Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  I sense that Dad is leading me away from the central subject—cleverly, but doing it all the same. My patience has almost evaporated when my cell phone rings in my pocket. The screen reads HENRY SEXTON.

  “I need to take this, Dad. Hello?”

  “Penn, it’s Henry. We need to talk.” The reporter’s voice quavers with fear. “I’ve learned a lot since this morning. You need to know about it, and the sooner the better.”

  My pulse picks up. “What is it?”

  “Not on a cell phone. It’s too easy to eavesdrop on these things, or so my FBI friends tell me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the Beacon office. Is there any way you can drive over here? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it could help your father.”

  My heart thuds in my chest. “My father?”

  Dad looks up with interest.

  “That’s all I can say on the phone. I know Dr. Cage is in trouble, and this can help him. But you’ve got to come here to hear it.”

  I look at my watch. Annie has a basketball game in half an hour. If I drive to Ferriday, I’ll miss it. But what choice do I have? At least her grandmother will make the game. “I’m on my way, Henry. Give me twenty minutes.”

  “Call my cell when you get here. The door’s locked.”

  “Was that Henry Sexton?” Dad asks as I pocket my phone.

  “Yes. He says he may be able to help you. I’m glad somebody wants to, since you refuse to help yourself.”

  Dad gives me an unpleasant look. “How could Henry possibly help me? What does he know about any of this?”

  “I don’t know. But he interviewed Viola a couple of times in the weeks before she died. By the way, do you have any idea what happened to the videotape that was in Henry’s camera?”

  Dad just stares back at me, saying nothing.

  Oh, Christ … this is bad. After rubbing my temples for a few seconds, I stand and reach for the doorknob. “Don’t kid yourself about this. If you don’t give me more than you have, Sheriff Byrd is going to arrest you for murder in the morning.”

  “Nothing can stop that, son. I’ve already accepted it.”

  “Are you telling me Shad would arrest you even if he knew all that you know?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Dad sighs wearily. “Is there any chance that Johnson would ask for the death penalty?”

  “I don’t see how Shad could stretch this into capital murder. Even if you killed Viola, it wasn’t during the commission of a separate felony, so the felony murder rule doesn’t apply.”

  Dad exhales with relief. “I just don’t want your mother to have to contemplate that.”

  “Have you told Mom about any of this?”

  He gives me a sheepish look. “Not yet.”

  I drop my hand from the doorknob. “Dad, for God’s sake. If you’re charged with assisted suicide, we can almost certainly plead it down to probation. Even if a jury found you guilty, we’d have a shot at a suspended sentence, or maybe just losing your license. So far as I can discover, no physician in Mississippi has gone to prison for assisted suicide. But several have gone to Parchman for murder.”

  “Penn … we’re going in circles again.”

  My impassioned argument has made no impression. “I suppose so. Well … the sheriff’s deputies could come as early as six A.M. Hopefully, they’ll wait until eight or nine, but you never know. I’ll be ready to bail you out. That’s if the judge sets bail, of course.”

  “I can’t control the district attorney or the sheriff,” Dad says with the resignation of Mohandas Gandhi. “What I told you this morning is what I’ll tell the judge tomorrow. What happened between Viola and me happened between doctor and patient, and that’s where it’s going to stay. I owe her that much. At least that much. Shad Johnson and his ilk can go spit. They’re dogs barking at a passing hearse.”

  My face colors. “And Viola’s son? Is Lincoln Turner a dog barking at a hearse?”

  “I’m sure that boy is grieving. But time can work wonders with grief. I’ve seen it ten thousand times. A night’s sleep just might change his mind.”

  I doubt it.

  “Will you call me if Henry Sexton has new information?” he asks.

  “I will, if you’ll tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

  He looks away like a caged animal turning from a door it knows is locked. Then he picks up the medical record he was reading when I walked in and lifts the phone to resume his dictation.

  MELBA PRICE IS LEANING against the wall by the back door, her big purse slung over the shoulder of her white uniform, her dark eyes watching me for clues. She looks like a middle-aged version of Esther Ford, and again I wish the old nurse were alive for me to question about Viola.

  “Is the word out yet?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” Melba is playing dumb, which she most assuredly is not.

  “About what Dad might have done. Is it spreading in the black community?”

  “There’s a little talk. Nothing bad yet.”

  “What do they think about Shad Johnson these days?”

  “My people?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Old Shadrach might not have a lot of black friends, but I will say this. He’s stuck around town enough years now that he’s earned some respect. He’s done a lot for black boys busted on drug charges, and that buys some gratitude.”

  “How do they feel about Dad?”

  “Lord, you know that. Dr. Cage is a saint on the north side of town.”

  “Do you think anything could change that?”

  Melba looks thoughtful. “They say that in Natchez people will forgive you for everything except going bankrupt. But that’s on the white side of town. On the black side, it’s something else people don’t forgive.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Breaking faith.”

  “That sounds like a long conversation.”

  Melba taps me in the middle of the chest. “You just do whatever you got to do to keep Doc out of jail. That man don’t deserve jail, no matter what he’s done. Not one day.”

  “Were you listening at the door?”

  The middle-aged nurse’s perfectly plucked eyebrows pantomime childlike innocence. “Wouldn’t dream of it, baby.”

  “The only person who can keep Dad out of jail is Dad himself. Why don’t you convince him to talk to me?”

  She gives me a mocking laugh. “I don’t control that man! He’s my boss, not the other way around.”

  “I’ll bet forty years ago, Viola Turner would have told me the same thing.”

  Melba’s face instantly turns sober. “You hush, boy. Get out of here, so he’ll finish those records and I can get home.”

  “Do what you can, Melba.”

  She watches me forlornly as I back down the hallway.

  “I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER 16

  TOM CAGE GOT slowly up from his chair, then locked his office door. Melba would panic if she turned that handle and found it locked, but he didn’t want her coming in for at least a couple of minutes. Going to the bookcase behind his desk, he took down a signed first edition of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a treasure that survived the house fire only because he’d had it on his office shelves at the time. None of his nurses would open this book, not even if they were desperate for something to read, because it was set during the Civil War. Tom fanned the pages to the three-quarters point, then reached in and slid out a Polaroid photograph he’d kept since 1968.

  The faded snapshot, which still had the primary-color saturation of a Technicolor movie, showed Viola Turner standing in front of a cabinet in Tom’s private office in the old clinic on Monroe Street. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking directly into the camera with a candid vulnerability that no one at the clinic had ever seen. Gone were the professional smile and practiced deference. In this picture, Viola was not the perfect ambassador for her race that her parents had raised her to be, but merely a woman in her late twenties, her defen
ses down, her eyes unguarded, her carefully straightened hair askew. Tom had shot the photo on a rainy afternoon one week after he patched up Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis, following their brawl with the Double Eagles. By that afternoon he was as different from the doctor who’d treated those boys as the Tom Cage who left Korea had been from the eighteen-year-old version of himself who’d arrived there in 1950.

  What had changed him was Viola Turner.

  The day after their midnight surgery, Viola had opened up the clinic as usual. By the time Tom got there, the surgery room was spic-and-span again, the bloody towels gone, the instruments autoclaved and ready for a new patient. The room where Tom had treated the Eagles was just as clean. Dr. Lucas didn’t notice anything out of order, nor did the clinic’s female staff. But Tom and Viola could no longer carry off the act they’d been perfecting for the previous four years. Their frantic embrace in the corner of the garage had shattered some boundary between them, and every instant of eye contact now communicated hidden significance. Tom was certain everyone in the clinic could sense the new intimacy between them, like a magnetic field made visible. He’d sensed the same thing whenever Gavin Edwards had been involved with one of the office girls. Edwards had never gone out of his way to hide his affairs, but even if he had, it would have been pointless. Once certain levels of intimacy have been reached, they simply cannot be concealed within a small group.

  During stolen moments that day, in quick snatches of conversation, Tom learned that Viola had gotten her brother and Luther Davis to the relative safety of Freewoods, a backwoods sanctuary for bootleggers, criminals, and people of all races who needed protection from the law. So long as Jimmy and Luther stayed there, they would be safe from Frank Knox and the Ku Klux Klan. The problem was, Jimmy was too committed to his civil rights work to stay hidden in the forests south of town while his brothers in the movement fought to change America. Viola’s anxiety about Jimmy made her quieter than usual, and the other girls commented on it. But beneath Viola’s worry Tom sensed something else, like a powerful motor spinning ceaselessly inside her, throwing off an energy that seemed directed at him. If he was alone in an examining room, he sensed her approach even before he heard her footfalls. When they worked together—when she passed him an instrument, say—any accidental touch sent a startling current up the nerves of his arm. He hardly slept that night, and Peggy noticed. But hardest to take were the gazes of the office girls, which followed him like the eyes of watchful informers.

  This heightened state of tension was shattered by the most commonplace of office events. Dr. Lucas had owned his X-ray unit for fifteen years, and the new developing machine he’d bought for it was temperamental. The X-ray tech could sometimes repair it, but when she couldn’t, Tom had proved the most adept at getting the unit back into operation. (Tom had a photographic darkroom at home, and he was much more mechanically inclined than Dr. Lucas.) Two days after the midnight surgery, the X-ray developer broke down yet again. Since the X-ray tech was on vacation, Tom had no choice but to take on the task of repairing the machine. And since Viola was Tom’s nurse, it was she who would be helping him get the unit back online.

  The developing room was hardly bigger than a closet; it had, in fact, been a closet in the original house. The old metal developing tanks stood against the wall opposite the door, still serving as backups when the automatic developer couldn’t be coaxed into action. The new machine sat on a stand against the right wall, and a metal cabinet for storing film stood against the left. The middle of this U contained barely enough room for one person to work; with two it was like being shoehorned into a crowded elevator. Separation was impossible.

  Tom first thought the problem was a jammed sheet of film, but he’d checked the path under the red glow of the safelight and found it unobstructed. Then he fed an already developed X-ray through the machine; it went through fine. The next step was to shut off the lights—even the safelight—and run an undeveloped X-ray through the machine.

  Standing with his stomach pressed against Viola’s back, he reached over his shoulder and shut off the overhead safelight. Utter darkness enveloped them. He heard her sliding open the bars of the rectangular cartridge that protected the X-ray film from light, then the rattle and pop of flexing film as she extracted it. Tom shifted back against the door so that she could turn and feed the film sheet into the machine. In the confines of the closet, her scent was even stronger than on the night she’d hugged him, strong enough to declare itself over the acrid bite of the developing chemicals. Tom felt his breath go shallow when her shoulder dug into his chest. She was trying to feed the film into the machine’s narrow slot.

  “Sorry,” she said, as her shoulder prodded him again. “Got it.”

  It would take ninety seconds for the exposed black sheet to pass through the chemicals—developer, stop bath, fixer—and finally the machine’s dryer. Even with his back flat against the door, there was no way to avoid physical contact. Viola’s upper back was flat against his chest, her hair brushed his face, and her rump pressed against his thighs and crotch. Tom’s mouth felt parched, but his palms were coated with sweat. Within thirty seconds his heart was pounding. He could feel her chest expand with each breath. To his alarm, his penis shifted, then grew steadily against her tight skirt. He didn’t know whether to apologize or to try to move away; any movement would only aggravate the problem. He was acutely aware that the rest of the office staff were outside the door, not to mention the twenty or so patients in the clinic. Yet in the cavelike darkness of the X-ray room, it was as though the two of them had stepped from a mother ship into deep space.

  When Viola began to turn in place, Tom experienced something between panic and exultation. When she was halfway around, her hand slid up his arm, her fingers searching along his shoulder, his collarbone, and then his neck, like the hand of a blind woman. When her fingers found his mouth, she probed it with a fingertip, then rose on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. Tom’s back flexed against the door as the shock went through him. Then he recovered himself, and the wood behind him creaked as he wrapped his arms around her. He squeezed hard enough to crush the breath from some women, but Viola only slid her fingers up into the hair behind his head and pulled his mouth harder against hers.

  The sharp taste of her stunned him, so different was it from what he’d known most of his life. Her tongue and full lips sucked his own, and her teeth bit his flesh. Despite the cramped quarters, they were not still. Their bodies slid, twisted, and probed, pressing together until no pocket of air remained between them. Their movements had a frantic quality, driven by the knowledge that after years of denial they might only have a few moments in this protective darkness. Tom wanted to squeeze her breasts, but he held back until he heard her skirt slide up her stockings. Thus encouraged, he unzipped the back of her white uniform dress and pulled it from her muscular shoulders. A low-pitched purr rose from her throat, then she reached back and unhooked her bra. Tom wasn’t sure how to proceed in the confined space. Viola solved his dilemma by entwining her arms behind his neck, pulling herself up, and closing her thighs around his waist.

  Even through her stockings, the heat from her pubis felt like the coffee mug he sometimes set between his legs as he drove to work. Despite being married for four years, Viola had never borne children, and her breasts were firm and high. As Tom kneaded them, he noticed they felt made of muscle rather than fat. He bent his neck and sucked a swollen nipple into his mouth. She moaned deep in her throat, then choked off the sound as though suddenly remembering the danger.

  “There’s not enough room,” he whispered. “The door’s going to break open.”

  “Let me down,” she said. “Scoot back. It’s locked.”

  Tom pressed his back against the door so hard that the wood groaned.

  As Viola slowly turned away, she said, “There’s not enough room to take my stockings off.”

  “It’s all right,” he replied, not meaning it. “We can wait.”

  H
e heard a swish of polyester against nylon, then a sharp ripping sound. Blood throbbed in his veins.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  He reached down, seeking out her hand in the dark. His fingers slid across her bare behind, found her grasping fingers. He pressed them against the swelling in his pants. She deftly unzipped him with a nurse’s confidence. When she closed her hand around his penis, he sucked in his breath, afraid he would lose control then and there. He felt her rise on tiptoe, tugging him forward, under her rump.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, bending his knees. “Will they hear us?”

  “They’ll think we’re working on the machine. Just push.”

  He pushed.

  She sucked in her breath sharply. “Lower down.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh,” she groaned, much too loudly.

  He’d plunged into her virtually without resistance. When her weight settled back against his pubic bone, she shuddered along the length of her body. He took hold of her hips and began to thrust into her by flexing and unflexing his knees, gently rocking in the confined space. Almost no other motion was possible.

  “This won’t be good for you,” he said.

  “Rub me,” she whispered, pulling his right hand from her hip and guiding it to the rip she’d made in her hose.

  As his fingers slipped between her thighs, Tom received one of the most profound shocks of his life. Viola’s pubic hair was softer than any he’d ever felt. Even after years of giving pelvic exams to Negro women, he’d unconsciously assumed that their pubic hair was coarser than a white woman’s. With Viola, at least, the opposite was true. He was still pondering this when he discovered her swollen clitoris. She jerked as though he’d shocked her, then flung her head to the right and bit his upper arm as though only this could keep her quiet.