Dad turns up his palms. “There’s no way to know. You killed a man last night. An hour before it happened, you couldn’t have conceived of doing that, could you?”
He’s right, but this only makes me angrier. “How many men have you killed, Dad?”
After a long silence, he says, “More than I like to remember.”
“Where?” My father has never told me a single war story about Korea. “In the war?”
“Yes.”
“But you were a medic.”
“That’s right.”
I wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Jesus . . . okay. I’m going to think about what you’ve told me. Or asked me, I guess.”
“Are you going to be coming back? Next time Peggy and Annie visit, maybe?”
“I don’t know.”
“I understand.”
“Listen, Mom’s terrified that something will happen to you once you’re transferred to the Adams County jail.”
Dad dismisses this with a wave of his crooked hand. “Billy Byrd won’t murder me in his jail, or even have me killed by an inmate. He wants to see me convicted. He wants a public downfall and he’s sure it’s coming. He and his deputies gathered the evidence themselves. To Billy, it’s an open-and-shut case.”
“It looks that way to me, too, honestly. How the hell can you get any semblance of a fair trial with those guys in charge of the evidence?”
“A fair trial?” Dad smiles strangely. “I never expected one. Any evidence that might even have muddied the water disappeared that first day. Probably never even reached the evidence room. But it doesn’t matter.”
“Why the hell not?”
Dad looks at me as he would a slow child. “Because I’m guilty, son.”
I must have misheard him. “What?”
“I killed Viola.”
His simple, declarative confirmation knocks the breath out of me. I search his eyes for some clue to a deeper message, but I see none. It takes a moment to get my voice working. “Are you speaking literally? Or . . . in some larger moral sense?”
A sad smile touches his mouth. “This isn’t a philosophy symposium, Penn. I killed Viola. The why is nobody’s business. That’s between her, me, and God.”
I am gobsmacked, as the Brits say. And utterly bewildered by the casual tone of his confession. “Dad, I’m feeling a little lost here.”
“Because you’re overthinking things. I worked in a movie house in the late forties, when I was a teenager. Do you remember me telling you that?”
I cannot find words to answer.
A look of nostalgia comes into his face. “The Rialto in DeRidder, Louisiana. I saw a lot of pictures in that grand old dame of a theater. Good ones, bad ones, just okay.”
A worm of fear is turning in my belly. Has my father lost his grip on reality? “Dad, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to set you straight, son.”
“About what?”
“You’re confused about what kind of movie you’re in.”
“What kind of movie . . . ?”
“Yes. This isn’t a mystery. It’s not a whodunit, with Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple. I’m the killer.”
“Dad, for God’s sake—”
“This isn’t even film noir,” he goes on. “It’s a western, Penn. It always was. With black hats and white hats. Well . . . maybe my hat is gray. Like Henry Fonda’s in his later years.”
I get up from the table and walk toward the door. His words are so maddening that I want to get physically away from him. Halfway to the door, I stop and turn back. “If you killed Viola . . . why even go through this trial? Why not plead guilty, take your sentence, and live out your last year or two of life in jail?”
He apparently takes my question very seriously. “I’ve thought about that. A great deal, in fact. But I can’t do that to your mother. Or to Annie. What I do now, I’m doing for them.”
Right. Tom Cage, the family martyr.
“You said your motive was between you, Viola, and God. But you don’t believe in God.”
This time his smile is sad. “That was only a figure of speech. What I meant was, it’s between Viola and me—and she’s gone now. When I go, my motive will be lost to history, just as it should be.”
Maybe I’m not listening with the proper detachment, because his words hit me like a slap in the face. “That’s great, Dad. Only you don’t live in a vacuum. The decisions you make have consequences for the rest of us. Terrible consequences.”
“I know. I’ve learned that, if nothing else. If you’d let me—”
I hold up my hand again, and this time, mercifully, he stops. But when the doorknob is in my hand, he says, “I’m so sorry for everything, son. I mean that.”
Without turning back, I say, “Is that what you said to your other son? To Lincoln?”
When he doesn’t reply, I look back.
“Yes,” he says finally, and then he shakes his head in resignation.
At these words, something in my mind simply shuts down. There’s only one thing left to say.
“Good-bye, Dad. I won’t be coming back before the trial.”
And I leave him.
Thursday
Chapter 6
It took twenty days for the VK motorcycle club to hit back in revenge for Tim and me killing their members, and what they did was something I had not imagined in my most horrific nightmares. What they did proved John Kaiser’s classification of the Double Eagle group as a domestic terror organization completely justified. What they did was obscene.
And it happened only yards from my front door.
I spent the twenty days between those two violent episodes doing what my father asked me to do—visiting Double Eagles, their wives, their children, and where possible their ex-wives and known associates—and I hated every minute of it. Of course I told myself I was picking up the torch Caitlin had dropped, not fulfilling the charge that my father had laid upon me at the federal prison. But whatever I was really doing, it didn’t work.
Nearly everywhere I went, I was walking in the footsteps of John Kaiser’s FBI agents, and not one of them had gleaned even a seed of valuable information from those sources. This was probably because all those agents had been walking in the footsteps of Henry Sexton, and Henry had died in a ball of fire in Brody Royal’s basement. Everyone I visited knew that. They knew, too, about Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield. And Silas Groom. And every person I talked to had fully absorbed the object lesson: if you go against Snake Knox’s Double Eagle group, you die.