Perfect killer

CHAPTER 2

Rex climbed down from his truck and waved as he started toward me. I returned Rex's greeting and took a last look at the family plot. My mother had often told me she wanted to be buried here, but her younger brother William had beat her to the last available real estate in the plot. She had really wanted to be buried next to her father, whom she called Daddy and others called the Judge even though he had never been elected or appointed to the judiciary and felt those sorts of public office were not for gentlemen like him. It was, he felt, the duty of true Southern gentlemen like him to anoint those who would stand for election and appointment and who would do his bidding once in office.

The success of his theory was attested to by a file cabinet full of personal correspondence from governors and senators and congressmen and lesser elected officials and lower mortals all assuring the Judge they would do his bidding. Mama had inherited the papers half a century ago, and when she'd moved out of her big house into the little apartment across Lakeland Drive from St. Dominic's Hospital in Jackson, she'd passed the papers along to me. Out of respect for her, I had not thrown the papers away, but after one slapdash glance through a couple of the hundred or so file storage boxes (the accreted paper residue of the Judge's forty years of law practice and power brokering), I had stashed them all in mini-storage and forgotten about them until now.

The Judge's elitism and especially his attitude toward public officials formed the basis for his everlasting contempt for my father, whose family tree hung heavy with elected officials including a congressman and a famous U.S. senator, my great-greatgrandfather J.Z. George, who, according to history books, was the first to formalize Jim Crow segregation when he wrote the Mississippi state constitution in 1890 and embodied in it the literacy test and the poll tax that disenfranchised half the state's population for the next three-quarters of a century.

For this, they put my great-great-grandfather in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall next to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. I never quite understood the Judge's contempt for my family's dark legacy, since it had produced a masterpiece of constitutional handiwork allowing the Judge to keep the black sharecroppers on both his plantations in virtual slavery.

For all these familial reasons and because my father worked for the governor at the time, I scandalized the family with my expulsion from Ole Miss in the fall of 1967 for leading a civil rights march. The Judge disinherited me from his substantial estate faster than you could say scalawag. They were all thankful when I enlisted in the Army and shipped out.

I turned away from this past — yet again — and headed toward Rex.

He had called me at my office on Thursday, something he had never done before. Mama, he said, had gone to the hospital that morning. Like any relatively affluent and extensively insured eighty-seven-year-old, Mama had a battalion of medical experts she visited on a regular basis. And on a regular basis they sent her to the hospital for inpatient tests.

And likewise regularly, she had her doctors forward copies of her test results to me. She and I would discuss these results extensively. We would have had nothing to talk about had I never gone to medical school. She disapproved of where I lived, how I lived, most of what I believed in, and never failed to complain about my accent and how I sounded "like a blank Yankee." My mother was far too genteel to say damn. Southern ladies, in her mind, never used coarse language.

And make no mistake about it, Mama was a Southern lady of the very old school, an unreconstructed Delta belle born on a plantation who never understood why happy darkies no longer wanted to stay in their place as God had ordained, like bluebirds not mixing with the sparrows. For this reason, our conversations tended to focus on her medical history. She loved me as only a mother could, but she never understood me or why I had turned out the way I had. Neither had I.

Rex and I met now, one hundred hours later, by a headstone bearing the Stallings name.

"Hey, Doc."

I held out my hand, but instead of shaking it, he stepped closer and gave me a bear hug. I returned it genuinely but briefly. Hugs from men — other than from my father, who was dead, and my son, who died far too short of being a man — made me uncomfortable.

"Thanks for coming." I knew it sounded lame even before Rex frowned at me. "Nice suit," I tried. He shrugged and turned to face the gravesite. "I owe you big time, man,"

Rex gave me a curious look.

"If you hadn't called me, I'd never have seen her alive again."

"How's that?"

"After you called me, I phoned Mama at the hospital. She gave me all her usual chatter about how I shouldn't come because my patients surely needed my attention more than she did, and wouldn't it be wonderful if I would take that endowed chair the University of Mississippi Medical School had offered me right there in Jackson."

Rex smiled. "She never stopped talking about that; that's for sure."

I shrugged. "Well, I just had a feeling this time. I'm glad you called me."

The religious would say it was a divine message, but I think maybe it was more the tone in her voice, or simply that she was getting old and my own professional medical judgment told me that the accretion of illnesses would soon overwhelm her stubborn grip on life. Regardless, I canceled my patient appointments and hospital rounds and took a red-eye from LAX Thursday night. When I got to her room at St. Dominic's Hospital early afternoon Friday, I sat down with a pale, dry husk of the woman I had seen only months before. It took a moment for her to open her eyes. They were lethargic, flat, and filled with tears when she recognized me. Colon cancer, she said. Terminal, the doctors said. She wanted no special measures, no interim surgeries or chemo.

"I spent the afternoon with her," I said as we walked toward the gravesite. "She was drifting in and out, and the few times she spoke, her voice was so faint I had to lean over the bed and hold my breath to hear her."

"What did you talk about?" Rex's voice had an odd tone, not fear but not simple curiosity.

"Mostly I read to her from the Bible, especially Psalm 121, over and over."

"That's it?"

I nodded and his usual poker face showed me something like relief. Something like a secret that had not been divulged. That confounded me and I put that down to yet another artifact of stress, like the person who wasn't by the magnolia.

"Yeah." I felt the regret. That was it. When the light from the window got too dim to read by any longer, I told her I needed some sleep, because I didn't have any on the redeye from L.A. I kissed her, gave her a hug, and told her I would be hack in the morning."

He gave me a knowing look, as if he already knew what I had said and what I was about to say.

Movement interrupted my thoughts. In the distance, a hearse turned into the cemetery off Highway 7. It glided to a dignified stop behind Rex's truck.

"Nothing more until the phone call from the hospital at maybe four thirty in the morning to tell me she was dead." I stopped and looked at Rex closely "They told me she had apparently gotten up to get a cigarette, lost her balance, hit her head as she fell in the darkness."

Rex stopped and looked back at me.

"She died all alone on the cold, hard linoleum floor." I shook my head as the image tore through my heart again. "You cannot possibly imagine how many times I have prayed that she had been knocked out by the blow on the way down. I can't stand to think that she ended up on the floor, conscious for a long time, dying all alone in the dark. I wonder if she called for help or simply gave up, closed her eyes, and let go?"

The detail in Rex's eyes gave my stress-worn nerves the impression that he somehow knew the answer to that.