“Involved?” Ike the Spike laughs quietly in the dark. “Oh, yeah.”

“That’s impossible. What could Leo Marston possibly have had to do with Del Payton?”

“He was D.A. back then, wasn’t he?”

My head is swimming. “Leo Marston was district attorney in 1968?”

“You didn’t know that? It was in the article this morning.”

I see my father jerking the paper from my hands and wadding it up. “I didn’t read the whole thing.”

“That wasn’t too smart, was it?”

“You’re saying Marston covered something up? Buried evidence while he was D.A.?”

Ike fires his rock across the street like a major league outfielder. It flies over the cyclone fence bordering the plant and strikes something metal, silencing the crickets for a few seconds. “I’m saying all these years that motherfucker been handing out jail time and making millions, he should have been rotting at Parchman Farm.”

A dark thrill ripples through my chest. “You’re saying Marston was involved in the actual crime?”

“I done said all I got to say.”

“You can’t drop a bomb like that and then shut up! How do you know any of this?”

“You a cop in this town for twenty years, even a black cop, you get to know some things.”

The hair on my arms is standing erect. I cannot interpret my emotions. Fear? Excitement? I walk the ten yards to the pecan tree, unzip my pants, and urinate on its trunk as I try to get my mind around what Ransom has told me.

“Shook you up, huh?” he says, laughing.

I zip up and turn back to him. “You’ve known for thirty years that Leo Marston was guilty of a felony and you’ve done nothing about it?”

“What says I knew for thirty years? I wasn’t on the job thirty years ago. What I’m gonna do anyway, man? A nigger cop on the bottle gonna go up against the judge? That’s why you here, man. Takes somebody like you to do it.”

“Like me?”

“You’re white, famous, and you make your money someplace else. They can’t hurt you much here.”

“Who’s they?”

“That’s what you got to find out.”

“Christ. Just tell me what you know. I’ll take it and run with it.”

Ike gives me a knowing smile. “You want Marston’s ass bad, don’t you?”

“Tell me, goddamn it!”

“That don’t play, college boy. You gotta work your way to it. Then you’ll understand.”

“Why tell me this, Ike?”

“Why me, Ike?” he mocks in a woman’s voice. “Don’t play that shit with me! Everybody knows the judge went after your old man. Damn near got him too.”

This stings me to the quick. “That’s bullshit. My father was unanimously exonerated by a jury.”