home.'
'Home?' Jasmine gave me that Mona Lisa smile again. 'I thought California's your home.'
I accelerated slowly through the gate as I thought about this.
'Camilla used to catch me saying that. She told me it made her sad.'
'The Delta never lets loose.'
'Yeah, it's got my heart, but I can't imagine living there again.'
We drove in silence for a bit more, then I said, 'Why now? Why bring Talmadge to trial now after so many years? And why kill Vanessa?'
'Well, the leading theory for the killing-at least among the cops-is that Mom was assassinated by someone in the African-American community who didn't want her helping Talmadge.'
'Blame the victim?'
'Old story She got a lot of hate mail. Some pretty angry voices among big AfricanAmerican groups condemned her for helping the white devil.'
Jasmine stared silently out the side window. 'It had a race thing about it. And a personal thing. Some of them were the same voices which slammed her years ago for being a traitor to her race when she dated a couple of white guys in New York.'
She said it evenly, but my pulse stumbled anyway. Her ability to talk so casually about the incendiary topic of race astonished me. I had friends of every race and tried to ignore skin color, which seemed to strengthen the friendships because I considered each as a surgeon, an entrepreneur, a talented artist, first, rather than as a Pakistani, Asian, black, whatever. But then, I was white and could afford to ignore race since it was not constantly thrown in my face by those who were incapable of seeing past skin color.
'So,' I said, and hesitated. 'So could it be that?'
'It's always possible, but I doubt it. Doubt it very seriously. Convincing the police is another matter.'
'But why prosecute Talmadge now? The man's old and coming apart at the seams. His awful seizures tear him apart and he's got terminal larynx cancer from cigarettes. Why doesn't somebody just let him die. The cancer's its own punishment.'
'Punishment is not always justice,' Jasmine said. 'Do you think the Nuremberg trials were only about punishment and the culpability of those being tried?' She paused for an answer I did not have, then shook her head.
'Justice outranks punishment. It brings a cultural repudiation of criminal behavior and that act brings justice- to the individual directly wronged and to society as a whole.'
'But why Talmadge and why now?'
'What's happening now began in 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas when a grand jury in Jackson indicted Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers.'
I was familiar with the case. Evers had been gunned down in front of his home in 1963. An ambitious young district attorney in Hinds County, Bill Waller, brought De La Beckwith to trial and endured abuse and anonymous death threats to see justice done. Waller also resisted intense pressure from the racists who controlled the state- the Stennis/Eastland Democrats who had made their careers standing in the schoolhouse door and who thought good race relations was providing new paint to freshen up the Colored Only signs smeared across the Mississippi landscape like ugly cultural graffiti. In this atmosphere, Waller got hung juries in two separate trials. I suppose that, given the allwhite juries back then, the verdicts stood as a partial victory, and indicated that not all white people were behind Mississippi's brutal apartheid.
Less than ten years later, Mississippi elected 'nigger lover' Waller as governor thanks in large part to the FBI backed up by the guns and steel of the federal government and National Guard troops. Many think the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent protests did the whole job. True enough, Dr. King and his protesters had to be the first wave to show the nation their dedication, their suffering, and to help Americans understand the evil. But they could never have succeeded without the federal muscle even the Klan had to respect.
'Bobby DeLaughter got a conviction in the Evers case,' Jasmine continued. 'And produced more than simple justice for Myrlie Evers and her children. It sent a tremendous signal that Mississippi had changed, and if we got a conviction here, it might happen everywhere. Lightbulbs went off all over the South, and pretty soon we had convictions in the Birmingham church bombings and in a whole lot of other Klan killings. All the way up to Indianapolis and Pennsylvania.'
'A compelling case, counselor,' I said.
'Feed one person's hunger for justice and you can feed a whole people. Its a fishand-loaves thing.'
We came out of the dense landscaping at the top of the hill to find a rambling, three-story building with extensive porticoes, a red-tiled roof, and simulated adobe walls designed to evoke the Spanish missions to the north and south along El Camino Real.
'Impressive.' She stretched the word out over several seconds.
'I wanted the best for her.' I let my eyes follow along with Jasmine's. 'And I'm fortunate enough to afford it.'
A uniformed man waved us past a small guardhouse, and I continued on into the guest parking lot and pulled into an empty space.
'There's one problem,' Jasmine said.
I put the truck into park and turned off the ignition.
'With this place?'
Jasmine shook her head. 'With the Talmadge case.'
'Which would be?'
'It's what bothered Mom. She looked up thoughtfully, gnawing on her lower lip as she searched for the words. 'Talmadge wasn't a known hate crime gone unsolved. It had been long forgotten as an old Balance Due homicide.
'Then one day last year, an anonymous file arrives at the Greenwood PD, the evidence and information all lined up, almost too perfect to be real. Mom suspected something and started asking questions.'
'Then they killed her?'
She nodded.
We sat quietly listening to the metallic ticks and creaks of the truck's engine cooling off. Then Camilla's primary physician, Jeff Flowers, walked out of the building, his white coat trailing behind and an arm extended in a broad wave.
'That's my appointment.' I pulled the keys from the ignition. 'Come on in and wait for a while.'
'Okay,' she said, then followed me across the lot.
'Professor,' Flowers said with a smile as he extended his hand. 'You don't look any worse for wear for a man up all night making news.'
I took his hand. 'Well, I feel a lot worse than I look.'
I turned to Jasmine. 'Jeff's the medical director and CEO here. This is his baby.' I introduced him to Jasmine.
'Very pleased,' Flowers said warmly as he shook her hand. 'Come on in. It's nicer inside.'
'Nicer?' Jasmine made a show of taking in the building and grounds, then said, 'This I have to see.'
We followed Flowers into the building, where he settled Jasmine in one of the private reception rooms.
'The phone there has my cell and pager number and my assistant marked on the speed dial,' he told her. 'Make sure to call one if you need anything.'
'Thank you.'
Flowers gave her a little bow, then held the door for me. I stepped into the corridor.
'Sorry to be so harried, Professor,' Flowers said to me as he took the lead, heading toward Camilla's suite. The days had long passed when he had been the bright student in the front row of my neurophysiology class at UCLA, but he still insisted on calling me professor in an honorific way that made me uncomfortable.
'It happens to me as well.'
He picked up his pace. 'Your wife is not doing well. In the past fourteen hours, she's acquired a nasty inflammation around the enteral site of the transgastric jejunostomy. We began immediate and aggressive antibiotic treatment, but there's no sign of a response so far.'
I nodded as we detoured around a housekeeping cart and made a right-hand turn into a stairwell leading up
