This question Quentin actually considers. “I don’t want to get into legal details, but I’ve tried to get some special considerations for Tom at the jail, considering the severity of his health problems—not to mention my worries about Billy Byrd—and Joe hasn’t been any help.”
“You should have filed that damned change-of-venue motion.”
Quentin looks upriver, where a string of barges is making its way down from Vicksburg. “You got any boiled peanuts? I could really use some.”
“No boiled peanuts, Q.”
“Damn. How ’bout you send that pretty writer out for some? Or one of them bodyguards you got?”
I stand in exasperation and walk to the rail. “Do you want to go over the jury pool or not?”
He waves his hand. “Nah. I just want you to go over it, so you can give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down during the voir dire. I choose by instinct, you know that. But you might know some info on locals that somehow escapes my Sherlockian skills.” The old lawyer gives me a self-mocking grin. “I’m not perfect. Not quite, anyway.”
“That’s for damn sure,” says Doris Avery, stepping onto the gallery with Serenity in tow.
Doris is thirty years her husband’s junior, which puts her close to my age. She’s also a lawyer, and a beautiful woman. In the afternoon light, I can’t help noticing the difference in skin tone between her and Serenity. Though lighter than Quentin, Doris is darker than Serenity, and thus solidly on the wrong end of the paper-bag-test spectrum.
“What have you ladies been talking about inside?” Quentin asks. “The handsome menfolk out here, I trust?”
“Delusional,” says Doris. “That’s what you are. And you’d better watch your mouth around this girl, Q. She won’t put up with your sass for five seconds.”
Quentin grins, then winks at Serenity. “I’ll look forward to being reprimanded.”
Doris snorts. “What have you two been talking about? The voir dire, I hope.”
“Boiled peanuts,” Quentin says. “I got a serious jones for some right now.”
“Well,” Doris says with infinite patience, “let me get cleaned up a little, and then we’ll take a ride and see if we can find some in this town. These two have more important things to do than listen to your bullshit.”
Serenity and I leave them smiling on the gallery, slapping it back and forth like a couple married for fifty years.
“She’s worried about Quentin,” Serenity says as we get into the Audi. “She said he’s been going down fast since he lost his second leg.”
I shift the car into gear and loop around by Rosalie, where the French settled Natchez back in 1716. “He’ll make it through the trial,” I say, sounding like I’m trying to persuade myself. “This is his swan song.”
Serenity nods, but she doesn’t look convinced.
As I turn left into traffic on Canal Street, she lays her hand over mine where it rests on the emergency brake lever. She squeezes lightly, then lifts her hand and puts it back in her lap.
A shiver goes through me at her touch, but upon reflection her gesture didn’t seem sexual in any way. It was more an unspoken acknowledgment of something we both sense. Bad times coming. Beyond that, she might have meant to add, And I’m here with you. But who knows?
The moment’s passed.
Chapter 19
By eight p.m. we’ve still heard nothing from Cleotha Booker. An hour ago, Serenity retired to her room to make some calls, which meant reaching out to friends in Detroit to have them ask their elders about any Dolores who got married in the 1960s and moved to Mississippi for a while, then returned. This kind of effort sounded absurd to me, but Serenity told me I might be surprised by the way information moved in the black community—even in a large city like Detroit. While she put out her feelers up north, I watched television with Annie and my mother. I paid no attention to the programs, and Mom didn’t, either. But sitting there served to begin the process of our coming back together as a family before the trial starts tomorrow.
During a commercial break, Annie muted the volume to raise the question of whether she’ll be allowed to go to court. I’m open to the idea, but Mom is dead set against it. She told Annie she doesn’t want her hearing any of the “scandalous lies” that will doubtless be told about her grandfather. Annie reluctantly accepted this—for the time being—but I know the real reason for my mother’s resistance. She doesn’t want Annie hearing the truth about her grandfather.
About eight thirty, I decide to walk the three blocks down to the courthouse and get a look at the field of battle. Tim walks with me through the darkness, and he’s perceptive enough not to talk beyond the first twenty steps. The scent of flowers is on the air: azaleas, Confederate jasmine, and my favorite—sweet olive—but the sweetness only serves to remind me how transitory all happiness tends to be.
The Natchez courthouse stands two blocks from the bluff, directly opposite the sheriff’s department and jail. On one side of State Street, set on a small hill, the classic Greek Revival building rises above the majestic oak trees that surround it. On the other side of the street squats a brick Stalinist version of a medieval pile, with slit windows on the jail floors piled atop one another to compete with the white columns and airy cupola facing them. The architect probably copied those windows from a castle in a book. My father is behind one of those slits, but I can’t tell which. If I stand here long enough he might look out, for like me, he doesn’t usually go to sleep until long past midnight.
Tim has given me about thirty yards of space, which is more than he usually does. Tonight I’m thankful for the separation. As I stare at the ugly, sodium-lit building, it suddenly strikes me that Dad hasn’t excluded me from this case to hurt me. Rather, he has cut himself off from us all, like a father in the Middle Ages infected with plague, crawling off into the forest to die before infecting his family. The only person he’s willing to talk to is an ailing peer: Quentin Avery.
Turning to face the courthouse, I reflect on the fact that I have tried more than a thousand criminal cases in my life—many of them murder cases—but tomorrow I will be only a spectator. I will carry Quentin’s water during the voir dire, but once the real action starts, I’ll be relegated to the gallery. Many lawyers would probably be content with this; Quentin’s courtroom skills are legendary. But that is cold comfort tonight. To my knowledge, he has no investigators, no co-counsel, not even assistants working for him (other than his wife). How in God’s name does he plan to break down the nearly impervious forensic case built up by Shadrach Johnson and Sheriff Byrd over the past three months? I suppose I’ll find out at the same time as everyone else in the courtroom. I can only pray that the old fox lives up to his legend one last time.
“Mr. Mayor?” calls a soft voice.
I squint and see the courthouse janitor—an old black man, naturally—walking down the concrete steps.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” he asks.