Esther Ford worked for my father longer than any other nurse, nearly forty years, and by the time she retired last year she was a physician assistant. Four months after she retired, Esther died of a stroke in her sleep. I’d give almost anything to have her around to question about Viola’s relationship with Dad.
“Viola had worked at Charity Hospital before Dr. Lucas hired her,” Dad goes on. “Young as she was, she’d done some of everything. Delivered babies, assisted with all kinds of surgery—you name it, she’d helped do it. More than I had, in some areas. Her Creole grandmother was a midwife in New Orleans, and Viola had spent several years with her as a girl. That’s where she picked up her French, and a lot of hard-earned medical knowledge besides. Most days, Viola and Esther could have run this clinic on their own.”
I start to ask another question, but Dad says, “I imagine the licensing requirements were stricter in Chicago than in Mississippi, though. I don’t think Viola had an easy time getting work when she got up there.”
“Did you stay in contact with her after she left Natchez?”
“No. She sent a couple of letters to the clinic, but I don’t think she put much truth in them. I saw her sister as a patient, and Cora told me things weren’t going too well for Viola ‘up north.’ Viola got married soon after she got there. Too soon, as it turned out. Women tend to do that during hard times. The pretty ones, anyway. She married some kind of con man. A hustler.”
A con man? “Do you know if he was the father of the son who’s down here? This Lincoln Turner?”
“I assume so. They have the same last name. But on the other hand, I don’t understand how he could be. Turner was the last name of the man Viola married down here, the one who was killed in Vietnam. It’s hard to believe she’d move to Chicago and marry a different man named Turner. But she didn’t talk to me about any of that, and I didn’t push it. He’s in jail now, by the way—the father.”
In jail? “That gives us something to think about.”
Dad arches his eyebrows.
“If Lincoln Turner was raised by a con man,” I say, “maybe he’s down here looking for money. This afternoon I called the Illinois State Bar Association and found out Lincoln is about to be disbarred.”
“Really? What for?”
“He apparently embezzled money from a client escrow account, and I got hints of a deeper scandal. Possible bribery of a judge. Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I’ll find out more soon, but for now, what else can you tell me about Viola’s life in Chicago?”
“Only what I learned these past weeks. I gather the husband was a charming rogue. He did all right in the beginning, so it took her a while to discover his crooked streak. But before long, Viola was doing all the work and he was spending all the money. He drank it up or gambled it away. After a while, she started drinking to help herself deal with his drinking. It’s an old story. Viola gained weight, started smoking, got depressed. She aged fast. The North could be as cruel as the South to blacks in those days. More cruel, in some ways. Things went steadily downhill. The husband looked elsewhere for sex. He’d probably been cheating on her from the start, Viola said.”
Dad shakes his head with a mixture of sadness and incomprehension. “I think it hurt Viola’s pride when she lost her looks. She was never vain, but I don’t care how selfless a woman is, she still cares about her looks. And Viola had been a beauty. I think between the drinking, the no-’count husband, and working hard to raise her son, she just wore herself out.”
“I sure hate to hear that. What I remember of Viola is like a dream. In my mind she looks like a TV star.”
Dad smiles wistfully. “I don’t think anybody who ever knew her down here would believe her fate. That’s why she never came home. Viola wanted people to remember her as she had been. And they did. She only worked here for eight years, but people still ask about her thirty-seven years later. She had a life force that made you want to be close to her. One lady told me that a smile from Viola Turner could warm you up on a cold day. She could give a child a shot without a tear being shed, and that was something in the days of screw-on needles you had to sand the burrs off of.”
I can’t help but laugh. “You’re right.”
Dad starts to smile, but the expression dies a-borning. “Penn … if you’d seen Viola in her sickbed yesterday, you’d have cried. I did, after the first time I saw her. Time is a terrible thing. And lung cancer’s worse.”
“I did see her,” I confess, wondering at the irony of the smoke filling this office.
Dad blinks like an old man awakened from an accidental nap. “You what? What do you mean?”
“Today I saw a video recording of the last minute of Viola’s life.”
His eyes narrow with suspicion. “What are you talking about?”
As deliberately as I can, I explain about Henry Sexton and the hard drive mounted on the camera left in Viola’s sickroom. “The mini-DV tape was missing,” I conclude, “but the hard drive was still there. Viola must have rolled over the remote control in her death throes. And that’s what got recorded. Shad Johnson has no idea I’ve seen the recording, of course.”
Dad is staring at me with an inscrutable expression. “What did you see?”
“Viola dying. But it sure didn’t look like any morphine overdose.”
“Why do you say that?”
I pause before answering. “If you have to ask me that, you weren’t in the room.”
Dad’s gaze seems locked on some obscure title in the bookshelves to my left. A defense mechanism. “Penn, please just tell me.”