My heart still tripping like an air hammer, I turn onto Highway 61, grab the cell phone, and dial 911. Before the first ring fades, I click End. Anything I say on a cell phone could be all over town within hours. The odds of catching the shooter are zero by now, and my father’s blackmail situation makes me more than a little reluctant to bring the police into our lives at this point.
Shad Johnson’s words echo in my head like a prophecy: A while back, some black kids started shooting at white people’s cars. Killed a father of three. But this shooting was not random. This morning’s newspaper article upset a lot of people—white people exclusively, I would have thought, until Shad Johnson disabused me of that notion. What the hell is going on? Johnson warns me that my family is in danger but gives no specifics, and ten minutes later I’m shot at on the highway? After being followed by a black deputy who doesn’t stop to check out the shooting?
Whoever was behind that rifle meant to kill me. But I can do nothing about it now. I’m less than a mile from my parents’ house, and my priority is clear: within an hour I will be talking to the district attorney about my father’s involvement in a murder case, and deciding how best to sting Ray Presley, a known killer.
“Tom Cage, you dog! I can’t believe you came!”
In small towns the most beautiful women are married, and Lucy Perry proves the rule. Ten years younger than her husband—the surgeon hosting the party—Lucy has large brown eyes and a high-maintenance muscularity shown to perfection in a black silk dress that drapes just below her shapely knees. She also has suspiciously high cleavage for a forty-year-old mother of three, which I know she is, having been given a social update by my father on the way over to the party. Lucy uses the sorority squeal mode of greeting, which is always a danger in Mississippi. She flashes one of the brightest smiles I’ve seen off a magazine cover and throws her arm around my father.
“I’m here for the free liquor,” Dad says. “Not for Wiley Warren to pick my pocket.”
Lucy has a contagious laugh, and Dad has drawn it out. He’s one of the few people honest enough to use the mayor’s nickname within earshot of the man himself. Now Lucy looks at me as though she’s just set eyes on me.
“So this is the famous author.”
I offer my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Perry.”
“Mrs. Perry? For God’s sake, Lucy.” She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she’s been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture. “I’ve forbidden anyone to mention that awful newspaper story. No one believes anything they read in the Examiner anyway.”
The house is full of people, and it’s some house. Though not one of Natchez’s premier mansions, it would easily fetch nine or ten million dollars in Los Angeles. A brass plaque announces that it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The interior has been meticulously restored at a cost of countless gall bladders and appendices. A wide hallway bisects the ground floor, with arched doorways leading to capacious rooms on both sides. Of the fifty or so faces in the hallway I recognize about a quarter. People I went to school with, friends of my parents, a half dozen doctors I know. I give a broad wave to cover the group. Many nod or smile in acknowledgment, but no one approaches. Caitlin Masters’s article has done its work. I stick close to Dad as we work our way toward the bar table at the end of the hall.
As Shad Johnson predicted, the only black faces in the house belong to white-jacketed bartenders and maids, who circulate with heaping platters of hors d’oeuvres.
“Bourbon and water, Roosevelt,” Dad tells the bartender. “Easy on the water. Penn?”
“Gin and tonic.”
The bartender grins. “Good to see you, Dr. Cage.”
Dad and I jump as a boom rattles the windowpanes behind the bar table. Terror grips me until a trombone, trumpet, and double bass join the thundering drum kit and reorient me to normalcy. A black Dixieland jazz band is performing on the patio. There are no dancers. It’s too damned hot to dance on a patio. It’s too damned hot to be playing music out there too, but Lucy and her hubby aren’t worried about the musicians.
Dad squeezes my arm and leans toward me. “Think they were gunning for you again?”
I try to laugh it off, but both of us are nervous as cats. He agreed with my decision not to report the shooting to the police, but he insisted on bringing a pistol to the party. He’s wearing it in an ankle holster.
I turn and pan the hall again. At the far end, beyond the talking heads, Lucy Perry opens the front door and pulls a young woman inside. I feel a little jolt when I recognize Caitlin Masters. She’s wearing a strapless jade dress with sandals, and her black hair is swept up from her neck. As she steps aside for Lucy to close the door, I spy the rebellious flash of a gold anklet above one sandal. How do I feel about her? Angry that she printed something I considered off the record. But I can’t help admiring her for shaking up our complacent town a little.
A blustering male voice pulls my attention to the staircase, where Wiley Warren stands dispensing political wisdom to seven or eight smiling listeners. Warren is a natural bullshitter, an ex-jock with enough brains to indulge his prodigious appetites within a younger group that admires his excesses and keeps his secrets like JFK’s press corps. Dad says he’s done a fairly good job as mayor, but nothing he’s accomplished thus far would compare to getting the BASF plant, a deal which would secure his political future.
“The reason Shad Johnson isn’t making race an issue,” Warren crows, “is that he’s damn near white as I am.”
This is vintage Wiley. The crowd chuckles encouragement.
“Ol’ Shadrach went off to prep school with the Yankees when he was eleven, and didn’t come back till he was forty and ready to run for mayor. He’s no more a representative of his people than Bryant Gumbel!”
“Who does he represent?” someone calls.
“Himself, of course.”
“So he’s just like you,” says a gastroenterologist whose name I can’t recall.
Warren laughs louder than anyone, tacitly admitting the self-interest that drives all politicians and which Southern voters prefer to see in the open rather than cloaked in hypo-crisy. Brutal honesty in such matters is part of the mayor’s charm.
I am about to go in search of Austin Mackey, the district attorney, when I spot him at the edge of the group listening to the mayor. He motions for me to follow him to some chairs in an empty corner. Mackey was a year ahead of me in school from kindergarten through college. A perennial middle-of-the-class kid, he managed to make most athletic teams but never the first string. His grades were unremarkable, and I’m pretty sure he chose Ole Miss Law School so he wouldn’t have to pass the bar exam in order to practice in Mississippi, a rule they changed the year after he went into practice.
“Any particular reason you came home and shat in our little sandbox?” he asks as we sit.
This is not a fortuitous beginning. “Good to see you again, Austin.”
“Skip the sentiment, Cage.” He keeps his eyes on the mayor.
Watching Austin Mackey play the tough throws me a little. But Natchez is his legal fiefdom now, and if he chooses to behave like George Raft in a bad film noir, he can.
“Look, Austin, about that article. Caitlin Masters didn’t exactly—”
“Earth to Cage, give me a fucking break. By now every jig in this town is bitching about how Austin Mackey never lifted a finger to help Mrs. Payton find out who killed her poor baby.”