The wiry little man nodded. “Maybe the big secret you’re a-looking for wasn’t hers.”
Just then the judge entered the courtroom, and they stood along with the others, putting the conversation to an end. Carl was glad to be sitting next to someone who knew the family. He would keep an eye on the fellow during the morning testimony, so that he could gauge what the truth was—or what the community thought the truth was, anyhow. Somehow or other, he wanted to find out what really happened on the July night in Pound. That was why he became a reporter: to find out the truth and to share it with the public.
NEAR THE FRONT OF THE COURTROOM, Rose shrugged off her coat and settled into the seat beside Henry Jernigan, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the defendants’ table. She had met Shade Baker as he was hurrying down the courthouse steps to go back and develop his photos, and she’d promised to look in on him during the lunch recess to identify the attorneys for him.
Erma Morton was sitting next to her attorney, with her back to the crowded spectator section of the court. The stiffness of her posture suggested that she was well aware that she was being stared at by a hundred ghoulish strangers. Occasionally she would lean over to whisper something to the lawyer, and Rose could catch a glimpse of the girl’s profile framed by a tangle of newly-permed curls. She studied the sculpted nose and the firm jaw.
Was this the face of a murderer?
It didn’t matter, of course. Nobody would ever really know the truth, and by now Rose was resigned to the fact that the truth was whatever she could plausibly persuade the newspaper’s readers to believe. Sometimes, though, she liked to examine her subjects, trying to determine what she really thought about them. It wasn’t a reliable test, of course. Shakespeare had been right about that: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” She had seen confessed killers with the faces of choirboys.
A year ago, just after Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in a shoot-out with police in the backwoods of Ohio, the newspaper had sent Rose to his funeral in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. The family hadn’t wanted much to do with the prying journalists, but Rose had managed to interview the dead man’s lover, Beulah Baird, a dark and slender beauty, who had been at his side for much of his crime spree.
“He had a good heart,” the girl had sobbed. “You could tell. He had the face of an angel.”
In the empty church, Rose had patted her hand, proffered lace hankies, and agreed with the grief-stricken girl, so that she would divulge more details about their life together on the lam: Grieving Gun Moll Claims Killer Had a Good Heart. But, although she didn’t say so, Rose knew that Charles Arthur Floyd also carried a watch fob, scored with ten notches, one for each person he had killed in his thirty years of life.
He had been a pitiless executioner of his fellow man, killing them incidentally when they blocked his path to a robbery or tried to prevent his escape, but because the lines and planes of his face came together in a pleasing shape, ordinary people built him a soul. Newspapers filled pages with the minutiae of his life and death, and romantic fools wrote doggerel verse to mark his passing.
Rose hoped that she would never find herself in the dock. As a plain woman she was wary of others, ducking before the blow, and the resulting shyness came off as sullen hostility. On the evidence of her face, a jury would presume her guilty until proven innocent.
She studied Erma Morton’s straight graceful nose and her well-sculpted chin. A determined face. Maybe she was shy from inexperience and lack of social skills, but she would have no doubts about her own worth. Here was a reasonably pretty girl who expected her youth and attractiveness to open doors for her, and now she was a celebrity. No doubt she would have preferred to achieve that fame as a model or an actress, or as the wife of an important man, but since none of those things was ever likely to happen to a backwoods schoolteacher, maybe this notoriety was better than nothing.
Rose thought that that much was true, but Erma Morton would not have killed for that reason. Nobody knows what will happen once the wheels of justice start to move. It would be madness to risk execution for such a frivolous reason. Rose thought that the most a murderer could hope for would be to get away with it altogether. Other than that, you’d just have to do the best you could not to be swept away by the legal process.
“So what do you think?” murmured Henry into her ear.
She whispered back, “What do I think, or what am I going to say in my articles?”
“Not the same?”
“No. In the newspaper, I have to sound positive. Trumpet her innocence with absolute certainty.” She shrugged. “In real life, I’m never sure about anything.”
Henry nodded. “I am reserving judgment, myself. I don’t see any point in describing the courtroom itself, do you?”
“You mean because there is no sawdust on the floor or dogs lying under the lawyers’ tables? I guess not. This looks like every other courtroom I’ve ever seen. Too bad the judge isn’t wearing overalls and a ten-gallon hat.”
“That would make a nice touch.” Henry smiled at the idea. “One could always slip it in, of course. You know: The judge, who looked as if he ought to be wearing overalls and a ten-gallon hat . . . That way the image will be planted in people’s minds without your having told any falsehoods.”
“Nobody deals in truth,” said Rose, watching the lawyers conferring at the judge’s bench. “Truth is what you can convince people to believe.”
IN THE MAKESHIFT DARKROOM that was also his bathroom, Shade Baker slipped the last of the prints into a manila envelope addressed to the newspaper. The shots he had taken at the courthouse that morning were not particularly good, but, given the lighting and time constraints, he had done his best. One of the lawyers, caught full in the face with the camera flash just as he mounted the last step, had reared back with flared nostrils and a round-eyed stare, looking as if he had just swallowed a gnat. It was not the way anybody would want to look when featured for the first—and probably only—time in a national newspaper. The reporters wouldn’t mind the unflattering picture, though. They didn’t seem to want the locals here to look too good.
The one clear shot he had managed to take of Erma Morton had turned out well, though. She hadn’t been much farther from the camera than the poor startled attorney, but her face registered no hint of alarm. She gazed into the camera with an expression of cool appraisal, and he felt as if she was looking past the lens and sizing him up, unimpressed by what she saw. When the photo was developing in the chemical solution, her eyes came into focus, staring up at him through the liquid, and giving him chills.
He had kept a print of that shot for himself. He propped it up on the dresser beside the ashtray, then thought better of it and laid it face-down.
Erma Morton was a tiny little thing. That had surprised him. He had seen one or two portrait shots of her in other newspapers before they arrived, and he had expected her to be more physically imposing. Any woman accused of bashing a man’s head in ought to be a tall, strapping Valkyrie of a maiden. Then it would make sense. But this elf girl with her oval face and her calm gray eyes did not look like the sort of willful termagant that would kill a man. Still, the intensity in those eyes suggested that her determination might compensate for her fragility. She looked like a woman who knew her mind, and who generally got what she wanted.
He knew what Luster Swann would say: the idea that pretty people were virtuous was a holdover from their childhood fairy-tale books. People wanted the world to be simple and classifiable: beautiful is good, ugly is bad, and the outlaws in Westerns always wear black hats. Henry would expect all the photographs accompanying his article to reflect that uncomplicated view of reality, and Shade would oblige him insofar as he could. But he knew that sometimes pretty and ugly were just tricks of lighting and camera angles, and that truth could look any way at all.
Shade rolled down his sleeves and put on his corduroy jacket. He glanced at his watch. Past noon. Where was Rose? Surely court would adjourn for
the lunch break soon. It was nearly time to ship the photos off to New York. He had decided that sending them by train would be safer than entrusting them to the vagaries of a rural postal service, so he had called the station at Norton and asked the departure time for the express train. He had allowed himself half an hour to reach the depot and complete the transaction. Then he would spend the rest of the afternoon driving around the county, getting more material to accompany the correspondents’ stories. The more good pictures you had, the more column inches they’d give the story in the newspaper, so it was up to him to see that Henry and Rose got the attention they deserved.
He had his hand on the doorknob when she knocked. Rose, living up to her name with red cheeks and a dewy nose, bustled in, shedding her coat and kid gloves on his bed. “Don’t pay the ransom. I escaped!” Laughing at her own wisecrack, she sank down in the chintz armchair by the window and rummaged in her purse for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry to be so late, Shade, but they just adjourned for the lunch break. I could actually hear stomachs growling around me. Got the prints?”
“I’d almost given up on you.” Shade handed her the unsealed brown envelope. “How is the trial going?”
She wrinkled her nose. “If things don’t liven up, I may be forced to confess to the crime myself, just to keep Henry awake.” She slid the photos out of the envelope and held them up to the light from the window. “Well . . . they’re not Alfred Stieglitz, but considering what you had to work with, they’re all right.”
Shade reddened. “The lighting was lousy, you know. And people weren’t exactly stopping to pose for me.
“Well, they never do, but that’s all right. Shall I write their names on the backs of these prints? This one fellow . . . he looks like a dog about to be run over, doesn’t he? That’s the prosecutor. Give me your pen, Shade. It’s no use my trying to find anything in this purse.”
He drew his fountain pen out of the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. “Where’s Henry?”
“In the dining room. Where else would he be? When I left him he was studying the bill of fare, and trying to decide what kind of wine goes best with swill.” She continued to scribble on the back of the photographs. “I haven’t eaten, by the way, but we only have an hour before court reconvenes. If you want to find a quick diner before you send off the pictures, I’ll tag along.”
“Sorry, Rose. I have to go to the station in Norton first, and if I don’t get there soon the package won’t go out today.”
“Well, I can’t miss court. It would be just my luck that some pillar of the community would confess to the crime, and I’d miss the whole thing. Of course, since I am going to be there, the proceedings will be duller than a Presbyterian sermon. I guess I’ll buy a candy bar and suffer until dinner.”
“I’d offer to smuggle a ham on rye into the courtroom, but we’d probably both end up in jail.”
Rose smiled. “Yeah, but thanks for the thought, Shade. I guess I’d better finish with these photos so that you can get going.” As she picked up the last of the photographs, she let out a low whistle. “Erma Morton. Now that’s a good shot. That’s her, all right! She’s a cool customer, isn’t she?”
She held the photo out to him, but he looked away. “Well, maybe she’s used to being an exhibit by now,” he said. “She got a lot of visitors to her jail cell. And maybe she’s even enjoying the notoriety. Some people do, even if they’re not murderers.”
“Well, it’s too bad Clyde Barrow didn’t drop by and whisk her away to a more famous life of crime.” Rose scowled at the face in the photo. “She’s prettier than Bonnie Parker, I’ll give her that.”
“Judging by the photographs, you mean.”
“Well, yeah. I never saw Bonnie Parker in person. But to me she looked scrawny and tough.”
Shade didn’t argue the point. “But Bonnie Parker never killed anybody, either, even if she was gunned down in that ambush with Barrow last year.”
“Yes, I missed those funerals.” The regret in Rose’s voice was for a missed news story, not for the death of two celebrity outlaws. “They were buried in Dallas, and I was busy elsewhere. They were about the same age as this one, weren’t they? Erma is—what? Twenty-two?”
“Something like that. They were both country girls.”
Rose looked again at the cropped photo of the face of Erma Morton. “I can understand Bonnie Parker, though. I didn’t always—but I do now.”
Shade glanced at his watch again. “Yeah?”
“It happens, you know. Usually the woman doesn’t become as famous as Bonnie Parker, but the pattern is the same. Some quiet, bookish girl—got a spelling bee medal still in its brown envelope, and a drawer full of Sunday school certificates—and she meets a wild boy. You know the kind—nothing rattles him, ever. He’s got no self-consciousness, no nerves, and not enough imagination to be scared. In wartime, we pin medals on them, or drape flags over their caskets, more likely. In peacetime, we hope they become pilots or firemen or lion tamers, because they just don’t work out in ordinary times.
“So the good girl meets this fellow with ice water in his veins. He’s attractive enough, but that’s not the draw. It’s because she lives in her head and he doesn’t. He’s as comfortable in his own skin as a dog fox, and she isn’t and never will be. Doesn’t matter that she could think rings around him. You couldn’t shake his confidence with dynamite, and she’s drawn to that. Makes her feel safe—for the completely crazy reason that she knows that he is the most dangerous thing in the world.”
“I believe you,” said Shade.
“Yeah—so this good girl up and kicks over the traces and off she goes with the fox boy. Before long she’s helping him pass counterfeit money, or rob banks, or crack safes—whatever it is he does to keep from living a monotonous regular existence. He sees regular stiffs who work, eat, and sleep in an unchanging round for forty years until they die, and he doesn’t want any of that.
“And I used to ask myself why a nice girl would throw away her whole life like that. A simple home, marriage, and kids—that’s supposed to be every girl’s dream, right?”
“That’s what I hear, Rose. Yeah.” Even you, he thought.
“I mean, look at Bonnie Parker. Gunned down in backwoods Louisiana at the age of twenty-four. And for what? A couple of frantic years with a two-bit hoodlum, always running, hiding, being scared?”
Shade was standing near the door with his fawn scarf and overcoat draped over his arm, but he was still listening. “Yeah. It seems pointless, all right. So?”
“No. It wasn’t pointless. When I met my Danny, I knew.” She smiled off into space for a moment. Then she shoved the photos back in the envelope and passed them back to Shade. “Right then I knew what those girls had felt. Because I felt it for Danny. Whatever it would take to be with him, I would do it.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, trying to find the words. “Because . . . he’s all that matters. Being with him is the only time I feel like I’m really living and not just working.”
Shade sighed. “Good thing he’s a pilot, then, and not a bank robber. I wonder why women never feel that way about a steady fellow who clerks in an insurance office. But if your pilot was an outlaw and wanted you to go off with him on the run, I’m not convinced you’d really do it, Rose, not if it came down to making that choice. You’re not a kid.”
“Yeah, and that clock ticks louder every day.” Rose traced her finger along the roses on the arm of the chintz chair. Her voice shook a little. “You know that old saying—‘it is better to live one day as a lion than a thousand as a sheep.’ Maybe that’s true.”
“You’re not like the Bonnie Parkers of the world, Rose.”
Rose lifted her chin a little, just as she might have if someone had hit her. Her eyes glistened. “Not pretty enough to be a gun moll, you mean.”
Shade reddened and looked away, pretending not to notice her tears. Funny to think that as tough as Rose was in most ways, she coul
d still be wounded by a careless word like that. Funny to think that a woman past thirty could still mind not being a beauty. He brushed her remark aside. “It’s not that. I just meant that you have an identity of your own. Gun molls are usually running out on a life of domestic drudgery or a series of dead-end jobs. But you’re no waitress in a hash house in Podunk, Rose. You are somebody already.”
She shook her head. “All this newspaper stuff? That’s like writing your name in water. I don’t care what the world thinks. I just want to live a few glorious days with my dog fox, before I am as forgotten as yesterday’s headlines.”
NORA
The little one-room school on Ashe Mountain was now in recess for lunch. A few of the students who lived close by had gone home to eat the big meal of the day with their families, and since the weather was mild for November, the rest had gone outside with their dinner buckets. Only Nora Bonesteel was left, standing hesitantly in front of Miss Parsons’s desk. Shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, she was obviously waiting to say her piece.
Emelyn Parsons was surprised. This student was not one to offer confidences. She made no excuses and asked no favors. You might almost forget the child was there, except that there was a quiet force about her that made itself felt.
The Bonesteel girl was as bright as any student Miss Parsons had, but there was something a little unsettling about her, as if she was always thinking about something else. When you called on her in class, she generally gave the correct response, but she seemed to come back from a long way away before she answered you. Miss Parsons often wondered what Nora Bonesteel was thinking about, but she wasn’t altogether sure she wanted to know.
A tall angular girl with a mass of dark hair curling about her head like a storm cloud, and cold blue eyes that never betrayed any emotion, she was pretty enough, but she kept to herself, either from shyness or because the other children seemed to hang back when she was around, and she never made any particular effort to win them over. She wasn’t a tease or a bully, but she had a quiet way of saying things in a matter-of-fact voice—things she couldn’t know about—that made people uneasy. Especially when the things she said turned out to be true.
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers Page 20