“Only the beginning, I’m afraid. Marrying Catherine opened the doors that had always been shut to him, doors no amount of money could open. The right Mardi Gras krewe, the Yacht Club, the second-best gentlemen’s club. And once he had that … Brody didn’t need her anymore.”

“What happened?”

“A lot of private suffering, I know. Some of it terrible, if rumor can be believed. In the end, Cathy drowned in her own bathtub. That was, oh … 1962. Her blood alcohol level was off the chart, so nobody looked too deeply into it. But her father was still alive, and I imagine he knew the truth. Brody had been cheating on Cathy from the beginning. That was no secret. And he’d got control of quite a bit of the family money by managing their investments. In the end, he virtually broke the father.”

“It sounds like The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“Not far from it. Revenge never brought Brody happiness, though. Nothing could. He’s gotten steadily richer, but his family …”

“What?”

“The sons are lazy. They’re from his second marriage. The daughter was his hope, I think. Katy was a pretty thing, and all the local beaux chased her. But something happened after her mother’s death. Katy disappeared, and everyone assumed she’d gotten pregnant. Back in those days, they sent girls to relatives to have the babies. But it turned out that Brody had committed her to an asylum in Texas. A private sanatorium—very tony, but still. A year later, Katy came back without any baby. If there ever was one, I suppose it was given up for adoption.”

“What about abortion?”

“Very difficult in those days, dear. Anyway, Brody married Katy to one of his workmen, an awful Black Irishman. A jumped-up roughneck, basically.” Pithy shook her head with poignant sadness. “I don’t know what they did to that girl in Texas, but all her spark was gone. And with that chapter closed, Brody turned his hand to making money again.”

“Until he married Dr. Robb’s wife in 1970.”

The old woman gives me a sharp look. “Something tells me that for once, you know more than I do about something.”

“I’m pretty sure Brody arranged for that plane to go down.”

“Because he wanted to marry Sue Robb?”

“That was probably half the reason,” I tell her. “But Dr. Robb also knew about earlier murders Brody had committed.”

Pithy taps her fingers on the coverlet, trying to absorb this. “You don’t think Brody killed all these people himself, surely?”

“No. Some ex-Klansmen helped him. Knoxes from across the river.”