The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (26 page)

“I could, but then there would be somebody else meddling with my exposures and cropping the shots. Photography is more than just taking a good shot, you know. You can do a lot to a picture in the developing process—for good or ill. I don’t like people messing with my work.”

“Of course,” said Rose, stirring her newly arrived mug of black coffee. “I get it. Your name goes on the photo. But even if you do the developing, you ought to have some free time this afternoon, so why don’t you get some general snapshots of the area? Find some run-down shacks with ramshackle porches.”

“I’d have to go a-ways to find some. The houses here in town looked pretty regular to me.”

“Take the car, then. There’s bound to be a few shacks somewhere around here. And see if you can get a portrait of a couple of scrawny-looking women in long dresses posing on a crumbling porch.”

“Long dresses? I haven’t seen anybody who looked like that.”

“Well, knock on doors. Offer them a quarter if they’ll pose. Give
them a dollar if you have to. The paper’s good for it, Shade. But I’ll bet you’ll find people willing to do it for free, just for the chance of getting their picture in the paper. Show a little initiative, Shade. I’ll bet some people have old clothes up in the attic, and maybe you could get them to dress up in grandma’s cast-off duds for the photograph.”

“What would that prove?”

“Well, it’s what people expect to see. I mean, here we are in the back of beyond and our readers expect to see local color in our reporting. If you just show them people in ordinary clothes getting out of cars and going into brick houses, where’s the fun in that? We might as well be in Hoboken.”

“We could do the same thing in Hoboken, you know. Get people to dress up in silly clothes from their grandmother’s trunk. Drive to the slum part of town and get a picture of the worst shack we can find.”

“Yeah, but that would be silly. Everybody knows Hoboken isn’t like that. I mean, sure they have poor people, like everywhere else. But Hoboken is a real place. This is fairy-tale country. America expects things to be backward up here. So we’re just showing people what they already know to be true.”

“Except that it isn’t true, Rose.”

“Well, the truth is just what everybody believes, Shade. There’s no point in trying to tell them anything else.”

“So you want just pictures of shacks and peculiar-looking people?”

“Well . . .” Rose screwed up her eyes, scanning an imaginary page layout. “Animal pictures always go over well with the readers. Sentimental bastards. Maybe you could get a shot of some dogs lying in the street or a huge pig on a porch. No Persian cats on satin pillows or thoroughbred horses, thank you very much. It would spoil the mood.”

“Horses? Spoil the mood?”

Rose nodded. “Yeah. See, this case has to
mean
something. Nobody cares if a backwoods schoolteacher killed her no-account father, but if our reporting leads us to an examination of some general problem in society, like . . . for instance . . . the old ways versus the new ways, or the oppression of the female sex, or whatever, then the story connects with the general public.”

Shade Baker downed the last of his coffee. “Okay,” he said. “You’re constructing the story. I’m just taking the pictures. But what do you think this case means?”

“Well, she’s pretty, so she’s innocent.” Rose made a face to let him know what she thought of that sentiment. “And my lady readers want to get a nice warm feeling of outrage knowing that this innocent girl is being persecuted. So—here’s where you come in, Shade—we have to show them a backward community of cold, ignorant, slovenly, mean people. We are spinning a Cinderella story for the readers. The worse we make these people look, the more the defendant will shine.”

Shade had picked up his camera and was fiddling with the flash attachment. “That seems hard lines on the folks around here who are just minding their own business, leading normal lives.”

“It won’t hurt them. It’s just a story. They don’t read our newspaper up here, anyhow. Two days after we print this story, people will be lining birdcages with it.”

“Whatever you say, lady,” said Shade, reaching in his camera bag for film. “I’d better get this thing loaded. Hey, Rose, how about I take a shot of you to start off the roll? You could send a print to that flyboy of yours.”

Rose clutched at the frizz of curls framing her face. Her gooseberry eyes were red-rimmed from sleep, and her unpowdered face was blotched and shiny. “The way I look right now? Don’t you dare! That’s more truth than anybody needs.”

He set the camera down beside his plate, and smiled at her gently. “You’re not a big fan of the truth, are you, Rose?”

“Never saw any percentage in it, Shade.”

NEARLY NINE O’CLOCK.
Bundled up in his overcoat and his white silk scarf, Henry Jernigan made his way to the courthouse alone, because he wanted to collect his thoughts before he was inundated with the noise and the mob of spectators who were sure to pack the courtroom. He had always been uneasy in crowds. When he was a small child in Philadelphia, his mother had taken him to a Christmastime performance of a children’s pantomime. Young Henry had sat quietly in his seat in his bow-collared sailor suit, while all around them other children squealed or shouted out of rage or boredom, or because they were being tormented by some other restless child. Spoiled little girls with fur-trimmed coats and shabby little boys in knickers and threadbare jackets ran up and down the aisles, screaming and chasing one another, heedless of the action on the stage. Ten minutes into the performance, Henry had leaned over and whispered to his mother that he wanted to leave. In later years, Mrs. Jernigan often told that story, marveling that her solemn offspring seemed to have been born middle-aged.

Henry started to take off his gloves, but thought better of it. He wondered if the courtroom would be adequately heated. Still, with that great crush of humanity packed inside, it might be all too warm for comfort, and heat intensifies odors. He shuddered.

Perhaps his aversion to crowds and noise explained his enchantment with Japan. The small, quiet people there were calm and orderly in public, and scrupulously polite in private—never pushy, never loud. He missed that tranquility sometimes, but he knew that he would never go back. For Henry, the memory of a single day in Tokyo had cancelled out all that had gone before.

So here he was, back from Lilliput, and living again among the yahoos in his native land. Sometimes colleagues who knew about Henry’s aversion to humanity in general would ask him how he could bear to be a journalist, forever forced to interact with uncongenial strangers. He seldom discussed the matter, but he knew the answer. His salvation lay in the fact that the people he met remained strangers. His tangential encounters with his interview subjects were fleeting and perfunctory. To strangers he might seem interested, sympathetic—a kindred spirit, even—but from even the most charming of his contacts, Henry was always glad to get away, and he never cared to look back. He had colleagues at the newspaper, whom he saw from time to time, but he was always out and about in search of more stories, more strangers, so that he never had to endure a day-to-day existence in proximity with his fellow journalists. Henry was always affable and courteous—because strife is a form of intimacy—and if people mistook his cordiality for friendship, he never disillusioned them, but he was always alone.

The first-floor hallway was becoming crowded now as spectators and court personnel arrived for the session. He watched them climbing the iron-railed staircase, chattering easily among themselves. Henry always wondered what people found to talk about with strangers, or, rather, why they would bother if they didn’t have to. He steeled himself to join the throng. He needed to get into the courtroom in time to get a good seat, preferably far away from whatever unwashed farmers and tobacco-chewing townspeople had troubled to attend the proceedings.

Henry picked up his briefcase and trudged up the stairs, taking his mind off the jostling of his fellow man by concentrating on the draft of his trial story, which he had already begun. Trials were so monotonously similar that he could almost craft a fill-in-the-blank, all-purpose narrative. Henry did not believe in identifying with his readers, though. He was not one of the masses, and he never let them forget it. He was the arbiter who would tell them what to think about a given issue, and he never pitched his prose to the level of his audience, because he felt
that his writing was something that they should try to live up to. Over the years Henry had developed little quirks in his style, almost a shorthand, to let readers know his feelings on certain matters, both moral and mundane. For instance, there were certain names of which he disapproved. Henry particularly disliked pretentious names when given to people of the lower classes, and whenever he came across such a person in the course of a story, he would always introduce him with a condescending phrase: “The pawnbroker, who rejoiced in the name of Menelaus H. Carson . . .” Thus would his readers be given to understand that he was gently mocking the fellow. Henry liked to think that the more perceptive among them would take this social instruction to heart, and refrain from saddling their children with fanciful appellations. He expected to find a great many unsuitable names cropping up in this case, because it was common knowledge that hillbillies bestowed peculiar names on their children, although in point of fact he had yet to find any examples worth noting. The Christian names in this case were slightly unusual, but not entertainingly so: Harley and Erma Morton, the attorneys were called Kenneth and Frank . . . no joy there. Still, it was early days yet. He might yet discover a Chickamauga Johnson or a Second Thessalonians Brown, and if he did, he would contrive to leave his readers with the impression that such outlandish names were standard among the hill folk.

He had not bothered to ask for directions to the courtroom. One could scarcely avoid arriving at its doorway, pulled along by the undertow of the surging mass of humanity coursing through the marble halls of the Wise Courthouse. Where was Rose? More important, where was Shade, who was needed to take photographs of the principals in the case? He supposed they were somewhere nearby, obscured from view by the crowd. Perhaps he should try to save a seat for Rose.

The thought of her reminded him that sometime when court was not in session, he and Rose needed to go out into the community and interview some of the townspeople about the case. Perhaps they could
even pose as a couple, and, if they could get away with it, they wouldn’t volunteer the fact that they were reporters. People always talked more freely when they thought they were having a discussion in private.

Henry didn’t mind whether the locals they interviewed believed in Erma Morton’s innocence or not. Provided he got their names on the record, they could say whatever they liked. But after they had said their piece, Henry Jernigan would write it up in his article, and he could direct how their opinions would be judged by the readers.

If he agreed with the speaker, he would write what they said in standard English, so that the sense of the statement was evident at a glance, but he rendered any dissenting voice with their regional accent indicated by phonetic spelling: “
Ah thank that l’il gal kilt her daddy
. . . ” Thus he signaled to the court of public opinion that this witness was flawed.

In addition to his phonetic weaponry, Henry stacked the deck by framing his respondent’s remarks in a few lines of carefully nuanced description, a thumbnail sketch to assist the newspaper’s readership in judging the worth of the opinion. An older man who expressed an acceptable view of an issue might be depicted as distinguished, experienced, silver-haired—patrician, even. But with a dissenting opinion, that same man would be dismissed as doddering, senile, curmudgeonly. It didn’t matter what people said, as long as you could control the reader’s impression of them, and Henry’s readers generally believed what he guided them toward believing. Words were Henry’s weapon of choice: concealed weapons, because people seldom realized that they were being manipulated by a master. But he told the truth as he saw it. He considered his little tricks just appliances enabling his readers to more easily discern that truth.

ON THE FIRST-FLOOR
landing of the courthouse stairwell, Shade Baker positioned himself so that he would have a clear shot of the
people coming up the stairs. He had slung his overcoat over the banister, and now he leaned back against the wall to steady himself and his camera so that—providing no one jostled his arm—the photos would not turn out blurred. From earlier published photos he had seen, Shade knew what Erma Morton looked like, so getting a photo of her should be easy, providing the bailiffs escorting her did not hinder him. If they gave him trouble today, he’d find them later and slip them a dollar or two to cooperate. If they objected to outright bribery—and in his experience, people seldom did—he could always soften them up by photographing their children or their girlfriends. There was always a way.

The other principals in the case—the attorneys and witnesses—presented more of a problem, but Shade’s solution was to photograph everyone who looked either distinguished or upset. Rose could look at the prints, and sort them out later.

There was a sudden hush in the first-floor hallway below, and the crowd suddenly parted to clear the way for two uniformed sheriff’s deputies who were escorting a slight young woman in clunky high heels and a dark print dress. Erma Morton.

The prisoner looked calm, but pale, and she wore little makeup, but her bobbed hair had been freshly curled for her court appearance. The dress, which looked new, hung on her angular body and stopped just short of her calves. He wondered if the outfit had been chosen by her attorney, because her appearance seemed calculated to present her as a modest and respectable young woman.

Shade steadied himself against the wall, tugged at the camera’s flash attachment, and put his eye to the viewfinder. She seemed to be looking straight at him with an expressionless stare. She walked slowly between the guards, her head held high, taking no notice of the people lining the hallway, gawking at her. One or two of them—friends, perhaps, but he doubted it—called out her name or waved as she went by, but she did not look around. Shade noticed that the prisoner was not
handcuffed, nor did her deputy escorts grip her by the arms. One of the deputies was a tall, solidly built man, and the other was short and swarthy.
Little Orphan Annie with the Asp and Punjab,
thought Shade.