Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  “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.”

  His righteous passion silences me, but only for a few moments. “I’m sorry if I sounded glib. But I’d understand your position a lot better if you only had yourself to worry about. What about Mom? Do you think she can stand waiting at home while you die slowly in Parchman Prison? Hell, in the shape you’re in, you might not even make it to Parchman. You could die in the county lockup awaiting trial. Think about the reality of that for Mom.”

  “I am thinking of your mother,” Dad says in a tone somewhere between reverence and shame.

  I shake my head. “I don’t believe it. You’re wracked with guilt about something. Fine. We’ve all done things we regret. But I don’t care what you might have done, and neither does Mom. Nothing on this earth could push us away from you.”

  He slowly shakes his head. “You don’t know that. You can’t.”

  “You think you’ve committed a sin so terrible that you could never be forgiven?”

  “No. But there are some things so—so complicated that it’s a man’s duty to work them out for himself. Not to depend on others to do it for him.”

  “Dad … I’d never say this to a client. But you’re not going to be my client beyond tomorrow, not if you’re going to trial, and—”

  “You won’t defend me if this goes to trial?”

  “A lawyer who represents himself or his family has a fool for a client.”

  He seems to take this philosophically. “Go on, then.”

  “Tell me what happened at Cora Revels’s house last night. Just the facts, in sequence, as best you can remember them.” I hold up my right hand. “Before you say no, let me tell you why you should confide in me. Maybe what happened was assisted suicide. Or maybe it was murder. But it might have been manslaughter, or even plain suicide. We won’t know until I hear the facts. Because even though laymen use those terms, each one has a strict legal definition.”

  For a moment I think I’ve convinced him. Then he says, “I’m not sure I know myself what happened last night.”

  “What do you mean? Can you prove you weren’t there? Or what time you left? With an alibi, this whole mess can magically go away. According to the clock-radio beside Viola’s bed, she died at five thirty-eight A.M.”

  He lifts a small, desert-colored replica of a Tiger tank from a shelf behind him and toys with its scaled-down 88 mm gun. After slowly turning the turret a few times, he sets the tank back on the shelf. “That’s not what I meant. I was there. But I’m still not sure what happened. Or why.”

  “Did you do anything to assist Viola to die? Did you inject her? Was there some kind of unexpected drug interaction?”

  Dad blinks twice, then seems to shake himself out of a trance. “We’ve come full circle, Penn. I’ve told you I can’t discuss what happened last night. Let that be an end of it.”

  “You mean you won’t discuss it.”

  He turns up his palms, exposing his arthritically deformed fingers. “Semantics.”

  “I know you didn’t murder Viola. I know that. You’re trying to protect somebody. Nothing else makes sense. You can’t be trying to protect yourself, because you’re about to destroy yourself. So it must be someone else. Tell me who you’re trying to save, and I’ll do all in my power to protect them. I swear it. Your life is on the line, Dad.”

  “I’ve been on borrowed time for quite a while, son. You know that.”

  At last my frustration boils over, and I get to my feet. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

  “Because you can’t,” he says calmly. He picks up his dead cigar from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, and relights it with a high-pressure butane lighter that roars like a miniature welding torch. “Penn, let me tell you something: I thought I knew my father. He lived to be eighty-six, remember? Died of colon cancer. Do you remember how religious he was?”

  “He never missed a Sunday at church. Or a Wednesday night.”

  “That’s right.” Dad exhales a raft of blue smoke. “Well, near the end, I found him staring out the front window of his house, crying. Crying. Can you see Percy Cage doing that?”

  My grandfather was as hard as a Salem judge. “No, I can’t.”

  “When I asked why he was crying, Dad told me he was afraid. Afraid of dying. I can’t tell you how shocked I was. I asked whether his religious faith didn’t give him some comfort—his belief in the afterlife. He turned to me with a stare that made me shudder, and he said, ‘There’s nothing after this life, Tom. This world. Nothing.’ Then he looked back out the window.”

  Dad studies the glowing tip of his cigar. “I felt like the earth had cracked open at my feet. Even though I believed basically the same thing. Dad had been going to church his whole life, professing faith, teaching Sunday school, saying and doing all the right things. But when it came to actually staring into the void, all that went out the window. All those years, he’d never been the person I thought I knew. Never. I’m not judging him. I’m just saying that I had no idea who my own father really was.”

  My palms tingle as I stare back into my father’s eyes. Do I have similar blind spots when I look at him? Is that what he’s telling me? I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep, invisible forces within my own father? Could Viola’s flight from Natchez in 1968 have been one of those events? What about my sister’s decision to leave America and live in England? Or Dad’s decision to help my wife die peacefully rather than in agony? You may be right, says a voice in my head, but this isn’t the time or place for speculation. Gathering myself as best I can, I sit back on the sofa and try to punch through his defenses.

  “I’ve been thinking back to the day of your last heart attack. I was on the river with Caitlin, spreading that waitress’s ashes. When Mom called me, she said you were in terrible pain, but you were asking to see me, that you were desperate to tell me something very important.”

  He stares at his cigar like a primitive tribesman entranced by fire.

  “Mom said you were afraid you would die before you could tell me whatever it was. Then, when I got to the hospital, you acted like you had no memory of that.”

  “Wasn’t I unconscious when you got to the hospital?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You asked me about this last month. My answer is the same. When I woke up, I had no memory of what you’re talking about.”

&
nbsp; “But Mom confirmed that you said those things.”

  He shrugs. “I was out of my head. Obtunded, we say in medicine.”

  “Uh-huh. Or maybe once you woke up, you realized you were going to survive, so you didn’t feel compelled to confess whatever it was.”

  He suddenly looks too exhausted to argue further. If Mom were here, she would tell me to stop warting him. But I can’t. He’s risking his life by forcing Shad to proceed with an arrest. The last time Dad was involved in a trial was during my senior year in high school—a malpractice case. That stress caused his first heart attack, and he was only forty-six. Tonight he’s thirty years and several surgeries down the road.

  “Let’s back up a second,” I say. “When you were telling me about Viola, you skimmed over why she left town.”

  He shrugs. “That’s no mystery. The KKK had kidnapped and murdered her brother. Also a friend of his. The bodies were never found, but I never had any doubt that the Klan killed those boys. How could Viola stay here after that?”

  “Which Klan guys? Do you have any idea?”

  “Probably the same bastards behind the rest of the killings around here. The rednecks who worked out at Triton and Armstrong and IP. Or those Double Eagles that Henry Sexton writes about.”

  I don’t want to reveal my contact with Henry yet. “Do you know that for sure?”

  “Who else could it have been? Everybody knew who’d done it, in a general way. But nobody knew exactly. That’s how it was all over the South. That’s why the violence continued. Nobody was willing to look too deeply into it, for fear of being targeted themselves.”

  Dad takes another pull on his cigar, then sets it in the ashtray. “Did you ever hear about the Heffner family in McComb?”

  “No.” McComb, Mississippi, is only sixty miles east of Natchez.

  “Red Heffner was an insurance man. Ex–air force. He invited a northern civil rights worker and a liberal preacher to his house for dinner. Next thing you know, the men in his neighborhood formed a vigilante association and started terrorizing his family. Red had to move them out of town. And his wife’s daughter by her first husband—who’d been killed in the Battle of the Bulge—had been elected Miss Mississippi that year. Can you imagine? Miss Mississippi was like royalty back then. Compared to the Heffners, we were nobody, in the social scheme of things. I wish I’d had his moral courage, the courage to get involved, but I was fresh out the army, and you were only four years old.”