Grass Roots (5 page)

Will left the jail, got into his car, and followed Larry Moody’s directions to his house. It turned out to be a shell home, one of those bought as nothing more than four walls and a roof, then finished by the owner. The little place sat on a lot bare of grass, separated from the road by a deep drainage ditch. Will pulled his car onto the wide shoulder of the road, got out and crossed a crude footbridge over the ditch. He found the flowerpot, which contained the remnants of some dead plant, and the key, and let himself into the house.

There was a surprising amount of furniture, most of it inexpensive and new-looking, packed into the small living room. There was a stacked stereo system in a rack against the wall, next to a large color television set and an expensive video tape recorder. The tiny dining room was given over to an elaborate weightlifting system. Judging from the amount of stuff in the house, and guessing at what the income of a furnace repairman must be, Willy could see why Larry Moody couldn’t afford a lawyer. He must be in hock up to his ears, what with all this stuff and the van.

Will stood for a moment, taking it all in. He was about to move toward the bedroom to collect Larry’s gear, when the front door suddenly opened, and he found himself facing a young woman.

She stood stock-still, staring at him, surprised.

Will was struck by how pretty—almost beautiful—she was. Her hair was even blonder than Larry’s, and he thought it must be her own color; her eyes were large and vividly blue; her nose was slight; and her lips were full and wide. She was no more than five feet four, but so well proportioned that she seemed taller. She was the first to speak.

“Who are you?” she asked, her brow wrinkling. Her speech was firm and broadly accented, much like her boyfriend’s.

“My name is Will Lee. I’m a lawyer, representing Larry Moody. I’m sorry if I startled you; Larry asked me to come here and pick up some things for him.” He stopped talking for a moment, but she didn’t speak. They stood, looking at each other.

“You must be Charlene Joiner,” he said finally.

“Yes,” she said.

“Somebody came in the store a few minutes ago and said they’d heard Larry was in some kind of trouble. I got a ride home.”

“Yes, I’m afraid he is. I’ve just come from the jail; the court has appointed me to represent him.” He stopped, unwilling to break the news to her.

“Well,” she said, her voice rising slightly, “are you going to tell me what’s happened?”

“I’m sorry,” Will stammered.

“Look, you’d better come sit down for a minute.”

She sat next to him on the sofa, facing him, clear-eyed, expressionless, as he told her about the charges against Larry. When he had finished, she stood up and shrugged off the parka she had been wearing. Beneath it was a yellow nylon smock with the Magi Mart logo emblazoned upon it.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

“Larry wouldn’t kill anybody. What the hell is going on?” She unzipped the smock and threw it at a chair. When she turned back toward him she was wearing only a thin T-shirt, the bottom of which missed meeting her low-cut jeans by a good six inches, leaving an expanse of silky, lightly browned skin.

Will was slightly rocked by the sight. Her breasts were full, and the nipples were hard, thrust lightly against the T-shirt.

“Well, uh, we won’t know much more about the case until Monday morning, when the preliminary hearing will be held. I’d like you to come to that.” He tried to keep his breathing slow and steady.

“Sure I will,” she said, sitting next to him on the sofa again.

Involuntarily, he inched away from her.

“As long as I’m here, I need to ask you some questions,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Whatever will help Larry.”

“I should tell you that anything you say to me will be in confidence and can’t be used against Larry. Our conversation is privileged.”

“Right,” she said, moving her tongue over her lower lip, in a motion that seemed astonishingly sensual to Will.

He coughed into his fist and made an effort to compose himself. This girl’s presence was having the most unsettling effect on him. He crossed his legs and realized that he was becoming tumescent. He coughed again, then began questioning her about her movements on Thursday night.

Her account of the evening matched Larry’s in every respect, except she said they had eaten ribs, instead of chicken. She did not, however, share Larry’s initial reticence in describing the later part of their evening.

“After the movie,” she said, “we fucked.” She wrinkled her brow as if trying to be precise.

“Two or three times.”

Will nodded and swallowed.

“I don’t want you to think I’m prying,” he said, “but is that something you and Larry do a lot of?”

Her eyebrows went up.

“Fucking? Oh, yeah. We like it. We’re good together.” She looked at him and smiled.

“Why, Counselor, I’m embarrassing you.”

“Not at all,” Will lied.

“Ah, is there anything else you want to know about Larry’s case?”

She questioned him briskly about the charges against Larry and what might happen to him. There was none of the deference that Larry had shown; she addressed Will as an equal, and her questions were intelligent and to the point. She seemed somehow older, more mature than Larry.

When he had answered her. Will stood.

“Well, I’d better get going. If you’ll put together a couple of changes of clothes and some shaving gear for Larry, I’ll drop them off at the jail.”

“I’ll take it myself. I want to see him.”

Will glanced at his watch.

“It’s after visiting hours, I’m afraid. You can go by tomorrow, though, between two and five.”

She disappeared into a bedroom, came back with a packed nylon duffel, and handed it to him.

“They’ll search it,” Will said to her.

“If there’s any thing in here you don’t want them to see…”

“No,” she said, then stuck out her hand.

“Thank you, Will, for what you’re doing for Larry. Can I call you Will?”

“Sure,” he said, taking her hand. It was warm and soft;

her fingers were long and her grip firm.

“The sheriff is holding Larry’s van for the moment. I may be able to get it released late next week. Larry wanted you to be able to use it.

Call me if you have any other questions; I’m in the Delano phone book—the office is Lee & Lee. Home is W. H. Lee the Fourth.”

She frowned, not letting go of his hand.

“Is your father Billy Lee? The one who was governor?”

“That’s right.” He took his hand back and put it in his pocket. It was damp.

“Goodbye,” she said.

Will left the house and got into his car with the duffel.

“Jesus Christ!” he said aloud to himself.

“No wonder Larry wants to get out of jail!” He drove off toward the square, trying not to think about Charlene Joiner. will entertained himself by driving back-country to the family farm, testing his memory on the network of little roads, most of them without signposts. Twenty minutes later, he turned onto the Raleigh road, and a moment later, the main house came into view. It was on the site where his great-great-grandfather had built, but the original frame farmhouse had burned in the 1930s.

His father had returned in 1945 from service in the Army Air Corps, flying bombers out of England, and had brought back with him an Anglo-Irish bride. Patricia Worth, New name Lee had carried with her the original drawings of her Georgian family home in County Cork, and she had overseen the construction of a more than reasonable facsimile in the Southern countryside, built of brick, rather than the stone of the Irish house. The house was of a comfortable size, not quite grand, and it seemed as much at home on the red clay of Georgia as the original had on the green fields of Ireland.

Will turned into the semicircular driveway, and, instead of continuing to the front door, went straight on toward a grove of trees on a little lake a couple of hundred yards behind the house. As he passed the house, a dog—a golden Labrador retriever—leapt from the back porch and tore after the car. Will slowed until the dog caught up with him, then laughed as the handsome animal raced alongside the car toward the trees.

Will turned into a well-kept dirt track through the trees and came to his own house, a small, neat, angular cottage of stone and cedar. He had built it, with the help of two farmhands, the year he had joined his father in the law practice, when he was twenty-five. It sat in the copse, elevated a few feet from the ten-acre lake that his mother had designed and had constructed during the 1950s. Now the lake looked as though it had always been there.

He got out of the car and was nearly knocked down by the flying dog.

“Hey, Fred! How are you, old sport?” He knelt and let the animal lick his face and, gradually, calmed him. He got the luggage out of the back of the Wagoneer and gave Fred a briefcase to carry. The dog pranced about, proud of himself, and tried to bark, in spite of the handle in his mouth.

Will trotted up the steps to the porch with the rest of his luggage, went into the house and dumped everything on the bed. Fred came and put the briefcase carefully on the bed, too.

“What a good boy!” He scratched the dog behind the ears and sniffed the air; Marie, half of the black couple who took care of his parents, had left something good in the house. He wandered through the book-cluttered living room to the kitchen, found a plate of fresh chocolate-chip cookies, helped himself, then went back to the bedroom, munching, and unpacked. After a hot shower, he threw himself on the bed and dozed fitfully, stirring now and then to glimpse the sun sink into the lake.

When he woke, he got into some clothes. The main house was run his mother’s way, and that meant a jacket and tie at dinner. Under a rising moon, with Fred running ahead, he walked through the trees and over the grassy expanse that separated the cottage from the main house.

It was chilly, but not cold, an improvement over Washington, he thought.

He entered the house and immediately ran into his father’s younger sister, Eloise, coming out of the kitchen.

They embraced warmly.

“You’ve lost some weight,” Ellie said. She had been widowed in World War II and had never remarried, still operating the ladies’ clothing store that her mother had started when Will’s grandfather had died. Now in her early seventies, she lived alone in Delano, but often came to dinner.

“I’ve needed to.” Will laughed.

“Anyway, they’ll put it back on me over Christmas, and if I know you, you’ll help.”

Patricia Lee met her son at the library door and hugged him. At seventy, she was still a beautiful woman—tall, slender, and erect, though her auburn hair had mostly faded to white. She stood back and held Will’s face in her hands.

“You look tired,” she said.

“But then you always do when you come home from Washington.” Her accent had softened a bit over the past forty years, but there was still a distinct west British edge to it. When she was joking or angry, she lapsed into a County Cork brogue.

Will’s father. Billy Lee, turned from his work at the cocktail cabinet concealed behind rows of leather book spines.

“Hello, there, boy!” he half-shouted. He came and embraced his son.

Billy Lee was in his late seventies now, and in spite of a heart attack a year before, he looked and sounded ten years younger. His thick hair had gone entirely white, and Will reflected, not for the first time, that his father looked much more the part of senator than did Benjamin Carr.

“Can I interest you in some bourbon whiskey?” he asked.

“You betcha,” Will said. He took the drink and sank into the sofa, opposite his parents’ matching chairs, before the hearth, where a cheerful fire was crackling away. He loved this room.

“Good flight down?” his father asked.

“Real good. It was pretty murky in the D.C. area, but it cleared up as I came south.”

“That’s as good a metaphor for the state of the union as I’ve heard.”

His father laughed.

“What did Judge Boggs want?” his mother demanded.

“I expect he’s stuck you with some case nobody else would take.”

“Probably,” Will said, “but he made it sound like he wouldn’t trust it to anybody else. He roped in Elton Hunter, the Greenville lawyer, too.

He’s prosecuting.” He gave them an account of his meeting with Judge Boggs.

“The cagey old reprobate had already spoken with the Senator about my time. There was no way out.”

“You think this Moody fellow did it?” his mother asked.

“Hard to say,” Will replied.

“The boy comes off well;

he’ll be good on the stand, if I use him. I don’t really know what sort of a case they’ve got yet, but they have some sort of a witness—to what, I don’t know. Still, there’s something about Moody that makes me want to believe him—a sort of sweetness. The women on the jury will want to mother him.”

“Has he got an alibi?” Billy Lee asked.

“Has he? Wow! He’s got a girlfriend, who, when she gets on the stand, will make everybody doubt that he would have the energy to rape somebody else.”

“Do you know anything about Sarah Cole?” his father asked.

“Just that she’s black and a farmer’s daughter from up around Luthersville.”

“There’s a lot more to her than that,” Billy said.

“She’s—she was—smart as a whip. She graduated from high school in Greenville, but she got a scholarship to Bennington, in Vermont, and she apparently excelled there.”

“You knew her?”

“No, this has all been in the papers. There’s more, too.

She got some sort of foundation grant and was running a counseling service for pregnant teenagers—the only thing like it around here.”

“Sounds good,” Will said.

“There’s a need for that.”

“Yes, but Sarah Cole wasn’t making any friends in the county, not any white ones, anyway. She was a militant feminist, an avowed atheist, and a general all-round pain in the ass, or so I hear around the courthouse.” Billy got up and retrieved a newspaper from a table and handed it to Will.

“She was also real good-looking.”

Will stared into a strikingly beautiful face: cafe-all-lait skin, the features perfectly arranged, the hair in a short Afro cut, the eyes intelligent and, he thought, a little angry.