The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (27 page)

He waited until she was halfway up the first flight of steps, perhaps ten feet below him, and then he leaned forward and snapped the shutter. The brightness of the popping flashbulb startled her out of her reverie. Her eyes widened and she raised her arm as if to ward off a blow. Then she drew back and turned, as if to run back down the stairs, but the wiry little deputy gripped her arm and leaned over to murmur a few words in her ear. She listened for a moment, and then gave a quick nod, and they continued to mount the steps. When they reached the landing, the heavyset officer took care to place himself between the prisoner and the camera, fixing Shade with a belligerent glare, daring him to try that again. Shade lowered the camera and nodded cordially to the officer. He was used to official wrath, and he was philosophical about it—but not apologetic. They were both just doing their jobs.

He hoped that his initial shot had been a good one. He would take another one as Erma Morton ascended the second flight, but that angle was not as good, and he would have to settle for a shot of her back or a profile shot. As a precaution, he would take that second photo, but he knew it was a waste of time. If the first one wasn’t good, he’d have to try again, perhaps at the end of the day as she was being led back to her cell. But he needed to send something to the newspaper much earlier than that, whether the shot was any good or not. He glanced at his watch. He still had time to get shots of the other principals in the case, if they turned up soon. Then he’d spend an hour in his makeshift lavatory darkroom, developing the roll, and sending it off in a parcel to New York.

Now where were the lawyers? Shade scanned the first-floor hallway, looking for men in suits, and hoping that both the jurors and the ordinary spectators lacked the means and the inclination to
dress formally for the occasion. And where was Rose? She was supposed to know what these people looked like, or at any rate she could find out, while he held his position on the staircase landing. Still making herself presentable, he supposed. Well, until she showed up, he’d just take shots at random and hope the people he needed would be there somewhere.

CARL JENNINGS STUMBLED
into the courtroom, dodging the blue spots before his eyes. That fool with the camera on the stairwell had nearly blinded him, shooting off the flash when he was right on the top step. He had nearly fallen, but a wiry older man in faded work clothes had grasped his arm and steered him up the second flight of stairs. Carl tried to show his identification to the bailiff at the door of the courtroom, but the man didn’t care who he was or why he was there. “It’s a free show, son,” he said, waving Carl inside with the rest of the jostling spectators.

He should have arrived ahead of the crowd in order to ensure that he got a good seat, but he had spent half an hour putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s dispatch, telling about his meetings with the two principal attorneys, with guarded comments from the Knoxville club women about Erma Morton. Then he’d had to get to the telegraph office to wire the story to his editor, which took more time and money than he had counted on. He didn’t suppose he could rely on ordinary mail, though. A letter mailed from Wise ought to reach Johnson City in a day, but there’d be hell to pay if it didn’t. Finally he had finished his errands, and he’d turned up at the courthouse with fifteen minutes to spare, which turned out to be barely enough time.

It was a big courtroom for a rural mountain county. Carl wasn’t much for noticing furnishings, but he took a moment to look around him and take stock of the room, so that he could toss a few descriptive passages in his next news story. For an ordinary day of court,
there would have been plenty of seating—at least a dozen rows of wooden pews facing a raised dais that held the judge’s bench, and above them a balcony for the overflow of spectators. Today the audience was seated elbow to elbow, and he would be lucky to find a place. The ceiling was high, the walls were wood-paneled, and here and there an oil portrait of some sedate former jurist looked down on the proceedings.

The jurors, already seated in their places, looked a little uneasy at being so prominently featured in a public setting, but their attire reflected the seriousness of the occasion. They all wore suits and ties, and one or two had on waistcoats as well. They were all male—Virginia law prohibited women from serving as jurors—and most of them looked comfortably middle-class and middle-aged. They seemed to be the embodiment of the phrase “town fathers,” solid and respectable. They probably represented the community as it saw itself. He wondered if they would compare Erma Morton to their own daughters, and if so would they feel protective of her or disapproving of her independent ways.

Carl looked around to see if there was a place reserved for the reporters to sit. He did spot Henry Jernigan a few rows from the front rail, as regally calm as a patron at the opera. Beside him was an empty seat, but Carl decided to save himself the embarrassment of another encounter with the great man by assuming that the place was being saved for one of the other national reporters. He ducked into the nearest bench farther back, and opened his notebook.

The local man who had helped him up the stairs slid in beside him, and tapped the notebook with a bony forefinger. “Taking notes, huh? You studying to be a lawyer?”

Carl looked into the alert blue eyes in a weatherbeaten face. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to admit that he was a journalist. He said carefully, “It’s not a bad idea, sir. But I don’t think I’d have the patience for it.”

“No, it’s doctors that have patients. I believe it’s clients that lawyers take on.” The fellow said this with a perfectly straight face, but his eyes sparkled, watching for Carl’s reaction.

Carl relaxed. This was mountain humor. Pretend to misunderstand something, and look honestly bewildered, while you wait to see if the stranger you’re talking to falls for the ruse. The trick is to let on that you know the game without acknowledging that it is a jest. Carl nodded solemnly, and studied the man next to him while he was thinking up a suitable reply. The fellow had a chiseled, seamed face, and he was probably in his early forties, although he looked older. Judging from his well-worn work clothes, he was probably a farmer or a coal miner, but, while he might not be able to quote Tennyson, he was certainly clever enough. Carl wondered if, by this fellow’s standards, he would be able to keep pace.

He said, “I don’t believe either one of those professions would suit me, sir. Doctors have to contend with sick people, and lawyers can never leave well enough alone.”

“I’m with you there,” said his seatmate. A look passed between them. Asked and answered. With one deadpan witticism they had acknowledged their kinship as men of the hills, and now that rapport had been established, they could talk without constraint. Although the matter would not be discussed, Carl decided that the fellow had guessed that he was a reporter, but at least they had established that Carl was one of the local variety, and that he might be all right, or at least the lesser of two evils.

Carl pointed at Erma Morton, huddled beside her lawyer at the defense table, staring up at the empty judge’s bench. “Do you know her?”

The wiry little man hesitated. “Just to speak to,” he said at last. It wouldn’t do to brag or exaggerate your own importance. “I worked the mine with her daddy over the mountain. Liked him well enough. They claim he was a mean drunk, but none of us ever saw it. I saw a
man who ate a cold potato for lunch because his womenfolk wouldn’t fix him nothing. The man they’re talking about in the newspapers is not the Pollock Morton that I ever knowed.”

Carl reddened, wondering if he was going to be held responsible for the sins of his profession. “Well, sir, sometimes it’s hard for outsiders to get at the truth.”

“Hard enough for insiders, too, I reckon.”

“Maybe trials ought to be like weddings,” said Carl. “Ushers could seat you on one side of the aisle or the other, depending on whether you’re a friend of the defendant or the deceased.”

“Wouldn’t help much in this case,” said his seatmate. “Same family. Well, it might help them that worked with Pollock Morton on the one side, and some of the kinfolks on the other. There was the dead man’s family and then there were his in-laws. Might get you a dogfight going there.”

“Which side do you reckon the daughter was on?” As soon as Carl said it, he realized what a foolish question it was. “She was her mama’s daughter, wasn’t she?”

“I’d say so. People said that the mother married beneath her. The daughter goes off to college and tries to better herself.”

“But she finished college,” said Carl, thinking it out as he spoke. “Her father wasn’t standing in her way. Except for making a fuss about when she came home at night. Nobody would kill their father over that.”

The wiry little man nodded. “Maybe the big secret you’re a-looking for wasn’t hers.”

Just then the judge entered the courtroom, and they stood along with the others, putting the conversation to an end. Carl was glad to be sitting next to someone who knew the family. He would keep an eye on the fellow during the morning testimony, so that he could gauge what the truth was—or what the community thought the truth was, anyhow. Somehow or other, he wanted to find out what
really happened on the July night in Pound. That was why he became a reporter: to find out the truth and to share it with the public.

NEAR THE FRONT OF THE COURTROOM,
Rose shrugged off her coat and settled into the seat beside Henry Jernigan, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the defendants’ table. She had met Shade Baker as he was hurrying down the courthouse steps to go back and develop his photos, and she’d promised to look in on him during the lunch recess to identify the attorneys for him.

Erma Morton was sitting next to her attorney, with her back to the crowded spectator section of the court. The stiffness of her posture suggested that she was well aware that she was being stared at by a hundred ghoulish strangers. Occasionally she would lean over to whisper something to the lawyer, and Rose could catch a glimpse of the girl’s profile framed by a tangle of newly-permed curls. She studied the sculpted nose and the firm jaw.

Was this the face of a murderer?

It didn’t matter, of course. Nobody would ever really know the truth, and by now Rose was resigned to the fact that the truth was whatever she could plausibly persuade the newspaper’s readers to believe. Sometimes, though, she liked to examine her subjects, trying to determine what she really thought about them. It wasn’t a reliable test, of course. Shakespeare had been right about that: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” She had seen confessed killers with the faces of choirboys.

A year ago, just after Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in a shoot-out with police in the backwoods of Ohio, the newspaper had sent Rose to his funeral in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. The family hadn’t wanted much to do with the prying journalists, but Rose had managed to interview the dead man’s lover, Beulah Baird, a dark and slender beauty, who had been at his side for much of his crime spree.

“He had a good heart,” the girl had sobbed. “You could tell. He had the face of an angel.”

In the empty church, Rose had patted her hand, proffered lace hankies, and agreed with the grief-stricken girl, so that she would divulge more details about their life together on the lam:
Grieving Gun Moll Claims Killer Had a Good Heart.
But, although she didn’t say so, Rose knew that Charles Arthur Floyd also carried a watch fob, scored with ten notches, one for each person he had killed in his thirty years of life.

He had been a pitiless executioner of his fellow man, killing them incidentally when they blocked his path to a robbery or tried to prevent his escape, but because the lines and planes of his face came together in a pleasing shape, ordinary people built him a soul. Newspapers filled pages with the minutiae of his life and death, and romantic fools wrote doggerel verse to mark his passing.

Rose hoped that she would never find herself in the dock. As a plain woman she was wary of others, ducking before the blow, and the resulting shyness came off as sullen hostility. On the evidence of her face, a jury would presume her guilty until proven innocent.

She studied Erma Morton’s straight graceful nose and her well-sculpted chin. A determined face. Maybe she was shy from inexperience and lack of social skills, but she would have no doubts about her own worth. Here was a reasonably pretty girl who expected her youth and attractiveness to open doors for her, and now she was a celebrity. No doubt she would have preferred to achieve that fame as a model or an actress, or as the wife of an important man, but since none of those things was ever likely to happen to a backwoods schoolteacher, maybe this notoriety was better than nothing.

Rose thought that that much was true, but Erma Morton would not have killed for that reason. Nobody knows what will happen once the wheels of justice start to move. It would be madness to risk
execution for such a frivolous reason. Rose thought that the most a murderer could hope for would be to get away with it altogether. Other than that, you’d just have to do the best you could not to be swept away by the legal process.

“So what do you think?” murmured Henry into her ear.

She whispered back, “What do I think, or what am I going to say in my articles?”

“Not the same?”

“No. In the newspaper, I have to sound positive. Trumpet her innocence with absolute certainty.” She shrugged. “In real life, I’m never sure about anything.”

Henry nodded. “I am reserving judgment, myself. I don’t see any point in describing the courtroom itself, do you?”

“You mean because there is no sawdust on the floor or dogs lying under the lawyers’ tables? I guess not. This looks like every other courtroom I’ve ever seen. Too bad the judge isn’t wearing overalls and a ten-gallon hat.”

“That would make a nice touch.” Henry smiled at the idea. “One could always slip it in, of course. You know:
The judge, who looked as if he ought to be wearing overalls and a ten-gallon hat
. . . That way the image will be planted in people’s minds without your having told any falsehoods.”