Читать книгу Blood Memory - Greg Iles - Страница 16

My grandfather sits in a leather club chair and regards me with interest. He’s an imposing figure, and he knows it. William Kirkland looks the way people want their surgeons to look: confident, commanding, untroubled by doubt. Like he could operate ankle-deep in blood and only get calmer as the situation deteriorated. God endowed my grandfather with that magical combination of brains, brawn, and luck that no amount of poverty could hold in check, and his personal history is the stuff of legend.

Born into the hard-shell Baptist farmland of east Texas, he survived a car crash that killed his parents while they were traveling to his baptism. Taken in by his widowed grandfather, he grew into a boy who worked from “can see to can’t see” in the summers and in the winters managed to score so highly in school that he attracted the attention of his principal. After receiving a full athletic scholarship to Texas A&M, he lied about his age and enlisted in the marines at seventeen. Twelve weeks later, Private Kirkland was on his way to the Pacific islands, where he won a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts as he fought his bloody way toward Japan. He recovered from his wounds, then used the GI Bill to graduate from A&M, where he won a scholarship to Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. There, he met my grandmother, the demure princess of Tulane’s sister college, H. Sophie Newcomb.

A Presbyterian and a pauper, my grandfather was initially regarded with suspicion by the Catholic patriarch of the DeSalle family. But by sheer force of personality, he won over his future father-in-law and married Catherine Poitiers DeSalle without changing his religion. They had two daughters before he finished his medical training, yet still he managed to win top honors during his surgical residency. In 1956 he moved his young family to his wife’s hometown—Natchez—and joined the practice of a prominent local surgeon. The future seemed set in stone, which, as a believer in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, suited my grandfather just fine.

Then his wife’s father died. With no male heir to take over the DeSalle family’s extensive farming and business interests, my grandfather began to oversee those operations. He showed the same aptitude for business that he had for everything else, and before long he’d enlarged the family holdings by 30 percent. Surgery soon became almost a hobby, and he began to move in more rarefied business circles. Yet he never left his rural past behind. He can still split a fifth of cheap bourbon with a group of field hands without their guessing he’s the man who pays their wages. He runs the DeSalle empire—his family included—like a feudal lord, but without sons or grandsons to carry on his legacy, the weight of his frustrated dynastic ambitions has devolved onto me.

“Where have you been?” I ask, having endured all the silent scrutiny I can stand.

“Washington,” he replies. “Department of the Interior.”

The candid answer surprises me. “I thought that was a big secret.”

He sips judiciously from his Scotch. “To some people it is. But unlike your mother and her sister, you know how to keep a secret.”

I feel my cheeks flush. My status as my grandfather’s favorite has always been more of a burden than a blessing, and it frequently causes jealousy in my mother and aunt.

“I want to show you something, Catherine. Something no one else has seen outside Atlanta.”

He stands and goes to a large gun safe built into the wall, which he unlocks with precise twirls of the combination lock. I feel a great urgency to get to New Orleans, but if I want to find out anything about the night my father died, I’ll have to humor my grandfather for a few minutes. Grandpapa Kirkland doesn’t hand out anything for free, especially information. He’s a quid pro quo man. This for that, I recite, mentally translating the Latin he insisted I study in school.

As he works at something in the safe, I recall what Michael Wells said about how strong Grandpapa seems. Most men age first in their shoulders and chests, their muscle mass waning as their middles thicken, the bones slowly becoming brittle like those of their wives. But my grandfather has somehow retained the shape of men twenty-five years his junior. He’s a member of that rare brotherhood that seems to age at half the rate of mortal men—epic figures like Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.

Instead of the priceless antique or musket I expect him to bring out of the gun safe, he produces a large architectural model. It looks like a hotel, with two grand wings framing a central section done in the Greek Revival style so common to the antebellum homes of Natchez.

“What’s that?” I ask, as he carries the model to a poker table in the corner.

“Maison DeSalle,” he says with pride.

“Maison DeSalle?” That’s the name of my mother’s interior design business. I walk over to the table. “That looks way too big to be a new building for Mom’s store.”

He chuckles with rich amusement. “You’re right. I just liked the name. This Maison DeSalle is a hotel and casino complex. A resort.”

“Why are we looking at it?”

Grandpapa sweeps his arm over the model like a railroad baron taking in a map of the continent. “Sixteen months from now, this will be standing in downtown Natchez, overlooking the Mississippi River.”

I blink in disbelief. By law, every Mississippi casino—even the Vegas-style palaces on the Gulf Coast—has to be built on some kind of floating platform. Natchez has its own riverboat casino permanently docked at the bottom of Silver Street. “How can that be? Doesn’t state law restrict gambling to casinos on water?”

He smiles slyly. Michael Wells was right: my grandfather knows something no one else does. “There’s a loophole in the law.”

“Which is …?”

“Indian gaming licenses.”

“You mean reservation gaming, like in Louisiana?”

“Louisiana and about twenty other states. We have one in Mississippi already, up at Philadelphia. Silver Star, it’s called.”

“But there’s no reservation in Natchez.”

Grandpapa’s smile becomes triumphant. “There soon will be.”

“But we don’t have any Native Americans here.”

“Who do you think gave this town its name, Catherine?”

“The Natchez Indians,” I snap. “But they were massacred by the French in 1730. Slaughtered down to the last infant.”

“Not true, my dear. Some escaped.” He runs his long fingers along the roof of one of the model’s wings, then caresses the casino’s central section. “I’ve spent the last four years tracking down their descendants and paying for DNA tests to prove their lineage. I think it would interest you. We’re using three-hundred-year-old teeth to get the baseline DNA.”

I’m too stunned to speak.

“Impressed?” he asks.

I shake my head in bewilderment. “Where did the survivors escape to?”

“Some vanished into the Louisiana swamps. Others went north to Arkansas. Some got as far as Florida. A few were sold into slavery in Haiti. The survivors mostly assimilated into other Indian tribes, but that doesn’t affect my venture. If the federal government certifies their descendants as an authentic Indian nation, every law that applies to the Cherokee or the Apache will apply to the descendants of the Natchez.”

“How many of these people are there?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven? Is that enough?”

He taps the model with finality. “Absolutely. Tribes have been certified with fewer members than that. You see, the fact that there are so few left isn’t the Indians’ fault. It’s the government’s.”

“The French government, in this case,” I say drily. “And by the way, they’re called Native Americans now.”

He snorts. “I don’t care what they call themselves. But I know what they mean to this town. Salvation.”

“That’s why you’re doing this? To save the town?”

“You know me well, Catherine. I’ll grant you, the cash flow from this operation could run twenty million a month. But no matter what you may think, that’s not my reason for doing this.”

I don’t want to listen to one of my grandfather’s righteous rationalizations for his ambition. “Twenty million a month? Where will the people come from? The gamblers, I mean. The nearest commercial airport is ninety miles away, and we still have no four-lane highway from it.”

“I’m buying the local airport.”

“What?”

He laughs. “Privatizing it, actually. I’ve already got a charter airline committed to coming here.”

“Why would the county let you do that?”

“I’ve promised to bring in ongoing commercial service.”

“It’s like Field of Dreams, isn’t it? You believe that if you build it, they will come.”

He fixes me with a pragmatist’s glare. “Yes, but this isn’t a dream of foolish sentimentality. People want glamour and stars, and I’ll give them that. The high rollers will fly into the cotton capital of the Old South on a Learjet and live Gone With the Wind for three days at a time. But that’s all window dressing. What they really come for is the age-old dream of getting something for nothing. Of walking in paupers and walking out kings.”

“That’s an empty dream. Because the house always wins in the end.”

Now his smile shows pure satisfaction. “You’re right. And this time we’re the house, my dear. But unlike that abomination floating under the bluff, which fleeces local citizens of their Social Security checks and sends the profits directly to Las Vegas, Maison DeSalle will keep its profits right here in Natchez. I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of this town. A state-of-the-art industrial park will be first. Then—”

“What about the Indians?” I ask bluntly.

The cool blue eyes lock onto mine, silently chastising me. Grandpapa has grown unused to interruptions in my absence. “I thought you said they were Native Americans now.”

“I thought you might answer my question.”

“Those eleven Indians will become some of the richest people in Mississippi. Naturally, I’ll receive fair compensation for spearheading the venture and laying out the initial capital.”

I see it now. My grandfather will be hailed as the savior of Natchez. Yet despite the stated nobility of his goal, I feel uneasy at the way he’s going about it. “Can anything go wrong at this point?”

“Oh, something can always go wrong. Every old soldier knows that. But my Washington contacts tell me that federal certification of the Natchez Nation should come within seven days.”

I walk away from the poker table, my eyes on a bottle of Absolut on the sideboard.

“Sure you don’t want a drink?” he asks.

I close my eyes. I’d hoped to wean myself off the Valium today, but I’m going to need one for the drive to New Orleans. “Positive.”

He takes a last look at his model, then carries it back to the gun safe. While his back is turned, I take a pill from my pocket and dry-swallow it. By the time my grandfather returns to his chair, the Valium is in my stomach.

“Tell me about the night my father died.”

Grandpapa’s eyelids seem to grow heavy. “I’ve told you that story at least a dozen times.”

“Humor me. Tell me once more.”

“You’re thinking about that blood you found.” He lifts his Scotch and takes another swallow. “It was late. I was reading here in the library. Your grandmother was upstairs with abdominal pain. Pearlie was with her. I heard a noise behind the house. A metallic sound. A prowler had knocked over a metal drum on the patio in the rose garden.”

“Did you see that happen?”

“Of course not. I found the drum when I went outside.”

“Were you armed?”

“Yes. I took a Smith and Wesson .38 out with me.”

“What was in the drum?”

“Pesticide for the roses. It was a heavy drum, so I figured a deer had got spooked while eating the roses and knocked it down.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

He shrugs. “I thought I could deal with it myself. Your father was standing outside your house. I thought he’d left for the island, but he’d been down in the barn, working on one of his sculptures. He’d heard something, too. Luke was holding the old Remington rifle he brought back from Vietnam.”

“The one that hung over our fireplace?”

“That’s right. The 700.”

“So he went into the slave quarters to get that?”

“Apparently so.”

“And then?”

“We separated. I went to look behind Pearlie’s house, while Luke circled around yours. I was on the far side of Pearlie’s house when I heard the shot. I raced around to the garden and found Luke lying dead. Shot in the chest.”

“Are you sure he was dead then? Did you check his pulse?”

“I spent a year in combat in the Pacific, Catherine. I know a gunshot death when I see it.” His voice has the kind of edge that closes further questions in that line.

“Did you see the prowler?”

“You know I did.”

“Please just tell me what you saw.”

“A man running through the trees toward Brookwood.”

“Did you chase him?”

“No. I ran into your house to make sure you and Gwen were all right.”

I try to picture this scene. “Were we?”

“Your mother was asleep, but you weren’t in your bed.”

“What did you do?”

He closes his eyes in recollection. “The telephone rang. It was Pearlie, calling from the main house. She and your grandmother were in a panic. She asked if you were all right. I said you were, but at that point I didn’t know.”

“Did you tell her to call the police?”

“She’d already called them.”

“What happened then?”

“I searched the house for you.”

“And?”

“I didn’t find you. I was worried, but I knew the man I saw running hadn’t been carrying a child, so I wasn’t panicked. I figured you were hiding somewhere.”

“Did you wake Mom up?”

“No, I knew Gwen would panic. But she soon woke up on her own. She didn’t believe Luke was dead, so I walked her out to look at his body.”

“Did she ask where I was?”

“The truth? Not at first. She wasn’t in very good shape. She’d taken a sedative. I think she assumed you were asleep in your bed.”

How many mothers would assume that under those circumstances? “Was there a lot of blood around Daddy’s body?”

Grandpapa tilts his head from side to side, as though filtering his memory of my father’s corpse through decades of surgical experience. “Enough. The bullet clipped the pulmonary artery, and there was a good-sized exit wound.”

“Enough for what?”

“For someone to track blood into your room, I suppose.” My grandfather’s face gives away nothing.

“When did I turn up?”

“Right after the police arrived. I was telling them what happened when you walked up out of the dark.”

“From the direction of our house?”

“I didn’t see where you came from. But I remember the eastern slave quarters behind you, so I guess so.”

“Was I wearing shoes?”

“I have no idea. I wouldn’t think so.”

“Did I get close to Daddy’s body?”

“You were practically on top of him before anyone noticed you.”

I close my eyes, willing my memory of that image back into the dark where I keep it. “Was the prowler you saw running away white or black?”

“Black.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“What kind of shoes were you wearing that night?” I didn’t mean to ask this aloud, but it’s too late to take it back.

“I wore boots during the day back then, but that night … I don’t recall.”

“Did you go into my room after the murder?”

“I did. To help your mother calm you down.”

“Was I upset?”

“Not that a stranger could tell. You didn’t make a sound. But I could see it. Pearlie was the only one you’d let hold you. She had to rock you in the chair like she did when you were a baby. That’s the only way we got you to sleep.”

I remember that feeling, if not that specific night. Pearlie rocked me to sleep on many nights, and long after I was a baby.

“Well.” He takes a conclusive breath. “Have I told you what you needed to know?”

I haven’t begun to get the answers I want, but at this point I’m not sure what the right questions are. “Who do you think the prowler was, Grandpapa?”

“No idea.”

“Pearlie thinks it might have been a friend of Daddy’s, looking for drugs.”

Grandpapa appears to debate with himself about whether to comment on this. Then he says, “That’s a fair assumption. Luke took a lot of prescription drugs. And I caught him growing marijuana down on the island more than once.”

“I never knew that.”

“Of course you didn’t. Anyway, I worried at times that he might be selling the stuff. When he was killed, I thought of telling the police to explore that avenue, but in the end I decided against it.”

“Why?”

“What could it do but bring calumny on the family name?”

Of course. The family name matters more than anything, even justice. I want to ask him the final question I put to Pearlie. But Grandpapa always saw my father as weak, and if he’d believed that fatal rifle shot had been self-inflicted, he wouldn’t have concealed from anyone this vindication of his instincts—not even to protect the family name. Because he didn’t really see my father as part of the family. And yet … there could be factors I know nothing about. My mother, for example.

“Did you really see a prowler that night, Grandpapa?”

His eyes widen, and for a moment I’m certain my blind shot has struck home. Before he speaks, he reaches out and drains the last of his Scotch. “Exactly what are you asking me, Catherine?”

“Did Daddy shoot himself that night? Did he commit suicide?”

Grandpapa raises a hand to his chin and massages the flesh beneath it. His eyes are unreadable, but I see a shadow of conflict in them. “If you’re asking me whether I think Luke was capable of suicide, my answer is yes. He was severely depressed a good deal of the time. But that night … everything happened just as I said. He died trying to protect his home and family. I’ll give the boy that.”

Only when I exhale do I realize how long I’ve been holding my breath. I feel such relief that it takes a supreme act of will not to get up and take a slug of vodka from the bottle on the sideboard. Instead, I stand and gather my fax pages from the table.

“You hardly draw anything from your trust fund nowadays,” Grandpapa remarks. “You don’t spend money anymore?”

I shrug. “I like earning my own.”

“I wish the rest of the family would take a page from your book.”

I take this for what it is, a thinly veiled insult to my mother and aunt, but most of all to my father. “You really didn’t like him, did you? Daddy, I mean. Tell the truth.”

Grandpapa’s eyes don’t waver. “I don’t think I made a secret of that. Perhaps I should have, but I’m no hypocrite.”

“Why didn’t you like him? Was it just oil and water?”

“A lot of it was the war, Catherine. Luke’s war. Vietnam. His mental problems, I guess.”

“He was wounded, too, you know.” I still recall the line of holes in Daddy’s back, caused by shrapnel from a booby-trapped artillery round. I always got chills when he removed his shirt.

“Luke’s physical wound wasn’t his problem.”

“You don’t know what he went through over there!” I cry defensively, though I don’t really know either.

“That’s true,” Grandpapa admits. “I don’t.”

“I heard some of the things you used to say to him. How Vietnam wasn’t a real war. How it wasn’t nearly as tough as Iwo or Guadalcanal.”

He stares curiously at me, as though wondering how an eight-year-old child could remember something like that. “I did say those things, Catherine. And in the time since, I’ve realized I might have been wrong. To an extent, anyway. Vietnam was a different kind of war, and I didn’t understand that then. But by God, I saw things in the Pacific that were about as bad as a man can see, and I didn’t let it paralyze me. A few men did—good men, some of them—and I guess maybe Luke was like them. Shell shock, the doctors called it then. Or battle fatigue. I’m afraid we just called it, well—”

“Yellow!” I finish, trying to resist a rush of emotion. My cheeks are burning. “Why didn’t you tell Daddy you’d seen good men react like the way he did? You called him yellow to his face. I heard you! I didn’t know what you meant then, but I did later.”

Grandpapa folds his still-powerful hands together and fixes me with an unrepentant gaze. “Listen to me, Catherine. Maybe I was too hard on your father. But at some point it doesn’t matter what you’ve gone through. You have to pull up your bootstraps and get on with living. Because one thing’s for sure, nobody else is going to do it for you. Your father’s job was to provide for you and your mother, and at that job he failed miserably.”

I’m almost speechless with fury. “Did you really want him to succeed?”

“What does that mean? I gave him three different jobs, and he couldn’t handle any of them.”

“How could he? You despised him! And didn’t you just love being the big man, the one who paid for everybody’s food and shelter? Who controlled us all?”

He settles deeper into his chair, his chiseled features hard as the face of a mountain. “You’re distraught, my dear. We’ll continue this at another time. If we must.”

I start to argue, but what’s the point? “I have to get back to New Orleans. Please don’t go into my old bedroom before I get back. You can’t see anything without special chemicals. And please don’t let anyone else go in there. Mom’s liable to try to scrub the place from top to bottom with 409.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep the room secure. Test anything and everything you like.”

I collect my papers and walk to the study door.

“You seeing anybody that looks like a potential husband?” Grandpapa asks.

A wave of heat shoots up my spine.

“I’m wondering if I’m ever going to see some children around here before I die.”

If he knew I was pregnant now, he probably wouldn’t even care that I’m not married. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” I say without turning. “You’re going to live forever, aren’t you?”

I open the door to find Grandpapa’s driver staring at me, an open leer on his face.

“Hey,” he says.

I brush past Billy Neal without a word, but as I walk away, I hear him mutter something that sounds like “Frigid bitch.”

On any other day I would turn back and bite his head off, but today … it’s just not worth it.

Today I keep walking.