“The Constitution meant nothing to these men. Richard Nixon was one of them, but he was bush league compared to them.”

“You’re talking about J. Edgar Hoover?”

“Hoover was one of the more visible.”

“How does this tie in with Del Payton?”

Stone looks from my face to Caitlin’s, as though deciding whether we have earned the right to any of his hard-won knowledge. Now that I think of it, he’s probably seventy years old, but his tanned, weathered face and soldier’s eyes convey the strength of a much younger man.

“A lot of blacks were killed in Mississippi in the nineteen-sixties,” he says in a deliberate voice. “Del Payton was one. But he was killed later than most. Have you thought about that? A lot of the race murders happened around sixty-four. Payton came later.”

“What’s the significance of that?”

“Just something for you to think about.”

Everything’s riddles with this guy. “Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968,” I point out.

He shakes his head. “I’m talking about grassroots murders.”

Caitlin looks ready to pop; she obviously has a hundred questions, but I hope she won’t ask them. The harder we push Stone, the more he’ll resist us. From lawyerly instinct, I move away from Del Payton and ask a question to which I already know the answer.

“Did you serve your full term of service with the Bureau? That is to say, did you retire at full pension?”

He takes a deep breath, and a little more anger spills through his eyes. “I’m going to answer that because you’re going to find it out anyway, if you don’t already know. And because I’m not ashamed to answer. I was asked to resign in 1972. Officially for alcoholism.”

Caitlin nods with empathy. “Did your drinking have anything to do with the Del Payton case?”

“That I won’t answer. But I’ll tell you this. If every alcoholic in the Bureau in 1972 had been asked to resign, Hoover couldn’t have mounted a raid on a cathouse. You had to drink just to stomach what was going on back then.”

“What kind of things are you talking about?” I ask.

“You ever read American Tabloid, by James Ellroy?”

“No.”

“Give it a look. Things weren’t quite that crazy, but they were damn close.”

“How did you earn a living after leaving the Bureau?”

A sour look wrinkles his face. “Worked as a private dick for a while. Big firm. That was sleazier than Hoover’s Bureau, so I quit. Worked as an insurance investigator. I drank professionally for a few years. I was close to dying when my daughter pulled me back up to the light. I finally hung out my shingle here and started helping the locals fight the government and the mining companies. That suited my temperament.”

“Were you in charge of the Payton investigation?”

“I was.”

“How did you like Natchez?”