The Quiet Game (55 page)

“Tapes?”

“Lacour taped everything. He was connected, like I said. And totally paranoid. He’d worked for the Marcello family when he was younger. Carlos Marcello, the Mob guy? Anyway, he saved these phone tapes just like files. Sometimes when he was drinking, he’d talk about his ‘insurance.’ That was the tapes. There were twelve tapes coded for Marston’s name. I took them all on the day I split.”

“What did Lacour say about you quitting?”

“I didn’t stick around to talk. I’m sure he thought I left because he couldn’t keep his hands off me. I’d used a fake name, so he couldn’t trace me. He’s bound to have noticed the missing files, but so what? I stole some other files related to Judge Marston just to confuse the trail.”

“What did you do next?”

“I went to Atlanta to find my mother.”

“And?”

“She refused to see me.”

“At all?”

“When I called her at home, she hung up on me. So, one day at her office, I sort of ambushed her. It’s a big law firm. She was so afraid I’d make a scene that she took me into her private office. Acted like I was a client. She told me she didn’t want anything to do with me. She had no interest in my life, nothing. She wrote me a check for twenty-five thousand dollars and told me to go away.”

Jenny is crying now, but she wipes away the tears with fierce determination. “She broke my heart that day. I’d been through a lot in my life. I thought I was tough. But to have the woman who’d given birth to me offer me money to disappear . . . to pretend that I’d never even been born. I just couldn’t stand it.”

She closes her eyes, takes a very deep breath, and holds it.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I suggest.

She expels the air in a long, steady exhalation. “No, this is better. Really.”

“What did you do next?”

“I tore up her check. I probably should have kept it, because I really needed the money. But I couldn’t. I tore it up and asked her to tell me my father’s name. She turned white, Mr. Cage. That question scared her to death. I begged her to tell me, but she wouldn’t. I told her I would never do anything to hurt her, and asked her to please reconsider. Then I left.”

“I’m so sorry, Jenny.”

“After that I got stoned for about three weeks. From the file, I worked out
that my mother must have gotten pregnant at the end of her senior year of high school. Which meant she was probably living here at the time, right? And her father still lived here. I figured if I hung around here awhile, I might be able to find out who she was dating back then. Maybe figure out my birth father that way. So I got on a Trailways and came to Natchez. When I got here, I found out Livy Marston was practically a celebrity. Everybody remembered her. They talked about her like she was like a princess or something.”

“She was, in a way. Did you tell anybody that she was your mother?”

“No. I played it very cool. I’d hear people talking about her sometimes, waiting tables or hanging out, and I’d ask about her. It didn’t take long to find out that you were her boyfriend during her senior year. I even saw an old yearbook with a picture of you together. And you
were
a celebrity. I mean, you are. A real one. It freaked me out, honestly. I knew so many foster kids who made up those kinds of fantasies. But this fantasy was
real
.”

I am past the point of being able to respond.

“People said Olivia disappeared for nearly a year after she graduated, that she’d gone to Europe or something. That’s when she was pregnant with me.”

The beginnings of nausea are welling in my stomach. The logic of Jenny’s story—and its accordance with the known facts—is unassailable. In five minutes a waitress has supplied the missing piece of a puzzle that has haunted me for twenty years. Leo Marston went after my father because I got his daughter pregnant. Because I changed the course of her life and shattered the dreams he’d had for her. His dream that she would go to Ole Miss. That she would attend the same law school he’d gone to. Marry some suitable Mississippi boy and move back to Natchez to practice with her father.
That
was what Maude was talking about the night she threw the drink in my face. What I can’t understand is why Livy wouldn’t tell me she was pregnant at the time. Why keep it from me? And why hadn’t her father called mine in a rage and demanded that I marry her?

But in that question lies the answer to the others. Livy’s parents weren’t white trash from the wrong side of the tracks, a family for whom a marriage to a doctor’s son—even a shotgun marriage—would be a step up the social ladder. They were
Marstons
. Natchez royalty. The worst thing Leo and Maude could possibly imagine would be anything that might slow the momentum of their perfect daughter’s perfect life. Marriage would never have entered their minds. They wouldn’t want a single soul to discover that Livy was pregnant, and they would want the resulting child to disappear from the face of the earth. I can’t believe Leo let Livy carry the child to term.

As for Livy keeping the pregnancy from me, her psychology was simple enough. She had ambitions, and marriage at eighteen wasn’t one of them. When she thought of marriage, she envisioned someone who could not possibly be
found in the backward and somnolent state of her birth. Yet for the past few days she has acted as though she’d like nothing better than to spend the rest of her life with me.

“She never told you anything about me?” Jenny asks in a small voice.

“Not a word. I never suspected that Livy had a child. No one did.”

“Well, she does. She may not want me, but she’s my mother.”

“Jenny, I know this sounds pathetic, but . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“I know I sprang this on you at a terrible time. I’m so sorry about your maid.”

“It’s all right.”

She takes a tentative step toward me. “Will you do me a huge favor, Mr. Cage?”

“If I can. What is it?”

“Will you get a blood test?”

My stomach flips over. “A paternity test?”

“It’s just one tube of blood. For a DNA test.”

“Jenny—”

“I know you feel like you’ve been hit with a ton of bricks. I don’t want to creep you out or anything. But when I saw you sitting down there today, you looked so vulnerable. The way I feel all the time. I just knew you were more compassionate than—
her.
Even if you didn’t want anything to do with me, I knew you’d be nicer about it.”

My mind has slipped away again. Livy’s reaction to Jenny’s appearance in Atlanta seems incomprehensible. I can understand her being shocked, or afraid of what her husband might think. But to be so cruel . . .

“It is possible, right?” Jenny asks. “I mean, you were sleeping with Livy Marston in high school?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head as though she still can’t believe we’re talking face to face. “This is so scary. But it’s liberating too. I really thought you were going to just run out of here. Straight to a judge to get a restraining order against me.”

“Jenny—”

“And you have a little girl,” she says excitedly. “I mean, I could have a
sister.
”

Primal fear grips my heart. “Jenny, we’ve got to take this one step at a time. You—”

“I know. I didn’t mean to be pushy. I don’t want to crash in on your life or anything. I’d never do that. I’ve just felt so alone my whole life.” In an instant her face seems to collapse in upon itself. “You don’t know the things that have happened to me, Mr. Cage.”

“I can guess. Look, the first thing I should do is talk to Livy.”

“She won’t talk about it.”

“She’ll talk to me.”

Jenny is wringing her hands again. “I heard a rumor last night. Someone in the restaurant said you were seeing her again. They saw you out driving. I’ve been so weirded out by that. I thought you had a thing for the publisher of the newspaper.”

“Jenny . . . Livy may have been cruel to you, but she’s not a monster.”

“I’m telling you, she’s not rational about this.”

“Does Leo Marston know about you?”

“Oh, yeah.” She nods slowly. “I talked to him once. He heard me out, then told me that he had to honor his daughter’s wishes regarding me, and he expected me to do the same.”

“I’ll bet he offered you fifty grand to disappear.”

“Ha. He told me it probably would have been better if I hadn’t been born, but that I had been, so I had to do the best I could. Life is tough, he said. You believe that? Like his life was ever tough. That son of a bitch. But he scared me. He told me if I tried to make any public scandal, he’d have to take steps to ‘resolve the situation.’ And he wasn’t talking about legal steps. God, I wish I’d taped that conversation. I’d seen mob guys in Lacour’s office in New Orleans. They were basically okay guys, most of them. But Leo Marston . . . he’s not a nice guy. He made me feel like I’d be doing the world a service if I slit my wrists.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny. That’s all I can say right now.” Though I probably shouldn’t, I walk to her and take her hands in mine. They’re alarmingly cold. “I don’t know what the truth is. I honestly don’t. But if I am your father, I’ll take care of you. It’s too late for me to be a father in the real sense. But you won’t want for anything, and you won’t be alone.”

To see a grown woman break into a child is a terrible thing, and I will not speak of it here.

The
Examiner
building is humming like a beehive, but I see no sign of Caitlin as I pass through the newsroom. I go straight to the conference room, which at the moment contains two female reporters poring over the Marston files, patiently separating wheat from chaff.

“Ladies, could I have the room for a few minutes?”

They look up at me like graduate students disturbed in their library carrels, then blink and look at each other.

“Uh, sure,” says the one wearing glasses.

As soon as the door closes, I tear through the stacks of paper on the table, looking for something that seemed trivial only two days ago: the scrawled note listing the income Marston realized from private adoptions. Yesterday it was just another scrap of paper among thousands. Now it’s my personal Rosetta stone.

It’s not on the table.

I drop to my knees and start working through the carefully stacked piles on the floor, shoving aside page after page, letting them fall where they will. In five minutes the room is awash in paper, and sweat is running down my face. In ten I am trying to suppress the furious panic of an Alzheimer’s patient who sets down his car keys and can’t find them five seconds later.

And then I am holding the damn thing.

One sheet of yellow legal paper, with a column of years beginning in 1972 and continuing to the present. Some years aren’t listed, but beside each that is, an amount of money is noted. The highest figures correspond to the 1980s, and some of these are followed by a one-digit number in parentheses, which probably indicates the number of adoptions handled in that year. Beside the year 1978 is written the figure $35,000.

Jenny Doe is telling the truth.

The weight of this knowledge is staggering, but before I can begin to absorb it, the door to the conference room opens a crack, and Caitlin walks in, her face flushed with excitement.

“I just heard you were here. Listen to this. My father called twenty minutes ago. He found out why Dwight Stone won’t testify for us.”

I fold the scrap of legal paper and slip it into my pocket. “Why?”

“Stone has a daughter.”

“So? I have a daughter too.”
Maybe two.

“Your daughter’s not an FBI agent.”

The scrap of paper is momentarily forgotten. “Dwight Stone has a daughter in the FBI?”

A triumphant smile lights Caitlin’s face. “Ten years in. John Portman can ruin her career with a single reassignment, and he can make it the same way.”

It had to be something like this. In Colorado I had gotten such an impression of integrity from Dwight Stone that I couldn’t fathom what would keep him from helping me expose the truth of what happened here in 1968. But children make us all vulnerable. They’re hostages to fortune, as the poet said.

“Hostages to fortune?” says Caitlin.

I must have spoken aloud. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“Penn, what’s the matter? You looked zoned out.”

“I’m fine.”

“Bullshit. You look terrible.” She glances around the room, which is strewn
with loose pages like leaves on a forest floor. “What happened in here? What are you looking for?”

“I already found it.”

“What?”

“Something personal. Nothing to do with our case.”

Caitlin goes to the table and picks up a few pages, straightens them into a stack, and sets them back down. Then she turns those remarkable green eyes on me and speaks in a voice raw with hurt. “It’s Livy Marston, isn’t it? Nothing else would get you so worked up.”

“It has to do with Livy, yes.”

“You can’t tell me what it is?”

“Not yet. Not until I know something for sure. Right now I need a telephone.”

She waves her hand with disgust. “Take any one you want.”