He gives me a sheepish look. “Not yet.”
I drop my hand from the doorknob. “Dad, for God’s sake. If you’re charged with assisted suicide, we can almost certainly plead it down to probation. Even if a jury found you guilty, we’d have a shot at a suspended sentence, or maybe just losing your license. So far as I can discover, no physician in Mississippi has gone to prison for assisted suicide. But several have gone to Parchman for murder.”
“Penn … we’re going in circles again.”
My impassioned argument has made no impression. “I suppose so. Well … the sheriff’s deputies could come as early as six A.M. Hopefully, they’ll wait until eight or nine, but you never know. I’ll be ready to bail you out. That’s if the judge sets bail, of course.”
“I can’t control the district attorney or the sheriff,” Dad says with the resignation of Mohandas Gandhi. “What I told you this morning is what I’ll tell the judge tomorrow. What happened between Viola and me happened between doctor and patient, and that’s where it’s going to stay. I owe her that much. At least that much. Shad Johnson and his ilk can go spit. They’re dogs barking at a passing hearse.”
My face colors. “And Viola’s son? Is Lincoln Turner a dog barking at a hearse?”
“I’m sure that boy is grieving. But time can work wonders with grief. I’ve seen it ten thousand times. A night’s sleep just might change his mind.”
I doubt it.
“Will you call me if Henry Sexton has new information?” he asks.
“I will, if you’ll tell me what you’re hiding from me.”
He looks away like a caged animal turning from a door it knows is locked. Then he picks up the medical record he was reading when I walked in and lifts the phone to resume his dictation.
MELBA PRICE IS LEANING against the wall by the back door, her big purse slung over the shoulder of her white uniform, her dark eyes watching me for clues. She looks like a middle-aged version of Esther Ford, and again I wish the old nurse were alive for me to question about Viola.
“Is the word out yet?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Melba is playing dumb, which she most assuredly is not.
“About what Dad might have done. Is it spreading in the black community?”
“There’s a little talk. Nothing bad yet.”
“What do they think about Shad Johnson these days?”
“My people?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Old Shadrach might not have a lot of black friends, but I will say this. He’s stuck around town enough years now that he’s earned some respect. He’s done a lot for black boys busted on drug charges, and that buys some gratitude.”
“How do they feel about Dad?”
“Lord, you know that. Dr. Cage is a saint on the north side of town.”
“Do you think anything could change that?”
Melba looks thoughtful. “They say that in Natchez people will forgive you for everything except going bankrupt. But that’s on the white side of town. On the black side, it’s something else people don’t forgive.”
“What’s that?”
“Breaking faith.”
“That sounds like a long conversation.”
Melba taps me in the middle of the chest. “You just do whatever you got to do to keep Doc out of jail. That man don’t deserve jail, no matter what he’s done. Not one day.”
“Were you listening at the door?”
The middle-aged nurse’s perfectly plucked eyebrows pantomime childlike innocence. “Wouldn’t dream of it, baby.”
“The only person who can keep Dad out of jail is Dad himself. Why don’t you convince him to talk to me?”
She gives me a mocking laugh. “I don’t control that man! He’s my boss, not the other way around.”
“I’ll bet forty years ago, Viola Turner would have told me the same thing.”
Melba’s face instantly turns sober. “You hush, boy. Get out of here, so he’ll finish those records and I can get home.”
“Do what you can, Melba.”
She watches me forlornly as I back down the hallway.
“I’ll try.”
CHAPTER 16
TOM CAGE GOT slowly up from his chair, then locked his office door. Melba would panic if she turned that handle and found it locked, but he didn’t want her coming in for at least a couple of minutes. Going to the bookcase behind his desk, he took down a signed first edition of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a treasure that survived the house fire only because he’d had it on his office shelves at the time. None of his nurses would open this book, not even if they were desperate for something to read, because it was set during the Civil War. Tom fanned the pages to the three-quarters point, then reached in and slid out a Polaroid photograph he’d kept since 1968.
The faded snapshot, which still had the primary-color saturation of a Technicolor movie, showed Viola Turner standing in front of a cabinet in Tom’s private office in the old clinic on Monroe Street. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking directly into the camera with a candid vulnerability that no one at the clinic had ever seen. Gone were the professional smile and practiced deference. In this picture, Viola was not the perfect ambassador for her race that her parents had raised her to be, but merely a woman in her late twenties, her defenses down, her eyes unguarded, her carefully straightened hair askew. Tom had shot the photo on a rainy afternoon one week after he patched up Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis, following their brawl with the Double Eagles. By that afternoon he was as different from the doctor who’d treated those boys as the Tom Cage who left Korea had been from the eighteen-year-old version of himself who’d arrived there in 1950.