Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  “You shouldn’t have carried that alone, though.”

  Her wide eyes are bright with tears. “I had to. I would have died before I ever let Mom find out what I’d seen.”

  “I know you would.”

  “But look what’s happened. Now Mom knows everything anyway. She had to suffer through it in spite of my silence.”

  I nod slowly. “These things usually get found out in the end.”

  Jenny draws back a little. Her mascara has run and made raccoon eyes on her face. “You don’t think Mom knew back then, do you? She didn’t suffer all that time in silence, the way I have?”

  “No. The house would have shaken to its foundations if Mom had found out Dad was sleeping with Viola.”

  Jenny laughs through her tears, but then her expression turns even more serious than before. “Penn, did you ever cheat on Sarah?”

  “What? Where did that come from?”

  “You heard me.”

  This is the last thing I want to talk about, but I know Jenny will have no peace until I answer. “I did once, before we were married.”

  She flinches as though I’ve caused her physical pain. “But not after?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Penn?” calls my mother from the kitchen. “Jenny? What’s taking so long?”

  “We’re coming!” I shout up the hallway.

  When I turn back to Jenny, she’s staring into space with glassy eyes. “What is it?” I ask. “Jen?”

  She seems not to hear me. I guess that despite the decades that have passed since the event, she’s still seeing her father kissing his nurse in the office garage.

  “Jenny, is there something else going on? Are you afraid Jack’s cheating on you?”

  Jack is her husband, whom I can’t imagine committing adultery if his life depended on it.

  “No,” she says, still looking dazed.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you positive?”

  She shakes her head once like someone trying to wake up from a nightmare, and then her eyes come clear. “Let me wash my face again. Tell Mom something to buy me a minute.”

  “I will.”

  She stands on tiptoe and kisses my cheek, then hurries back into the bathroom.

  “Where’s Jenny?” Mom asks from the kitchen door. “Is she sick?”

  “Just a little, I think. Her stomach. Nerves, I’m sure.”

  “Well, we can’t wait all day. I’m not going to miss those summations.”

  “We won’t, Mom. I promise.”

  She frowns, then speaks under her breath. “That girl has had nerves ever since she was a child. You’d think that by fifty-three she’d outgrow them.”

  “High-strung,” I answer, walking back to the kitchen with a forced smile. “Isn’t that what you always said?”

  Mom pats my arm, but I’m not sure whether she’s doing it to comfort me or herself. “I’m just glad Jenny didn’t have to grow up on a cotton farm,” she says. “She wouldn’t have made it.”

  “She might have surprised you.”

  Chapter 68

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Shad Johnson begins, nodding to the twelve jurors, then turning to acknowledge the audience, which has somehow swelled even larger than in past sessions. “Good afternoon.”

  We’re bound to be in violation of the fire codes at this point, but Judge Elder has allowed it, so nothing will be done to thin the crowd. Shad gives a respectful nod to the gallery, then turns back to the jury box.

  “I’ve learned a lot during this case, and what I’ve learned has tried my spirit. I’ve learned that no matter how hard I might bend my mind and will to the task of understanding the intimate relations between the black and white races, I can’t do it. I can’t fathom the pain and guilt and fear that led a beautiful soul like Viola Turner to welcome death from the hand of a man who had once claimed to love her. I cannot plumb the depths of despair in a son who never knew his real father, who sank so low that he felt he had no option but to steal back the inheritance he believed was his birthright. Though it hurts my heart, I must accept that I will never understand these things. I don’t think the law is equal to that task. But the law was not written for that purpose. It was written to judge the acts of men, not their motives. Not their hearts. And under the law, Tom Cage is guilty of murder.”

  And with that, Shad begins as masterful and concise a summation of a forensic case as I’ve ever heard. He does not merely parrot what he laid out in his opening remarks or his case in chief. He culls what did not work for him and incorporates the elements of Quentin’s case that worked against him before this hour. As I feared, he tailors his theory of Dad using the adrenaline to kill Viola while fentanyl was ready to hand by suggesting—as Drew Elliott did to me on the first day of the trial—that Dad had intended to claim that Viola had suffered a heart attack and he’d tried in vain to resuscitate her. He doesn’t bother to mention that Dad never made that claim, but instead counts on the details and emotion of his presentation to sweep all doubt before them. Shad speaks with authority and precision, but he manages never to talk down to the jury—something he’s been guilty of in the past. Nor does he put them to sleep by delving too deeply into the science of the case. He chooses to conclude the first act of his closing argument with the weakest point of his case: Viola’s videotape.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, watching that videotape was difficult for me. One reason is that judging by what Mrs. Turner said on that tape, I turned out to be wrong about some of the things I’d guessed about Dr. Cage’s motivations. But if I was wrong in part about his motive, I was not wrong about his actions. You must remember that all the while Viola Turner was speaking to that camera, she was doing so in the firm belief that only hours later, Tom Cage was going to inject her with a lethal dose of morphine. Nothing she said on the tape disputes that. In fact, Mrs. Turner specifically refers to her imminent death. And so, I will remind you of something I told you in my opening remarks: in the last analysis, motive is not a key element of the crime of murder. Under the law, the question is this: Did Tom Cage, on December twelfth, intend to enter that house and end the life of Viola Turner? If he did, he is guilty of murder. And all of the evidence we have indicates that he did.”

  For a moment I think Shad is about to sit down, but he appears to think better of it. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I should address a couple of points before Mr. Avery gives his summation.

  “First, we live in a time when public perception of the justice system has been greatly influenced, even distorted, by television shows like CSI. Juries sometimes feel that if the State’s case is anything less than a parade of high-tech tests and recordings, then they cannot judge someone to be guilty of a crime. In this case, purely by chance, video recordings were made of the time surrounding the crime, and of the victim’s death. We saw some of that footage. And there’s nothing I would have liked more than for us to see the contents of the tape found in the Dumpster of St. Catherine’s Hospital. I am almost certain that it showed the actual commission of the murder. However, as you know, the killer’s efforts to wipe out this record of his crime ultimately proved successful. Our hopes of seeing Mrs. Turner’s murder presented as an objective reality were thwarted.

  “But that does not mean that her murder was not real. You saw the terror and pain in Viola’s eyes when she died. You heard her cry out the defendant’s name. And it falls to you twelve jurors to determine the events that immediately preceded that final recording. You are the finders of fact. You were not summoned here to sit passively and watch a film of a crime. You were summoned to sift through the sum total of evidence brought before you, to listen to the witnesses, and then to the best of your ability judge the innocence or guilt of the accused.”

  Shad’s eyes were on my father as he said the last sentence, but now he shifts his gaze to Quentin.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, when my learned
opponent gave his opening remarks, he spoke to you about something called the Unwritten Law. He described it as what happens when a jury, for some compelling reason, decides to set aside the rules—the law—and vote what it feels in its collective gut. As you all know now, Mr. Avery has a silver tongue, and he made this phenomenon—known as jury nullification—sound downright noble. Like a vote for conscience, if you will. Like a jury being brave, instead of kowtowing to whatever rules some lazy, cigar-chomping legislators wrote over in Jackson. But I’m afraid that’s not the case.

  “When Mr. Avery characterized jury nullification as something noble, he was cleverly trying to provide justification for you to set aside the law, and the judge’s instructions, and vote in defiance of the evidence. What Mr. Avery was really telling you was, ‘If you think Dr. Cage is a fine old fellow, no matter how incriminating the evidence against him might be, just vote your heart. You can get a good night’s sleep afterward, because there’s plenty of precedent for it. Why, you’re showing moral courage by doing it.’”

  Shad raises his hands, palms outward, like a man showing he has no aggressive intent, but also no choice about what he is about to do. “But there’s a simple corrective for that. Let me give you a little legal history.”

  Walking slowly between the jury box and the bar, he speaks, gathering power. “Do you know the most common situation in which juries fell back on the so-called Unwritten Law? When a man came home and found his wife in bed with another man and killed one or both of them. In those cases, no matter what the law said, a jury would sometimes acquit the husband. But let me tell you the type of case in which juries historically resorted to the Unwritten Law in our state. You might be surprised, after how fine a practice Mr. Avery made it sound. It wasn’t cases of assisted suicide. No, it was cases like the Neshoba County trial of the Klansmen who murdered Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in 1964. It was cases like the one in which the killers of Emmett Till were set free in Money, Mississippi, after one of the most gruesome murders in our state’s history. When white juries set aside the law and ignored overwhelming evidence in order to free white men who had lynched African-Americans, they were falling back on the Unwritten Law that Mr. Avery spoke reverently about.”

  This time when Shad falls silent, a vapor trail of righteous indignation hangs in the room. Each name he mentioned is a talisman, with positive and negative power depending on the race and politics of the listener.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, these proceedings are not a popularity contest. This is a criminal trial. A murder trial. And you are bound by oath to follow the law and the instructions of the judge to the best of your ability. Your duty is clear. Do not let a warm voice and a fine turn of phrase distract you from the cruel facts of this case.”

  When Shad retakes his seat at the prosecution table, exactly twenty-nine minutes have elapsed, yet not once did I ever see him look at his watch or the clock mounted high on the courtroom wall. The jury looks appropriately impressed by his performance. After he sits, they turn as one to study the district attorney’s wheelchair-bound opponent, who suddenly does not seem quite as formidable as he did this morning.

  As Quentin rolls his chair forward, I suddenly realize how badly he would like to rise from that chair and walk to the lectern. Like Judge Elder, he would tower over Shadrach Johnson. But Quentin Avery will never walk again, and he must do what he can with what he has.

  Chapter 69

  “Many lawyers and members of the media refer to me as Preacher Avery,” Quentin begins, speaking clearly and calmly from his wheelchair near the lectern. “They do this because I supposedly have a flair for emotional argument, and because I often quote scripture during my discourse. But today I will not preach to you. I never invoke the Good Book lightly, and today I have no need of it.

  “Nor do we have need of the Unwritten Law, which Mr. Johnson just made quite a thing of, as I’m sure you noted. Today I’m telling you to forget the Unwritten Law. Because the law on the books is quite sufficient to dispose of the matter before you, a grave matter that was rushed to prosecution, and for all the wrong reasons. Why is the written law sufficient today? Because the law in a murder trial comes down to one thing—the presumption of innocence. In this case, the State—in the person of Shadrach Johnson—had the insurmountable burden of proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Dr. Tom Cage murdered Viola Turner, a woman he loved and respected for decades.

  “And the question for you today is not whether a reasonable person might have a solid basis to doubt the State’s case. The question is whether any reasonable person could stretch his imagination to believe that the State has done anything more than accuse Dr. Cage of murder.”

  Quentin rolls his chair back a foot and scans the faces of the jury. “For what has the State proved? One, that Dr. Cage was Viola Turner’s physician. Two, that he prescribed her medications consistent with those normally prescribed for terminally ill patients. Three, that he administered at least one of those medications, morphine, at various times for therapeutic reasons. Four, that Dr. Cage was in her home on the night she died, as he was on almost every other night for the preceding six weeks. Well . . . Dr. Cage admitted all those things himself on the stand. And why shouldn’t he? All of those actions are the actions of an innocent man.

  “Just a few moments ago, the district attorney implored you to focus on the facts. Did any of you happen to notice that is the opposite of what he told you to do during his opening statement? Remember? What did Mr. Johnson tell you this case was about? Motive. And what was the motive, according to him? Race. Were it not for the fact of race . . . Viola Turner would not have been murdered. Do you remember those words? I do. Well, now, after three and a half days of inflammatory accusations by the district attorney and the witnesses for the State, we have finally heard from the victim herself. And I think she surprised the district attorney quite a bit.”

  Quentin grips the big wheels and rolls a couple of feet toward the rapt jury. “Mr. Johnson and Sheriff Byrd told you that Dr. Cage did all in his power to destroy the videotape that Viola Turner made just before she died. He told you himself why he did that. But here today, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you have heard Viola Turner speak from beyond the grave. And what did she tell you about Tom Cage?

  “First, that Dr. Cage did not know he had a son by her until the night of her death—just as he told you. Second, that Tom Cage helped her to conceal the fact that she had killed a racist who had helped to gang-rape her as an act of terrorism—just as Dr. Cage told you himself. Third, that two known killers had threatened to murder her if she continued to talk to a reporter about unsolved civil rights murders in the past—just as Dr. Cage told you. Fourth, that she intended to give fifty thousand dollars to Henry Sexton, in the hope that it would help him to solve her martyred brother’s murder. This testimony directly refutes what two of Mr. Johnson’s star witnesses told you.

  “Now, let’s ask ourselves another question: What did the State try but fail to prove?

  “They tried to prove that an assisted-suicide pact existed between Viola Turner and Dr. Cage. Their source for that information was Cora Revels, a proven liar. Cora Revels did not know that such a pact existed. Only because Dr. Cage took the stand and freely admitted entering into this pact do we know that it, in fact, existed.

  “Mr. Johnson spent many hours of testimony trying to prove that a motive existed for Tom Cage to murder Viola, to ensure her silence. And yet, after all the lies of his witnesses had been drawn out like poison, what did Mr. Johnson prove? That the State’s witnesses themselves had profited by the victim’s death and sought to cover their crime by getting Tom Cage charged with murder.”

  Quentin rotates his wheelchair slowly in place, allowing him to make eye contact with not only the jury, but also every spectator in the courtroom.

  “And while we’re on the subject of motive, let me pose a very simple question, one so simple that I don’t believe our ingenious pr
osecutor even thought of it. How could killing Viola Turner protect Dr. Cage’s reputation from what most threatened it? Killing Viola Turner would not erase Lincoln Turner from the earth. Lincoln Turner is a living fact. A simple DNA test would prove that Dr. Cage is Lincoln’s father, as it did three months ago. So . . . what could Dr. Cage gain by killing the mother of his child? If he meant to cover his sin with Viola and hide the existence of his illegitimate son, he would have had to kill Lincoln Turner as well. But if that was his plan, why did he not wait for Lincoln to ‘arrive from Chicago’? Dr. Cage had drugs ready to hand that would have killed Lincoln stone dead. A few drops of fentanyl in a cup of coffee . . . But wait”—Quentin slaps his forehead like a cartoon character—“Lincoln Turner wasn’t on his way from Chicago, was he? He was on his way from Mr. Patel’s motel, thirty miles from his mother’s sickbed! He’d been hiding out by the county line for several days, under an alias, waiting to put his schemes for theft and revenge into motion.”

  I glance over at the prosecution table. Shad looks as though he might be on the verge of vomiting. What must it feel like to sit mute under a barrage like this? To be made to look foolish by one of the masters of your profession? As a prosecutor in Houston, I experienced some bad days in court, but I never faced an attorney of Quentin Avery’s caliber with a case like this one. If Shad is going to get a conviction today, he’s going to have to turn iron into gold during his final close.

  Quentin presses on relentlessly. “Anyone who watched Lincoln Turner on the stand saw that he also harbored a deep desire to revenge himself upon Dr. Cage. And the circumstances of his mother’s illness and death offered him a perfect chance to do that.”

  Quentin takes a deep breath, then releases a long, sad exhalation. “Lincoln Turner,” he says in the tone of a sorrowful pastor. “It’s been a while since I heard anything as tragic as that boy’s childhood. Born from an unwanted pregnancy, with a mother who did what she thought was best to get by, but who chose deceit as her tool, and ultimately caused more pain than she averted. That poor boy didn’t even know who he was growing up, and he was taken under the spell of an amoral criminal before he had the wits to know right from wrong.