Unwritten Laws 01(17)

“You got any last words?” he asked, tilting his head to wipe his face on his shirt.

Revels nodded soberly.

“Get on with it, then.”

“Are you listening, Mr. Thornfield?”

Sonny prepared himself for some dreadful curse in the name of God, or perhaps some ancient African demon. “I’m listening.”

“I forgive you.”





PART TWO





2005




The truth is rarely pure and never simple.





—Oscar Wilde





MONDAY





CHAPTER 4





Natchez, Mississippi




AS A YOUNG LAWYER, I had a recurring dream. My father stood in the dock, accused of some terrible but unknown crime, and I was charged with defending him. There were a dozen versions of this dream, all turned to nightmares by different mistakes on my part. Some were routine, such as realizing I’d failed to file a critical motion or to ask for a continuance, or being physically unable to get into the courtroom. Other variations were more alarming. Sometimes the prosecutor could speak but I was mute; other times everyone could speak but I was deaf, and thus powerless to save my own father. The strangest part of this whole experience was that I was an assistant district attorney—a prosecutor, not a defense lawyer. Stranger still, my father had led an exemplary life. He was a war hero and a beloved physician, without the slightest blemish on his character. Yet in the final episode of this troubling series of dreams, when my father was asked to enter his plea, he stood and opened his mouth, then began coughing uncontrollably. The bailiff handed him a white handkerchief, and when he took it away from his mouth, clotted black blood stained the cotton, like lung tissue coughed up by someone dying of consumption. After a few moments of paralyzed horror, I awakened in my bedroom, my heart thudding against my sternum, and sweating as though I’d run six miles.

That was the last time I had the dream. As the years passed, I occasionally remembered it, but never again did it trouble my sleep. I came to believe that its significance had more to do with my sometimes harrowing experiences in law school and court than anything to do with my father. Other lawyers would occasionally mention similar nightmares, and this convinced me I was right. But then, at the age of forty-five … my nightmare came true.

It began with a phone call.



“MR. MAYOR, I HAVE the district attorney for you on line one.”

I look up from my BlackBerry, mildly shocked by the identity of the caller. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“What do you think, boss?” A dollop of sarcasm from Rose, my executive secretary. Shadrach Johnson, the district attorney of Adams County, only calls me when he has no way to avoid it.

“Hello, Shad,” I say with as much goodwill as I can muster. “What’s going on?”

“Strange days, Mayor,” he says in a surprisingly diffident voice. “You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got a man in my office demanding that I arrest your father for murder.”

I set my BlackBerry on my desk. Surely this is some sort of joke, a prank set up by the DA to pay me back for what he perceives as my many sins against him. “Shad, I don’t have time for this. Seriously. What do you need?”

“I wouldn’t play games about something like this, Penn. This guy isn’t a random citizen. He’s an attorney from Chicago. And he means business.”

Chicago? “Who’s Dad supposed to have killed?”

“A sixty-five-year-old woman named Viola Turner. Do you know that name?”

Viola Turner. “I don’t think so.”

“Take a minute.”

After a disjointed moment of confusion, a Proustian rush of scents and images flashes though my brain. With the tang of rubbing alcohol in my nose, I see a tall, dark-skinned woman who looks very much like Diahann Carroll playing Julia on TV in the late 1960s, her white nurse’s cap fitted perfectly into diligently straightened black hair, her bright, intelligent eyes set in a café au lait face. Nurse Viola. I never saw Viola Turner after I was eight years old, yet this image remains startlingly true. Viola administered my tetanus and penicillin shots when I was a boy, and held my hand while my father stitched up my knees after I ripped them open on the street. During these stressful episodes, I almost never cried, and now I remember why. While Dad hooked that curved needle through my torn skin, Viola would chant or sing softly to me in a language I had never heard. My father later told me this was Creole French, which only confused me. I’d taken French in elementary school, but Nurse Viola’s songs resembled nothing I had heard within the walls of St. Stephen’s Prep. Only now do I realize that Viola’s gift for empathy and her exotic voice must have imprinted her indelibly in my young mind.