Greg Iles 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, The Devil’s Punchbowl. Greg Iles
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Medgar got Del into civil rights work?”
“Lord, yes. Medgar ate right in this house whenever he came through town.” Althea shakes her head sadly. “When Beckwith killed Medgar in June of sixty-three, Del changed again. He said the war had come home to America. Then President Kennedy was shot that November. Del had joined the NAACP by then, of course, and by 1965 he was in charge of voter registration for this area. Del was the highest-ranking black man at the battery plant. Even the white men liked him. They knew he knew his job.”
“Who do you think planted that bomb, Althea?”
“Well … the Klan, I guess. There were a lot of beatings out at the paper mill around then, Klan workers beating black workers. You know. Scaring them off. There was some Klan at the tire plant, and at the battery plant too.”
“A car bomb is quite an escalation from a beating. Did Del have any personal enemies you know of?”
“Del didn’t have an enemy in this world.”
He had at least one, I say silently. But it’s certainly possible that Payton was chosen at random, to send a warning to someone. “Did he seem any more worried than usual about going to work near the time of his death?”
She shakes her head. “We had some death threats, but we got those with every promotion Del had. He just kept on keeping on. He’d say, ‘Thea, we can’t let ’em get us down.’”
I remember the nightmarish weeks of the Hanratty trial, when death threats arrived almost daily. What courage it must have taken for Del Payton to get up every morning of his life and go to work with men he knew wanted him dead.
“He was depressed,” Althea adds. “Over Dr. King’s death. Martin was assassinated just five weeks before Del was killed. And Del was so saddened by that, because already he saw the Movement being taken over by advocates of violence. Men with bitterness in their hearts. Stokely Carmichael and the rest. Black racists, he called them.”
The more I learn about Del Payton, the more I feel that his murder was a terrible loss to the community in which I grew up. “Does anything else stand out?”
“No. The FBI asked me all this back when it happened, and I told them the same thing. One day Del went to work and just didn’t come home.”
I looked helplessly around the room. Del Payton has been dead for thirty years, but he is as alive here as a dead man can be. When Annie is a grown woman, will this large a piece of my heart still be reserved for Sarah?
“Do you remember the names of any of the FBI agents who talked to you?”
“I remember one, very well. Agent Stone. He was about Del’s age, and he’d served in Korea too. Agent Stone really tried to help me. But he was the only one. He had a younger man with him who never said much. He didn’t care nothing about us. Like all the rest.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. Just a stuck-up Yankee. Agent Stone came by the house before he left town the last time. He apologized for not having gotten justice for Del. He was a good man, and I got the feeling he knew there was some dirty work at the crossroads on Del’s case.”
“Did he say anything specific?”
“No. He just seemed like he wanted to say more than he could.”
“Do you know a deputy named Ike Ransom? Some people used to call him Ike the Spike.”
A strange stillness comes over Althea. “They still call him that. Ike was a good boy who turned out bad. He got on that dope over in Vietnam and drank all the years after that. He hurt a lot of black people to impress his bosses. Why you asking about Ike Ransom?”
“It’s not important.” I stand. “I think that’s enough questions for now.”
Althea studies me for a few moments, then stands and presses her shorts flat against her thighs. “Come out to the garden and let me get you some tomatoes.”
“Oh, no. But thank you.”
“Nonsense. Your daddy loves my tomatoes. I been paying him in tomatoes for years.”
I follow her to the kitchen, where she picks up a Piggly Wiggly sack and goes out the back door.
The backyard is bordered by woods, and most of the yard is taken up by a vegetable garden laid out with architectural precision. The vines along the ground are bursting with squash and rattlesnake watermelons, and the tomato plants stand four feet tall. Toward the back rows I see butter beans, corn, collards, and pole beans. The only eyesore is a rusted, weed-grown husk of a car sitting up on blocks on the near side of the garden.
Althea pulls a red bandanna from her back pocket, ties it around her head, and walks between two rows of tomato plants. I check the junker for obvious wasp nests, then climb onto its trunk and watch Althea pick prize specimens for her sack.
“This is some garden,” I call after her.
“Daddy always had a garden. Drove mama crazy. We had mason jars stacked to the ceiling at canning time.”
The low rumble of a truck passing on the road breaks the stillness, then fades. I wish Annie was here to see the garden.
“I don’t know why I keep that old wreck,” Althea says from among the plants. “It makes me sad more than anything. But sometimes it reminds me of the times me and Del went riding out by the river, when we were young. We’d roll down the window and cruise up the levee road, listening to Nat Cole. Del would have his arm around me, and it was like nobody could touch us. We could do anything we wanted, you know? Go anywhere. It was just a dream, but it was a good one.”
I feel a strange heat at the back of my neck. For the first time I really look at the car I am sitting on. It’s a Ford Fairlane. A white sedan, maybe a ’61. I slide off it slowly.
“Is this …?”
“I thought you recognized it when you first saw it,” Althea says, stepping out of the rows. “From the newspaper picture.”
“I guess it’s the rust,” I say distractedly.
The Fairlane’s hood is lying crossways over the engine compartment. I put my hands under the hot metal and flip the hood off the car. Several desiccated wasp nests cling to the fender wells, but it’s not the wasp nests that send a chill through me. The Ford’s engine is a mass of mangled metal. The bomb that killed Del Payton was set between the engine block and the firewall. The explosion blew the motor forward, breaking the mounts, tore the transmission away from the bell housing, and cut a fissure through the lower part of the firewall. I can’t believe Payton survived two seconds after that blast. Even the engine block shows signs of shearing, and the whole compartment is littered with tiny metal fragments. The exhaust manifold was sliced in two like a length of salami. This image tickles something at the back of my mind.
“It sat rusting behind the jail for a year,” Althea says. “I thought they were keeping it in case they got a clue about the bombing, but they’d just forgot about it. So I had my father tow it out here. Nothing but a home for birds and wasps now.”
As I bend over the wrecked engine, something else strikes me. This car burned. I knew that, of course, from Caitlin’s article, and also from the picture, but it never really registered. Rust has eaten away the charring on the exterior of the car, but the passenger compartment is a nightmare of blackened metal and melted plastic. This too has hidden significance.
“What do you see?” Althea asks.
“I’m not sure.”
Alarms are ringing now. I don’t know the significance of what I am seeing, but I know with utter certainty that it is significant. And I know a man who can tell me why. While researching my third novel, I spent two days with a BATF explosives expert named Huey Moak. Huey showed me a lot of photographs and even more pieces of stretched and twisted metal. What I’m seeing now, I saw in some of those photos.
“Do