“Thank you. Now, I heard the story Mr. Cage told me on the telephone. Tell me what you really know about the Payton case. And why you care.”

“We’ve read the original police file,” I begin. “Informant reports, interviews, interrogations, theories.”

“What did you learn from that?”

“The report was wrong about the bomb that blew up Payton’s Fairlane.”

If this rings a bell, Stone has one hell of a poker face. “Wrong how?”

“It said the bomb was made of dynamite, based on a patrolman discovering fragments of blasting caps, plus lab analysis.”

“So?”

“I located Payton’s car. It’s still in decent shape, believe it or not. The damage looked more characteristic of C-4 to me. A lot of metal shearing, small shrapnel. I sent a fragment of the engine to an expert for analysis. Last night he confirmed it. C-4.”

Stone nods thoughtfully. “C-4 was damn hard to come by in 1968. And your Klan boys didn’t know shit about using it.”

He has not directly refuted my assertion. “You’re saying the expert is wrong?”

“It’s happened before. But that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then you’re saying the Klan wasn’t behind the murder.”

“I didn’t say that either. What kind of theories were in the report?”

“Mostly rumors. I thought one story was plausible. Someone thought Payton’s death was a mistake. That the real target was the president of the local NAACP. He apparently rode to and from work with Payton a good bit.”

Stone nods with familiarity. “What about the one where a black button man was hired from New Orleans to come up and pop Payton? Strictly a money hit.”

This scenario had been reported to the police by a Louisiana woman. Her story was given credence because she turned down the full fifteen-thousand-dollar reward rather than give more details. She claimed she’d never live to spend the money. No further information was recorded in the file.

“Is that what you think happened?” I ask.

Stone smiles. “It could have happened. How old are you, Mr. Cage? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Do you have any idea what things were like in 1968?”

“In Mississippi?”

“In America.”

“Well . . . the country was turning against Vietnam. LBJ was being ground down by the war. Civil rights hit its high-water mark, with Martin Luther King at his peak before he—”

“I’m glad you passed your civics course,” he interrupts. “I’m talking about reality, son. Behind the scenes. In 1968 a few powerful and paranoid men were trying to hold their vision of this country together in the face of social revolution. It was a tide they had no prayer of stopping, but they didn’t understand that, and they used every method at their disposal to try.”

As Stone speaks, I glimpse a furnace of anger seething behind his eyes. He has tight control over it, but he’s been holding in that anger for years.