“You’re kidding.”
“We can’t take any risks here.”
A pause, then, “It’s your money.”
“That’s right, it is.” Randall cut the connection, sat staring out the window of his Mercedes, wishing he knew what it was that had him so concerned.
WHEN RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC trapped him on I-95, Marcus used his cellular phone to call ahead. The lawyer in Richmond sounded hostile and half-drunk. Marcus bullied the man into granting him five minutes and his home address.
The hundred-mile drive took three traffic-clogged hours. Following the lawyer’s slurred directions, Marcus took a central Richmond exit and entered a wounded city. Darkness hid the worst of the scars, but what the streetlights and shadows revealed was not pleasant. Buildings had the abandoned look of old tombstones. The sidewalks were empty save for those who loitered and clustered and called to passing cars as if they were hailing death.
He turned off the main thoroughfare and entered a gloom so thick he could not see the street sign, much less house numbers. Finally he spotted a front porch with a light, and in the process of reading the number he also observed the bars where the screen door should have been. Marcus drove down another block to the correct address and parked.
Marcus climbed the steps of the attorney’s house and heard the tinny voices of a television game show. The noise marked the dark and his own creeping fear. Marcus fumbled for a bell, found none, so he banged on the door. He heard footsteps scraping the sidewalk behind him. He banged harder still.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Taub, it’s Marcus Glenwood. We spoke on the phone.” He did not wait for a reply, but banged again. “Open up.”
“Hang on.” The latch rattled, the door cracked open a notch. “I told you, you’re wasting your—”
Marcus pushed inside, almost knocking the man to the floor. “Sorry. There was somebody out there.”
Marshall Taub did not appear the least surprised. “Yeah, this is a creepy place. I never go out at night.” He waved his hand, sloshing his drink on the already-stained carpet. “You might as well sit down.”
The room’s lighting was yellow and feeble, the house dank with old smells. Dishes were piled on a cheap corner shelf. The coffee table between the battered sofa and the television bore two empty bottles and a half dozen glasses. Marcus deliberately walked over and cut off the television. “As I said on the phone, I am representing a client who wants to enter suit against New Horizons.”
Marshall Taub relocked and latched the door. “Don’t do it.”
“I have a file on your case.” Marcus had managed to scan the top pages while trapped on the interstate. “I’d just like to ask—”
“I’m telling you, don’t go after them.” Taub motioned a second time with his glass. “Wanna drink?”
“No thanks.” The Richmond attorney had the doughy appearance of someone carrying the worst kind of extra poundage. “You won your suit against New Horizons, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t win a thing. Lost it. Lost it all.”
“But the records show—”
“Siddown, why don’t you.” He took a hard slug from the glass. “Don’t believe what you read. Never believe what you read.”
Marshall Taub could have been forty, he could have been sixty-five. His graying beard only partly masked the pastiness of his features. He had the shaky hands and blank gaze of a man determined to kill himself slowly. Marcus asked, “What’s wrong with the court records, Mr. Taub?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. Except they’re a lie.” He drained his glass, reached for the bottle on the coffee table, slopped bourbon into his glass and over his hand. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”
“Mr. Taub, who is handling further action against the appeal?”
“Nobody. Not a soul.” Another hard slug from the glass. “Know how many motions they attached? Forty-seven.”
“They’re trying to bury the appeal,” Marcus interpreted.
“Burying the case, burying the lawyer.” He thought that was funny enough for a repeat. “Won the case, lost it all.”
Marshall Taub took a long sip, almost toppled over backward, caught himself, and flopped down into a chair whose exposed springs were partially covered by a ratty throw rug. “Don’t do it.”
Marcus saw the dark stains covering the sofa cushions, decided to remain on his feet. “Tell me what happened.”
“Started with threats. Pretrial motions, pretrial threats.” The whiskers parted in a bleary grin. “That didn’t work, so they went for the jugular. My other clients started heading south. My partners got worried. I got mad, wouldn’t let go, so they dumped me. I had New Horizons cold. A great case.”
“You left your firm?”
“Yep. That’s when it got bad. Real bad.” He drained his glass, let it slide to the floor. “They got pictures of me with a lady I knew. Mailed ’em to my wife.”
“They framed you?”
“Manner of speaking.” He fumbled, managed to grab the bottle, took a long hit. “My wife left me. Took the kids. Walked out the day I won the case.” Another bleary grin. “Great victory, huh.”
SIX
MARCUS ARRIVED at the Hayes mansion in the soft light of early Saturday morning. Before he cut the motor, his battered Blazer was surrounded by three barrel-chested Labs. The dogs clustered and poked him with cold noses as he climbed down. The extremely well-trained bird dogs neither barked at his familiar smell nor pressed their case. Instead they both followed and led at an amiable distance as he made for the open garage door.
Mansion was the only way to describe the eleven-thousand-square-foot yellow-brick dwelling—despite its doors and shutters and pillars and porticoes and garage all being painted a startling sky blue. The four-car garage had one oversize door that belonged on an airplane hangar, upon which was painted the emblem of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. Behind it hulked an RV larger than a Greyhound bus and painted the same blue as the house trim. As Marcus walked up the drive, the house’s owner was loading sky blue dog boxes into the back of a blue Cherokee sporting a license plate that read GO-HEELS. Marcus knew for a fact that the license plate had cost Boomer Hayes a quarter-million-dollar contribution to the UNC football fund, as the tag had formerly been the personal property of the team coach.
“Marcus!” Boomer Hayes had a voice to match his body, big and raucous and pushy. “Did I invite you?”
“No.”
“Don’t matter. You got a gun?”
“No.”
“That’s okay too. Go on downstairs and pick yourself out a couple.” Boomer swatted at the dogs, who circled excitedly. “Y’all just hold on to your tails. I’ll get to you in a minute.” To Marcus, “You remember where I keep the gun?”
“Yes.” Boomer’s gun room was a basement running the entire length of the house. At one end was an arsenal capable of equipping a fair-size insurrection. At the other loomed an entertainment center with fourteen speakers and a 118-inch Swiss-made television. The carpets, drapes, gun cabinets, leather sofas, and walls were all Carolina blue. Boomer Hayes was serious about only three things—Carolina football, his toys, and his family. The order depended upon how well the Tar Heels were doing that year. Marcus said, “I’m not going hunting.”
“Sure you are. It don’t mean a thing, me forgetting to invite you.” He opened the first cage door and the dogs started whining. They knew where they were headed. “The ’Heels don’t kick off till seven Sunday. We got plenty of time to go pack us some birds.”
A querulous voice wafted from the house’s side door, the one that led up to the separate apartment wing. “He ain’t interested in your football silliness and he ain’t going hunting!”
Boomer reached for the nearest dog and hefted him into the cage. “Shame how the old man’s gone all doddery. Guess before long we’ll have to start chaining him to the bedpost.”
A man with the fragility of the very old came tottering into view. He carried a cane, but
did not use it, as though the stick were there for assurance alone. “Can somebody please tell me where my only son got this fanaticism over something as absurd as Tar Heel football?” Charlie Hayes limped over to where Marcus stood, huffed a single breath, then continued. “I went to Carolina. Twice. Undergrad before the war and law school after. I never felt like the world would end if Carolina lost a game.”
Boomer gave the old man a stricken look. “Don’t talk nasty like that, Daddy.”
“Humph.” Charlie peered at Marcus through bifocals so thick his eyes changed shape and shade with each shift of his chin. “First time Marcus comes by in over a year, you don’t even offer your old friend so much as a how-do.”
“Now that’s not true.” Boomer closed the gate on the third dog pen, and began stacking leather-cased rifles like cordwood. From behind their wire-meshed doors the dogs watched with lolling tongues. “I asked him to come hunting. Didn’t I ask you, Marcus?”
“You did indeed.”
“See there? You can’t get any nicer than that, now, can you.”
Marcus said to the old man, “You’re looking good, Charlie.”
“I’m not either. I look like I sleep with death as a bedfellow. You’re just trying to suck up to me on account of not stopping by for so long.” Charlie Hayes brandished his cane in Marcus’ face. “Well, it won’t do you a bit of good. I’ve written you off and that’s final.”
Boomer slammed the tailgate shut. “That’s my pop. All sweetness and light.”
“Now that’s a shame,” Marcus said. “I came back from a trip last night to find I’d been invited to go fishing this morning. I just stopped by to see if you wanted to come along.”
“Then I might have to recollect on what I said,” Charlie replied instantly. “I’d pay cold hard cash to get off on some body of water and hold a pole in my hands again.”
Boomer murmured something that sounded vaguely like old folks’ home.
“I heard that. You ship me off to some perfumed death house and I’ll come back to haunt you.”
“He would, you know.” Boomer’s eye was caught by the Blazer’s mangled side panel. He marched down the drive, then shouted back up, “Dang, Marcus! Who did the number on your wheels?”
“Two redneck goons over at New Horizons.”
Boomer continued to circle the Blazer. “Looks like they put you through the grinder.”
Charlie moved down beside his son. “They come at you from both sides?”
“Yes.” He walked back to join them. The right and rear windows were quilts of plastic and duct tape. Marcus had used the tire iron to peel off what remained of the left rear fender. “Both sides.”
Charlie Hayes poked his cane at where the rear bumper was tied in place with a coat hanger. “What’d you do to rile them?”
“I said I was a lawyer representing union organizers.”
Boomer laughed, and in doing so he lived up to his name. “Shoot, you might as well have doused yourself with gasoline and asked them for a light!”
Marcus asked, “What do you know about them?”
“I know they’re a Carolina textile company. None of their lot takes kindly to unions. Even a transplanted Yankee like you ought to know that.”
Charlie corrected, “Marcus’ momma’s family is just as Carolina as they come.”
“Half-Yankee, then. To say lawyer and union in the same breath is like waving red shorts in front of an angry bull.” Boomer surveyed the damage. “You’re lucky they didn’t come after you with pick handles.”
“They did.” Then to Charlie, “You’ll have to slide over from my side, the passenger door won’t open.”
“Then you’re lucky to be alive.” Boomer pounded back up the drive in his size-thirteen boots, patting Marcus on the shoulder as he passed. “Good seeing you again, old son. Things have been awful dull around here.”
CHARLIE WAITED until they were halfway to Rocky Mount before saying, “You want to tell me why you went and did such a fool thing?”
“I was approached by a couple who are accusing New Horizons of kidnapping their daughter. I wanted to see if they were capable of rough tactics.”
Charlie fiddled with the cane, a gift from his son. The ivory top was carved in the shape of a ram’s head and dyed blue. “Why don’t they take something like that to the FBI?”
“They did, but the FBI can’t help much. The kidnapping allegedly took place in China.”
The fiddling halted. “As in the country way yonder over there, China?”
“The very same.”
The old man used both hands and the dash to swivel himself about. “All right. I’m listening.”
Telling what little he knew took them into Rocky Mount. Marcus threaded his way through empty Saturday streets, following Deacon’s carefully printed instructions to the fields and woodlands on the town’s south side. He concluded, “I read through the files last night. Whatever else she might be, Gloria Hall is a fine researcher. She followed the Richmond case from the outset. Had all the relevant data, including a confidential report from the state EPA advisory panel, something the defense managed to keep out of court. New Horizons was dumping a ton of poisons into that river.”
The old man’s response exhibited all the mental acuity that had made Judge Charlie Hayes a force in the legal establishment for more than forty years. “Long way to travel, from polluting the James River to kidnapping a student in China.”
“I realize that.”
“Do you have any concrete tie-ins?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you accepting the case?”
Marcus spotted Deacon Wilbur’s paint-spattered pickup and pulled to the side of the road. “I haven’t decided.”
Charlie squinted through the sun-dappled windshield, and said idly, “Sometimes you don’t have to win a case to succeed.”
Marcus turned to his oldest friend in the legal profession. Charlie Hayes looked every one of his seventy-eight years. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You just think on it a spell.” Charlie leaned over and called through Marcus’ window, “Deacon Wilbur. If I’d known you were going to be our guide today, I’d have been out here at midnight.”
The pastor smiled for the first time Marcus had ever seen outside of church. “Why, glory in the morning. If it ain’t Judge Hayes.”
“Get out of my way, son. I want to stand up and shake Deacon’s hand.” Impatiently Charlie allowed Marcus and the pastor to ease him from the truck. “How are you, sir?”
“Can’t complain, Judge. Can’t complain.” Deacon Wilbur clasped Charlie’s hand with both his own. “Marcus told me he was bringing somebody, but I didn’t have no idea it was you. My, but it’s good to see you again.”
“I hooked up with Marcus when he was still a shavetail recruit. Boy came down from some highfalutin college up north. Didn’t help him none. He looked ready to drown his first time in a Carolina courtroom.” To Marcus, “Deacon and I go way back.”
“That’s right, we surely do. My daddy fished with your daddy for more years than I know how to count.”
“Deacon’s daddy was the finest bass guide I ever hope to meet. How long has he been gone now?”
“Oh, he’s been laid to rest a whole passel of years. Resting easy, now that Marcus here saw to our cemetery.” Deacon then spotted the taped window on the Blazer’s other side. “What on earth’s happened here?”
Marcus replied, “A long story.”
Charlie demanded, “What’s this about a cemetery?”
“Another long story.”
“Come on, let’s get out on the river.” Deacon reached for a pole and a tackle box. “Ain’t no law says we can’t fish and talk. You all right with a little trail walking, Judge?”
“Fine. Grab my cane there, Marcus.”
“Ain’t far. Just round that bend up ahead.”
Within a hundred paces the swamp cypress and medieval oaks had closed in. The air became dank and rich with
forest odors, and the morning light no longer accompanied them. The only signs remaining of the previous year’s floods were scattered debris and watermarks high up tree trunks. Ahead, the river moved dark and steady and timeless. Marcus helped Charlie down a slippery embankment, taking them farther into the timeless gloom, down to where a young black man held two aluminum skiffs.
“This here’s my youngest brother’s boy, Oathell. Mister Charlie, why don’t you join me right over here. Easy now, hold her steady, son.” The pastor slipped into the flat-bottomed boat and reached back, saying, “Hand me the judge’s pole, Marcus. Now Judge, you know I ain’t gonna let you work, so you can set that paddle right back down. You two climb in that other skiff and follow us on up the river.”
The skiffs were both powered by electric trolling motors, silent save for a high-pitched whine. They pushed easily upstream, traveling beneath a canopy of branches and sun-struck leaves. The river ran dark and slow as molasses, shining a ruddy gold whenever sunlight managed to glance through. From the bow of the second boat Marcus could hear the pair up ahead talking softly. Marcus remained content to float in soft silence within this green cathedral. The young man remained silent save for once, when the older pair up ahead almost shouted their laughter. Oathell humphed his disdain and muttered, “Yes sir, Mister Charlie, yes sir.” Speaking low yet loud, meaning for Marcus to hear and be forewarned.
They followed Deacon into a narrow inlet that Marcus would have taken for merely another crack between oily black roots. Only this one meandered through water-clad groves and veils of Spanish moss before opening into a hidden cove a hundred feet wide and ringed by gray pillars of long-dead trees. Far overhead nesting hawks cried their displeasure at the boats’ arrival. Otherwise the cove was close, fetid, still, and very beautiful.
“They might as well put up a sign,” Charlie said quietly over the water to Marcus. “Bass welcome here.”
“Wasn’t sure what we’d find after the floods. But it seems like all it did was perk the bass up a little.” Deacon ran out his pole. “Ain’t more than five, six people know about this place. So few it ain’t even got a name.”
The Great Divide Page 8