“I’m sorry, Caitlin.”
“I can get another one.”
“I meant for getting so… you know.”
She shakes her head. “I liked it. Hey, you didn’t break any laws here. You look like you saw a ghost.” Her smile vanishes. “You did see a ghost. God, I’m such an ass sometimes.”
“It’s all right.”
She takes my hand again. “This just happened, okay? Nobody’s fault. We’ll just be friends, if you want.”
“This is unfamiliar territory for me.”
“We’re the only ones out here, Penn. Everything’s fine.” She reaches behind her neck to pin her hair back up. “Do you need a ride home?”
“No. I need to talk to Sam Jacobs. He’ll give me a ride. Thanks, though.”
She releases my hand and gives me the kind of encouraging smile you give a sick friend, then walks up the steps ahead of me. As she turns the doorknob, I reach out and touch her elbow. “I do think that lunch would be nice, though.”
She turns and smiles. “Same place?”
“Works for me. Twelve?”
“I’ll meet you there.”
She opens the veneered door and goes inside, and I follow, watching her wend her way through the crowd in the hall, drawing looks from most of the women and all of the men. A woman that beautiful and perceptive hasn’t been seen in these precincts for quite some time. Not since Livy Marston came back from the University of Virginia to serve as Queen of the Confederate Pageant.
As Caitlin disappears into one of the great rooms, I detour out of the hallway to search for Sam. The first room I enter is relatively empty, but the arched proscenium leading to the next is completely blocked by a semicircle of men and women. I move closer to the line of backs, then freeze.
The focus of their attention is Judge Leo Marston.
The mere sight of him raises my temperature a couple of degrees, from anger mostly, but also-though I hate to admit it-from a residue of fear. Most of the men I knew as a boy I outgrew during high school, and they seem small to me now. Leo Marston still has three inches on me, and age has not diminished his physical presence. He must be nearly seventy by now, but he looks as though he could outfight any man here. With bulk in proportion to his height, he dwarfs the men standing in his audience. He masks his rawboned body in bespoke suits shipped to him once a year from London, but his outsized hands betray the power beneath. Like my father, Marston has kept his hair through the years, and he wears it in a steel-gray brush cut reminiscent of the leading men of the 1950s. When I was younger, I thought of him as an oversized Lee Marvin with a patina of Southern refinement. But no amount of refinement can conceal the animal alertness of his eyes. The irises are ice blue with gray rims, giving him a wolfish aspect, and they never settle anywhere for long. In moments they will pick me from the crowd.
I step behind a tall man to my right, removing myself from Leo’s line of sight. Still, his mellifluous basso carries to me without losing any volume to distance. It’s one of his most formidable weapons as an attorney, second only to his intellect. The timbre of that voice is graven forever in the circuits of my brain. Twenty years ago I listened to it accuse my father of negligence bordering on murder, first indirectly, as Marston tried to draw out testimony from reluctant nurses and technicians, then directly, like an inquisitor, as he cross-examined Dad on the stand. I took two weeks off from college to attend the trial, and by the second Friday I was ready to confront Marston on his way home from court and put a bullet through his heart.
“My point,” Marston is saying, “is that the Germans are either at your feet or at your throat. We have to let BASF know that while we want them to locate here, we won’t grovel.”
“But we will,” someone says. “And they know it.”
Everyone laughs, then stops abruptly when they see that Marston does not share their humor.
“It all comes down to dollars,” he says in a cold voice. “That’s when you find out who needs whom. And that remains to be settled.”
He continues in this line, tantalizing the men with his inside knowledge and the women with his references to money. When people speak of “old Natchez families,” they mean the Marstons. Leo’s great-great grandfather, Albert Marston, owned a massive cotton plantation in Louisiana, which he administered from an Italianate mansion in Natchez called Tuscany. During the Civil War, Albert paid lip service to the Confederate cause while lavishly entertaining the Union officers occupying the city. He was the first Natchez planter to sign the loyalty oath to the Union, which enabled him to maintain his assets and continue to do business while prouder men lost everything. Many called Marston a traitor, but he laughed all the way to the bank.
People say Leo is the reincarnation of Albert, and they’re right. I often saw the grim ancestral portrait in the hall at Tuscany when I picked up Olivia in high school, a canvas enshrining a virtual twin of the man who warned me without subtlety to have “his angel” home by eleven “or else.” By the time Leo graduated law school nearly a century after Albert’s death, the family appetites for power and profit had expressed themselves as forcefully as the genes for those chilling blue eyes. Leo Marston knew the secret and immutable laws of Mississippi politics the way a farmer knows his fields. The state’s eighty-two counties function more or less as feudal domains, each with its closed circle of power, and Leo was born into one of the richest. Yet despite the relative wealth of Adams County, its elected officials cannot help but be swayed by admiration, envy, or outright fear of men like Leo Marston. Add to these the appointees whose hirings Marston has assured, and the result is a local political network that allows the judge to grant or quash things like building permits and zoning variances with a single phone call.
And Marston’s power is not limited to the city. During his judicial career-first as a circuit judge, then a justice of the state supreme court-he did so many favors for so many people that his capital reserves of influence are impossible to estimate. Nor did he idly spend his time as state attorney general or chairman of the Agriculture Board. He has like-minded friends in every corner of Mississippi, and owns financial stakes in businesses all over the state, including the two biggest banks. He can sway the trials of friends and enemies from Tupelo to Biloxi, and put fear into newspaper editors as far away as Memphis and New Orleans. He is a vindictive son of a bitch, and everybody knows it.
On the other hand, he is easy to like. A man doesn’t attain that kind of power without being able to play the social game with flair. Marston can discuss the finer points of obscure wines with vintners vacationing in Natchez, and an hour later put a crew of roughnecks on the floor of an oil rig with jokes that would make a sailor blush. In the company of women he becomes whatever the mood and situation require. With a priggish society wife he fancies, he tells off-color stories in a quiet, bourbon-laced voice, flustering her with the idea that a man in the judge’s exalted position could be so down-to-earth. With a buxom barmaid he plays the cultured Southern aristocrat for all he is worth. I’ve seen Leo Marston play so many roles that I’m not sure anything lies at the center of the man other than a burning compulsion to increase his dominion over people, land, and money.
As I contemplate him, his words begin to lose their rhythm, then falter altogether. He has spotted me. The blue-gray eyes hold mine, unblinking, searching, revealing nothing. A few heads in the audience turn to me, wondering who could possibly have upset the equilibrium of the judge. Noticing this, Leo resumes speaking, though without the ease he earlier displayed.
He focuses on the women in his audience, lingering upon the prettiest. That his weakness was women I discovered in high school, when his sexual escapades almost destroyed his family. Leo’s wife found a way to live with his flagrant infidelities, but his youngest daughter could not. When Olivia Marston learned at sixteen that her father had left a wake of brokenhearted and pregnant women behind him (which clarified the mystery of her mother’s chronic alcoholism), she turned the strength she’d inherited from Leo against him, shaming and threatening him into changing his ways. It worked for a while, but appetites on that scale can’t be suppressed long. What I found fascinating-and Livy disgusting-was that she was the only woman who ever challenged him. Not one of Leo’s cast-off paramours ever tried to bring him down. The single ones he paid off with abortion money and more, frequently enough to send them back to college or get them started in a new town. The married ones nursed their broken hearts in silence, or, if they confessed to their husbands, were surprised by the nonviolence of the reaction. Such male passivity was unheard of in the South, but by virtue of his power, Leo Marston enjoyed a sort of modern-day droit du signeur, and he used it. As far as I know, he’s paid only one price for his sexual adventures. Though his name has been floated more than once as a potential candidate for governor, each time party officials quietly let the suggestion die. No one feels confident about exposing Leo Marston’s past to the scrutiny of a modern election.