I stab my right forefinger at Billy, and though I say nothing, the subtext is clear to two Mississippi boys.
In a voice laced with malice, he says, “You better pray your daddy’s bail ain’t revoked. And you’d better make sure he don’t break one condition of his bond. If he does, I’ll own his ass until the last day of trial. And I can make it mighty rough on a prisoner in my jail. Think about that tonight when you’re laid up with your dyke girlfriend, trying to get to sleep.”
The prospect of my father in this man’s custody sends a shudder down my back, and Billy Byrd doesn’t miss it. He smiles like an arrogant prizefighter first sensing fear in his opponent.
“Don’t forget your picture,” Shad says brightly, walking to his desk and retrieving the printout, which he holds out to me.
“Keep it. Put it on your Wall of Respect, since you’re so proud of it.”
My right hand tingles as I grasp the doorknob, and something makes me turn to the DA one last time. “Stop this while you can, Shad. Before it gets so big you can’t stop it.”
Almost imperceptibly, the district attorney shakes his head.
“Hubris, Shad. Remember the word?”
Like a black Leonard Nimoy, he raises one chiding eyebrow. “That’s a question better asked of your father, I think. Don’t you?”
CHAPTER 40
BACK ON THE STREET, the full import of what happened in Shad Johnson’s office finally sinks in. For a few seconds I think I might actually vomit. I’ve been through many tense confrontations in my career, but not with my father’s life hanging in the balance.
“This thing’s going to trial,” I murmur. “Christ.”
Until a couple of minutes ago, I believed that the photo of Shad torturing that pit bull was my weapon of last resort, like Israel’s nuclear stockpile. Now I’ve opened my arsenal and found my plutonium replaced with baking powder. The realization that nothing can hinder Shad from going after my father with maximum intensity—from exploiting every sordid detail of this situation in the media—is almost paralyzing.
“Afternoon, Mayor,” says a lawyer’s secretary, hurrying past, her coat wrapped tight against the wind.
The temperature is dropping fast. To avoid further human interaction, I back into a recessed doorway and gaze at the wall of the sheriff’s office and jail, whose high slit-windows give it the look of a Stalinist prison. Huddling in the nook while people stride past, I try to get my bearings and make a plan.
Nothing comes to me.
Taking out my cell phone, I dial Quentin Avery’s house in Jefferson County. His cell phone rings eight times, and then a sterile female voice informs me that the AT&T customer I’ve called has not set up his voice mail. “Of course he hasn’t. He’s a fucking fossil.”
Slowly it comes to me that in this town that once nurtured me—the town that, in theory, I rule—I have no power to alter the course of events. Mayor Penn Cage. What a joke. The title is meaningless. My Mississippi law license grants me more power than my political office. As I consider heading to the City Hall parking lot for my car, one of Billy Byrd’s growled taunts comes back to me with cutting power: Your daddy shoulda wore a rubber when he screwed that hot chocolate back in the day.
Why do so many people seem ready to assume that my father and Viola were lovers? I’m almost certain that Shad painted this scenario for the grand jury this afternoon, and their true bill proves they believed it. Last night, even Caitlin told me I should assume that Dad had made love with Viola, given her beauty and the closeness of their work relationship.
Am I the only fool involved in this mess?
For the first time since Shad called me with the news of Viola’s death, I feel utterly directionless—a ship without a rudder. Stranger still, I feel a temporal dislocation that’s almost dizzying. Some passing pedestrians clutch Christmas packages in their hands, but that makes no sense. Caitlin and I were supposed to be married on Christmas Eve, which can’t be many days from now, yet the idea seems absurd. I don’t even have a firm grip on the year. The last definite event in my mind is Hurricane Katrina, which must have been … four months ago? Everything since seems a blur, with my father’s face at the center of it. Leaning out of the doorway, I blink against the chill wind, and whatever grip I still had on the present falls way.
I am eight years old. My father has dropped me off at the hospital to visit a friend who broke both his legs in a motorcycle accident. Dad promises to return by 9:30 P.M., when visiting hours are over. If I’m late, he says, walk outside and wait under the light pole by the flower bed in front of the hospital. I do what I can to amuse my friend, who’s in constant agony from the traction cables attached to pins through his femurs, and I silently resolve never to get on a motorcycle. At nine thirty, the nurses tell me I have to go.