Mississippi Blood

  “How long have you had that Mr. Devine waiting in the wings?” she asks Quentin. “From the beginning?”

  “No,” Quentin admits. “I knew nothing about him until last night, and we didn’t know he would testify until this morning.”

  “That needle was waiting for Tom,” Mom declares in a flat voice. “That’s who they’re most afraid of, Snake Knox and his gang.” She comes around the chair and looks down at Dad. “That could have been you, Tom. It was supposed to be you.”

  Dad sighs and takes her hand. “But it wasn’t.”

  This gives Mom no comfort, but she allows the conversation to be steered away from imminent danger. Jenny is the slowest to calm down, and as I watch her, I realize my older sister is one of those children who seem to take after neither parent. After another couple of minutes of decompression, Quentin tells Mom he needs some time alone with Dad, and together Mom and Walt shepherd Jenny toward the door. As I walk them out, Jenny takes my hand and whispers, “Will you please talk some sense into them? I can’t understand what they’re trying to do.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” I tell her, though I’m far from sure of this.

  Mom motions for Walt to escort Jenny down the hall, then looks back at me and whispers, “Don’t let your father take the stand.”

  The idea strikes me as absurd. “Dad’s not going to testify now. No way.”

  She closes her eyes for a moment. “Don’t be so sure. He’s going to want to. You and Quentin have to talk him out of it.”

  “But we’ve won the case.”

  Mom’s eyes narrow as though she’s trying to see whether I’m lying. “Have we?”

  “By any normal standard we have.”

  “Well, they’re not acting like it. Quentin looks anything but triumphant, and Tom has sunk inside himself. I know how he is when he gets that look. There are things driving him that we know nothing about.” Mom reaches out and squeezes my hand; her skin is startlingly cold. “Don’t let him sway you, Penn.”

  I consider questioning her further, but there’s no time or privacy to do it. “I won’t. Go catch up with Walt. And please do whatever Tim tells you to do. That’s your only job now.”

  “I will. Penn, did you really see Snake Knox out there?”

  “I think I did.”

  She sighs and bows her head, then turns and hurries down the hall to catch up with Jenny. I give Tim a pointed glance, and he gives me a firm thumbs-up.

  As Mom’s heels click down the steps, I hear her speak to someone, and then Rusty Duncan appears at the head of the staircase. He raises his eyebrows, asking permission to join the group in my office. I beckon him on and lead him into the suite.

  “What’s he doing here?” Quentin asks as we enter.

  “Two against two is a fairer fight,” I reply, taking my chair behind my desk and motioning for Rusty to sit down before Quentin can argue.

  Rusty sits in a club chair facing the sofa where Dad has stretched out, while Quentin holds court from his wheelchair in the space between.

  “Will the judge stop the trial?” Dad asks. “Or postpone it?”

  “Doubtful,” says Quentin. “Since they had that bomb threat on Joe’s house, there are probably BATF techs in town who can screen the courthouse overnight. And I know Joe Elder. He’ll take this as a personal insult. It would take an act of Congress to stop this trial now.”

  “What do you think, Penn?” Dad asks.

  “I’ve seen witnesses murdered before. It didn’t stop the trials.”

  “Ever seen one murdered on the stand?” Rusty asks.

  “I saw a defendant shot on the stand. Died instantly.”

  “That’s different,” says Quentin. “You can’t have a trial without a defendant.”

  “You should move for a mistrial,” Rusty advises.

  “Yeah!” Quentin says with mock enthusiasm. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. It’s a good thing you showed up, Rust Bucket. Hmm . . .”

  “Let’s assume the trial will go forward,” I say, signaling for Quentin to get off Rusty’s ass. “It’s over anyway, right?”

  Dad and Quentin share a look that I can’t read but makes me nervous.

  “Mom’s worried you’re still going to put Dad on the stand,” I say slowly, watching Quentin, who seems to be studying a print on the wall. “She’s crazy, right?”

  With painful effort, Dad gets his elbows under him and sits up straight on the couch. Before he can speak, my phone pings. The text message is from John Kaiser.

  Judge Elder wants to see all counsel in the conference room at the DA’s office in 30 minutes. I’ll be there. Your father should remain in your office under guard until the ATF guys have signed off on the jail being secure. I’m coming over to update you in 15. No sign of Snake, but we’ve got every LE officer in the city on the streets. What a nightmare.

  “We have to meet the judge in Shad’s conference room in half an hour,” I tell them. “Kaiser is coming over here in fifteen minutes to update us.”

  “Joe’s going to either postpone the trial or tell us to finish up tomorrow,” says Quentin. “I’ve got a thousand bucks that says the latter.”

  Nobody takes him up on it.

  “Back to Dad taking the stand,” I say. “Does any lawyer in this room not agree with my assessment that, at this point, that would be insane?”

  Quentin doesn’t speak, or even meet my eye.

  Rusty clears his throat and says, “In my humble opinion, after what the jury just witnessed—and after Junius Jelks and Mr. Patel gutted Lincoln Turner on the stand—I’d say giving Shad Johnson a shot at Tom would pretty much qualify as malpractice.”

  “Quentin, you’re not saying anything,” I observe. “That worries me.”

  At last the old lawyer looks over at me, and in his eyes I see a weariness I didn’t see in the courtroom. “You need to talk to your father, not me.”

  All eyes turn to Dad, who’s scratching one of the psoriatic lesions beneath his shirtsleeve. Pinpoints of blood appear on the light blue cotton.

  “There are four reasons that I have to take the stand,” he says with deliberation, as though about to go through a differential diagnosis for a medical student.

  I groan, but that doesn’t stop him.

  “One, the jury wants to hear me say I didn’t do it.”

  “Will you say that?” I ask him. “That’s not what you told me at the Pollock prison.”

  His eyes look almost steely. “I’ll say it.”

  But will you mean it? I ask silently.

  “Two,” he goes on, “Quentin promised in his opening statement that I would testify.”

  I glare at Quentin, who gives Dad a look that says, Promises are made to be broken. “You don’t have to do that, Tom, given what’s happened.”

  “Forget what just happened. You told the jury I would get up there, and if I don’t, they’re going to think I’m hiding something. You’ve based your whole defense on my character and forthrightness. And a man with good character isn’t afraid to take the stand in his own defense.”

  “A valid point,” Rusty concedes.

  “So relieved you think so,” I mutter.

  “Third, the truths that lie behind my relationship with Viola impact a lot of people, and they’ve been buried for too long. Remember my eulogy for Henry Sexton? I called on people to break their silence, no matter the cost. It’s like Reverend Baldwin coming forward with Albert’s ledgers after forty years. That’s what we need.”

  This kind of thinking is what Mom is afraid of. “Reverend Baldwin didn’t publish the contents of those ledgers in the paper. He gave us copies of a couple of pages. A courtroom is no place to confess your sins, Dad. Not under oath. Write a book, if you want to wash your soul clean.”

  He looks at the floor and shakes his head with mulish resolve. “I can’t do that. I owe it to Viola—and to Jimmy and Luther and all the others—to tell what I know. I owe it to Henry, and I owe it to Caitlin, too.”
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  I get up and walk over to the sofa, crouching before him. “Caitlin wouldn’t want you to risk going to jail out of some misguided sense of duty to reveal the past.”

  His eyes meet mine with unsettling fervor. “Caitlin died trying to uncover the past. Not to save me, or to win glory for herself. She wanted to know what happened to Jimmy Revels. And she was right to want to know. This poison has been tainting this area for too long. It’s time to lance the abscess once and for all.”

  “Fine, I agree. But you don’t have to do it from the witness stand. Not with your life on the line. You can work side by side with Kaiser and me to make sure every last Double Eagle goes to jail or to the grave. But don’t destroy your own life in the process.”

  “I’ve come damn close to destroying it already. What more harm can I do?”

  “Things can always get worse. Quentin?”

  The wheelchair creaks as Quentin leans forward. “He’s right, Tom. Have we established reasonable doubt? Absolutely. But there are two things you never know in life: who your daughter’s going to marry, and what a jury’s going to do. The forensic case against you is still strong. You and Walt destroying that videotape looks bad, if they believed that.”

  “That’s another reason I need to testify. I need to deny erasing that second videotape from the hospital Dumpster.”

  For the first time since we arrived here, my office goes quiet. No one, it seems, wants to touch the matter of the DV tape blanked by the MRI machine.

  “I didn’t finish what I was saying,” Quentin says. “Despite Lincoln’s little scheme with the will, he got to the jury when he talked about you hurting his mother.”

  “Junius Jelks landed a blow, too,” Rusty says with reluctant admiration.

  “That no-’count bastard,” Quentin says. “I’ll be damned if I’ll ever take a look at his case. He can rot in Joliet till he’s lost his last tooth.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, guys,” I remind them. “As far as alternate suspects for sympathetic jurors to pin the murder on, I see two candidates. First, Lincoln. Could the jury believe that Lincoln might have killed his mother?”

  After a brief silence, Quentin says, “No.”

  “Then why did he come to Natchez early and lie about it?”

  “He was waiting for your father to fulfill the assisted-suicide pact. And he wanted to be close by to orchestrate the destruction of the will and the reporting of the crime.”

  “Is the jury smart enough to figure all that out?”

  Quentin nods. “Twelve people can see through a brick wall if you give them enough time.”

  “Rusty?” I prompt.

  “That jury won’t think Lincoln killed his mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “You want it straight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Black folks don’t kill Mama.”

  Dad looks up at this. “Why do you say that, Rusty?”

  Rusty gives my father his lopsided smile. “That’s conventional wisdom with prosecutors, Doc. When you get a perp who killed his father or mother, it’s almost always a white male. Now and then a white girl will do it, to stop sexual abuse, something like that. But as a general rule, blacks don’t kill their mothers.”

  “To my everlasting amazement,” Quentin says, “Rust Bucket is right. Maybe it’s because we’re a matriarchal society, I don’t know. But it’s true. The jury won’t buy that theory.”

  “Wait a second,” Rusty says, “Lincoln Turner is only half black.”

  An awkward silence fills the air, but then Quentin scoffs and says, “Next question, Penn.”

  “Second candidate: Snake and the Double Eagles. Will the jury believe—without Will Devine’s testimony—that the Double Eagles murdered Viola?”

  “I don’t think so,” says Dad. “Not without hard evidence proving that they wanted to kill her. Or threatened to kill her. In this century.”

  The audiotape Lincoln tried to sell me flashes into my mind, and I glare at Quentin, but he silences me with a slight shake of his head.

  “Won’t the fact that someone just murdered a Double Eagle witness for the defense make the jury think that witness was about to implicate the killer?” I ask. “And that the killer was a Double Eagle? Quentin?”

  Quentin looks far from certain. “They might just think an old Klansman was about to break his blood oath, and he got killed for it. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Tom.”

  Rusty looks incredulous. “Come on! They triggered that needle just when you asked Devine about Viola. Penn, help me out here.”

  “The question,” I say, drilling into Quentin with my eyes, “is did the Double Eagles represent a present-day threat to Viola? Had they threatened her within weeks or even days of her death?”

  “Will Devine was about to verify that,” says Quentin.

  “Well, he’ll never tell anybody about it now,” Dad says.

  “Damn it,” I mutter, still thinking of Lincoln’s audiotape. Unable to contain my frustration, I turn to Quentin. “I’ll bet you wish you’d let me buy that tape from Lincoln now.”

  He dismisses me with a wave of his hand.

  “What tape?” Rusty asks.

  “Forget it,” says Quentin. “Some scam from Lincoln.”

  “Maybe it’s worth exploring after all,” Dad says, looking preoccupied.

  “What the hell are you guys talking about?” Rusty demands.

  “Fairy tales,” snaps Quentin.

  Before Rusty can push harder, there’s a knock at the door.

  “Got to be Kaiser,” I tell them. “Rusty, ask him to give us a second.”

  Rusty jumps up with surprising speed, considering his bulk, and I move closer to my father. “I think it’s worth trying to get that tape from Lincoln. I heard it. It would definitely push at least some of the jurors to believe Snake killed Viola.”

  “Trust that boy and it’ll bite you on the ass,” Quentin says.

  “Uh, Penn,” Rusty calls. “We’ve got deputies out here to pick up your dad.”

  As I look up at the door, two ACSO deputies enter my office, their jaws set tight. “Mayor, the jail has just been declared secure. The sheriff ordered us to take your father back to his cell.”

  Dad’s heavy sigh makes it plain how much he’s enjoyed sitting here strategizing with us, free from manacles and the stink of the jailhouse.

  “I’ll see you all in the courtroom,” he says, getting to his feet with a loud creaking. “Goddamn knees.”

  “Be glad you got ’em,” Quentin says with a wink.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Dad squeezes my shoulder, then leans down between Quentin and me and says, “Ya’ll make the call about Lincoln’s tape. But either way, I’m going to testify.”

  As he walks into the custody of the deputies, Quentin and I share a look of perfectly attuned awareness. We may disagree about most issues in this case, but on one point we are as one: Dad does not need to take the stand.

  “Penn, it’s John,” Kaiser calls from my secretary’s office. “Judge Elder wants you over in Shad’s conference room, and he’s in no mood to wait. I need two minutes with you guys before we go.”

  “Come in.”

  Kaiser waits for the deputies to escort Dad through the door, then hurries into my office. “We’ve got about a minute before we have to start walking.”

  I can tell by the FBI agent’s face and posture that he has bad news for us. “Are our families okay?”

  “Yes. It’s not that.”

  “Then it can’t be that bad.”

  “You be the judge.” Kaiser looks at Rusty. “Mr. Duncan, I need you to leave the room.”

  “Whaaaat?” Rusty almost whines.

  “Go, Rusty,” I snap, sensing more gravitas than usual in Kaiser’s manner.

  After Rusty closes the door behind him, Kaiser begins speaking quickly.

  “Since 9/11 the U.S. intel community has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into digita
l forensics. Maybe billions. When your only looks at Osama bin Laden come from videotapes or discs, that’s where you put your money. Every major tech university in the country has a classified program working on new methods to recover, restore, or rebuild captured digital material, whether deleted, erased, shredded, or burned.”

  “Shit.” I sense where this is going. “And?”

  “The Bureau has the best restoration technology extant today. Better than the NSA, better than the CIA. And a lot better than Sony.”

  “What did you do, John?” I ask, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.

  “I’ll tell you what I did,” he says defensively. “I held off asking Shad Johnson for those tapes for a lot longer than I should have. But when Devine was murdered on the stand, I got a call from an assistant director in D.C. And he told me we need to know what’s on those tapes.”

  “Wait a minute,” Quentin says. “An assistant director called you out of the blue about a state murder case?”

  “This is no normal murder case, Mr. Avery. I invoked the Patriot Act three months ago when I started investigating the Double Eagles. When Snake Knox knocked down our plane in December, we lost new evidence in the JFK assassination. That’s as big as it gets. And after all the deaths we had—Glenn Morehouse, Sleepy Johnston, Henry Sexton, Brody Royal—I’ve had some serious Bureau oversight on me. They almost pulled me out of here when we lost that plane. So you can imagine what keeping your client under protective custody cost me in political capital. Now, I’m sorry it’s come to this, but we are here now.”

  The tension in Kaiser’s voice brings back a flood of memories from three months ago. The heated conversations with Kaiser and Dwight Stone about the Working Group and their assassination theory about mobster Carlos Marcello. It’s been weeks since I’ve thought of what was lost in that FBI plane crash: a handwritten letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to his wife, Marina; rifles taken from Brody Royal’s trophy gun cabinet, one of which was supposedly the weapon Frank Knox used to shoot John Kennedy from the Dal-Tex building—

  “I understand all that,” Quentin says with some gratitude in his voice. “But has this tape restoration technique ever been used in a civilian trial on American soil? Criminal or civil?”