The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (25 page)

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 Mommy, 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.

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?”