Turning Angel

“What about the fishermen who found the girl’s body?” I ask, trying to take Shad’s mind off Drew’s alibi. “Have you ruled them out?”

“They’re down at the hospital providing DNA samples as we speak. They couldn’t wait to do it.”

Damn. “And Kate Townsend’s boyfriend?”

“Steve Sayers? Same deal.” Shad taps the cherry desktop with manicured fingernails. “The boy’s alibi is a little weak, but he couldn’t wait to get over to the hospital and give blood. He offered to whack off in a cup right here in my office. Says he hasn’t had sex with the victim in months. Seems Miss Townsend just up and stopped putting out, no explanation. And before that, she was as hot as they come, according to the Sayers boy. Kinky, he said.” Shad gives me a cagey look. “You think she got religion?”

I keep my face impassive.

Shad smiles and leans back in his chair. “The bottom line is this: I need DNA from everybody who might have known the Townsend girl in the biblical sense. And any reasonable man would have to include your client on that list. Now, everybody but your client is chomping at the bit to give me said sample. Your client, on the other hand, has sent his celebrity mouthpiece down here to talk for him. So I’ll ask you straight out, is Dr. Elliott going to provide a DNA sample to the state in the interest of expediting this investigation? Or is he not?”

I choose my words with great care. “No judge would order my client to give a blood sample on the basis of an anonymous call alone.”

Shad concedes this with a slight inclination of his head. “That may be true. But in the interest of protecting the community, what innocent man would object to it?”

“In a perfect world, I’d agree. But if it got out that you asked Drew Elliott to give a DNA sample in connection with this murder—and it would get out, if he complied—the rumor alone could destroy him. It’s practically a child molestation charge. The stigma would never go away.”

“You can’t keep his name out of this mess, Cage. Our mystery caller didn’t telephone just me this morning.”

I cover my mouth and swallow hard. “Who else?”

“Sheriff Byrd and the chief of police. Our caller’s a persistent fellow. He seems to believe strongly in his cause.”

“Did you trace the source of the calls from phone records?”

“They originated from a pay phone on the north side of down-town.”

“The black section?”

Shad inclines his head again.

This fits what Drew told me about the blackmailer’s voice. “Did the police fingerprint the phone?”

“They’re working that angle, but no matches yet.” Shad suddenly gives me a look of honest puzzlement. “The thing is, Penn, accusing Dr. Elliott of this affair seems so out of left field, it’s hard to imagine anyone making it up. You know? If it’s not true, who would even think of it?”

“Somebody who hates Drew Elliott.”

Shad turns up his palms. “From what I gather, the good doctor hasn’t got an enemy in the world. Everybody talks about him like he’s a saint.”

“There’s a reason for that. He’s a genuinely good man.”

Another beatific smile. “Then he’s got nothing to worry about. The way I see it, providing a DNA sample is about the only way Dr. Elliott is going to be able to preserve his sterling reputation.”

“There’s no way I’m letting Drew go down to the St. Catherine’s Hospital lab for a DNA test. The man’s on staff there, for God’s sake. Word would shoot through that building in less than an hour. By nightfall, everybody in town would know about it.”

Shad leans back and speaks in a cold voice. “I’m sorry to hear that. Because if he doesn’t, I’ll be forced to consider other alternatives.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I’ve been sitting here thinking about that. One thing, it’s the first week of the month. That means the grand jury’s in session. Probably will be for two more days. They might be real interested in hearing about this situation. About the anonymous call, and about the strange coincidences, like how Dr. Elliott lives up-stream on that creek where the girl’s body was found. They might just decide they want a DNA sample from the doctor on their own.”

Jesus. “That’s unethical, Shad. You’d be perverting the purpose of the grand jury. It doesn’t exist to investigate crimes. And for your information, at least a thousand people live upstream on that creek, maybe more.”

Shad’s eyes brim with confidence. “Just a thought, Counselor. But emotions are running high in this town. People want a brutal killer like this caught and punished. That’s my sole interest here. And I’m not going to let the fact that your client is white and rich stop me from getting to the bottom of this poor girl’s death. That kind of miscarriage of justice stopped the day I took over this office.”

Like a chess player experiencing a flash of insight, I suddenly see a dozen moves down the board. And what I see sends a rush of adrenaline through my veins. This conversation isn’t about murder at all—it’s about politics. I should have realized that before I walked in the door.

The mayoral election Shad lost five years ago was the most hotly contested in Natchez history. He lost to Riley Warren, a two-term white incumbent with a flamboyant style and a love for backroom business schemes that earned him the nickname Wiley. While some of those schemes benefited the city, others weighed it down with suffocating debt, and by the end of his term—last summer—even Wiley’s supporters suspected that he’d enriched himself more than the city he was elected to serve. Shad might have defeated Warren then, but he was only halfway into his first term as district attorney. It wouldn’t have looked good for him to resign after the promises he’d made to rectify “racial inequalities” in Natchez’s criminal courts.

Despite dwindling support, Wiley Warren ran for mayor a third time. His enemies polled local worthies in search of an opposition candidate—myself included. Like most who were asked, I declined to enter the fray. Ultimately, Warren’s enemies ran a rather dim bulb named Doug Jones against their nemesis, and despite Jones’s utter lack of distinction or vision, he handily defeated Warren in the primary. The only black candidate to step forward was a funeral director with a checkered past, a man with enemies of his own in the black community. Black turnout was low on election day, and Doug Jones won by a 58 to 42 percent margin. The newly Honorable Mayor Jones took office and promptly became the invisible man. If he took no bold new initiatives for the city, neither did he make any tragic mistakes. He managed this by doing almost nothing at all. But shortly after Christmas he finally did do something: he held a press conference and announced that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and would resign his office within ninety days.

That was two months ago.

If Mayor Jones pulls the trigger within the next four weeks, as promised, then the chief executive office of the city will be up for grabs. Local election rules dictate that once the mayor’s office is vacated, a special election must be held within forty-five days. Sitting here in this office, I realize just how important that fact is to Shad Johnson. If Shad were to convict a rich white doctor of capital murder, he could pronounce his election promises to the black community fulfilled and enter the mayoral race with a united front behind him—something that didn’t happen five years ago.

The seemingly boundless confidence in Shad’s eyes triggers another revelation: he doesn’t even have to convict Drew. Even if Shad loses, he wins politically in the black community, just for making the effort. He can always blame a courtroom loss on the white man’s secret manipulation of the system.

I look Shad hard in the eyes but speak softly. “You’re going to run for mayor again.”

He blinks like a reptile basking in the sun. “No comment, Counselor.”

“You think putting Drew Elliott in Parchman is your ticket to a unified black electoral base.”

Shad attempts to dispose of my theory with a wave of his hand. “Our business here is to rule out Dr. Elliott as a murder suspect—if we can—so that my officers can get on with the investigation of this heinous crime.”

Spoken as though for reporters. My new understanding of the political situation has sent my mind racing down a dozen different paths, but I’m not here to figure out the future of Natchez. I’m here to protect Drew Elliott.

“All right,” I say in a tone of surrender. “What about this? Dr. Elliott has a laboratory in his office. Send over a couple of police officers right now, during his lunch hour. His lab tech can draw the blood you need—do a buccal swab, whatever—and the cops can attest that it’s his. The chain of custody remains intact, and so does Dr. Elliott’s reputation.”

Shad nods. “I can live with that.”

I look at my watch. “I’d better call him.”

“I thought he had an emergency.”

“He’s probably handled it by now.” I get up and offer Shad my hand.

He takes it, but he squeezes gently rather than shakes, then withdraws his hand. “I hope your boy comes up clean, Penn. If he doesn’t …”

“He will.”

Shad looks surprised by my statement. But I was talking about Kate’s murder, nothing else.

I’m almost to the door when he says, “Penn, about the mayoral situation.”

I turn and regard him steadily. “Yes?”

“I heard some local power brokers asked you to run against Wiley Warren last year.”

“That’s right. I wasn’t interested.”

“Not interested in running against Warren? Or not interested in being mayor?”

“Both. Neither.”

Shad studies me with unguarded curiosity. “The town’s in a lot different place than it was a year ago.”

“You’re right, I’m sad to say.”

It kills him to ask the next question. “Are you still not interested?”

I turn up my palms, then smile easily. “No more than you. Have a good day, Shad.”

Outside the D.A.’s office, I stand in the sun and stare across the street at the courthouse. Somewhere inside, a simple white man named Doug Jones is wrestling with his fear of death and deciding when to resign the office of mayor. I’m surprised he’s waited two months, given the gravity of his diagnosis. I watched an uncle die of lung cancer, and I’ve forgotten neither my horror nor his pain. But while Mayor Jones struggles with his mortality, Shad Johnson watches from across the street like a hungry vulture waiting to draw life from death. My new appreciation of Shad’s deeper motive has clarified Drew’s situation.

If Shad can get sufficient evidence, he will rush Drew to trial in record time, hoping to convict him—or at least garner a week’s worth of headlines—before Mayor Jones resigns. But Drew’s legal jeopardy is not the sole reason for my interest in Shad’s political intentions. For the past six months, despite my decision not to seek the office of mayor a year ago, I have been pondering the idea of entering the special election.

My reasons are simple. One month into Doug Jones’s administration, the International Paper Company—the largest employer in the county—announced that it would close its Natchez mill after fifty years of continuous operation. The shock to the community still hasn’t passed. Closure came swiftly, and about a month ago the severance pay of former employees began to peter out. So did their heath insurance benefits. And IP was merely the last in a short but devastatingly complete line of local manufacturing companies to shut down. Triton Battery. Armstrong Tire and Rubber. Johns-Manville. That leaves tourism the only industry pumping outside dollars into Natchez. And tourism is a seasonal business.

In a single year, Natchez has been transformed from a fairly healthy city into a community on the edge. We’ve lost more than five hundred families in the wake of the IP closure, and more are leaving every week. In 1850, Natchez boasted more millionaires than every city in America except New York and Philadelphia, the money flowing in as cotton flowed out by the hundreds of thousands of bales. But as the soil was slowly depleted, cotton farming moved north to the Delta, and Natchez entered a period of decline. Then in 1948, oil was discovered practically beneath the streets. By 1960, the year I was born, the city was flush with millionaires again, and Natchez became a truly magical place in which to grow up. But in 1986, the price of oil crashed, and the Reagan administration sacrificed domestic oil producers in his battle to win the Cold War. The number of local oil companies dwindled from sixty to seven, and by the time the price of oil began to climb again, there wasn’t enough industry left to exploit what remained of our depleted reserves. Without visionary leadership, Natchez will soon shrink to a quaint hamlet of ten or twelve thousand people—mostly retirees, service workers, and people on welfare—and the thriving city of twenty-five thousand that I grew up in will be only a memory.

When I first heard about Doug Jones’s terrible diagnosis, I sensed the hand of fate offering this city a final opportunity for salvation. And to my surprise, I felt a powerful surge of civic responsibility swelling in my heart. Shad Johnson will tell voters he felt a similar call to public service, but I know him too well to believe that. Five years ago, he left his Chicago law firm to return to Natchez and run one of the most cynical campaigns I’ve ever witnessed on either a local or national level. I’m proud that my efforts in the courtroom helped snatch victory from his grasp, but it was black voters who ultimately did that. Enough of them saw through Shad’s theatrical skills to tip the balance against him. They closed their eyes, gritted their teeth, and voted for what they hoped was a harmless white man. But as Shad himself said earlier, Natchez was a different city a year ago. Now we are in crisis. And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.

As I stare at the great white courthouse, my cell phone rings. I climb into my Saab and answer.

“Are you out of the meeting?” Drew asks in a tense voice. “Did you see the autopsy report?”

No questions about his future, only about what happened to Kate. Is that because he loved her so dearly? Or because he has something to fear? “She was strangled, Drew.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says quietly. “From the petechiae around her eyes. Was she pregnant?”

“Yes. Four weeks along.”

A sharp intake of breath. “That’s why she was so desperate to see me. Jesus, what about—”

“Stop talking, Drew. We can go into details later. Right now we have a problem. The district attorney wants a sample of your DNA.”

Silence.

“The pathologist found semen inside Kate’s body.” There’s no point in telling Drew that the pathologist found the semen of two different men, and in two different locations. “Of course, I expected that, given what you told me about the previous night.”

“I’m listening.”

“Shad wants to prove you murdered Kate. He wants to prove it badly.”

“Does he really think I’m capable of that?”

“All men are capable of that, Drew. We can talk about Shad’s motives later. Right now, under these circumstances, giving him the sample is the best thing you can do. It’ll buy us three or four weeks while the lab does the test. And time is what we need more than anything right now.”

“Why?”

“Because the police may have caught the real murderer long before the test is completed, or even begun. And by that point, it won’t matter nearly so much that you were having sex with Kate Townsend. In fact, if Shad gets a confession from someone else, I might be able to persuade him to cancel the test altogether. You’d probably have to make a massive contribution to his next political campaign”—which will be sooner than anyone suspects—“but I think you could live with that.”

“Okay, fine. But what about the autopsy? What else did the report show?”

“Later. Shad wanted you to waltz into the St. Catherine’s Hospital lab and give the blood sample, but I worked out a compromise.”

“Which is?”

“Can you trust your lab technician?”

“Susan? Sure. She’s been with me nine years.”

“Good. Because in the next hour, a couple of cops are going to show up at your office and watch Susan draw some blood from your arm.”

“Okay.”

“And, Drew?”

“Yes?”

“From now on, don’t answer any questions from anybody without talking to me first. Nothing. You got that?”

“Okay.”

“You’d better get things straight with Susan.”

“I will. Are you going to be here when they draw the blood?”

“Is your office empty during lunch?”

“Like a cemetery.”

“All right. I’ll come by and make sure they don’t hassle you for pubic hairs or anything like that.”

“Thanks.”

As I hang up and start my car, a tall, big-bellied white man wearing a brown uniform and a gray cowboy hat swaggers by my car and turns into the doorway of the district attorney’s office. He is Billy Byrd, the sheriff of Adams County. As Sheriff Byrd pulls open the D.A.’s door, he glances back at me and gives me a superior smile, as though he already knows exactly what transpired in the office upstairs a few minutes ago. And of course he does.

Welcome to Mississippi politics.

EIGHT

Shad’s emissaries arrive at Drew’s medical lab before I do. But they’re not cops, as I expected; they’re sheriff’s deputies. I can tell by the big yellow star on the door of the white cruiser parked outside. This tells me that in the investigation of Drew Elliott, the district attorney has chosen to align himself with the fat man in the cowboy hat who walked by my car a few minutes ago, rather than with the chief of police, who by any standard of common sense should be handling this matter.

Drew practices in a suite of offices maintained by Natchez Doctors’ Hospital, which is located behind the cluster of primary care clinics that feed patients to the main facility. The front door of Drew’s office is unlocked. I enter to find his waiting room dark. There’s light in the corridor beyond it, but the door to the hall is locked. After I bang loudly, a young woman’s face appears behind the receptionist’s window. She waves, then buzzes me into the corridor.

Drew’s lab is right across the hall, a brightly lit rectangle containing centrifuges, microscopes, and expensive blood chemistry machines. Against the far wall, a blue phlebotomist’s chair stands beside a white refrigerator. Drew himself is reclining in the chair, one shirtsleeve rolled up past his elbow.

I step in and find two deputies standing with their backs to the wall opposite Drew. They look uncomfortable. I recognize one of them. Tom Jackson was the top detective at the police department until the sheriff hired him away, which wasn’t hard to do. The county pays cops about five thousand a year more than the city does. Jackson is as tall as Drew, and his handlebar mustache gives him the look of a cowboy in a Frederic Remington painting. He gives me a friendly nod, but his partner—a short, black-haired man with pasty skin—doesn’t even acknowledge me.

“Tom,” says Drew, “this is Penn Cage, a buddy of mine.”

“I know Penn,” Jackson says in a deep voice.

Both deputies must know why I’m here, but Drew seems to want to preserve the illusion of a friendly get-together. He nods past me, and I turn to see the white-uniformed woman who let me in. She’s in her midthirties, with short brown hair and a heart-shaped face distinguished by intelligent brown eyes.

“Penn, this is Susan Salter, my med tech.”

“Nice to meet you, Susan.”

She manages a slight nod; she looks the least comfortable of us all.

“Well,” says Drew, “let’s get this over with.”

Susan takes a long white box from a cabinet and looks at the deputies. “You said four tubes?”

“That’s what our evidence technician told us,” says Tom Jackson. “I guess they want to make sure they don’t have to ask for more blood later.”

Susan removes four vacuum tubes with purple stoppers from the box and lays them flat on one arm of the chair. Then she straps a Velcro tourniquet around Drew’s left biceps and slaps his antecubital vein three times. A vein like a rigid blue pipe stands up at the place where Drew’s arm muscles insert at the inner elbow. Susan pushes the stopper end of one of the tubes into a Vacutainer syringe, then with a single deft motion pricks the needle into Drew’s vein and presses the stopper of the tube down onto the rear of the needle with her thumb.

A fountain of dark blood begins filling the tube, sucked inward by the vacuum inside it. The short deputy looks away.

“I need to use the restroom,” he mumbles.

“Down the hall to your right,” says Drew.

The deputy disappears. As Susan replaces the full tube with an empty one, I realize her hands are shaking. She’s playing out a scene she couldn’t possibly have imagined an hour ago. How much has Drew told her? I wonder.

“Tom?” I say, taking advantage of the other deputy’s absence. “What do you figure the time of death was?”

Jackson looks warily at me. “You don’t know?”

“The D.A. wouldn’t tell me.”

He sighs and shakes his head. “People are acting mighty squirrelly about this case. I’d like to help you out, though.”

“Will you?”

“Well … we know the girl didn’t leave the school until three. The fishermen say they found her about six-twenty.”

“What did the body temperature tell you?”

Jackson glances uncomfortably at the door. “I don’t know about all that. I heard they’re not sure how long she was in the water.”

“Best guess?”

The short deputy walks through the door, looks at Jackson, and smiles. It seems a strange thing to do, but it shuts Jackson up.

When the four tubes lie full of blood on a table and the tourniquet has been removed from Drew’s arm, Tom steps forward with a plastic evidence bag and holds it open. Susan drops the tubes inside. Drew shakes his head, looking more than anything like an innocent man doing his best to humor overzealous cops.

“That it, guys?”

Jackson nods. “That’s it, Doc. Sorry to bother you with this.”

“How long do you think it will take to get the DNA results?” I ask.

“Usually takes a month, at least,” Tom replies. “They’ll probably rush this, considering the situation. But two and a half weeks is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Out of New Orleans, anyway.”

This is exactly what I expected.

Drew stands and offers Tom his hand, and Jackson gives it a strong shake. In all likelihood, Tom is a patient of Drew’s. But when Drew offers his hand to the shorter deputy, the man turns without a word and leaves the lab. Tom shrugs sheepishly, then follows his partner out.

Drew looks at Susan. “I guess I screwed up your lunch hour.”

She forces a smile. “That’s okay. I’m not hungry.”

Drew gives me a pointed glance, and I realize he needs to speak further with Susan in private.

“I’ll give you a call later,” I tell him, starting for the door.

“Wait,” he says. “Have you had lunch yet? I’m starving.”

“I was about to get something.”

“Why don’t we eat together? We ought to talk about a couple of things.”

I don’t want to risk talking about this situation in public. “Tell you what, I’ll grab some food and come back here. We can eat in your office.”

Drew looks dismayed, but then he seems to get it. “Okay. See you in a few minutes. No hamburgers.”

I leave the office and go out to my car, my mind on Susan and her ability to keep quiet. I feel like Thai food, but the only Thai restaurant is downtown, and it would take too long to get there and back to Drew’s office. The only options on this side of town are fast food and Ruby Tuesday’s. I pull into the drive-through lane at Taco Bell and order a couple of zesty chicken bowls, some tacos, and two Mountain Dews, which the restaurant delivers in record time. Then I pull back onto the bypass and get into the turning lane for Jefferson Davis Boulevard, the street that leads to Drew’s office.