Mississippi Blood

  After a few seconds of processing, Shad turns and walks to the prosecution table, where he picks up a sheet of paper, then starts back toward the witness box.

  “Doctor, the evidence report introduced by the sheriff’s department does not include fentanyl as one of the drugs listed as confiscated from the house.”

  “That’s because it was in my bag.”

  Shad halts in midstride, then makes a course correction back to his table, where he scans some more papers. His assistant jumps up from his chair and tries to help Shad find what he’s looking for, but Shad brushes him aside. Right now he’s remembering that, while he induced Melba Price to testify about Dad routinely keeping adrenaline in his black bag, he never asked her to list the full contents of that bag. God help me, I almost feel sorry for him. As a prosecutor I had some moments like that—rare, thank God, but it only takes one to scar you for life.

  “How would you have explained an overdose of fentanyl,” Shad asks, “which would have been detected on autopsy?”

  Dad purses his lips like a physics teacher asked to consider some improbable problem. “I would have said Viola was having breakthrough pain. In general, morphine would raise fewer questions postmortem, if for any reason an autopsy was done. Viola knew that. That’s why she chose morphine. But she did tell me that if the morphine proved ineffectual, I should use the fentanyl to be sure.”

  Shad’s posture has gone rigid. “You can’t prove a bit of that.”

  “I can prove I had the fentanyl in my bag.”

  The DA blinks in surprise. “How?”

  My ears are roaring. Once again, Shadrach Johnson has stepped off the edge of the map of known answers. It’s the prosecutor’s equivalent of Beyond This Point Lie Dragons.

  “When Viola and I first discussed her desire to die peacefully, I prescribed fentanyl, so that we could have it on hand if she actually chose to go through with her plan.”

  As Shad shuffles through his papers, his assistant pulls a single sheet from a different pile and hands it to him.

  “Doctor, I reviewed the records of Leo Watts, Mrs. Turner’s pharmacist. He had no record of Viola Turner being prescribed fentanyl.”

  “I didn’t prescribe it through Mr. Watts’s pharmacy,” Dad says equably. “Leo’s a friend, and a churchgoer, and since I knew how the drug might be used, I didn’t want him troubled by that kind of issue.”

  “Or by the police?” Shad says sharply.

  Dad inclines his head. “That too, I suppose.”

  “Where did you get this fentanyl, Dr. Cage?”

  “From a compounding pharmacy. But that isn’t the point, is it? The point is that I had the drug, and I had it with me that night.”

  “How can we possibly know that?”

  Dad shrugs. “Recall Melba Price, my nurse. She was well aware of the contents of my bag, since she checked its inventory regularly and maintained my drug stocks.”

  Shad looks like a man who has awakened from a deep sleep with no idea where he is.

  “I’d like to remind the court,” Dad says, taking advantage of Shad’s distress, “that Henry Sexton’s hard-drive recording doesn’t show me at all. It only shows Viola dying, and in a way I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I can promise you this: if I had meant to kill Viola, whether out of anger or mercy, I’d have done a hell of a lot better job of it.”

  Shad should sit down. When a witness gets away from you like this, you have to cut your losses and try to make it up elsewhere. In this case, Shad has only his closing argument left, but that’s better than pushing further into uncharted regions. And yet . . . I see almost limitless anger in Shad’s face as he grasps the magnitude of his error, and anger makes some lawyers reckless. He walks around the table with a pugnacious stride and stops just short of the witness box.

  “Dr. Cage, before any legal action was taken against you, I called your son, the mayor, and asked him to find out what had happened at Cora Revels’s house that night. Yet you refused to tell your own son anything. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes. I had just learned that Lincoln Turner was my son. Penn hadn’t the first idea that I’d had an affair with Viola Turner, much less that he had a half brother. How was I supposed to tell him that, especially with the DA making noises about charging me with a crime?”

  “An innocent man would have confided in someone.”

  “Well . . . I didn’t.”

  “Once you were arrested, why did you jump bail? Is that the act of an innocent man?”

  Dad takes a deep breath and looks past Shad to the jury. “I didn’t believe the sheriff was interested in learning who had really killed Viola. He’d decided I was guilty on the first day, and he stopped looking for any other solution after that.”

  “All the evidence pointed to you, Doctor.”

  “There was other evidence,” Dad says doggedly. “But Sheriff Byrd didn’t care about that. He’d been looking to get even with me for twenty years, and with Viola’s death, he finally got his chance.”

  “Why would the sheriff want to ‘get even’ with you, as you say?”

  “Because I knew things about him.”

  “What things?”

  “Things he wouldn’t want to be made public. I can’t be more specific without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “You’ve been quite cavalier about breaking rules thus far. Why stick at a little talking out of school?”

  “Subpoena the sheriff’s ex-wife. She’ll tell you what his problem was.”

  “Did you have an affair with her as well?”

  “Ob-jection,” Quentin says in lazy tone. “We’re getting mighty far afield of the issue before the bar, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained. Mr. Johnson, you seem to be taking shots without aiming at this point.”

  In that moment, reality breaks through to Shad. I doubt he has ever felt more exposed or impotent than he does now. Strangely, I take no pleasure in his torment. If Billy Byrd were standing there like that, I surely would. But Shad, I can tell, believes he is on the side of right. The problem with the law as a profession is that belief, personal conviction, and even knowledge buy you nothing in a courtroom. If you can’t prove that something occurred . . . it never happened.

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” Shad says.

  “Thank you, Counselor. Redirect?”

  “None.”

  Judge Elder turns his head to the defense table. “Mr. Avery, do you have any further witnesses?”

  “I do not, Your Honor. The defense rests.”

  A deep silence follows Quentin’s declaration, like the silence after a storm has blasted all the birds and insects out of a field. No one can quite believe that the old wizard has emptied his bag of tricks. Shad looks like he’s hardly aware of what’s transpiring around him.

  “Does the State call rebuttal witnesses?” Judge Elder asks.

  “None,” Shad says dully.

  “Very well.” Elder leans down to his mike. “At this time, I am going to instruct the jury. Then we’ll adjourn for lunch, and return at noon for closing arguments.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Quentin says, his white shock of hair now looking like the flag on an anchored ship.

  As Joe Elder begins the tedious process of reading his jury instructions, my gaze wanders to the jury box. If I were trying this case, I’d have been stealing glances at those twelve anointed citizens every chance I got, and having associates watch them for signs of which way they were leaning. But during this trial I’ve mostly watched the lawyers, and if not them, then the witnesses or the judge. It was Tuesday—an eternity ago—that I advised my mother to do exactly this, and wondered whether I could take my own advice. As it turned out, I have. I’ve coined no nicknames for these jurors, as was once my habit, and even now I find little of interest in their studiously severe faces.

  But when Judge Elder begins instructing them about reasonable doubt, I see some eyes flicker, and I realize that, if nothing else, Quentin Avery
has summoned doubt into this courtroom as a living, breathing spirit. This jury is not going to convict Tom Cage of murder. They might go for physician-assisted suicide, but that’s not on the menu. So, unless something happens that I cannot foresee, unless Shadrach Johnson performs actual magic during his closing argument, my father is going to walk out of this courtroom a free man.

  Chapter 67

  We eat lunch at my house on Washington Street, Mom and Jenny and me. Rusty hinted about coming with us, but I worried that his presence during this break might raise our sense of relief to mild euphoria, and I didn’t want to risk that. Dad has been taken back to his cell, which for me conjures images of Billy Byrd or even Snake Knox sending someone in there to dispatch him on the verge of acquittal. Quentin and Doris have repaired to Edelweiss, and as they departed the courtroom, Quentin looked back at me and gave me a thin smile. I returned a respectful salute.

  A mood of cautious optimism prevails during our meal of salad and grocery-store-made lasagna from the Natchez Market. We get through most of it by avoiding any mention of the day’s events in the courtroom. As the clock ticks into the final quarter of the hour, a strange silence descends on the table. Then Mom says, “I miss Walt. Has anybody heard how his wife is doing?”

  “A little better,” I tell her, though I actually have no idea.

  Just as I think we’re going to get through lunch without any drama, Jenny says in a brittle voice: “I don’t want to jinx anything, but—do you think it went as well as I do this morning? From a legal perspective, I mean. Please don’t sugarcoat it.”

  Mom sighs irritably, but Jenny has made up her mind to push forward. I have a feeling that despite her words, she’s scared to death Dad will be convicted.

  After a few seconds’ thought, I say, “Today was a good day. A great one, actually. But Shad won’t lose any time taking the jury back to day one in his close—the forensic case.”

  Mom’s face pinches with concern. “Didn’t Tom dispense with that when he explained about the fentanyl?”

  “Let’s hope some jurors agree.”

  “I saw several perk up when he explained that point.”

  “Shad made a huge mistake missing the fentanyl being in Dad’s bag. Maybe fatal. But he painted a compelling picture of how Dad might have gone from intending to euthanize Viola for the wrong reasons, to finishing the job with adrenaline. I can’t see twelve people buying it, but that scenario would be easy to understand for a layman.”

  “Daddy never argued that he tried to resuscitate Viola with adrenaline,” Jenny points out.

  “You’re right. That’s one of the few virtues of his self-destructive honesty.”

  Mom’s jaw has tightened, and her face lost some color. “Isn’t Quentin at his best in things like closing argument? Isn’t that how he got the nickname ‘Preacher’?”

  “Yes. And I expect him to do well. But we’d be foolish to underestimate Shad, and I think Quentin has done that throughout the trial.”

  Jenny looks more worried than before. “But hasn’t Quentin done a wonderful job in the end? He destroyed two of Shad’s main witnesses.”

  “Absolutely. He proved that they both perjured themselves.”

  “Well, then,” Mom says. “That’s reasonable doubt right there.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “Well, what’s about to happen?” Jenny asks. “I tried to pay attention during the judge’s instructions, but I kept drifting off. Give me the last act for dummies.”

  “Closing arguments,” I tell her. “Shad Johnson and Quentin each get one hour to summarize their cases for the jury. Typically, the prosecutor will take thirty minutes of his hour, then sit down. The defense is required to give all his remarks in one go, the full hour, if he wants to speak that long. Then the prosecutor has thirty minutes left to finish.”

  “So Shad gets to hear Quentin’s whole pitch before he finishes.”

  “Right. And that’s a real advantage. It helped me win a lot of cases back in Houston.”

  Mom kicks me under the table, and I feel my face go red.

  “I think we’re about to see Quentin Avery’s finest hour,” she announces.

  She stands up and flattens her skirt. “I’m going to run upstairs to the ladies’ room. I’ll see you all in a minute. Jenny, we should get back to the courthouse as soon as possible.”

  After Mom leaves the room, Jenny swallows her last bite of lasagna. “What’s wrong? Were you holding something back in front of Mom? Did we miss something important?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then what is it?” she presses.

  “Everybody seems to be forgetting the fact that when Viola made that tape for Henry, she was doing it in the expectation that Dad was going to euthanize her. The things she said in the recording did a lot to puncture Shad’s theories about Dad’s motive to silence her, but even if he injected her out of a desire to give her a dignified death, that’s murder. Not assisted suicide. I expect Shad to make that clear in his closing. Trying this case on motive may have bitten Shad in the ass, but that doesn’t change the facts. Motive doesn’t really have anything to do with whether Dad committed murder or not. It comes down to what the jury believes happened in that room. What physically happened. If they think he injected her with that adrenaline as well as the morphine, they could convict him.”

  “But if they think Daddy injected her out of a sense of mercy, don’t you think they’ll acquit him in the end?”

  The base of my skull has begun to throb. Leaning forward, I squeeze my neck as tightly as I can with my right hand. “Imagine twelve people, most of whom have about a fourth of your scientific knowledge. A lot can depend on who takes control of that jury once they begin deliberations.”

  Seeing worry in my sister’s eyes, I reach out and squeeze her shoulder. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate. It’s an old defense against getting overconfident. Most people are going to believe Dad did just what he said: pushed that needle through her vein and walked out of there with her alive.”

  Jenny gets up and walks around the table, then looks down into my eyes. “You’re still not telling me everything. Something’s worrying you.”

  She knows me better than I thought. “Only this. If Dad didn’t inject that adrenaline, who did? You see? That jury would have a lot easier time if there was a big fat suspect sitting up there for them to pin it on in their minds.”

  “What about Snake Knox?”

  “You’re right, I’m sure.”

  Mom flushing the toilet upstairs sends water rushing through the pipes in the kitchen wall.

  “Tell me something, Penn, before Mom gets down.”

  “What?”

  “Did you believe Daddy’s story?”

  I hesitate, but then to my surprise I speak my mind. “Not a hundred percent, no.”

  Jenny’s eyes flash. “Why not?”

  “I just . . . I don’t think he’s lied much in his life. But when he talked about the injection, his tone reminded me of something.”

  “What?”

  “Something from my childhood.”

  “A time he lied to you?” she asks.

  “I think so.”

  Jenny closes her eyes, then reaches out and threads her fingers into mine. For a few seconds, I sense she’s going to confide something to me. But then she says, “I’m praying it’s going to come out all right.”

  I have no response to this.

  “I’m going to run to the restroom myself,” she says. “I’ll see you in a sec.”

  After finishing off the remainder of my lasagna, I walk to the half bath at the back of the house to piss, but the door opens and Jenny walks out with her hands in her hair, trying to pin it up. She’s got a bobby pin in her mouth, and for a moment I’m thrown back to my childhood, when she was the cool teenager in our house and I the goofy little brother. Smiling, I reach out to pat her arm as I pass, but instead she grabs my hand and pulls me to a stop, her eyes deeply troubled.
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  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Penn, I saw something.”

  “When? What are you talking about?”

  “A long time ago. When I was fifteen. I was riding a bicycle downtown with one of my friends, Tracy Moon. Do you remember Tracy?”

  “What did you see, Jenny?”

  “Something bad. I was telling Tracy about how, when we were little kids, we used to make milkshakes using the barium mixing machine in the lab at Daddy’s office. I thought it would be fun to do that again, if we could. So we rode over to his office on High Street. We went to the lab door like we used to, but nobody answered. I told Tracy to wait while I checked around front. I didn’t go to the front door, though. I rode around to the garage to see if Daddy’s car was there. But the garage door was closed. I leaned my bike against the wrought-iron fence and walked up to the side door. I heard voices. One was Daddy’s. I almost called out, but something stopped me. Instead, I got up on tiptoe and peeked through the glass.”

  “Jenny, come on. We don’t have much time.”

  She nods quickly, her face red with shame and doubt. “Daddy and Viola were standing in the corner of the garage. At first I thought they were arguing, because he was holding her arms and shaking them. But then he kissed her, and she kissed him back. I don’t know how long I stood there, but . . . they were making out the whole time. There was no doubt about what I was looking at. When she started taking off her top, I ran.”

  “Jenny. I’m sorry. Did you ever tell Dad or Mom what you saw?”

  “No, God, no. But I can’t tell you how bad it freaked me out. From that moment forward, I was sure Daddy loved Viola more than Mom. And I guess I was right, in a way. But the worst thing was, I knew he was lying to us. I don’t think I ever trusted him after that.”

  Though Jenny’s not a big hugger, I put my arms around her and squeeze her tight. “I wish you’d told me about it.”

  “I couldn’t,” she says, her voice a sob into my chest. “You were so young, and you worshipped him. I couldn’t shatter your respect for him.”