Turning Angel

“All right,” I say in a tone of surrender. “What about this? Dr. Elliott has a laboratory in his office. Send over a couple of police officers right now, during his lunch hour. His lab tech can draw the blood you need—do a buccal swab, whatever—and the cops can attest that it’s his. The chain of custody remains intact, and so does Dr. Elliott’s reputation.”

Shad nods. “I can live with that.”

I look at my watch. “I’d better call him.”

“I thought he had an emergency.”

“He’s probably handled it by now.” I get up and offer Shad my hand.

He takes it, but he squeezes gently rather than shakes, then withdraws his hand. “I hope your boy comes up clean, Penn. If he doesn’t …”

“He will.”

Shad looks surprised by my statement. But I was talking about Kate’s murder, nothing else.

I’m almost to the door when he says, “Penn, about the mayoral situation.”

I turn and regard him steadily. “Yes?”

“I heard some local power brokers asked you to run against Wiley Warren last year.”

“That’s right. I wasn’t interested.”

“Not interested in running against Warren? Or not interested in being mayor?”

“Both. Neither.”

Shad studies me with unguarded curiosity. “The town’s in a lot different place than it was a year ago.”

“You’re right, I’m sad to say.”

It kills him to ask the next question. “Are you still not interested?”

I turn up my palms, then smile easily. “No more than you. Have a good day, Shad.”

Outside the D.A.’s office, I stand in the sun and stare across the street at the courthouse. Somewhere inside, a simple white man named Doug Jones is wrestling with his fear of death and deciding when to resign the office of mayor. I’m surprised he’s waited two months, given the gravity of his diagnosis. I watched an uncle die of lung cancer, and I’ve forgotten neither my horror nor his pain. But while Mayor Jones struggles with his mortality, Shad Johnson watches from across the street like a hungry vulture waiting to draw life from death. My new appreciation of Shad’s deeper motive has clarified Drew’s situation.

If Shad can get sufficient evidence, he will rush Drew to trial in record time, hoping to convict him—or at least garner a week’s worth of headlines—before Mayor Jones resigns. But Drew’s legal jeopardy is not the sole reason for my interest in Shad’s political intentions. For the past six months, despite my decision not to seek the office of mayor a year ago, I have been pondering the idea of entering the special election.

My reasons are simple. One month into Doug Jones’s administration, the International Paper Company—the largest employer in the county—announced that it would close its Natchez mill after fifty years of continuous operation. The shock to the community still hasn’t passed. Closure came swiftly, and about a month ago the severance pay of former employees began to peter out. So did their heath insurance benefits. And IP was merely the last in a short but devastatingly complete line of local manufacturing companies to shut down. Triton Battery. Armstrong Tire and Rubber. Johns-Manville. That leaves tourism the only industry pumping outside dollars into Natchez. And tourism is a seasonal business.

In a single year, Natchez has been transformed from a fairly healthy city into a community on the edge. We’ve lost more than five hundred families in the wake of the IP closure, and more are leaving every week. In 1850, Natchez boasted more millionaires than every city in America except New York and Philadelphia, the money flowing in as cotton flowed out by the hundreds of thousands of bales. But as the soil was slowly depleted, cotton farming moved north to the Delta, and Natchez entered a period of decline. Then in 1948, oil was discovered practically beneath the streets. By 1960, the year I was born, the city was flush with millionaires again, and Natchez became a truly magical place in which to grow up. But in 1986, the price of oil crashed, and the Reagan administration sacrificed domestic oil producers in his battle to win the Cold War. The number of local oil companies dwindled from sixty to seven, and by the time the price of oil began to climb again, there wasn’t enough industry left to exploit what remained of our depleted reserves. Without visionary leadership, Natchez will soon shrink to a quaint hamlet of ten or twelve thousand people—mostly retirees, service workers, and people on welfare—and the thriving city of twenty-five thousand that I grew up in will be only a memory.

When I first heard about Doug Jones’s terrible diagnosis, I sensed the hand of fate offering this city a final opportunity for salvation. And to my surprise, I felt a powerful surge of civic responsibility swelling in my heart. Shad Johnson will tell voters he felt a similar call to public service, but I know him too well to believe that. Five years ago, he left his Chicago law firm to return to Natchez and run one of the most cynical campaigns I’ve ever witnessed on either a local or national level. I’m proud that my efforts in the courtroom helped snatch victory from his grasp, but it was black voters who ultimately did that. Enough of them saw through Shad’s theatrical skills to tip the balance against him. They closed their eyes, gritted their teeth, and voted for what they hoped was a harmless white man. But as Shad himself said earlier, Natchez was a different city a year ago. Now we are in crisis. And a man who does nothing during a crisis is as bad as a man who causes one.

As I stare at the great white courthouse, my cell phone rings. I climb into my Saab and answer.

“Are you out of the meeting?” Drew asks in a tense voice. “Did you see the autopsy report?”

No questions about his future, only about what happened to Kate. Is that because he loved her so dearly? Or because he has something to fear? “She was strangled, Drew.”

“That’s what I thought,” he says quietly. “From the petechiae around her eyes. Was she pregnant?”

“Yes. Four weeks along.”

A sharp intake of breath. “That’s why she was so desperate to see me. Jesus, what about—”

“Stop talking, Drew. We can go into details later. Right now we have a problem. The district attorney wants a sample of your DNA.”

Silence.

“The pathologist found semen inside Kate’s body.” There’s no point in telling Drew that the pathologist found the semen of two different men, and in two different locations. “Of course, I expected that, given what you told me about the previous night.”

“I’m listening.”

“Shad wants to prove you murdered Kate. He wants to prove it badly.”

“Does he really think I’m capable of that?”

“All men are capable of that, Drew. We can talk about Shad’s motives later. Right now, under these circumstances, giving him the sample is the best thing you can do. It’ll buy us three or four weeks while the lab does the test. And time is what we need more than anything right now.”

“Why?”

“Because the police may have caught the real murderer long before the test is completed, or even begun. And by that point, it won’t matter nearly so much that you were having sex with Kate Townsend. In fact, if Shad gets a confession from someone else, I might be able to persuade him to cancel the test altogether. You’d probably have to make a massive contribution to his next political campaign”—which will be sooner than anyone suspects—“but I think you could live with that.”

“Okay, fine. But what about the autopsy? What else did the report show?”

“Later. Shad wanted you to waltz into the St. Catherine’s Hospital lab and give the blood sample, but I worked out a compromise.”

“Which is?”

“Can you trust your lab technician?”

“Susan? Sure. She’s been with me nine years.”

“Good. Because in the next hour, a couple of cops are going to show up at your office and watch Susan draw some blood from your arm.”

“Okay.”

“And, Drew?”

“Yes?”

“From now on, don’t answer any questions from anybody without talking to me first. Nothing. You got that?”

“Okay.”

“You’d better get things straight with Susan.”