“A pack of pussies, more like. They didn’t do no better with the case than Creel and Temple did. And Kennedy got what he deserved a couple weeks later.”

Robert Kennedy deserved a bullet in the head? “What about an agent named Stone? Special Agent Dwight Stone?”

Jones’s face goes as dead as though someone zipped it shut. “Never heard of him.”

“He was lead agent on the Payton murder.”

The ex-Triton man sets his jaw and stares straight ahead like an obstinate mule. He remembers Agent Stone, all right. And not fondly.

We’re approaching the arched midpoint of the eastbound bridge. Above us, Natchez stretches across the horizon like a Cecil B. De Mille movie set, sweeping up from the cotton-rich bottomland to the spires and mansions on the great bluff, then back down again to the Triton plant and the sandbars where the river rolls on toward New Orleans and the Gulf. It’s the first time in years that I’ve seen the city from this aspect, and it’s breathtaking. Below us, two steamboats are docked at Under-the-Hill, grand anachronisms that now carry tourists rather than cotton merchants and gamblers. As we roll off the bridge and top the first long incline, the Pontiac sign appears in the distance. Jones’s posture instantly relaxes. This will be my last chance to speak to the man with any hope of a candid answer.

“What were you doing out there in the parking lot by yourself at eight o’clock that night?”

Something in his reaction telegraphs that he is about to lie. He does not squirm in his seat or make a sharp exclamation. Rather, a new stillness settles over him, one that sits heavily on a man unaccustomed to it.

“My wife called me,” he says. “She wanted me to get some bread and eggs and such. I was on night shift and the Pik Quick was about to close.”

This is the story recorded in the police report. But hearing Jones repeat it aloud, I sense the wrongness of it. “You were coming back from getting groceries when you saw the explosion?”

“I never got to leave.” He shifts in his seat, finally giving release to his nervous energy. “Had a problem with my battery. Or I thought it was my battery. Turned out to be my solenoid.”

A strange elation takes hold of me. Eight years of questioning hostile witnesses honed my intuition to a pretty fine point. Frank Jones is lying. He’s been lying for thirty years. And any cop worth a damn would have seen it as easily in 1968 as I saw it today. Dwight Stone would have seen it a damn sight quicker.

I pull onto the edge of the Pontiac lot and stop, then catch Jones’s left wrist and hold it tight. “Who else was in that parking lot that night?”

His eyes go wide with surprise. “What? Nobody.”