Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

  I turned away from this past – yet again – and headed toward Rex.

  He had called me at my office on Thursday, something he had never done before. Mama, he said, had gone to the hospital that morning. Like any relatively affluent and extensively insured eighty-seven-year-old, Mama had a battalion of medical experts she visited on a regular basis. And on a regular basis they sent her to the hospital for inpatient tests.

  And likewise regularly, she had her doctors forward copies of her test results to me. She and I would discuss these results extensively. We would have had nothing to talk about had I never gone to medical school. She disapproved of where I lived, how I lived, most of what I believed in, and never failed to complain about my accent and how I sounded "like a blank Yankee." My mother was far too genteel to say damn. Southern ladies, in her mind, never used coarse language.

  And make no mistake about it, Mama was a Southern lady of the very old school, an unreconstructed Delta belle born on a plantation who never understood why happy darkies no longer wanted to stay in their place as God had ordained, like bluebirds not mixing with the sparrows. For this reason, our conversations tended to focus on her medical history. She loved me as only a mother could, but she never understood me or why I had turned out the way I had. Neither had I.

  Rex and I met now, one hundred hours later, by a headstone bearing the Stallings name.

  "Hey, Doc."

  I held out my hand, but instead of shaking it, he stepped closer and gave me a bear hug. I returned it genuinely but briefly. Hugs from men – other than from my father, who was dead, and my son, who died far too short of being a man – made me uncomfortable.

  "Thanks for coming." I knew it sounded lame even before Rex frowned at me. "Nice suit," I tried. He shrugged and turned to face the gravesite. "I owe you big time, man,"

  Rex gave me a curious look.

  "If you hadn't called me, I'd never have seen her alive again."

  "How's that?"

  "After you called me, I phoned Mama at the hospital. She gave me all her usual chatter about how I shouldn't come because my patients surely needed my attention more than she did, and wouldn't it be wonderful if I would take that endowed chair the University of Mississippi Medical School had offered me right there in Jackson."

  Rex smiled. "She never stopped talking about that; that's for sure."

  I shrugged. "Well, I just had a feeling this time. I'm glad you called me."

  The religious would say it was a divine message, but I think maybe it was more the tone in her voice, or simply that she was getting old and my own professional medical judgment told me that the accretion of illnesses would soon overwhelm her stubborn grip on life. Regardless, I canceled my patient appointments and hospital rounds and took a red-eye from LAX Thursday night. When I got to her room at St. Dominic's Hospital early afternoon Friday, I sat down with a pale, dry husk of the woman I had seen only months before. It took a moment for her to open her eyes. They were lethargic, flat, and filled with tears when she recognized me. Colon cancer, she said. Terminal, the doctors said. She wanted no special measures, no interim surgeries or chemo.

  "I spent the afternoon with her," I said as we walked toward the gravesite. "She was drifting in and out, and the few times she spoke, her voice was so faint I had to lean over the bed and hold my breath to hear her."

  "What did you talk about?" Rex's voice had an odd tone, not fear but not simple curiosity.

  "Mostly I read to her from the Bible, especially Psalm 121, over and over."

  "That's it?"

  I nodded and his usual poker face showed me something like relief. Something like a secret that had not been divulged. That confounded me and I put that down to yet another artifact of stress, like the person who wasn't by the magnolia.

  "Yeah." I felt the regret. That was it. When the light from the window got too dim to read by any longer, I told her I needed some sleep, because I didn't have any on the redeye from L.A. I kissed her, gave her a hug, and told her I would be hack in the morning."

  He gave me a knowing look, as if he already knew what I had said and what I was about to say.

  Movement interrupted my thoughts. In the distance, a hearse turned into the cemetery off Highway 7. It glided to a dignified stop behind Rex's truck.

  "Nothing more until the phone call from the hospital at maybe four thirty in the morning to tell me she was dead." I stopped and looked at Rex closely "They told me she had apparently gotten up to get a cigarette, lost her balance, hit her head as she fell in the darkness."

  Rex stopped and looked back at me.

  "She died all alone on the cold, hard linoleum floor." I shook my head as the image tore through my heart again. "You cannot possibly imagine how many times I have prayed that she had been knocked out by the blow on the way down. I can't stand to think that she ended up on the floor, conscious for a long time, dying all alone in the dark. I wonder if she called for help or simply gave up, closed her eyes, and let go?"

  The detail in Rex's eyes gave my stress-worn nerves the impression that he somehow knew the answer to that.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the distance, an older, four-door Chevrolet sedan with clergy license plates pulled into the cemetery behind the hearse. A bent, old gentleman in a dark suit climbed painfully from the sedan, his ragged white hair stirring in the wicked wind.

  Rex and I turned toward him. "Mama stage-managed everything you know," I said. "Right down to the last detail."

  Rex raised his eyebrows.

  "Right there in the safe-deposit box with her will," I said. "She'd paper-clipped a note to the prepaid funeral papers and specified everything she was to be dressed in right down to hosiery and undergarments, which pastor to call, and what Scripture he would read."

  I couldn't help but smile as I thought of her lifelong theological rebellion against one of the foundations of Christianity.

  "What's so funny?" Rex asked me.

  "The note was very clear that when we recited the Apostles' Creed during the service, we would absolutely, positively not say the part about Jesus descending into hell." I shook my head. "No matter how much she ragged on me about my heretical religious beliefs, she never managed to accept her personal savior spending time in hell."

  "You mean Hades," Rex corrected me.

  I smiled again at the memory. To Mama, hell was profanity and she was always too much of a lady to say those sorts of words.

  As we drew closer to the hearse, two large men in dark suits got out of it and met the bent, old man at the rear of the vehicle. I pegged him as the minister rustled up by the local funeral home.

  The funeral attendants were well dressed and professionally bland. The minister's face was chapped and red, patched all over with scars I recognized as from a workmanlike removal of skin lesions. I counted at least a dozen more precancerous patches in need of treatment. His left hand clutched a cracked and worn leather-covered Bible. His free hand was cupped gently and trembled faintly like a farmer sowing seed.

  I shook the trembling hand and thanked him for coming and introduced Rex.

  "I remember your mother," the minister said "And especially the Judge—but then, who doesn't? — particularly during the spring floods of 1929 when the levees threatened to burst, all of them except the ones the Judge built when he was president of the Levee Board. Yessiree, he was a man all right."

  The well-practiced funeral home functionaries interceded then and pulled the old preacher back to the present. Rex and I slid Mama's pewter-finish casket—the one she had picked out herself God-only-knew how many years ago—out of the back of the hearse and carried it to the gravesite and placed it on the aluminum structure over the hole. Rex and I stood silently during the brief ceremony. Psalm 121 again, and the usual dust to dust. During the final prayer, as I closed my eyes and tried without success to visualize Mama in any other setting than the hospital or in her casket, I heard a car pull to a halt on the gravel access road behind us.

  When t
he minister said the last amen, the men from the funeral home tripped some hidden lever and Mama descended into the hole.

  Rex and I stood at the side of the hole as the sound of the backhoe grew louder. I picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it on the top of the coffin. The impact of the dirt, the hollow, dull sound the frozen dirt clods made as they rolled off the metal, tore a membrane in my heart, and suddenly I saw nothing for the tears. I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of my new suit and cursed at the sky for not showing even a little sunshine for Mama. I thought about cursing God as well, but I've never been much for existentially futile gestures.

  Finally, I turned and saw that Rex had walked away and stood with his back to me, head bowed. On the other side of the dirt mound the backhoe idled restlessly. The two men in overalls looked expectantly at me. I nodded, then turned and made my way to the minister, who stood discreetly at a small distance. I thanked him for coming, mentioned that he should have his face looked at closely by a competent dermatologist, then slipped him an envelope containing two hundred-dollar bills.

  As he walked away, I saw a tall woman with mocha skin climb out of a bright red Mercedes sedan parked behind Rex's truck.

  "Well, I guess the bodies are spinning in their graves now," Rex said as he stopped by my side. He nodded at the woman walking toward us. She looked awfully familiar to me.

  "Meaning?"

  "Dude. This is a cemetery for white folks," Rex said. "Even the labor with shovels're white."

  I resented Rex's comments, wanted nothing to do with skin-color irrelevancies right now. But I turned toward the backhoe anyway and realized he was right. What's more, the men stood stock-still, their heads tracking the woman as she made her way toward us. Likewise, the two funeral home attendants and the minister were shocked into immobility by the sight of a dark-skinned woman in a white cemetery.

  I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but the disappointment tasted like dirt. I hadn't been here to Itta Bena in twenty years, and that absence from Delta reality had allowed me to construct a convenient little fiction of self-congratulation that my modest efforts in the civil rights movement and the phenomenal dedication of many others had changed things here into a culture of meritorious equal opportunity. But clearly, life here in the Delta, more than in the rest of Mississippi, more than in the rest of the Deep South, and more than most any other where in America, still revolved about a deeply rutted axis of race, class, and misunderstanding.

  I started to verbalize this to Rex when my heart stopped: the woman walking toward us was Vanessa Thompson. The Vanessa Thompson, moneyed securities attorney former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose striking face had made the cover of Time magazine when she'd shuttered her lucrative New York law practice to move back to Mississippi almost ten years ago to use her money to provide legal services for the state's poor, because "it was time to give back." But I also remembered quotes in the article from some of the more cynical observers who thought her move was "more like payback than give back." I still had that copy of Time in a drawer in my living room in Playa Del Rey.

  But it wasn't the powerful, wealthy crusader Vanessa Thompson who arrested my pulse. No, it was the teenage Vanessa Thompson, my high school heartthrob and the ultimate forbidden fruit, who momentarily flatlined my EKG precisely as she had done more than thirty years before.

  Her appearance didn't entirely surprise me because she and I had swapped e-mails over the past month about a strange, cold hate-crime case. While I kept e-mailing her that I didn't do forensics, Vanessa persisted, attaching her e-mails with file after file crammed with information about Darryl Talmadge, a local white man who had recently been convicted of murdering a black man in the 1960s. I could not fathom why Vanessa wanted me to help save Talmadge from the gas chamber.

  CHAPTER 4

  Vanessa Thompson had single-handedly deflected the trajectory of my life from that of privileged, multigenerational son of the Confederacy to a traitorous scalawag, who betrayed his race and turned his back on a heritage filled with statues and oil portraits in public buildings. I met Vanessa in 1965 when court-ordered integration placed her in my Jackson high school as part of a handful of token black students. I'd like to believe I changed way back then because Vanessa showed me how wrong the old system was. But it wasn't that way at all, not that clean and simple.

  "You sure as hell know how to piss folks off, my friend," Rex mumbled to me as we made our way toward Vanessa.

  I looked around and saw the white-hot hate stares shift from Vanessa to me and back.

  "Comes naturally I guess."

  "Damn straight," Rex said. "So how is it you know the famed Vanessa Thompson?"

  "High school," I said, remembering the wild sweetness of adolescence and the intoxicating hormone rushes. "She was in my history class. She always spoke up—"

  "That sure hasn't changed."

  "—spoke up and always had something interesting to say. Things I had never considered. Dangerous ideas."

  "Y'Mama thought you had way too many dangerous ideas. I imagine one of those started with her?" Rex nodded toward Vanessa.

  "Not exactly."

  "How exactly?"

  "I fell in love with her a long time before her words really mattered."

  Rex grimaced and made a sucking sound with his front teeth. "Lordy!"

  I nodded.

  The meaning of her words would grow paramount as time passed, but at first it was her voice, the tones and timbre of the words, the steel of commitment reinforcing her voice, the energy of her emotions, and mostly the inexorable gravity of her wisteriacolored eyes that pulled me into orbit and made me hers.

  And the testosterone.

  "Vanessa and the other black students took the same classes, ate lunch by themselves at the same table every day, and pretty much kept to themselves, " I said. "White students ignored them, like they were invisible. I started out the same way until American history."

  "Let me guess," Rex said. "You committed the unpardonable sin of talking to them."

  "To Vanessa," I said nodding. "Sometimes just a few seconds between classes. But that was enough."

  "Nigger lover."

  The word still hit me like a physical slap. No matter how much hip-hop practitioners gratuitously tossed the word around, it felt like a profanity of the soul.

  "Scratched into my locker, painted on my car, spelled out on the front lawn with used motor oil. I think they tried to set the oil on fire, but Papa chased them off with his twelve-gauge.

  "The principal called me into his office and told me to stop fraternizing with the enemy, something about 'godless Communists' being behind it all. He called my parents. My mother cried; my father said he'd lose his job."

  "So she turned your head around?"

  "In a manner of speaking," I said. The old irresistible rush fluttered in my gut as Vanessa drew closer. How could this be? How could this feeling endure over the distance of so many decades?

  "I was in love. Civil rights started out as a way to her heart. It took a while for it to become an end of its own." I nodded at the memories that played out in my head. "I asked her what to read, who to listen to, how to find the subversive literature behind the movement.

  "Not surprisingly, Vanessa's dad was one of the leaders. He was a professor at Tougaloo. The whole thing came to a head right before Christmas when Vanessa invited me to a discussion-group party at her house. I told Mama I had to do some research at the library, then drove north on old Highway Fifty-one toward Tougaloo. When I got to Vanessa's house, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. That plain little tract house was packed—I mean literally jammed—with people of every color." I shook my head. "Black, white, Asian, Latino—" I turned to Rex. "I remember that day like it was this morning. I'd never, ever, been anywhere before in my entire life where blacks and whites and everybody else just ... just hung around as equals.

  "I wasn't all that surprised to find all three of the Jewish students a
t my high school or the owner of the only real deli in town. But I was floored to find my physics teacher there, and that was my first indication that there were white people who didn't hate.

  "When Vanessa took my arm, I was on cloud nine as she led me around and introduced me to people there. It was almost like the initiation into a secret society."

  I felt the euphoria again as Rex and I covered the remaining few steps toward Vanessa. Now, as then, I felt the euphoria turn dark and ugly remembering how all hell had broken loose when she'd introduced me to her parents. Her father was furious, and his deep, booming anger silenced the assembled crowd.

  "How dare you step foot in my house!" he yelled at me. "You of all people! Your entire family and your ancestors have done more damage to my people than anybody else in this state's sorry history!"

  He was convinced that at worst, I was there as a spy, and at the very best, a fulminating embarrassment.

  He and Vanessa's brother Quincy escorted me to my car and told me never to speak to her again. Vanessa transferred out of my high school the next week, and I had not seen her face-to-face again until this moment.

  CHAPTER 5

  Now on this bitter day, next to one of the many graves hearing a rusty iron Southern Cross, Vanessa and I met again. She reached out and touched my forearm with her fingers.

  Seismic plates moved again in my heart.

  "I'm so sorry about your mother."

  I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if the past thirty-five years had

  never rolled by She returned my embrace, then slipped a hand inside my suit coat to make the hug even more intimate. She took a step back then. Reluctantly, I let her go. "I'm very, very sorry to barge in at a time like this, but this Talmadge thing has gotten out of control in the past few days. We really need your help and I hoped to convince you in person."