The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Mrs. Coeburn, who had been putting on her gloves, hesitated, seeing the sense of his argument. “It would be a shame to waste the time and expense of the journey on a fool’s errand,” she conceded. “We have a duty to the club members.”

  Her companion nodded. “We do, indeed. And, Alice, we are worried about the poor girl’s treatment. At least we could satisfy ourselves that she is in good health.”

  Carl solemnly agreed with this line of reasoning, since it suited his purposes so well, but privately he was thinking that anyone housed in a private cell with a brand-new mattress, a family member running the jail, and food brought in every day without their having to do a hand’s turn of work was a good deal better off than he was. But, since he was all for getting a look at the prisoner, he forbore to say so.

  Mrs. Coeburn looked at her watch. She had sent away the taxi for an hour, but no more than ten minutes had elapsed. “Well, Mr. Morton, if we are not permitted to speak with your sister, perhaps you can give us your own views on the case.”

  Harley Morton shook his head. “I was five hundred miles away when it happened, ma’am. All I know is what the rest of the world has been told—the events of that night, based on my sister’s word. But I trust her completely.”

  “Yes, you are an honorable family,” Carl murmured.

  Morton glanced at him, and addressed his remarks to the two women. “My father’s death was an unfortunate accident, ladies. He was a heavy drinker, and in his drunken state, he fell and hit his head. It was a tragic occurrence, but it is a private family sorrow, not a matter for the courts. My sister is innocent. That’s all I have to say.”

  Carl wondered how many times he had said it. The speech had all the polish of a well-worn homily. He turned to the lawyer. “Is it far to the courthouse from here, Mr. Hubbard?”

  Kenneth Hubbard smiled. “Nothing is very far in Wise, though you might think so in this weather. You just go along to the main road there at the corner, and go right about a block. Well, you can’t miss it. Big yellowish stone building. Italianate architecture, they call it.”

  “And the jail?” asked Mrs. Coeburn.

  “In the basement.”

  “Will they let us in?”

  The attorney walked them to the door. “I will telephone the jail and instruct them to let you in to see Miss Morton. My permission will suffice.”

  Mrs. Manning clutched at the sleeve of her friend’s coat. “But, Alice! What about the taxi? He is expecting to fetch us here.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Hubbard will send him on to the courthouse. And if we are not there, tell him that he can find us at the home of your colleague, Mr. Schutz.”

  “The prosecutor?” Carl marveled at Mrs. Coeburn’s ruthless determination to complete her mission, regardless of how many people’s Sunday afternoons she had to disrupt in order to do so.

  Alice Coeburn smiled. “Certainly.” She swept the fur stole across her shoulders so that little mink feet dangled inches from Carl’s nose. “I believe in getting both sides of a story whenever possible. Come along.”

  SEVEN

  As long as the road is, even if it ends in dust, the gods come with us.

  —MATSUO BASH

  Should we go and have a look at the village where the murder took place?” asked Rose. “Ordinarily I’d be in favor of going to the hotel first, but it gets dark so quickly this time of year.”

  Shade Baker glanced up at the slate-colored sky. “I’d like to go this afternoon. Besides losing the light, the other thing about this time of year is the uncertainty of the weather. Right now it’s cloudy outside, but reasonably dry. Tomorrow, though, we might get anything from gully washers to blizzards, so I’d just as soon get the pictures taken. Then I won’t have to worry about them anymore. If that’s all right with you, Henry?”

  In the backseat, Henry was either lost in thought or dozing, but he roused himself enough to wave vaguely his assent. “I am along for the ride, children. Go where you will. I only ask that when the dinner hour arrives, we shall be in some approximation of civilization.”

  Rose turned, peeping at him over the fur collar of her black coat. “I don’t hold out much hope of that, Henry, but we’ll dine at the hotel and hope for the best. It isn’t far to Pound from Wise, is it, Shade? Didn’t you check?”

  “Yeah, I did. Maybe half an hour if the sages of Abingdon can be believed. And it shouldn’t take long to look over this little one-horse town. We ought to make the hotel right at dusk.”

  Rose laughed. “Take long? In twenty minutes we should be able to tour the place, get your photos taken, and help them roll up the sidewalks for the night.”

  “You are indeed an optimist, my dear,” Henry called out. “Sidewalks, indeed!”

  “What about talking to people?” said Shade. “Do you plan to go knocking on doors, seeing if you can round up some gossip about the Morton family?”

  “Not today,” said Henry. “We just want a general idea of the place. Snapshots of the mind, as it were.”

  “Good, because if it’s too cold, I plan to be back in the car with the motor running within five minutes.”

  “Shade, you can’t even get your camera focused to your satisfaction in five minutes.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, with Henry dozing and Rose staring out disapprovingly at the bleak landscape of leafless trees and barren pastures of brown grass. Then, losing interest in the scenery, she pulled out her notebook and began to write, scratching out a word here and there, and then pushing on in her crabbed, illegible script.

  For the last few miles of the drive, the mountains seemed to close in around the car. To Shade, the prairie native, the looming hills seemed vaguely oppressive, as if eyes were watching him from atop every wooded ridge, and an ambush waited around every curve. In flat country you could see trouble coming from a mile away, but here in this temperate jungle, an attacker could be ten feet from you before you knew he was there. It made him vaguely uneasy. And the steep mountains blocked the low winter sun, making for long stretches of gloomy shade in the narrow passes.

  The village of Pound, when they reached it, offered no relief from his feeling of claustrophobia. There was little more than a stone’s throw of distance between the steep cliffs that hemmed in the town in a narrow river-cut passage. A bedraggled row of wood frame shops and houses huddled close to the river, facing steep embankments on either side, where the mountains seemed to have been sheared off in a straight line to make room for a village. From the edge of the cliff tops, dense hardwood forest stretched away to the crest of the distant ridges.

  The buildings comprising the village were not shacks, though. Well, they might seem so to Henry, who had been raised in a Philadelphia mansion, but Shade thought the white frame houses seemed pretty typical of the small towns that he had seen in his travels coast to coast: from New England to Seattle, you could find much the same. Rose, raised in the concrete canyons of New York, had probably been expecting log cabins or teepees, but she was half a century too late to see the picturesque quaintness of the American frontier. This town was maybe a century old. It had sprung up so that the loggers and coal miners would have someplace to live, and so that there would be a few stores to accommodate them and the farmers in the surrounding area. But Henry had been right about one thing: there weren’t any sidewalks, either.

  Shade pulled the car off to the side of the main road, studying the line of one-story buildings, trying to decide how best to frame a shot that would capture the essence of the place. He wondered which house belonged to the Mortons. Surely, they’d have to find somebody to tell them that. The newspaper readers wouldn’t know any different, of course, but since they weren’t the only nationals covering the story, they might as well get it right, to save embarrassing challenges later. With a sigh of resignation he cut the Ford’s motor. It was going to be cold out there. The wind probably whipped through that narrow valley like a butcher knife.

  “So this is it, huh?” said Rose. �
�Not much to it. How can people live in a little place like this?”

  Shade raised his camera, sighting along the ridgeline, more out of habit than because he wanted a shot of it. “The way I figure it, everybody lives in a little place, Rose. Sure, you’ve got the five boroughs of the city, but how often do you set foot in any of them except the one you live in? Mostly you eat at the same joints, frequent the same handful of stores, and keep to your own neighborhood, where you probably don’t know any more people than there are in this little town. And don’t give me the Statue of Liberty and the art museums speech, either, because when was the last time you went there?”

  Rose shook her head. “Guess you can’t take the hick town out of the boy, Shade. So this little burg is your idea of heaven, huh?”

  “No, I just think there’s good in both places—city and country—and maybe not as much difference between the two as you’d like to think.”

  “Where are the millionaires and the scholars, then?”

  “I can name you parts of New York that don’t have any of them, either. And maybe there aren’t any right here, but somebody owns those coal mines, so I’ll bet you somewhere in this county there are mansions and maidservants. And that writer fellow who wrote The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Where did he live?”

  Rose looked around at the row of wood frame houses, and the encroaching mountains that seemed to hold the town like a vise. “I’ll bet Erma Morton wishes she had gotten out of here.”

  The fact that the car was not moving had finally awakened Henry, and, finding himself alone in the parked vehicle, he clambered out of the backseat, cinching the belt of his overcoat tighter around him to protect against the cold. For a moment, he stood in the street next to the car, making cloud breaths and taking in the sights of the tiny main thoroughfare. The wind ruffled his hair, and he pulled his scarf up over his chin as he stared at the shabby dwellings with their backs to the river. Rousing himself from the last vestiges of sleep, he murmured, “They’re built too close together. Wooden. If a fire broke out in one of them, it would sweep away the whole village in the blink of an eye.” He shuddered and turned away.

  “Well, Henry, I wouldn’t exactly call that a tragedy,” said Rose. “This isn’t Versailles. Whatever they built to replace them would be an improvement.”

  Henry kept staring at the buildings and the hills that loomed over them, but he did not respond to Rose’s banter. He only said, “Jishin,” and turned away, tears glittering in his eyes.

  Rose and Shade looked at each other and shrugged. When the black mood took Henry, it was best just to wait it out. They had given up trying to draw him out about it. No one is less susceptible to a friendly interviewer than a journalist. After a couple of minutes he usually managed to overcome whatever had upset him, and he would carry on as usual, only a bit more subdued, perhaps. Henry didn’t talk much about his past. They had learned not to ask.

  “Guess I’ll get ready to take my pictures before I lose the light,” said Shade, moving away from them. “I hope I’m not shivering too hard to get a steady shot.” He opened the boot of the Ford and began to haul out the rest of his camera equipment. As he fiddled with the tripod and the lenses, Rose led Henry out of camera range, and they walked a little way up the street, keeping close to the buildings in an effort to escape the wind.

  “There’s the post office,” said Rose, nodding at a building across the street. “Too bad it’s Sunday or we could ask for directions there.”

  “Oh, give it a minute or two. I’ll warrant that strangers are a sufficient novelty around here to send someone out to examine the exhibits.” Henry tugged gently at the sleeve of her coat and nodded toward a window, where a lace curtain had been twitched aside to reveal the round-eyed face of a small boy peering out at them.

  Henry nodded gravely to the watching boy, and made a show of reaching into his trouser pocket. He drew out a buffalo nickel, holding it up speculatively between his thumb and forefinger. Then he turned toward the still-watching child and beckoned to him with a crooked finger. Never pretend you like children, he often said. They can spot a phony in a heartbeat.

  The window curtain fell back into place. Henry stopped a few feet from the doorway of the house while Rose took a cigarette out of her purse and attempted to light it, using Henry as her shield from the wind. A moment later, the front door opened and the boy came out, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved. He was a freckle-faced blond whose shrewd blue eyes matched the hand-knit sweater he wore over his faded overalls and scuffed boots. He was just pulling on an old corduroy coat for his foray into the street, but his head and hands were bare. He glanced warily at Henry, who was still holding out the nickel nonchalantly, as if he had forgotten about it.

  Noting that he—or rather the coin—had captured the boy’s undivided attention, Henry nodded again in his direction, this time holding the nickel down within the child’s reach. “Good afternoon, young sir. Would you be the mayor of this charming community?”

  “Naw.” The boy took the coin and shoved it into his pocket. “I ain’t but nine year old. You’uns come about the murder?”

  “What an astute fellow,” Henry said to Rose. “I daresay he might make a mayor one day. At any rate, I think we have found our local authority.”

  “What makes you think that?” asked Rose, beaming at the boy with that simpering smile that she always hoped would conceal her unease with children. It never worked.

  The boy, apple-cheeked with cold, gave her a blank stare, and then he pointed to Shade, who was positioning his camera for a general view of the houses along the main road. “He’s taking pictures.”

  “Would you like your picture taken?” asked Rose.

  He looked at her scornfully. “Naw.”

  Henry smiled. “I am Henry Jernigan, and this is my colleague, Miss Rose Hanelon. And what is your name, young man?“

  “Jake Hardy. I got a new pup. You wanna see him?”

  “Perhaps later, thanks. Jake, we are newspaper reporters from New York City. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

  The boy nodded. “Knowed you warn’t laws on account of the lady,” he said, addressing Henry, whom he judged to be the one in authority. He looked appraisingly at Henry’s tailored black overcoat and his silk scarf. “And I reckon you dress too good to be one o’ them do-gooder missionary types, which I’d as lief set the dogs on. So I figured you for sight-seers, but seeing him over yonder with his camera, I knowed you for newspapermen. My mama’ll tan my hide if she catches me talking to you’uns.”

  “We shall be brief,” said Henry. “Just point out the Morton house and we’ll leave you to rusticate in peace.”

  The boy shook his head. “I don’t know if I ought to. My mama wouldn’t like it if I was to do that. She says newspaper men—”

  Henry sighed, reached into his pocket, and extracted a dime. “Make it quick before she catches you, then.”

  The boy tugged up his sweater and pocketed the dime. “Reckon I can oblige you,” he said. “You see that little shop over across the road?”

  “The post office?” said Rose.

  The boy looked at her as if he was surprised that she could talk. “That’s right. Well, the white building beside it is where the Mortons live. Used to be a garage, but they fixed it up and made it into a place to live. They rent it from the man who lives on the other side. He owns the drugstore and a lot of other buildings around here besides.”

  “A regular backwoods Rockefeller,” murmured Rose. “We’d better go and tell Shade which house to get a shot of.”

  Henry waved her on. When Rose was out of earshot, he leaned down close to the boy and said, “Well, young man, there has been a good deal of excitement around here, hasn’t there? A murder investigation going on right across the street. Do you fancy yourself a detective? Any thoughts on who might have killed the late Mr. Morton?”

  The boy shook his head. “Don’t know that anybody did. Might’a fell on his own.”


  “Do you think it likely?”

  “I ain’t the one to ask. Nobody seen nothing. And as for the other way of knowing, my grandmaw’s got the Sight, and we’re beginning to think my little sister Moselle might have it, too, but she ain’t but five, so it’s hard to tell. Young’uns are awful fanciful, ain’t they?”

  “Unlike a man of the world such as yourself,” murmured Henry. “The Sight, did you say?”

  “Yeah, sometimes they’ll see or smell smoke a day or so before there’s a house fire, or they’ll see things nobody else does. My sister Moselle used to play with a little Injun girl down by the river. Reckon there was a camp there once’t.”

  Henry nodded. This tale had the makings of a story, but such emotional excursions were Rose’s line of country, not his. “I don’t suppose she has seen Mr. Morton walking about, haunting the scene of his demise?”

  “Naw. Leastways she never said.”

  “Well, perhaps you have heard the grown-ups talking it over when they thought you weren’t listening. Do you know what they think?”

  The boy blew on his reddening hands while he considered the matter. “Well, there warn’t no love lost between Mr. Morton and his womenfolk. That’s certain sure. But I reckon that if Miss Erma done it, it weren’t on purpose. No reason to, is there? Not on account of getting whupped for coming home late, like the Law’s been saying. Why, that happens to me regular as clockwork, and you don’t see me fixing to kill nobody over a whuppin’.”

  Henry nodded encouragingly, hoping that the boy would go on.