Elizabeth MacPherson 07 - MacPherson’s Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Even that had been too long, she decided later. Trust Mary Lee to strike up a conversation with some nice-looking young man in the parking lot, and before you could say “Chickamauga,” she was telling him that they were from Danville and they were playing “Do you know so-and-so?” Flora came upon them in the middle of this conversation, and to her horror she discovered that they did seem to have a common acquaintance. They were nodding and smiling to a degree that gave her palpitations. And of course he asked where they were going, at which point Flora gave Mary Lee a sharp jab in the ribs, so she amended her answer to “an island to see our friend Major Edward Anderson.” Mary Lee was a dreadful liar. She couldn’t even make up a name without accidentally quoting something she’d read.

  “Loose lips sink ships!” Flora had hissed at Mary Lee as she hustled her off to the Chrysler. “Do you want to end up in an old folks’ home back in Danville?”

  “But I didn’t tell him who we are,” Mary Lee protested, trying to look sweet and helpless.

  “Just as well I got to you in time,” snapped Flora. “You were about to exchange visiting cards with that whippersnapper. How do you know he’s not a policeman?”

  “Oh, no, dear. He told me that he’s an actor.”

  “So was John Wilkes Booth,” muttered Flora.

  “Perhaps we should move along,” said Dolly as the rest of them climbed into the car. “I’ll feel much better when we’ve found the gold. Won’t you, Flora?”

  “If we find it,” muttered Flora.

  “While we were marching through Georgia”

  —SONG COMMEMORATING SHERMAN’S MARCH

  CHAPTER 8

  MY BROTHER’S OFFICE is too small to accommodate visitors except on the most temporary basis, but since I needed access to a telephone, it seemed like a logical place from which to work. Bill did not seem to agree, even though I assured him that I would be completely unobtrusive and that he would soon forget my proximity, except when the phone was for me. Men are such territorial creatures; you would have thought there was another rooster on his dunghill the way he glowered at me, rattled his papers, and displayed exaggerated symptoms of claustrophobia.

  Finally I pointed to the cloaked rodent on the bookcase. “Anyone who would consent to share an office with that,” I said, “has absolutely no business objecting to the presence of a charming relative who is merely trying to help.”

  “I feel like I’m under house arrest,” muttered Bill, throwing open the window to let in a blast of steam from a Danville summer afternoon. “Why don’t you use A. P. Hill’s office? Or Edith’s desk? It’s her day off.”

  “I’m a Ph.D.,” I reminded him. “I’m not going to masquerade as your receptionist. And as for using your partner’s office, I wouldn’t dream of intruding into her space because I haven’t met her,” I said in a voice of sweet reason. “Besides, she doesn’t need my help. You do.”

  “You’re supposed to be finding the old ladies,” Bill replied. “And they’re not in here.”

  The phone rang at that moment, forestalling my next remark, which would have been to explain that I was in the process of tracking the absconding Confederate women, but like any sensible person with management experience, I had delegated the task. First I went to all the local travel agents to see if any of them had assisted in the travel plans of eight elderly women. The initial answer had been negative, but they all agreed to check their records and get back to me. I had told them a pretty story about Great-Aunt Flora needing her prescription refill at once, which would no doubt inspire them to speedier efforts at locating my quarry.

  I had told a similarly fanciful tale to a sympathetic young clerk at the local moving company. She in turn had promised to search through the last month’s paperwork for evidence of the vanishing old ladies.

  Meanwhile, on a hunch, I’d obtained a list of all the hotels in the Cayman Islands, and was systematically calling them to see if Flora Dabney and her cohorts were in hiding there. I think it was extremely ungrateful of Bill to be churlish about my use of his phone line. Even when I told him I’d pay his miserable little long-distance bill, he wasn’t the least bit gracious about it.

  Now, though, he looked as if he was regretting having put a stop to my phone inquiries. He was nodding into the phone with a decidedly agitated expression, and saying, “Yes, Mr. Trowbridge,” about six times a minute.

  “Well, actually, I’m still looking into that last question of yours, Mr. Trowbridge,” Bill said, with the hollow laugh he uses when he’s lying. “I wanted to make sure I covered all the ramifications for you. But you can certainly give me another question now. Certainly. That’s what I’m here for. What would you like to know this week?” He began to scribble notes on his yellow legal pad, grimacing as he wrote.

  After a few more minutes of sickening politeness, he hung up the phone and threw his pencil up in the air, making absolutely no attempt to catch it.

  I retrieved the pencil for him, setting it carefully on his desk, and waiting to see if he would throw it again, at which point I planned to suggest that he purchase a dog.

  “That was Mr. Trowbridge,” said Bill. “His wife put us on retainer to answer stupid legal questions for him. He has a very fertile mind-by which I mean that it is absolutely full of crap. He never seems to run out.”

  “What is it this time?” I asked, to humor him. At least he was talking.

  “He wants me to find out—get this: can an Indian tribe confiscate your property if they prove that their tribe once owned the land? If there’s an Indian burial or something on your property. He says that Israel seems to have used that logic to establish their nation, and he wants to know if it would work for the Shawnees.”

  “How would he go about finding a Shawnee?” I asked. I knew that Cherokees were still around, but I thought that most of the other eastern Indian tribes had vanished.

  “It may be hypothetical,” said Bill. “Or Mr. Trowbridge may be planning to declare himself the last of the tribe, and claim—who knows what? Monticello? Downtown Richmond?”

  “I see. Good luck figuring out that answer,” I said. “Well, not the answer. It’s pretty clear that the answer is no. Nonpayment of taxes for a few centuries would disqualify them, if nothing else, but I suppose he wants the terms of some obscure treaty. It’s the whys and wherefores that will take time.”

  “I haven’t got time,” said Bill. “I need to work on this house sale business before the bar association—”

  The phone rang again, and Bill snatched it up with a hunted look on his face. “MacPherson and Hill!” he bleated. Then his face fell and he heaved a mighty sigh. “Oh, hello, Mother.”

  I was poised to take the phone, thinking surely she must want to speak to me, her only daughter just back from Europe; but Bill ignored my presence, looking more miserable with every breath.

  “Yes, Mother. I guess I was supposed to be in court today to see about that restraining order we filed against Dad about the goldfish, but something came up. What? Well, another case, actually. No, Mother, I don’t think your case is trivial at all. I do like goldfish, it’s just that—Well, I don’t care what your friend Frances told you, I … What? Fine! I hope you can afford him!”

  “What was that all about?” I asked when the sound of a receiver being slammed down stopped ringing in my ears.

  “I thought you were supposed to be unobtrusive!” Bill said with a snarl. “What are you? A backseat lawyer? If you must know, that was one of my clients. A Mrs. Margaret MacPherson, who shares many of your less attractive traits, such as a tendency to nag. And since you ask, she fired me from her divorce proceedings against my father. Our father. Are you happy now?”

  “You haven’t told them about the mess you’re in, have you?”

  Bill put his head in his hands. “No. I have not told my mommy and daddy that I am in imminent danger of going to jail for legal malpractice. I thought they might have enough to worry about as it is. A goldfish custody hearing, perhaps.”
/>   I began to pace, which in Bill’s cubbyhole does not burn up too many calories. “I can’t believe Mother actually fired you, Bill. She always liked you best.”

  “Yeah, right,” sneered my brother. “In her current mood, she considers Jack the Ripper just an average guy. She’ll probably hire a woman lawyer now. I wonder if Powell would take the case. At least she’s competent.”

  “You’re all right,” I said. “You’re honest, anyhow. That’s a start.”

  “It is if I can prove it. Right now I’m popularly supposed to have a million bucks salted away in the Cayman Islands.” He was out of his seat and through the door before I could protest.

  “Where are you going?” I called after him.

  “To the courthouse law library!” said Bill. “To check on Shawnee property laws.”

  Doug MacPherson sagged against a park bench, listening to his heartbeat. He thought that if he took off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, he could watch his heart beat. A masochistic generation, these youngsters of the nineties. In his day, once you finished with boot camp, you tried not to exert yourself unduly and you certainly didn’t consider it recreation. But Caroline had insisted. Well, she hadn’t nagged; she had simply assumed that he would be as addicted to running as she was. And of course, physical exercise was so good for him. At the moment, though, all it seemed good for was ensuring that he would look fit and trim in his coffin!

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Caroline prancing back to see what was keeping him, little beads of sweat glistening on her golden forehead. He tried to subdue his breathing into a controlled wheeze so that she wouldn’t see his shoulders shaking with the effort.

  “Hi, hon!” she said, handing him the towel from around her neck. “You didn’t get a leg cramp, did you?”

  “Yes!” he gasped, thankfully seizing the excuse. It sounded better than the total collapse he was experiencing. He eased himself down on the park bench and began massaging his calf. The right one, he thought. I must remember which one to limp on. Aloud he said, “That darned calf muscle. It’s an old football injury from my days on the varsity at Georgia Tech.” (Well, he had attended Georgia Tech, and he had played varsity in high school, so it was almost true.)

  Caroline pushed her dark bangs away from her forehead. Her lovely, vacant face furrowed with concern. “Gee, can you walk on it, Doug?”

  “I can manage,” he said, still a trifle breathless. “I probably ought to take it easy for a while, though. Wouldn’t want to tear the muscle.”

  He allowed Caroline to put her shoulder under his arm and guide him along, as he hopped and limped back to the car. “Well, I guess that puts the kibosh on running for a while,” he remarked, trying to mute the cheerfulness in his tone. “Maybe I could teach you to play bridge this week instead.”

  Caroline wrinkled her nose. “Yecch! I hate card games. They’re so dreary.”

  Doug felt a pang of disappointment. He quite enjoyed a rousing game of bridge, and what’s more he was good at it. He and Margaret almost always won a prize at the—he choked off the memory in mid-thought. That was the old Doug MacPherson, he reminded himself. If he was going to start over, he couldn’t live in the past. Besides, with Caroline there were better things to do than play cards. He pictured poor Margaret at home, watching soap operas and counting the goldfish, and sighed to himself, thinking how close he had come to death from sheer boredom.

  “The leg feels better now,” he told Caroline. “Let’s try it again.”

  I was sitting around watching the phone not ring and wondering if one could have an early hamburger in lieu of Scotland’s very civilized afternoon teatime when the door to the outer office banged, and a beautiful blonde walked in. Oh, goody, I thought. Can fistfights and shots of rye be far behind? Alas, women’s lives never live up to men’s fantasies.

  She was very pretty in a wholesome track-team sort of way, with short-cropped hair and blue eyes that didn’t have time to be charming because they were boring into you for analysis. I endeavored to look pleasant, but since she was probably the sort of person accustomed to being fawned over, my effort made little impression. “May I help you?”

  She frowned in my direction and then looked wildly around the office. “Good grief! Edith hasn’t resigned, has she?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” I assured her. “But she isn’t here. I’m Elizabeth MacPherson. Can I help?”

  She stopped pacing for a moment and stuck out her hand. “A. P. Hill. I’m your brother’s partner. I guess you know that.”

  I nodded. What I didn’t know was whether Bill had confided his current legal difficulties to her. “He’s in the courthouse, I think. Mr. Trowbridge called with another legal question.”

  A. P. Hill rolled her eyes. “I knew Bill should never have taken that stupid job. He’ll end up spending all his time ferreting out answers to useless questions—and he’ll neglect the real practice. I can’t stick around to keep him working on more productive matters because I have an out-of-town trial to deal with.” She sighed. “How is he?”

  “Oh, he’s keeping busy,” I said somewhat evasively. “How is your case going? I heard it was a murder trial.”

  “It’s a tough one,” she said. “Of course, it’s my first real trial, which makes it even more difficult for me.”

  “They trusted you with a murder trial?” I didn’t mean to sound unflattering, but I wouldn’t want to risk my life in the hands of a novice attorney.

  “Nobody else wanted to take it.” She shrugged. “By the time I’m through, it’ll hardly pay minimum wage. But I thought that if I did well for Tug Mosier, I could get myself noticed in local legal circles.”

  “How’s the plan going so far?”

  “I haven’t evolved any brilliant schemes for the defense. He was drunk at the time he supposedly killed his girlfriend, so I had a doctor give him a regression-therapy drug to see if it would help him recall the events of that night.”

  “What if he remembered doing it?”

  A. P. Hill fiddled with a pencil from the desk. “I would have pleaded diminished capacity, I guess. It certainly wouldn’t be first-degree murder. I was hoping he’d remember not doing it. It could have been a burglar, you know. I needed some kind of evidence that somebody else could have done it.”

  “Reasonable doubt?”

  “Yes. And I got it. Under sedation, Tug remembered a guy named Red going home with him. After that, he just stared at the wall and wouldn’t talk. I thought about trying again, but then I remembered one of my law professors saying that you don’t really want to know if your client is guilty, because it will detract from the zeal of your defense of him.”

  “But I thought the whole point of the sedation was to find out if he did it.”

  “Well, it was, but when I heard him mention another man at the scene of the crime, I thought the safest thing was to go with that. All I have to do is suggest to a jury that Red could have done it, and then they can’t convict Tug.”

  “They can’t?”

  A.P. groaned. “Of course they can. The jury can do whatever it wants. It’s my job to persuade them that they aren’t sure enough to convict Tug.”

  “It would be interesting to know if he did it or not,” I mused. “Do you have the paperwork on the case?”

  “Copies in the file cabinet. Why?”

  “I thought I’d take a look at the autopsy report. I’m a forensic anthropologist.”

  A. P. Hill did not look particularly impressed by this announcement. “I’ll get it for you,” she said. “Just leave it on my desk when you’re through. I have to go.” She scribbled a telephone number on a note pad and wrote Powell beside it. “That’s the phone number of the motel I’m staying in. I moved out of the old one because they kept forgetting to give me my messages.”

  “I’ll see that Bill gets this,” I promised.

  “Thanks. While you’re at it, tell Bill to start boning up on discrimination law in his copious free time. When this trial is over, I
’ll have a new case for us.”

  “A new client?”

  She grinned. “Yeah. Me. We’re suing the National Park Service.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant by that, she was gone. I started to leaf through the stack of papers. The case seemed rather ordinary, I thought. Very tragic for the family of the victim, but not exceptional for an attorney or a policeman. It was the sort of case you read about in small-town papers every Monday morning: drunken good old boy kills his girlfriend. I thought prison might not be such a bad idea for Tug Mosier. He didn’t seem to have any other prospects.

  I hadn’t got very far in the case file when the phone rang again.

  “Bill MacPherson, please,” said a voice like old razor blades.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not here. May I take a message?” I didn’t want to talk to this voice long enough to explain who I wasn’t. He sounded like the kind of man who thinks female and secretary are synonymous anyhow.

  “This is Agent Runge of the State Bureau of Investigation. When do you expect Mr. MacPherson to return?”

  “Any time now,” I said as pleasantly as I could while my blood froze. “Shall I have him call you?”

  “You do that.” He barked out his number and then hung up without saying goodbye. He probably thought I was scum just because I answered the phone for one of his suspects. I actually felt guilty when I hung up. In fact, I think if the agent had walked in at that point, I might have confessed to two robberies and an earthquake. I’ll bet Mr. Runge is pretty darned good at his job.

  I made a note to Bill to call SBI Agent Runge at the number given. Do not whimper into phone, I added. I thought Bill ought to be warned.