The Quiet Game

Caitlin tenses beside me, but I ignore her.

"How?" asks Stone.

"Poisoned his IV bag. He had a coronary, but he's still ambulatory and mad as hell."

Stone says nothing, but I can sense the conflict raging within him. "I know you worked with Portman on the Payton case in sixty-eight," I tell him. "Why did you lie about that?"

"I was trying to protect people."

"Who?"

"You, for one. Others too."

"Well, I took your advice. I talked to the eyewitnesses, and I've placed Presley at the crime scene."

"And?"

"I want Leo Marston, not Presley."

"Squeeze Presley."

"That's easier said than done."

Stone laughs softly. "Ray's not very squeezable, is he? Son of a bitch tried to kill us on the highway to Jackson."

"You're the agent who got shot at on Highway 61?"

"Portman and me, if you can believe it. The world would be a lot nicer place if Presley had hit Portman that day."

"Why? Goddamn it, what's the big secret? What was so terrible that Hoover had to bury it under a national security seal? What's Portman hiding? What could still scare you after thirty years?"

"Do you really expect me to answer that?"

"You're damn right I do. It's time you listened to your conscience, Stone."

"Don't preach to me, son. You haven't earned the right."

"If Ray Presley shot at you, why didn't he go to jail for it?"

"He did."

"Presley went to Parchman for drug trafficking. That's a state prison."

"Justice doesn't always happen in a straight line. You should know that."

I grip the phone with exasperation. "I've thought of a way to go after Marston without Presley's help, but it's a gamble. A big one. I can't afford to be wrong."

"What are you asking me, counselor?"

"Am I wrong about Leo Marston being behind the murder of Del Payton?"

Just as I decide Stone is not going to answer, he says, "You're not wrong."

A wave of triumph surges through me.

"But that doesn't mean there's evidence lying around waiting to be picked up," he adds. "I don't know how much I'd gamble on being able to prove it."

"Did you prove it in sixty-eight?"

"Yes."

"Then why wasn't the son of a bitch prosecuted?"

"Oldest reason in the world. You just be damn sure about every step you take. This road doesn't end where you think it does."

"Hold on. Why are you willing to warn me, but not to help me?"

"I thought I just did. Good hunting, counselor."

When I hang up, Caitlin grabs my arm, her eyes furious. "Why didn't you tell me someone tried to kill Presley?"

"No one knew but my father, and he asked me not to tell."

She takes a deep breath and expels it slowly. "What did Stone say?"

I glance around the dark parking lot, searching for suspicious vehicles. Would I even see surveillance if it was there? Surely the FBI is better than that. I pull Caitlin to me and put my mouth to her ear. She stiffens.

"What are you doing?"

"Stone says we're probably under surveillance. Act like we're lovers."

After a moment her arms slip around me and her breasts flatten against my chest, but her eyes are anything but romantic.

"We've got to go with my slander plan," I whisper. "We don't have time for anything else, and the more public this is, the safer we are."

She slides her cheek past mine and answers in my ear. "I won't do that. Don't ask me to."

"It's the only way."

She pulls away from me, her eyes bright. "Take me back to my car."

"You told me you wanted to shake up your father's business."

"Not like that. I have no right to put him in jeopardy that way."

We get into the car, and I cross the highway to 61 South. "You think Marston's going to stand on ethics?" I ask her. "He'd kill us in a second if he thought he had to."

She turns to me with a defiant look. "As far as I know, the worst thing Leo Marston has ever done is sabotage your love life. And that's not against the law."

"The danger is real, Caitlin."

"Give me a break. Nobody killed Woodward and Bernstein."

"They weren't working in Mississippi."

CHAPTER 25

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.