“It looked like some sort of heart attack to me, or maybe a drug reaction. Possibly a stroke. She was short of breath, gasping, sweating. She was trying to reach a telephone that had fallen onto the floor. Whatever the underlying problem was, she called out your name twice. And the district attorney thinks that’s tantamount to an accusation of guilt. A dying accusation, in fact—which carries more weight, legally speaking.”
Dad appears not only lost in thought, but strangely untroubled by my words. Part of me wants to shake him until he faces up to the looming danger, but another wants to spare him all the stress I can (as my mother begged me to do) and minimize the chance of another heart attack.
“Shad’s full of shit, of course,” I say.
Dad cuts his eyes at me. “Why do you say that?”
“Because if you’d helped Viola to die, she would have died painlessly. And you would have held her hand to the very end.”
He looks back at me without blinking. “Are you sure you know me so well?”
“Yes. Dad, a lot has happened since we spoke this morning. That video isn’t your only problem. The sheriff’s department has a syringe with your fingerprints on it, and also two prescription vials of morphine sulfate, with you listed as the prescribing physician. Worse, Viola’s sister has stated that you and Viola had a euthanasia pact, and I gather she’s willing to testify to that. Cora Revels will establish that you’ve been treating Viola for the past few weeks. I don’t know what other physical evidence they have, but they’ll get toxicology back from the medical examiner in Jackson before long. If they rush it, we’re liable to know what killed her in two or three days.”
“That should make interesting reading.”
“You don’t already know what it will say?”
Dad shrugs noncommittally. “I’ll tell you something about death: it’s infinitely variable. A twenty-year-old Olympic athlete can trip over a curb and die instantly, and a ninety-year-old woman with three kinds of cancer can live to be a hundred.”
“Your point?”
“Drug interactions are unpredictable.”
His enigmatic tone makes me wonder if he’s caught in some transition stage between shock and grief. I should have recognized it immediately, based on my experience with murder victims’ families in Houston. But all that seems a long time ago now, and despite the nearness of Viola’s death, I need Dad to snap out of it. I need his self-preservation instinct to kick in.
“The DA isn’t thinking about drug interactions. He’s not even thinking about assisted suicide anymore. Shad intends to charge you with murder.”
After a brief grimace, Dad takes a brown bottle from his inside coat pocket and places a tiny white pill under his tongue.
“Is that nitro? You’re having angina now?”
He nods distractedly. “I’m fine. Go on.”
“I wish I could spare you this, but I can’t. At first I assumed that Shad’s idea of murder was you giving Viola the morphine injection, which is technically murder but much less serious than what we’re facing now. This afternoon Shad told me that he’s planning to charge you with first-degree murder. He won’t give me details, but he claims to have strong evidence of motive on your part—a motive for premeditated murder.”
Dad looks incredulous. “What kind of motive?”
“Shad believes you wanted to silence Viola before she could reveal some information you want kept secret.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“That’s the contention of Viola’s son.”
“Johnson wouldn’t tell you what this information was?”
I shake my head. Part of me wants to ask the brutally blunt question about Viola and my father, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to do it. Confronting him about a possible affair with Viola feels like challenging Dwight Eisenhower about his wartime mistress.
“Dad,” I say instead, “I have something on Shad that would destroy his legal career, and he knows it. He wouldn’t risk moving against you unless he felt he had no other choice. Whatever Lincoln Turner told Shad, or showed him, Shad genuinely believes it was a motive for murder.”
My father ponders this revelation like a monk parsing contradictory passages in the Bible.
“Given what I just told you, is there anything you want to tell me now?”
He grunts and shifts position like a man with upper back pain. “No.”
Leaning forward, I speak with all the conviction I can muster. “There is nothing you could tell me today that would alter my opinion of you, or make me judge you. Nothing. You understand?”
He closes his eyes for a moment. “Are you so sure?”
“Yes. If you and Viola were closer than you should have been … I’ve got no problem with that.”
Nothing in his expression changes.
“If you and Viola had a euthanasia pact, I’ve got no problem with that, either. You ought to know that.” I look meaningfully to his left, where a portrait of me with Sarah and Annie sits framed. “Maybe something went wrong, or something unforeseen occurred. Whatever it was, you’re the only person who can shed light on that event. And if you don’t, you’re going to wind up on trial for murder.”
Dad’s face hardens. “If that’s true … then so be it.”
I groan with frustration. “Dad, the trusty old doctor-patient privilege defense isn’t going to fly in this case. You understand?”
“You’re mighty quick to make light of that. Penn, you once told me about a journalist who went to jail for three weeks to protect a source, and you couldn’t stop telling me how much you admired the man.”
“That’s different.”