Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  “Dr. Cage?” says Judge Elder. “Do you agree with your attorney that a frank discussion of race and what part it might have played in this crime will not prejudice the jury against you?”

  “I do, Your Honor. I fully understand the implications, and I am fine with them. All I want from these proceedings is the truth.”

  Judge Elder frowns at this. “Very well, it will be noted. The jury will disregard the defendant’s last statement. Mr. Johnson, you may proceed.”

  “Thank you, Judge,” Shad says, looking at Quentin like a man studying a familiar dog that has begun acting strangely.

  Turning back to the jury, Shad says, “Think about what I said before, ladies and gentlemen. Not many years ago, this trial would not even have happened. Dr. Thomas Cage would not even have been accused of this crime by the State. Viola Turner would have been buried under the ground, and that would have been the end of her. But today, in this room, we are living out the progress that this nation, and hopefully this state, has made since the 1960s. Here in this courtroom, we have a black judge, two black attorneys, and seven black jury members. And I tell you now: Nothing will be hidden. Before we are through, all will be revealed.”

  This obviously rehearsed statement comes off as anticlimactic after what my father said moments ago. But this is what the crowd has come to hear, both black and white. They want to know what secret history underlies the scandal that has swept through Natchez like an unquenchable fire during the past few months. Shad acknowledges this by addressing not only the jury, but also the assembled audience.

  “Some people may be upset that I’m speaking so openly about race. We’re supposed to be living in a color-blind society, aren’t we? But we all know that we do not live in such a society. I keep hearing about a post-racial society. Whatever a post-racial society is, we’re still decades away from it. In Mississippi, and in Washington, D.C., too. And make no mistake: race lies at the very heart of this case. Were it not for the fact of race—the perceived difference between people of different colors—Viola Turner would not have been murdered.”

  This statement brings a hush over the crowd. Judge Elder looks right at Quentin as if expecting an objection, but Quentin appears unperturbed, even carefree.

  Shad holds up his forefinger like a passionate professor. “Let me explain something to you. As a prosecutor, I normally stay away from the issue of motive during trials. Everybody who watches TV is familiar with the terms ‘motive, means, and opportunity.’ But in this room, means and opportunity carry a whole lot more weight than motive. Why? Because the State is not required to prove why anybody did anything. What the State is required to prove is that a given person did on a certain day, at a certain time, with malice aforethought, kill a particular person. That’s all. The why doesn’t come into it. That’s for the Law & Order writers to worry about.”

  Soft laughter reverberates through the room.

  “But this case, ladies and gentlemen, is different. This case is all about motive. The question we must answer is ‘Why?’ And the answer lies in the relations—both public and private—between black and white. Which happens to be the two colors we have sitting in the gallery, in the jury box, and standing by the hundreds outside this courthouse. Well, you lucky few are inside. And you’re going to hear a remarkable tale over the next couple of days. A brutal and tragic story. So, let me play storyteller for a few minutes and set the stage for you.”

  Shad leaves the lectern and steps into the well, which is a presumptuous habit of his, and to my surprise Judge Elder doesn’t stop him.

  “Who was Viola Turner?” Shad asks. “She was a woman who lived a tragic life. Though Viola spent most of her years in Chicago, she was born right here in Natchez, the former slave capital of the South. She was educated at Sadie V. Thompson High School. She married at the Holy Family Catholic Church, where she was a devoted and outstanding member of the choir. But in 1967, Viola’s husband was killed in Vietnam, before she could have any children by him. From the age of twenty-three until she was twenty-eight years old, Viola worked for the defendant, Dr. Thomas Cage. In her twenty-eighth year, in 1968, she suddenly moved north to Chicago without telling anybody why. After she moved to Chicago, Viola remarried.” Shad pauses for effect. “But not before she had a son.”

  In the gallery audience, several women audibly catch their breath.

  “As the evidence will show, that child was fathered by Viola’s employer, Dr. Thomas Cage, before she ever left Natchez.”

  This is old news by now, but to hear it spoken in court, and entered into the record, gives the clinical fact a denser reality.

  “You will hear testimony from that child,” Shad promises (like a good showman). “He is now thirty-seven and can speak for himself. But let us return to Viola. After leaving Natchez, she lived and worked in Chicago until four and a half months ago, when she returned to her hometown. Nine months earlier, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She began treatment in Chicago, and she exhausted all viable treatment options before she left. Make no mistake about one fact: When Viola arrived in Natchez, she knew there was no hope of a cure. Only palliative care, until the end. Viola Turner came home to die.”

  The grim finality of these words deepens the silence in the courtroom.

  “As soon as she arrived here, Viola placed herself under the care of Dr. Thomas Cage, her former employer, former lover, and father of her only child. The evidence will show that at least a month before her death, Viola made a pact with the defendant to help her end her life. And there, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, lies the heart of this case.

  “There’s a certain perception in our community that what happened to Viola Turner was not murder at all, but what is colloquially known as a ‘mercy killing.’ I discussed this concept during the voir dire, but I want to be sure we’re all clear on this point. Legally, the act that laymen refer to as ‘mercy killing’ is known as assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is a felony, and a separate one from murder. In the simplest terms, assisted suicide means you help someone to die. Either a doctor or a layman can be guilty of this crime. If a layman hands a depressed paraplegic a loaded shotgun, or a doctor hands that same man a lethal dose of morphine, and the paraplegic kills himself, they are both guilty of assisted suicide. This is a controversial subject, and people’s deepest feelings come into the debate. Most often, religious feelings. Some people feel that assisted suicide is justified in some cases; others think it’s outright murder in every case.

  “What’s important today, in this case, is that you understand that what happened in Cora Revels’s house on December twelfth of last year was not assisted suicide. It was murder. Murder in the first degree. That is the issue before the jury. You need to understand something else, too. Assisted suicide can very quickly slide over into murder. If the layman who gave the depressed paraplegic the loaded shotgun pulled the trigger himself because the man in the wheelchair was unable to do it, that layman committed murder, not assisted suicide. Likewise, if a physician in Mississippi injects a patient with a lethal drug because the patient is unable to do so, he has committed murder under the law—even if that victim desired his or her death at the time. Murder.

  “Many people might sympathize with the case I just described, so I want to clarify further. Dr. Thomas Cage did not inject a dying woman with morphine because she was too helpless to do it herself. He did inject morphine into Viola Turner, as he had on almost every day prior to her death. And he did inject a lethal dose. But morphine is not what killed Mrs. Turner. Due to Dr. Cage’s severe arthritis, and probably stress, he only injected a part of the lethal morphine dose into his victim’s vein. The remainder went into the soft tissue beneath the vein, where it was rendered essentially harmless because of how slowly it would be absorbed into the patient’s bloodstream.

  “The evidence will show that Viola Turner actually died of a massive overdose of adrenaline, causing a terrifying and painful death. By pure chance, or perhaps fate, that agonizing d
eath was recorded on a computer hard drive attached to a video camera left in the victim’s room by a journalist. I can assure you that, after seeing that video, you will be under no illusions that what happened to Viola Turner could be described as a mercy killing.”

  Word of Henry Sexton’s video recording leaked out weeks ago, but thankfully the file itself has not leaked, to pop up on YouTube or some similar site. With Shad Johnson and Billy Byrd in charge of the evidence, I’m more than a little surprised. Shad must have decided that he’d rather handle the premiere of that footage himself. Looking away from the large, flat-screen TV on a cart against the wall, I glance up at the balcony and see Miriam Masters, Caitlin’s older sister, leaning on the rail, looking into my eyes. Miriam and Caitlin did not much resemble each other. They were both thin and strong, but where Caitlin had jet-black hair, pale skin, and green eyes, Miriam has sandy-blond hair and gray eyes that hold a different sort of intelligence than her sister’s did. Caitlin was lightning quick on the uptake, while Miriam has a slow-burning intellect that suits itself to the siege-type litigation that until five years ago she handled for her father’s newspaper chain.

  “If you feel confused by what I’ve just said,” Shad says to the jury, “I sympathize. At the simplest level, a person might ask, ‘How can you murder somebody who begged you to help kill them?’ On one level, that’s easy to answer, if we use the example I gave of the depressed paraplegic and the shotgun. But there the motive is still to end pain out of mercy, something reasonable people can argue both ways. What makes this case unique in the annals of jurisprudence is that we have a willing victim—a woman who wanted to die, and who’d asked her physician to help her do that as a mercy—but a physician whose motive for agreeing to end her life was the moral opposite of mercy or compassion. Dr. Cage’s motive was not to help Viola Turner end her pain, but to silence her forever.” Shad’s eyes move from one face to the next in the jury box. “Tom Cage acted ruthlessly to protect himself from a woman who was about to shatter the reputation he had spent decades building, and to destroy the family he had chosen over the victim herself, and the son she had borne by him.”

  Shad folds his hands and looks at the floor. If anyone had any doubts about how aggressively he would go after my father, Shad has laid those doubts to rest.

  “The question,” he goes on, “is not whether or not Tom Cage killed Viola Turner—he did. Evidence will show that Dr. Cage was alone with the victim in the hour prior to her death. Fingerprint evidence recovered at the scene proves that Dr. Cage injected Viola Turner with morphine on that night. The autopsy proved it was a lethal dose. Both the syringe and the morphine vial were recovered by law enforcement. The autopsy also proved that Viola was given a lethal dose of adrenaline. The adrenaline ampoule was not recovered, but evidence will show that Dr. Cage had ready access to untraceable stocks of adrenaline and was known to keep ampoules at home, in his office, and in his emergency medical bag.”

  After this recitation of facts, Shad raises his head and moves on to what the jury is really interested in. “Right now, I’d like to dispel one misconception: the video recording I just mentioned does not show Dr. Cage injecting Viola Turner with adrenaline, as some rumors have claimed. It shows only the results of that injection, which are horrifying enough. Mrs. Turner probably triggered the camera during her death throes, when she was trying to reach her telephone to call for help. But regardless of this omission, the critical facts are not in doubt.”

  Shad nods toward my father with almost casual condemnation. “That man sitting there killed Viola Turner. The question is, why? And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, is depressingly simple. For most of her life, Viola Turner had known things about Tom Cage that no one else in the world knew. The most dangerous of those secrets was a staple of Southern gothic fiction: Tom Cage, the beloved white physician, had fathered a black child. I feel strange saying that, I don’t mind telling you. Because in point of fact, Lincoln Turner is half black, and half white.” Shad’s voice drips sarcasm as he pays off his setup line. “But as we all know, it only takes one drop of black blood to make you a nigger.”

  No exclamation of horror follows this word, but a state of hyperalertness has taken possession of the people in the room. Tactically, Shad’s choice of words was a blunt announcement that no punches will be pulled during this trial, that the euphemistic language of political correctness will not be used to mask painful truths. In my experience, juries appreciate such frankness, and my lawyer’s instinct tells me that Shad has stolen a march on Quentin.

  “I’m sorry if I offended anyone by saying that,” he says, “but anyone easily offended by such language would be well advised to leave this courtroom and not return. For race and racism, as I said, lie at the very heart of this case. Let us be honest here together. Everyone in this room has heard the word ‘nigger’ more times than they could count. We’ve heard it said in anger and in jest, in casual discourse, and in flaming rhetoric. But the important thing to recognize about the statement I made—that it only takes one drop of black blood to make you a nigger—is that a horror and hatred of what was once called miscegenation was part of the world Tom Cage grew up in. Even if Dr. Cage himself did not share the deepest prejudices of many whites—and I’m not saying he didn’t, for many a white racist loved to bed black women—Tom Cage knew that he lived in a town filled with people who did. This town. And after a lifetime of building a reputation for integrity unsurpassed in this city, Dr. Cage could not stand to see that reputation shattered, his children disillusioned, his son’s political career damaged, his personal legacy destroyed.

  “And what of Viola Turner? For four decades she had dutifully concealed his darkest secrets. But when she returned to Natchez, this poor woman was staring at death’s door, and she was ready to unburden her soul. Ready to do right by her child. She could no longer stand to carry Dr. Cage’s lies within her like a second cancer. Hiding those lies had forced Viola to enmesh herself in a web of deceit so complex that no one knew the whole of her terrible life story. Tragically, Viola believed that Tom Cage had enough integrity and responsibility to live up to the actions of his past. But he did not. Faced with the choice of telling the truth or committing murder, Dr. Cage chose to kill. And how easy it must have been. For evidence will show you that Tom Cage was no stranger to murder.”

  This assertion stuns me like a blow. First, because my father is connected to a murder some years ago—an accidental killing that resulted from a beating Ray Presley carried out in Mobile, Alabama, in 1973, against a dirty cop who had threatened my aunt’s life. I can’t imagine that Shad would know anything about that, and even if he does, such information would not be admissible in this trial. But therein lies the rub. “Prior bad acts” are generally not admissible in a criminal trial, and Quentin should have raised the roof the instant Shad declared his intention to bring up such. Yet Quentin still sits at the defense table like a placid old man on a town square bench. Judge Elder clearly expected some sort of protest, but Quentin offers none. What the hell was Shad referring to? I wonder. There’s no way he could know about Dad helping my wife to pass when she lay on the verge of death from cancer.

  Perhaps surprised not to be interrupted, Shad says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the details of this case are complicated, but the heart of it is simple. This is the tale of a saint who turned out to have feet of clay. Worse, a saint who made a pact with the devil. Make no mistake, this trial is the final act in the public and professional life of Dr. Tom Cage.”

  If Shad stops here, he will leave the jury awestruck and Quentin Avery almost no chance of retaking the emotional ground gained in the collective mind of the jury. But Shad does not stop.

  Why, I’m not sure. Is it the packed courtroom? The distinguished members of the audience? The historic nature of the trial? All of that goes into it, certainly. But the most likely reason Shad doesn’t have the good sense to sit down is his knowledge that the moment he does, Quentin is going to stand up. Not literally
, of course. But Quentin is going to nudge his joystick and roll that wheelchair out in front of the jury, and from that moment on, facts will have only secondary importance. On a good day, Quentin Avery in front of a jury is a combination of Martin Luther King Jr. preaching in Selma, Sam Cooke playing the Apollo Theater, and Harry Houdini escaping from the most diabolical restraining devices known to man. Facing that kind of oratorical firepower might keep me talking when I ought to sit down, too.

  And keep talking Shad does. He launches into a long, sequential outline of the facts of the case—who did what, and when; who knew what, and when—when he should be saving all that for his case in chief. Most of these facts are already known to me, through my illegal contact with Jewel Washington, the county coroner and a loyal supporter of my father. (Jewel has friends in the sheriff’s department, the police department, the courthouse, and every other institution that matters in this county, thank God.) As Shad laboriously guides the jury through a timeline involving Viola and her sister, Cora, my mind begins to wander.

  I can’t count the times I’ve done what Shad is doing: outlining the facts of a murder to a jury that is sometimes bored, other times riveted by what you have to tell them. The only thing different about this case is that everyone in the jury box is already familiar with the facts to some degree, and every one of them knows or knows of my father. One might think that would be grounds for a change of venue, but in Mississippi only the defense can request a change of venue, and Quentin made no such request. And as with every other facet of my father’s defense, Quentin did not seek my opinion on this.