Lewis Perdue: Perfect killer

But it wasn't the powerful, wealthy crusader Vanessa Thompson who arrested my pulse. No, it was the teenage Vanessa Thompson, my high school heartthrob and the ultimate forbidden fruit, who momentarily flatlined my EKG precisely as she had done more than thirty years before.

Her appearance didn't entirely surprise me because she and I had swapped e-mails over the past month about a strange, cold hate-crime case. While I kept e-mailing her that I didn't do forensics, Vanessa persisted, attaching her e-mails with file after file crammed with information about Darryl Talmadge, a local white man who had recently been convicted of murdering a black man in the 1960s. I could not fathom why Vanessa wanted me to help save Talmadge from the gas chamber.

Vanessa Thompson had single-handedly deflected the trajectory of my life from that of privileged, multigenerational son of the Confederacy to a traitorous scalawag, who betrayed his race and turned his back on a heritage filled with statues and oil portraits in public buildings. I met Vanessa in 1965 when court-ordered integration placed her in my Jackson high school as part of a handful of token black students. I'd like to believe I changed way back then because Vanessa showed me how wrong the old system was. But it wasn't that way at all, not that clean and simple.

"You sure as hell know how to piss folks off, my friend," Rex mumbled to me as we made our way toward Vanessa.

I looked around and saw the white-hot hate stares shift from Vanessa to me and back.

"Comes naturally I guess."

"Damn straight," Rex said. "So how is it you know the famed Vanessa Thompson?"

"High school," I said, remembering the wild sweetness of adolescence and the intoxicating hormone rushes. "She was in my history class. She always spoke up-"

"That sure hasn't changed."

"— spoke up and always had something interesting to say. Things I had never considered. Dangerous ideas."

"Y'Mama thought you had way too many dangerous ideas. I imagine one of those started with her?" Rex nodded toward Vanessa.

"Not exactly."

"How exactly?"

"I fell in love with her a long time before her words really mattered."

Rex grimaced and made a sucking sound with his front teeth. "Lordy!"

I nodded.

The meaning of her words would grow paramount as time passed, but at first it was her voice, the tones and timbre of the words, the steel of commitment reinforcing her voice, the energy of her emotions, and mostly the inexorable gravity of her wisteriacolored eyes that pulled me into orbit and made me hers.

And the testosterone.

"Vanessa and the other black students took the same classes, ate lunch by themselves at the same table every day, and pretty much kept to themselves, " I said. "White students ignored them, like they were invisible. I started out the same way until American history."

"Let me guess," Rex said. "You committed the unpardonable sin of talking to them."

"To Vanessa," I said nodding. "Sometimes just a few seconds between classes. But that was enough."

"Nigger lover."

The word still hit me like a physical slap. No matter how much hip-hop practitioners gratuitously tossed the word around, it felt like a profanity of the soul.

"Scratched into my locker, painted on my car, spelled out on the front lawn with used motor oil. I think they tried to set the oil on fire, but Papa chased them off with his twelve-gauge.

"The principal called me into his office and told me to stop fraternizing with the enemy, something about 'godless Communists' being behind it all. He called my parents. My mother cried; my father said he'd lose his job."

"So she turned your head around?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said. The old irresistible rush fluttered in my gut as Vanessa drew closer. How could this be? How could this feeling endure over the distance of so many decades?

"I was in love. Civil rights started out as a way to her heart. It took a while for it to become an end of its own." I nodded at the memories that played out in my head. "I asked her what to read, who to listen to, how to find the subversive literature behind the movement.

"Not surprisingly, Vanessa's dad was one of the leaders. He was a professor at Tougaloo. The whole thing came to a head right before Christmas when Vanessa invited me to a discussion-group party at her house. I told Mama I had to do some research at the library, then drove north on old Highway Fifty-one toward Tougaloo. When I got to Vanessa's house, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. That plain little tract house was packed-I mean literally jammed-with people of every color." I shook my head. "Black, white, Asian, Latino-" I turned to Rex. "I remember that day like it was this morning. I'd never, ever, been anywhere before in my entire life where blacks and whites and everybody else just… just hung around as equals.

"I wasn't all that surprised to find all three of the Jewish students at my high school or the owner of the only real deli in town. But I was floored to find my physics teacher there, and that was my first indication that there were white people who didn't hate.

"When Vanessa took my arm, I was on cloud nine as she led me around and introduced me to people there. It was almost like the initiation into a secret society."

I felt the euphoria again as Rex and I covered the remaining few steps toward Vanessa. Now, as then, I felt the euphoria turn dark and ugly remembering how all hell had broken loose when she'd introduced me to her parents. Her father was furious, and his deep, booming anger silenced the assembled crowd.

"How dare you step foot in my house!" he yelled at me. "You of all people! Your entire family and your ancestors have done more damage to my people than anybody else in this state's sorry history!"

He was convinced that at worst, I was there as a spy, and at the very best, a fulminating embarrassment.

He and Vanessa's brother Quincy escorted me to my car and told me never to speak to her again. Vanessa transferred out of my high school the next week, and I had not seen her face-to-face again until this moment.

Now on this bitter day, next to one of the many graves hearing a rusty iron Southern Cross, Vanessa and I met again. She reached out and touched my forearm with her fingers.

Seismic plates moved again in my heart.

"I'm so sorry about your mother."

I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if the past thirty-five years had never rolled by She returned my embrace, then slipped a hand inside my suit coat to make the hug even more intimate. She took a step back then. Reluctantly, I let her go.

"I'm very, very sorry to barge in at a time like this, but this Talmadge thing has gotten out of control in the past few days. We really need your help and I hoped to convince you in person."

As Vanessa spoke, movement from behind her caught my eye. Again, I found myself staring toward the big magnolia tree; this time, I registered movement far beyond, in the trees down by Roebuck Lake.

Before I could react, a rifle shot thundered through the chill air. Vanessa pitched forward. I opened my arms to catch her and saw an evil void where her left eye had once been. The warm, red-and-gray eruption from the ghastly wound blinded me. I grabbed Vanessa, rolled us to the ground, and covered her with my body as a second shot tore through the morning silence.

From a shadowy perch hidden beyond the silvery, weathered boards of a derelict and graffiti-smeared lakeside cottage, the shooter focused on the drama playing out in the perfect circle of the scope's eyepiece. The reddish mist from the lawyer's head appeared as a silent cloud of dust and created the familiar calming satisfaction that ran warm in the shooter's veins.