“I figured Lincoln had learned something from me after all.”
“What do you mean by that?” Quentin asks, with the soft implacability of an ocean swell that will soon build into a tidal wave that could sweep all before it.
“That boy had been working cons even before he knew what he was doing. By the time he was six, he was as good as anybody I ever saw. He could run up to a lady crying he was lost and come back with her pocketbook and her watch, and her not miss them till five blocks later.”
Jelks actually has pride in his voice, but the image he conjured only serves to tell me how radically different my childhood was from that of my half brother.
“I figured he’d found a way to lose Viola’s new will,” Jelks continues, “so the old one would stay in effect.”
“Objection, Judge!” Shad presses. “Witness is speculating and has no knowledge of any such event.”
“Sustained.”
Jelks chuckles low. “I know it probably killed Lincoln to give me that eleven grand. But there wasn’t no way around it, see? He still got twice as much for himself than if he’d let Vee give the lion’s share to that white reporter.”
“I’ve warned you about speaking out of turn, Mr. Jelks,” Judge Elder snaps. “The jury will disregard the witness’s last comments.”
“Right,” Rusty says in my ear. “Quentin was planning this all along, Penn. He let them spend two days hanging themselves.”
“Mr. Jelks,” Quentin says, “when your wife’s will was probated, why didn’t you come forward with the letter you read today?”
Jelks shakes his head, but then he goes through the steps for the sake of form. “I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And Vee was doing me wrong, changing her will like that. Illinois is one of the only states in the whole country where you can stop a spouse from inheriting. Anyhow, I sure didn’t blame Lincoln any.”
Quentin’s sigh is freighted with a lifetime’s weariness of dealing with self-serving convicts. “You were still Viola’s spouse at the time she changed that will, Mr. Jelks. But in any case . . . is there anything you want to say before I hand you over to the district attorney?”
Junius Jelks looks down at the letter in his lap, then out over the crowd. “Only this. Viola was right about me. I wasn’t no saint, as you can see from these guards I got with me. But then, I couldn’t afford to be. Lord, was it hard to look her in the face knowing how far you’d fallen short of what she expected—and deserved. But Vee was wrong about her brother, Jimmy. By dying young, that boy stayed a kind of saint to Viola. But it was him and Luther that got her in trouble with the Klan, got her raped and such. Not me. Ain’t that something?”
Quentin turns to Shad and gives him the first completely unshrouded look he has given anyone since the beginning of the trial. It’s as though a man wearing a cloak has suddenly thrown it back to reveal a gleaming sword. Shad actually slides a couple of inches back in his chair.
But Junius Jelks isn’t finished. Just as Quentin opens his mouth to tender the witness, Jelks looks down at my father and says, “Doc, I don’t know if you injected that poison or not, but you damn sure killed Viola. I drug on her my whole life, but you broke her heart before I ever laid eyes on her. It was you who killed her. At least my conscience is clean on that.”
Quentin gapes at Junius Jelks, probably reflecting, as most trial lawyers have, that even a good witness can be a double-edged sword. “Your witness,” he says finally.
Shad sits blinking in confusion, like a young boxer after catching a surprise hook from an aging champion.
As Quentin rolls back toward the defense table, Rusty catches his eye and gives him a covert thumbs-up. Quentin doesn’t deign to acknowledge the signal. Even in the wheelchair, his regal bearing makes it clear that he exists above both the criticism and praise of men like Rusty Duncan.
Shad stands and approaches the witness box, walking right past the lectern and taking a combative stance that makes clear he feels only disdain, even disgust, for Junius Jelks.
“Why are you telling us all this now, Mr. Jelks?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir, that a man like you doesn’t do anything for free. What have you been promised in exchange for your testimony?”
Jelks smiles in tacit agreement. “I see. Well, nobody paid me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did anyone make you promises of any kind?”
“Well, sure. Mr. Avery there promised to look into my case and see if he might be able to get my sentence reduced, on account of what that judge done. How he went to jail for taking bribes, and such. But that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Shad asks with theatrical verve, looking at the jury.
“Is that illegal?” Jelks asks, with perfectly acted sincerity, and only then does Shad realize that he has stepped on a spring-loaded land mine.
Judge Elder is staring at Shad as though waiting for the answer, but Shad isn’t about to give one unless ordered to from the bench.
“Mr. Johnson?” he prompts.
“Yes, Judge?”
“The witness asked a question. I think the jury would probably like to know the answer.”
Shad looks at the floor and swallows what must have been an acid retort, but when he raises his head, he says, “No, that’s not strictly illegal. However, it certainly raises the probability that this witness would never have come forward without such an inducement.”
“And the jury will be instructed to consider that,” says Judge Elder, “in due course. Please continue.”
“Mr. Jelks,” Shad muses, “what if your testimony today results in you losing your inheritance? How will you feel about that?”
Jelks shrugs philosophically, the gesture of a pragmatic man who can calculate the odds of any proposition before most people even understand the question. “Mr. Johnson, money don’t mean much to a man facing thirteen more years behind bars. Not a man my age. Even a small chance of freedom is worth fifty times the paper I’ve got rotting in the bank.”
“Obviously. And given your feeling about this, is there anything you would not do to hasten your release from prison?”
“Probably not.”
“You would lie on the witness stand?”
“Of course. I might even kill somebody, if he was the only thing standing between me and freedom.”
Loud murmurs come from the crowd behind me. Shad faces the jury and again turns his palms up, as if to say, What are we to do with such a man?
“But my wife wouldn’t lie for any reason,” Jelks says with conviction. “Except maybe to protect her child. She wrote that letter, sir. Nobody can prove different.”
“I didn’t ask you a question, Mr. Jelks.”