Natchez Burning

  “Are you there?” Henry asked tentatively. “Are you okay, Glenn?”

  A single wracking sob came through the phone.

  “What’s the matter, man?”

  “They made me do those things, Henry,” said a childlike voice.

  “What things?”

  “They made me hurt Jimmy. And Viola. I hated it.”

  “Who made you do that?”

  “Snake, mostly. But they all pushed me. To scare people, and hurt ’em. Ever since we was kids. Just because I’m big. But Snake knew I couldn’t stand up to him. Nobody could.”

  Henry swallowed hard. “What did Snake make you do, Glenn?”

  “I can’t say it.”

  “Yes, you can. Let it go, brother.”

  Another sob. Then the old man croaked, “Unnatural things. Sins against God. Like in Leviticus.”

  Henry shuddered at the images this conjured, but also at the raw pain in the man’s voice. “Did you kill Jimmy Revels, Glenn?”

  “No. I couldn’t of done that. That boy was different. Whenever Snake hit or cut Luther, Jimmy acted like it hurt him worse than it did Luther. Which was crazy, cause Revels was a skinny little thing, and Luther was a damn gorilla. And—when we had our way with Viola … Jesus.”

  The stunned numbness of the earlier interview had returned. “Wait a second. Are you saying Jimmy and Luther saw Viola raped? How could that be?”

  “Don’t you know anything, Henry? Snake went crazy after Frank died. He sent some boys to grab Viola again. He claimed it was to make them boys talk, and then to shut her up, but he just wanted her again. And them boys didn’t know nothing, Henry. Nothing Snake wanted to hear, no ways.”

  Henry was “gobsmacked,” as an English reporter he knew would say. “If Viola witnessed so much, why on earth did Snake let her live?”

  “I already told you that.”

  “Ray Presley and Dr. Cage?”

  “Yeah. Jesus … I took too many pills. I ain’t used to this pain patch they got me on.”

  Henry sensed that he was going to have to wait until the next interview to get to the bottom of this story. They’d already passed the time limit Morehouse had set on their conversation. But he had to make one more stab at the case that meant the most to him—

  “Wilma?” Morehouse said sharply.

  Henry’s breath caught in his throat. The silence lasted so long that Henry thought Morehouse had hung up. But after some indeterminate delay, Glenn whispered, “Did you hear that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “You didn’t hear a click?”

  “No. I think we’re fine. But we’d better go. Her show must be over.”

  “Wait … I still hear her TV. Listen to me, Henry. You’re a good ole boy. I know you mean well. But you need to start paying attention. They know where you live, and where your mama lives, too.”

  Henry’s face and palms went cold. “My mother?”

  “How you think they operate, son? They hit you where you’re soft.”

  “Who exactly are you talking about? Snake?”

  “All of ’em. Snake, Sonny, Billy, Forrest … even Brody and his son-in-law. Don’t kid yourself. You were right about that flamethrower, too. They’ve still got it. You hear me? It still works. And that’s a shitty way to die. I wouldn’t wish it on a Jap.”

  “Glenn—”

  “There’s one more thing. Something I need to clear up. I lied to you about something today. Something big.”

  Henry’s heart thumped. “What’s that?”

  “About Jimmy and Luther. I told you Frank picked them because they was black Muslims, running guns.”

  “I knew that wasn’t true. I always knew Jimmy was the real target, because of his civil rights work.”

  Morehouse wheezed into the phone. “If you think that, you’re just as dumb as I am.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jimmy Revels wasn’t the real target.”

  Henry felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “Then who was? Luther Davis?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Glenn … what the hell are you tryin’ to say?”

  “The real target was Bobby Kennedy.”

  Henry gulped. “What?”

  “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy.”

  “Glenn, that’s crazy. You must be drunk. That’s nuts.”

  “You think so? You ever hear of the Ben Chester White case?”

  “You know I have.”

  “Well, this was like that.”

  Henry’s mind raced over the White case, which involved the brutal murder of a sixty-seven-year-old black handyman just outside Natchez. In June 1966, some Klansmen had offered White two dollars and an orange soda pop to “help them find their lost dog.” Then they drove him out into the woods and shot him close to twenty times. Out of a hundred details of that crime, one lit up like fireworks behind Henry’s eyes: Ben Chester White was murdered to lure Martin Luther King to Natchez, so that he could be assassinated.

  In a quavering voice, Henry said, “Say it plain, Glenn. I don’t want to make assumptions.”

  “The whole damn operation got FUBAR, but it started with Frank, way back on the sandbar, the day he founded the Eagles. Then Brody Royal and Carlos Marcello got into it. Nobody hated Bobby Kennedy like Carlos …”

  Henry took out a pen and started writing as fast as he could.

  CHAPTER 15

  EVERY DOCTOR EVENTUALLY commits murder.

  All physicians make mistakes, both of commission and omission, and sooner or later one will be fatal. But some doctors kill more directly. When certain patients near death, these physicians walk the legally sanctioned road of withdrawing nourishment or mechanical support, allowing a “natural” death to occur. Others kill more purposefully, by actually providing the drugs for patients to make a permanent end to their suffering. But a few physicians—the brave or the mad—walk the last mile and administer the lethal drug themselves, usually for those too ill to do so. To some people, those few doctors are criminals; to others—to the gravely ill and their families—they can be angels of mercy. My father has probably done all of the above. And now, barring a miracle, he, unlike so many of his colleagues before him, will be charged with murder.

  I’m no expert on assisted suicide, but murder is another matter. Eight years as an assistant DA in Harris County, Texas, lifted me into the major league of murder trials. I tried many of Houston’s highest-profile cases, and as a result sent sixteen people to death row at the Walls Unit in Huntsville. Then a slow accretion of events and realizations convinced me that I had not been divinely ordained to punish the guilty. I had seen inexcusable mistakes made in capital cases—by cops, lawyers, pathologists, crime labs, and juries—and this weighed heavily in my decision to leave the prosecutor’s office. I never convicted an innocent man, but I worried I’d seen it done by colleagues, and nine months ago a burgeoning scandal in the Houston crime lab suggested that my sickening premonitions were all too accurate. Having my own father charged with murder is a sobering prospect, especially in a small Mississippi town. If there’s anything Dad can do to head off his arrest tomorrow, he needs to do it—for my mother, for my daughter, and most of all for himself.

  Seven weeks ago he almost died, I remind myself, as I park my car and walk to the side door of his medical office. Keep that fact at the forefront of your mind. It’s easy to dismiss a heart attack, once the critical danger has passed, but something tells me that the psychological fallout of Dad’s near-death experience is affecting his assessment of his present jeopardy. Of course, he doesn’t yet grasp the full magnitude of that jeopardy. He still believes that the district attorney views Viola’s death as assisted suicide. I almost called him several times today to correct that perception, but I wanted to be sure I had a clear understanding of the situation first. More important, I wanted to speak to Dad alone. This isn’t easy to manage, since at home my mother always seems to hover within earshot, and when he’s in his office
, his longtime nurse, Melba Price, is forever at his side.

  Before I could even attempt such a meeting, I had to spend three hours with the superintendent of schools and three dozen angry parents. I came into office promising to reform education in the city. Two years later, 50 percent of the kids in our public schools drop out before graduating from the twelfth grade, while only 2 percent in our private schools drop out. The city’s public schools are 95 percent black, the private schools 85 percent white. This problem is easy to diagnose but virtually impossible to cure, and even basic treatment is one of the most contentious issues in the county. This afternoon’s meeting brought zero progress.

  After leaving that meeting, I drove past my parents’ house and saw that my father’s car wasn’t in their driveway. On a hunch I drove by his office and found his old BMW parked in the back. That car was a gift from me, bought with my first big royalty check, and he’s kept it perfectly maintained ever since. Dad developed a love for German cars when he served in Bonn as an army doctor during the early 1960s, and he’s shown no inclination to trade in the old 740 for anything newer. With dusk falling and only one other car parked in the lot, I decide to brace him on his home turf.

  I try not to get impatient as I bang loudly on the side door. Dad’s too deaf to hear the knocking, and anyone else will assume I’m an after-hours patient or a drug salesman. But after repeated efforts, a key rattles in the lock and the dark face of Melba Price appears in the crack. The nurse’s expression instantly morphs from a glare to a welcoming smile of relief.

  “What’s he doing, Melba?”

  “What you think he’s doin’? Goin’ over charts on the patients Dr. Elliott been seein’ for him.” Melba points down the hall. “Just follow the cigar smoke.”

  A former schoolmate of mine, Drew Elliott is now one of my father’s junior partners. Drew has taken on as many patients as he can during Dad’s recuperation, but no full-time doctor—not even an athletic forty-two-year-old—can keep up with my father’s workload on top of his own.

  I start down the hall, then stop and lay my hand on the nurse’s arm. “Melba, have you been going out to treat Viola Turner for the past few weeks?”

  She takes a deep breath and tries to pull away, but I hold her arm. “I’m trying to help him, Melba. You know that. And I’d never hurt you to do it.”

  The nurse sucks in her upper lip, and her eyes flick nervously toward the ceiling before finally settling on me. “I went out there a few times. Drove Doc out there a few more. Miss Viola was in a bad way, Penn. She really should have been in a hospital, but she said she’d seen too many folks die in hospitals, and she didn’t want any part of that.”

  “Thank you. Don’t tell me any more.”

  I squeeze her wrist, then follow the smoke down the hall. Turning right, I see my father through a cloud of blue haze rising from the Romeo y Julieta burning in an ashtray on his desk. His concentration is absolute as he pores over a patient’s medical record. Through the obfuscating cloud, I recognize the familiar clutter of his office, a room so packed with books and other objects that not even Melba’s constant labor can keep it in order.

  At first glance, Dad’s inner sanctum looks like an exhibit at the Smithsonian: The Small-Town General Practitioner’s Office, Circa 1952. From the meticulously hand-painted Napoleonic soldiers in a glass cabinet to the 1/96th scale model of the USS Constitution on a bookshelf, from the red Dinky double-decker London bus on his desk to the P-51 Mustang suspended from the ceiling by fishing line, this room exudes the scent of history. On a credenza to my left sits a set of pistols that date to the Revolutionary War, and a Civil War surgeon’s kit with the long, gleaming knives used for countless amputations in the days before antibiotics and helicopters.

  A casual observer might take the occupant of this office as something of an antique himself—the white beard and sagging flesh make it easy to do—but that would be a grave mistake. For the shelves of this room are lined with books that have kept my father’s mind sharper and more vital than those of colleagues half his age, who haven’t read a biography or literary novel since they left college. Skipping the medical library on the lower shelves, one quick perusal of the spines reveals biographies spanning three centuries of American history, weighted to the Civil War; a sprinkling of philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein; a set of the Greek tragedians; a treasured shelf of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, mostly by Russian and American authors; a dozen back issues of Foreign Affairs; a shelf covering the Middle East, with a focus on Islam and Iran; and assorted volumes on subjects from counterterrorism to Seymour Cray. Sadly, this office holds but a tiny fraction of his original collection. In essence, this room is a twelve-by-fifteen lifeboat containing the survivors of the fire that destroyed my parents’ home in 1998, and with it a library fifty years in the making.

  “Melba?” Dad says, his eyes still on the chart. “This note says Drew put Jeanne Edwards on five hundred milligrams of Cipro b.i.d. She had a little reaction to Cipro the last time I put her on it, didn’t she?”

  Expecting to see his nurse, Dad looks up and blinks in confusion. “Penn? Is it five thirty already?”

  “Quarter to six.”

  “Has Melba gone?”

  “No. She’s still out there.”

  I sit on the worn leather sofa Dad brought here from his downtown office against the fervent protests of the decorator who did the new office building. Whenever I sit on this smoke-cured artifact, I think of the secrets confided by the thousands of patients who sat here before me, and the prognoses, both hopeful and terrible, that my father gave them. Today, though, I’m wondering whether this familiar sofa is old enough that Viola Turner sat on it as a young nurse.

  “Tell me about Viola,” I say softly.

  Dad sighs heavily, then leans back in the leather chair behind his desk. No matter how aged and battered his body gets, his blue-gray eyes, like his mind, remain incisively clear. But this evening the bags under them tell me that he hasn’t slept for many hours, maybe even days. Fifteen years ago his face developed a healthy roundness over his bones. After his beard went white, children sometimes mistook him for Santa Claus in December. But now, seven weeks after a heart attack, he’s become gaunt and angular again. With his hollow cheeks and eyes, he reminds me of Mathew Brady’s photograph of Robert E. Lee, taken shortly after the surrender at Appomattox. The civilian clothes Lee wore in that photo could not disguise the solemn gaze of a man who’d endured loss of a magnitude known to only a few men throughout history. A shadow of that look darkens my father’s face now.

  “I’m not going to talk about last night,” he says.

  Stonewalling is no longer an option, but I’m going to wait a few minutes to tell him that. “I’m not asking about last night. I’m asking about Viola herself.”

  His chair creaks as he leans farther back (at least I hope it was his chair; it might have been his joints). “Viola was a Revels, originally. That’s a famous name across the South. Hiram Revels was the first black U.S. senator, seated during Reconstruction. He represented Mississippi. I never knew whether or not Viola was descended from him, and she didn’t either, but I always suspected she was. Revels was a brilliant man, and Viola was pretty sharp herself.”

  “Was she a trained nurse?”

  “Not formally. She wasn’t an RN, or even an LPN. Back in those days, the docs would take on some of the smartest girls and train them right in the hospitals. And I’ll tell you, some of the nurses who came out of those programs knew more medicine than those I see getting out of the schools today. That’s how Esther was trained. Same program. It was hands-on from the first day, the way it was in the army.”

  Esther Ford worked for my father longer than any other nurse, nearly forty years, and by the time she retired last year she was a physician assistant. Four months after she retired, Esther died of a stroke in her sleep. I’d give almost anything to have her around to question about Viola’s relationship with Dad.

&nbs
p; “Viola had worked at Charity Hospital before Dr. Lucas hired her,” Dad goes on. “Young as she was, she’d done some of everything. Delivered babies, assisted with all kinds of surgery—you name it, she’d helped do it. More than I had, in some areas. Her Creole grandmother was a midwife in New Orleans, and Viola had spent several years with her as a girl. That’s where she picked up her French, and a lot of hard-earned medical knowledge besides. Most days, Viola and Esther could have run this clinic on their own.”

  I start to ask another question, but Dad says, “I imagine the licensing requirements were stricter in Chicago than in Mississippi, though. I don’t think Viola had an easy time getting work when she got up there.”

  “Did you stay in contact with her after she left Natchez?”

  “No. She sent a couple of letters to the clinic, but I don’t think she put much truth in them. I saw her sister as a patient, and Cora told me things weren’t going too well for Viola ‘up north.’ Viola got married soon after she got there. Too soon, as it turned out. Women tend to do that during hard times. The pretty ones, anyway. She married some kind of con man. A hustler.”

  A con man? “Do you know if he was the father of the son who’s down here? This Lincoln Turner?”

  “I assume so. They have the same last name. But on the other hand, I don’t understand how he could be. Turner was the last name of the man Viola married down here, the one who was killed in Vietnam. It’s hard to believe she’d move to Chicago and marry a different man named Turner. But she didn’t talk to me about any of that, and I didn’t push it. He’s in jail now, by the way—the father.”

  In jail? “That gives us something to think about.”

  Dad arches his eyebrows.

  “If Lincoln Turner was raised by a con man,” I say, “maybe he’s down here looking for money. This afternoon I called the Illinois State Bar Association and found out Lincoln is about to be disbarred.”

  “Really? What for?”

  “He apparently embezzled money from a client escrow account, and I got hints of a deeper scandal. Possible bribery of a judge. Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I’ll find out more soon, but for now, what else can you tell me about Viola’s life in Chicago?”