“What’s a ‘rough’ vow?”
“Kind of like the Masons’ oath, but simpler. We all swore that if we betrayed a brother, our firstborn child would be killed. Whatever else you got was up to Frank. And that weren’t no Tom Sawyer bullshit, neither. You ever hear of Earl Hodges, up toward Eddiceton?”
Henry nodded. “A Klan informant. He was beaten to death in Franklin County. The flesh was ripped off him by a strap with roofing tacks in it.”
Morehouse’s eyes went cold. “Strap, my ass. We used two-by-fours with nails hammered through ’em. When it was over, you could see Earl’s teeth through the back of his skull.” A look of pain entered the old man’s face. “Frank had no mercy on informants. Which is what I am now, I reckon.”
Henry felt a strange numbness creeping through him, as though he’d been bitten by some venomous creature. He’d thought he’d been prepared for this interview, but he was wrong. Morehouse had just confessed to first-degree murder, yet the detachment with which he spoke of human butchery was beyond Henry’s experience. The men who’d debriefed Death’s-Head SS men after World War II must have felt a similar horror.
Morehouse gave him a disturbingly direct look. “And Earl wasn’t even an Eagle, you know? I need to know whether you can keep a secret, Henry, like you promised. At least until I’m gone. Frank always said, ‘A man’s biggest enemy is his mouth.’ And God knows he was right.”
“I can keep a secret.”
“Well, get on with it, then.”
Henry consulted the notes he’d made prior to the interview. “I know the Double Eagle group was founded by Frank Knox. Twenty men, organized into wrecking crews. I’m curious about Frank Knox’s younger brother, the one they call Snake. He seems to have been the most violent of all the Eagles, and he’s made some pretty fantastic claims in the past three years. About Martin Luther King’s assassination, for example.”
Morehouse bit his lower lip, and his pale face lost some color. “We won’t be talking about Snake Knox today. Move on.”
Henry didn’t like this, but he decided to go with the flow and return to Snake later. “As best I can tell, the Eagles killed between eleven and fifteen people over the years.”
“I don’t honestly know. I know about my squad, plus some of the bigger operations by the others.”
“Who did your squad kill?” Henry asked in a neutral voice.
Morehouse closed his eyes and breathed in and out several times. “The first hit I was in charge of was an FBI informant who worked with us at Triton Battery.”
Henry felt the thrill he’d felt as a boy in a freezing duck blind when the first mallards came in over the tree line. “Are you talking about Jerry Dugan?”
Morehouse’s left cheek twitched. “That’s right. Dropped him in a tank of sulfuric acid. The foreman wrote ‘accidental fall’ on the incident report, but that guardrail was four feet high. Jerry needed a little help getting over it.”
Henry had seen Dugan’s name in FBI 302s that he’d obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau had never been positive that Dugan’s death was a homicide. The Natchez police had ruled it an industrial accident. Now, with no more than a facial tic, Glenn Morehouse had not only confirmed the murder but also taken responsibility for it. Two murders solved in as many minutes.
“We didn’t even want to kill Jerry,” Morehouse went on. “We growed up with him, and Frank liked him feeding the Bureau stuff on the regular Klan. But Jerry overheard something about the Metcalfe operation, just a couple of days before we was scheduled to go, so that was that. We had to act quick.”
Henry’s heart thudded. The Metcalfe operation? “Are you talking about George Metcalfe? The president of the Natchez NAACP?”
“That’s right.”
“You guys planted the bomb in Metcalfe’s Chevrolet?”
Morehouse nodded as though confirming some trivial fact.
Henry swallowed and tried to figure the best way forward. “But Metcalfe didn’t die. Did the bomb malfunction or something?”
Morehouse shook his head. “We never meant to kill him. If we had, we’d have placed the bomb right under the dashboard instead of under the hood.”
“Well … what was your motive in that case? To scare Metcalfe? To scare the black population? Or the national NAACP leadership?”
The old man gave Henry a coy smile. “Never you mind, right now. Maybe we’ll cover that in our next meeting.”
Again Henry hesitated. His usual tactic with hostile sources was to get them into a rhythm of answering questions. The questions themselves weren’t critical; it was the give-and-take that counted. Because sources were quick to identify what you most wanted to know, and often held back that information, attempting to use it as currency (or sometimes just out of spite), Henry usually buried his critical queries in a litany of less important ones. But given Morehouse’s almost casual confessions, he felt tempted to go straight to the case that meant the most to him. And yet … if he somehow let Morehouse see how deeply he cared about Albert Norris, he’d be giving the Double Eagle control over the interview, and that chance he would not take.