The Devil’s Punchbowl

As I park and exit my car, a faint but steady glow from the second floor of the house across the street catches my eye. My stomach gives a little flip and I pause, trying to recall whether I’ve seen that light in the past few weeks. The question has some importance, for the house still belongs to Caitlin, though she hasn’t lived in it for eighteen months, preferring to spend most of her time in Charlotte, North Carolina, where her father’s newspaper chain is based. But the house remains furnished, and she does not rent it out. Caitlin and I parted on good enough terms that I still possess a key, in theory so that should any kind of emergency befall the house, I could help the proper people to deal with it.

The reality is that for six of the past seven years, Caitlin and I lived as a couple. Her owning a house across the street from mine helped maintain the fiction that we were not ‘living in sin,’ which people still say here, and only half-jokingly. Caitlin often spent the night when Annie was in the house, but Caitlin’s an early riser, and she was usually at work by the time Annie got up to get ready for school. As I remember those mornings now, something catches in my chest. It’s been too long since I felt that relaxed intimacy, and I know my daughter misses it.

For most of the time we were together, Caitlin and I planned to marry. We took it for granted in the beginning, when we still believed that fate had brought us together. We met during the civil rights case that seized control of my life after I returned here, and before the resulting trial ended, we’d discovered that though we were ten years apart in age and quite different on the surface, we were joined as inseparably as siblings beneath the skin. The only tension in our relationship developed later, when living and working in a small Southern town no longer felt charming to Caitlin, but rather like a prison. She was born and raised for the big canvas (her coverage of our case earned her a Pulitzer at twenty-eight), and while Natchez sometimes explodes into lethal drama, for the most part it remains a quiet river town, trapped in an eddy of time and history, changing almost imperceptibly when it changes at all.

My decision to run for mayor threw our differences into stark relief and ultimately made the relationship untenable. Caitlin came to Natchez as a flaming, Ivy League liberal with no experience of living in the South, but after five years here, she’d developed ideas more racist than those of many ‘good ol’ boys’ I’d grown up with, and she was ready to get out. Our sharpest points of contention were (a) whether the city was worth saving, and (b) if so, was I the person to save it? Caitlin claimed that people get the government they deserve, and that Natchez didn’t deserve me. She did, in her view, and added the argument that Annie deserved a culturally richer childhood than she would have here. In short, Caitlin wanted me to leave my past behind. But true Southerners don’t think that way. I was willing to risk being turned into a pillar of salt, if by so doing I could help renew the city and the land that had borne me. More than this, I believed that living closely with my parents would provide my daughter an emotional bedrock that no amount of cultural diversity would ever replace. In the end, I followed my conscience and my heritage, ensuring that my future marriage became the first casualty of my mayoral campaign. Caitlin cried–as much for Annie as for us–then wished me well and went back to North Carolina, to the New South of glass office towers, boutique restaurants, and the Research Triangle. I stayed in the land of kudzu and Doric columns and bottleneck guitars–one short ride away from James Dickey’s Land of Nine-Fingered People.

There’s no denying the light glowing softly through the curtain in the upper room across the way. But if Caitlin has returned to Natchez, she’s most likely come back in some connection with the Balloon Festival. Still, something else might have influenced her unexpected appearance, and it’s worth considering. Ten days ago I ended my relationship with Libby Jensen, after seeing her for nearly a year. Was ten days sufficient time for that news to reach North Carolina? Of course. One e-mail from a gossipy Examiner employee would have done it, and a text message would be even faster. If Caitlin has returned, her timing is certainly suggestive.

The casino file has grown damp under my shirt by the time I climb the porch and reach for my front door. Before my hand touches the knob, the door squeaks open, startling me, and the tenth-grade honor student who babysits Annie speaks uncertainly through the crack.

‘Mr Cage? Is everything okay?’

Because of my experiences with Mia Burke, the senior who used to sit for Annie, I no longer allow babysitters to use my first name. ‘Everything’s fine, Carla. What about here?’

She pulls back the door, revealing her blue-and-white jumper and eyes red from sleep or studying. ‘Yeah. I was kind of scared, though. I heard the car stop, but then you didn’t come in…’

I smile reassuringly and follow her inside, keeping the file pressed inside my shirt with my left hand while I dig for my wallet with my right. Having no idea how long I’ve been gone, I pull a couple of twenties and a ten from my billfold and give Carla permission to go with a wave.

‘Annie did all her homework,’ she says, slinging a heavy backpack over her slight shoulder. ‘Paper’s written.’

‘Did she do a good job?’

‘Honestly?’ Carla laughs. ‘That girl knows words I don’t know. I’d say she’s about one year behind me, gradewise.’

‘I feel the same way sometimes. Thanks again. What about this weekend?’

Carla’s smile vanishes. ‘Um…maybe some late at night, if you need me. But I’m going to be at the balloon races most of the time. They have some decent bands this year.’

‘Okay. Any time you can spare, I’ll pay you extra. This weekend is crazy for me.’

She smiles in a way that doesn’t give me much hope.

After closing the door behind Carla, I pour a tall iced tea from the pitcher in the kitchen fridge, carry it to the leather wing chair in my library, and spread the file open on the ottoman.

Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation pitched itself to the city as the Southwest Airlines of the casino industry. Capitalized by a small, feisty group of partners led by a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, the company evolved a strategy of moving into secondary gaming markets and undercutting the competition’s prices in every way possible, while simultaneously providing personable and personalized service, even to its less moneyed patrons. They run a phenomenally efficient operation, but what’s opened many stubborn doors for them is their practice of forming development partnerships with the communities they move into, building parks, ball fields, community centers, and even investing in the development of industrial parks in some cities. Small town officials eat this up, and Natchez was no exception.

More than anything, though, Golden Parachute’s success in penetrating our market came down to timing. They applied for their gaming license in the aftermath of Toyota’s disastrous decision to build a new plant in Tupelo versus Natchez. Citizens were bitter about the lost jobs and ready to climb into bed with someone else–almost anybody else–on the rebound. Golden Parachute already had successful casinos up and running in Tunica County, near Memphis, and Vicksburg, just sixty miles north of Natchez. With that track record, they had no trouble getting local heavyweights to lobby the state gaming commission to grant a fourth license for Natchez.

Bringing another casino boat to town had not been one of my goals when I ran for mayor. (In truth, none of the floating casinos are navigable vessels; they are barges built to look like paddle wheelers from the era of Mark Twain, but at five times historical scale.) My platform was reforming education and revitalizing local industry. But after considerable persuasion by the board of selectmen, I agreed to help close the casino deal. My reasons were complex: exhaustion in wake of the Toyota failure; a savior complex running on adrenaline after the depletion of my initial inspiration; disillusionment with my colleagues in government and with many of the citizens I was supposed to be serving. I was also frustrated that the board of selectmen were often divided along racial lines: four black votes and four white, with me the deciding factor. I voted my conscience every time, but few people saw it that way, and with every vote, I lost more allies on one side or the other. The only thing the board could agree on was any proposition that could bring money or jobs to their constituencies. And so…Golden Parachute found a receptive audience for its sales pitch.

The problem, as it so often is with casinos, was site approval. Golden Parachute wanted to moor the Magnolia Queen on riverfront property donated to the city by a prominent Natchez family–the Pierces–by means of a complicated trust. One stipulation of that trust was that Pierce’s Landing never be developed as a casino or shopping mall while the matriarch of the family remained alive. Inconveniently for the selectmen, Mrs Pierce had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-eight, and she was still, as the saying goes, as sharp as a tack. That tack lay directly in the path of the inflated giant that was the Golden Parachute deal.

My first instinct was to try to persuade the company to find another property, but the company wouldn’t budge. Golden Parachute wanted the Pierce land, which was not only the last suitable river property within the city limits, but also the finest, barring the Silver Street spot taken by Lady Luck, the first riverboat casino in the state. Predictably, Golden Parachute began making noises about scrapping its plan to come to Natchez, and just as predictably the selectmen went into panic mode. I heard whispers about the new eminent-domain law, which allowed the government to seize private land for commercial development. I viewed this as one of the most anti-American laws ever put on the books, but my fellow officials did not share my feelings. Only Selectman Paul Labry stood with me in resisting this Stalinist move. Desperate to prevent the use of this tactic, Labry and I quietly went into action.

First we met with one of the Pierce heirs, who’d graduated several years ahead of me at St Stephen’s. He got us a copy of the actual document governing the trust, which few people had seen, outside the preservationists who’d helped to write it, and the former mayor, who’d died of lung cancer shortly after leaving office. To my surprise, I discovered that Mrs Pierce possessed the authority to unilaterally revoke the clause preventing casino development. Disturbed by the board’s increasing clamor to seize the land in question, I requested an audience with the grand old dame of Pierce’s Landing.

I met the distinguished lady in a conference room at Twelve Oaks Gardens, an assisted-living facility on the outskirts of town. As the granddaughter of an officer who had served under General J. E. B. Stuart at Gettysburg, Mrs Pierce presided over an entire wing of the facility like a dowager empress. Her children had offered to take her in, but they had all settled in other states, and Mrs Pierce preferred to remain in the city she’d lived in all her life, and to ‘be around people’ rather than to live in her mansion with round-the-clock nurses (or ‘watchers,’ as she called them, as in ‘They’re here to watch me have my final heart attack.’) Mrs Pierce granted me the audience because my father had treated her for more than thirty years, and because, she told me, she had enjoyed several of my novels on tape. At ninety-eight, she confessed with some embarrassment, her eyes were not what they had once been.

For the best part of an hour, I made the case for allowing a casino riverboat to be moored to her ancestral land. Early in our conversation, I discovered that Mrs Pierce was neither a religious zealot nor a hidebound moralist. She confided that her father had hated gambling in all its forms, not least because his brother had lost a fine home and several hundred acres of farmland during a drunken poker game. She also mentioned that forty years earlier she’d become aware of quite a bit of ‘unpleasantness’ going on across the river, all related to gambling. One of her maids had actually been accosted on the road by men who’d believed she was a prostitute. After realizing the basis of her objections, I pointed out that legalized casino gambling was far different from the illicit juke-joint operations she remembered. Gambling was now a legitimate industry of strictly regulated corporations that had brought prosperity to our struggling state. In making this argument, the numbers were all on my side.

Legalized casino gambling lifted Mississippi’s Tunica County–once the poorest in the United States–from wretched poverty to wealth in fifteen years. A rural county serviced by open sewer ditches in 1991, Tunica has doubled its per capita income while going from two thousand total jobs to over seventeen thousand. They’ve invested $40 million in school improvements, poured millions into police and fire protection, built a sports arena, doubled the size of their library, and invested over $100 million in their road system. Statewide, the verdict on gambling is beyond question. Since 1992, the casino industry has come to provide nearly 5 percent of the state’s total tax revenue.

Despite Mrs Pierce’s suspicion that ‘vice is vice, whatever cloak it wears,’ I knew I was making headway when she told me that she’d always chastised her friends who had blindly resisted change and felt they had hobbled the city’s efforts to keep pace with the rest of the country. I knew I was almost home when she said softly that she’d never imagined she would gaze down the hill that led to her ‘home place’ and see a neon casino sign. I promised her that if that was her final objection, she never would. The city would submit all of Golden Parachute’s signage plans to her for approval. My mouth fell open when the old belle said she wouldn’t carp about the sign if the company would devote one-half of 1 percent of its revenues from the Magnolia Queen to helping the city’s underprivileged children. (Mrs Pierce actually said ‘colored,’ but her heart was in the right place.) In the end the company agreed to one-quarter of 1 percent, but that has amounted to $162,000 this year.

Two days after our meeting, Mrs Pierce revoked the restrictive clause, and the Golden Parachute casino deal went forward. This made me a hero to the board of selectmen, but I felt like a heel. What I feel tonight is immeasurably worse. Mrs Pierce died one month after revoking that clause, and if even half of Tim’s allegations are true, it’s a mercy that she did. The town at large never learned that it was I who opened the final gate to Golden Parachute, but that does not lessen my guilt. Tonight I feel more like I lifted our hoopskirt and pulled down our petticoats.

Nevertheless, dogfighting, drug use, and prostitution went on here before the Magnolia Queen arrived, just as they do in every city in America. The thesis that Golden Parachute is defrauding the city of millions of dollars in taxes is an accusation of a different order. This kind of crime, while not as disturbing on the surface as the others, is more harmful in the end, because it impacts every man, woman, and child in the city. If this allegation is true, then food is being stolen from the mouths of the children Mrs Pierce wanted to help.

Yet this is the part of Tim’s tale that I find impossible to believe. I don’t know enough about computers to judge the feasibility of distorting the casino’s gross receipts, but even if such fraud were possible, the central question remains: Why would Golden Parachute risk it? Especially now.

Forty-six days ago, Hurricane Katrina roared over the floating gold mines that were the casinos at Biloxi and Gulfport and left behind something resembling Omaha Beach on D-day. A single storm wiped out a $100-million-a-month industry. But 150 miles to the northwest, in Natchez, the Magnolia Queen and her sister casinos simply battened down their hatches and rode out the winds and rain. The city sustained severe damage, and some areas were without power for more than a week, but the Magnolia Queen was running on her generators the day after the hurricane. And no sooner had some refugees gotten settled into the shelters at the local churches and school gymnasiums than they found time and means to get down to the river and gamble away what little money they’d brought with them (or had been given by the churches). That image brings a sick feeling to the pit of my stomach, but more than that, it tells me that the partners of Golden Parachute Gaming would have to be insane to risk their gaming license to pick up a few extra million when God is going to dump ten times that amount into their coffers over the next year.

Moreover, until tonight, the company has given me no reason to regret bringing them to town. They’ve paid their taxes promptly and followed through on the community investments they promised. I enjoy cordial relations with their general manager, an Englishman named Sands who works the city with the professional charm one would expect from a manager in Las Vegas, not Mississippi. The only part of Golden Parachute that’s ever rubbed me the wrong way is their chief of security, a coarse Irishman named Seamus Quinn, who looks and talks like an overdressed thug from the London underworld. But Sands vouched for Quinn’s credentials, and I decided my problem with the security man was more a matter of style than anything, like my problem with some cops. The bottom line is that I’ve watched Golden Parachute operate without incident in every market they serve. So I find myself at a loss when trying to reconcile Tim Jessup’s allegations with what I know of the company.

My eyes are blurring with fatigue near the end of the file, but I blink myself awake when I find a note I wrote in the margin of one document over a year ago. In red ink, on a copy of Golden Parachute’s original application for its gaming license, I see the words Voting trust. % voting power reflect actual ownership? Something Tim said tonight makes this note resonate within me, and suddenly my only serious suspicion about the original Golden Parachute deal returns to me.

By law, anyone who plans to own more than 5 percent of a casino in Mississippi must submit to a comprehensive investigation of his past. This is no simple background check; no aspect of the prospective owner’s life is off-limits, and the subject must pay for the investigation himself. The gaming commission maintains a full staff of investigators for this purpose, and they will not hesitate to fly to the Philippines to subpoena the contents of a safe-deposit box if they deem it necessary to determine the ‘suitability’ of an applicant. In fact, most rejections of gaming applications have been based on the ‘unsuitability’ of investors.

During the Golden Parachute deal, I learned from talking to an old law school classmate that there is a way around this statute. Lawyers can establish a ‘voting trust,’ which may own all or part of a casino. Behind such a trust lies a group of investors with a private understanding of who owns what percent of the company, but on paper 95 percent of the voting power is held by the one partner who has nothing to fear from a background investigation. The other partners are named in the application, but since on paper they own only the remaining 5 percent between them, they are not subject to similar scrutiny. A neat system. But what happens, I asked my friend, if the squeaky-clean front partner decides to actually start using his voting power to make the decisions? My friend laughed and said that because most of the ‘five percent partners’ tend to have names that end with vowels, this rarely happens. When it does, the front partner usually winds up inside a fifty-five-gallon drum in a convenient body of water.

Golden Parachute Gaming is owned by a voting trust called Golden Flower LLC. Flipping to the back of the application, I see that it was signed only by the front partner–the L.A. entertainment lawyer–and not the ‘five percenters.’ What stuck in my mind tonight was Tim’s comment about a Chinese billionaire’s son flying in from Macao to fight his dog in Mississippi. Why, I wondered, would a billionaire come so far to do something he could easily do in Macao? Was he simply seeking new competition? After all, for a man with a private jet, distance means little. But I’m almost sure I remember that two of the five percent partners in Golden Parachute were Chinese. By the time I learned this, the deal was so far along that I gave it little thought. I simply made this note in the margin and moved on, caught up in the next day’s business. No one wanted to rock the boat by then, not even, apparently, the gaming commission. But tonight, I realize, I need an answer to the question I wrote in this margin so long ago.

Who really owns Golden Parachute?

With a last swallow of diluted tea, I close the file and slip it behind my collection of Patrick O’Brian novels on the third shelf. As I walk upstairs, my thoughts and feelings about what I heard in the cemetery start to separate, like solids precipitating from a solution. On one hand, I don’t doubt that Tim witnessed the horrors he described. On the other, if someone shook me awake at 4:00 a.m. and asked whether I was sure that Jessup hadn’t started snorting coke again–or heroin or crystal meth or whatever he was doing before Julia Stanton got him straightened out–I would be hard-pressed to say I was. Most people who know us both would assume the worst about Tim. I don’t, but it wouldn’t be hard to convince myself that he’s dreamed up a conspiracy in which he can play the hero to belatedly make up for the real-life drama in which he played the villain.

During his first year at Ole Miss, Tim agreed to host two prospective freshmen from St Stephen’s Prep, our alma mater, during a football weekend. Like a lot of other students, he made several highspeed trips to the county line to procure cold beer, which was not legally available in Oxford, Mississippi (and still isn’t). During his third beer run, Tim drove his Trans Am eighty-eight feet off the highway and into a pecan tree standing at the edge of a cotton field. Tim and one of the high school boys were wearing their seat belts; the third boy was not. The impact ejected him from the backseat through the front windshield and into the branches of the tree, where with any luck he died instantly. Because of the alcohol found at the scene, both sets of parents sued Jessup’s father, and Tim served a year in jail for manslaughter. Pleading the case down from vehicular homicide probably cost Dr Jessup all the goodwill he’d built up in twenty years of practicing medicine, not to mention the cash that must have changed hands under the table. But despite the light sentence, things were never really the same for Tim after that. As his life slipped further and further off track, people blamed drugs, weakness of character, even his father, but in my gut I always knew it was the wreck that had ruined him.

Now, with his new wife’s help, Tim seems to have clawed his way back to a decent life. But a casino boat is probably a tough place for a guy with his past to stay clean. Stop, says a voice in my head. Stop blaming the messenger. Just because you don’t want to hear what he said doesn’t mean it’s not true. Remember the pictures.

A mangled dog. A half-naked teenager serving beer. A middle-aged man screwing the young girl on a board floor while four other men drink and watch. I saw those three images for only seconds, but I’ll never forget them. When I close my eyes and recall them in detail, I feel nauseated. And that nausea is the reason I promised Tim that I’d help him.

As I walk down the hall to check on my daughter, a different sensation chills me. Fear. Raw fear. After twelve years in the Houston DA’s office, it’s a familiar feeling. As I told Tim, I’ve run investigations using confidential informants, and more than one ended badly for the person wearing the wire. Highly trained FBI agents trip up under the pressure of living double lives, and even the best undercover agents can be burned by a random event. The reality of tonight’s meeting with Tim cannot be pushed aside: by encouraging him to proceed with his plan, I could be sending an impassioned amateur to his death.