“Wouldn’t have done no good, though,” Lincoln says in despair. “He’d given her the morphine by then, and Cora was passed out at the neighbor’s house.”
Shad bows his head again, as though gathering himself after being wrung out emotionally. “Let’s clarify something. Junius Jelks, your mother’s husband and widower, never knew who your real father was. Is that correct?”
“That’s right.”
“All right. Now . . . what did you find when you arrived at Cora Revels’s house in the wee hours of December twelfth?”
“By then, Auntie had come back home, and I told her to call 911. The paramedics were there.”
“Did your aunt mention Dr. Cage to you?”
“Not at first. But within an hour, she told me about the assisted-suicide pact.”
“Yesterday Cora Revels testified that, at that point, she believed that what had taken place was an assisted suicide.”
“She told me the same thing.”
“But you didn’t believe her?”
“The scene looked chaotic to me. It didn’t look like the scene of an assisted suicide.”
“Do you have enough experience to make that judgment?”
“I’m no expert. But it didn’t look as though Mama had died peacefully. I didn’t know the Mississippi law on assisted suicide, but I knew that if Dr. Cage had given her the injection himself, he was guilty of murder.”
“I see.” Shad starts to walk back to his table, but then he turns back to the witness. “Tell me this, Lincoln. Did you hope that Dr. Cage had given her the injection? That he was guilty of murder?”
“At that time? Yes, sir. I did.”
The silence that follows this statement is absolute.
“And now?”
“Now . . . I just want to know the truth.”
“Thank you.” Shad gives Lincoln a sympathetic smile, then walks to his chair and sits down. He doesn’t look at Quentin when he says, “Your witness.”
Judge Elder is looking at his watch and probably thinking of his stomach when the click and whir of Quentin’s chair announces that he will indeed cross-examine Lincoln Turner.
Quentin’s chair rolls up to the lawyer’s podium, then past it, and stops about ten feet from Lincoln, who stares back with sullen defiance.
“Hello, Mr. Turner,” Quentin says in his warm baritone.
Lincoln nods warily. He is facing a man whose cases he probably studied in law school.
“That’s a mighty sad story you just told.”
Lincoln offers no comment.
“Judge,” Shad complains, “is there a question on the horizon?”
Joe Elder gives Shad a dark look. “Mr. Johnson, Mr. Avery just allowed you to conduct a fireside chat with your witness. Be patient.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Quentin hasn’t broken eye contact with Lincoln since rolling up to the witness box. But now he looks down, touches his joystick, and makes a quarter turn toward the jury. “Before we get into any of the substantive issues you raised, Mr. Turner, I want to get my chronology straight. I find that it sometimes helps me—and also jury members—to work backwards from the present rather than forward from a past event. All right?”
“Whatever you say.”
Quentin gives a tight smile. “You stated that you did not see your mother from the time you had the confrontation over Tom Cage until she lay dead in her sister’s home. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you never got to tell your mother you’d forgiven her, because you didn’t arrive from Chicago in time. You were still thirty minutes outside of town when she died.”
I can see the lawyer in Lincoln trying to figure out where Quentin is going with these questions, but Quentin’s casual tone gives no clue to what he considers important.
“That’s right,” Lincoln says.
“All right. Now, you stated that you wanted to kill Tom Cage after you learned he was your father.”
“That’s right.”
“And you only learned that fact three months before your mother died?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still want to kill Dr. Cage?”
Lincoln looks like he’d prefer to kill Quentin Avery right now, but the blaze of anger in his eyes slowly subsides. “No, I don’t want to kill him. I don’t want nothing from him.”
Quentin draws back his head in surprise. “You want him to go to jail, don’t you?”
“If the jury believes he should.”
Quentin smiles at this. “Come now, Mr. Turner. Don’t you believe that Tom Cage murdered your mother?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you prompt the DA to begin the investigation into her death?”
“Any son would have done the same.”
Quentin nods agreeably. “But you never wanted anything from Dr. Cage, you said?”
“You mean money? Or something like that?”
“I mean anything.”
Lincoln looks down into his lap, as though genuinely lost in thought. Then he looks up and says, “I wanted his acknowledgment. When Mama told me he was my father, what I really wanted was to hear that he wasn’t ashamed of me. That I meant something to him. But that ain’t nothing but a little boy’s dream.” Lincoln gives me a baleful glare. “Tom Cage had his white son over there, the mayor. What would he want with me? The truth is, he wished I’d never been born—and he still does.”
A pall of ill will toward the Cage family falls over the court. I can feel it like a sudden drop in temperature, like the shadow of storm clouds passing overhead.
Quentin regards Lincoln for several seconds in silence. Then, after glancing up at Judge Elder, he rotates his chair and whirs back toward the defense table. Just before reaching it, he rotates to face Lincoln again.
“If you didn’t want anything from Dr. Cage—nothing but his acknowledgment, as you claim—then why do you think your mother hid his identity from you all those years?”
Lincoln blinks slowly in the face of Quentin’s question. At length, he says, “I think she was more worried about protecting him than helping me. But I don’t know for sure. And thanks to Tom Cage, I never will.”
Quentin smiles faintly, as though in appreciation of a fine line heard at a play. “No further questions, Judge.”
“Redirect?”
“No, Your Honor,” Shad replies.
Quentin’s suddenly truncated cross-examination leaves everyone perplexed, including Lincoln Turner.
Judge Elder recovers first, and says, “It’s past twelve o’clock. Let’s all have some lunch. We’ll resume at one fifteen.”
Chapter 38
Rusty and I are escorting my mother and sister out of the courthouse through the side door that leads to City Hall when my cell phone pings to alert me to a text message. Checking the screen, I see danforth washington on the LCD. Dan Washington is Jewel Washington’s son. I hate to be rude to my own mother, who is talking, but I can’t afford to ignore a message from the county coroner, a staunch ally of both me and my father.
“Just a second, Mom. This is important.”
Darting through the jostling people to the wall, I read Jewel’s text.
Urgent we talk f2f. Mrs. Petros is out of town. I’ll be in the courtyard behind her house in five minutes. Can u get there?
The antebellum home Jewel is referring to stands only two blocks from the courthouse. I type: On my way, then press send.