41

   After eleven days of confinement, Clay was finally set free. A lighter cast was placed on his left leg, and, though he couldn’t walk, he could at least maneuver a little. Paulette pushed his wheelchair out of the hospital to a rented van driven by Oscar. Fifteen minutes later, they rolled him into his town house and locked the door. Paulette and Miss Glick had turned the downstairs den into a temporary bedroom. His phones, fax, and computer had been moved to a folding table near his bed. His clothes were stacked neatly on plastic shelves by the fireplace.
   For the first two hours he was home, he read mail and financial reports and clippings, but only what Paulette had screened. Most of what had been printed about Clay was kept away from him.
   Later, after a nap, he sat at the kitchen table with Paulette and Oscar announced that it was time to start.
   The unraveling began.

   The first issue was his law firm. Crittle had managed to trim a few costs, but the overhead was still galloping along at a million bucks a month. With no current revenues, and none expected, immediate layoffs were unavoidable. They went down a list of the employees—lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, clerks, gofers—and made the painful cuts. Though they considered the Maxatil cases worthless, it would still take work to close the files. Clay kept four lawyers and four paralegals for the job. He was determined to honor every contract he’d signed with his employees, but to do so would eat up some badly needed cash.
   Clay looked at the names of the employees who had to go, and it made him ill. “I want to sleep on this,” he said, unable to make the final decision.
   “Most of them are expecting it, Clay,” Paulette said.
   He stared at the names and tried to imagine the gossip that had been raging about him in the halls of his own firm.
   Two days earlier, Oscar had reluctantly agreed to go to New York and meet with Helen Warshaw. He had presented a broad picture of Clay Carter’s assets and potential liabilities, and basically begged for mercy. His boss did not want to file for bankruptcy, but if pushed too hard by Ms. Warshaw he would have no choice. She had been unimpressed. Clay was a member of a group of lawyers, her defendants, with a combined net worth that she estimated at $1.5 billion. She could not allow Clay to settle his cases for, say, a meager $1 million each, when the same cases against Patton French might fetch three times that much. Plus, she was not in a settling mood. The trial would be an important one—a bold effort at reforming abuses in the system, a media-hyped spectacle. She planned to savor every moment of it.
   Oscar returned to D.C. with his tail between his legs, certain that Helen Warshaw, as the lawyer for Clay’s biggest group of creditors, wanted blood!
   The dreaded word bankruptcy had first been uttered by Rex Crittle in Clay’s hospital room. It had cut through the air like a bullet and landed like a mortar. Then it was used again. Clay began saying it, but only to himself. Paulette said it once. Oscar had used it in New York. It didn’t fit and they didn’t like it, but over the past week it had become part of their vocabulary.
   The office lease could be terminated, through bankruptcy.
   The employment contracts could be compromised, through bankruptcy.
   The Gulfstream could be sent back on better terms, through bankruptcy.
   The disgruntled Maxatil clients could be stiff-armed, through bankruptcy.
   The disgruntled Hanna plaintiffs could be convinced to settle, through bankruptcy.
   And, most important, Helen Warshaw could be reined in, through bankruptcy.
   Oscar was almost as depressed as Clay, and after a few hours of misery he left for the office. Paulette rolled Clay outside and onto the small patio where they had a cup of green tea with honey. “I got two things to say,” she said, sitting very close and staring at him. “First, I’m going to give you some of my money.”
   “No you’re not.”
   “Yes I am. You made me rich when you didn’t have to.
   I can’t help it that you’re a stupid white boy who’s lost his ass, but I still love you. I’m going to help you, Clay.”
   “Can you believe this, Paulette?”
   “No. It’s beyond belief, but it’s true. It’s happened. And things’ll get much worse before they get better. Don’t read the papers, Clay. Please. Promise me that.”
   “Don’t worry.”
   “I’m going to help you. If you lose everything, I’ll be around to make sure you’re okay.”
   “I don’t know what to say.”
   “Say nothing.”
   They held hands and Clay fought back tears. A moment passed. “Number two,” she said. “I’ve been talking to Rebecca. She’s afraid to see you because she might get caught. She’s got a new cell phone, one her husband knows nothing about. She gave me the number. She wants you to call her.”
   ” Female advice please?”
   “Not from me. You know how I feel about that Russian hussy. Rebecca’s a sweet girl, but she’s got some baggage, to put it mildly. You’re on your own.”
   “Thanks for nothing.”
   “You’re welcome. She wanted you to call her this afternoon. Husband’s out of town or something. I’ll leave in a few minutes.”

   Rebecca parked around the corner and hustled down Dumbarton Street to Clay’s door. She was not good at sneaking around; neither was he. The first thing they decided was that they would not continue it.
   She and Jason Myers had decided to dissolve their marriage amicably. He had initially wanted to seek counseling and delay a divorce, but he also preferred to work eighteen hours a day, whether in D.C., New York, Palo Alto, or Hong Kong. His massive firm had offices in thirty-two cities, and he had clients around the world. Work was more important than anything else. He’d simply left her, with no apologies and with no plans to change his ways. The papers would be filed in two days. She was already packing her bags. Jason would keep the condo; she had been vague on where she would go. In less than a year of marriage, they had accumulated little. He was a partner who made $800,000 a year, but she wanted none of his money.
   According to Rebecca, her parents had not interfered. They had not had the opportunity. Myers didn’t like them, which was no surprise, and Clay suspected that one reason he preferred the firm’s branch office in Hong Kong was because it was so far away from the Van Horns.
   Both had a reason to run. Clay would not, under any circumstances, remain in D.C. in the years to come. His humiliation was too raw and deep, and there was a big world out there where people didn’t know him. He craved anonymity. For the first time in her life, Rebecca just wanted to get away—away from a bad marriage, away from her family, away from the country club and the insufferable people who went there, away from the pressures of making money and accumulating stuff, away from McLean and the only friends she’d ever known.
   It took an hour for Clay to get her in the bed, but sex was impossible, with the casts and all. He just wanted to hold her and kiss her and make up for lost time.
   She spent the night and decided not to leave. Over coffee the next morning, Clay began with Tequila Watson and Tarvan and told her everything.

   Paulette and Oscar returned with more unpleasantries from the office. Some instigator up in Howard County was encouraging the homeowners to file ethics complaints against Clay for the botched Hanna settlement. Several dozen had been received by the D.C. Bar. Six lawsuits had been filed against Clay, all by the same attorney who was actively soliciting more. Clay’s office was finalizing a settlement plan to be put before the judge in the Hanna bankruptcy. Oddly enough, the firm might be awarded a fee, though one far less than what Clay had turned down.
   There was an urgent Warshaw motion to take the depositions of several of the Dyloft plaintiffs. Urgency was required because they were dying, and their video depositions would be crucial to the trial, which was expected in about a year. To employ the usual defense tactics of stall, delay, postponement, and outright procrastination would have been enormously unfair to these plaintiffs. Clay agreed to the schedule of depositions suggested by Ms. Warshaw, though he had no plans to attend them.
   Under pressure from Oscar, Clay finally agreed to lay off ten lawyers and most of the paralegals, secretaries, and clerks. He signed letters to every one of them—brief and very apologetic. He took full responsibility for the demise of his firm.
   Frankly, there was no one else to blame.
   A letter to the Maxatil clients was hammered out. In it, Clay recapped the Mooneyham trial in Phoenix. He held to the belief that the drug was dangerous, but proving causation would now be “very difficult, if not impossible.” The company was not willing to consider an out-of-court settlement, and, given Clay’s current medical problems, he was not in a position to prepare for an extended trial.
   He hated to use his beating as an excuse, but Oscar prevailed. It sounded believable in the letter. At this low point in his career, he had to grab whatever advantage he could find.
   He was therefore releasing each client, and doing so in sufficient time for each to hire another lawyer and pursue Goffman. He even wished them luck.
   The letters would cause a storm of controversy. “We’ll handle it,” Oscar kept saying. “At least we’ll be rid of these people.”
   Clay couldn’t help but think of Max Pace, his old pal who’d gotten him into the Maxatil business. Pace, one of at least five aliases, had been indicted for securities fraud, but had not been found. His indictment claimed that he used insider information to sell almost a million shares of Goffman before Clay filed suit. Later, he covered his sale and slipped out of the country with around $15 million. Run, Max, run. If he was caught and hauled back for a trial he might spill all their dirty secrets.
   There were a hundred other details on Oscar’s checklist, but Clay grew weary.
   “Am I playing nurse tonight?” Paulette whispered in the kitchen.
   “No, Rebecca’s here.”
   “You love trouble, don’t you?”
   “She’s filing for divorce tomorrow. An uncontested divorce.”
   “What about the bimbo?”
   “She’s history if she ever comes back from St. Barth.”
   For the next week, Clay never left his town house. Rebecca packed all of Ridley’s things into 30-gallon trash bags and stuffed them in the basement. She moved in some of her own stuff, though Clay warned her that he was about to lose the house. She cooked wonderful meals and nursed him whenever he needed it. They watched old movies until midnight, then slept late every morning. She drove him to see his doctor.
   Ridley called every other day from the island. Clay did not tell her she’d lost her place; he preferred to do that in person, when and if she returned. The renovation was coming along nicely, though Clay had seriously curtailed the budget. She seemed oblivious to his financial problems.

   The last lawyer to enter Clay’s life was Mark Munson, a bankruptcy expert who specialized in large, messy, individual crashes. Crittle had found him. After Clay retained him, Crittle showed him the books, the leases, the contracts, the lawsuits, the assets, and the liabilities. Everything. When Munson and Crittle came to the town house, Clay asked Rebecca to leave. He wanted to spare her the gruesome details.
   In the seventeen months since he’d left OPD, Clay had earned $121 million in fees—$30 million had been paid to Rodney, Paulette, and Jonah as bonuses; $20 million had gone for office expenses and the Gulfstream; $16 million down the drain for advertising and testing for Dyloft, Maxatil, and Skinny Bens; $34 million for taxes, either paid or accrued; $4 million for the villa; $3 million for the sailboat, A million here and there—the town house, the “loan” to Max Pace, and the usual and expected extravagances of the newly rich.
   Jarrett’s fancy new catamaran was an interesting issue. Clay had paid for it, but the Bahamian company that held its title was owned completely by his father. Munson thought the bankruptcy court might take one of two positions—either it was a gift, which would require Clay to pay gift taxes, or it was simply owned by someone else and thus not part of Clay’s estate. Either way, the boat remained the property of Jarrett Carter.
   Clay had also earned $7.1 million trading in Ackerman stock, and though some of this was buried offshore it was about to be hauled back. “If you hide assets you go to jail,” Munson lectured, leaving little doubt that he did not tolerate such thinking.
   The balance sheet showed a net worth of approximately $19 million, with few creditors. However, the contingent liabilities were catastrophic. Twenty-six former clients were now suing for the Dyloft fiasco. That number was expected to rise, and though it was impossible to throw darts at the value of each case, Clay’s legitimate exposure was significantly more than his net worth. The Hanna class-action plaintiffs were festering and getting organized. The Maxatil backlash would be nasty and prolonged. None of those expenses could be predicted either.
   “Let the bankruptcy trustee deal with it,” Munson said. “You’ll walk away with the shirt on your back, but at least you won’t owe anything.”
   “Gee thanks,” Clay said, still thinking about the sailboat. If they were successful in keeping it away from the bankruptcy, then Jarrett could sell it, buy something smaller, and Clay could have some cash to live on.
   After two hours with Munson and Crittle, the kitchen table was covered with spreadsheets and printouts and discarded notes, a debris-strewn testament to the past seventeen months of his life. He was ashamed of his greed and embarrassed by his stupidity. It was sickening what the money had done to him.
   The thought of leaving helped him survive each day.

   Ridley called from St. Barth with the alarming news that a FOR SALE sign had appeared in front of “their” villa.
   “That’s because it’s now for sale,” Clay said.
   “I don’t understand.”
   “Come home and I’ll explain it to you.”
   “Is there trouble?”
   “You might say that.”
   After a long pause, she said, “I prefer to stay here.”
   “I can’t make you come home, Ridley.”
   “No, you can’t.”
   “Fine. Stay in the villa until it sells. I don’t care.”
   “How long will that be?”
   He could see her doing everything imaginable to sabotage a potential sale. At the moment, Clay just didn’t care. “Maybe a month, maybe a year. I don’t know.”
   “I’m staying,” she said.
   “Fine.”

   Rodney found his old friend sitting on the front steps of his picturesque town house, crutches by his side, a shawl over his shoulders to knock off the autumn chill. The wind was spinning leaves in circles along Dumbarton Street.
   “Need some fresh air,” Clay said. “I’ve been locked in there for three weeks.”
   “How are the bones?” Rodney asked, as he sat beside him and looked at the street.
   “Healing nicely.”
   Rodney had left the city and become a real suburbanite. Khakis and sneakers, a fancy SUV to haul kids around. “How’s your head?”
   “No additional brain damage.”
   “How’s your soul?”
   “Tortured, to say the least. But I’ll survive.”
   “Paulette says you’re leaving.”
   “For a while, anyway. I’ll file for bankruptcy next week, and I will not be around here when it happens. Paulette has a flat in London that I can use for a few months. We’ll hide there.”
   “You can’t avoid a bankruptcy?”
   “No way. There are too many claims, and good ones. Remember our first Dyloft plaintiff, Ted Worley?”
   “Sure.”
   “He died yesterday. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I sure didn’t protect him either. His case in front of a jury is worth five million bucks. There are twenty-six of those. I’m going to London.”
   “Clay, I want to help.”
   “I’m not taking your money. That’s why you’re here, and I know it. I’ve had this conversation twice with Paulette and once with Jonah. You made your money and you were smart enough to cash out. I wasn’t.”
   “But we’re not going to let you die, man. You didn’t have to give us ten million bucks. But you did. We’re giving some back.” “No.” “Yes. The three of us have talked about it. We’ll wait until the bankruptcy is over, then each of us will do a transfer. A gift.” “You earned that money, Rodney. Keep it.” “Nobody earns ten million dollars in six months, Clay.
   You might win it, steal it, or have it drop out of the sky, but nobody earns money like that. It’s ridiculous and obscene. I’m giving some back. So is Paulette. Not sure about Jonah, but he’ll come around.”
   “How are the kids?”
   “You’re changing the subject.”
   “Yes, I’m changing the subject.”
   So they talked about kids, and old friends at OPD, and old clients and cases there. They sat on the front steps until after dark, when Rebecca arrived and it was time for dinner.

42

   The Post reporter was Art Mariani, a young man who knew Clay Carter well because he’d documented his astounding rise and his equally amazing crash with careful attention to detail and a reasonable dose of fairness. When Mariani arrived at Clay’s town house, he was greeted by Paulette and led down the narrow hall to the kitchen where folks were waiting. Clay hobbled to his feet and introduced himself, then went around the table—Zack Battle, his attorney; Rebecca Van Horn, his friend; and Oscar Mulrooney, his partner. Tape recorders were plugged in. Rebecca made the rounds with the coffeepot.
   “It’s a long story,” Clay said, “but we have plenty of time.”
   “I have no deadline,” Mariani said.
   Clay took a swig of coffee, a deep breath, and jumped into the story. He began with the shooting of Ramon “Pumpkin” Pumphrey by his client, Tequila Watson. Dates, times, places, Clay had notes of everything and all the files. Then Washad Porter and his two murders. Then the other four. Camp Deliverance, Clean Streets, the amazing results of a drug called Tarvan. Though he would never mention the name of Max Pace, he described in detail Pace’s history of Tarvan—the secret clinical trials in Mexico City, Belgrade, and Singapore, the manufacturer’s desire to test it on those of African descent, preferably in the United States. The drug’s arrival in D.C.
   “Who made the drug?” Mariani asked, visibly shaken.
   After a long pause in which he seemed unable to speak, Clay answered, “I’m not completely sure. But I think it’s Philo.”
   “Philo Products?”
   “Yes.” Clay reached for a thick document and slid it over to Mariani. “This is one of the settlement agreements. As you will see, there are two offshore companies mentioned. If you can penetrate them, pick up the trail, it will probably lead you to a shell company in Luxembourg, then to Philo.”
   “Okay, but why do you suspect Philo?”
   “I have a source. That’s all I can tell you.”
   This mysterious source selected Clay from all the attorneys in D.C. and convinced him to sell his soul for $15 million. He quickly quit OPD and opened his own firm. Mariani already knew much of this. Clay signed up the families of six of the victims, easily convinced them to take $5 million and keep quiet, and within thirty days had the matter wrapped up. The details poured forth, as did the documents and settlement agreements.
   “When I publish this story, what happens to your clients, the families of the victims?” Mariani asked.
   “I’ve lost sleep worrying about that, but I think they’ll be fine,” Clay said. “First, they’ve had the money for a year now, so it’s safe to assume a lot of it has been spent.
   Second, the drugmaker would be insane to try and set aside these settlements.”
   “The families could then sue the manufacturer directly,” Zack added helpfully. “And those verdicts could destroy any big corporation. I’ve never seen a more volatile set of facts.”
   “The company won’t touch the settlement agreements,” Clay said. “It’s lucky to get out with a fifty-million settlement.”
   “Can the families set the agreements aside when they learn the truth?” Mariani asked.
   “It would be difficult.”
   “What about you? You signed confidentiality agreements?”
   “I’m not a factor anymore. I’m about to be bankrupt. I’m about to surrender my license to practice law. They can’t touch me.” It was a sad admission, one that hurt Clay’s friends as much as it hurt him.
   Mariani scribbled some notes and shifted gears. “What happens to Tequila Watson, Washad Porter, and the other men who were convicted of these murders?”
   “First, they can probably sue the drugmaker, which won’t help them much in prison. Second, there’s a chance their cases could be reopened, at least the sentencing aspect.”
   Zack Battle cleared his throat and everyone waited. “Off the record. After you publish whatever you decide to publish, and after the storm dies down, I plan to take these cases and have them reviewed. I’ll sue on behalf of the seven defendants, that is, if we can identify the pharmaceutical company. I might petition the criminal courts to reopen their convictions.”
   “This is very explosive,” Mariani said, stating the obvious. He studied his notes for a long time. “What led to the Dyloft litigation?”
   “That’s another chapter for another day,” Clay said. “You’ve documented most of it anyway. I’m not talking about it.”
   “Fair enough. Is this story over?”
   “For me it is,” Clay said.

   Paulette and Zack drove them to the airport, to Reagan National where Clay’s once-beloved Gulfstream sat very close to the spot where he’d first seen it. Since they were leaving for at least six months, there was a lot of luggage, especially Rebecca’s. Clay, having shed so much in the past month, was traveling light. He got about fine with his crutches, but he couldn’t carry anything. Zack acted as his porter.
   He gamely showed them his airplane, though they all knew this was its final voyage. Clay hugged Paulette and embraced Zack, thanked them both and promised to call within days. When the copilot locked the door, Clay pulled the shades over the windows so he would see none of Washington when they lifted off.
   To Rebecca, the jet was a ghastly symbol of the destructive power of greed. She longed for the tiny flat in London, where no one knew them, and no one cared what they wore, drove, bought, ate, or where they worked, shopped, or vacationed. She wasn’t coming home. She had fought with her parents for the last time.
   Clay longed for two good legs and a clean slate. He was surviving one of the more infamous meltdowns in the history of American law, and it was further and further behind him. He had Rebecca all to himself, and nothing else mattered.
   Somewhere over Newfoundland, they unfolded the sofa and fell asleep under the covers.

Author’s Note

   It is here that authors often submit massive disclaimers in an effort to cover their rears and, hopefully, avoid liability. There is always the temptation to simply create a fictional place or entity rather than research the real ones, and I confess I would rather do almost anything than verify details. Fiction is a marvelous shield. It’s very easy to hide behind. But when it ventures near the truth, it needs to be accurate. Otherwise, the author needs a few lines in this space.
   The Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., is a proud and vibrant organization that has zealously protected the indigent for many years. Its lawyers are bright, committed, and very tight-lipped. Downright secretive. Its inner workings remain a mystery, so I simply created my own Office of the Public Defender. Any resemblance between the two is purely coincidental.
   Mark Twain said he often moved cities, counties, and even entire states when necessary to help a story along. Nothing gets in my way either. If I can’t find a building, then I’ll construct one on the spot. If a street does not fit on my map, then I won’t hesitate to either move it or draw a new map. I would guess that about half the places in this book are described somewhat correctly. The other half either don’t exist or have been modified or relocated to such an extent that no one would recognize them. Anyone looking for accuracy is wasting time.
   That’s not to say I don’t try. My idea of research is frantically working the telephone as the deadline draws near. I leaned on the following people for advice, and it’s here that I thank them: Fritz Chockley, Bruce Brown, Gaines Talbott, Bobby Moak, Penny Pynkala, and Jerome Davis.
   Renee read the rough draft and didn’t fling it at me—always a good sign. David Gernert picked it to pieces, then helped me put it together again. Will Denton and Pamela Creel Jenner read it and offered salient advice. When I had written it for the fourth time and everything was correct, Estelle Laurence read it and found a thousand mistakes.
   All of the above were eager to help. The mistakes, as always, are mine.

The Last Juror

John Grisham

Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20

Part Two
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30

Part Three
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Author’s Note

The Last Juror
by John Grisham

Part One

Chapter 1

   After decades of patient mismanagement and loving neglect, The Ford County Times went bankrupt in 1970. The owner and publisher, Miss Emma Caudle, was ninety-three years old and strapped to a bed in a nursing home in Tupelo. The editor, her son Wilson Caudle, was in his seventies and had a plate in his head from the First War. A perfect circle of dark grafted skin covered the plate at the top of his long, sloping forehead, and throughout his adult life he had endured the nickname of Spot. Spot did this. Spot did that. Here, Spot. There, Spot.
   In his younger years, he covered town meetings, football games, elections, trials, church socials, all sorts of activities in Ford County. He was a good reporter, thorough and intuitive. Evidently, the head wound did not affect his ability to write. But sometime after the Second War the plate apparently shifted, and Mr. Caudle stopped writing everything but the obituaries. He loved obituaries. He spent hours on them. He filled paragraphs of eloquent prose detailing the lives of even the humblest of Ford Countians. And the death of a wealthy or prominent citizen was front page news, with Mr. Caudle seizing the moment. He never missed a wake or a funeral, never wrote anything bad about anyone. All received glory in the end. Ford County was a wonderful place to die. And Spot was a very popular man, even though he was crazy.
   The only real crisis of his journalistic career happened in 1967, about the time the civil rights movement finally made it to Ford County. The paper had never shown the slightest hint of racial tolerance. No black faces appeared in its pages, except those belonging to known or suspected criminals. No black wedding announcements. No black honor students or baseball teams. But in 1967, Mr. Caudle made a startling discovery. He awoke one morning to the realization that black people were dying in Ford County, and their deaths were not being properly reported. There was a whole, new, fertile world of obituaries waiting out there, and Mr. Caudle set sail in dangerous and uncharted waters. On Wednesday, March 8, 1967, the Times became the first white-owned weekly in Mississippi to run the obituary of a Negro. For the most part, it went unnoticed.
   The following week, he ran three black obituaries, and people were beginning to talk. By the fourth week, a regular boycott was under way, with subscriptions being canceled and advertisers holding their money. Mr. Caudle knew what was happening, but he was too impressed with his new status as an integrationist to worry about such trivial matters as sales and profits. Six weeks after the historic obituary, he announced, on the front page and in bold print, his new policy. He explained to the public that he would publish whatever he damned well pleased, and if the white folks didn’t like it, then he would simply cut back on their obituaries.
   Now, dying properly is an important part of living in Mississippi, for whites and blacks, and the thought of being laid to rest without the benefit of one of Spot’s glorious send-offs was more than most whites could stand. And they knew he was crazy enough to carry out his threat.
   The next edition was filled with all sorts of obituaries, blacks and whites, all neatly alphabetized and desegregated. It sold out, and a brief period of prosperity followed.
   The bankruptcy was called involuntary, as if others had eager volunteers. The pack was led by a print supplier from Memphis that was owed $60,000. Several creditors had not been paid in six months. The old Security Bank was calling in a loan.
   I was new, but I’d heard the rumors. I was sitting on a desk in the front room of the Times’s offices reading a magazine, when a midget in a pair of pointed toes strutted in the front door and asked for Wilson Caudle.
   “He’s at the funeral home,” I said.
   He was a cocky midget. I could see a gun on his hip under a wrinkled navy blazer, a gun worn in such a manner so that folks would see it. He probably had a permit, but in Ford County one was not really needed, not in 1970. In fact, permits were frowned upon. “I need to serve these papers on him,” he said, waving an envelope.
   I was not about to be helpful, but it’s difficult being rude to a midget. Even one with a gun. “He’s at the funeral home,” I repeated.
   “Then I’ll just leave them with you,” he declared.
   Although I’d been around for less than two months, and though I’d gone to college up North, I had learned a few things. I knew that good papers were not served on people. They were mailed or shipped or hand-delivered, but never served. The papers were trouble, and I wanted no part of them.
   “I’m not taking the papers,” I said, looking down.
   The laws of nature require midgets to be docile, noncombative people, and this little fella was no exception. The gun was a ruse. He glanced around the front office with a smirk, but he knew the situation was hopeless. With a flair for the dramatic, he stuffed the envelope back into his pocket and demanded, “Where’s the funeral home?”
   I pointed this way and that, and he left. An hour later, Spot stumbled through the door, waving the papers and bawling hysterically. “It’s over! It’s over!” he kept wailing as I held the Petition for Involuntary Bankruptcy. Margaret Wright, the secretary, and Hardy, the pressman, came from the back and tried to console him. He sat in a chair, face in hands, elbows on knees, sobbing pitifully. I read the petition aloud for the benefit of the others.
   It said Mr. Caudle had to appear in court in a week over in Oxford to meet with the creditors and the Judge, and that a decision would be made as to whether the paper would continue to operate while a trustee sorted things out. I could tell Margaret and Hardy were more concerned about their jobs than about Mr. Caudle and his breakdown, but they gamely stood next to him and patted his shoulders.
   When the crying stopped, he suddenly stood, bit his lip, and announced, “I’ve got to tell Mother.”
   The three of us looked at each other. Miss Emma Caudle had departed this life years earlier, but her feeble heart continued to work just barely enough to postpone a funeral. She neither knew nor cared what color Jell-O they were feeding her, and she certainly cared nothing about Ford County and its newspaper. She was blind and deaf and weighed less than eighty pounds, and now Spot was about to discuss involuntary bankruptcy with her. At that point, I realized that he, too, was no longer with us.
   He started crying again and left. Six months later I would write his obituary.
   Because I had attended college, and because I was holding the papers, Hardy and Margaret looked hopefully at me for advice. I was a journalist, not a lawyer, but I said that I would take the papers to the Caudle family lawyer. We would follow his advice. They smiled weakly and returned to work.
   At noon, I bought a six-pack at Quincy’s One Stop in Lowtown, the black section of Clanton, and went for a long drive in my Spitfire. It was late in February, unseasonably warm, so I put the top down and headed for the lake, wondering, not for the first time, just exactly what I was doing in Ford County, Mississippi.


* * *

   I grew up in Memphis and studied journalism at Syracuse for five years before my grandmother got tired of paying for what was becoming an extended education. My grades were unremarkable, and I was a year away from a degree. Maybe a year and a half. She, BeeBee, had plenty of money, hated to spend it, and after five years she figured my opportunity had been sufficiently funded. When she cut me off I was very disappointed, but I did not complain, to her anyway. I was her only grandchild and her estate would be a delight.
   I studied journalism with a hangover. In the early days at Syracuse, I aspired to be an investigative reporter with the New York Times or the Washington Post. I wanted to save the world by uncovering corruption and environmental abuse and government waste and the injustice suffered by the weak and oppressed. Pulitzers were waiting for me. After a year or so of such lofty dreams, I saw a movie about a foreign correspondent who dashed around the world looking for wars, seducing beautiful women, and somehow finding the time to write award-winning stories. He spoke eight languages, wore a beard, combat boots, starched khakis that never wrinkled. So I decided I would become such a journalist. I grew a beard, bought some boots and khakis, tried to learn German, tried to score with prettier girls. During my junior year, when my grades began their steady decline to the bottom of the class, I became captivated by the idea of working for a small-town newspaper. I cannot explain this attraction, except that it was at about this time that I met and befriended Nick Diener. He was from rural Indiana, and for decades his family had owned a rather prosperous county newspaper. He drove a fancy little Alfa Romeo and always had plenty of cash. We became close friends.
   Nick was a bright student who could have handled medicine, law, or engineering. His only goal, however, was to return to Indiana and run the family business. This baffled me until we got drunk one night and he told me how much his father cleared each year off their small weekly—circulation six thousand. It was a gold mine, he said. Just local news, wedding announcements, church socials, honor rolls, sports coverage, pictures of basketball teams, a few recipes, a few obituaries, and pages of advertising. Maybe a little politics, but stay away from controversy. And count your money. His father was a millionaire. It was laid-back, low-pressure journalism with money growing on trees, according to Nick.
   This appealed to me. After my fourth year, which should’ve been my last but wasn’t close, I spent the summer interning at a small weekly in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. The pay was peanuts but BeeBee was impressed because I was employed. Each week I mailed her the paper, at least half of which was written by me. The owner/editor/publisher was a wonderful old gentleman who was delighted to have a reporter who wanted to write. He was quite wealthy.
   After five years at Syracuse my grades were irreparable, and the well ran dry. I returned to Memphis, visited BeeBee, thanked her for her efforts, and told her I loved her. She told me to find a job.
   At the time Wilson Caudle’s sister lived in Memphis, and through the course of things this lady met BeeBee at one of those hot tea drinkers’ parties. After a few phone calls back and forth, I was packed and headed to Clanton, Mississippi, where Spot was eagerly waiting. After an hour of orientation, he turned me loose on Ford County.
   In the next edition he ran a sweet little story with a photo of me announcing my “internship” at the Times. It made the front page. News was slow in those days.
   The announcement contained two horrendous errors that would haunt me for years. The first and less serious was the fact that Syracuse had now joined the Ivy League, at least according to Spot. He informed his dwindling readership that I had received my Ivy League education at Syracuse. It was a month before anyone mentioned this to me. I was beginning to believe that no one read the paper, or, worse, those who did were complete idiots.
   The second misstatement changed my life. I was born Joyner William Traynor. Until I was twelve I hammered my parents with inquiries about why two supposedly intelligent people would stick Joyner on a newborn. The story finally leaked that one of my parents, both of whom denied responsibility, had insisted on Joyner as an olive branch to some feuding relative who allegedly had money. I never met the man, my namesake. He died broke as far as I was concerned, but I nonetheless had Joyner for a lifetime. When I enrolled at Syracuse I was J. William, a rather imposing name for an eighteen-year-old. But Vietnam and the riots and all the rebellion and social upheaval convinced me that J. William sounded too corporate, too establishment. I became Will.
   Spot at various times called me Will, William, Bill, or even Billy, and since I would answer to all of them I never knew what was next. In the announcement, under my smiling face, was my new name. Willie Traynor. I was horrified. I had never dreamed of anyone calling me Willie. I went to a prep school in Memphis and then to college in New York, and I had never met a person named Willie. I wasn’t a good ole boy. I drove a Triumph Spitfire and had long hair.
   What would I tell my fraternity brothers at Syracuse? What would I tell BeeBee?
   After hiding in my apartment for two days, I mustered the courage to confront Spot and demand he do something. I wasn’t sure what, but he’d made the mistake and he could damned well fix it. I marched into the Times office and bumped into Davey Bigmouth Bass, the sports editor of the paper. “Hey, cool name,” he said. I followed him into his office, seeking advice.
   “My name’s not Willie,” I said.
   “It is now.”
   “My name’s Will.”
   “They’ll love you around here. A smart-ass from up North with long hair and a little imported sports car. Hell, folks’ll think you’re pretty cool with a name like Willie. Think of Joe Willie.”
   “Who’s Joe Willie?”
   “Joe Willie Namath.”
   “Oh him.”
   “Yeah, he’s a Yankee like you, from Pennsylvania or some place, but when he got to Alabama he went from Joseph William to Joe Willie. The girls chased him all over the place.”
   I began to feel better. In 1970, Joe Namath was probably the most famous athlete in the country. I went for a drive and kept repeating “Willie.” Within a couple of weeks the name was beginning to stick. Everybody called me Willie and seemed to feel more comfortable because I had such a down-to-earth name.
   I told BeeBee it was just a temporary pseudonym.


* * *

   The Times was a very thin paper, and I knew immediately that it was in trouble. Heavy on the obits, light on news and advertising. The employees were disgruntled, but quiet and loyal. Jobs were scarce in Ford County in 1970. After a week it was obvious even to my novice eyes that the paper was operating at a loss. Obits are free—ads are not. Spot spent most of his time in his cluttered office, napping periodically and calling the funeral home. Sometimes they called him. Sometimes the families would stop just hours after Uncle Wilber’s last breath and hand over a long, flowery, handwritten narrative that Spot would seize and carry delicately to his desk. Behind a locked door, he would write, edit, research, and rewrite until it was perfect.
   He told me the entire county was mine to cover. The paper had one other general reporter, Baggy Suggs, a pickled old goat who spent his hours hanging around the courthouse across the street sniffing for gossip and drinking bourbon with a small club of washed-up lawyers too old and too drunk to practice anymore. As I would soon learn, Baggy was too lazy to check sources and dig for anything interesting, and it was not unusual for his front page story to be some dull account of a boundary dispute or a wife beating.
   Margaret, the secretary, was a fine Christian lady who ran the place, though she was smart enough to allow Spot to think he was the boss. She was in her early fifties and had worked there for twenty years. She was the rock, the anchor, and everything at the Times revolved around her. Margaret was soft-spoken, almost shy, and from day one was completely intimidated by me because I was from Memphis and had gone to school up North for five years. I was careful not to wear my Ivy Leagueness on my shoulder, but at the same time I wanted these rural Mississippians to know that I had been superbly educated.
   She and I became gossiping pals, and after a week she confirmed what I already suspected—that Mr. Caudle was indeed crazy, and that the newspaper was indeed in dire financial straits. But, she said, the Caudles have family money!
   It would be years before I understood this mystery.
   In Mississippi, family money was not to be confused with wealth. It had nothing to do with cash or other assets. Family money was a status, obtained by someone who was white, somewhat educated beyond high school, born in a large home with a front porch—preferably one surrounded by cotton or soybean fields, although this was not mandatory—and partially reared by a beloved black maid named Bessie or Pearl, partially reared by doting grandparents who once owned the ancestors of Bessie or Pearl, and lectured from birth on the stringent social graces of a privileged people. Acreage and trust funds helped somewhat, but Mississippi was full of insolvent blue bloods who inherited the status of family money. It could not be earned. It had to be handed down at birth.
   When I talked to the Caudle family lawyer, he explained, rather succinctly, the real value of their family money. “They’re as poor as Job’s turkey,” he said as I sat deep in a worn leather chair and looked up at him across his wide and ancient mahogany desk. His name was Walter Sullivan, of the prestigious Sullivan & O’Hara firm. Prestigious for Ford County—seven lawyers. He studied the bankruptcy petition and rambled on about the Caudles and the money they used to have and how foolish they’d been in running a once profitable paper into the ground. He’d represented them for thirty years, and back when Miss Emma ran things the Times had five thousand subscribers and pages filled with advertisements. She kept a $500,000 certificate of deposit at Security Bank, just for a rainy day.
   Then her husband died, and she remarried a local alcoholic twenty years her junior. When sober, he was semiliterate and fancied himself as a tortured poet and essayist. Miss Emma loved him dearly and installed him as coeditor, a position he used to write long editorials blasting everything that moved in Ford County. It was the beginning of the end. Spot hated his new stepfather, the feelings were mutual, and their relationship finally climaxed with one of the more colorful fistfights in the history of downtown Clanton. It took place on the sidewalk in front of the Times office, on the downtown square, in front of a large and stunned crowd. The locals believed that Spot’s brain, already fragile, took additional damage that day. Shortly thereafter, he began writing nothing but those damned obituaries.
   The stepfather ran off with her money, and Miss Emma, heartbroken, become a recluse.
   “It was once a fine paper,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But look at it now. Less than twelve hundred subscriptions, heavily in debt. Bankrupt.”
   “What will the court do?” I asked.
   “Try and find a buyer.”
   “A buyer?”
   “Yes, someone will buy. The county has to have a newspaper.”
   I immediately thought of two people—Nick Diener and BeeBee. Nick’s family had become rich off their county weekly. BeeBee was already loaded and she had only one beloved grandchild. My heart began pounding as I smelled opportunity.
   Mr. Sullivan watched me intently, and it was obvious he knew what I was thinking. “It could be bought for a song,” he said.
   “How much?” I asked with all the confidence of a twenty-three-year-old cub reporter whose grandmother was as stout as lye soap.
   “Probably fifty thousand. Twenty-five for the paper, twenty-five to operate. Most of the debts can be bankrupted, then renegotiated with the creditors you need.” He paused and leaned forward, elbows on his desk, thick grayish eyebrows twitching as if his brain was working overtime. “It could be a real gold mine, you know.”


* * *

   BeeBee had never invested in a gold mine, but after three days of priming the pump I left Memphis with a check for $50,000. I gave it to Mr. Sullivan, who put it in a trust account and petitioned the court for the sale of the paper. The Judge, a relic who belonged in the bed next to Miss Emma, nodded benignly and scrawled his name on an order that made me the new owner of The Ford County Times.
   It takes at least three generations to be accepted in Ford County. Regardless of money or breeding, one cannot simply move there and be trusted. A dark cloud of suspicion hangs over any newcomer, and I was no exception. The people there are exceedingly warm and gracious and polite, almost to the point of being nosy with their friendliness. They nod and speak to everyone on the downtown streets. They ask about your health, the weather, and they invite you to church. They rush to help strangers.
   Hut they don’t really trust you unless they trusted your grandfather.
   Once word spread that I, a young green alien from Memphis, had bought the paper for fifty, or maybe a hundred, or perhaps even two hundred thousand dollars, a great wave of gossip shook the community. Margaret gave me the updates. Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.
   Just the same, as they all conceded quietly among themselves, I now controlled the obituaries! I was somebody!
   The new Times debuted on March 18, 1970, only three weeks after the midget arrived with his papers. It was almost an inch thick and loaded with more photos than had ever been published in a county weekly. Cub Scout troops, Brownies, junior high basketball teams, garden clubs, book clubs, tea clubs, Bible study groups, adult softball teams, civic clubs. Dozens of photos. I tried to include every living soul in the county. And the dead ones were exhalted like never before. The obits were embarrassingly long. I’m sure Spot was proud, but I never heard from him.
   The news was light and breezy. Absolutely no editorials. People love to read about crime, so on the bottom left-hand corner of the front page I launched the Crime Notes Section. Thankfully, two pickups had been stolen the week before, and I covered these heists as if Fort Knox had been looted.
   In the center of the front page there was a rather large group shot of the new regime—Margaret, Hardy, Baggy Suggs, me, our photographer, Wiley Meek, Davey Bigmouth Bass, and Melanie Dogan, a high school student and part-time employee. I was proud of my staff. We had worked around the clock for ten days, and our first edition was a great success. We printed five thousand copies and sold them all. I sent a box of them to BeeBee, and she was most impressed.
   For the next month, the new Times slowly took shape as I struggled to determine what I wanted it to become. Change is painful in rural Mississippi, so I decided to do it gradually. The old paper was bankrupt, but it had changed little in fifty years. I wrote more news, sold more ads, included more and more pictures of groups of endless varieties. And I worked hard on the obituaries.
   I had never been attracted to long hours, but since I was the owner I forgot about the clock. I was too young and too busy to be scared. I was twenty-three, and through luck and timing and a rich grandmother, I was suddenly the owner of a weekly newspaper. If I had hesitated and studied the situation, and sought advice from bankers and accountants, I’m sure someone would have talked some sense into me. But when you’re twenty-three, you’re fearless. You have nothing, so there’s nothing to lose.
   I figured it would take a year to become profitable. And, at first, revenue increased slowly. Then Rhoda Kassellaw was murdered. I guess it’s the nature of the business to sell more papers after a brutal crime when people want details. We sold twenty-four hundred papers the week before her death, and almost four thousand the week after.
   It was no ordinary murder.


* * *

   Ford County was a peaceful place, filled with people who were either Christians or claimed to be. Fistfights were common, but they were usually the work of the lower classes who hung around beer joints and such. Once a month a redneck would take a shot at a neighbor or perhaps his own wife, and each weekend had at least one stabbing in the black tonks. Death rarely followed these episodes.
   I owned the paper for ten years, from 1970 to 1980, and we reported very few murders in Ford County. None was as brutal as Rhoda Kassellaw’s; none was as premeditated. Thirty years later, I still think about it every day.

Chapter 2

   Rhoda Kassellaw lived in the Beech Hill community, twelve miles north of Clanton, in a modest gray brick house on a narrow, paved country road. The flower beds along the front of the house were weedless and received daily care, and between them and the road the long wide lawn was thick and well cut. The driveway was crushed white rock. Scattered down both sides of it was a collection of scooters and balls and bikes. Her two small children were always outdoors, playing hard, sometimes stopping to watch a passing car.
   It was a pleasant little country house, a stone’s throw from Mr. and Mrs. Deece next door. The young man who bought it was killed in a trucking accident somewhere in Texas, and, at the age of twenty-eight, Rhoda became a widow. The insurance on his life paid off the house and the car. The balance was invested to provide a modest monthly income that allowed her to remain home and dote on the children. She spent hours outside, tending her vegetable garden, potting flowers, pulling weeds, mulching the beds along the front of the house.
   She kept to herself. The old ladies in Beech Hill considered her a model widow, staying home, looking sad, limiting her social appearances to an occasional visit to church. She should attend more regularly, they whispered.
   Shortly after the death of her husband, Rhoda planned to return to her family in Missouri. She was not from Ford County, nor was her husband. A job took them there. But the house was paid for, the kids were happy, the neighbors were nice, and her family was much too concerned about how much life insurance she’d collected. So she stayed, always thinking of leaving but never doing so.
   Rhoda Kassellaw was a beautiful woman when she wanted to be, which was not very often. Her shapely, thin figure was usually camouflaged under a loose cotton drip-dry dress, or a bulky chambray workshirt, which she preferred when gardening. She wore little makeup and kept her long flaxen-colored hair pulled back and stuck together on top of her head. Most of what she ate came from her organic garden, and her skin had a soft healthy glow to it. Such an attractive young widow would normally have been a hot property in the county, but she kept to herself.
   After three years of mourning, however, Rhoda became restless. She was not getting younger; the years were slipping by. She was too young and too pretty to sit at home every Saturday and read bedtime stories. There had to be some action out there, though there was certainly none in Beech Hill.
   She hired a young black girl from down the road to baby-sit, and Rhoda drove north for an hour to the Tennessee line, where she’d heard there were some respectable lounges and dance clubs. Maybe no one would know her there. She enjoyed the dancing and the flirting, but she never drank and always came home early. It became a routine, two or three times a month.
   Then the jeans got tighter, the dancing faster, the hours longer and longer. She was getting noticed and talked about in the bars and clubs along the state line.
   He followed her home twice before he killed her. It was March, and a warm front had brought a premature hope of spring. It was a dark night, with no moon. Bear, the family mutt, sniffed him first as he crept behind a tree in the backyard. Bear was primed to growl and bark when he was forever silenced.
   Rhoda’s son Michael was five and her daughter Teresa was three. They wore matching Disney cartoon pajamas, neatly pressed, and watched their mother’s glowing eyes as she read them the story of Jonah and the whale. She tucked them in and kissed them good night, and when Rhoda turned off the light to their bedroom, he was already in the house.
   An hour later she turned off the television, locked the doors, and waited for Bear, who did not appear. That was no surprise because he often chased rabbits and squirrels into the woods and came home late. Bear would sleep on the back porch and wake her howling at dawn. In her bedroom, she slipped out of her light cotton dress and opened the closet door. He was waiting in there, in the dark.
   He snatched her from behind, covered her mouth with a thick and sweaty hand, and said, “I have a knife. I’ll cut you and your kids.” With the other hand he held up a shiny blade and waved it before her eyes.
   “Understand?” he hissed into her ear.
   She trembled and managed to shake her head. She couldn’t see what he looked like. He threw her to the floor of the cluttered closet, face down, and yanked her hands behind her. He took a brown wool scarf an old aunt had given her and wrapped it roughly around her face. “Not one sound,” he kept growling at her. “Or I’ll cut your kids.” When the blindfold was finished he grabbed her hair, snatched her to her feet, and dragged her to her bed. He poked the tip of the blade into her chin and said, “Don’t fight me. The knife’s right here.” He cut off her panties and the rape began.
   He wanted to see her eyes, those beautiful eyes he’d seen in the clubs. And the long hair. He’d bought her drinks and danced with her twice, and when he’d finally made a move she had stiff-armed him. Try these moves, baby, he mumbled just loud enough for her to hear.
   He and the Jack Daniel’s had been building courage for three hours, and now the whiskey numbed him. He moved slowly above her, not rushing things, enjoying every second of it. He mumbled in the self-satisfying grunts of a real man taking and getting what he wanted.
   The smell of the whiskey and his sweat nauseated her, but she was too frightened to throw up. It might anger him, cause him to use the knife. As she started to accept the horror of the moment, she began to think. Keep it quiet. Don’t wake up the kids. And what will he do with the knife when he’s finished?
   His movements were faster, he was mumbling louder. “Quiet, baby,” he hissed again and again. “I’ll use the knife.” The wrought-iron bed was squeaking; didn’t get used enough, he told himself. Too much noise, but he didn’t care.
   The rattling of the bed woke Michael, who then got Teresa up. They eased from their room and crept down the dark hall to see what was happening. Michael opened the door to his mother’s bedroom, saw the strange man on top of her, and said, “Mommy!” For a second the man stopped and jerked his head toward the children.
   The sound of the boy’s voice horrified Rhoda, who bolted upward and thrust both hands at her assailant, grabbing whatever she could. One small fist caught him in the left eye, a solid shot that stunned him. Then she yanked off her blindfold while kicking with both legs. He slapped her and tried to pin her down again. “Danny Padgitt!” she shouted, still clawing. He hit her once more.
   “Mommy!” Michael cried.
   “Run, kids!” Rhoda tried to scream, but she was struck dumb by her assailant’s blows.
   “Shut up!” Padgitt yelled.
   “Run!” Rhoda shouted again, and the children backed away, then darted down the hallway, into the kitchen, and outside to safety.
   In the split second after she shouted his name, Padgitt realized he had no choice but to silence her. He took the knife and hacked twice, then scrambled from the bed and grabbed his clothing.


* * *

   Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Deece were watching late television from Memphis when they heard Michael’s voice calling and getting closer. Mr. Deece met the boy at the front door. His pajamas were soaked with sweat and dew and his teeth were chattering so violently he had trouble speaking. “He hurt my mommy!” he kept saying. “He hurt my mommy!”
   Through the darkness between the two houses, Mr. Deece saw Teresa running after her brother. She was almost running in place, as if she wanted to get to one place without leaving the other. When Mrs. Deece finally got to her by the Deece garage, she was sucking her thumb and unable to speak.
   Mr. Deece raced into his den and grabbed two shotguns, one for him, one for his wife. The children were in the kitchen, shocked to the point of being paralyzed. “He hurt Mommy,” Michael kept saying. Mrs. Deece cuddled them, told them everything would be fine. She looked at her shotgun when her husband laid it on the table. “Stay here,” he said as he rushed out of the house.
   He did not go far. Rhoda almost made it to the Deece home before she collapsed in the wet grass. She was completely naked, and from the neck down covered in blood. He picked her up and carried her to the front porch, then shouted at his wife to move the children toward the back of the house and lock them in a bedroom. He could not allow them to see their mother in her last moments.
   As he placed her in the swing, Rhoda whispered, “Danny Padgitt. It was Danny Padgitt.”
   He covered her with a quilt, then called an ambulance.


* * *

   Danny Padgitt kept his pickup in the center of the road and drove ninety miles an hour. He was half-drunk and scared as hell but unwilling to admit it. He’d be home in ten minutes, secure in the family’s little kingdom known as Padgitt Island.
   Those little faces had ruined everything. He’d think about it tomorrow. He took a long pull on the fifth of Jack Daniel’s and felt better.
   It was a rabbit or a small dog or some varmint, and when it darted from the shoulder he caught a glimpse of it and reacted badly. He instinctively hit the brake pedal, just for a split second because he really didn’t care what he hit and rather enjoyed the sport of roadkilling, but he’d punched too hard. The rear tires locked and the pickup fishtailed. Before he realized it Danny was in serious trouble. He jerked the wheel one way, the wrong way, and the truck hit the gravel shoulder where it began to spin like a stock car on the backstretch. It slid into the ditch, flipped twice, then crashed into a row of pine trees. If he’d been sober he would’ve been killed, but drunks walk away.
   He crawled out through a shattered window, and for a long while leaned on the truck, counting his cuts and scratches and considering his options. A leg was suddenly stiff, and as he climbed up the bank to the road he realized he could not walk far. Not that he would need to.
   The blue lights were on him before he realized it. The deputy was out of the car, surveying the scene with a long black flashlight. More flashing lights appeared down the road.
   The deputy saw the blood, smelled the whiskey, and reached for the handcuffs.

Chapter 3

   The Big Brown River drops nonchalantly south from Tennessee and runs as straight as a hand-dug channel for thirty miles through the center of Tyler County, Mississippi. Two miles above the Ford County line it begins twisting and looping, and by the time it leaves Tyler County it looks like a scared snake, curling desperately and going nowhere. Its water is thick and heavy, muddy and slow, shallow in most places. The Big Brown is not known for its beauty. Sand, silt, and gravel bars line its innumerable bends and curves. A hundred sloughs and creeks feed it with an inexhaustible supply of slow-moving water.
   Its journey through Ford County is brief. It dips and forms a wide circle around two thousand acres in the northeasternmost corner of the county, then leaves and heads back toward Tennessee. The circle is almost perfect and an island is almost formed, but at the last moment the Big Brown turns away from itself and leaves a narrow strip of land between its banks.
   The circle is known as Padgitt Island, a deep, dense woodland covered in pine, gum, elm, oak, and a myriad of swamps and bayous and sloughs, some connected but most isolated. Little of the rich soil had ever been cleared. Nothing was harvested on the island except timber and lots of corn for illegal whiskey. And marijuana, but that was a later story.
   On the thin strip of land between the banks of the Big Brown a paved road entered and left, came and went, always with someone watching. The road was built long ago by the county, but very few taxpayers ever dared to use it.
   The entire island had been in the Padgitt family since Reconstruction, when Rudolph Padgitt, a carpetbagger from the North, arrived a bit late after the War and found all the prime land taken. He searched in vain, found nothing attractive, then somehow stumbled upon the snake-infested island. On the map, it looked promising. He put together a band of newly freed slaves and, with guns and machetes, fought his way onto the island. No one else wanted it.
   Rudolph married a local whore and began cutting timber. Since timber was in great demand after the War, he became prosperous. The local proved to be quite fertile and soon there was a horde of little Padgitts on the island. One of his ex-slaves had learned the art of distillery. Rudolph became a corn farmer who neither ate nor sold his crop, but instead used it to produce what was soon known as one of the finest whiskeys in the Deep South.
   For thirty years Rudolph made moonshine until he died of cirrhosis in 1902. By then an entire clan of Padgitts inhabited the island, and were quite proficient at milling timber and producing illegal whiskey. Scattered about the island were half a dozen distilleries, all well protected and concealed, all operating with state-of-the-art machinery.
   The Padgitts were famous for their whiskey, though fame was not something they sought. They were secretive and clannish, fiercely private and deathly afraid that someone might infiltrate their little kingdom and disrupt their considerable profits. They said they were loggers, and it was well known that they produced timber and were prosperous at it. The Padgitt Lumber Company was very visible on the main highway near the river. They claimed to be legitimate people, taxpayers and such, with their children in the public schools.
   During the 1920s and 1930s, when alcohol was illegal and the nation was thirsty, Padgitt whiskey could not be distilled fast enough. It was shipped in oak barrels across the Big Brown and hauled by trucks up North, as far away as Chicago. The patriarch, president, and director of production and marketing was a tight-fisted old warrior named Clovis Padgitt, eldest son of Rudolph and the local. Clovis had been taught at an early age that the best profits were those from which no taxes were extracted. That was lesson number one. Number two preached the marvelous message of dealing strictly in cash. Clovis was a hard-nosed cash and no-taxes man, and the Padgitts were rumored to have more money than the Mississippi state treasury.
   In 1938, three revenue agents sneaked across the Big Brown in a rented flatboat in search of the source of Old Padgitt. Their covert invasion of the island was flawed in many ways, the obvious being the original idea itself. But for some reason they chose midnight as their hour to cross the river. They were dismembered and buried in deep graves.
   In 1943, a strange event occurred in Ford County—an honest man was elected Sheriff. Or High Sheriff, as he is commonly known. His name was Koonce Lantrip, and he wasn’t really that honest but certainly sounded good on the stump. He vowed to end corruption, to clean up county government, to put the bootleggers and moonshiners, even the Padgitts, out of business. It made for a nice speech and Lantrip won by eight votes.
   His supporters waited and waited, and, finally, six months after taking office he organized his deputies and crossed the Big Brown on the only bridge, an ancient wooden structure that had been built by the county in 1915 at the insistence of Clovis. The Padgitts sometimes used it in the springtime when the river was high. No one else was allowed to cross it.
   Two of the deputies were shot in the head, and Lantrip’s body was never found. It was carefully laid to rest on the banks of a swamp by three Padgitt Negroes. Buford, the eldest son of Clovis, supervised the burial.
   The massacre was hot news in Mississippi for weeks, and the Governor threatened to send in the National Guard. But the Second War was raging, and D-Day soon captured the attention of the country. There wasn’t much left of the National Guard anyway, and those who were able to light had little interest in attacking Padgitt Island. The beaches of Normandy would be more inviting.
   With the noble experiment of an honest Sheriff behind them, the good people of Ford County elected one from the old school. His name was Mackey Don Coley and his father had been the High Sheriff back in the twenties when Clovis was in charge of Padgitt Island. Clovis and the senior Coley had been rather close, and it was widely known that the Sheriff was a rich man because Old Padgitt was allowed to move so freely out of the county. When Mackey Don announced his candidacy, Buford sent him $50,000 in cash. Mackey Don won in a landslide. His opponent claimed to be honest.
   There was a widely held but unprofessed belief in Mississippi that a good Sheriff must be a little crooked to ensure law and order. Whiskey, whoring, and gambling were simply facts of life, and a good Sheriff must be knowledgeable in these affairs to properly regulate them and protect the Christians. Those vices could not be eliminated, so the High Sheriff must be able to coordinate them and synchronize the orderly flow of sin. For his coordinating efforts, he was to be paid a little extra from the purveyors of such wickedness. He expected it. Most of the voters expected it. No honest man could live on such a humble salary. No honest man could move quietly through the shadows of the underworld.
   For the better part of a hundred years following the Civil War, the Padgitts owned the Sheriffs of Ford County. They bought them outright with sacks of cash. Mackey Don Coley received a hundred thousand a year (it was rumored), and during election years he got whatever he needed. And they were generous with other politicians. They quietly bought and kept influence. They asked little; they just wanted to be left alone on their island.
   After the Second War, the demand for moonshine began a steady decline. Since generations of Padgitts had been schooled to operate outside the law, Buford and the family began to diversify into other forms of illicit commerce. Selling only timber was dull, and subject to too many market factors, and, most important, did not generate the piles of cash the family expected. They ran guns, stole cars, counterfeited, bought and burned buildings to collect insurance. For twenty years they operated a highly successful brothel on the county line, until it mysteriously burned in 1966.
   They were creative and energetic people, always scheming and searching for opportunity, always waiting for someone to rob. There were rumors, quite significant at times, that the Padgitts were members of the Dixie Mafia, a loose-knit gang of redneck thieves who ran rampant through the Deep South in the sixties. These rumors were never verified and were in fact discounted by many because the Padgitts were simply too secretive to share their business with anyone. Nonetheless, the rumors persisted for years, and the Padgitts were the source of endless gossip in the cafes and coffee shops around the square in Clanton. They were never considered local heroes, but certainly legends.
   In 1967, a younger Padgitt fled to Canada to avoid the draft. He drifted to California where he tried marijuana and realized he had a taste for it. After a few months as a peacenik, he got homesick and sneaked back to Padgitt Island. He brought with him four pounds of pot, which he shared with all his cousins, and they, too, were quite taken with it. He explained that the rest of the country, and primarily California, was toking like crazy. As usual, Mississippi was at least five years behind the trend.
   The stuff could be grown cheaply, then hauled to the cities where there was demand. His father, Gill Padgitt, grandson of Clovis, saw the opportunity, and soon many of the old cornfields were converted to cannabis. A two-thousand-foot strip of land was cleared for a runway and the Padgitts bought themselves an airplane. Within a year there were daily flights to the outskirts of Memphis and Atlanta, where the Padgitts had established their network. To their delight and with their help, marijuana finally became popular in the Deep South.
   The moonshining slowed considerably. The brothel was gone. The Padgitts had contacts in Miami and Mexico and the cash was coming in by the truckloads. For years, no one in Ford County had a hint that the Padgitts were trafficking in drugs. And they never got caught. No Padgitt was ever indicted for a drug-related offense.
   In fact, not a single Padgitt had ever been arrested. A hundred years of moonshining, stealing, gunrunning, gambling, counterfeiting, whoring, bribing, even killing, and eventually drug manufacturing, and not a single arrest. They were smart people, careful, deliberate, patient with their schemes.
   Then Danny Padgitt, Gill’s youngest son, was arrested for the rape and murder of Rhoda Kassellaw.

Chapter 4

   Mr. Deece told me the next day that when he was certain Rhoda was dead he finally left her in the swing on the front porch. He went to his bathroom, where he stripped and showered and saw her blood spin down the drain. He changed into work clothes and waited for the police and the ambulance. He watched her house while holding a loaded shotgun, anxious to blast anything that moved. But there was no movement, no sound. In the distance he could barely hear a siren.
   His wife kept the children locked in the back bedroom, where she huddled with them in the bed, under a blanket. Michael kept asking about his mother, and who was that man? But Teresa was too traumatized to speak. She managed only a low groaning sound as she sucked her fingers and shook as if she were freezing.
   Before long Benning Road was alive with red and blue flashing lights. Rhoda’s body was photographed at length before it was taken away. Her home was cordoned off by a squad of deputies, led by Sheriff Coley himself. Mr. Deece, still holding his shotgun, gave his statement to an investigator, then to the Sheriff.
   Shortly after 2 A.M… a deputy arrived with the news that a doctor in town had been notified and had suggested that the children be brought in for a look. They rode in the backseat of a patrol car, Michael clutching Mr. Deece, and Teresa in the lap of his wife. At the hospital, they were given a mild sedative and placed together in a semiprivate room where the nurses brought them cookies and milk until they finally went to sleep. Later in the day an aunt arrived from Missouri and took them away.


* * *

   My phone rang seconds before midnight. It was Wiley Meek, the paper’s photographer. He’d picked up the story on the police scanner and was already hanging around the jail waiting to ambush the suspect. Cops were everywhere, he said, his excitement barely under control. Hurry, he urged me. This could be the big one.
   At the time I lived above an old garage next to a decaying but still grand Victorian mansion known as the Hocutt House. It was filled with elderly Hocutts, three sisters and a brother, and they took turns being my landlord. Their five-acre estate was a few blocks from the Clanton square and had been built a century earlier with family money. It was covered with trees, overgrown flower beds, thick patches of mature weeds, and enough animals to stock a game preserve. Rabbits, squirrels, skunks, possums, raccoons, a million birds, a frightening assortment of green and black snakes—all nonpoisonous I was reassured—and dozens of cats. But no dogs. The Hocutts hated dogs. Each cat had a name, and a major clause in my verbal lease was that I would respect the cats.
   Respect them I did. The four-room loft apartment was spacious and clean and cost me the ridiculous sum of $50 a month. If they wanted their cats respected at that price, fine with me.
   Their father, Miles Hocutt, had been an eccentric doctor in Clan-ton for decades. Their mother died during childbirth, and, according to local legend, Dr. Hocutt became very possessive of the children after her death. To protect them from the world, he concocted one of the biggest lies ever told in Ford County. He explained to his children that insanity ran deeply in the family, and thus they should never marry lest they produce some hideous strain of idiot offspring. His children worshiped him, believed him, and were probably already exposed to some measure of unbalance. They never married. The son, Max Hocutt, was eighty-one when he leased me the apartment. The twins, Wilma and Gilma, were seventy-seven, and Melberta, the baby, was seventy-three and completely out of her mind.
   It was Gilma, I think, who was peeking from the kitchen window as I descended the wooden stairway at midnight. A cat was asleep on the bottom step, directly in my path, but I respectfully stepped over it. I wanted to kick it into the street.
   Two cars were parked in the garage. One was my Spitfire, top up to keep the cats out, and the other was a long, shiny black Mercedes with red-and-white butcher knives painted on the doors. Under the knives were phone numbers in green paint. Someone had once told Mr. Max Hocutt that he could completely write off the cost of a new car, any car, if he used it for business and some sort of logo was painted on the doors. He bought a new Mercedes and became a knife sharpener. He said his tools were in the trunk.
   The car was ten years old and had been driven less than eight thousand miles. Their father had also preached to them the sinfulness of women driving, so Mr. Max was the chauffeur.
   I eased the Spitfire down the gravel drive and waved at Gilma peeking from behind the curtain. She jerked her head away and disappeared. The jail was six blocks away. I had slept for about thirty minutes.
   Danny Padgitt was being fingerprinted when I arrived. The Sheriff’s office was in the front section of the jail, and it was packed with deputies and reserves and volunteer firemen and everybody with access to a uniform and a police scanner. Wiley Meek met me on the front sidewalk.
   “It’s Danny Padgitt!” he said with great excitement.
   I stopped for a second and tried to think. “Who?”
   “Danny Padgitt, from the island.”
   I’d been in Ford County less than three months and had yet to meet a single Padgitt. They, as always, kept to themselves. But I’d heard various installments of their legend, with much more to follow. Telling Padgitt stories was a common form of entertainment in Ford County.
   Wiley gushed on, “I got some great shots just as they got him out of the car. Had blood all over him. Great pictures! The girl’s dead!”
   “What girl?”
   “The one he killed. Raped her too, at least that’s the rumor.”
   Danny Padgitt, I mumbled to myself as the sensational story began to sink in. I had my first glimpse of the headline, no doubt the boldest one the Times had run in many years. Poor old Spot had shied away from the jolting stories. Poor old Spot had gone bankrupt. I had other plans.
   We pushed our way inside and looked around for Sheriff Coley. I’d met him twice during my brief stint with the Times and I had been impressed with his polite and warm nature. He called me mister and said sir and ma’am to everyone, always with a smile. He’d been the Sheriff since the massacre in 1943, so he was pushing seventy years of age. He was tall and gaunt without the obligatory thick stomach required of most Southern sheriffs. On the surface he was a gentleman, and both times I’d met him I’d later wondered how such a nice man could be so corrupt. He emerged from a back room with a deputy, and I, practicing my assertive-ness, rushed to him.
   “Sheriff, just a couple of questions,” I said sternly. There were no other reporters present. His boys—the real deputies, the part-timers, the wannabes, the jackleg constables with homemade uniforms—they all got quiet and gave me their sneers. I was still very much the brash new rich boy who’d somehow wrangled control of their newspaper. I was a foreigner, with no right to barge in at a time like this and start asking questions.
   Sheriff Coley smiled as usual, as if these encounters happened all the time around midnight. “Yes sir, Mr. Traynor.” He had a slow rich drawl that was very soothing. This man couldn’t tell a lie, could he?
   “What can you tell us about the murder?”
   With his arms folded across his chest, he gave a few of the basics in copspeak. “While female, age thirty-one, was attacked in her home on Benning Road. Raped, stabbed, murdered. Can’t give you her name until we talk to her kinfolks.”
   “And you’ve made an arrest?”
   “Yes sir, but no details now. Just give us a couple of hours. We’re investigatin’. That’s all, Mr. Traynor.”
   “Rumor has it that you have Danny Padgitt in custody.”
   “I don’t deal in rumors, Mr. Traynor. Not in my profession. Yours neither.”
   Wiley and I drove to the hospital, sniffed around for an hour, heard nothing we could print, then drove to the scene on Benning Road. The cops had cordoned off the house and a few of the neighbors were huddled quietly behind a strand of yellow police ribbon near the mailbox. We eased next to them, listening intently, hearing almost nothing. They seemed too stunned to talk. After a few minutes of gawking at the house, we crept away.
   Wiley had a nephew who was a part-time deputy, and we found him guarding the Deece home where they were still inspecting the front porch and the swing where Rhoda took her last breath. We pulled him off to the side, behind a row of Mr. Deece’s crepe myrtles, and he told us everything. All off the record, of course, as if the gory details would somehow be kept quiet in Ford County.


* * *

   There were three small cafes around the square in Clanton, two for the whites, one for the blacks. Wiley suggested we get an early table and just listen.
   I do not eat breakfast, and I’m usually not awake during the hours in which it is served. I don’t mind working until midnight, but I prefer to sleep until the sun is overhead and in full view. As I quickly realized, one of the advantages of owning a small weekly was that I could work late and sleep late. The stories could be written anytime, as long as the deadlines were met. Spot himself was known to drift in not long before noon, after, of course, dropping by the funeral home. I liked his hours.
   The second day I lived in my apartment above the Hocutt garage, Gilma banged on my door at nine-thirty in the morning. And banged and banged. I finally staggered through my small kitchen in my underwear and saw her squinting through the blinds. She announced that she was just about to call the police. The other Hocutts were down below, wandering around the garage, looking at my car, certain that a crime had been committed.
   She asked what I was doing. I said that I had been sleeping until I heard somebody banging on the damned door. She asked me why I was still asleep at nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning. I rubbed my eyes and tried to think of an appropriate response. I was suddenly aware that I was almost nude and standing in the presence of a seventy-seven-year-old virgin. She kept looking at my thighs.
   They’d been up since five, she explained. Nobody sleeps till nine-thirty in Clanton. Was I drunk? They were just concerned, that’s all. As I closed the door I told her I was sober, still sleepy, thanks for being concerned but I would often be in bed past 9 A.M.
   I’d been to the Tea Shoppe a couple of times for late morning coffee and once for lunch. As the owner of the paper, I felt it necessary to circulate and be seen, at a reasonable hour. I was keenly aware that I would be writing about Ford County, its people and places and happenings, for years to come.
   Wiley said the cafes would be crowded early. “Always after football games and car wrecks,” he said.
   “What about murders?” I asked.
   “It’s been a long time,” he said.
   He was right, the place was packed when we walked in, just after 6 A.M. He offered some hellos, shook some hands, exchanged a couple of insults. He was from Ford County and knew everyone. I nodded and smiled and caught the odd looks. It would take years. The people were friendly, but also wary of outsiders.
   We found two scats at the counter and I asked for coffee. Nothing else. The waitress did not approve of this. She warmed to Wiley, though, when he reconsidered and ordered scrambled eggs, country ham, biscuits, grits, and a side of hash browns, enough cholesterol to choke a mule.
   The talk was of the rape and murder and nothing else. If the weather could cause arguments, imagine what such a heinous crime could stir up. The Padgitts had had the run of the county for a hundred years; it was time to send ‘em all to jail. Surround the island with the National Guard if necessary. Mackey Don had to go; he’d been in their pockets for too long. Let a bunch of crooks run free and they think they’re above the law. Now this.
   Not much was said about Rhoda because little was known. Someone knew she’d been hanging around the lounges on the state line. Someone said she’d been sleeping with a local lawyer. Didn’t know his name. Just a rumor.
   The rumors roared around the Tea Shoppe. A couple of the loudmouths took turns holding court, and I was surprised at how reckless they were with their versions of the truth. Too bad I couldn’t print all the wonderful gossip we heard.

Chapter 5

   We did, however, print a lot. The headline proclaimed that Rhoda Kassellaw had been raped and murdered, and that Danny Padgitt had been arrested for it. The headline could’ve been read from twenty yards down any sidewalk around the courthouse square.
   Under it were two photos; one of Rhoda as a senior in high school, and one of Padgitt as he was led into the jail in handcuffs. Wiley had ambushed him all right. It was a perfect shot, with Padgitt sneering at the camera. There was blood on his forehead from the wreck, and blood on his shirt from the attack. He looked nasty, mean, insolent, drunk, and guilty as hell, and I knew the photo would cause a sensation. Wiley thought we’d better avoid it, but I was twenty-three years old and too young to be restrained. I wanted my readers to see and know the ugly truth. I wanted to sell newspapers.
   The photo of Rhoda had been obtained from a sister in Missouri. The first time I talked to her, by phone, she had had almost nothing to say and quickly hung up. The second time she thawed just a little, said the children were being seen by a doctor, that the funeral would take place Tuesday afternoon in a small town near Springfield, and, as far as the family was concerned, the entire state of Mississippi could burn in hell.
   I told her that I understood completely, that I was from Syracuse, that I was one of the good guys. She finally agreed to send me a photo.
   Using a host of unnamed sources, I described in detail what happened the previous Saturday night on Benning Road. When I was sure of a fact, I drove it home. When I wasn’t so sure, I nibbled around the edges with enough innuendo to convey what I thought happened. Baggy Suggs sobered up long enough to reread and edit the stories. He probably kept us from getting sued or shot.
   On page two there was a map of the crime scene and a large photo of Rhoda’s home, one taken the morning after the crime, complete with cop cars and yellow police ribbon everywhere. The photo also included the bikes and toys of Michael and Teresa scattered around the front yard. In many ways, the photo was more ominous than one of the corpse itself, which I didn’t have but tried to get. The photo stated plainly that children lived there, and that children were involved in a crime so brutal that most Ford Countians were still trying to believe it really happened.
   How much did the children see? That was the burning question.
   I didn’t answer it in the Times, but I got as close as possible. I described the house and its interior layout. Using an unnamed source, I estimated that the children’s beds were about thirty feet from their mother’s. The children fled the house before Rhoda, they were in shock by the time they got next door, they were seen by a doctor in Clanton and were undergoing therapy of some nature back home in Missouri. They saw a lot.
   Would they testify at a trial? Baggy said there was no way; they were simply too young. But I pulled the question out of the air and posed it anyway, to give the readers something else to argue and fret over. After exploring the possibility of parading the children into a courtroom, I concluded that “experts” agreed that such a scenario was unlikely. Baggy enjoyed being considered an expert.
   Rhoda’s obituary was as long as I could possibly make it, which, given the tradition of the Times, was not unusual.
   We went to press about 10 P.M. on Tuesday night; the paper was in the racks around the Clanton square by 7 A.M. on Wednesday. The circulation had dropped to fewer than twelve hundred at the time of the bankruptcy, but after a month of my fearless leadership we had close to twenty-five hundred subscribers—five thousand was a realistic goal.
   For the Rhoda Kassellaw murder we printed eight thousand copies and put them everywhere—by the doors of the cafes around the square, in the halls of the courthouse, on the desks of every county employee, in the lobbies of the banks. We mailed three thousand free copies to potential subscribers, as part of a sudden, one-time special promotion effort.
   According to Wiley, it was the first murder in eight years. It was a Padgitt! It was a wonderfully sensational story and I saw it as my golden moment. Sure I went for the shock, for the sensational, for the bloodstains. Sure it was yellow journalism, but what did I care?
   I had no idea the response would be so quick and unpleasant.


* * *

   At 9 A.M.… Thursday morning, the main courtroom on the second floor of the Ford County Courthouse was full. It was the domain of the Honorable Reed Loopus, an aging Circuit Court Judge from Tyler County, who passed through Clanton eight times a year to dispense justice. He was a legendary old warrior who ruled with an iron fist and, according to Baggy—who spent most of his working life hanging around the courthouse either picking up gossip or creating it—was a thoroughly honest Judge who had somehow managed to avoid the tentacles of the Padgitt money. Perhaps because he was from another county, Judge Loopus believed criminals should serve long sentences, preferably at hard labor, though he could no longer order such.
   The Monday after the murder, the Padgitt lawyers had scrambled around trying to get Danny out of jail. Judge Loopus was preoccupied with a trial in another county—his district covered six of them—and he refused to be pushed into a quick bail hearing. Instead, he set the matter for 9 A.M. Thursday, thus allowing the town several days to ponder and speculate.
   Because I was a member of the press, indeed the owner of the local paper, I felt it was my duty to arrive early and get a good seat. Yes, I was a bit smug. The other spectators were there out of curiosity. I, however, had very important work to do. Baggy and I were sitting in the second row when the crowd began to assemble.
   Danny Padgitt’s principal lawyer was a character named Lucien Wilbanks, a man I would quickly learn to hate. He was what was left of a once prominent clan of lawyers and bankers and such. The Wilbanks family had worked long and hard to build Clanton, then Lucien came along and had pretty much ruined a fine family name. He fancied himself as a radical lawyer, which, for that part of the world in 1970, was quite rare. He wore a beard, swore like a sailor, drank heavily, and preferred clients who were rapists and murderers and child molesters. He was the only white member of the NAACP in Ford County, which alone was enough to get you shot there. He didn’t care.
   Lucien Wilbanks was abrasive and fearless and downright mean, and he waited until everyone was settled in the courtroom—just before Judge Loopus entered—to walk slowly over to me. He was holding a copy of the latest Times, which he began waving as he started swearing. “You little son of a bitch!” he said, quite loudly, and the courtroom became perfectly still. “Who in hell do you think you are?”
   I was too mortified to attempt an answer. I felt Baggy inch away. Every single person in the courtroom was staring at me, and I knew I had to say something. “Just telling the truth,” I managed to say with as much conviction as I could muster.
   “It’s yellow journalism!” he roared. “Sensational tabloid garbage!” The paper was just a few inches from my nose.
   “Thank you,” I said, like a real wise guy. There were at least five deputies in the courtroom, none of whom were showing any interest in breaking this up.
   “We’ll file suit tomorrow!” he said, his eyes glowing. “A million dollars in damages!”
   “I got lawyers,” I said, suddenly terrified that I was about to be as bankrupt as the Caudle family. Lucien tossed the paper into my lap, then turned and went back to his table. I was finally able to exhale; my heart was pounding. I could feel my cheeks burning from embarrassment and fear.
   But I managed to keep a stupid grin on my face. I couldn’t show the locals that I, the editor/publisher of their paper, was afraid of anything. But a million dollars in damages! I immediately thought of my grandmother in Memphis. That would be a difficult conversation.
   There was a commotion up behind the bench and a bailiff opened a door. “Everyone rise,” he announced. Judge Loopus crept through it and shuffled to his seat, his faded black robe trailing behind him. Once situated, he surveyed the crowd, and said, “Good morning. A rather nice turnout for a bail hearing.” Such routine matters generally attracted no one, except for the accused, his lawyer, and perhaps his mother. There were three hundred people watching this one.
   It wasn’t just a bail hearing. It was round one of a rape/murder trial, and few people in Clanton wanted to miss it. As I was keenly aware, most folks would not be able to attend the proceedings. They would rely on the Times, and I was determined to give them the details.
   Every time I looked at Lucien Wilbanks, I thought about the lawsuit for a million dollars. Surely he wasn’t going to sue my paper, was he? For what? There had been no libel, no defamation.
   Judge Loopus nodded at another bailiff and a side door opened. Danny Padgitt was escorted in, his hands cuffed at his waist. He was wearing a neatly pressed white shirt, khaki pants, and loafers. His face was clean shaven and free of any apparent injuries. He was twenty-four, a year older than me, but he looked much younger. He was clean cut, handsome, and I couldn’t help but think he ought to be in college somewhere. He managed a slow strut, then the sneer as the bailiff removed the handcuffs. He looked around at the crowd, and for a moment seemed to enjoy the attention. He showed all the confidence of someone whose family had unlimited cash, which it would use to get him out of his little jam.
   Seated directly in back of him, behind the bar in the first row, were his parents and various other Padgitts. His father Gill, grandson of the infamous Clovis Padgitt, had a college degree and was rumored to be the chief money launderer in the gang. His mother was well dressed and somewhat attractive, which I found unusual for someone dimwitted enough to marry into the Padgitt clan and spend the rest of her life secluded on the island.
   “I’ve never seen her before,” Baggy whispered to me.
   “How often have you seen Gill?” I asked.
   “Maybe twice, in the last twenty years.”
   The State was represented by the county prosecutor, a part-timer named Rocky Childers. Judge Loopus addressed him: “Mr. Childers, I assume the State is opposed to bail.”
   Childers stood and said, “Yes sir.”
   “On what grounds?”
   “The horrific nature of the crimes, Your Honor. A vicious rape, in the victim’s own bed, in front of her small children. A simultaneous murder caused by at least two knife wounds. The attempted flight of the accused, Mr. Padgitt.” Childers’s words cut through the hushed courtroom. “The great likelihood that if Mr. Padgitt leaves jail we will never see him again.”
   Lucien Wilbanks couldn’t wait to stand up and start bickering. He was on his feet immediately. “We object to that, Your Honor. My client has no criminal record whatsoever, never been arrested before.”
   Judge Loopus looked calmly over his reading glasses and said, “Mr. Wilbanks, I do hope that is the first and last time you interrupt anyone in this proceeding. I suggest you sit down, and when the Court is ready to hear from you, then you will be so advised.” His words were icy, almost bitter, and I wondered how many times these two had tangled in this very courtroom.
   Nothing bothered Lucien Wilbanks; his skin was as thick as rawhide.
   Childers then gave us a bit of history. Eleven years earlier, in 1959, a certain Gerald Padgitt had been indicted for stealing cars over in Tupelo. It took a year to find a couple of deputies willing to enter Padgitt Island to serve a warrant, and though they survived, they were unsuccessful. Gerald Padgitt either fled the country or secluded himself somewhere on the island. “Wherever he is,” Childers said, “he’s never been arrested, never been found.”
   “You ever hear of Gerald Padgitt?” I whispered to Baggy.
   “Nope.”
   “If this defendant is released on bail, Your Honor, we’ll never see him again. It’s that simple.” Childers sat down.
   “Mr. Wilbanks,” His Honor said.
   Lucien stood slowly and waved a hand at Childers. “As usual, the prosecutor is confused,” he began pleasantly. “Gerald Padgitt is not charged with these crimes. I don’t represent him and really don’t give a damn what happened to him.”
   “Watch your language,” Loopus said.
   “He’s not on trial here. This is about Danny Padgitt, a young man with no criminal record whatsoever.”
   “Does your client own real estate in this county?” Loopus asked.
   “No, he does not. He’s only twenty-four.”
   “Let’s get to the bottom line, Mr. Wilbanks. I know his family owns considerable acreage. The only way I’ll grant bail is if it’s all pledged to secure his appearance for trial.”
   “That’s outrageous,” Lucien growled.
   “So are his alleged crimes.”
   Lucien flung his legal pad onto the table. “Give me a minute to consult with the family.”
   This caused quite a stir among the Padgitts. They huddled behind the defense table with Wilbanks and there was disagreement from the very start. It was almost funny watching these very wealthy crooks shake their heads and get mad at each other. Family fights are quick and bitter, especially when money is at stake, and every Padgitt present seemed to have a different opinion about which course to take. One could only imagine what it was like when they were dividing their loot.
   Lucien sensed that an agreement was unlikely, and to avoid embarrassment he turned and addressed the Court. “That’s impossible, Your Honor,” he announced. “The Padgitt land is owned by at least forty people, most of them absent from this courtroom. What the Court is requiring is arbitrary and overly burdensome.”
   “I’ll give you a few days to put it together,” Loopus said, obviously enjoying the discomfort he was causing.
   “No sir. It’s just not fair. My client is entitled to a reasonable bail, same as any other defendant.”
   “Then bail is denied until the preliminary hearing.”
   “We waive the preliminary.”
   “As you wish,” Loopus said, taking notes.
   “And we request that the case be presented to the grand jury as soon as possible.”
   “In due course, Mr. Wilbanks, same as all other cases.”
   “Because we will move for a change of venue as soon as possible.” Lucien said this boldly, as if an important proclamation was needed.
   “It’s a bit early for that, don’t you think?” Loopus said.
   “It will be impossible for my client to get a fair trial in this county.” Wilbanks was gazing around the courtroom as he continued, almost ignoring the Judge, who, for the moment, seemed curious.
   “An effort is already under way to indict, try, and convict my client before he has the chance to defend himself, and I think the Court should intervene immediately with a gag order.”
   Lucien Wilbanks was the only one who needed gagging.
   “Where are you going with this, Mr. Wilbanks?” Loopus asked.
   “Have you seen the local paper, Your Honor?”
   “Not lately.”
   All eyes seemed to settle upon me, and once again my heart stopped dead still.
   Wilbanks glared at me as he continued. “Front page stories, bloody photographs, unnamed sources, enough half-truths and innuendos to convict any innocent man!”
   Baggy was inching away again, and I was very much alone.
   Lucien stomped across the courtroom and tossed a copy up to the bench. “Take a look at this,” he growled. Loopus adjusted his reading glasses, pulled the Times up high, and sank back into his fine leather chair. He began reading, apparently in no particular hurry.
   He was a slow reader. At some point my heart began functioning again, returning with the fury of a jackhammer. And I noticed my collar was wet where it rested on the back of my neck. Loopus finished the front page and slowly opened it up. The courtroom was silent. Would he toss me into jail right there? Nod to a bailiff to slap handcuffs on me and drag me away? I wasn’t a lawyer. I’d just been threatened with a million-dollar lawsuit, by a man who’d certainly filed many, and now the Judge was reading my rather lurid accounts while the entire town waited for his verdict.
   A lot of hard glances were coming my way, so I found it easier to scribble on my reporter’s pad, though I couldn’t read anything I was writing. I worked hard at keeping a straight face. What I really wanted to do was bolt from the courtroom and race back to Memphis.
   Pages rattled, and His Honor was finally finished. He leaned slightly forward to the microphone and uttered words that would instantly make my career. He said, “It’s very well written. Engaging, perhaps a bit macabre, but certainly nothing out of line.”
   I kept scribbling, as if I hadn’t heard this. In a sudden, unforeseen, and rather harrowing skirmish, I had just prevailed over the Padgitts and Lucien Wilbanks. “Congratulations,” Baggy whispered.
   Loopus refolded the newspaper and laid it down. He allowed Wilbanks to rant and rave for a few minutes about leaks from the cops, leaks from the prosecutor’s office, potential leaks from the grand jury room, all of them somehow coordinated by a conspiracy of unnamed people determined to treat his client unfairly. What he was really doing was performing for the Padgitts. He had lost his attempt to get bail, so he had to impress them with his zealousness.
   Loopus bought none of it.
   As we would soon learn, Lucien’s act had been nothing but a smokescreen. He had no intention of moving the case from Ford County.

Chapter 6

   When I bought the Times, its prehistoric building came with the deal. It had very little value. It was on the south side of the Clanton square, one of four decaying structures built wall to wall by someone in a hurry; long and narrow, three levels, with a basement that all employees feared and shied away from. There were several offices in the front, all with stained and threadbare carpet, peeling walls, the smell of last century’s pipe smoke forever fused to the ceilings.
   In the rear, as far away as possible, was the printing press. Every Tuesday night, Hardy, our pressman, somehow coaxed the old letterpress to life and managed to produce yet another edition of our paper. His space was rank with the sharp odor of printer’s ink.
   The room on the first floor was lined with bookshelves sagging under the weight of dusty tomes that had not been opened in decades; collections of history and Shakespeare and Irish poetry and rows of badly outdated British encyclopedias. Spot thought such books would impress anyone who ventured in.
   Standing in the front window, and looking through dingy panes of glass, across which someone had long ago painted the word “TIMES,” one could see the Ford County Courthouse and the bronze Confederate sentry guarding it. A plaque below his feet listed the names of the sixty-one county boys who died in the Great War, most at Shiloh.
   The sentry could also be seen from my office, which was on the second floor. It, too, was lined with bookshelves holding Spot’s personal library, an eclectic collection that appeared to have been as neglected as the one downstairs. It would be years before I moved any of his books.
   The office was spacious, cluttered, filled with useless artifacts and worthless files and adorned with fake portraits of Confederate generals. I loved the place. When Spot left he took nothing, and after a few months no one seemed to want any of his junk. So it remained where it was, neglected as always, virtually untouched by me, and slowly becoming my property. I boxed up his personal things—letters, bank statements, notes, postcards—and stored them in one of the many unused rooms down the hall where they continued to gather dust and slowly rot.
   My office had two sets of French doors that opened to a small porch with a wrought-iron railing, and there was enough room out there for four people to sit in wicker chairs and watch the square. Not that there was much to see, but it was a pleasant way to pass the time, especially with a drink.
   Baggy was always ready for a drink. He brought a bottle of bourbon after dinner, and we assumed our positions in the rockers. The town was still buzzing over the bail hearing. It had been widely assumed that Danny Padgitt would be sprung as soon as Lucien Wilbanks and Mackey Don Coley could get matters arranged. Promises would be made, money would change hands, Sheriff Coley would somehow personally guarantee the boy’s appearance at trial. But Judge Loopus had other plans.
   Baggy’s wife was a nurse. She worked the night shift in the emergency room at the hospital. He worked days, if his rather languid observations of the town could be considered labor. They rarely saw each other, which was evidently a good thing because they fought constantly. Their adult children had fled, leaving the two of them to wage their own little war. After a couple of drinks, Baggy always began the cutting remarks about his wife. He was fifty-two, looked at least seventy, and I suspected that the booze was the principal reason he was aging badly and lighting at home.
   “We kicked their butts,” he said proudly. “Never before has a newspaper story been so clearly exonerated. Right there in open court.”
   “What’s a gag order?” I asked. I was an ill-informed rookie, and everybody knew it. No sense in pretending I knew something when I didn’t.
   “I’ve never seen one. I’ve heard of them, and I think they’re used by judges to shut up the lawyers and the litigants.”
   “So they don’t apply to newspapers?”
   “Never. Wilbanks was grandstanding, that’s all. The guy is a member of the ACLU, only one in Ford County. He understands the First Amendment. There’s no way a court can tell a newspaper not to print something. He was having a bad day, it was apparent his client was staying in jail, so he had to showboat. Typical maneuver by lawyers. They teach it in law school.”
   “So you don’t think we’ll get sued?”
   “Hell no. Look, first of all, there’s no lawsuit. We didn’t libel or defame anyone. Sure we got kinda loose with some of the facts, but it was all small stuff, and it was probably true anyway. Second, if Wilbanks had a lawsuit he would have to file it here, in Ford County. Same courthouse, same courtroom, same Judge. The Honorable Reed Loopus, who, this morning, read our stories and declared them to be just fine. The lawsuit was shot down before Wilbanks typed the first word. Brilliant.”
   I certainly didn’t feel brilliant. I’d been worrying about the million dollars in damages and wondering where I might find such a sum. The bourbon was finally settling in and I relaxed. It was Thursday night in Clanton and few people were out. Every shop and store and office around the square was locked tight.
   Baggy, as usual, had been relaxed for a long time. Margaret had whispered to me that he often had bourbon for breakfast. He and a one-legged lawyer called Major liked to have a nip with their coffee. They would meet on the balcony outside Major’s office across the square and smoke and drink and argue law and politics while the courthouse came to life. Major lost a leg at Guadalcanal, according to his version of the Second War. His law practice was specialized to the point that he did nothing but type wills for the elderly. He typed them himself—had no need for a secretary. He worked about as hard as Baggy, and the two were often seen in the courtroom, half-soused, watching yet another trial.
   “I guess Mackey Don’s got the boy in the suite,” Baggy said, his words starting to slur.
   “The suite?” I asked.
   “Yeah—have you seen the jail?”
   “No.”
   “It’s not fit for animals. No heat, no air, plumbing works about half the time. Filthy conditions. Rotten food. And that’s for the whites. The blacks are at the other end, all in one long cell. Their only toilet is a hole in the floor.”
   “I think I’ll pass.”
   “It’s an embarrassment to the county, but, sadly, it’s the same in most places around here. Anyway, there’s one little cell with air conditioning and carpet on the floor, one clean bed, color television, good food. It’s called the suite and Mackey Don puts his favorites there.”
   I was mentally taking notes. To Baggy, it was business as usual. To me, a recent college attendee and sometime journalism student, a real muckraking story was in the works. “You think Padgitt’s in the suite?”
   “Probably. He came to court in his own clothes.”
   “As opposed to?”
   “Those orange jail coveralls everybody else wears. You haven’t seen them?”
   Yes, I had seen them. I had been in court one time, a month or so earlier, and I suddenly recalled seeing two or three defendants sitting in the courtroom, waiting for a judge, all wearing different shades of faded orange coveralls. “Ford County Jail” was printed across the front and back of the shirts.
   Baggy took a sip and expounded. “You see, for the preliminary hearings and such, the defendants, if they’re still in jail, always come to court dressed like prisoners. In the old days, Mackey Don would make them wear the coveralls even during their trials. Lucien Wilbanks got a guilty verdict reversed on the grounds that the jury was predisposed to convict since his client certainly looked guilty as hell in his orange jail suit. And he was right. Kinda hard to convince a jury you’re not guilty when you’re dressed like an inmate and wearing rubber shower shoes.”
   I marveled once again at the backwardness of Mississippi. I could see a criminal defendant, especially a black one, facing a jury and expecting a fair trial, wearing jail garb designed to be spotted from half a mile away. “Still fightin’ the War,” was a slogan I’d heard several times in Ford County. There was a frustrating resistance to change, especially where crime and punishment were concerned.


* * *

   Around noon the following day I walked to the jail looking for Sheriff Coley. Under the pretext of asking him questions about the Kassellaw investigation, I planned to see as many of the inmates as possible. His secretary informed me, rather rudely, that he was in a meeting, and that was fine with me.
   Two prisoners were cleaning the front offices. Outside, two more were pulling weeds from a flower bed. I walked around the block and behind the jail I saw a small open area with a basketball goal. Six prisoners were loitering under the shade of a small oak tree. On the east side of the jail I saw three prisoners standing in a window, behind bars, gazing down at me.
   Thirteen inmates in all. Thirteen orange suits.
   Wiley’s nephew was consulted about things around the jail. At first he was reluctant to talk, but he had a deep hatred of Sheriff Coley, and he thought he could trust me. He confirmed what Baggy had suspected—Danny Padgitt was living the good life in an air-conditioned cell and eating whatever he wanted. He dressed as he wished, played checkers with the Sheriff himself, and made phone calls all day long.


* * *

   The next edition of the Times did much to solidify my reputation as a hard-charging, fearless, twenty-three-year-old fool. On the front page was a huge photo of Danny Padgitt being led into the courthouse for his bail hearing. He was handcuffed and wore street clothes. He was also giving the camera one of his patented go-to-hell looks. Just above it was the massive headline: BAIL DENIED FOR DANNY PADGITT. The story was lengthy and detailed.
   Alongside was another story, almost as long and much more scandalous. Quoting unnamed sources, I described at length the conditions of Mr. Padgitt’s incarceration. I mentioned every possible perk he was getting, including personal time with Sheriff Coley over the checkerboard. I talked about his food and diet, color television, unlimited phone use. Everything I could possibly verify. Then I compared this with how the other twenty-one inmates were living.
   On page two, I ran an old black-and-white file photo of four defendants being led into the courthouse. Each, of course, was wearing the coveralls. Each had handcuffs and unruly hair. I blacked out their faces so, whoever they were, they would not suffer any more embarrassment. Their cases had long since been closed.
   I’d placed another picture of Danny Padgitt as he was led into the courthouse next to the file photo. Except for the handcuffs, he could’ve been on his way to a party. The contrast was startling. The boy was being pampered by Sheriff Coley, who, so far, had refused to discuss the matter with me. Big mistake.
   In the story, I detailed my efforts to chat with the Sheriff. My phone calls had not been returned. I’d gone to the jail twice and he wouldn’t meet with me. I’d left a list of questions for him, which he chose to ignore. I painted the picture of an aggressive young reporter desperately searching for the truth and being stiff-armed by an elected official.
   Since Lucien Wilbanks was one of the least popular men in Clanton, I included him in the fray. Using the phone, which I was quickly learning was a great equalizer, I called his office four times before he called me back. At first he had no comment about his client or the charges, but when I persisted with questions about his treatment at the jail he erupted. “I don’t run the damned jail, son!” he growled, and I could almost see his red eyes glowing at me. I quoted him on that.
   “Have you interviewed your client at the jail?” I asked.
   “Of course.”
   “What was he wearing?”
   “Don’t you have better things to report?”
   “No sir. What was he wearing?”
   “Well he wasn’t naked.”
   That was too good a quote to pass up, so I put it in bold print in a sidebar.
   With a rapist/murderer, a corrupt Sheriff, and a radical lawyer on one side, and me standing alone on the other, I knew I couldn’t lose the fight. The response to the story was astounding. Baggy and Wiley reported that the cafes were buzzing with admiration for the fearless young editor of the paper. The Padgitts and Lucien had been despised for a long time. Now it was time to get rid of Coley.
   Margaret said we were swamped with phone calls from readers incensed with the soft treatment Danny was receiving. Wiley’s nephew reported that the jail was in chaos and Mackey Don was at war with his deputies. He was coddling a murderer—1971 was an election year. Folks were angry out there and they might all lose their jobs.


* * *

   Those two weeks at the Times were crucial to its survival. The readers were hungry for details, and, through timing, dumb luck, and some guts, I gave them just what they wanted. The paper was suddenly alive; it was a force. It was trusted. The people wanted it to report with detail and without fear.
   Baggy and Margaret told me that Spot would have never used the bloody pictures and challenged the Sheriff. But they were still quite timid. I can’t say that my brashness had in any way emboldened my stall”. The Times was, and would be, a one-man show with a rather weak supporting staff.
   Little did I care. I was telling the truth and damning the consequences. I was a local hero. Subscriptions jumped to almost three thousand. Ad revenue doubled. Not only was I shining a new light into the county, I was making money at the same time.