing," Georgia adds with venom. "They don't care about my baby none. He wasn't a big enough name. They cry about Martin and Medgar every year, got white folks makin' movies about Medgar. But my baby Del in the ground and nobody care. Nobody."