Natchez Burning (26 page)

“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.

“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?”

“Only what I learned these past weeks. I gather the husband was a charming rogue. He did all right in the beginning, so it took her a while to discover his crooked streak. But before long, Viola was doing all the work and he was spending all the money. He drank it up or gambled it away. After a while, she started drinking to help herself deal with
his
drinking. It’s an old story. Viola gained weight, started smoking, got depressed. She aged fast. The North could be as cruel as the South to blacks in those days. More cruel, in some ways. Things went steadily downhill. The husband looked elsewhere for sex. He’d probably been cheating on her from the start, Viola said.”

Dad shakes his head with a mixture of sadness and incomprehension. “I think it hurt Viola’s pride when she lost her looks. She was never vain, but I don’t care how selfless a woman is, she still cares about her looks. And Viola had been a beauty. I think between the drinking, the no-’count husband, and working hard to raise her son, she just wore herself out.”

“I sure hate to hear that. What I remember of Viola is like a dream. In my mind she looks like a TV star.”

Dad smiles wistfully. “I don’t think anybody who ever knew her down here would believe her fate. That’s why she never came home. Viola wanted people to remember her as she had been. And they did. She only worked here for eight years, but people still ask about her thirty-seven years later. She had a life force that made you want to be close to her. One lady told me that a smile from Viola Turner could warm you up on a cold day. She could give a child a shot without a tear being shed, and that was something in the days of screw-on needles you had to sand the burrs off of.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You’re right.”

Dad starts to smile, but the expression dies a-borning. “Penn … if you’d seen Viola in her sickbed yesterday, you’d have cried. I did, after the first time I saw her. Time is a terrible thing. And lung cancer’s worse.”

“I did see her,” I confess, wondering at the irony of the smoke filling this office.

Dad blinks like an old man awakened from an accidental nap. “You what? What do you mean?”

“Today I saw a video recording of the last minute of Viola’s life.”

His eyes narrow with suspicion. “What are you talking about?”

As deliberately as I can, I explain about Henry Sexton and the hard drive mounted on the camera left in Viola’s sickroom. “The mini-DV tape was missing,” I conclude, “but the hard drive was still there. Viola must have rolled over the remote control in her death throes. And that’s what got recorded. Shad Johnson has no idea I’ve seen the recording, of course.”

Dad is staring at me with an inscrutable expression. “What did you see?”

“Viola dying. But it sure didn’t look like any morphine overdose.”

“Why do you say that?”

I pause before answering. “If you have to ask me that, you weren’t in the room.”

Dad’s gaze seems locked on some obscure title in the bookshelves to my left.
A defense mechanism.
“Penn, please just tell me.”

“It looked like some sort of heart attack to me, or maybe a drug reaction. Possibly a stroke. She was short of breath, gasping, sweating. She was trying to reach a telephone that had fallen onto the floor. Whatever the underlying problem was, she called out your name twice. And the district attorney thinks that’s tantamount to an accusation of guilt. A dying accusation, in fact—which carries more weight, legally speaking.”

Dad appears not only lost in thought, but strangely untroubled by my words. Part of me wants to shake him until he faces up to the looming danger, but another wants to spare him all the stress I can (as my mother begged me to do) and minimize the chance of another heart attack.

“Shad’s full of shit, of course,” I say.

Dad cuts his eyes at me. “Why do you say that?”

“Because if you’d helped Viola to die, she would have died painlessly. And you would have held her hand to the very end.”

He looks back at me without blinking. “Are you sure you know me so well?”

“Yes. Dad, a lot has happened since we spoke this morning. That video isn’t your only problem. The sheriff’s department has a syringe with your fingerprints on it, and also two prescription vials of morphine sulfate, with you listed as the prescribing physician. Worse, Viola’s sister has stated that you and Viola had a euthanasia pact, and I gather she’s willing to testify to that. Cora Revels will establish that you’ve been treating Viola for the past few weeks. I don’t know what other physical evidence they have, but they’ll get toxicology back from the medical examiner in Jackson before long. If they rush it, we’re liable to know what killed her in two or three days.”

“That should make interesting reading.”

“You don’t already know what it will say?”

Dad shrugs noncommittally. “I’ll tell you something about death: it’s infinitely variable. A twenty-year-old Olympic athlete can trip over a curb and die instantly, and a ninety-year-old woman with three kinds of cancer can live to be a hundred.”

“Your point?”

“Drug interactions are unpredictable.”

His enigmatic tone makes me wonder if he’s caught in some transition stage between shock and grief. I should have recognized it immediately, based on my experience with murder victims’ families in Houston. But all that seems a long time ago now, and despite the nearness of Viola’s death, I need Dad to snap out of it. I need his self-preservation instinct to kick in.

“The DA isn’t thinking about drug interactions. He’s not even thinking about assisted suicide anymore. Shad intends to charge you with murder.”

After a brief grimace, Dad takes a brown bottle from his inside coat pocket and places a tiny white pill under his tongue.

“Is that nitro? You’re having angina now?”

He nods distractedly. “I’m fine. Go on.”

“I wish I could spare you this, but I can’t. At first I assumed that Shad’s idea of murder was you giving Viola the morphine injection, which is technically murder but much less serious than what we’re facing now. This afternoon Shad told me that he’s planning to charge you with first-degree murder. He won’t give me details, but he claims to have strong evidence of motive on your part—a motive for premeditated murder.”

Dad looks incredulous. “What kind of motive?”

“Shad believes you wanted to silence Viola before she could reveal some information you want kept secret.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“That’s the contention of Viola’s son.”

“Johnson wouldn’t tell you what this information was?”

I shake my head. Part of me wants to ask the brutally blunt question about Viola and my father, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to do it. Confronting him about a possible affair with Viola feels like challenging Dwight Eisenhower about his wartime mistress.

“Dad,” I say instead, “I have something on Shad that would destroy his legal career, and he knows it. He wouldn’t risk moving against you unless he felt he had no other choice. Whatever Lincoln Turner told Shad, or showed him, Shad genuinely believes it was a motive for murder.”

My father ponders this revelation like a monk parsing contradictory passages in the Bible.

“Given what I just told you, is there anything you want to tell me now?”

He grunts and shifts position like a man with upper back pain. “No.”

Leaning forward, I speak with all the conviction I can muster. “There is nothing you could tell me today that would alter my opinion of you, or make me judge you.
Nothing
. You understand?”

He closes his eyes for a moment. “Are you so sure?”

“Yes. If you and Viola were closer than you should have been … I’ve got no problem with that.”

Nothing in his expression changes.

“If you and Viola had a euthanasia pact, I’ve got no problem with that, either. You ought to know that.” I look meaningfully to his left, where a portrait of me with Sarah and Annie sits framed. “Maybe something went wrong, or something unforeseen occurred. Whatever it was, you’re the only person who can shed light on that event. And if you don’t, you’re going to wind up on trial for murder.”

Dad’s face hardens. “If that’s true … then so be it.”

I groan with frustration. “Dad, the trusty old doctor-patient privilege defense isn’t going to fly in this case. You understand?”

“You’re mighty quick to make light of that. Penn, you once told me about a journalist who went to jail for three weeks to protect a source, and you couldn’t stop telling me how much you admired the man.”

“That’s different.”

“You’re right. This is far more serious. Do you realize how sacred the doctor-patient privilege is? I have patients secretly suffering from HIV, patients fighting suicidal depression, wives who’ve secretly had abortions, mothers who suspect their husbands of abusing their children, women who’ve been raped and never told the police, prominent drug addicts … the list is endless. If I were forced to reveal any of that in court, incalculable suffering would ensue. Yet you act like fighting to protect that secrecy is some quaint gesture. Do you expect me to raise a white flag at the first sign of danger? Surely you know me better than that. I’m seventy-three years old. If I choose this hill to make my stand, that’s my lookout.”