Turning Angel (37 page)

”I’m glad I never came up against you in court, Quentin. You’re a pragmatic son of a bitch.“

His eyes twinkle. ”That I am, my boy. You are, too. You just have this romantic haze over your eyes. You want the world to be better than it is. But I know your record. You’re as hard as I am when it comes down to it. You just get there by a different route.“

”I’m not sure about that.“

Quentin snorts. ”As many people as you got executed, I hope you’re sure.“

Images of desperate men fill my mind, some of them glaring at me from death row cages, others staring through bulletproof glass as a technician injects paralyzing drugs into their veins. In some of those eyes I see a plea for forgiveness, in others unalloyed hatred. But one thing is common to them all: the animal fear of death.

”Stop it,“ Quentin says. ”Let the dead bury the dead.“

”Sometimes I can’t stop it.“

The old lawyer looks out over the rooftops toward the river and speaks in a low voice. ”Fifteen years ago, I was asked to review the case of a young man sitting on death row in Huntsville, Texas. He was black, and his family told me he’d been railroaded by the state. The facts sounded promising as presented, so I flew down to Texas and reviewed the file.“ Quentin glances at me. ”You were the lawyer who convicted him.“

A chill goes through me. ”What was his name?“

”Doesn’t matter.“ Quentin looks back at the river. ”The point is, I spent three days and nights going over that case. I had two associates helping me. And we couldn’t find one chink in the wall of evidence that had convicted that boy. There wasn’t a glimmer of hope. I gave the family back their files and flew home.“ He spits over the brick wall of the balcony, then turns to me. ”I don’t believe in the death penalty, Penn, not in this mortal world. It’s applied unfairly, and innocent men are executed. But I will say this: according to the law of the land, that boy in Huntsville got exactly what he deserved. And you have nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve reviewed a lot of death penalty cases, and that was the best work I’ve ever seen.“

”Why are you telling me this?“

”Because that’s the reason the two of us are standing here now, working together. We’re about to go through some shit, you and I. And I want you to know
I
know you’ve got what it takes to do it. Now, if you want to do your friend any good, you’re going to have to start looking at the facts as coldly as you would if you were dealing with some dead-eyed killer in Texas.“

”It’s hard for me to look at Drew like that.“

”That’s because he’s white.“

I feel my back stiffen. ”That’s not true. I sent five white men to death row. I killed a white supremacist myself.“

Quentin shakes his head like a patient tutor. ”I said he’s white, not white trash. When you look at Drew Elliott, you see yourself. When you look at Kate Townsend, you see your sister, or your daughter, or your mother. How do you think I got so many black men off of death row? When I looked at them, I saw myself. Or what could have been me, with just a tiny push at the wrong time.“

”I see what you mean. So, you’re telling me not to try to find Cyrus?“

”Damned straight. As long as Cyrus White stays a mystery, he’s our acquittal on the hoof. The last thing we want is that depraved hoodlum on the witness stand telling a jury how Kate was scoring dope for Drew’s wife. You get me?“

”Yes. Only…“

”What?“

”I tried a lot of murder cases, Quentin. If you don’t really know what happened at a crime scene, you can get your ass handed to you in court.“

”Stop thinking like a prosecutor. We’re the defense, boy! We don’t
care
what really happened at the crime scene. We don’t even want to know. All we care about is
reasonable doubt.
That’s your mantra from now on. I want you saying it in your sleep:
reasonable doubt.
Say it, man! It’s like, ’Show me the money!‘ “ Quentin grins. ”Come on…
reasonable doubt.
“

I’d like to humor him, but at bottom I just don’t believe in his strategy.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. ”It’s human nature to want to know the truth, Penn. But what if the truth is that your best friend flew into a jealous rage, raped that girl in the ass, and strangled her to death?“

Quentin’s frank tone tells me that he fully believes in this possibility. I know what he’s trying to do, but I simply can’t abandon my faith in my friend. If I do that, I abandon my faith in myself. ”I don’t think that’s what happened.“

”But you don’t
know.
And at least until this trial is over, that’s the way I want it. Because if you find out that is what happened, you won’t be any earthly good to me or Drew Elliott. And I need your help. Just remember, you’re the foot soldier here, not the general.“

”I got it.“

”Make sure you do.“

Chapter
27

Cemetery Road runs through the old black section of town, past the Little Theater and up along the two-hundred-foot bluff that stretches along the Mississippi River north of town. The road is narrow, bordered on the right by a low stone wall and on the left by a tangle of kudzu that festoons the bluff from top to bottom. As I pass the second wrought-iron gate in the cemetery wall, I realize that my plan to photograph the mourners at Kate’s interment is impractical. The turnout for burials is usually much smaller than that for funeral services, but the faded green tent over Kate’s open grave is surrounded by more than a hundred people.

I drive past the third gate in the wall, pass a row of shacks on my left, then turn right into the fourth gate, which lets me drive up the back side of Jewish Hill, the highest point in the cemetery. Jewish Hill holds the remains of Natchez’s second-generation Jewish settlers, and it has the best view of the Mississippi River anywhere in the nation. I take my camera and walk past the stones of the Rothstein and Schwarz families, then stop behind a wall in the Cohen plot. From here I can see the whole sweep of the ninety-acre cemetery.

This ground was consecrated in 1822, but some of the coffins were moved here from an even older graveyard, where Natchez settlers were buried in the early 1700s. Kate Townsend’s grave has been dug in an area near the bluff called the Zurhellen Addition. It lies between the steep rise of Jewish Hill and the long row of majestic oak trees that borders the next section of graves to the south. About forty yards in front of Kate’s grave, near the stone wall at the edge of the cemetery, stands the most famous monument in this city of the dead: the Turning Angel. Erected in 1932 to commemorate five girls who died in a fire, this marble statue has become an object of both legend and ritual in Natchez. The life-size angel stands on its pedestal in an attitude of purposeful repose, writing names into the Book of Life. The angel possesses a face of Madonna-like serenity, but its musculature and powerful wings make it appear almost masculine. When you drive down Cemetery Road, the angel appears to be looking directly at you. Yet once you pass the monument and look back over your shoulder, the angel is
still
looking at you. Thus the appellation: the Turning Angel. For me, the effect is much more dramatic at night, and it’s probably caused by a trick of light as the beams of headlights create ever-changing shadows on the monument. In daylight—from up close—you can clearly see the angel standing with its back to the bluff and the river. Yet so famous is this legend that every Natchez teenager at some point in his life drives or is driven down the dark stretch of road to watch the angel turn. Thus has legend spawned a rite of passage for all the children in the town.

The faded green tent at the center of the funeral crowd reads, ”McDonough’s Funeral Home,“ and it’s been the centerpiece of almost every white funeral in town for as long as I can remember. The crowd is pressing so close to the tent that I have no hope of photographing anyone. My only hope is to walk down and join the throng.

A concrete staircase leads down Jewish Hill to the flat rectangle of the Zurhellen Addition. As I walk down it, I hear the chime of an acoustic guitar. Then a young male voice floats over the tops of the mourners’ heads, cracking with grief but also communicating defiance. It’s singing about unpredictability and fate and the brevity of youth.

I guess Kate Townsend was a Green Day fan.

Very slowly, I weave my way through the crowd, nodding to those mourners who meet my eye. I know most of the people here, but some I don’t. As I near the tent, the crowd becomes too thick for me to negotiate further. Thanks to my height, though, I can survey the gathering from here.

Jenny Townsend is sitting beneath the burial tent with her ex-husband, the Englishman. Reverend Herrick is performing the graveside service, a much more traditional one than he gave in the school gymnasium. There are other people beneath the tent, but they don’t interest me. The people gathered around the tent do. I see most of the St. Stephen’s school board, with Holden Smith at their head. Jan Chancellor is wearing a silk pants suit. Steve Sayers stands in the front row to my right, one eye swollen and purple. Not far down the line from him stands Mia Burke with her mother, a paralegal for the city’s largest law firm. To my surprise, Mia is wearing a black dress and makeup; with her dark hair pulled up in a bun, she looks twenty-five. She catches my eye and vouchsafes a demure smile. Coach Wade Anders is standing with his back to me, but I recognize his head and shoulders, even in a suit. I have to do a double-take to confirm that one of the women on the far side of the tent is Ellen Elliot, but I’m right. I guess Ellen felt she needed to show the town that she mourns Kate as much as anyone, despite whatever her soon-to-be-ex-husband might have done to her.

As Reverend Herrick prays, I turn my head and scan the gravestones on Jewish Hill, then the mausoleums on the high ground above the superintendent’s office. I have a feeling that someone else is here today. But who? Cyrus White, maybe? Marko Bakic? Or could Drew be here? Some part of me can’t quite accept that Drew will not see his paramour lowered into the ground. How difficult would it be for him to slip out of the fence behind the city jail and make his way here? Prisoners with half his intelligence and strength have done it. But I see no one hiding among the stones. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no one there.

Reverend Herrick is reminiscing about Kate. As I look around the cemetery, I recall many memories of this place: sneaking into it as a twelve-year-old with friends to ride madly through the dark lanes on our banana bikes; walking through the stones in the heat of summer with a lovely girl, then lying on the soft grass beneath a wall to explore each other; meeting the love of my life on Jewish Hill in the dead of night, twenty years after I lost her, hoping to learn the secret truth of our lost lives—

”Excuse me.“

A woman I don’t know brushes past me. The crowd is dispersing. Car engines start in the lanes and idle softly, while figures in black recede from my vision. I recede with them. I see Mia looking for me, but I turn away and walk toward the concrete steps in the wake of some people who parked where they could avoid the long funeral cortege.

Breaking away, I climb to the top of Jewish Hill and turn back toward the river, watching the last of the living depart. Kate’s gleaming casket lies suspended above her open grave. Soon all evidence that she lived will be buried forever. Jenny Townsend still stands beside the tent, alone with Reverend Herrick. The minister reaches out and lays a comforting arm on her shoulder. As they speak, a lone figure appears from beneath the tent. Ellen Elliott. Reverend Herrick hesitates, then moves away from the two women. What can Ellen be saying? And how is Jenny responding? Jenny knew about the affair between her daughter and Drew for some time, yet she didn’t try to stop it, nor did she inform Ellen about it. Thank God, Ellen doesn’t know any of that.

Watching Ellen offer her condolences, I realize that she’s adhering to a code of Southern womanhood that demands precisely what she is doing now: maintaining composure and grace through all trials, however difficult. The women do not embrace, but they do shake hands. Then Ellen walks toward the last two cars in the lane with quiet dignity.

”You fucked up, Drew,“ I say softly. ”You couldn’t see what you had.“

Of course, I’ve never known Ellen as a wife. The gracious figure that gave her sympathy to Jenny Townsend is a far cry from the drug-crazed addict Drew has probably faced more nights than I would have been able to endure. Conjuring that image, it’s not hard to see how appealing Kate Townsend must have looked to him.

Christ, what do I really think about Drew? Quentin Avery is willing to believe that he committed brutal rape and murder. But the mother of the victim is not. Of course, Jenny doesn’t have all the facts of the case. I do. Most of them, anyway. Is there a dark corner of my heart where I admit that Drew might have blown a gasket and murdered the teenager he’d fallen in love with? That he got her pregnant, panicked, and then—terrified of losing the family he’d worked so hard to build and sustain—erased her from the world?

No. The boy I grew up with, had he committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best about the South is archaic. The tragedy is that it should be so.

If Drew didn’t kill her,
says a voice in my head,
then why didn’t he call for help when he found Kate’s body?

”He’s a doctor,“ I say aloud. ”He knew she was already dead. All he would have accomplished by reporting the body was the destruction of his family.“

But what if he didn’t mean to kill her? What if they were playing a sex game, and it simply got out of hand?

”He would have told me that,“ I mutter. ”He would have.“

When you start talking to yourself in a graveyard, it’s time to go home.

As I turn toward my car, my cell phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s Caitlin, calling from the newspaper. I haven’t spoken to her since last night. My phone showed a missed call from her when I woke up this morning, but she’d called from the paper and hadn’t left a message, so I didn’t call her back. She must be desperate to question me about all the murders, but she’s trying hard to preserve the illusion that she won’t exploit our relationship in order to write a better story.