Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [122]
“I haven’t had anything,” he replied.
Nobody believed him, because Peter Payton was a drunk. The smell of alcohol regularly reeked from his breath, and to spot him passed out on some bench or in the front seat of his truck was hardly an uncommon occurrence. As the father of two NFL players, Peter was a recognizable figure throughout Marion County. When a recognizable figure attaches himself to the bottle, folks notice.
Peter exited the store and drove off. Moments later he crashed into an empty parked car at a gas station. When a couple of Marion County police officers arrived on the scene, they asked Peter to step out of his vehicle, then watched him stumble around, mumbling nonsense. When he refused to take a blood alcohol test, he was charged with driving under the influence of intoxicants and taken to the Marion County Jail. An officer allegedly tried contacting Alyne, but she was in Chicago with Walter. “You’re going to spend the night here,” Peter was told. “Sober up.” He was placed in a singleperson cell, with a concrete floor and an open toilet and a small bar of soap. The walls were made of cement.
Shortly before midnight, a handful of inmates screamed for help. Peter was having trouble breathing, and he needed medical assistance. Depending on who one asks, the guards either called for paramedics or ignored the pleas and attended to their business. Moments later, Peter collapsed. His breathing stopped; his gasps for breath silenced. An ambulance was finally summoned, but by the time it arrived Peter Payton was dead.
Walter couldn’t believe it. Though never especially close to his father—who concealed his emotions and buried himself in his work—loss was loss, and this one stung. How would his mother cope all alone? What would she do?
Walter knew his dad drank too much, but there was no way he would be dumb enough to drive drunk. Peter Payton—a black man in the Deep South—had never before been arrested. Not once. So for his father to die in jail, all alone, was unbearable for Walter.
When he finally collected himself, Walter asked his agent to go to Columbia and deal with the situation on his behalf. Holmes drove the thirty-four miles from Hattiesburg, met with Robert Bourne, Columbia’s mayor, and then headed for the jail, where he ran into Sergio Gonzalez, the Laurel, Mississippi–based doctor brought in to perform the autopsy. Having spent much of his life as a Mississippi power player, Holmes knew seemingly everyone, ranging from the most famous politicians to the mangiest streetwalkers. He asked Gonzalez whether he could sit in.
“Sure, Bud,” the doctor replied. “I don’t see why not.”
Holmes has never forgotten the experience. Like everyone else, he assumed Peter had died of a heart attack. “I watched the whole damn thing, A to Z,” Holmes said. “Because I didn’t want any misunderstanding.” Gonzalez began by making an incision from the left shoulder to the right shoulder to the base of the neck, then south to the base of the pubic bone. He removed the breastplate/sternum to expose the thoracic organs. “Next he takes Peter’s heart out and he takes the lungs out, and he checks the lungs,” Holmes said. “The lungs are very clear. Then he checks his liver, his kidneys, his stomach—nothing. At this point, the thing he knows he’ll definitely find is a rupture in the heart, because it’s the only logical conclusion. He gets his heart, he slices it, then he cuts the ventricles.
“Everything’s right there, clear as a bell. No ruptures. I remember [Gonzalez] saying to me, ‘If I didn’t know any better I’d think this man is twenty-one years old, because every artery and every