Brody set aside the flood photos, picked up his glass of whiskey, and got up from the sofa. More and more frequently over the past year, he’d spent his leisure hours in the basement of his home on Lake Concordia. Most of this vast underground floor was occupied by a state-of-the-art firing range, but Brody had also added a display room for his collection of antique weapons. Over the years, this room had taken on the look of a gentlemen’s club, with comfortable furniture occupying the rectangular space between the glass-fronted cypress display cases. Here Brody entertained senators, governors, CEOs, sports stars, and country singers, allowing them to fire weapons they’d only seen in Hollywood movies. He loved watching citified ego-freaks turn into jelly as the BAR came alive in their hands, chewing up a fifty-five-gallon drum placed against the wall of railroad ties at the end of the shooting lanes.

The staircase leading to the house’s main floor was decorated with photographs that made Shad Johnson’s Wall of Respect look like a bulletin board in a teenage girl’s room. Anyone ascending those stairs saw Brody’s father and Governor Huey P. Long standing behind a balcony rail draped in campaign bunting. After that came Brody Sr. and a grinning young Carlos Marcello sitting in the bed of a tomato truck loaded with slot machines. Signed photos included Brody himself with President Lyndon Johnson, Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, President Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Candid shots showed Brody playing poker with John Stennis and Big Jim Eastland, eating catfish at Jughead’s with Senator Earl Long, drinking with Ernest Hemingway in the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, and singing with Al Hirt on the roof of the Eola Hotel. Brody’s favorite image, shot in 1952, only showed him in the background, while in the glare of a flashbulb General Douglas MacArthur danced with Natchez belle Pythia Nolan, whom Brody had once pursued with all his will but had failed to bring to the altar.