“Can you explain that?”
“At the time I was conceived—probably March of 1968—Mama’s first husband, James Turner, had been dead for nine months. Killed in Vietnam. When Mama went to Chicago, she was pregnant by Dr. Cage. But when I was born, she put down James Turner’s name on the birth certificate. She told them her husband was still over in Vietnam. They didn’t have computers back then, so I guess that wasn’t hard. Anyway, a year later, when Mama married Daddy—Mr. Jelks—she believed he was an insurance man. But by the time I was five, she’d figured out different. Junius Jelks made his living breaking the law. Mama almost left him then, but she really wanted me to have a father, so she made a deal with him. If Mr. Jelks would legally adopt me, she would stay his wife.”
Lincoln’s Dickensian narrative has everyone in the room enthralled. Looking behind me, at the balcony, I see Serenity writing in her notebook, her rapt eyes on the witness box.
“Mr. Jelks agreed to this arrangement,” Lincoln goes on, “but they still had a problem. Daddy didn’t have a good enough ID to adopt me under the name of Taney, and he was wanted for several crimes under his legal name, Jelks. Then he hit on the idea of using Mama’s first husband’s ID papers to adopt me. It’s kind of sad to say it out loud, but Mama agreed to the plan, and that’s what they did. Junius Jelks became James Turner, Vietnam vet and war hero, and I went from being Lincoln Taney to Lincoln Turner.”
Shad pauses to let this sad and complex tale sink into the minds of the jury.
“How long did Junius Jelks succeed in passing himself off as James Turner?”
“Several years. He went by James Turner when he did anything legitimate, but he had a lot of other aliases for criminal activities.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he used me in his cons. From the time I was little. People will believe almost anything when you’ve got a child with you. And if you teach that child to help you, the marks are like fish in a barrel.”
“When did you learn that James Turner was not your father’s true name?”
“We got arrested when I was thirteen. A vice cop recognized Daddy’s face. He’d arrested him before, down in Minooka. That cop didn’t care what the driver’s license said; he knew he’d collared Junius Jelks. Daddy had to do another stretch in jail, and I was lucky not to go to the reformatory.”
“How did your mother explain the problem with the names to you?”
“Mama told me we’d had to use the name Turner because Daddy had been framed for something a long time ago. She had no idea that I’d been helping Daddy work cons for years. He’d take me out of school to do it. I was his meal ticket for a while. All Mama did back then was work and drink. I think she suspected how bad things were, but she couldn’t face it. She was depressed. They didn’t have drugs for that then, so she just drank and chain-smoked her Salems.
“I was pretty confused by then,” Lincoln goes on. “I made decent grades, but I was in and out of trouble all the time. I had anger problems. Fought a lot. I was lucky that Child Protective Services didn’t take me out of the home during that period.”
“But still you managed to attend college.”
“That’s right. Mama had always worked hard, and she managed to hide a lot of her money from Mr. Jelks. She had a decent little nest egg put back for me.”
“Enough to pay for four years of college?”
“No. But she’d worked for the same doctor for seventeen years, and he put up some money for me to go. Whatever Mama didn’t have, he paid.”
“Was this doctor black or white?”
Lincoln seems almost reluctant to answer. “White.”
This answer obviously resonates with the jury, who now realizes that Viola went to Chicago and put herself into a situation almost identical to the one she’d left behind in Mississippi. At least some jury members must be wondering whether Viola might have been sleeping with that doctor, too. A smart defense lawyer would bring this up during cross-examination, subtly suggesting that Viola Turner had a very practical—perhaps even predatory—side when it came to survival. But of course Quentin will suggest no such thing. He probably won’t even bother to question Lincoln.
“What was Mr. Jelks doing during your teen and college years?”
“Messing up like me, only worse. Mama got him a few legitimate jobs—the doctor she worked for did, too—but Jelks always managed to get himself fired. He still tried to rope me into cons, but by then I knew that if I was convicted of a felony, I’d never be a lawyer, and for some reason that was what I’d made up my mind to be.”
“Why did you want that?”
“I guess Mama put it in my head. She was tired of all Daddy’s lies and crime. I think she wanted something she could be proud of. She’d named me after Abraham Lincoln, you know.”
Shad vouchsafes the witness a supportive smile, and he makes sure he’s facing the jury when he does it.
“And did you go to law school?”
“Yes, sir. Night school. It took me longer than most, because I had to work my way through. But I passed the Illinois State Bar in 1995. I was twenty-seven years old.”
“How did your legal career go?”
“Pretty good, for a while.”
“And today?”
Lincoln looks into his lap like a sinner in church about to come to Jesus. “I no longer have a license to practice.”
Shad feigns surprise. “Why is that, Mr. Turner?”
Like any good prosecutor, Shad is removing all chance of Quentin making capital out of forcing Lincoln to admit he’s been disbarred.
“Daddy did a stretch in prison from 1997 to 2001,” Lincoln says quietly. “After he got out, I got him a legit job as a runner with a law firm.”
“Excuse me? A runner? Do you mean a gofer?”
“Uh, no. In some places, a ‘runner’ is somebody who recruits clients for attorneys. Hangs around ERs and places like that, drumming up business.”
“I see.”
“Well, Daddy managed to stay straight for almost three years. Or at least he didn’t get caught during that time. But then he got busted for a big con. It was either the public defender or me, so I defended him in court.”
“How did that go?”
“Not well. He was a three-time loser, and the prospects for acquittal were zero. I was hoping for a reasonable plea deal, but the ADA was being a hardass—excuse me, Judge.”
“Keep it civil, Mr. Turner.”
Lincoln ducks his head like a disciplined child. “Well, not long before Daddy’s trial date, he told me he’d got word through a contact in the courthouse that we’d hit the jackpot with the judge we drew. For seventy-five thousand dollars, our judge would supposedly see that Daddy did no more than a year behind bars, then a year of house arrest, and the rest on probation. At that time he was looking at fifteen years without parole, so this deal was like a gift from the gods.”
“You’re talking about bribery, Lincoln.”