Natchez Burning (9 page)

I try to imagine our black DA reacting to Turner’s accusation. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’m handling this case just like I would any similar case. But I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

“Have you ever
had
a similar case?”

“Hell, no. Have you?”

“I prosecuted one once. Not exactly like this one, though. The doctor was a nut job. But what you told me before held true in Houston. Ninety-nine percent of these cases never get to the police, much less the DA’s office.”

Shad grunts. “I’ll tell you something else for free. Lincoln Turner isn’t impressed by my melanocytic credentials. He thinks I’m some kind of stooge for the Man.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, I can’t help but chuckle at Shad’s predicament. “How old is this guy?”

“Forty, maybe? He did just lose his mother. I keep thinking he’s bound to calm down. But that doesn’t help us
today
.”

“How long can you stall him?”

“I suppose I can tell him I’m not going to arrest a community physician of spotless reputation without one hundred percent documented evidence. I can take statements from the sister and anyone else who knew what was going on, process the physical evidence. But by tomorrow morning—afternoon at the latest—you’d better have the straight story out of your old man. If you don’t, he’s going to need a first-rate criminal defense attorney.”

As Shad waits for my reply, my eyes lock on to the assisted suicide statute in the 1972 Code. One quick scan starts a chain of muscle spasms up my back. “Shad, what exactly does Turner say happened? Is he saying my father provided the morphine, or that he injected the drug himself?”

“He didn’t say. He just kept yelling about morphine and a syringe. Why?”

“The way I read the statute, if Dad provided the drug and Viola injected herself, that’s assisted suicide. But if he injected her himself … that’s murder. Have you checked for precedents?”

“Not yet. But I suggest you get on it. Ten minutes ago I heard that Sheriff Foti down in Orleans Parish is thinking about prosecuting a respected lady doctor who may have euthanized patients during Katrina. And the charge will be murder.”

My heart thumps. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And Viola Turner wasn’t exactly a nobody, Penn. She had a younger brother who was a civil rights martyr. Jimmy Revels. Revels was kidnapped with a friend in 1968. Bodies never found.”

I recall this incident from the newspaper stories by a crusading reporter from across the river. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just this. If I get Al Sharpton down here yelling to Greta Van Susteren about racial genocide by euthanasia on Court TV, I’ll have no choice but to send your father to Parchman, no matter what kind of leverage you’ve got on me.”

“Don’t say that, man.”

“Then get your ass in gear. The clock’s ticking.”

TOM CAGE STARED
down at his ringing cell phone, then looked through the bottom of his trifocals to read the name on the caller ID:
ROSE MEADOWS.
Penn’s secretary, cliché name and all. He’d already received two additional calls from City Hall, which he’d ignored. Rose’s call from her cell meant that Penn was pushing her hard to reach him again. Tom wished he could have been more forthcoming with his son, but Penn could do nothing to mitigate the situation, while he might easily aggravate it. And by getting involved at all, Penn might be putting himself and his daughter in harm’s way. Tom took a deep breath and switched off his phone.

He didn’t consider himself a sentimental man. He wasn’t the type to wistfully return to the town of his boyhood or attend a high school reunion and get maudlin over his fourth bourbon. A child of the Depression, he had always moved forward, never back. His war experiences in Korea had only reinforced this habit. But there was one building in Natchez that Tom never passed without a tightening in his chest, and the events of the past twelve hours had brought him back to it like an icy comet returning to the star where it began its journey through the cosmos.

The house stood on Monroe Street, a rambling one-story structure in the shadow of the massive water tower that supplied the north side of town. In this residence Tom had first begun practicing medicine as a civilian, after being discharged from the army in 1962. He only passed it now on the rare occasions when he broke his own rule and attended a service at Webb’s Funeral Home, or when he made a house call on the north side of town. But today he’d parked his aging BMW beside the wrought-iron fence that bordered the yard of his old office, and stared at the familiar oak door while images of the distant past flowed through his mind.

A surgeon named Wendell Lucas had founded the clinic that once occupied this house. Over the years Lucas had hired a progression of young GPs to handle daily patients and refer him the appendectomies and gallbladder resections that gave him his living. Lucas was a better businessman than a surgeon, and the GPs who had good business sense moved on after three or four years, establishing their own practices in Natchez or other towns. But Tom had cared only about practicing medicine, and having the old surgeon take care of the business side of things freed him up for that, so he’d remained in the arrangement. He had always known the older man was taking advantage, but he was too embarrassed for Lucas to confront him about it. Peggy had ridden Tom about it sometimes, but after enough years even she had given up, and then in 1980 Lucas finally retired to play golf full-time. Tom abandoned the old clinic and moved into a modern new office complex beside St. Catherine’s Hospital, the same one he occupied now.

In many ways, this old clinic represented Tom’s growth into manhood. Here he had truly come into his own as a physician. He’d experienced great triumphs and made sickening mistakes. The triumphs had been silent for the most part, inspired diagnoses arrived at after deep study and research, and only after following the diagnoses of other doctors to demoralizing dead ends. That was in the days before nuclear imaging and complex lab screening, when all he had to go on was education, experience, and instinct. But the life-and-death intensity of the work Tom had done here was only part of the invisible web that tied him to this building. More than anything else, this was the place where he’d come to know Viola Turner.

As a rule, Dr. Lucas always kept two GPs working under him at the clinic. Most had been decent docs, with only a couple of bad apples over the years. But one of those apples Tom had never forgotten. Gavin Edwards had been at the clinic when Tom arrived in 1963. Viola Turner was Edwards’s nurse, but as soon as Tom was hired, Dr. Lucas had transferred Viola to him. Tom figured Lucas had made this change to ease him into the practice (and increase his production numbers), but before long Tom deduced that Viola had requested the transfer. The reason was simple: Gavin Edwards would screw anything in a skirt, and he devoted most of his waking hours to trying. Despite being married, he’d had flings with both receptionists and the lab technician, a full-blown affair with the insurance girl, and he’d possibly even molested some patients.

Viola was the only one of “the girls” Edwards hadn’t nailed, and he was clearly itching to do so. He often commented on her physical assets, even after Tom pointedly discouraged him. The irony was that Gavin Edwards was as racist as the average welder at Triton Battery, yet he still wanted to sleep with Viola. Of course, that particular hypocrisy had flourished in America since the seventeenth century. White men loved having sex with black women, so long as they would never have to treat them as equals. And in Mississippi in the early 1960s, there was no risk of that. Truth be told, there wasn’t much risk of it in New York, either. In Natchez, Edwards probably could have raped Viola and gotten away with it, but he didn’t have the guts to go quite that far. Viola took great pains to avoid being alone with him, but still he persisted. Eventually, Tom began to wonder what he would do if Edwards, who was senior to him, made an overt advance toward Viola. Dr. Lucas would undoubtedly support Edwards in such a circumstance. And if that happened … what would Tom do?

Fate soon answered the question for him. It was Viola’s duty to unlock the clinic every morning, then set up the examining rooms and the surgery for the day. The other girls came in thirty minutes later, and the docs a half hour after that, after completing morning rounds at the hospital. Dr. Edwards always arrived last, but not because of rounds. He was usually visiting a bored housewife whose husband left early for work. But one morning in 1965, Gavin Edwards was waiting inside the clinic when Viola arrived. He told her he’d come in early to catch up on his records, but within three minutes his hands were all over her. When he tried to pin her in a corner of an examining room, Viola pretended to cooperate just long enough to get a ceramic mug filled with tongue depressors into her hand. Then she cracked him across the face with it.

Tom’s first knowledge of the incident came when Dr. Lucas called him into his office. Viola had reported Dr. Edwards’s behavior, and the surgeon had already called Edwards in to question him. Edwards told Lucas that he’d been having consensual sex with Viola for a couple of weeks, and she’d only hit him when he admitted that he had no feelings for her and had simply wanted to find out what it was like to “dip his pen in ink.” Lucas believed Edwards, mostly because of his track record with the other female employees, yet something had made him ask Tom’s opinion. Almost before he knew what he was going to say, Tom blurted out, “Gavin Edwards is a damned liar.”

Dr. Lucas’s mouth dropped open as though he’d seen a pig start to dance. Then he drew himself up and gave Tom a stern glare. “That’s a pretty serious charge against a colleague, Tom. Not to mention the obvious.”

“What’s the ‘obvious’?” Tom asked, wondering if Lucas had the balls to say that Edwards was white and Viola black.

“Are you taking the word of an unregistered nurse over that of a fellow medical man?”

“Viola Turner is the best nurse I’ve ever worked with,” Tom replied, his chin quivering with fury. “Gavin Edwards is a lazy bastard who can’t keep his prick in his pants. Worse, he’s a lousy diagnostician. I don’t think he can even read an EKG.”

Dr. Lucas started to say something, but Tom cut him off with an ultimatum. “If you fire Viola, you’re firing me as well. Then you and Edwards can do
all
the diagnosing around here.” Then he walked out.

After two face-saving days, Dr. Lucas fired Gavin Edwards. Tom had no illusions that this was anything other than a business decision. Edwards might have been a good golfing partner, but it was Tom who kept the practice humming. More than half the patients openly praised him as the best doctor Lucas had ever employed, and Lucas was too greedy to let a frustrated cocksman like Edwards hurt his bottom line.

Viola stayed home from work during those two days, and the clinic suffered mightily because of it. It was like an army company trying to get along without its top sergeant. Her absence quickly revealed just how much work she’d been doing during the course of each day. Patients constantly complained, despite Tom working the substitute nurse off her feet. The day after Edwards cleaned out his desk, Viola reappeared, looking more serene than she ever had. Within hours the clinic was back on keel. But late in the afternoon, as Tom was searching for a chart in the clutter atop his desk, she’d stepped into his private office and closed the door.

“I want to thank you for what you did,” she said softly.

Tom felt blood rush to his face. He couldn’t look her in the eyes. “It was nothing. Anybody in my place would have done it.”

“No,” Viola replied. “Nobody else would have done it. No doctor who ever came through here, anyway. I was sure I was going to be fired. Dr. Lucas told me what you said.”

Tom stared at Viola’s hands, which were folded in front of her white skirt. He couldn’t bear to look into her eyes. Perhaps, he thought guiltily, because he shared Edwards’s desire. And because of this, he deserved anything but gratitude. As he stared, he realized Viola’s hands were clenched so tightly that her skin was bloodless where her thumbs and fingers pressed into it.

“I just told the truth,” he said awkwardly, trying to speak around his seemingly swollen larynx. At last he looked up into her big brown eyes. “You’re a fine nurse. As good as any I’ve ever worked with.”

“Even in the war?”

“Yes. I wasn’t a doctor in Korea, of course. Just a medic. But I saw a good bit of work at the clearing stations, and at a MASH unit after I was wounded.”

“You don’t know what that means to me.” Her hands parted, and Tom saw that they were shaking. “Your next patient is ready in room four.”

“Thank you,” Tom said, and hesitantly started forward.

Viola stepped aside as if to let him pass, but as she did, she turned into him, buried her face in his chest, and wrapped both arms around him in a fierce hug. Though she was shaking badly, she must have felt his heart pounding. Stunned by the sudden intimacy, he encircled her in his arms and just stood there, holding her. After what seemed a full minute, she drew back, and he saw tears on her face. She wiped them unself-consciously, then smiled.

“Did I say room four or room five?”

“I have no idea.”

Viola laughed. “I’ll go find out.”

And that was that.

They spent the next three years pretending this moment had not passed between them. They were both married, after all. Of course, marriage didn’t stop people like Gavin Edwards, and in all truthfulness it might not have stopped them, either. The real barrier to any deeper relationship was simpler and more frightening: Tom was white and Viola black. That gulf could not be bridged in Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1960s, not without casualties. They both knew it, and they lived under the tyranny of that unwritten code.

Playing the role of objective employer with Viola was the hardest thing Tom had ever done. He soon learned the basic human truth that the more you try to put something out of your mind, the more difficult it becomes to think of anything else. Oscar Wilde’s dictum that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it quickly lost any humor it had once had. Five days a week, Tom worked within eight feet of Viola for most of the day, and within two feet for much of it. When they labored over an open wound in the surgery, their heads sometimes touched, and he almost couldn’t stand her proximity. He knew the tightly restrained curves of that white uniform more intimately than he knew his wife’s naked body. He came to think of Viola’s scent like the smell of the caramel candy his grandmother had made when he was a boy—unobtainable in the real world, but vividly, mouthwateringly alive in his mind.