“Hell, no. Henry Bookbinder and me. The technology was primitive, but Henry was an artist with it, God rest his soul.”

“What did you pick up?”

Stone smiles with satisfaction. “The mother lode. One day Presley drove up to the mansion and knocked on the door. Then he and the judge went out to the gazebo and had a long chat. They said enough in thirty minutes to put Marston in the gas chamber.”

I hear a faint ringing in my ears. “Jesus. What did they say?”

Stone shakes his head. “You haven’t got anywhere on a motive for Marston?”

“That’s been my problem all along. I know Leo secretly owned some property that an out-of-town company was thinking of buying. There was some kind of race angle to that. Labor problems. Beyond that, I don’t have anything.”

“You were right on target, and you didn’t know it. It was a carpet company from Georgia. Zebulon Hickson, the owner, was about a mile to the right of Attila the Hun. He thought slavery was the finest and most misunderstood institution this country ever had. When he opened new factories, he went into communities where what he called ‘the nigger problem’ didn’t exist. Of course, by 1968 towns like that were hard to find. Especially along the Mississippi River, which was where he wanted to be.

“Leo Marston stood to make a lot of money off that land. But the labor situation wasn’t as stable as Hickson wanted it. Blacks were using the unions to push into white jobs. Hickson had the idea that if an example was made, it would calm the blacks down. Apparently he’d done this somewhere in Georgia, and it had worked.”

Marston’s plan seems so obvious now. All it takes is a few facts.

“I honestly doubt Marston ever thought it would work,” muses Stone. “He was too smart for that. But he didn’t care whether it worked. He just wanted to sell Hickson his land.”

“So, he went to Ray Presley,” I fill in. “He said, ‘We need to make an example of somebody.’ ”

“You got it. Marston didn’t care who died. It was just business.”

“Why didn’t he use the local Klan? Put a word into the right ear and let the Klan take care of Payton? Why use a cop?”

“Marston was the D.A. He knew the Klan was riddled with federal informants. He wanted zero risk of the murder being traced back to him. He also despised the White Citizens’ Council. He called them illiterate Baptist sons of bitches several times on the phone.”

“But he trusted Presley.”

“Yes. And he was right to. It’s ironic as hell, really.”

“Why?”