He looks around his study as if searching for something. “Penn,” he says finally, “this isn’t like the Del Payton case. As important as that was, it was basically a case of greed. The race angle was only incidental.”

I feel my face flush with frustration. “You’re avoiding my question. This picture isn’t all Henry has, you know. I saw FBI surveillance records that document Marcello’s hoods driving up from New Orleans to visit your office in the 1970s. Can you explain that?”

To my surprise, he shrugs as though he has nothing to hide. “I probably did treat some of Ray’s friends from New Orleans. God knows I treated enough Ku Klux Klansmen among the workers at Armstrong and Triton and IP. But there’s nothing evil in that. Assholes need doctors, too.”

“But why would mobsters drive the three hours from New Orleans to see you? In at least one case, a visit was after hours, and Ray Presley showed up at your office at the same time.”

Dad looks confused for a few moments, but then he seems to recover his composure. “I remember that! Some of Ray’s old cronies tried to bribe me to write fraudulent prescriptions for amphetamines. That was the big-demand drug back then. I said no, and that was that. Honestly, I didn’t see it as any different from Natchez lawyers asking me to pad my bills to fatten up their personal injury lawsuits. Human beings are avaricious, Penn. You know that.”

He’s responded to all my questions with calm assurance, yet amid all the words I sense a different kind of concealment. “Dad … so far as I know, in all my life, you only refused to open up to me about one thing—Korea. But today I discovered there’s a whole other chapter you kept back. This afternoon you lamented not doing more to help during the civil rights struggle, but it sounds like you were neck-deep in it. Henry says he’s been trying to interview you about that era for years, yet you’ve constantly put him off. Why?”

He focuses in the middle distance for a few silent seconds. Then he looks at me and answers in a low, earnest voice. “I never told you about the war because you can’t tell anyone about war, any more than you can tell a virgin what it means to go through labor. But make no mistake: what happened here during the 1960s was a war, too. A civil war.” He thumps Shelby Foote’s thick history. “Maybe the true end of this one. And as in any war, there were casualties. Viola was one of them.”

“Viola was gang-raped in 1968. I’m thinking you already know that.”