I glare at Quentin, who gives Dad a look that says, Promises are made to be broken. “You don’t have to do that, Tom, given what’s happened.”
“Forget what just happened. You told the jury I would get up there, and if I don’t, they’re going to think I’m hiding something. You’ve based your whole defense on my character and forthrightness. And a man with good character isn’t afraid to take the stand in his own defense.”
“A valid point,” Rusty concedes.
“So relieved you think so,” I mutter.
“Third, the truths that lie behind my relationship with Viola impact a lot of people, and they’ve been buried for too long. Remember my eulogy for Henry Sexton? I called on people to break their silence, no matter the cost. It’s like Reverend Baldwin coming forward with Albert’s ledgers after forty years. That’s what we need.”
This kind of thinking is what Mom is afraid of. “Reverend Baldwin didn’t publish the contents of those ledgers in the paper. He gave us copies of a couple of pages. A courtroom is no place to confess your sins, Dad. Not under oath. Write a book, if you want to wash your soul clean.”
He looks at the floor and shakes his head with mulish resolve. “I can’t do that. I owe it to Viola—and to Jimmy and Luther and all the others—to tell what I know. I owe it to Henry, and I owe it to Caitlin, too.”
I get up and walk over to the sofa, crouching before him. “Caitlin wouldn’t want you to risk going to jail out of some misguided sense of duty to reveal the past.”
His eyes meet mine with unsettling fervor. “Caitlin died trying to uncover the past. Not to save me, or to win glory for herself. She wanted to know what happened to Jimmy Revels. And she was right to want to know. This poison has been tainting this area for too long. It’s time to lance the abscess once and for all.”
“Fine, I agree. But you don’t have to do it from the witness stand. Not with your life on the line. You can work side by side with Kaiser and me to make sure every last Double Eagle goes to jail or to the grave. But don’t destroy your own life in the process.”
“I’ve come damn close to destroying it already. What more harm can I do?”
“Things can always get worse. Quentin?”
The wheelchair creaks as Quentin leans forward. “He’s right, Tom. Have we established reasonable doubt? Absolutely. But there are two things you never know in life: who your daughter’s going to marry, and what a jury’s going to do. The forensic case against you is still strong. You and Walt destroying that videotape looks bad, if they believed that.”
“That’s another reason I need to testify. I need to deny erasing that second videotape from the hospital Dumpster.”
For the first time since we arrived here, my office goes quiet. No one, it seems, wants to touch the matter of the DV tape blanked by the MRI machine.
“I didn’t finish what I was saying,” Quentin says. “Despite Lincoln’s little scheme with the will, he got to the jury when he talked about you hurting his mother.”
“Junius Jelks landed a blow, too,” Rusty says with reluctant admiration.
“That no-’count bastard,” Quentin says. “I’ll be damned if I’ll ever take a look at his case. He can rot in Joliet till he’s lost his last tooth.”
“We don’t have a lot of time, guys,” I remind them. “As far as alternate suspects for sympathetic jurors to pin the murder on, I see two candidates. First, Lincoln. Could the jury believe that Lincoln might have killed his mother?”
After a brief silence, Quentin says, “No.”
“Then why did he come to Natchez early and lie about it?”
“He was waiting for your father to fulfill the assisted-suicide pact. And he wanted to be close by to orchestrate the destruction of the will and the reporting of the crime.”
“Is the jury smart enough to figure all that out?”
Quentin nods. “Twelve people can see through a brick wall if you give them enough time.”
“Rusty?” I prompt.
“That jury won’t think Lincoln killed his mother.”
“Why not?”
“You want it straight?”
“Yeah.”
“Black folks don’t kill Mama.”
Dad looks up at this. “Why do you say that, Rusty?”
Rusty gives my father his lopsided smile. “That’s conventional wisdom with prosecutors, Doc. When you get a perp who killed his father or mother, it’s almost always a white male. Now and then a white girl will do it, to stop sexual abuse, something like that. But as a general rule, blacks don’t kill their mothers.”
“To my everlasting amazement,” Quentin says, “Rust Bucket is right. Maybe it’s because we’re a matriarchal society, I don’t know. But it’s true. The jury won’t buy that theory.”
“Wait a second,” Rusty says, “Lincoln Turner is only half black.”
An awkward silence fills the air, but then Quentin scoffs and says, “Next question, Penn.”
“Second candidate: Snake and the Double Eagles. Will the jury believe—without Will Devine’s testimony—that the Double Eagles murdered Viola?”
“I don’t think so,” says Dad. “Not without hard evidence proving that they wanted to kill her. Or threatened to kill her. In this century.”
The audiotape Lincoln tried to sell me flashes into my mind, and I glare at Quentin, but he silences me with a slight shake of his head.
“Won’t the fact that someone just murdered a Double Eagle witness for the defense make the jury think that witness was about to implicate the killer?” I ask. “And that the killer was a Double Eagle? Quentin?”
Quentin looks far from certain. “They might just think an old Klansman was about to break his blood oath, and he got killed for it. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Tom.”
Rusty looks incredulous. “Come on! They triggered that needle just when you asked Devine about Viola. Penn, help me out here.”
“The question,” I say, drilling into Quentin with my eyes, “is did the Double Eagles represent a present-day threat to Viola? Had they threatened her within weeks or even days of her death?”
“Will Devine was about to verify that,” says Quentin.
“Well, he’ll never tell anybody about it now,” Dad says.
“Damn it,” I mutter, still thinking of Lincoln’s audiotape. Unable to contain my frustration, I turn to Quentin. “I’ll bet you wish you’d let me buy that tape from Lincoln now.”
He dismisses me with a wave of his hand.
“What tape?” Rusty asks.
“Forget it,” says Quentin. “Some scam from Lincoln.”
“Maybe it’s worth exploring after all,” Dad says, looking preoccupied.
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Rusty demands.
“Fairy tales,” snaps Quentin.
Before Rusty can push harder, there’s a knock at the door.
“Got to be Kaiser,” I tell them. “Rusty, ask him to give us a second.”
Rusty jumps up with surprising speed, considering his bulk, and I move closer to my father. “I think it’s worth trying to get that tape from Lincoln. I heard it. It would definitely push at least some of the jurors to believe Snake killed Viola.”
“Trust that boy and it’ll bite you on the ass,” Quentin says.