The first Saturday after receiving this letter, he drove down to the clinic’s rented storeroom, rolled up his sleeves, and began tearing through every box of extant medical records. It took him six hours, but he finally found the answer he had both sought and feared. It waited in a bellied old box containing the medical records of deceased patients from 1968. There, in the file of Frank Knox, was a notation in Tom’s scrawled hand recording a visit by Frank on November 18, 1963, during which Tom had ordered Knox to stay home from work for five days. The medical reason: chronic hepatitis. Tom sat alone in the storeroom, his heart pounding, his blurred eyes skimming the final page of Knox’s file, where he’d recorded Frank’s “accidental” death by industrial mishap. As terrible as that lie had always seemed, it paled in comparison to the implication of freeing Frank Knox from work during the week of the Kennedy assassination.

Tom returned home that evening a changed man. He had satisfied his curiosity, but the price had been a piece of his soul. He told no one about his discovery. After all, Carlos Marcello was still alive, and the FBI already had its own copy of Frank Knox’s absentee record. Though Tom lived in constant dread of being contacted by the Bureau about Frank, he never was. And while he half expected to receive tragic news about Viola any day, he never did. Eventually, the demands of his practice and the passage of time drove his anxiety into the background, and three years passed before he was forced to confront his fears once more.

On March 3, 1993, Carlos Marcello finally died.

Naturally, the first Tom heard of it was when his nurse ushered Ray Presley into his office at the end of a workday. The rawboned former detective held a brown paper bag in his hands. In that bag was a bottle of expensive bourbon, which Ray took out, set on Tom’s desk, and said, “The king is dead. Long live the king.”

“What are you talking about?” Tom asked.

“The Little Man passed.”

A cold shudder went through Tom: it was fear that Viola’s days were now numbered—possibly in single digits.

Ray opened the bourbon and poured shots, and Tom drank three in a row. After Ray waxed poetic for a few minutes about the old days in New Orleans, he fell silent and looked into Tom’s eyes. Then he asked whether Tom was still confused about who’d killed JFK.

Tom shook his head and said, “Frank, right?”

“Good old Frank,” Ray confirmed, nodding.

“So what happens now?” Tom asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . Frank’s been dead for a quarter century. Now Marcello’s dead. Kennedy’s been dead thirty years. Are you going to carry the secret to the grave? Or are you going to do something else with it?”

Presley’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Like what?”

“You know what. You’re a history buff, like me. We’re talking about the biggest murder case in American history. You can set the record straight, let the world know what really happened. Hell, that story’s probably worth millions of dollars.”

Ray thought about this for a while. Then he said, “I’d never live to spend it.”

“But you told me his family had lost most of its power, that his brothers were going straight. Where’s the danger?”

Presley chuckled softly. “Not from his brothers. I’m thinking about the Corsican.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“Another guy who was involved in that hit.”

“Another shooter?”

“No, no. He was the cleanup man. If anything went wrong, he would have cleaned it up.”

“Meaning?”

Ray laughed at Tom’s ignorance. “Meaning kill everybody involved. Oswald, Frank, Ferrie . . . everybody.”

“Who was he?”

“Shit, I don’t know. He was Corsican, a CIA contract man. He worked as an instructor at one of the Mongoose camps, like Frank did. Hell, you met him yourself.”

Tom blinked in disbelief. “What? When?”

“On the fishing boat, remember? That time down on the coast. With Brody Royal and Devereux?”

A wave of heat rolled across Tom’s face. “That Frenchman who got so drunk and ranted about Dallas?”

“That’s right, cher. That’s him. They speak French in Corsica, don’t they? And I heard some real horror stories about that guy. Frank killed people, but that fucker liked it.”

“Christ.” The bourbon soured in Tom’s mouth and gut. “Is that guy still around?”

“Who knows? But you never leave a guy like that out of your calculations.”

“Hm. But . . . with Carlos dead, why would he take the risk of killing somebody who talked now?”

Presley laughed again. “Because he was involved in the hit. Because he’s a pro. Because he’s a sick fuck. Need I continue?” Presley threw back a shot and shrugged. “No, I’ll carry what I know to my grave, because I want that grave to be a long way off. I’d advise you to do the same, Doc.”

Later that night, Tom decided he would heed Ray’s advice. Keeping such knowledge secret went against every principle he believed in, but the logic seemed inescapable: If he contacted the authorities about what he “knew,” what would really happen? First, he had no objective proof of anything. There was the medical excuse, of course, but all that proved was that Frank Knox had lied about why he’d skipped work during the week in question. That didn’t place him in Dealey Plaza, or even in Texas. Second, Ray Presley would never corroborate anything Tom said, and he might well kill Tom for dragging him into the mess. Third, the Corsican assassin remained an enigma who might or might not be out there somewhere, ready to silence anyone who talked. If Ray was scared of the guy, that was sufficient for Tom. Finally, who would see Tom’s tale as anything more than just another crackpot conspiracy theory?

Ethically, his dilemma wasn’t as thorny as some. Unlike the Albert Norris case, the perpetrators in the JFK assassination were as dead as the victim. No one had been wrongfully imprisoned. Nothing would bring the victim back. At the empirical level, Tom would be risking his family’s lives in order to set the historical record straight—and with only the slimmest circumstantial evidence to back up his accusations. Tom was far more concerned that with Carlos Marcello physically gone, Snake Knox and his old Double Eagle comrades would take the opportunity to silence the one person who could send them to death row for murdering her brother and Luther Davis.

But that did not happen.

Tom’s original deal with Marcello had stipulated that so long as Viola did not return to Natchez, she would be left alone, and it seemed that the Double Eagles were content to abide by that arrangement. Maybe they figured that since Viola had held her silence for that long, she never intended to speak. And until a few weeks ago, history had proved them right. But at some point during her journey toward death, Viola had decided to return home. In so doing, she had attracted the attention of Henry Sexton. And through Henry, she’d drawn the notice of the other local men who knew that Viola possessed information that could alter not only the perception of the past, but the reality of their futures. The Double Eagles.

Through the chemical fog that held him in his suspended state, Tom heard a distant voice calling his name. Tom? Tom . . . ?

“Tom,” said a voice in the dark. “Can you hear me?”

Someone shook him. Then Walt’s face appeared above his, eyes bleary in the weathered brown skin. “You were moaning something. Then you stopped breathing.”

“Did I?”

“Were you having a nightmare?”

“I don’t . . . Must be the drugs.”

Walt nodded, then took Tom’s pulse. “Not good,” he said. “But you can dance to it. Can I get you anything?”

Tom shook his head in exasperation. “I need the goddamn urinal again.”

“You and me both. Let me get enough light on to find it.”

While Walt searched the floor beside the bed, Tom lay back and remembered Viola in the year he’d first gone to work at the clinic. But then, flowing through and over those memories, came images of Peggy during those summers in New Orleans when they’d been as poor as Viola and her husband would be later, when a meal in Mosca’s Italian Restaurant and a tableside visit from Carlos Marcello had made Tom feel like he was more than a penniless student, and when the smooth rumble of the Ford Fairlane carrying his wife and him back to their apartment with good wine and food in their stomachs was as solid and comforting as anything he’d ever known. For it was only later—much later—that Tom realized the three-hundred-dollar Fairlane was the costliest possession he would ever own.