I found John Patterson speaking to two doctors with a large gathering of newsmen and photographers. They popped off flashes from their boxed Rolleiflex cameras, John’s face sweating and dull eyes vacant in the quick strobes of light. They asked him questions about his father and the rackets and the reputed Phenix City Machine and he didn’t answer them, unblinking in the quick strobes, until I grabbed his elbow and steered him into a hallway, where he just stared down the long vacuum of tile and linoleum and nurses and doctors in antiseptic white.

John hadn’t been back from the service long, a World War II combat veteran who’d served from Africa to Austria with France in between. He’d been briefly recalled to Korea but ended up with some legal work in Germany before returning home to partner with his father. He was a stocky guy with a heavy brow, the kind of man who’d rather be in a boat fishing than be involved in anything political. But John was a loyal man, loyal to his friends and his family, and I knew he’d spent the better part of the year dropping his practice to crisscross the state to campaign for his father.

They took him into a room in the emergency ward, never telling him a damn thing, where he found his father on a gurney, hidden under a white sheet. Sheriff Matthews was there with Chief Deputy Bert Fuller and the county solicitor, Arch Ferrell, and when John walked into the room you could only hear the click, click, click of his shoes across the floor and the stiff pop of the sheet as he pulled it away and looked down at his father.

Sheriff Matthews sucked a tooth. Bert Fuller leaned against the wall and fanned himself with his cowboy hat. And Arch Ferrell rubbed his face, his finger trembling across his jaw.