The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (13 page)

The listeners nodded in agreement. “A hell of a thing,” one of them remarked. “But they
lied
about it.”

“It’s a shameful business,” another one said. “How those journalists could hold their heads up, I’ll never know.”

John nodded. “That’s it, boys. Every one of those reporters came back out of that cave claiming he’d had a chat with the trapped man. Full of stories about what poor Floyd had said to them, and what he’d eaten. And every word of it a lie.”

“They printed those lies in their papers, too, didn’t they?”

The storyteller drummed his fist on his knee. “They left that man to freeze and starve while his friends and neighbors on the surface thought that he was being looked after. They sold his chance of survival for a few false words in a newspaper that would line a birdcage the day after it was printed.”

The group fell silent then, and in the dim light Carl felt their accusing stares. He hung his head. “Yes, sir, I reckon they gave the profession a bad name. But I never would. I would have tried to get that interview, fair enough, but I wouldn’t have lied about it. I’d have crawled as far as I had to in order to look that man in the face. And I would have taken his food to him, or I’d never have been able to touch another bite myself in this world.”

One of the old men laughed. “Are you as young as that, boy?”

John’s anger had subsided into weary resignation. “Life has a way of taking all those fine sentiments and making them seem outmoded, compared to the more practical virtues like feeding your family, getting praise from your colleagues, keeping your job. Wait until you have a hard choice to make before you start polishing your halo.”

“I haven’t seen anything worth trading my honor for yet, sirs.” Carl drew his notebook out of the pocket of his overcoat. “Now, as long as I’m here, I was hoping you might help me with a little information about this murder trial up in Wise, if you can see your way clear to do that—as honorable men.”

The man in the next chair reached for his tobacco pouch and began to construct another cigarette. “Brutus was an honorable man.”

“Oh, come off it, Jim,” said the one called Bob. “This boy’s from over in Johnson City. Green he may be, but he’s bound to be better than those boiled owls from the big city. I say we give him a leg up. Wouldn’t you hate to see the fancy scribes leave him in the dust on this story?”

The denizens of the pink tearoom exchanged looks while Carl waited, conscious that he was holding his breath. Finally, the grizzled man in the brown suit said, “Did you bring a pen to go with that notebook, son? Because we’re only going over this once.”

“And don’t pester us with questions,” said John. “If we know it, and if it matters, we’ll tell it to you without prompting. You’ve read the newspaper accounts thus far, of course?”

Carl nodded, wisely choosing not to interrupt, even to answer a question.

“Right, well, I grew up in the Pound,” said a wiry little man in gray tweed. “So I’ll start you off. Ever been there? No? Well, it’s a wide place in the road just over the mountain from Kentucky.”

Another of the armchair sages spoke up. “Pretty country. You’ll know about the Breaks, I’ll warrant?”

Carl nodded. Travel writing was not his field, but of course,
he  knew about the local wonders. Just over the Tennessee line in Kentucky they had a waterfall whose spray made a rainbow by moonlight: only two or three “moonbows” in the whole world, and he lived fifty miles from one. And Roan Mountain, which was even closer to home. On Roan Mountain you could see your own shadow in the clouds below you. Roan Mountain had bare patches called “Balds” where trees wouldn’t grow and nobody knew why. The locals’ explanation was that the devil got drunk up there on the mountain, and left his staggered footprints, which were poisonous to plants. He knew that southwest Virginia’s claim to a geographic wonder was the Breaks. He had read about it, but he had never been there.

The Grand Canyon of the South was a deep gorge straddling the state line between Virginia and Kentucky, covering thousands of acres of wilderness with soaring cliffs, forested mountains, and here and there a scattering of caves. Over millions of years the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River had cut the five-mile gorge, wearing away the soft sandstone of Pine Mountain, and sculpting majestic vistas among the green Appalachian hills. The Virginia side of the Breaks, as the gorge was called, was located in Dickenson County, just north of Wise, perhaps twenty miles from the Mortons’ hometown of Pound. It was a popular spot for hikers, painters, and sightseers. But to someone with little money, a trial to cover, and only the train for transport, the Breaks was surely as inaccessible as the moon.

He wished he had time to see it, though.

What a stunning setting the Breaks would have made for the filming of
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
: breathtaking scenery, plus the advantage of being the geographically correct place to set the story. But Carl had read somewhere that the Paramount moviemakers had chosen instead to film at Big Bear Lake in California, and in the San Bernardino National Forest. He didn’t suppose that those western landscapes would look much like the Virginia Blue Ridge, but most cinema audiences wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe they
wouldn’t even care. For the first time ever, the filmmakers were shooting the movie outdoors in full color, so for audiences the novelty of colorful scenery would overshadow all other considerations. The movie people had other problems to contend with besides the technology of color photography: mountain accents, an exotic setting, and a rural Southern culture. But the movie would be important for southwest Virginia. It would focus the eyes of the nation on their corner of the world. It might even bring in some tourists, expecting Wise County to look like the California movie set. Carl wondered if Hollywood would get anything right. The film would be in theatres in about in six months’ time. He supposed he’d find out then.

“Coal mine country,” said the man in the bow tie. “The girl’s father was a miner. I expect you knew that.”

“They say he was bad to drink,” said the man with the briar pipe. “My sister married into a family up there in Wise.”

Bow Tie nodded. “I’ve heard that, too. People liked him, though. The whole county turned up for the funeral. If you’ve got a picture in your mind of a poor peasant family stuck in the back of beyond, you’d best get rid of it right now.”

John nodded. “You have to take the mother’s family into account. They always thought she married beneath her. Her people owned land. Her uncle was a sheriff, and the commonwealth attorney is a cousin, if I remember correctly. The Pound may be a little pond, but they were big frogs within its confines. Well, the girl went to college. That says it all, doesn’t it?”

Carl hesitated. “Well, I suppose it means they are not a typical rural family. Not many people from little mountain hamlets go to college. Or at least it suggests that Miss Erma Morton is not a typical mountain girl. I think I read that she paid her own way to East Radford Teachers College.”

“That’s right. Borrowed money from a maiden aunt. Now I wonder why she set such a store on college.”

“Well, I can speak for myself, coming from a similar background,” said Carl. “I did it for a chance to see the world. It was a way out of that little town I came from.”

“Well, that makes sense—for you, I reckon. But we were talking about Erma Morton. She went a hundred miles or so away to college, and then she turned right back around and went home to that speck of a community buried deep in the mountains. If she wanted to see the world, I don’t reckon it agreed with her. She got her book learning and she went home. What do you make of that?”

“Couldn’t get a husband?” The grizzled fellow’s laugh turned into a wheezing cough, and he scrabbled in his coat pocket for a handkerchief.

“But she’s beautiful,” said Carl, who found himself thinking out loud. “At least, if the press photographs can be believed.”

One of the tearoom elders gave him a careless wave. “We concede the point.”

“Well, then, surely Erma Morton could have acquired a husband if she had put her mind to it.”

“Have you looked up East Radford Teachers College? The next town over is Blacksburg, home of an all-men’s college, Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Any halfway pretty girl that couldn’t land a catch in a stocked pond as big as that couldn’t have been trying.”

Carl nodded. “Right. And if she went to college solely in order to get married, she shouldn’t have attended an all-female teacher’s college. Now, my alma mater, East Tennessee State, would have been closer to home for her, and it’s coeducational. I expect we could have found her a sweetheart.”

“Seems strange, doesn’t it?” mused John. “If she hated her daddy bad enough to kill him, why would she move back home once she’d escaped from him by going away to school?”

Carl had an answer for that one. He had not been long out of college himself. “You look at things differently after you’ve been away
from home, I think. At least, I did. Maybe when she lived at home, she thought her life was normal—or that the situation was inevitable, anyhow—but after a taste of independence, she found she couldn’t stand him anymore.”

“You’re all talking like she did it,” said the man in tweeds. “Want another drink, son?”

“No, thanks,” said Carl, waving away the proffered bottle. “And I don’t know if she did it or not. I came here hoping for an informed opinion.”

John laughed. “Oh, between us we’ve got a raft of opinions, all right. Some more informed than others. My thinking was that if the county sheriff arrested a pretty young girl who led a blameless life, then he must have had an iron-clad reason for doing so. A girl like that wouldn’t be anybody’s first choice for the villain of the piece, so they must have some solid evidence against her—or nowhere else to turn.”

“Especially since you made such a point of their family connections, John. That the Mortons are kin to local lawyers and such.”

Carl had been thinking the same thing. “I guess I’ll hear the evidence for myself,” he said. “I’m attending the trial. I just wondered if you knew anything that might not come out in the public record.”

“A trial is a chess game, young man,” drawled the silver-haired man in the corner.

The elders laughed. “You ought to know, counselor!”

“Well, I do know. Anybody who thinks he’ll attend a trial in order to learn the facts of the case is a graven fool. It is a chess game, I tell you. Each side presents only the facts and opinions that serve their case, and they slant those facts to strengthen their position. You know who ought to be the patron saint of judges? Pontius Pilate! When he said, ‘What is truth?’ he spoke for all of us.”

“I just want to know if you think she’s guilty,” said Carl. “I know that as a reporter, I’m not supposed to have an opinion about that.”

“Damn right, you’re not. You’re paid to report the facts. Nobody cares what you think.”

“I know. But I just wonder if she is guilty.”

The judge shook his head. “Start looking for an angel, then. Because all a jury’s going to tell you is which side won the legal chess game. Which is not the same as revealing the truth. Don’t forget that. What the world knows is this: a pretty young schoolteacher came home after ten o’clock one night last July, and her intoxicated father pitched into her about it. They had a screaming fight. A neighbor claimed to overhear cries in the night, and the next morning the old man is found dead in his house with a wound on his temple. The rest is conjecture.”

“But maybe the townspeople know something that hasn’t made the newspapers. Maybe there’s a boyfriend or some enemy of the family.” It sounded unlikely, even to Carl, but he was reluctant to abandon hope of an inside source.

The patrician reached for the bottle to refill his glass. “Well, you journalists should take to heart the motto of the mongoose, young man. That’s my advice to you.”

Carl recognized the quotation, because from the time he could read, Rudyard Kilpling had been among his favorite authors. The motto of the mongoose is, “Run and find out.”

At least she was pretty enough. With her big dark eyes, and her thick black hair, she was someone that people noticed. After the first glance they would see her good straight nose and the graceful swan neck that showed she had breeding—those were the signs of a real lady. There was class in her mother’s bloodline, and it showed in her fine features. There was no shame in being a spinster at twenty-one, not if you looked like she did.

She could have got married at fifteen if she’d a mind to, but she didn’t want to end up like some of the girls she had gone to school with: old at thirty, bedraggled in faded print dresses and down-at-heel shoes, with babies hanging all over them like leeches. She repressed a shudder. No man was worth that. That was one thing her mother had taught her without meaning to. There must have been some reason her pretty, well-born mama had married that lout—some spark of passion in a long-ago summer. But whatever momentary joy Mama had found with him, she had repented for in the leisure of the next twenty years. Youthful passion was not worth what it would cost you over the course of a lifetime. Mama was living proof of that.