Unwritten Laws 01(46)

“I’d better pull around the corner before I play the file for you,” Henry says. “Shad could look out his window and see us sitting here.”

“Do it.”

The reporter slides his Mac onto my lap, looks furtively up at the sheriff’s office, then drives up State Street and turns on Commerce.

I’ve always considered Henry Sexton to be a modern-day Don Quixote, and for that reason I trust him. I’ve been accused of having the same complex, but I’m nowhere near Henry’s league. The articles he writes about unsolved civil rights murders occasionally attract the odd death threat or flying bottle by way of criticism. The man himself is tall and lanky, with the perpetually sad eyes of a faithful hound. With his wire-rimmed glasses and a goatee, he looks like a cross between a college professor and a biologist you’d expect to find checking the acidity of catfish ponds.

“How about here?” Henry asks, pulling up before the old Jewish temple on Commerce Street. My town house is just around the corner, on Washington, but Shad is expecting me in his office at any moment.

“This is fine, Henry. Let’s see it.”

He touches his Mac’s trackpad, and a three-by-five video window appears on the screen. A hospital bed stands in the corner of what appears to be a dim room in a private residence. First I hear a wail that sets my teeth on edge. Then I make out a skeletal figure thrashing in the covers as though trying to free itself from a knotted sheet. A gasping sound is clearly audible, punctuated by a repeated word that sounds like “Help.” The figure half falls off the bed, then reaches for something on the floor. At first I’m not sure what—then I see an empty phone cradle on the bedside table. Suddenly the scene makes sense. The desperate patient has knocked the phone onto the floor and hasn’t enough mobility to reach it.

“Help!” comes the strangled cry again. “Cora … help me.” A few wisps of white hair cling to the patient’s skull. In a moment of horror I realize that this emaciated figure must be what remained of the beautiful nurse I remember from my childhood. Viola’s right hand opens and closes like a claw, but she cannot twist herself out of the bed. “Lord, he’s killing me!” she cries. “Tom … Tom! Why? Where are you?”

My father’s name prickles every hair on my body. Henry’s barely breathing beside me. Somehow the old woman struggles back into a supine position in the bed, one hand pulling at her bare throat as though trying to rip away some invisible ligature. Sweat glistens on her face and forehead, and her breath comes far too fast. She’s going to hyperventilate, if she doesn’t stroke out first. Viola seems to have no idea that the camera is recording anything. But then again, maybe she does.

“Cora!” she screeches, but before she can continue, her gasping stops and her eyes bulge in their sockets. “Hail Mary … full of grace,” she coughs in a strangled voice. “Hail Mary full of—”

In mid-prayer Viola Turner’s mouth locks open, and she sits motionless for so long that I think she must be dead. Then in a final spasm she lurches to her left, throwing herself far enough that her upper torso falls out of the bed. She comes to rest with her lower body still tangled in the bedclothes, her right hand touching the floor near the telephone. I hear no more sounds of respiration. Not even a death rattle.

“She’s dead,” I say softly.

“I think so,” Henry agrees.

“Who else has seen this?”

“Me and the DA. Maybe the sheriff by now.”

“Jesus, Henry.”

“I know.”

Sexton’s video isn’t the most horrifying visual evidence I’ve ever seen—not by a long shot. During my years as an assistant DA in Houston, I heard and saw tapes made by narcissistic rapists, torture-killers, and other assorted freaks. But this video would go a long way toward convincing a jury that Viola Turner didn’t die by her own choice. Worse, many people might reasonably interpret her last words as a direct accusation against my father. I think the recording is equivocal on that point, but you never know how a jury will read something. If my father were vigorously defending himself on the stand (and had a good explanation for what the recording shows), a jury might believe him. But if he sat silently at the defense table, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment, they might well convict him.

“Is there anything but this on the rest of the recording?”

“Just twenty-eight minutes of her lying there.”

“You watched it all?”

“I fast-forwarded through it, but I’m pretty sure.”

My right hand is gripping the door handle so hard that my forearm cramps, but I can’t pull myself away from the computer screen. For the first time I notice the appointments in Viola’s sickroom. On the bedside table stands a white statuette of the Virgin Mary, and hanging on the wall behind the hospital bed are three framed photos: Abraham Lincoln; Martin Luther King Jr.; John and Robert Kennedy standing on the White House Colonnade, looking pensive. The bedside lamp is a faux gas lantern, and it stands on a lace doily—an impractical item to use near a sickbed. I also see a clock-radio, which clearly reads 5:38 A.M.