The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (4 page)

“Oh, I’m going up home to Wise. Been to see my sister and her family up in the big city.” The little man looked at him appraisingly, taking note of Jernigan’s well-cut suit and the gold clasp on his silk rep tie. A slow grin spread across his face. “Coal company business, then? Like as not you’ll be headed up to Wise County, I reckon, to visit the mines.”

Jernigan inclined his head. “My business does take me to Wise County. Would you be a resident there yourself?”

“Born and bred,” said the man happily. “I’m not in the mines, though, no sir. My business is timber. I hope you’ve made arrangements for accommodations in the town already. Lodging should be at a premium this week.”

“In a village in the back of beyond?” Henry’s murmur conveyed polite skepticism. “Why should it be crowded, especially at this bleak time of year?”

The man blinked at him, astounded by this display of ignorance. “Not crowded?” he spluttered. “Did you not hear about the murder trial that’s about to start up there?”

Henry Jernigan was careful to set his face into a mask of polite boredom. “Why, no,” he said with as much indifference as he could muster. “A murder trial, you say? I don’t suppose it amounts to much, but if you’d care to pass the time, you may tell me something about it.”

Had he identified himself as a reporter and attempted to question this garrulous stranger about the local scandal, no doubt the man would have clammed up and refused to utter a single word on the subject, but by implying that this singular news was of no consequence to him, he had ensured that he would be regaled with every salacious detail the fellow could muster. Odd creatures, human beings, but entirely predictable, once you had learned the patterns of behavior. He contrived to look suitably indifferent to the tale.

“A man got murdered up there in Wise County back in the summer,” his seatmate declared.

Jernigan stifled a yawn. “Nobody important, I daresay?”

“Well, sir, it happened in Pound, which is barely big enough to be called a village, so everybody there is somebody, if you catch my drift. Anyhow, it wasn’t no ordinary killing, no sir.”

“Gunned down by some feuding neighbor, I suppose? Or felled in a drunken brawl?” said Jernigan. He opened his book again.

“Now that’s just where you’re wrong,” said his seatmate, eager to be the bearer of scandalous news. “You’ll scarcely credit it, but they went and arrested the fellow’s wife and daughter for the crime. They let Mrs. Morton go right away, decided not to prosecute her, but they charged the daughter with first-degree murder. Yes, sir, they did. And her the prettiest little thing you ever did see, and ladylike, to boot. Been to college and then came back and taught school up home. Last girl in the world you’d expect to do a thing like that. Last . . . girl . . . in . . . the . . . world.”

“Pretty, you say,” said Jernigan, raising his eyebrows with polite disbelief. “And by that I suppose you mean ‘passably attractive for a village maiden.’ Fine blond hair, good teeth, but perhaps she has the face of an amiable sheep, and the overstuffed body of a dray horse? Ankles like birch trees?”

“Now that’s just where you’re wrong, sir,” said the man, who felt that being the authority on this local sensation made him temporarily equal to this superior-looking gentleman. “Pretty, I said, sir, and pretty I meant. Miss Erma Morton is a slip of a girl, dark-haired with big brown eyes, more doe than dray horse. Just twenty-one years old. She has a quiet, ladylike way about her, too. She could be in the pictures, I’m telling you for a fact.”

So the accused was a beauty. Henry Jernigan relaxed a little, relieved to have the early descriptions of the accused confirmed in
person by a local source. Stories about pretty girls in trouble practically wrote themselves.

“Indeed?” he said. “But why would a lovely and learned young woman such as you describe resort to the killing of her own father? The poor creature was deranged, I suppose.” He coughed discreetly and lowered his voice. “I have heard it said that venereal disease can—”

The little man was shocked. “Why, no such thing! There was no trouble of that kind, I assure you, and I’ve known her all her life.”

“Friend of the family, are you?” said Jernigan, scenting blood.

“No, I wouldn’t go as far as that, but we knew her to speak to, same as anybody would. There are no strangers thereabouts. And she was always a good girl. Now I don’t say the young lady didn’t have a mind of her own, going off and getting educated like she did, and maybe her father was apt to forget that she was a grown girl paying rent to live there. They say he wanted to lay down the law like he did when she was a little girl. Curfews and such.”

Henry Jernigan was all polite astonishment. “The refined young lady killed her father over a curfew?”

The authority shook his head sadly, obviously sorry that he had ever attempted to plow the stony field of this discussion. “Well, we don’t know that she killed him at all,” he said. “There were no witnesses. As I said, the case is just about to go to trial. It will all turn out to be some tragic misunderstanding, like as not.”

Jernigan nodded. With his luck, that would indeed turn out to be the case. Still, with backwoods justice, you never could tell what the outcome would be, guilt notwithstanding. In 1916 they had hanged a circus elephant at the railroad yards in Erwin, Tennessee, less than a hundred miles from his current destination. He had heard of the case when he interviewed a Tennessee congressman, and ever since then he had dined out on that story, dramatizing the incident for his listeners over cigars and brandy, and always ending with the solemn admonition:
“So, gentlemen, if you are ever charged with murder in the great state of Tennessee, do not plead
elephant
. It is not a valid defense.”

He wrenched his attention away from the amusing elephant story and back to the matter at hand. “Still, you say the young woman was arrested, so there must be some reason to assume her guilt. I don’t recall your saying exactly how the old man met his end.” He already knew the answer to that, but he needed the quote. Besides, a bit of local gossip could put an unexpected twist on a story. You never knew what sort of embellishment you could get from a local talemonger.

“Head wound,” said the local expert. “They found a big bruise on his temple, and the coroner reckoned that it might have been made with Mr. Morton’s own shoe.”

Henry considered this piece of information. Why couldn’t the murder weapon have been a lady’s slipper? Surely a high-heeled shoe would have more dramatic effect in a news story. Aloud, he said, “Well, that seems to narrow things down quite a bit, my friend. The man’s own shoe. That’s hardly the weapon of choice for a burglar. Was anyone else on the premises besides the pretty little schoolmarm?”

“A younger sister, nothing but a kid. Now there was the mother, of course. They say that there was no love lost between them, but after thirty years and six young’uns, I can’t see her smiting her man in a fight. Folks around liked him well enough, and even if she didn’t, she came from a family with lawyers and sheriffs among ’em. Besides, she had stood him all those years with Christian fortitude.”

Jernigan smiled. “Ah, but the worm sometimes turns, my friend,” he murmured.
And look out when they did.

In Jernigan’s experience the modern Medea generally betook herself to the offices of whatever lawyer was currently fashionable with her social set. In Philadelphia, he had known many of those society lawyers since childhood, and this acquaintance had served him well. Had he charted his life’s course more wisely, he might have been one of them.

Henry Jernigan had been destined for better things than a job as a newspaper hack. His father had been a prominent banker in Philadelphia, with family money compounded by a judicious marriage to the plain but well-pedigreed woman who in 1895 became Henry’s mother. He had grown up in the family’s stone fortress on Greene Street in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, with equally wealthy neighbors who were shipbuilders, physicians, and businessmen.

Henry’s parents, intending for their only child to take his rightful place in society, had sent him to the Germantown Academy with the scions of the city’s other prominent families, where he showed early promise. He had been an editor of the
Academy Monthly
. He joined the debate team and the swim team, and he won a prize with his senior essay. He played guitar with the Mandolin Club and sang baritone in the Glee Club. When he graduated from the Academy in 1913, Henry Jernigan seemed well on his way to living up to his parents’ aspirations.

They sent him on to Haverford College to complete his gentleman’s education, but he hadn’t overtaxed himself there, because, after all, his position in life was assured. In hindsight, he realized that this had been a mistake. The world was changing. He should have applied himself to the study of law, or better still medicine. Doctors never lacked for work—how true that became a few years later.

Bring out your dead.

But at the time he had thought it would be easy enough to follow in his father’s footsteps and take a position at the bank. He dabbled in
English literature, and wrote for the college literary magazine; he took electives in French, Greek, and art, and he managed to graduate with a less than stellar record, but the time had been pleasant, and he had acquired a veneer of sophistication.

If you needed a few lines from
The Iliad
rendered from their original Greek, Henry could rise to the occasion. In a gentlemanly battle of bon mots, Henry would not be found wanting. At the drop of a cocktail shaker, he could discuss art or music or fashion—not with any originality, of course, but he could keep up his end of a conversation.

This all-too-liberal arts education and a singular lack of ambition rendered him insufficiently prepared for an executive position at his father’s bank, and Henry felt he had a soul above a mere clerkship, which prevented him from starting out in the lower echelons of banking. His father suggested that he might put his degree to good use by doing a bit of teaching, but after a year of toiling among the adverbs at the South Philadelphia High School for Boys, he went abroad—not entirely by choice.

It had seemed like such a trifle at the time. An old friend from the academy was launching an avant garde publication: he called it Philadelphia’s answer to Max Eastman’s magazine,
The Masses.
There would be a fashionable mix of the arts and socialist philosophy, opposing the European War and advocating higher wages and more rights for workers. Would Henry contribute a piece to the new venture?

Henry would and did. Flattered to be considered one of the new aesthetes, he dashed off an ironic little essay criticizing, as he put it, America’s intrusion into Europe’s family squabble. He even illustrated the article with a pen and ink drawing, showing the body of a soldier, sprawled a few feet from an open trench in No Man’s Land. The caption read: “It’s Over, Over There.”

For weeks after its publication, Henry Jernigan had dined out on his new fame as a man of letters. The idyll had ended with a subpoena. The magazine had run afoul of the newly passed Espionage Act, and those
contributors who had blatantly opposed the war were charged with treason. While Henry considered his options, the news broke that Victor Berger, the editor of the
Milwaukee Leader
, had been convicted under the Act, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

The Jernigans, consulting with the family lawyer, decided not to risk a trial. Henry would go abroad until the crisis had passed.

It was September 1918. The British had crossed the Hindenburg line, and the war in Europe was drawing to a close. It was safe once more to travel—not, perhaps, to the countries of Europe, but at least the seas would no longer be dangerous. Anything was safer than staying in Philadelphia and standing trial.

Henry had not wanted to do the Grand Tour, anyhow. In the waning days of the Great War, such an effete journey would have seemed frivolous, even callous. Besides, a war-ravaged country was hardly the place for an idyllic sojourn.

So Henry set out for the Orient. There was a current passion for all things Japanese, and he longed to experience the wonders of that culture firsthand. Perhaps he would study woodblock printing, or master the language and translate verse.

The ship was just navigating the Panama Canal when the telegram arrived, saying that his father was ill. By the time they reached the International Date Line, people in Philadelphia were dying by the hundreds, but Henry Jernigan sailed on.

IN HIS SEAT
by the window, Shade Baker, with his stick-insect legs stuck under the seat in front of him, had balanced a notebook on the suitcase in his lap, so that he could try to get some work done. Within a day of reaching his destination, he’d have to telegraph stories and captions back to the newspaper, so he thought he’d steal a march on his fellow journalists by getting some of the preliminary material out of the way now. There was no sense in wasting all these hours of
enforced idleness on the train journey. Neither the scenery nor his fellow passengers interested him in the least. He occupied himself by describing the town where the crime had taken place.