shit go. He loved him some colored folks. And it made him famous, for a while. The ‘Conscience of Mississippi,’ remember that? But . . . he kinda lost his fire after that car wreck, didn’t he?”
My anger has leveled off and begun cooling into dread. “Are you saying the Poker Club had something to do with that wreck? With the deaths of his first wife and child?”
Max smiles strangely. “Did I say that? No. The Poker Club never got involved in nigger trouble. And we sure didn’t whack newspaper publishers.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Duncan was warned by some different boys, and he ignored the warning. And, well, they done what boys like that always did back then.”
“They caused the wreck?”
Max turns up his big hands. “One-car accident on Cemetery Road? Come on.”
“It’s happened before, and since. That’s a bad turn.”
“Sure it is, if you try to take that dogleg at eighty miles an hour. You think a mama with a baby did that? In the rain? Hell, no.”
The ringing in my ears has risen in frequency. “They murdered his wife and baby? For what? To punish him?”
“No, no, they thought it was him in the car. See? Your old man was working late that night, and his wife had brought him some home-cooked food. She left about the time he would have driven home, but Duncan stayed to keep working. In the rain, those old boys couldn’t see it was a woman behind the wheel. They ran her off the road, right down into that gully. Car flipped, and they drowned in the runoff. Three feet of water.”
In my mind I hear Dr. Kirby telling me that people in Bienville have died over the years without their deaths ever being recognized as homicide. “You’ve known that all these years?”
Max smiles again, then raises his chin and scratches his neck. “Didn’t I just tell you I know everything that goes on in this town? Why do you think the investigation never turned up anything suspicious? The police blamed that accident on the rain and the dark, and that was the end of it. I don’t think Duncan even questioned the accident report.”
“Who caused that wreck, Max? Local Klansmen?”
“Not local, no.” He hesitates, then seems to decide I can’t do anything about it after so many years. “It was that bunch from down in Ferriday. The ones behind the murders in Natchez. The Double Eagles.”
The name rings a distant bell in my mind. I faintly recall a series of stories by a Louisiana reporter who died chasing the truth about cold cases in his parish. “How do you know it was them?”
Max shrugs as if this kind of specificity is unimportant. “Don’t worry about it. I’m telling you this to illustrate a life principle. If you do what your daddy did—get a bug up your ass and start publishing things that’ll hurt me or my partners—there’s nothing anybody can do to save you. The Poker Club’s a goddamn institution. And institutions protect themselves. Your life’s in your own hands, boy. Don’t throw it away. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
“Go fuck yourself, Max.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waves off my insult like he knows I have no choice but to work for him. “After you think about what I’ve said, you’ll come to the right conclusion. You’re smarter than your daddy was.”
“You think?”
“You tell me. Duncan’s been a drunk for fifty years. Got a fine son like you and treats you like you don’t exist. If he’d just eased up a little back in the sixties, practiced a little live and let live, his wife and baby would’ve been fine. Course, you and Adam never would have been born. But there’s no point speculating about that kind of thing. It’s the butterfly and the hurricane, right?”
“I actually spend a lot of time doing that.”
Max grins. “Clearly. Like what if Jet would’ve married you instead of Paul? That’s over with, Marshall. That water ran downstream twenty years ago. You can’t bring it back. Water don’t flow uphill. You need to bury your daddy and get your ass back to Washington, where you fit in.”
“It’s time for you to go, Max.”
He sniffs, then walks toward me from the window. “Do we have a deal?”
It physically pains me to promise this man anything. “I’ll try to find Sally’s cache for you. But I think you’re lying about your wife. I think you killed Sally. I think she knew something about you. Something