Unwritten Laws 01(23)
“Forty, maybe? He did just lose his mother. I keep thinking he’s bound to calm down. But that doesn’t help us today.”
“How long can you stall him?”
“I suppose I can tell him I’m not going to arrest a community physician of spotless reputation without one hundred percent documented evidence. I can take statements from the sister and anyone else who knew what was going on, process the physical evidence. But by tomorrow morning—afternoon at the latest—you’d better have the straight story out of your old man. If you don’t, he’s going to need a first-rate criminal defense attorney.”
As Shad waits for my reply, my eyes lock on to the assisted suicide statute in the 1972 Code. One quick scan starts a chain of muscle spasms up my back. “Shad, what exactly does Turner say happened? Is he saying my father provided the morphine, or that he injected the drug himself?”
“He didn’t say. He just kept yelling about morphine and a syringe. Why?”
“The way I read the statute, if Dad provided the drug and Viola injected herself, that’s assisted suicide. But if he injected her himself … that’s murder. Have you checked for precedents?”
“Not yet. But I suggest you get on it. Ten minutes ago I heard that Sheriff Foti down in Orleans Parish is thinking about prosecuting a respected lady doctor who may have euthanized patients during Katrina. And the charge will be murder.”
My heart thumps. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not. And Viola Turner wasn’t exactly a nobody, Penn. She had a younger brother who was a civil rights martyr. Jimmy Revels. Revels was kidnapped with a friend in 1968. Bodies never found.”
I recall this incident from the newspaper stories by a crusading reporter from across the river. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just this. If I get Al Sharpton down here yelling to Greta Van Susteren about racial genocide by euthanasia on Court TV, I’ll have no choice but to send your father to Parchman, no matter what kind of leverage you’ve got on me.”
“Don’t say that, man.”
“Then get your ass in gear. The clock’s ticking.”
CHAPTER 5
TOM CAGE STARED down at his ringing cell phone, then looked through the bottom of his trifocals to read the name on the caller ID: ROSE MEADOWS. Penn’s secretary, cliché name and all. He’d already received two additional calls from City Hall, which he’d ignored. Rose’s call from her cell meant that Penn was pushing her hard to reach him again. Tom wished he could have been more forthcoming with his son, but Penn could do nothing to mitigate the situation, while he might easily aggravate it. And by getting involved at all, Penn might be putting himself and his daughter in harm’s way. Tom took a deep breath and switched off his phone.
He didn’t consider himself a sentimental man. He wasn’t the type to wistfully return to the town of his boyhood or attend a high school reunion and get maudlin over his fourth bourbon. A child of the Depression, he had always moved forward, never back. His war experiences in Korea had only reinforced this habit. But there was one building in Natchez that Tom never passed without a tightening in his chest, and the events of the past twelve hours had brought him back to it like an icy comet returning to the star where it began its journey through the cosmos.
The house stood on Monroe Street, a rambling one-story structure in the shadow of the massive water tower that supplied the north side of town. In this residence Tom had first begun practicing medicine as a civilian, after being discharged from the army in 1962. He only passed it now on the rare occasions when he broke his own rule and attended a service at Webb’s Funeral Home, or when he made a house call on the north side of town. But today he’d parked his aging BMW beside the wrought-iron fence that bordered the yard of his old office, and stared at the familiar oak door while images of the distant past flowed through his mind.
A surgeon named Wendell Lucas had founded the clinic that once occupied this house. Over the years Lucas had hired a progression of young GPs to handle daily patients and refer him the appendectomies and gallbladder resections that gave him his living. Lucas was a better businessman than a surgeon, and the GPs who had good business sense moved on after three or four years, establishing their own practices in Natchez or other towns. But Tom had cared only about practicing medicine, and having the old surgeon take care of the business side of things freed him up for that, so he’d remained in the arrangement. He had always known the older man was taking advantage, but he was too embarrassed for Lucas to confront him about it. Peggy had ridden Tom about it sometimes, but after enough years even she had given up, and then in 1980 Lucas finally retired to play golf full-time. Tom abandoned the old clinic and moved into a modern new office complex beside St. Catherine’s Hospital, the same one he occupied now.