The Quiet Game (31 page)

“What do you think Dwight Stone knows?” she asks.

“More than we do. Maybe he knows everything.”

She opens the door and slips through without looking back, leaving me alone with my ghosts.

Crested Butte, Colorado, is a tiny village nestled nine thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains, twenty-five miles from Aspen as the crow flies, three hours by car. The easiest way to get there is to fly into Gunnison and drive north up the valley for half an hour. But to get to former special agent Dwight Stone’s cabin, you must leave the pastel storefronts of Crested Butte’s old town behind and drive northwest into the mountains on a forest service road, past the summer homes of the rich, until the road turns into a jeep trail that follows the Slate River upstream between Anthracite Mesa and Schuylkill Mountain. A few hundred yards north of an eight-foot vertical drop in the river, situated in the thick fir and spruce between the jeep track and the narrow blue-black span of the Slate, stands a small but well-built cabin, facing southwest to catch the sun.

Dwight Stone likes his solitude.

When I called Stone from the Gunnison airport and asked if I could speak to him about the Payton case, he politely declined. I did not tell him where I was calling from.

That was an hour ago.

Now Caitlin and Annie and I approach his front porch like a lost family asking for directions. I’m glad we brought coats. When we left Natchez it was ninety degrees. Here it’s less than fifty, and there are dark clouds glowering over the summit of Gothic Mountain to the east.

Before I can knock, a tall, fit-looking man in his late sixties clumps around the side of the cabin wearing hip waders, a Black Watch flannel shirt, and carrying a fly rod.

“You folks lost?” he asks in a deep, resonant voice.

“That depends on where we are.” I’ve already recognized the voice, but I say, “Are you former special agent Dwight Stone?”

Stone has the eyes of a combat veteran, and they narrow instantly, assessing threat. A man with a woman and a little girl can’t seem like much danger, but I don’t know what his anxieties are.

“You’re on my property,” he points out, quite reasonably. “Why don’t you introduce yourself first?”

“Fair enough. I’m Penn Cage.”

His eyes relax, but he sighs wearily. “You’ve wasted your time, son. Flying up here to get told no to your face instead of over the phone.”

“I hoped you might soften up a little when you saw us.”

He shakes his head, climbs onto the porch, and leans the fly rod against the cabin wall.

“I’m not a journalist. I have no interest in sensationalizing this story.”

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but that’s not why I’m looking into this case.”

“Why are you?”

My gut feeling about Dwight Stone is that if you want to get anywhere with him, honesty is the best policy. “I could say it was to help the victim’s family. Althea Payton and her mother-in-law. And I do want to help them. But I also have a selfish reason. I’m trying to nail a man who hurt my father a long time ago.”

Stone studies me for several seconds. “Who would that be?”

“Leo Marston. Judge Leo Marston. He was the district attorney back—”

“I know who he was.” Stone eyes Caitlin. “This your wife?”

“No, a friend. Caitlin Masters. But this is my daughter. Say hello, Annie.”

Annie waves her right hand while clinging to Caitlin’s leg with her left.

“You bring her along for the sympathy factor?”

“I brought her to keep her out of harm’s way. I’ve already been shot at. Not many people want the Payton case reopened.”

A flicker of something in Stone’s eyes. “You convicted Arthur Lee Hanratty, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I saw you on CNN last night, at the Walls.”

I nod but say nothing.

“That’ll buy you a half hour of my time, Mr. Penn Cage. How about some coffee?”

“Coffee would be wonderful,” Caitlin says, lifting Annie into her arms.

Stone takes a trout bag from his shoulder, then wipes his hands on his shirt and reaches for the cabin door. “I don’t get much company up here, but I think maybe we could rustle up some hot chocolate too.”

Annie breaks into a wide grin.

Stone settles Caitlin and me on a sand-colored leather sofa with Annie between us. Before us is a huge fieldstone fireplace, and Stone quickly builds a
roaring blaze in it. The cabin is full of hunting and fishing gear, snowshoes hanging on the walls, rifles over the mantel, a fly-tying bench littered with bright feathers. A large double-paned window faces the Slate, which runs flat and smooth thirty yards from the cabin’s back door. Only a large white propane tank mars the illusion of virgin wilderness, and when there’s snow it’s probably invisible.

After putting the trout in his sink, Stone brings us mugs of coffee and chocolate heated on an old woodstove, then sits opposite us in a rough handmade chair. His waders hang on a hook by the door, dripping into a brass bucket with the sound of men making use of a spittoon.

“You’ve got a nice place,” I tell him. “No neighbors at all. How’d you manage that?”

He smiles. “Everything you see around this place is government land. But this cabin sits on a mining claim that’s been in my family for three generations. Grandfathered down to the present. The federal government can’t do a thing about me.”

“I love it,” Caitlin says.

“Thank you. Now, I heard the story Mr. Cage told me on the telephone. Tell me what you really know about the Payton case. And why you care.”

“We’ve read the original police file,” I begin. “Informant reports, interviews, interrogations, theories.”

“What did you learn from that?”

“The report was wrong about the bomb that blew up Payton’s Fairlane.”

If this rings a bell, Stone has one hell of a poker face. “Wrong how?”

“It said the bomb was made of dynamite, based on a patrolman discovering fragments of blasting caps, plus lab analysis.”

“So?”

“I located Payton’s car. It’s still in decent shape, believe it or not. The damage looked more characteristic of C-4 to me. A lot of metal shearing, small shrapnel. I sent a fragment of the engine to an expert for analysis. Last night he confirmed it. C-4.”

Stone nods thoughtfully. “C-4 was damn hard to come by in 1968. And your Klan boys didn’t know shit about using it.”

He has not directly refuted my assertion. “You’re saying the expert is wrong?”

“It’s happened before. But that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then you’re saying the Klan wasn’t behind the murder.”

“I didn’t say that either. What kind of theories were in the report?”

“Mostly rumors. I thought one story was plausible. Someone thought Payton’s death was a mistake. That the real target was the president of the local NAACP. He apparently rode to and from work with Payton a good bit.”

Stone nods with familiarity. “What about the one where a black button man was hired from New Orleans to come up and pop Payton? Strictly a money hit.”

This scenario had been reported to the police by a Louisiana woman. Her story was given credence because she turned down the full fifteen-thousand-dollar reward rather than give more details. She claimed she’d never live to spend the money. No further information was recorded in the file.

“Is that what you think happened?” I ask.

Stone smiles. “It
could
have happened. How old are you, Mr. Cage? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Do you have any idea what things were like in 1968?”

“In Mississippi?”

“In America.”

“Well . . . the country was turning against Vietnam. LBJ was being ground down by the war. Civil rights hit its high-water mark, with Martin Luther King at his peak before he—”

“I’m glad you passed your civics course,” he interrupts. “I’m talking about reality, son. Behind the scenes. In 1968 a few powerful and paranoid men were trying to hold their vision of this country together in the face of social revolution. It was a tide they had no prayer of stopping, but they didn’t understand that, and they used every method at their disposal to try.”

As Stone speaks, I glimpse a furnace of anger seething behind his eyes. He has tight control over it, but he’s been holding in that anger for years.

“The Constitution meant nothing to these men. Richard Nixon was one of them, but he was bush league compared to them.”

“You’re talking about J. Edgar Hoover?”

“Hoover was one of the more visible.”

“How does this tie in with Del Payton?”

Stone looks from my face to Caitlin’s, as though deciding whether we have earned the right to any of his hard-won knowledge. Now that I think of it, he’s probably seventy years old, but his tanned, weathered face and soldier’s eyes convey the strength of a much younger man.

“A lot of blacks were killed in Mississippi in the nineteen-sixties,” he says in a deliberate voice. “Del Payton was one. But he was killed later than most. Have you thought about that? A lot of the race murders happened around sixty-four. Payton came later.”

“What’s the significance of that?”

“Just something for you to think about.”

Everything’s riddles with this guy. “Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968,” I point out.

He shakes his head. “I’m talking about grassroots murders.”

Caitlin looks ready to pop; she obviously has a hundred questions, but I hope she won’t ask them. The harder we push Stone, the more he’ll resist us. From lawyerly instinct, I move away from Del Payton and ask a question to which I already know the answer.

“Did you serve your full term of service with the Bureau? That is to say, did you retire at full pension?”

He takes a deep breath, and a little more anger spills through his eyes. “I’m going to answer that because you’re going to find it out anyway, if you don’t already know. And because I’m not ashamed to answer. I was asked to resign in 1972. Officially for alcoholism.”

Caitlin nods with empathy. “Did your drinking have anything to do with the Del Payton case?”

“That I won’t answer. But I’ll tell you this. If every alcoholic in the Bureau in 1972 had been asked to resign, Hoover couldn’t have mounted a raid on a cathouse. You had to drink just to stomach what was going on back then.”

“What kind of things are you talking about?” I ask.

“You ever read
American Tabloid
, by James Ellroy?”

“No.”

“Give it a look. Things weren’t quite that crazy, but they were damn close.”

“How did you earn a living after leaving the Bureau?”

A sour look wrinkles his face. “Worked as a private dick for a while. Big firm. That was sleazier than Hoover’s Bureau, so I quit. Worked as an insurance investigator. I drank professionally for a few years. I was close to dying when my daughter pulled me back up to the light. I finally hung out my shingle here and started helping the locals fight the government and the mining companies. That suited my temperament.”

“Were you in charge of the Payton investigation?”

“I was.”

“How did you like Natchez?”

“It wasn’t much like the rest of Mississippi. Better in a lot of ways. More liberal, the people more educated. But in a way that made the things that happened there worse. You know? Because there were people there who knew better.”

Stone goes to the stove and returns with the coffeepot, talking as he refills our cups. “When I was assigned to that case, I was only a couple of years younger than Payton was when he died. I had a wife and two kids, and I still had a few illusions. That case knocked them right out of me.”

He sets the empty pot on the stone hearth of his fireplace and takes his chair. “Do you have any illusions left, Mr. Cage?”

“Not many.”

He studies me as if judging the truth of my statement.

Caitlin takes this chance to jump in. “How do you feel personally about J. Edgar Hoover?”

Stone examines his fingernails, a seemingly casual gesture calculated to hide inner turmoil. “I don’t care if the man wore Frederick’s of Hollywood to bed every night. I don’t care if he wanted to
marry
Clyde Tolson, that pompous ground squirrel. But the man presented himself to this nation as a paragon of law and order. A champion of right. And the son of a—” Stone winces like Humphrey Bogart—“the
man
didn’t know the meaning of the words. He stole from the government, misused agents for personal gain, colluded with mobsters, broke the securities laws. . . . Human beings just weren’t meant to have that much power. Jesus, I need a drink.”

“Go right ahead.” It’s barely two p.m., but I feel like I could use one too.

Stone shakes his head. “Four months sober. It’s a daily battle.”

Watching him get control of his craving is like watching a man fight a malarial fever. As a younger man Dwight Stone did what most Americans never do—peered behind the curtain at the men running the machine—and he is a different man because of it. America isn’t the same country now, of course. It’s better in a lot of ways. But I can see how this wouldn’t matter to Stone. We are, all of us, men of our own eras.