“Of course. She stayed with us for a summer. You remember, don’t you?”
I do. For most of one summer our hall bathroom became an exotic world of hanging stockings, lacy underwear, cut-glass perfume bottles, and blue Noxema jars.
“Hillman called the house a few times after the breakup. Late, drunk out of his mind and railing, or else hanging up. One night when he didn’t hang up, I told him if he came to Natchez making trouble, he’d be a long time getting back to Mobile. The calls stopped. After a while Ellen wanted her own place, so I rented her an apartment at the Windsor Arms and got her a job at the Jeff Davis.”
He takes another slug of Dr Pepper. “As soon as she got her own place, strange things started happening. Slashed tires, eggs on her door, more juvenile crap. One morning she found her cat at her door with its throat cut. I called the Natchez police, but they couldn’t find Hillman anywhere in town.” He closed his eyes and sighs. “Then he raped her.”
A shudder of horror accompanies my amazement. Families are mazes of secrets, and none of us ever knows them all.
“Hillman was waiting inside her apartment when she got home from a date. He beat the hell out of her, raped her, sodomized her. Then he disappeared. Ellen was too shaken up to swear out charges. I had to sedate her. I got the Natchez D.A. to call the Mobile D.A. and make a lot of noise, but Ellen would have been a shaky witness at best, even if I could have gotten her to press charges. And Hillman’s brother was a cop, remember? The Mobile D.A. didn’t sound excited about making trouble for him.”
I nod in sympathy. The old-timers in Houston told me a thousand times how tough it was to get rape convictions before feminists changed public perception of the crime. And the cop angle was a serious complication. Nothing is more incestuous than Southern law enforcement. Everything is personal relationships.
“Needless to say, things were pretty bad at home,” Dad goes on. “We tried to keep it from you and your sister, but your mother and Ellen were at the end of their rope. Peggy was driving her to Jackson every three days to see a psychiatrist.”
I remember this too. Mom taking Aunt Ellen to the doctor all the time. “We thought it was her ovaries or something.”
“That’s what we told you. Anyway, two weeks after the rape, Hillman started calling again.” Dad is clenching and unclenching his right fist on the desk. “I never felt so goddamn impotent in my life.”
I don’t know what’s coming, but the hair on my forearms is standing up.
“About this time, Ray Presley happened to come to see me about his blood pressure. You know how I get to talking to patients, and Presley always had a good story. He saw that I wasn’t myself. He asked what was bothering me, and I told him. He’d been a cop, after all. I thought he might have a suggestion.”
He’d also done a hitch in Parchman prison, I think, but now does not seem the best time to bring that up.
“Ray heard me out, and he didn’t say much. Grunted a couple of times in the right places. You never know what he’s thinking. So we’re both just sitting there, saying nothing. After a while he says, ‘So what’s this shitbird’s name, Doc?’ I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I told him. We shot the bull for a few more minutes, and Ray left. Three weeks later, the Natchez D.A. called and told me Hillman was dead. Somebody’d shot him in the head and taken his wallet outside a topless bar in Mobile.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“At first I was relieved. But somewhere in the back of my mind I was worried about Ray. He’d always appreciated me taking care of his mother, and some part of me wondered if he hadn’t taken it into his head to get rid of my problem for me.”
“Oh, man.”
“A month later he came back in to get his pressure checked. I told the girls I was too busy to talk, but he slipped into my office and waited for me. When I went in, I asked him point blank if he knew anything about Hillman’s death.”
“And?”
“He told me right out he’d killed the guy.”
“Shit.”
Dad shakes his head. “Just like saying, ‘I fixed that flat for you. Doc.’ He gave me this funny smile and told me not to give it another thought. Said I didn’t owe him anything. Just get back to doctoring and living. Those were his exact words.”
“Tell me you reported this to the police.”
“I didn’t.”
Having watched my father make moral choices that cost him money and friendships for years, I am stunned by this answer. “That’s accessory after the fact, Dad. Five years in the pen.”
“I realize that. But the situation was more complicated than you know.”
“You hadn’t committed any crime until you kept Presley’s confession from the police.”
“Listen, damn it! Ray must have seen how he upset me. Because twenty minutes after he walked out, he came back and handed me a zipper pouch. Inside it was a pistol I’d lent him about six months before, a forty-five.”
My heart slaps against my chest wall. “He killed Hillman with that pistol?”
“No. But he was always borrowing things from me back then. Guns, books, my Nikon for a stakeout, that kind of thing. You know I can’t say no to anybody. Anyhow, I’d lent him another pistol about a year before, a little feather-weight thirty-eight. So, when he handed me the forty-five, I asked about the thirty-eight.” Dad takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “He told me it had been stolen.”
I close my eyes as though to shield myself from what is coming.
“He told me not to worry about it, that he’d get me another thirty-eight. But he was really telling me that reporting the murder wasn’t an option. He’d killed Hillman with my thirty-eight, and he still had the gun. If I tried to report him, he could tell the police that I’d asked him to commit the crime and had given him the gun to do it.”
“How soon did he start blackmailing you?”
“He didn’t mention it again for twenty-five years.”
“What?”
“He had no intention of blackmailing me, Penn. Ray Presley idolized me back then. Still does, I think. But last year he got prostate cancer, and he doesn’t have health insurance. He needed money, so he started getting it wherever he could. For all I know, he’s blackmailing ten other people besides me. The point is, he had me over a barrel. I couldn’t see any option but to pay him.”
“Why didn’t you call me when he first came to you?”
“Do you really have to ask? I was ashamed. Because of me, a man was murdered.”
“You had nothing to do with that! You didn’t solicit the thing, for God’s sake. You couldn’t know Presley would kill the guy.”
Dad dismisses this rationalization with a wave of his hand. “Do you remember Becket?”
“The movie or the historical archbishop?”
“The movie. After Becket makes his moral stand against King Henry, the king is alone in the palace with his nobles. These so-called nobles are a nasty bunch, greedy, violent, and drunk. And though King Henry loves Becket, he says out loud: ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ And of course they do. They go to Canterbury and murder him with swords.”
Sometimes I wish my father had less rigorous moral standards.
“Henry knew what he was saying, Penn. He knew the company he was in. And that made him guilty of murder. That’s why he submitted to the lashing by Becket’s monks.”
“You’re not a king. You couldn’t know what Presley would do.”
Dad