“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need to go take care of something.”
“Is everything all right?” she asked, her eyes making it clear that she knew better.
“Yes.”
“It’s not Annie, is it?”
“No, no.”
“Are you and Caitlin all right?”
“We’re fine, Mom. This is just some legal business.”
She went back to painting the shelves with long, smooth strokes of her brush. At sixty-eight, she works with the strength and flexibility of someone twenty years her junior. Being raised in the country does that for some people.
When I arrived at the house this morning, Mom held up the newspaper and asked me about Kate’s death. Thankfully, Caitlin’s staff had reported only the known facts, which left my mother as curious as the rest of the town. And like most of the town, Mom believes Drew Elliott hung the moon. She often says that Drew is the only “young” doctor who practices medicine with the conscientiousness of my father. What would she say if she knew that he was sleeping with Kate Townsend until the day she died?
“Be careful,” Mom called as I walked to my car.
“I will,” I called, thinking that was good advice to follow when dealing with Shadrach Johnson.
The district attorney’s office is on the third floor of the waterworks building in Lawyer’s Alley, across from the massive city courthouse. In a town filled with architecturally significant buildings, the waterworks is nothing special, a three-story concrete block with one glass-brick corner enclosing the staircase. I park under the courthouse oaks and cross the street, waving at one of my parents’ neighbors as she walks into the DMV office.
There’s no receptionist behind the door on the ground floor, just a staircase. As I climb the stairs, my errand weighs heavy below my heart. I’ve got to tell Shad Johnson the truth as I know it-up to a point, anyway. Drew had sex with Kate the night before she died, so I have to assume that the state pathologist has already recovered his semen from her body. And while no judge would order Drew to take a DNA test based solely on an anonymous telephone call, Shad may already have more proof connecting Drew to Kate.
Last night, Drew told me he’d been intimate with Kate for the past seven months. How many seventeen-year- old girls could sleep with a forty-year-old man that long without telling a single friend about it? If Kate told her mother about the affair, why not her best friend? And with Kate dead at the hands of a killer, how long will it take Jenny Townsend-however much she may like Drew-to tell the police what she knows? Shad may already have proof of the affair; he may have called this meeting simply to see if Drew will lie about it, using the lesser crime of sexual battery as a litmus test for deception before questioning Drew about the murder. I did the same thing many times as a prosecutor.
When I reach the third floor, a heavy female secretary with dyed-orange hair and a flower-print dress gives me a quizzical look from behind a glass partition. Five years ago Shad had a male factotum who dressed like Malcolm X, but he vanished shortly after Shad’s mayoral defeat. This woman was obviously expecting Drew, who is known on sight by most Natchezians. I’m pretty well-known myself, but in a small town no one ever quite attains the celebrity of the best doctors. My father is testament to that fact. He can’t walk twenty yards in Wal-Mart without being stopped by adoring or inquisitive patients.
“I’m Mr. Johnson’s noon appointment,” I tell the secretary.
“No, you’re not.”
“You expecting Dr. Drew Elliot?”
She looks confused. “That’s right.”
“I’m his attorney.”
Her lips form a perfect O, just like they do in cartoons. “You’re Penn Cage.”
“I am. I’m Dr. Elliott’s attorney.”
The expression of surprise morphs into an uncertain glare. “I know about you.”
“Your boss and I once went a few rounds over a civil rights murder.”
She picks up the phone and begins speaking in a hushed tone.
My statement about the civil rights murder is true. The irony of that case is that I, the white lawyer, was crusading to solve the twenty-year-old murder of a black man, while Shad, the black politician, was trying to bury the case to keep from upsetting the white voters he needed to win the mayor’s office.
The secretary hangs up and buzzes me through the door. “End of the hall,” she says curtly.
As soon as I enter the blandly painted corridor, a door at the far end opens and a black man a few inches shorter than I peers out, an expression of annoyance on his face. “Son of a bitch,” he says without a trace of Southern accent. “I was having a good day until now.”
“Hello, Shad.”
The district attorney shakes his head, then walks back into his office, squaring his shoulders for combat as he goes. I follow him inside and wait to be invited to sit.
As usual, Shadrach Johnson is dressed to the nines in a bespoke suit and Italian shoes. His hair has a little more gray in it than the last time we locked horns, but his eyes still flash with quick intelligence. My first impression of him was of a brash personal injury lawyer, and nothing in the intervening years has changed that. Shad’s jutting jaw greets the world with a perpetual challenge, his eyes project arrogance and mistrust, and his shoulders stay flexed under the weight of an invisible yet enormous chip.
“Your buddy’s not playing this right, Cage,” he says, taking a seat behind an enormous desk that looks like an antique. “An innocent man doesn’t send his lawyer to speak for him in a situation like this. Have a seat.”
I was prepared to say those things, but now that I’m actually facing Shad Johnson, something stops me. It all seemed so clear in the car: pay the short-term price for a long-term gain. But this office, as modest as it is, gives me the old feeling I had when I worked for the D.A. in Houston. Irrevocable decisions are made in this room, decisions about who will be punished and who will not. Who will spend decades in prison? Who will die at the hands of the state? For any prosecutor, Drew Elliott would be a juicy target, but for a man like Shad Johnson-a man who dreams of being governor and more-Drew is a prize elephant.
There’s no doubt that Drew would look better to a future jury if he told the truth now. But what other consequences might result? Natchez is a small town, and when small-town cops are handed a likely suspect, they don’t look too hard for another. Truth be told, city cops aren’t much different. And confessing to the affair with Kate would immediately open Drew to a sexual battery charge that Shad could use to jail him, should he choose to. No, better to keep my cards close to the vest.
“That’s a lot nicer desk than the one the last D.A. had,” I observe, stalling for time as I take the chair opposite Shad.
The district attorney can’t help but brag; it’s his nature. “I got it out of storage from the old Natchez Museum,” he says, rubbing the finely grained wood. “It came from the attic of one of the antebellum homes. Longwood, I think. Ironic, isn’t it? Me working at a cotton planter’s desk? I had it appraised. It’s worth sixty grand.”
I give Shad a level gaze. “I hope you’re not one of those people who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Shad’s eyes narrow. “What are you doing here, Penn? Where’s Dr. Elliott?”
“He had an emergency at his office. He had to stay and handle it.”
“Bullshit. Your client’s scared. His dick’s got him tangled up in a capital murder case, and he’s terrified.”
Shad must have more than the anonymous call in his pocket. “How do you figure that?”
“Did Elliott tell you about the call I got this morning?”
“He said you mentioned an anonymous caller who told you some story about him being intimate with Kate Townsend.”
