Word of Henry Sexton’s video recording leaked out weeks ago, but thankfully the file itself has not leaked, to pop up on YouTube or some similar site. With Shad Johnson and Billy Byrd in charge of the evidence, I’m more than a little surprised. Shad must have decided that he’d rather handle the premiere of that footage himself. Looking away from the large, flat-screen TV on a cart against the wall, I glance up at the balcony and see Miriam Masters, Caitlin’s older sister, leaning on the rail, looking into my eyes. Miriam and Caitlin did not much resemble each other. They were both thin and strong, but where Caitlin had jet-black hair, pale skin, and green eyes, Miriam has sandy-blond hair and gray eyes that hold a different sort of intelligence than her sister’s did. Caitlin was lightning quick on the uptake, while Miriam has a slow-burning intellect that suits itself to the siege-type litigation that until five years ago she handled for her father’s newspaper chain.
“If you feel confused by what I’ve just said,” Shad says to the jury, “I sympathize. At the simplest level, a person might ask, ‘How can you murder somebody who begged you to help kill them?’ On one level, that’s easy to answer, if we use the example I gave of the depressed paraplegic and the shotgun. But there the motive is still to end pain out of mercy, something reasonable people can argue both ways. What makes this case unique in the annals of jurisprudence is that we have a willing victim—a woman who wanted to die, and who’d asked her physician to help her do that as a mercy—but a physician whose motive for agreeing to end her life was the moral opposite of mercy or compassion. Dr. Cage’s motive was not to help Viola Turner end her pain, but to silence her forever.” Shad’s eyes move from one face to the next in the jury box. “Tom Cage acted ruthlessly to protect himself from a woman who was about to shatter the reputation he had spent decades building, and to destroy the family he had chosen over the victim herself, and the son she had borne by him.”
Shad folds his hands and looks at the floor. If anyone had any doubts about how aggressively he would go after my father, Shad has laid those doubts to rest.
“The question,” he goes on, “is not whether or not Tom Cage killed Viola Turner—he did. Evidence will show that Dr. Cage was alone with the victim in the hour prior to her death. Fingerprint evidence recovered at the scene proves that Dr. Cage injected Viola Turner with morphine on that night. The autopsy proved it was a lethal dose. Both the syringe and the morphine vial were recovered by law enforcement. The autopsy also proved that Viola was given a lethal dose of adrenaline. The adrenaline ampoule was not recovered, but evidence will show that Dr. Cage had ready access to untraceable stocks of adrenaline and was known to keep ampoules at home, in his office, and in his emergency medical bag.”
After this recitation of facts, Shad raises his head and moves on to what the jury is really interested in. “Right now, I’d like to dispel one misconception: the video recording I just mentioned does not show Dr. Cage injecting Viola Turner with adrenaline, as some rumors have claimed. It shows only the results of that injection, which are horrifying enough. Mrs. Turner probably triggered the camera during her death throes, when she was trying to reach her telephone to call for help. But regardless of this omission, the critical facts are not in doubt.”
Shad nods toward my father with almost casual condemnation. “That man sitting there killed Viola Turner. The question is, why? And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, is depressingly simple. For most of her life, Viola Turner had known things about Tom Cage that no one else in the world knew. The most dangerous of those secrets was a staple of Southern gothic fiction: Tom Cage, the beloved white physician, had fathered a black child. I feel strange saying that, I don’t mind telling you. Because in point of fact, Lincoln Turner is half black, and half white.” Shad’s voice drips sarcasm as he pays off his setup line. “But as we all know, it only takes one drop of black blood to make you a nigger.”
No exclamation of horror follows this word, but a state of hyperalertness has taken possession of the people in the room. Tactically, Shad’s choice of words was a blunt announcement that no punches will be pulled during this trial, that the euphemistic language of political correctness will not be used to mask painful truths. In my experience, juries appreciate such frankness, and my lawyer’s instinct tells me that Shad has stolen a march on Quentin.
“I’m sorry if I offended anyone by saying that,” he says, “but anyone easily offended by such language would be well advised to leave this courtroom and not return. For race and racism, as I said, lie at the very heart of this case. Let us be honest here together. Everyone in this room has heard the word ‘nigger’ more times than they could count. We’ve heard it said in anger and in jest, in casual discourse, and in flaming rhetoric. But the important thing to recognize about the statement I made—that it only takes one drop of black blood to make you a nigger—is that a horror and hatred of what was once called miscegenation was part of the world Tom Cage grew up in. Even if Dr. Cage himself did not share the deepest prejudices of many whites—and I’m not saying he didn’t, for many a white racist loved to bed black women—Tom Cage knew that he lived in a town filled with people who did. This town. And after a lifetime of building a reputation for integrity unsurpassed in this city, Dr. Cage could not stand to see that reputation shattered, his children disillusioned, his son’s political career damaged, his personal legacy destroyed.
“And what of Viola Turner? For four decades she had dutifully concealed his darkest secrets. But when she returned to Natchez, this poor woman was staring at death’s door, and she was ready to unburden her soul. Ready to do right by her child. She could no longer stand to carry Dr. Cage’s lies within her like a second cancer. Hiding those lies had forced Viola to enmesh herself in a web of deceit so complex that no one knew the whole of her terrible life story. Tragically, Viola believed that Tom Cage had enough integrity and responsibility to live up to the actions of his past. But he did not. Faced with the choice of telling the truth or committing murder, Dr. Cage chose to kill. And how easy it must have been. For evidence will show you that Tom Cage was no stranger to murder.”
This assertion stuns me like a blow. First, because my father is connected to a murder some years ago—an accidental killing that resulted from a beating Ray Presley carried out in Mobile, Alabama, in 1973, against a dirty cop who had threatened my aunt’s life. I can’t imagine that Shad would know anything about that, and even if he does, such information would not be admissible in this trial. But therein lies the rub. “Prior bad acts” are generally not admissible in a criminal trial, and Quentin should have raised the roof the instant Shad declared his intention to bring up such. Yet Quentin still sits at the defense table like a placid old man on a town square bench. Judge Elder clearly expected some sort of protest, but Quentin offers none. What the hell was Shad referring to? I wonder. There’s no way he could know about Dad helping my wife to pass when she lay on the verge of death from cancer.
Perhaps surprised not to be interrupted, Shad says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the details of this case are complicated, but the heart of it is simple. This is the tale of a saint who turned out to have feet of clay. Worse, a saint who made a pact with the devil. Make no mistake, this trial is the final act in the public and professional life of Dr. Tom Cage.”