Unwritten Laws 01(62)

Henry kept silent, afraid of saying the wrong thing. Morehouse seemed to have no idea Viola was dead. Before Henry revealed that fact, he would draw out what information he could. “Why was Viola threatened, Glenn? Did she know who killed her brother?”

But Morehouse seemed to have sunk into himself again.

“If she’d known who killed Jimmy,” Henry reasoned aloud, “she wouldn’t have made it out of Natchez alive. Would she?”

“She damn near didn’t,” the old man muttered. “If it hadn’t been for Ray Presley and Dr. Cage, she wouldn’t have.”

Henry raced through his mental files: Ray Presley had been a dirty cop in both Natchez and New Orleans. He had strong ties to the Marcello mob and was feared by everyone on both sides of the law. Stranger still, he’d been killed during Penn Cage’s effort to solve Natchez’s most famous civil rights murder, which had also happened in 1968.

“What did Ray Presley and Dr. Cage have to do with saving Viola?”

The old man touched a knuckle to his forehead as though to ward off some evil spirit. “Ray’s dead, Henry. Best to pass over that bastard in silence.” A strange urgency came into his eyes. “Are you going to talk to Viola again?”

Henry thought of the emaciated corpse from the video. “I don’t know. Why?”

“If you do … you tell her I’m sorry. Okay? Tell her I didn’t mean her no harm.”

Morehouse had to be thinking about the rape. “What did you do to her, Glenn?”

Seeing dread in the old man’s eyes, Henry decided to press ahead. “Did you rape her?”

Morehouse winced.

“On March twenty-seventh of sixty-eight,” Henry said, “a rumor spread that Viola had been gang-raped by the Klan. I think you guys knew Jimmy and Luther wouldn’t be able to keep hiding if they thought Viola was suffering in their place. Was that just a story, Glenn? Or did you guys really rape her?”

Morehouse struck out with one arm, as though to ward off a blow.

“You need to tell it, man. Let go of this thing. That’s why you brought me here.”

The old man clung to his silence like a shield.

“Viola wouldn’t admit the rape to me,” Henry said softly, “but I saw the pain in her eyes. You took a turn, didn’t you?”

Morehouse’s face had gone bone white, and his eyes looked wild.

Henry forced down his disgust and laid a hand on the old man’s arm, hoping to appeal to his Baptist fundamentalism. “It’s God’s judgment you need to worry about, not Snake Knox. God already knows what you did. He wants to hear you own up to what you did, Glenn. That’s what matters to Him.”

Morehouse jerked his arm away and pulled the crocheted comforter over the lower half of his face. Only his eyes and nose showed, like those of a terrified child after a nightmare. To imagine this pathetic shell of a man brutalizing a proud young woman like Viola Turner sickened Henry; yet he knew now that it had happened.

“You just do what I asked you to do,” Morehouse said through the crocheted yarn. “Tell Nurse Viola I never meant her no harm, and tell her to get back to Chicago. Quick. I’ll pay her airfare if she needs it. She don’t deserve what Snake and the others will do to her.”

Present tense again. “I’m afraid I can’t do that for you, Glenn.”

“Why not?”

All Henry’s senses kicked wide open, preparing to read the old man’s reaction. “Because Viola’s dead. Somebody killed her this morning.”

The shock in the old man’s eyes was so profound that Henry acquitted him of murder on the spot. Morehouse worked his jaw, trying to gum up some spit, but he couldn’t seem to do it. The implications of his ignorance spun out in Henry’s mind. If the Eagles had fulfilled their threat against Viola—and kept Morehouse out of it—then that meant they no longer trusted him. Had the old man realized this yet? Was he gauging the odds of his survival even now? Henry didn’t think so. Casting his gaze desperately about the room, Morehouse looked like a man with a terrible sin lashed to his back, one that Viola’s death had cursed him to carry into the afterlife.

Henry gently shook his arm. “The Eagles killed Jimmy and Luther back in sixty-eight, didn’t they?”

Morehouse nodded like a man struck dumb.

Triumph surged through Henry’s chest. He’d toiled for more than a decade to prove this. “Where are their bodies, Glenn? Tell me, man. For the sake of the families.”

Morehouse stared into the flames as though hypnotized. The news of Viola’s death had pushed him into some kind of fugue state. But Henry could no longer restrain himself. He stood over the recliner and glared down without a shred of mercy in his heart. “You were there when they died, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”