Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  “I see.”

  I wait for him to continue. When he does, his voice barely registers above a whisper.

  “Did Peggy tell you she was there?”

  “Who else could have told me that?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Jenny suspected it first, but she doesn’t really know. She just started chattering about calling the house the night Viola died, and Mom not answering the phone. When I pressed Mom about it, she finally cracked.”

  “Was anybody in the room with you and Jenny? A nurse? Drew, even?”

  “No. Now, come on. The trial is over. I’ve got to know what happened.”

  Dad leans back in the plastic chair, then brings his hands together in front of him. “Things happened exactly the way I described on the stand, only I left out everything to do with your mother.”

  “Obviously. So?”

  “Just the facts, ma’am?”

  “Please.”

  He nods again, and flecks of dandruff fall onto the metal tray below the screen. “I’d gone there to fulfill the pact Viola and I made. But once I was there, and she told me about Lincoln, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. Not without thinking about it a lot more first. So I diluted some morphine to look like a big dose and injected her in the inguinal vein. She went to sleep, and I left.”

  “What about the tape she made for Henry?”

  “I took that with me. She’d told me what was on it. I went to my office and watched it anyway, all the while thinking about the enormous secret she had kept from me all those years. Lincoln.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “I left the tape at my office and drove back to Cora’s house. Viola was the only one there, and she was sleeping soundly. I was surprised, given the relative mildness of the dose I’d given her. I stood there and watched her breathing and tried to see the young woman I’d fallen in love with all those years ago. But I couldn’t. Anyway, as I waited for her to stir, I heard a sound. A whirring. It seemed to be coming from the camera Henry had left there, but there was no red light on. Still, I walked over to the tripod to check, and that’s when I realized the camera was on. On and recording.”

  The Dumpster tape, I think with a chill. You flat-out lied about that.

  “And the lack of red light told you someone had set it up that way? To secretly record what happened while you were there that night?”

  He nods. “Exactly. And I panicked. As quickly as I could, I unloaded that tape and hurried back to my car.”

  “Viola was still alive?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And then?”

  “I went back to my office and watched that second tape. It had started recording about ten minutes before I got to the house.”

  “You think Cora started it?”

  “That was my guess. Now I wonder if it was Lincoln.”

  “It could have been.”

  Dad closes his eyes, thinking back to that night. “The tape was set on slow speed, so it could record six hours. My whole first visit with Viola was there, but that wasn’t what shocked me. Five minutes after I left the first time, your mother walked into that sickroom like Donna Reed in a goddamn movie. I saw everything she did, heard everything she and Viola said. That was when I learned that Peggy had known about Viola back in 1968. That she’d even helped her to leave town, sent her money all those years.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “I went home and pretended I knew nothing.”

  “What? What about the tape?”

  “I kept it with me—both of them, actually. Peggy was home, pretending to be asleep. I couldn’t bear to go through all that pain with her right then. Think about it. As far as I knew, Viola was going to live for another week or ten days. There was time to manage things. If someone had been trying to trap me with that second tape, they had no evidence of anything.”

  “But you erased it anyway, didn’t you? In the MRI machine?”

  “Of course I did. I took it with me on morning rounds and taped it under the tray inside the MRI unit. For an hour that tech blasted it to hell without even knowing it. Then I retrieved the tape and took it back to my office. I thought everything was fine. I didn’t even throw that erased tape into the hospital Dumpster until the next day, on my way out to Walt’s van.”

  “When did you talk to Mom about what had happened at Viola’s?”

  “The previous morning. When you called me about Shad Johnson and the potential murder charge . . . I knew I had to talk to Peggy.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wanted to tell the truth from the start. You know your mother. But I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Penn, once the facts about my affair with Viola came out—and they were going to come out—no one would have believed Peggy did what she did out of empathy, or mercy. They’d have said it was jealousy, or a cover-up, or murder for revenge, pure and simple. You know I’m right.”

  I do. When I was an assistant DA, I saw plenty of cases where people in their seventies and even their eighties shot or stabbed each other over romantic triangles, or even past infidelities that only came to light years later.

  “Then why the hell didn’t you confide in me? The very first day?”

  “Because I knew your instinct would be to tell the truth and take our chances with the system. You’d have thought you could make people see the truth. And in a perfect world, you probably could have. But with Shad Johnson so hungry for revenge against you, and Billy Byrd aching to give me some payback, they’d have railroaded your mother to get their revenge.”

  Dad brings his hands to his face and pulls his cheeks down like a man at his wit’s end. “For the last three months I’ve lived in dread that Peggy would snap and go to the police. Especially while I was in jail. But she turned out to be even stronger than I knew.”

  “Not that strong. She broke today.”

  At this he closes his eyes and bows his head again.

  “So, Dad . . . I have to ask you. And I need an answer. Who really killed Viola?”

  He opens his eyes and looks at me as if the answer to this question is self-evident. “Snake Knox, of course. Him and Sonny, and maybe one more with them.”

  “Did they arrive during your second visit?”

  “Hell, no. They were there when Peggy was. They saw her leave.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “Remember the message Snake sent me through the VK guy you shot? The message you brought me at the Pollock prison?”

  “Sure. ‘Wives and children have no immunity.’”

  “That was Snake telling me to remember that Peggy’s freedom was on the line. He masked it just enough that it seemed like a simple threat. But that was code, and I knew what he meant. Either I took the fall for Viola’s death, or he would put Peggy in my place in that trial.”

  “How could he do that? How much did he know?”

  “At first? Probably nothing. Snake and Sonny were probably parked in the trees on the road when Peggy left, waiting to kill Viola. Peggy being there wouldn’t have told them anything, of course. They probably assumed she was just sitting with Viola, or doing female chores. Cleaning bedpans, like that. They probably figured Viola was a friend of the family. But once I was accused of the crime—thanks to Lincoln—they saw me acting guilty. That must have puzzled them for a while. But Snake figured it out soon enough. Because either I believed I had killed Viola—which no doctor would, after seeing the tape of her death—or I was afraid of something else. And once he heard the details of the affair . . . he knew he had me set up to take the fall for him.”

  “And he knew you well enough to know you’d sacrifice yourself to save your wife.”

  “He was certain of it. Because he knew how far I’d gone to save Viola from the Double Eagles back in ’68.”

  “You got in bed with Carlos Marcello.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t like thinking about that.”


  “I imagine not.”

  This time Dad doesn’t shrink from my gaze. In his face I see the resolve of a man who did what he had to do to protect a woman he loved.

  “So how much of all this did Quentin know?”

  Dad sticks out his bottom lip and sighs. “Very little. Quentin was as exasperated with me as you were.”

  I mull this over for a while. “And Walt?”

  “Walt knew even less.”

  “Goddamn, Dad. You sure ask a lot of your friends.”

  This time he looks down at the tray below the window and says nothing.

  Faced with the yawning void of his deepest motives, I grasp at a niggling detail that’s bothered me for two days. “What about that hair-and-fiber evidence tampering? When Jewel told me Billy Byrd’s deputies were messing with that evidence, you had Quentin shut me down quick.”

  “Of course I did. Because I knew exactly what was going on. That’s another irony of this screwed-up case. Byrd’s deputies probably destroyed or replaced Caucasian hairs that might have turned out to match Snake or Sonny, but by doing so, they inadvertently protected Peggy. I wasn’t about to let you open that can of worms. The FBI might have gone in there and found a dozen more gray hairs from your mother’s head.”

  For the first time in a while, I feel like laughing, at the thought of my father exploiting Billy Byrd’s corruption to protect my mother. But Dad isn’t smiling.

  “Of course, I couldn’t be sure that Snake hadn’t told Byrd everything,” he goes on. “That was one more thing I had to sweat. Did Billy Byrd have Peggy’s hair sitting over there in an envelope, ready to drop into the case file on command from Snake if it looked like I was going to be acquitted?”

  “Christ. But they didn’t do that. They thought they had you. And once things began turning your way, it was too late to drag Mom into it.”

  Dad’s eyes settle on me with disturbing intensity. “Was it?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If I’d been acquitted, couldn’t someone else have been charged with Viola’s murder?”

  I feel as though my father just sucked the gravity from the entire building and I might float up off the chair. “Are you saying you changed your plea because they threatened to charge Mom with Viola’s death?”

  He looks back at me without answering for several seconds. Then he says, “No. I was afraid of that, sure, but that wasn’t my reason.”

  Again we’ve come to the question of why he changed his plea to guilty. This time I don’t steer away from it. “Shad got to you with that parable of his, didn’t he? That’s what triggered your change of plea.”

  Dad acknowledges this with a single nod. Then he says, “What do you think about Shad’s theory that everything I did for black people over the years was motivated by guilt?”

  “I don’t think it matters. They needed help, and you helped them. Few others did.”

  He doesn’t look convinced.

  “Didn’t you start all that long before you knew Viola?”

  “A couple of years before, I guess. It’s hard to remember now.”

  “So forget it.”

  He doesn’t look like he’s going to stop second-guessing himself anytime soon, and in prison there’s not much else for a man to do.

  “Dad, I need to ask you two questions. And I need you to answer them. No matter how much you think it might hurt me.”

  “All right. You’re entitled, after the hell I put you through these past months.”

  “Did you know Lincoln was your son all along? Is that why you sent the money all those years?”

  His eyes narrow, and then he hooks the fingers of his right hand in the wire screen and shakes his head without a trace of deception. “No. I told the truth about that. I never even suspected Lincoln was mine. And Viola confirmed that on the tape, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what . . . ?”

  “Back in October, when you had your last heart attack, Caitlin and I were out on the river in a boat. When Mom called us, she told me you kept saying there was something you needed to tell me. Something you could only tell me. After you recovered, you denied ever saying that. I’ve been thinking that might have been about Lincoln. That you were going to tell me I had a brother.”

  Dad’s eyes fill with pain and something else, maybe shame. “No, Penn. That was about Viola, though. I was going to tell you to make sure she didn’t want for anything during her last years. See, at that time I didn’t know Peggy knew about her, so I couldn’t put anything in my will. That kind of thing needs to stay between father and son. But after I got better, I thought I could procrastinate a little longer. I guess one of these days I’m going to have to face the fact that I’m not going to live forever.”

  Before I lose my nerve, I say, “If Viola had wanted you to leave us, would you have gone to Chicago with her?”

  My father’s eyes widen like those of man slapped without warning. He swallows, then drops his hands and looks away from me, pondering the question. I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. Maybe his delay is the answer.

  “I think your mother worries about that a lot,” he says softly.

  “She does.”

  He sighs with infinite regret. “The answer is . . . she did.”

  “Wait a second. Who did what? I don’t understand.”

  Dad looks straight into my eyes. “Viola broke her promise to Peggy. She did ask me to come to Chicago. I lied on the witness stand, Penn. About the notes I sent with my checks.”

  “I’m confused. What do you mean?”

  “About four years after she got to Chicago, Viola sent one of my notes back to the clinic. She sent it in an envelope marked ‘personal.’”

  My heartbeat is accelerating. “Was there a letter in it?”

  “No. Just two words, written above my note asking whether she was all right.”

  “What were the words?”

  Dad looks down and takes a deep breath, as though summoning the strength to answer. Then he looks up with wet, bloodshot eyes.

  “Save me.”

  Chapter 74

  I started drinking gin as soon as I got home from the jail. I had no limes, but it didn’t matter. I had tonic. I ran out a half hour ago, having spent the hours until sundown padding through my Washington Street house wondering exactly when everything started going off the tracks for our family. Until three months ago, the Cages had a pretty blessed run. Excluding the death of Annie’s mother, of course. But on balance, we’d been far more lucky than not.

  Now it’s all gone to hell. Caitlin dead. Dad in prison. Mom in the hospital. Annie in protective custody a hundred miles away. Friends dead—some because of what they did to try to help us. Henry Sexton, Walt Garrity, even Viola. Lincoln Turner poisoned by lies and hatred. And yet, as my mother pointed out . . . Snake Knox still roams free.

  As I drank away the afternoon, a single line spoken by my father in Judge Elder’s chambers kept repeating in my head: I hope you never do the things you’d have to do to be able to understand what I’m doing now. When I wasn’t pondering this, I was sifting through the information my parents had given me about the night Viola died. Once I knew my mother’s role, of course, all that had followed seemed simple enough to understand, and maybe even inevitable.

  But no matter how much gin I consumed, I couldn’t rid myself of the image of my father’s face behind the wire screen, revealing that Viola had asked him to leave us after all, her heartrending plea carried in two desperate words: Save me. Given Viola’s pride, Dad would have known what it cost his old lover to beg him for deliverance. What had it cost him to hear her plea and then ignore it? To give up Viola for my mother, Jenny, and me? By the old standards of honor and loyalty, he did the right thing. But for himself, and for Viola . . .

  Lincoln was right when he said that in some ways what our father had done to his mother was worse than killing her. Dad gave Viola a glimpse of another world, a better world in almost every way, and th
en took it away, condemning her to a half-life in exile from her home, with a man who did not love her. It was Viola who ended the affair, but only because she realized first how impossible any future together had been. Dad had the luxury of self-delusion; she didn’t.

  In the end only one thing matters: he chose to stay with us.

  I tried to leave the jail without berating him about his guilty plea, but in the end I couldn’t. All I said was, “You know, if you were religious, I might be able to understand this self-flagellation, at least a little. But you’re not. Not at all.” He smiled then—to himself, not me—and said, “I don’t believe in God, it’s true. But I guess I do believe in atonement.”

  Atonement.

  I told him I thought there were less dangerous ways to pay for transgressions than locking himself up with a bunch of killers and gangbangers.

  “Maybe,” he allowed. “But I don’t think so. When Judge Elder turned to that jury to send them back to deliberate, I knew they were going to set me free. Four jurors looked right at me and told me that with their eyes. And I was terrified. I knew then that if I let that happen, I would never pay for what I had done. Never balance the scales. So I took away that option.”

  “Oh, you left human nature behind today. You got on the Jesus train, whether you intended to or not.”

  “No, Penn. I followed my conscience, that’s all.”

  “And you do realize where it’s led you? What will you do in Parchman when Snake Knox sends some skinhead with a shank to kill you?”

  Dad considered this, then shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe one of the black gangs will look out for me.”

  “Get real.”

  He looked at me the way missionaries look at nonbelievers. “Who knows what I’ll find in there? Maybe I can use my medical skills to help some people. People who really need help. Whatever happens . . . I’m resigned to it. Ready for it, even.”

  When he said that, I dropped all pretense of normalcy. “You don’t have to do this. I know why you’re doing it. Because of Caitlin, and Walt, and Henry, and all the others. You feel responsible for their deaths. And you are, at least in part.” At that point I stuck my fingers through the screen and touched the papery skin of his hand. “But not one of them would want you to do this. It would break their hearts to see this.”