Mississippi Blood

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Between eight thirty and eight forty. I can’t be any more specific than that. I was between patients.”

  “And where did you see him?”

  “In the hallway on the first floor.”

  “And how far was he from the room housing the MRI machine at that time?”

  “Um . . . about sixty feet.”

  I close my eyes and force myself to breathe deeply. As I exhale, I feel my mother’s hand grip mine. She’s not looking for comfort, I realize. She’s trying to comfort me.

  “And what was Dr. Cage doing there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes. I always speak to Dr. Cage. He always has a word for everybody.”

  “And how did he seem on that day?”

  Reed takes his time with this question. “About like any other day, I’d say.”

  “He didn’t seem preoccupied?”

  “Objection,” Quentin says. “Leading.”

  “Sustained,” Judge Elder declares.

  “Withdrawn. Mr. Reed, did Dr. Cage have patients anywhere in the area of the MRI unit?”

  “Ah . . . not really, no. But Dr. Cage is the kind of doc who’s all over the hospital all the time. Old school, you know? Visiting techs and nurses, other people’s patients. You might find him fiddling with a microscope in the lab, helping the techs try to fix it.”

  “So, in your experience, Dr. Cage was handy with technology?”

  “Oh, yeah. A lot of doctors know medicine but don’t know anything about the technology that gives them the data to make their diagnoses. A lot of docs couldn’t shoot an X-ray if they had to.”

  “But Dr. Cage is different?”

  “Yes, sir. When it comes to lab tests, X-rays, surgical equipment, rehab stuff, he can tell you the way they did it in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, and right on up to now.”

  Shad is working hard to conceal his pleasure. Byron Reed doesn’t seem to understand that by his enthusiastic praise of my father, he is damning him further with every word.

  “Thank you, Mr. Reed.”

  Quentin declines to cross-examine Byron Reed, and Judge Elder releases him. Then Shad calls a man I do know to the stand, an X-ray technician named Gerald McGraw. Gerry McGraw is about sixty, with a bald head and a salt-and-pepper beard. A Vietnam vet, the X-ray tech has been a friend of my father’s for years. As the clerk swears McGraw in, I realize exactly what Shad is doing. Having been deprived of the content of the videotapes, Shad means to demonstrate that Dad had both the opportunity and, more important, the technical know-how to erase them so thoroughly (and exotically, in the case of the Dumpster tape).

  Though obviously reluctant to hurt my father in any way, Gerry is forced to concede that the basis of their friendship centered around shared enthusiasm for various technologies. McGraw is a ham radio operator, and Dad loved to stop by his house and help him tinker with his setup. Both Gerry and Dad had photographic darkrooms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this memory makes me remember standing in our bathroom/darkroom as a boy, counting seconds as my wet hands moved between the trays of developer, stop bath, fixer. The pungent smell of those chemicals comes back in a powerful rush, and with it a sense of oneness with my father that I haven’t experienced in a long time.

  Somehow Shad has even dug up the fact that both Gerry and my father were hi-fi fanatics, and built Heathkit receivers and speakers at home. Gerry is forced to concede that Dad was as good with a soldering iron as he was with a suturing needle, and even more damaging, that both men were familiar with—and owned—“bulk degaussers” used by enthusiasts to erase old reel-to-reel tapes.

  By the time Shad releases Gerry, the damage has been done, and Quentin elects not to cross.

  Judge Elder looks at his watch, then says, “Mr. Johnson, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Can you examine your next witness in an hour?”

  “I believe so, Your Honor. The State calls Lincoln Turner.”

  As Lincoln enters the courtroom wearing a sport coat and tie, I realize that things are about to get worse, not better.

  Chapter 37

  When Lincoln Turner enters the witness box to be sworn, every eye in the courtroom but my mother’s follows him, and every head but hers strains forward so as not to miss anything he might say. For if anyone knows the truth or the cost of Tom Cage’s past sins, they reckon, it is the big black man facing them now.

  My half brother looks out over the assembled citizens with something between detachment and disdain. While the bailiff gives Lincoln the oath, I think back to last night, when Doris Avery revealed to me her darkest fear: that her husband and my father have bound themselves in an unholy bargain to provide services that only they could give each other. If my father will give Quentin a painless escape from this life, then Quentin will allow Dad to be convicted. This scenario only makes sense to me if my father believes he’s protecting one or all of us from pain or death by his sacrifice. If that is the case, then the evil he fears can only be Snake Knox and his henchmen. I know far better than to discount this threat, yet I can’t help but hope that Dad has not despaired of saving himself altogether.

  As the bailiff takes back his Bible and Shad rises from his table, my sister, Jenny, squeezes my left wrist hard enough to bruise. She’s fidgeting and sweating as though unconsciously trying to prove she’s my mother’s opposite.

  “You were sworn in as Lincoln Turner,” Shad says, standing about ten feet from his witness. “Who is your biological father?”

  “That man sitting right there,” Lincoln says, pointing at my father. “Dr. Tom Cage.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A DNA test proved it.”

  “That DNA test has been entered into evidence and marked State’s Exhibit Seven, Your Honor.” Shad spreads his hands, touches his fingers together, and addresses Lincoln like a more restrained version of Dr. Phil. “When were you first told that Tom Cage might be your father?”

  “I wasn’t told. Not really. I had to dig that information up myself.”

  “And how did that come about?”

  “About six months ago, I discovered some checks and letters in my mother’s personal effects in her Chicago apartment, plus a photograph of Dr. Cage and my mother in a state of undress. My mother finally told me the story then. Up to that time, she had lied to me.”

  “From 1968 until 2005 she had kept this information from you?”

  “Yes, sir. She’d been lying about who my father was ever since I was born. And not just to me. She lied to everybody.”

  Shad pauses to let this tragedy—or outrage—sink into the minds of the jury members.

  “Will you tell us what your understanding of your paternity was, from the earliest time you remember?”

  Quentin should object that the defense has already stipulated that Tom Cage fathered the witness and no further questioning on this point is necessary.

  But Quentin says nothing.

  “From the time I was a little boy,” Lincoln says, “I believed my mother’s husband was my father. The man I called Daddy. That’s what she told me.”

  “What was that man’s name?”

  “His legal name was Junius Jelks, but I didn’t know that for a long time. In my first memories, my last name is Taney, which was the name Daddy was going by then.”

  “Excuse me, let’s be clear for the jury. Whenever you say ‘Daddy,’ you’re referring to Junius Jelks, and not Tom Cage, your biological father?”

  “That’s right. I’ll try to call him Mr. Jelks, but it gets confusing when I think back to different times.”

  “I think we can all follow you. Please just tell us what you knew and when. And, Judge, let me state for the record that all relevant documentation such as birth certificates, adoption records, et cetera has been stipulated into evidence.”

  Judge Elder glances at Quentin Avery as though wo
ndering why he didn’t challenge some of the documents to which Shad refers, but Quentin seems oblivious to this.

  “I was born in December of 1968,” Lincoln begins, “in Charity Hospital in Chicago. When I first went to school, our family went by the last name of Taney. But I know now that was just an alias.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Daddy had a lot of jobs over the years, but the truth is, he was a con man. A grifter. Because of that, he always went by different names. Aliases. That goes with that kind of work.”

  “Where is Junius Jelks now, Lincoln?”

  “The Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, serving a fifteen-year sentence for fraud.”

  “Go on.”

  “When I was six years old, Mama moved me to a different school. She told me then that our last name was going to be Turner from then on. She said that had been our real name all along. Which was true, in a way. It turns out that Turner was the name on my birth certificate.”

  “Can you explain that?”

  “At the time I was conceived—probably March of 1968—Mama’s first husband, James Turner, had been dead for nine months. Killed in Vietnam. When Mama went to Chicago, she was pregnant by Dr. Cage. But when I was born, she put down James Turner’s name on the birth certificate. She told them her husband was still over in Vietnam. They didn’t have computers back then, so I guess that wasn’t hard. Anyway, a year later, when Mama married Daddy—Mr. Jelks—she believed he was an insurance man. But by the time I was five, she’d figured out different. Junius Jelks made his living breaking the law. Mama almost left him then, but she really wanted me to have a father, so she made a deal with him. If Mr. Jelks would legally adopt me, she would stay his wife.”

  Lincoln’s Dickensian narrative has everyone in the room enthralled. Looking behind me, at the balcony, I see Serenity writing in her notebook, her rapt eyes on the witness box.

  “Mr. Jelks agreed to this arrangement,” Lincoln goes on, “but they still had a problem. Daddy didn’t have a good enough ID to adopt me under the name of Taney, and he was wanted for several crimes under his legal name, Jelks. Then he hit on the idea of using Mama’s first husband’s ID papers to adopt me. It’s kind of sad to say it out loud, but Mama agreed to the plan, and that’s what they did. Junius Jelks became James Turner, Vietnam vet and war hero, and I went from being Lincoln Taney to Lincoln Turner.”

  Shad pauses to let this sad and complex tale sink into the minds of the jury.

  “How long did Junius Jelks succeed in passing himself off as James Turner?”

  “Several years. He went by James Turner when he did anything legitimate, but he had a lot of other aliases for criminal activities.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he used me in his cons. From the time I was little. People will believe almost anything when you’ve got a child with you. And if you teach that child to help you, the marks are like fish in a barrel.”

  “When did you learn that James Turner was not your father’s true name?”

  “We got arrested when I was thirteen. A vice cop recognized Daddy’s face. He’d arrested him before, down in Minooka. That cop didn’t care what the driver’s license said; he knew he’d collared Junius Jelks. Daddy had to do another stretch in jail, and I was lucky not to go to the reformatory.”

  “How did your mother explain the problem with the names to you?”

  “Mama told me we’d had to use the name Turner because Daddy had been framed for something a long time ago. She had no idea that I’d been helping Daddy work cons for years. He’d take me out of school to do it. I was his meal ticket for a while. All Mama did back then was work and drink. I think she suspected how bad things were, but she couldn’t face it. She was depressed. They didn’t have drugs for that then, so she just drank and chain-smoked her Salems.

  “I was pretty confused by then,” Lincoln goes on. “I made decent grades, but I was in and out of trouble all the time. I had anger problems. Fought a lot. I was lucky that Child Protective Services didn’t take me out of the home during that period.”

  “But still you managed to attend college.”

  “That’s right. Mama had always worked hard, and she managed to hide a lot of her money from Mr. Jelks. She had a decent little nest egg put back for me.”

  “Enough to pay for four years of college?”

  “No. But she’d worked for the same doctor for seventeen years, and he put up some money for me to go. Whatever Mama didn’t have, he paid.”

  “Was this doctor black or white?”

  Lincoln seems almost reluctant to answer. “White.”

  This answer obviously resonates with the jury, who now realizes that Viola went to Chicago and put herself into a situation almost identical to the one she’d left behind in Mississippi. At least some jury members must be wondering whether Viola might have been sleeping with that doctor, too. A smart defense lawyer would bring this up during cross-examination, subtly suggesting that Viola Turner had a very practical—perhaps even predatory—side when it came to survival. But of course Quentin will suggest no such thing. He probably won’t even bother to question Lincoln.

  “What was Mr. Jelks doing during your teen and college years?”

  “Messing up like me, only worse. Mama got him a few legitimate jobs—the doctor she worked for did, too—but Jelks always managed to get himself fired. He still tried to rope me into cons, but by then I knew that if I was convicted of a felony, I’d never be a lawyer, and for some reason that was what I’d made up my mind to be.”

  “Why did you want that?”

  “I guess Mama put it in my head. She was tired of all Daddy’s lies and crime. I think she wanted something she could be proud of. She’d named me after Abraham Lincoln, you know.”

  Shad vouchsafes the witness a supportive smile, and he makes sure he’s facing the jury when he does it.

  “And did you go to law school?”

  “Yes, sir. Night school. It took me longer than most, because I had to work my way through. But I passed the Illinois State Bar in 1995. I was twenty-seven years old.”

  “How did your legal career go?”

  “Pretty good, for a while.”

  “And today?”

  Lincoln looks into his lap like a sinner in church about to come to Jesus. “I no longer have a license to practice.”

  Shad feigns surprise. “Why is that, Mr. Turner?”

  Like any good prosecutor, Shad is removing all chance of Quentin making capital out of forcing Lincoln to admit he’s been disbarred.

  “Daddy did a stretch in prison from 1997 to 2001,” Lincoln says quietly. “After he got out, I got him a legit job as a runner with a law firm.”

  “Excuse me? A runner? Do you mean a gofer?”

  “Uh, no. In some places, a ‘runner’ is somebody who recruits clients for attorneys. Hangs around ERs and places like that, drumming up business.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, Daddy managed to stay straight for almost three years. Or at least he didn’t get caught during that time. But then he got busted for a big con. It was either the public defender or me, so I defended him in court.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Not well. He was a three-time loser, and the prospects for acquittal were zero. I was hoping for a reasonable plea deal, but the ADA was being a hardass—excuse me, Judge.”

  “Keep it civil, Mr. Turner.”

  Lincoln ducks his head like a disciplined child. “Well, not long before Daddy’s trial date, he told me he’d got word through a contact in the courthouse that we’d hit the jackpot with the judge we drew. For seventy-five thousand dollars, our judge would supposedly see that Daddy did no more than a year behind bars, then a year of house arrest, and the rest on probation. At that time he was looking at fifteen years without parole, so this deal was like a gift from the gods.”

  “You’re talking about bribery, Lincoln.”

  “I’m talking about the Chicago
judicial system. I know it sounds bad, but this was a judge asking for the money. This was the real world, not some moot court.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “I tried to find that seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “How did you go about that?”

  “First, I asked Mama for it. I was pretty sure she still had some money squirreled away. But she wouldn’t lift a finger to help Daddy, not by then. After her mother died in ’96, she lost a lot of empathy for Mr. Junius Jelks.”

  And why was that? I wonder. But Shad doesn’t ask the question.

  “So where did you get the money for the bribe?” he asks instead.

  “From the escrow account of one of my clients.”

  “You embezzled the money?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A collective grunt of judgment comes from the gallery, but the tale is far from over. Redemption is still possible for our abused urchin.

  “And what happened when you tried to pay the bribe?” Shad asks.

  “The judge’s bagman took the money. But just by bad luck, my client learned I had dipped into his account, and he went after me. Before I knew what had happened, I’d been suspended, and Daddy had been sentenced to fifteen years without parole.”

  “What happed to the money?”

  “What do you think? The judge and his bagman played dumb. They’re probably still laughing today.”

  “You must have had some hard feelings toward Junius Jelks by that time.”

  “Not really, to tell you the truth. Not then. I thought we’d both been screwed by the system. I mean, he was guilty of fraud, sure, and I of embezzlement. But in my eyes, what that judge did was ten times worse. Abusing the public trust for his own gain?”

  “Will you ever be allowed to practice law again?”

  “Maybe. I hope so. First I have to pay restitution, but that’s hard to do when I can’t practice law to earn the money. It’s a catch-22.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t help you pay the restitution?”

  “No, sir. She thought I would just give the money to Daddy. Which he was asking me to do. He wanted to hire another lawyer and try to go after that crooked judge.”