The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Poor girl,” he said, reaching for another biscuit. “They say the old man beat her. And worse.”

  Objections forgotten, Mrs. Cathcart waded into the fray. “Who said that? It’s a wicked lie! I never heard tell of Mr. Morton being anything but a gentleman, even when he was the worse for drink.”

  Swann settled back in his chair, hoping that he’d started a lively debate, but to his chagrin he found that no one else at the table claimed acquaintance with the murdered man, so he didn’t learn as much as he’d hoped. He might have to fall back on speculation and innuendo.

  After dinner, Mrs. Cathcart and her lodgers actually tried to make him play cards, but, pleading weariness, he had hurried off to bed before they could argue. Now he sat upright in bed with his flask of Abingdon hooch, with the chair wedged under the doorknob in case the landlady decided to deliver fresh towels or a wake-up call in person.

  He missed the anonymity of the city. He didn’t think he could take much more of this neighborliness.

  ERMA

  The trial was hours away. She could not sleep.

  The jail was seldom quiet and never dark, so that even at the most monotonous times, she found it difficult to rest. There was always a murmur of voices through the wall or the sound of a deputy’s footsteps in the concrete passageway. Saturday nights were the worst. That’s when the drunks howled and sang, so that even when she put her head under the pillow the sound seeped through. This was Sunday, though, and a hush seemed to have settled over the place, as if the building and everyone in it were holding their breath in anticipation of the trial to come.

  She sat on the edge of the bed in the semidarkness, wide awake, too keyed up to read and tired of pacing the cell. They wouldn’t let her take anything to make her sleep, and she didn’t feel like talking, even if one of the guards would come by and sit a spell. She couldn’t really talk to anybody anyhow. She always had to watch what she said, because people would pretend to be all friendly and sympathetic, and then they would go right out and sell her confidences to some newspaper. No. Talking would only make her feel worse.

  She had laid out her clothes for the next day: a drab, ladylike outfit carefully chosen so that the court would see her as a demure and innocent young woman, facing this ordeal with quiet fortitude. She knew that there were stories going around about her late-night visit to the roadhouse, and about her staying out until all hours with one fellow or another. It was all innocent enough, but people were always ready to think the worst of a pretty woman, and the gossips would always tell those stories in such a way that she sounded like a tramp. Like forgetting to mention that the boy she was supposedly running around with was her own cousin. She knew that in court she must look and act as if those tales could not possibly be true.

  She’d give anything for a cigarette, but that wasn’t allowed. “Do you think I’m going to set fire to my mattress, like some crazy drunk?” she’d asked the jailer. But he had set his face in a vinegary scowl and walked away. Rules are rules. The jailer didn’t think nice girls ought to smoke, either.

  The jurors were all local men of middle age, which meant that they had thoroughly old-fashioned ideas about how a good girl should look and act. She should know—her daddy had been cut from the same cloth. If those twelve men could be persuaded to see her as a daughter, perhaps their protective instincts would arise and they would let her go.

  Suddenly she was afraid.

  To sit there in a courtroom with hundreds of strangers watching you while people accused you of terrible things. All those eyes boring into her. Why, that was like being stripped naked in public. She didn’t see how she would be able to stand it.

  At least it would all be over soon. Although sometimes she had the feeling that it was already over except for the playing out of the consequences of decisions made long ago. Like coming to a fork in the road, and having to choose in a split second which way you would go, and then everything that happened on the journey thereafter could be traced back to that one hasty decision.

  In a way the trial was only the final step of the journey, the one in which she would find out if the choices they had made were wise ones. How strange to have one’s entire life depend upon a decision only half considered, and made in the space of a heartbeat.

  Had it even been her own decision?

  Daddy had been lying there on the floor, his breathing ragged, and blood spilling out onto the floor . . . And Mommy just stood there frozen, with her fist in her mouth, not making a sound, but with big oily tears sliding down her face. And a decision had to be made in an instant, and then stuck to forever after, right or wrong.

  Well, that had been her choice, and she could live with that. She had her reasons. But before very long, she had been forced to abide by decisions that were not of her own making, and that was harder to bear. Maybe it was all for the best, but she wouldn’t know that until the end of the trial, and by then it would be too late.

  Harley had come back into town, just as full as a tick with pride over his fancy clothes and his big-city ways, just positive that he was equal to the task of running the family’s legal defense. As if hailing a taxicab in Chicago and second-guessing a mountain jury were all one and the same. He didn’t consult her about any of it, either. Just breezed in and started ordering everybody around like he was an avenging angel sent to protect the poor helpless females in his backwoods family.

  Well, where was he when he could have done them some good?

  She hadn’t thought to complain about his highhandedness at first. They were so overwhelmed with Daddy’s death, and the funeral and the arrest and the questioning and all, that it seemed like a great relief to have someone step in and take charge of everything, so that she could pull herself together and prepare for what was to come. At first she was so numb that she hadn’t even wanted to think. She would have given anything to be able to go to sleep and not wake up until it was all over and done with. And maybe not even then.

  But she had recovered her wits soon enough, and then she began to feel a tinge of resentment taking the edge off her gratitude. So her brother was the smart one, was he? The capable one, taking care of his addled, ignorant female relations. Well, that dog wouldn’t hunt.

  She had been to college. He hadn’t.

  She was on trial for her life. He wasn’t.

  She lived here and knew the people, taught their children, belonged to the community. He left at sixteen and never looked back.

  But ever since he came back to town—and he had been a long time gone—he had taken over the management of the case, making decisions left and right, as if he was the only one in the family that had good sense. As far as she could tell, most of Harley’s knowledge centered around making money, and he apparently thought that because he had moved out of the mountains, he outranked the rest of the family now. Or maybe he assumed that because he made more money than she did, that proved he was smarter. And—to give him his due—he probably was smarter than she was when it came to figuring out ways to cash in.

  He had sold her story to a big-time newspaper syndicate, and they had paid well enough for the privilege. Harley was real proud of himself for that piece of sharp practice. His reasons had been sound enough. They needed a lot of money to mount a decent defense. But . . . She shied away from the disloyal thought, but it stayed there in the back of her mind. After the death of Pollock Morton—quick: slide past that memory—both she and Mommy had been charged with murder and taken to jail in Wise. But Mommy had posted bail. There was enough money to post her bail—but not enough to free both of them. Well, that was all right. They didn’t have much money, that was true enough. And she couldn’t imagine Mommy penned up in this never-silent basement cell, so if one of them had to be shut in here, it should be her. She was young and strong. She could stand it.

  But then Harley had come swanning down from New York to take charge of everything in sight, and before long he had made a deal with the newspaper people for a good bit of money. And Mom
my, who in the end wasn’t even charged with anything, was home now, scot-free.

  But she was still here in jail.

  Why wasn’t there enough money now to get her out on bail?

  Harley always had a different answer to that one. The money hadn’t arrived yet from the newspaper headquarters. The judge didn’t want to grant her bail anymore. She wouldn’t be safe out in the community, because feelings were running high against her.

  And maybe all that was true. Or some of it, anyhow.

  But she had begun to suspect that the real reason was something else entirely. Regardless of the money, or the legal obstacles, or any other considerations, the truth was: Harley wanted her to stay in jail. It took a while for that realization to surface in her mind, because she had so much wanted to think of her prosperous big brother as her champion, so that she could feel protected and she would not have to think.

  The trouble was, she couldn’t stop thinking, and eventually she had to think about this whole trial from a point of view other than her own. It was then that she realized that from everyone else’s point of view the only sensible course of action was to leave her in jail. The newspapers who were underwriting her defense had paid good money for her story, which depended upon the image of a trapped young heroine—and that meant that she needed to stay trapped, in order to generate pity and outrage in those readers who were following the story via the national newspapers.

  If she were free on bail, back at home with her family and simply going to court to take care of this legal matter, no one would care one bit about what was going to become of her. Certainly no one would be footing the bill for her defense or paying for interviews and family photographs. She thought that Harley wouldn’t mind if they chained her to the wall and fed her bread and water. That would generate a lot of sympathy, which would make her story worth even more money.

  She wondered how much money he was actually taking in, and whether all of it was really being spent to pay the lawyers. And if she was convicted, what then? What would happen to the money?

  She pressed her face to the bars and strained until she could see out the little ground-level window at the front of the building. It wasn’t daybreak yet, but the darkness had softened to a sort of woolly gray that meant that dawn wasn’t very far off. She had passed many a night here watching that window.

  Another thing about being stuck in jail: there was nobody to check up on Harley. She would have to trust him and the twelve old men who constituted the “jury of her peers.” But in her experience, trusting men didn’t get you very far in this world.

  NINE

  Set out to see the Murder Stone, on a borrowed horse.

  —MATSUO BASH

  Only the prospect of an early day in court could have forced Rose Hanelon into the hotel dining room at such an ungodly hour. She seldom ate breakfast, and she wasn’t hungry, but the tedium of a trial would require her full attention, and for that she would need several cups of coffee.

  She had barely dragged a comb through her hair before pulling on a comfortable tweed skirt and her green pullover and making her way to breakfast. She could wait until after the meal to put on her red wool suit and her makeup. Ordinarily, Rose would never have appeared in public bare-faced and casually dressed, but she decided that her appearance would hardly matter in the back of beyond.

  Henry was nowhere to be seen, but Shade Baker, dressed for the day in a rumpled brown suit and a yellow tie, was already seated at a small table near the fireplace, sipping coffee and reading a skimpy local newspaper. A basket of cold toast and the remains of his breakfast sat at the empty place beside him, and his camera kit occupied the chair. Rose signaled to the waitress that she would be joining her colleague, and motioned for coffee.

  Shade did not notice her until she slid into the chair across from him and tapped the back of his newspaper.

  “Any news in there?”

  He smiled. “I reckon the people around here only read this paper to find out who has been caught. They also seem to be quite taken with the weather. Anyhow, good morning, Rose. Did you sleep well?”

  She stifled a yawn. “Sleep is overrated. I wrote a letter to my Danny, and then I tried roughing out the background of this trial story. Not much to say, though, until we hear from the star herself in the courtroom today. What about you? They won’t let you take pictures during the trial, will they?”

  “They never do.” Shade was spreading jam on a piece of toast. He pushed the basket over to Rose and nodded for her to help herself. “But that’s okay. I plan to set up inside the courthouse early enough to get a shot of the principals before they go in. I’ve already set up my darkroom equipment in my bathroom. I need to get some shots developed this afternoon in time to express some prints off to New York.”

  “That’s a lot of work. Couldn’t you just send off the film, and let the lab boys at the paper do it?”

  “I could, but then there would be somebody else meddling with my exposures and cropping the shots. Photography is more than just taking a good shot, you know. You can do a lot to a picture in the developing process—for good or ill. I don’t like people messing with my work.”

  “Of course,” said Rose, stirring her newly arrived mug of black coffee. “I get it. Your name goes on the photo. But even if you do the developing, you ought to have some free time this afternoon, so why don’t you get some general snapshots of the area? Find some run-down shacks with ramshackle porches.”

  “I’d have to go a-ways to find some. The houses here in town looked pretty regular to me.”

  “Take the car, then. There’s bound to be a few shacks somewhere around here. And see if you can get a portrait of a couple of scrawny-looking women in long dresses posing on a crumbling porch.”

  “Long dresses? I haven’t seen anybody who looked like that.”

  “Well, knock on doors. Offer them a quarter if they’ll pose. Give them a dollar if you have to. The paper’s good for it, Shade. But I’ll bet you’ll find people willing to do it for free, just for the chance of getting their picture in the paper. Show a little initiative, Shade. I’ll bet some people have old clothes up in the attic, and maybe you could get them to dress up in grandma’s cast-off duds for the photograph.”

  “What would that prove?”

  “Well, it’s what people expect to see. I mean, here we are in the back of beyond and our readers expect to see local color in our reporting. If you just show them people in ordinary clothes getting out of cars and going into brick houses, where’s the fun in that? We might as well be in Hoboken.”

  “We could do the same thing in Hoboken, you know. Get people to dress up in silly clothes from their grandmother’s trunk. Drive to the slum part of town and get a picture of the worst shack we can find.”

  “Yeah, but that would be silly. Everybody knows Hoboken isn’t like that. I mean, sure they have poor people, like everywhere else. But Hoboken is a real place. This is fairy-tale country. America expects things to be backward up here. So we’re just showing people what they already know to be true.”

  “Except that it isn’t true, Rose.”

  “Well, the truth is just what everybody believes, Shade. There’s no point in trying to tell them anything else.”

  “So you want just pictures of shacks and peculiar-looking people?”

  “Well . . .” Rose screwed up her eyes, scanning an imaginary page layout. “Animal pictures always go over well with the readers. Sentimental bastards. Maybe you could get a shot of some dogs lying in the street or a huge pig on a porch. No Persian cats on satin pillows or thoroughbred horses, thank you very much. It would spoil the mood.”

  “Horses? Spoil the mood?”

  Rose nodded. “Yeah. See, this case has to mean something. Nobody cares if a backwoods schoolteacher killed her no-account father, but if our reporting leads us to an examination of some general problem in society, like . . . for instance . . . the old ways versus the new ways, or the oppression of the female sex, or what
ever, then the story connects with the general public.”

  Shade Baker downed the last of his coffee. “Okay,” he said. “You’re constructing the story. I’m just taking the pictures. But what do you think this case means?”

  “Well, she’s pretty, so she’s innocent.” Rose made a face to let him know what she thought of that sentiment. “And my lady readers want to get a nice warm feeling of outrage knowing that this innocent girl is being persecuted. So—here’s where you come in, Shade—we have to show them a backward community of cold, ignorant, slovenly, mean people. We are spinning a Cinderella story for the readers. The worse we make these people look, the more the defendant will shine.”

  Shade had picked up his camera and was fiddling with the flash attachment. “That seems hard lines on the folks around here who are just minding their own business, leading normal lives.”

  “It won’t hurt them. It’s just a story. They don’t read our newspaper up here, anyhow. Two days after we print this story, people will be lining birdcages with it.”

  “Whatever you say, lady,” said Shade, reaching in his camera bag for film. “I’d better get this thing loaded. Hey, Rose, how about I take a shot of you to start off the roll? You could send a print to that flyboy of yours.”

  Rose clutched at the frizz of curls framing her face. Her gooseberry eyes were red-rimmed from sleep, and her unpowdered face was blotched and shiny. “The way I look right now? Don’t you dare! That’s more truth than anybody needs.”

  He set the camera down beside his plate, and smiled at her gently. “You’re not a big fan of the truth, are you, Rose?”

  “Never saw any percentage in it, Shade.”

  NEARLY NINE O’CLOCK. Bundled up in his overcoat and his white silk scarf, Henry Jernigan made his way to the courthouse alone, because he wanted to collect his thoughts before he was inundated with the noise and the mob of spectators who were sure to pack the courtroom. He had always been uneasy in crowds. When he was a small child in Philadelphia, his mother had taken him to a Christmastime performance of a children’s pantomime. Young Henry had sat quietly in his seat in his bow-collared sailor suit, while all around them other children squealed or shouted out of rage or boredom, or because they were being tormented by some other restless child. Spoiled little girls with fur-trimmed coats and shabby little boys in knickers and threadbare jackets ran up and down the aisles, screaming and chasing one another, heedless of the action on the stage. Ten minutes into the performance, Henry had leaned over and whispered to his mother that he wanted to leave. In later years, Mrs. Jernigan often told that story, marveling that her solemn offspring seemed to have been born middle-aged.