LITMIR.BIZ

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for others I can’t predict now, I may decide I need to tell Shad the truth. Everything. Today. The affair, the blackmail, everything.”

      Drew said nothing.

      “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think coming clean may still be the best option we have. Even lying by omission digs a hole they can bury you in later.”

      A woman on Drew’s end of the line called out a blood pressure reading. Drew lowered his voice. “You’re my lawyer, Penn. I trust your instincts. Say whatever you think you need to. I’m innocent—of murder, anyway—and I’m not going to hide anything except to protect my son.”

      What could I say to that? “I’ll call you when the meeting’s over. Keep your cell phone wired to your hip, and don’t answer any calls until you hear from me. Don’t talk to anybody.”

      “I won’t.”

      I hung up and turned back to the garage. My mother was watching me with a quizzical look on her face. In that moment I realized just how far my life had already slid off its accustomed track. After dropping Annie at school this morning, I drove down to the football field and searched it for my lost pistol. Failing to find it, I went up to the high school and told Coach Wade Anders to keep an eye out for it. Anders is the athletic director of St. Stephen’s, and he promised to have his assistants search the bowl again before any kids were allowed into it. He also asked if I knew anything about the switch box for the stadium lights being shot up. I told him I didn’t, but that I’d send someone to install a new box as soon as possible. He looked at me in silence for a little while, then nodded as though we shared a special understanding. Like everybody, Anders was building up capital where he could.

      The lost gun problem didn’t end there. The land that Drew and I chased the blackmailer over is owned by a group of investors who use it as a hunting camp. I called the doctor who heads the group to tell him I might have lost a pistol on their land, and to ask his members to keep an eye out for it. When he asked what I was doing on their land, I made up a story about a troublesome armadillo rooting up the St. Stephen’s football field—an armadillo I chased onto their land in my single-minded quest to kill it. Remarkably, he laughed as though he understood completely.

      “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

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