Natchez Burning (89 page)

Byrd looks down at Turner. “Did you know the mayor wants to rebuild the old slave market for tourists to gawk at? ‘Cultural tourism,’ he calls it. What you think about that? As an Afro-American? Would you pay money to come look at the block they sold your ancestors on?”

Lincoln wipes his mouth with a napkin and gets up from the table. He towers six inches above Billy Byrd, and he doesn’t make any effort to give the sheriff the space he’s accustomed to.

“You in the wrong jook, Sheriff,” he says. “We settle our own business up in here. Ain’t no place for the law.”

Byrd seems stunned by “his” witness’s behavior. Leaving his hand on his pistol grip, he takes a step back and says, “I’m the high sheriff of this county, boy. I go any damn place I please.”

“Then go,” Lincoln says. “Before somebody decides to disabuse you of your notions.”

Sheriff Byrd glances over his shoulder. The big bartender stares back at him, both hands invisible behind the bar. The waitress and cook are watching from the kitchen curtain, and there’s a cleaver in the cook’s hand.

“All right, now!” Billy says loudly, backing away from our table. “Nobody do nothin’ stupid!”

“That sounds like good advice,” Lincoln says.

Billy finally looks to me for help—the only other white man in the room. But I simply turn up my palms.

“Where’s my damn biscuits?” he calls, trying to assert the old hierarchy.

The bandanna-clad waitress slides between two tables with a small brown sack in her hand. As Billy reaches out with his free hand, she drops the sack on the floor at his feet.

“Sorry ’bout that,” she says, making no effort to pick it up.

“You people need a little reeducation,” Billy mutters. “Oh, yeah.”

The sheriff looks like he’s going to say something else, but instead he shakes his head and marches out to the parking lot, leaving his biscuits on the floor.

“I thought you were working with him,” I say to Lincoln.

“I’m not working with anybody, Mayor. I’m here for justice. I’ll use a cracker like Byrd if I have no choice, but I don’t have to like it.”

“What about Shad Johnson?”

Lincoln shrugs. “Same for that Oreo. But he’s the man in the DA’s office.”

“What
were
you doing outside my house this afternoon?”

“Looking at the life I might have lived, if things had been different.” He gazes down into my eyes with emotion that I can’t begin to read. “Think about what I’ve told you today. Think about what the Bible says: ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the father on the sons unto the third and fourth generation.’”

As he quotes the Bible, I sense a malevolent urge within him, something darker and more primitive than anything he’s voiced today.

“Lincoln … you wish history was something less terrible than it was for your mother. I wish the same thing. But you shouldn’t try to punish my father for pain inflicted by someone else. My father loved your mother. He proved that in the last month of her life. Why can’t you leave it at that?”

Lincoln lays a twenty-dollar bill on the table and prepares to go.

“You talk about sin like you’ve never committed any yourself,” I observe.

His eyes blaze with sudden passion. “Whatever evil I’ve done goes on Tom Cage’s account. You hear me? I
am
his sin, alive in the world.”

Lincoln’s ominously resonant voice makes my skin prickle. “If that’s true, then what am I?”

He looks back at me for several silent seconds. “You’re what he could have been.”

Lincoln turns toward the door and walks out without looking back.

Before I follow, the bartender calls: “Don’t come back here no more, Mayor. I don’t want that sheriff up in here again.”

I acknowledge his order with a wave, then walk out of the juke in the footsteps of a man who just might be my brother.

A MILE DOWN
the road from CC’s Rhythm Club, something breaks in my mind, like a steel restraining pin giving way inside some complex machine. For the past two and a half days, my father’s behavior has stumped me. Nothing about it has made sense from the moment Shad Johnson called to tell me that Viola was dead and Lincoln wanted my father charged with murder.

But if I simply accept Lincoln Turner’s assertion to be true—
that my father is also his father
—then logic leads me to a sequence of deductions that can’t be refuted. One: If Lincoln
is
my father’s son, then he’s family in my father’s eyes. Two: If Lincoln is family, then he deserves my father’s protection as much as I or my sister would. My heart clenches as the next question forms in my mind: In what circumstance would my father risk his life to protect Lincoln Turner?

Lincoln’s life must be at risk.

How could Lincoln’s life be at risk?

He’s either been threatened, or he’s guilty of a serious crime.

Who might have threatened him?

No way to know.

Of what crime could Lincoln be guilty?

“Killing his mother,” I say aloud.
Killing his mother
…

My heart flexes like a straining biceps, but still my mind races down the interrogatory chain. “How could Lincoln kill his mother if he was thirty miles outside Natchez?”

He couldn’t.

The next question flares in my mind like a bottle rocket in a black sky:
What if Lincoln was
in
Natchez when Viola died?

In some process infinitely faster than conscious thought, a new relationship between the principals in this deadly drama forms in my mind. If Lincoln
was
in Natchez when Viola died, then he would surely have agreed to help her end her life—especially if my father had already refused. If my mother were dying of a terminal illness, wracked with pain and with no hope of recovery, I’d do whatever she asked without question. Would the man I just spoke to in CC’s Rhythm Club do less?
No.
But if Lincoln euthanized his mother in the wee hours of Monday morning … then my father did not.

Unless they did it together,
whispers a voice in my head.

“No,” I say softly, my mind racing. “No way.”

Yet once I accept the possibility that both Lincoln and Dad could have been in that house at the same time—or even within minutes of each other—a dozen new scenarios become possible.

Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, causing Dad to try desperately to revive Viola. (Only Dad wouldn’t have given an adrenaline overdose under those circumstances.) Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, panicked,
then tried to revive Viola himself
. A son overcome by guilt might easily do that. If something like that did happen—after Dad had left the house with Viola alive—then Dad may have deduced that Lincoln probably killed his mother. He might even know that for a fact. Cora Revels might have told him. Or he might have returned to the scene and found Lincoln grieving over Viola’s body. I saw dozens of crazier death scenes as a prosecutor.

If any of these scenarios occurred, then Dad knows he’s innocent of Viola’s murder. But knowing him as I do, that awareness—in those circumstances—would probably cause him to behave
just as he has
since he learned of his potential prosecution for murder. For if Dad really believes that Lincoln is his son, then his guilt over failing that son for four decades would make him all too willing to take the fall for Lincoln, regardless of the cost to himself.

But …

There would be no fall to take, had not Lincoln pushed Shad Johnson to press murder charges. And if Lincoln actually killed his mother, why would he risk pressing the DA to punish my father?

“Oh, no,” I whisper, certain I’ve found the truth at last. “Because he’ll risk almost anything to punish
his
father.”

I can’t imagine a purer, more righteous anger than that of a son who helped his mother to die after a life ruined by a man who’d refused to marry her or acknowledge him. The situation must have been tempting for a lawyer. If Lincoln knew Dad had been in Cora’s house before him, he would have instantly seen how easily Dad could be framed for his mother’s death. The necessary props for the deception were ready to hand: the syringe with Dad’s fingerprints, the vial of morphine prescribed by the man Lincoln longed to punish. And Cora Revels probably told Lincoln about the euthanasia pact between Dad and Viola. If fate handed Lincoln a chance like that—a chance to make “his father” pay for a lifetime of neglect—would he refuse? I doubt it.

This scenario easily explains Lincoln’s behavior. But does it explain Dad’s? His refusal to say what happened in Cora’s house that night? Holding his silence in the face of deputies handcuffing him and leading him to court? Silence in the face of indictment for murder?
Yes, yes, and yes.
In the mind of a guilt-ridden father, all these acts must have seemed noble efforts to protect the son he’d failed throughout his life.

But jumping bail?

This takes me a little longer, but at last the answer comes. So long as Dad remained silent while awaiting trial—and so long as I and others protested his innocence—people might continue to investigate Viola’s death. Friends like Jewel Washington might have gone back over the crime scene, or probed more deeply into Lincoln’s whereabouts on the night of her death. They might have asked, as I did, why Lincoln hadn’t been in Natchez for the past month while his mother slipped inexorably toward death. But by jumping bail, Dad swept all those possibilities off the table. From the moment his flight became public, every cop, lawyer, and average citizen would view him as a killer trying to escape punishment.

I can’t begin to guess what Dad was doing with Sonny Thornfield last night at the Ferriday hospital. Maybe he wasn’t there with Thornfield at all. Maybe he had coronary symptoms himself, and stopped to get a nurse or doc he knew to provide him some meds or do an EKG. Hell, maybe he was meeting Drew there. Whatever his reason, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that every cop in Mississippi and Louisiana is chasing the wrong man. And now I know who the right man is. There’s just one little problem—

Proof.

Could anyone other than my father prove that Lincoln euthanized his mother? Lincoln has a perfectly defensible reason for his fingerprints to be all over Cora Revels’s house. Even if they’re on the medicine vials and the syringe, that only proves he handled those items at some point—after the fact, he would argue. Worst of all, the case is being handled by a hostile DA and sheriff who’ll ignore any evidence I present them, short of a videotape showing someone other than Dad killing Viola.

With that thought, I recall the missing tape from the camcorder Henry left in Viola’s sickroom. The hard drive attached to Henry’s camera showed only Viola’s death throes, not what precipitated them. But according to Henry, what triggered that hard drive to start recording was the mini-DV tape in the camera running out. And that tape was supposedly missing when the deputies arrived at the scene.
Who took it?
When I questioned Dad in his office on Monday evening, I got the feeling he might have taken it. But what if
Lincoln
removed that tape before the deputies arrived? Could that tape show Viola’s actual murder? And if so, does it still exist?

Before I can second-guess myself, I speed-dial Quentin Avery’s house in Jefferson County, thirty miles north of here. I’m not going to ask Quentin if Dad and Walt are hiding out there—as badly as I’d like to. No one answers my call, just as they haven’t for the past two days. But this time, when the beep of the answering machine sounds, I leave a message.

“Quentin, it’s Penn. I just spoke to Lincoln Turner, and my worldview changed radically. I think you probably know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, you need to catch up in a hurry. If you don’t call me back in ten minutes, I’m going to drive up there and tell the police I’m worried you’ve had a heart attack. That’ll—”

“Hold on, Penn,” says a female voice. “This is Doris. Quentin’s right here.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to make threats, but things are pretty serious down here.”

“They’re serious up here, too, but here he is.”

After several clicks and grunts, Quentin says, “Telling me you’d call the police was a veiled threat against my weed stash, boy. Don’t think I don’t know that.”

“Lincoln Turner just told me Dad is his father.”

Quentin is silent for several seconds. “And that surprised you?”

“Are you telling me it’s true?”

“I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But it doesn’t surprise me that he said it. Hell, a blind mule could see that boy’s game from twelve rows away.”

“Quentin, what are you talking about?”

“Why wouldn’t Viola tell that boy Tom was his father? Beats the hell out of telling him he was fathered by some booger-eating Ku Klux Klansman.”

“You’re deflecting, Quentin. I’m asking you what’s
true
. Has Dad ever told you he had an illegitimate son?”

“That’s privileged information, as you well know. But I’ll tell you anyway. Hell, no.”

“Lincoln offered to take a DNA test.”

“Well, it may come to that. But that’s not the primary issue right now.”

“What is?”

“I would have said the trial, until I heard about the dead state trooper and the APB.”

At this, I fall silent. Quentin doesn’t sound like a lawyer hiding his client from the police, but he’s a subtle character. “And …?”

“I wish Tom had come to me rather than go running off with Walt Garrity. But I don’t control the man.”

If Dad and Walt are hiding out at Quentin’s isolated compound, then Quentin is a consummate actor.
He is,
says a voice in my mind.
There’s no one better.

“How about we get back to Lincoln for a minute?” I quickly summarize my deductions since leaving the CC’s Rhythm Club, culminating with my theory that Dad is protecting Lincoln, who probably killed his mother. Quentin listens in surprising silence. “Well, what do you think?” I ask.

“That all makes sense, I’m sorry to say. Covering for Lincoln sounds exactly like Tom. Sacrificing himself out of guilt, I mean. He’d probably do that on Viola’s word alone, without even checking to make sure the boy was his.”