Sycamore Row (52 page)

He called the other bouncer at home but got no answer. The owner wasn’t there and, at the moment, Lonny was in charge. More vodka was ordered. Lonny thought about cutting it with water, but these guys would know it immediately. When one slapped a waitress on her shapely rear end, events spiraled out of control, and quickly. The lone bouncer, a man who had never shied away from violence, barked at the offending Russian, who barked back in another language while rising angrily. He threw a wild punch, which missed, and then took one that didn’t. From across the room, a gang of patriotic bikers hurled beer bottles at the Russians, all of whom were springing into action. Lonny said, “Oh shit!” and thought about leaving through the kitchen, but he’d seen it all before, many times. His bar had a tough reputation, which was one reason it paid so well, and in cash.

When another waitress was knocked down, he ducked around the bar to help her. The melee raged on just a few feet away, and as he reached to grab her a blunt object of some variety struck him in the back of his head. He fell comatose, blood pouring from his wound and draining into his long gray ponytail. At sixty-six, Lonny was simply too old to even watch such a brawl.

For two days he lay unconscious in a Juneau hospital. The owner of the bar reluctantly came forward and admitted he had no paperwork on the man. Just a name—Lonny Clark. A detective was hanging around, and when it became apparent he might never wake up, a plan was hatched. The owner told them which flophouse Lonny called home, and the cops broke in. Along with almost nothing in the way of assets, they found thirty kilos of cocaine wrapped neatly in foil and seemingly untouched. Under the mattress, they also found a small plastic binder with a zipper. Inside was about $2,000 in cash; an Alaska driver’s license that turned out to be fake, name of Harry Mendoza; a passport, also fake, for Albert Johnson; another fake passport for Charles Noland; a stolen Wisconsin driver’s license for Wilson Steglitz, expired; and a yellowed naval discharge summary for one Ancil F. Hubbard, dated May 1955. The binder consisted of Lonny’s worldly assets, discounting of course the cocaine, which had a street value of roughly $1.5 million.

It took the police several days to verify records and such, and by then Lonny was awake and feeling better. The police decided not to approach him about the coke until he was ready to be discharged. They kept an officer in street clothes outside his room. Since the only legitimate names in his arsenal appeared to be Ancil F. Hubbard and Wilson Steglitz, they entered them into the national crime computer system to see what, if anything, might turn up. The detective began chatting with Lonny, stopping by and bringing him milk shakes, but there was no mention of the drugs. After a few visits, the detective said they could find no records of a man named Lonny Clark. Birth place and date, Social Security number, state of residence? Anything, Lonny?

Lonny, who’d spent a lifetime running and ducking, grew suspicious and less talkative. The detective asked, “You ever know a man by the name of Harry Mendoza?”

“Maybe,” Lonny replied.

Oh really? From where and when? How? Under what circumstances? Nothing.

What about Albert Johnson, or Charles Noland? Lonny said maybe he’d met those men long ago but wasn’t sure. His memory was foggy, coming and going. He had, after all, a cracked skull and a bruised brain, and, well, he couldn’t remember much before the fight. Why all the questions?

By then Lonny knew they had been in his room, but he wasn’t sure if they had found the cocaine. There was an excellent chance the
man who owned it went to the flophouse not long after the fight and removed it himself. Lonny was not a dealer; he was just doing a friend a favor, one for which he was to be paid nicely. So, the question was whether the cops had found the cocaine. If so, Lonny was in some serious trouble. The less he said the better. As he had learned decades earlier, when the cops start asking serious questions, deny, deny, deny.

Jake was at his desk when Portia rang through and said, “It’s Albert Murray.” Jake grabbed the phone and said hello.

Murray ran a firm out of D.C. and specialized in locating missing persons, both nationally and internationally. So far, the estate of Seth Hubbard had paid the firm $42,000 to find a long-lost brother and had almost nothing to show for it. Its results had been thoroughly unimpressive, though its billing procedures rivaled those of any big-city law firm.

Murray, always skeptical, began with “We have a soft hit on Ancil Hubbard, but don’t get excited.” He relayed the facts as he knew them—an assumed name of Lonny, a bar brawl in Juneau, a cracked skull, lots of cocaine, and fake papers.

“He’s sixty-six years old and dealing drugs?” Jake asked.

“There’s no mandatory retirement age for drug dealers.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway,” Murray continued, “this guy is pretty crafty and won’t admit to anything.”

“How bad is he hurt?”

“He’s been in the hospital for a week. He’ll go from there to the jail, so his doctors are in no hurry. A cracked skull is a cracked skull.”

“If you say so.”

“The locals there are curious about the discharge paperwork from the Navy. It appears to be authentic and it doesn’t really fit. A fake driver’s license and a fake passport might take you places, but a discharge that’s thirty years old? Why would a con man like this need it? Of course it could be stolen.”

“So we’re back to the same old question,” Jake said. “How do we verify him if we find him?”

“You got it.”

There were no helpful photos of Ancil Hubbard. In a box in Seth’s closet they had found several dozen family photos, mainly of Ramona, Herschel, and Seth’s first wife. There were none from Seth’s childhood;
not a single photo of his parents or younger brother. Some school records tracked Ancil through the ninth grade, and his grainy, smiling face appeared in a group photo taken at the Palmyra junior high school in 1934. That photo had been enlarged, along with several of Seth as an adult. Since Ancil had not been seen in Ford County in fifty years, there was not a single person who could offer an opinion as to whether he favored his older brother as a child, or looked completely different.

“Do you have someone in Juneau?” Jake asked.

“No, not yet. I’ve talked to the police twice. I can have a man there within twenty-four hours.”

“What’s he gonna do when he gets there? If Lonny Clark is not talking to the locals, why would he talk to a complete stranger?”

“I doubt if he would.”

“Let me think about it.”

Jake hung up and thought about nothing else for an hour. It was the first lead in months, and such a weak one at that. The trial started in four days, and there was no way he could race off to Alaska and somehow verify the identity of a man who did not want to be identified; indeed, one who’d apparently spent the past thirty years changing identities.

He walked downstairs and found Lucien in the conference room studying index cards with the jurors’ names in bold letters. They were arranged neatly on the long table, alphabetized, all ninety-seven of them. They were rated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most attractive. Many of them had not yet been rated because nothing was known of the jurors.

Jake replayed the conversation with Albert Murray. Lucien’s first response was, “We’re not telling Judge Atlee, not yet anyway. I know what you’re thinking—if Ancil’s alive and we might know where he is, then let’s scream for a continuance and buy some more time. That’s a bad idea, Jake.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“There’s a good chance the old boy might be locked up for the rest of his life. He couldn’t show up for a trial if he wanted to.”

“No, Lucien, I’m more concerned with verification. There’s no way to do it unless we go talk to him. Keep in mind he has a chunk of money on the line here. He might be more cooperative than we think.”

Lucien took a deep breath and began pacing around the table. Portia was too inexperienced, and she was also a young black female, not
the type to pry secrets out of an old white man who was running from something, or everything. That left him, the only available member of the firm. He walked to the door and said, “I’ll go. Get me all the information you can.”

“Are you sure, Lucien?”

There was no response as he closed the front door behind himself. Jake’s only thought was, I hope he can stay sober.

Ozzie stopped by late Thursday afternoon for a quick visit. Harry Rex and Portia were in the war room poring over juror names and addresses. Jake was upstairs at his desk, on the phone, wasting time trying to track down a few more of Wade Lanier’s forty-five witnesses. So far the task had been frustrating.

“Wanna beer?” Harry Rex asked the sheriff. A fresh Bud Light sat nearby.

“I’m on duty and I don’t drink,” Ozzie replied. “I hope you’re not driving. I’d hate to see you busted for a DUI.”

“I’d just hire Jake to postpone it forever. You got some names?”

Ozzie handed him a sheet of paper and said, “A few. That Oscar Peltz guy we were talkin’ about yesterday, from down near Lake Village, well, he goes to the same church with the Roston family.” Portia picked up the card with “OSCAR PELTZ” written in a black marker across the top.

“I’d stay away from him,” Ozzie said.

Harry Rex looked at his notes and said, “We had him as a five anyway, not too attractive.”

“Mr. Raymond Griffis, lives down from Parker’s Country Store, south of here. What do you have on him?”

Portia picked up another card and said, “White male, age forty-one, works for a fencing contractor.” Harry Rex added, “Divorced, remarried, father died in a car wreck about five years ago.”

Ozzie said, “Stay away from him. I got a source says his brother was involved with the Klan three years ago during the Hailey trial. Don’t think the brother ever joined up, but he was a bit too close. They might be presentable on the surface, but could be a rough bunch.”

“I had him as a four,” Harry Rex said. “I thought you were going after all the black folks.”

“That’s a waste of time. All black folks get automatic tens in this trial.”

“How many are on the list, Portia?”

“Twenty-one, out of ninety-seven.”

“We’ll take ’em.”

“Where’s Lucien?” Ozzie asked.

“Jake ran him off. Any luck with Pernell Phillips? You thought Moss Junior might know him.”

“He’s Moss Junior’s wife’s third cousin, but they try to avoid family gatherings. Backwater Baptists. He wouldn’t get too many points from me.”

“Portia?”

“Let’s give him a three,” she said, with the authority of a veteran jury consultant.

“That’s the problem with this damn pool,” Harry Rex said. “Far too many threes and fours, not enough eights and nines. We’re gonna get clobbered.”

“Where’s Jake?” Ozzie asked.

“Upstairs, fighting the phone.”

Lucien drove to Memphis, flew to Chicago, and from there flew all night to Seattle. He drank on the flight but went to sleep before being excessive. He killed six hours in the Seattle airport, then caught a two-hour flight to Juneau on Alaska Air. He checked into a hotel downtown, called Jake, slept three hours, showered, even shaved, and dressed himself in an old black suit that hadn’t been worn in a decade. With the white shirt and paisley tie, he could pass himself off as a lawyer, which was exactly what he planned to do. With a battered briefcase in hand, he walked to the hospital. Twenty-two hours after leaving Clanton, he said hello to the detective and got the latest scoop over coffee.