“That term, ‘con man,’ it doesn’t sound bad, does it? Makes you think of some slick Hollywood actor. But that’s the biggest lie of all. Like Mama’s letter said, Junius Jelks preyed on the weak his whole life, like a jackal in the desert. He cheated old people and the sick. He steered runaway kids to pimps for a cut of the take. He used me to help him do that, even before I knew what I was doing. He fleeced every immigrant and minority class there is—used their ignorance like a gun against them. I’ve seen him talk thirteen-year-old girls right out of their clothes. He can fake his way through five languages and doesn’t know a one of them. ‘Caveat emptor!’ he used to yell after he’d taken somebody. ‘Let the buyer beware!’”

“Mr. Turner,” Quentin says gently. “I think we get the point. Your stepfather was no saint, as he said himself.”

Lincoln nods intently, as though trying to focus through the furnace glow of his anger on some wavering point beyond it.

“What about your mother’s will, Mr. Turner?”

After several seconds, Lincoln looks up, and this time it’s Quentin who rolls back about a foot in the face of his withering stare. “Mama made a new will, just like her letter said. And I burned it. I burned it as soon as I got to Natchez that morning.” Lincoln looks over Quentin at the spectators. “Who in this room wants to condemn me for that? All my life, Mama told me she was going to take care of me. She often talked about her will and said she was going to do all she could for Cora and me. And she meant to, right up until a couple of weeks before she died. Right up until that white reporter got her alone and filled her head with crazy dreams about Jimmy. My mama was sick, man. She was on drugs! She was dying, and that Henry Sexton took advantage of her just like Junius Jelks used to cheat them old folks in the nursing homes in Chicago. I deserved that money, people. Cora did, too. Mama wanted us to have it, and then a smooth-talking white man came along and cheated her out of her life savings on her deathbed. Do you think I should have stood by and let that crook walk away with my mama’s life savings? When my auntie can’t hardly pay her electric bill?” Lincoln looks down at Quentin. “Do you really believe that?”