Greg Iles 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, The Devil’s Punchbowl. Greg Iles
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Caitlin. Stone needs to unburden himself, and I think he’ll come through for us. Or for himself, rather.”
“What about Ike Ransom? What’s his story?”
“I think Ike’s got a personal grudge against Marston that has nothing to do with Payton. He knew I’d go after Marston if I had any kind of weapon, so he gave me the Payton case.”
“But has he given you any real information? Any idea of Marston’s motive for the crime?”
“Not really.”
She drums her fingers on the table. “Motive, means, and opportunity, right? The means and opportunity are Ray Presley, but we’re stuck on motive. Marston actually made public statements supporting civil rights in the sixties. I found them in the morgue here.”
“I think it’s money. Somehow Payton’s death increased Marston’s fortune or power.”
“I can’t see that. Financially, Payton was a nonentity.”
“Maybe he was an obstacle to something. Some deal.”
“What about sex?” suggests Caitlin. “Sexual jealousy. That’s a common motive for murder.”
The photo shrine in Althea Payton’s house flits through my mind, followed by images of Del Payton huddled over his dinner table with Medgar Evers, talking about changing the white man’s heart. “That’s not it. Payton was a family man all the way.”
“That’s what they all say until they’re caught with their wee-wees in the wrong cookie jar.”
“It’s not sex, Caitlin. It’s money or power. That’s what Marston lives for.”
She sighs and gets up, then drops her left hand on the charred box of files. “I hope there’s something in here.”
“You’ve got to remember one thing. I’m treating this like a murder case, but it’s not. It’s a civil case.”
“So?”
“So the standard of proof is lower. I don’t have to prove Marston’s guilt to twelve people beyond a reasonable doubt. I have to convince nine jurors that it’s more likely than not that Marston was involved in the Payton murder. That means a fifty-one percent certainty. And the jury won’t have to agonize over their decision the way a criminal jury would. Because their verdict won’t send Marston to jail or to a gurney for lethal injection. Another jury will get that job.”
Caitlin moves toward the door. “I think you’re going to have a hell of a job convincing those nine people unless you figure out why Marston would want Payton dead. And prove it.”
When she opens the door, the goateed anarchists pop through it with their sleeves rolled up and smirks on their faces.
“Mulder and Scully reporting for duty,” says one.
Caitlin shakes her head and walks out, leaving me to deal with my new assistants.
In the forty hours between the end of my lecture on Friday and dawn on Sunday, we built a circumstantial case against Leo Marston. The only sleep I got was brief naps on the couch in Caitlin’s office, taken while reporters, photographers, and interns worked in shifts over the boxes of Marston papers that arrived in desultory waves from storage rooms unknown. Only my anarchists—who did have actual names, Peter and Ed, prosaically enough—kept pace with me during this marathon. They seemed to see it as a holy mission, one in which iconoclasts could cheerfully take part.
Daniel Kelly moved through the building like the ghost at the feast, making wry observations, delivering coffee, and disappearing for brief reconnaissance patrols, which he called “checking the perimeter.” Whenever Caitlin left the building to cover a story, Kelly went with her. The police scanner in her office enabled her to reach the scene of several racial altercations before the cops did. Most of these involved two or three individuals, and broke out in stores or restaurants, where inflammatory language was easily overheard. On two occasions these fights escalated into brawls, and Kelly proved his value both times by protecting Caitlin with his rather alarming skills.
Saturday morning, Ed the anarchist decided we needed fresh inspiration, so he sat down with a computer and inkjet printer and went to work. An hour later, he walked into the conference room wearing a T-shirt with NAIL BOSS HOG emblazoned across the chest in red. I found it hard to believe that Ed had ever watched an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, but he assured me he’d followed it religiously as a child growing up in Michigan, and that most of his ideas about the South had been formed by this grotesque television show. By afternoon, half the Examiner staff was wearing NAIL BOSS HOG shirts, and their galvanizing effect was undeniable. Even Caitlin popped into the conference room wearing one.
But the work itself was tedious and exhausting. The master map that guided us on our paper journey into Marston’s past was his 1997 tax return. It listed most of his business holdings (the number of Schedule C’s and E’s was astounding), and I immediately began drafting a supplemental request for production using these as a guide. His form 1040 showed an adjusted gross income of over two million dollars for 1997, and the sheer variety of his holdings was staggering. Real estate, manufacturing, banking, timber. And despite the moribund oil business, he had recently struck a significant gas field in south Texas. What fascinated me was the variety of small enterprises in which he participated. Several fast-food franchises around town. A steam laundry. A Christmas tree farm. Hunting camps. Apartment buildings in the black sections of town. We even found a scrawled note listing income he had realized from arranging private adoptions over a period of twenty-five years.
In short, Leo Marston appeared to administer an empire of great and small dominions, all entirely aboveboard. On closer examination, however, a dark underside began to show itself. One of the boxes Leo had planned to burn contained records of a collection agency wholly owned by him. Listed as an officer of that company was one Raymond Aucoin Presley. This was the first tangible proof of a connection between Marston and Presley. We found copies of letters sent to hundreds of local citizens, demanding payment of debts on everything from materials bought through Marston companies to personal loans made by the judge. It wasn’t hard to guess what function Presley served when these letters failed to bring payment of the outstanding balances. Most important, he was operating in this capacity during 1968, while serving as a Natchez police officer and in the month Del Payton was murdered. Closer inspection of Marston’s other companies revealed that Presley was listed as a paid “security consultant” to several of them.
Another of the “burn boxes” contained records of land transfers made to Marston or his business partners. I noted the disturbing frequency with which the parcels of land had been sold by recent widows whose estates Marston’s firm had handled. Many other sellers could be cross-indexed to debtors listed in the “collection-agency” box. It was a letter from this box that gave me my first glimmer of a possible motive for Payton’s murder.
The letter pertained to a large parcel of land south of town, near the present industrial park. It was written in an oblique style, but from it I inferred that Marston had used a secret intermediary to buy this parcel of land. Thus, while Marston was not legally the owner, he controlled the parcel’s future use and would receive all monies from such use, without anyone but the intermediary knowing about it. A related letter—this one from one Zebulon Hickson, the owner of several carpet factories in Georgia and Alabama—expressed interest in purchasing this land for use as a site for a new factory. Hickson also expressed concern about labor conditions in Adams County. He was aware that Natchez had long been a “union” town, but what concerned him more was the “wave of racial unrest” sweeping through Southern factories. This was clearly a euphemism for “nigger trouble.” What made all this interesting was that the letters had changed hands in January 1968, a few months before Del Payton died. The situation was oddly similar to the present one, in which Leo Marston owns the land BASF needs to have adequate space for its projected facility.
On Saturday night, things began to turn our way. I had requested Marston’s telephone records, but with the trial only a week away, I had little hope of getting them. Technically, phone