Fate soon answered the question for him. It was Viola’s duty to unlock the clinic every morning, then set up the examining rooms and the surgery for the day. The other girls came in thirty minutes later, and the docs a half hour after that, after completing morning rounds at the hospital. Dr. Edwards always arrived last, but not because of rounds. He was usually visiting a bored housewife whose husband left early for work. But one morning in 1965, Gavin Edwards was waiting inside the clinic when Viola arrived. He told her he’d come in early to catch up on his records, but within three minutes his hands were all over her. When he tried to pin her in a corner of an examining room, Viola pretended to cooperate just long enough to get a ceramic mug filled with tongue depressors into her hand. Then she cracked him across the face with it.

Tom’s first knowledge of the incident came when Dr. Lucas called him into his office. Viola had reported Dr. Edwards’s behavior, and the surgeon had already called Edwards in to question him. Edwards told Lucas that he’d been having consensual sex with Viola for a couple of weeks, and she’d only hit him when he admitted that he had no feelings for her and had simply wanted to find out what it was like to “dip his pen in ink.” Lucas believed Edwards, mostly because of his track record with the other female employees, yet something had made him ask Tom’s opinion. Almost before he knew what he was going to say, Tom blurted out, “Gavin Edwards is a damned liar.”

Dr. Lucas’s mouth dropped open as though he’d seen a pig start to dance. Then he drew himself up and gave Tom a stern glare. “That’s a pretty serious charge against a colleague, Tom. Not to mention the obvious.”

“What’s the ‘obvious’?” Tom asked, wondering if Lucas had the balls to say that Edwards was white and Viola black.

“Are you taking the word of an unregistered nurse over that of a fellow medical man?”

“Viola Turner is the best nurse I’ve ever worked with,” Tom replied, his chin quivering with fury. “Gavin Edwards is a lazy bastard who can’t keep his prick in his pants. Worse, he’s a lousy diagnostician. I don’t think he can even read an EKG.”

Dr. Lucas started to say something, but Tom cut him off with an ultimatum. “If you fire Viola, you’re firing me as well. Then you and Edwards can do all the diagnosing around here.” Then he walked out.