The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The rapping started again.

  Carl padded over to the door and opened it just enough to peep through. “I’m up,” he mumbled.

  “Good thing.” Cousin Araby was fully dressed, with a flour-streaked apron over her calico housedress, and her broom-straw hair already pinned up into a cowpat on top of her head. She had been awake a good while, brewing the coffee and baking biscuits for the boarders’ breakfast. “The telephone rang just now. Trunk call from Johnson City for you. Don’t wait to dress. It’ll cost them a fortune to wait.”

  The door closed, and Carl could hear her carpet slippers swishing away down the polished oak floor of the hall. He pulled the quilt off his camp bed, wrapped it around him to cover his shorts and undershirt, and hurried barefoot into the hall where the black telephone sat on a little table at the foot of the stairs. Still groggy, he wondered who in the family could be calling him here. Surely it was about Nora’s visit, but there were no telephones up on Ashe Mountain.

  He picked up the receiver and croaked out a tentative hello.

  “Jennings! I thought I’d better catch you before you headed off to the trial.”

  Carl froze, instantly awake. It was his editor, Gene Dugger, calling from the newspaper. Carl managed to stammer a feeble good morning, knowing that a daybreak summons by phone was not going to be good news. “Did you get my dispatch yesterday, sir?”

  “Well, we did, son, and it wasn’t a bad effort for a novice report, I’ll give you that.”

  Carl started breathing again. “I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Dugger.”

  “But it wasn’t up to snuff for a big story like the one you’re working on, and it wasn’t worth the fortune it’s going to cost us to pay Western Union. Whatever possessed you to telegraph your copy?”

  “Well, sir, I didn’t like to send it through the mail. I thought you would be in a hurry to get it.”

  “Oh, you got that right. But did it ever occur to you to telephone us?”

  Carl gulped. “Well . . . no. I mean, I had written it all out, you see.”

  “And you think Bill Shakespeare is lying awake nights worrying that your rhapsodies in prose will put him in the shade, huh? Well, I tell you what, you call here this evening, and you ask for Mr. Farthing, who can write shorthand faster than you can talk. Those big-city boys you’re no doubt hobnobbing with have both the budget and the literary style to warrant telegraphing their stories in, but you are in a less exalted situation. So you and Mr. Farthing will have to work it out between you. Tell the operator to reverse the charges. We will pay for the calls.”

  “I will, Mr. Dugger.”

  “Solved the case yet?” The sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable.

  “No, sir. I know the national press thinks Erma Morton is innocent, but I’m not sure that I do.”

  “And I’m not sure that anybody cares what you think, son. You’re a reporter, not an editorial writer. Is there anything in the way of facts that you know?”

  “I think there will be soon, sir,” said Carl, offering up a silent prayer to which Nora Bonesteel would be the answer.

  “Make it good, then,” said the editor. “Your job is riding on it.” Without waiting for a reply, he rang off.

  Carl hung up the telephone, thinking that he had rarely felt like such an utter fool that early in the morning. He had nearly reached his room when the telephone rang again, and he rushed back to answer it, thinking that it would be the editor again with some new cause for complaint.

  “Carl, is that you?” It was his mother.

  He told her, with more bravado than truth, that his assignment was going well, and that he had high hopes of impressing his employers with his skill and diligence on this assignment. “But why are you telephoning? Is everything all right?”

  “We just wanted to let you know that Nora is on her way to Wise. Her father stopped by on his way home this morning to let us know that he had just dropped her off at the station. He wanted to make sure someone would meet her at the station. Her train should reach Norton by noon.”

  Half a dozen questions were buzzing around in Carl’s head, so he picked the first one that came to mind. “Uncle stopped by your house in Erwin? At this hour?”

  “We didn’t mind. It was very practical of him, really, because he knows we’re on the telephone, so we could call Wise as many times as we needed to and make sure that someone was there to meet her train. He had breakfast with us and then headed on home. I was a bit surprised that Cousin Araby should think of asking Nora to come and help with the chores. Though, of course, they’ll be glad of the money these days. But who really thought of inviting Nora?

  “Well, this is costing us dearly, Carl, so I’ll let you go now. Write us a letter.”

  THE COURTROOM WAS TOO WARM. Rose, who had not slept very well the night before, had not drunk enough coffee at breakfast to keep her awake, and, even at the best of times, trials tended to be monotonous. She had wriggled out of her coat, but her red suit jacket was also wool, and much too warm for the close quarters of the crowded courtroom. Her head was bent over her yellow legal pad, and she seemed to be diligently making notes on the court proceedings, but beneath the top page with its dozen scribbled words, Rose was composing a letter to Danny. There was no point in trying to explain the trial to him, since so far it wasn’t very interesting. Danny had trouble following anything more subtle than cowboy movies. She decided not to describe Erma Morton, either. Why call his attention to pretty girls, even ones who might be safely locked away in prison? She had to be jaunty and brave, and, above all, amusing, so it wouldn’t do to embark on a litany of complaints about the material failings of this backwoods community. Rose prided herself in never being a pampered lapdog of a woman, and if she realized that it was because she wasn’t pretty enough to get away with it, she never acknowledged that fact, even to herself.

  What would Danny see if he were here? She tried to consider the surroundings from his point of view. That might work. She wrote:

  I don’t suppose you would like to fly over these mountains. There’s hardly any place around here flat enough for an airfield. I’ll bet a pilot could make good money for a week or so barnstorming in the district, though. Most of these people have probably never seen an airplane, and at five bucks a head, some of them might be willing to dig the cash out of their mattresses to buy a ten-minute ride in one. I wish I could think of a good reason to get you down here, but I don’t suppose I’ll be staying long enough for it to matter. Trials cost money, and this little backwoods belle can’t afford more than a couple of days of legal representation, so in a day or so we’ll be folding our tents and hopping a train back to Manhattan. You wouldn’t think I’d miss you since I’ve been away less than a week, but I do. I may be back by the time this reaches you, and I will try again to call you before then. If you find yourself fogged in at the airport with time on your hands and nothing better to do, drop me a line. I’m in a pretty decent room at the hotel in Wise—but without you, it might as well be a cell in the county jail.

  She stopped the letter there, because there was a small stir in the courtroom as a tall, thirtyish man in a tweed suit approached the witness stand. The doctors and the law enforcement people had finished their dry recitations of facts and figures, and now, apparently, something more interesting was about to be presented.

  Rose jotted down a few descriptive words so that she would remember how to describe the man when she wrote it up later.

  “Please state your name for the record.”

  “Junius Ryan.”

  Rose nodded to herself. This was the next-door neighbor who had heard a commotion next door in the middle of the night, and had gone over to see what was the matter. That was the most damaging bit of evidence against the girl. Why would you not let a concerned neighbor in your house if someone was gravely injured? Rose could think of all kinds of reasons not to let him in, because she had no use for people at the best of times. Suppose he was a notorious tale-monger and your house wa
s a mess? In a small town, that would be reason enough to keep him out. Suppose you’d had a real donnybrook of a family quarrel, and punches had been thrown? You wouldn’t want him spreading that story in church the next morning, either. Really, you could argue it either way. The prosecution was going to contend that Mr. Ryan was an upstanding citizen, concerned about his neighbors, and the defense would paint him as a nosey parker prying into the Mortons’ private business. Which was he really?

  Rose stifled a yawn. You would be none the wiser for watching the man testify in court. Everybody walks chalk in a courtroom. They dress up in their Sunday clothes, and sit there in the witness box like a plaster saint, giving pious answers to the lawyers’ questions, detailing their unselfish intentions and their noble thoughts. They probably even believed it themselves by the time the case got to trial, months after the incident in question.

  She scribbled a few notes about Ryan’s appearance and his clothing. He didn’t look like an old busybody. He was in his mid-thirties, and he spoke in a clear and forthright manner, without displaying any animosity toward Erma. When a lawyer asked him a question, he put his head to one side for a moment while he thought it over, and then he answered in a calm, clear voice. Rose thought it would be easy to lionize this man as an honest good Samaritan, but that wouldn’t fit her story at all. If Erma Morton was a persecuted innocent, this man would have to be depicted as one of her tormentors. She would have to give it some thought and perhaps interview him outside of court. At the moment, the only fault she could find with him was his accent. She could mock him for his countrified speech patterns, as long as she took care not to mention that Erma Morton talked exactly the same way.

  Rose decided that covering a news story was like painting a portrait: what you emphasized and what you omitted told the viewers what they ought to think of the subject.

  CARL JENNINGS WISHED he had learned shorthand. He hated having to choose between watching the witness and scribbling down an approximation of what he was saying. He compromised by listening, and then making hasty notes while the attorney was posing the next question. At least the newspaper did not expect him to produce a transcript of the proceedings. A summary in a few hundred words was all that they required, but he wanted to get it right.

  The next-door neighbor Junius Ryan was testifying now, and he made an impressive witness. Carl watched him through the preliminary questions of who he was and where he lived, and jotted down “Gary Cooper.” He could picture the tall, rugged actor in A Farewell to Arms or that movie he did last year, playing the father of little Shirley Temple. Junius Ryan was that type: calm, upstanding, forthright. You looked at him, and you felt that you could trust him, that what he told you was the truth of the matter.

  Junius Ryan established his bona fides in a few terse sentences. He had lived at Pound for fourteen years, and next door to the Mortons for twelve. Yes, he had known the deceased, and he had known the defendant for virtually all her life. He lived on the second floor of the building next to that of the Morton family, but their residence was on the far side of the one-story duplex. The side nearest him was occupied by the village post office.

  The prosecutor led him forward from these basic facts into an account of what had happened on the night Pollock Morton died. Ryan had been in his bedroom, not asleep but reading. It was a hot night, and the window was open. He had not heard Erma arrive home in a car, but some time later, a noise from the Morton house attracted his attention.

  “I heard a racket.” When asked to explain that remark, he said, “I heard feminine voices. They were quarreling.”

  “Did you recognize these feminine voices?”

  “I could not swear to that.”

  “Did you know the voice of Mr. Pollock Morton?”

  “I do.”

  “And did you hear his voice upraised in that quarreling?”

  “I did not.”

  “How long did this quarreling continue?”

  “Eight . . . maybe ten minutes.”

  “Could you make out anything that was being said?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Was there cursing going on?”

  Ryan considered it. “From the tone of the voices, it sounded like cursing.”

  “What happened after the quarreling?”

  Junius Ryan took a deep breath and glanced down at Erma Morton, seated at the defense table. Then he clenched his jaw and looked away as he answered. “Well, then I did hear Pollock Morton’s voice. He started hollering, ‘Oh lordy.’ He said it over and over, and every time he said it, he would say some other words after it, but he spoke too low for me to make out what he was saying.”

  “When he said oh lordy, was he hollering very loud?”

  “Loud enough for it to be heard for two, three hundred yards, I’d judge. It went on for about eight minutes.”

  “Well, Mr. Ryan, what were you doing while all this was going on?”

  “At first I just put down my book and lay there listening to those mournful calls. Then I got up, and I hunted around for my kimono and my house slippers. When I got them on, I went out into the hall, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk. I walked along it over to the Mortons’ building.”

  Carl scribbled a few perfunctory notes, but he knew that he would have no trouble remembering Junius Ryan’s testimony.

  “I was in front of the post office side of the building when I saw the Mortons’ front door open a crack. When Erma Morton saw it was me, she came out on the porch and said, ‘There’s no fire here. You need not be a-coming.’ Well, I looked into the house, and saw the rooms were all lit up, and I took a step or two toward the porch, and she said again, ‘Go back. If we want you, we will send for you.’ I answered that I thought I might be of some assistance. I have a little drugstore, and so I had first aid material. I thought I might be able to help. But she stood there blocking the doorway, and she said a second time, ‘Go away. If we need you or anything you’ve got, we will send for you.’ So I stood there for a moment or two, and then reluctantly I turned and went back home.”

  Carl felt a chill run up his spine. He didn’t see how the defense could defuse this testimony.

  The prosecutor was asking if Ryan heard any noise inside the house while he stood outside talking to Erma.

  “I could hear a noise in that back room where Pollock Morton was. Not his voice anymore. He had quit saying oh lordy, but I heard some kind of a shuffling noise. And I did not see Pollock Morton’s wife.”

  “Did you see Pollock Morton?”

  “I did not see Pollock Morton.”

  “And then you went home?”

  “I did. I went back to my bed and started to read again, and then I heard a radio playing over at the Mortons’ house.”

  “Did you hear Pollock Morton’s voice anymore?”

  “No. I heard noise. Shuffling, sounded like. And that radio, playing loud.”

  Carl doodled an Atwater Kent radio on the margin of his notes. Despite what he had heard, Junius Ryan had not called the police. It would never have occurred to him that someone in the house was dying. He thought he had interrupted a domestic dispute, and since the first commandment of the hills is, “Mind your own business,” he went home, thinking his duty done.

  Carl tried to think of some innocent explanation for playing a radio in the wee hours of the morning, when a family member has just been heard crying out in distress. Nothing plausible occurred to him.

  “How long did the radio play, Mr. Ryan?”

  “Five, maybe ten minutes. Then it cut off completely. And I went back to my book, but I couldn’t get my mind on the reading, because I was still thinking about what might have happened next door.”

  “So you tried to read and didn’t make much headway at it. Then what?”

  “Well, about twenty-five minutes passed. Thereabouts. And then Erma Morton’s little sister came knocking on our door. That’s Sarah Beth, who is nine years old. She was out of breath, and yelling that her daddy was dying an
d would I come over. So I put on my robe and slippers again, and I followed her around to the lattice porch at the back of the house. It’s maybe ten feet wide. The girl went on back inside, but Erma Morton and her mother were there on the porch, standing next to a meat block.”

  Carl sketched a smooth-planed tree stump, wondering if he should elaborate on “meat block” for his readers. He thought not. Most of them would either have such an item at home or they would have seen one.

  “Did you see Pollock Morton?”

  “Yes. The little girl, Sarah Beth, told me that her daddy had fallen against the meat block and hit his head. He was laying right in the doorway, with his feet and legs inside the kitchen and the rest of him sprawled out on the porch, about three feet to one side of that meat block.”

  “How was Mr. Morton lying?”

  “On his back with his arms thrown wide. And I could hear the death rattle in his throat, and I stood watching him for a minute, trying to figure out what I could do for him. I started trying to give him physical respiration, and he was growing weaker, but just then Dr. Ogburn arrived and took hold of his wrist to check his pulse. So I started looking on his head to see where he had struck it. But it was dark there on the porch, and I couldn’t find it.”

  “What were Mrs. Morton and the defendant doing while this was going on?”

  “Well, they were standing there hollering for us to do something. Then they left the porch and I said to Dr. Ogburn—”

  The judge looked suddenly alert. “We object. Do not tell what you said to the doctor.”

  The prosecutor said, “But, your honor, isn’t that conversation part of the res gestae?”

  The judge addressed his reply to Junius Ryan. “Tell what you saw and did, and not what conversation passed between you and Dr. Ogburn.”

  Carl made a note to ask somebody why the judge was making objections. He thought the lawyers did that, but the old gentleman on the bench seemed determined to keep a tight rein on the proceedings personally. He craned his neck to look at Erma Morton seated at the defense table. She was whispering to her attorney, but he did not think she seemed particularly moved by the witness’s account of her father’s dying moments. He made a note of it.