“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.”