The Paperboy (13 page)

I saw myself in competition with Hillary Van Wetter. I was taller and in better shape and had better teeth, and I wanted her as much even if I had yet to ejaculate in my pants just sitting with her in a room.

The Chrysler was always in the driveway when I got home. My father was preoccupied with things at his newspaper, and he often walked away from the car with the keys in the ignition and the door wide open. To someone approaching the house, it would resemble an emergency.

It was dark this particular night, and the small dome light inside had attracted insects. I felt them as I reached in to take the keys out of his ignition, like cold ashes, all over my arm. Dinner was over and my father was sitting in his chair, a glass of wine on the table next to him, going through his papers.

“I believe she left you a plate in the oven,” he said, not remembering Anita Chester’s name.

He followed me into the kitchen, bringing his wine, to watch me eat.

“How is Mr. Van Wetter?” he asked, making a small joke.

I said I didn’t know, and that was the truth.

“Still innocent?”

I shook my head, and that was the truth too. And then my father sat still and waited, as he often did these days, and in the waiting I found myself talking. It was a reporter’s trick, I’d seen Ward use it on the attorney Weldon Pine.

I told him what Ward and Yardley Acheman had done that day, what they had said in their office. Much of it was about Mr. Pine and his defense of Hillary Van Wetter. Weldon
Pine and my father were casual friends, sharing a prominence in Moat County society.

“The man’s reputed to be the best lawyer in the state,” he said, and I shook my head, as if I didn’t understand any of it either. But I had seen enough of what was inside the boxes holding the trial transcript now to know that he hadn’t done much to help Hillary Van Wetter.

He made no issue of the knife and bloody clothes that the sheriff’s department had taken from the kitchen and then lost on the way back to Lately. He hadn’t found Hillary’s uncle; there was no sign that he’d even tried.

“It might be,” my father said, “that Weldon Pine knew what he was doing.”

“It doesn’t look like he did anything,” I said.

And then, in the long moments that followed, I realized that my father hadn’t done anything either. His paper had covered the trial without reference to Sheriff Call’s record of violence against the Negroes of Moat County. While the sheriff had been alive, my father had fought him as hard as he could, but on his death even the
Tribune
’s routine plea for a convicted killer’s life was never issued.

“Weldon Pine is a respected and beloved man,” he said. “You do not earn that overnight.”

I didn’t argue with him, understanding that he was talking of himself as much as Mr. Pine. I ate my dinner, he sipped at his wine. An unopened copy of the
Daytona Beach News-Journal
lay on the table next to his arm, but he had forgotten it was there. He was joyless.

“Do you see much of this Yardley Acheman?” he said.

I nodded, my mouth was full of food.

“He’s older, right?”

“He’s older than Ward,” I said.

“What, thirty-five, forty?”

“Maybe thirty-five, I don’t know.”

My father weighed that, and then finished what was in his glass. “What was he doing all that time before they put them together?” he said. “He’s been at the
Times
a long while.”

“I don’t know what he does now,” I said. “Ward’s doing all the work. I think Yardley’s supposed to be the writer.”

My father nodded. It made sense to him that one of them would do the work and the other one would be the writer. He stood up and went to the refrigerator and poured another glass of wine. “You wonder who’s supposed to be in charge,” he said after he sat back down.

He said it as if one of them had gotten the other one lost.

M
R. PINE DECIDED
he did not want us visiting his client again. “I believe it’s time to leave the man have his privacy,” he said, pained but kind.

“Mr. Pine,” my brother began, “Mr. Acheman and I have a considerable amount of work left to do, work that is in Mr. Van Wetter’s interests.”

The old man sighed. “I’ve done the work,” he said. “The appeals been filed and rejected.” He paused, as if the weight were too heavy. “With all due respect, gentlemen, there isn’t a thing your newspaper can do for the man that I couldn’t. His options been exhausted, and it don’t do him any favors to raise his expectations.”

“You haven’t seen him one time since the trial,” Charlotte Bless said. It was the first time she had spoken to Mr. Pine without being spoken to first, and the insult crossed his face as if he’d been slapped.

“The fiancée,” he said.

She stood up, and moved to his desk. “What I am,” she
said, “is the only damn one in this room that cares what happens to Hillary Van Wetter.”

He looked at her, taking in her clothes and demeanor, dismissing them and her all in one glance. “Vulgarities do not flatter a woman,” he said.

“There are areas left to be explored,” my brother said.

Weldon Pine turned the same look on him. “Is that your legal opinion, Mr. James?” he said.

“I’ve got a legal opinion for you,” Yardley Acheman said quietly. “Hillary Van Wetter was entitled to a competent defense.”

“You don’t know one thing about this person,” the old man said. “You been in this world five minutes.”

And then he stood up and walked to the door and held it open. Slowly, my brother began to nod.

“All right,” he said. “If we could just ask you a few questions …”

“What for?”

“For the newspaper.”

The old man shook his head. “No comment. That’s my answer, no comment.” He pointed at the open door.

“You already commented,” Yardley Acheman said.

“Everything you’ve said to us since we met is a comment.”

“Not for the newspaper,” he said. “I am putting you on notice that anything I said was only informational, an effort to be helpful. Not for attribution of any sort. You are on notice.…”

He seemed to get weaker the longer he went on.

“In fairness,” my brother said, ignoring what he’d said, “I’d like to give you the chance to answer the questions.” He had them written down inside his notebook. The old man stood at the open door, torn between wanting us out
and wanting to hear the questions. In the quiet, my brother began to read.

“Why was the prosecutor in Mr. Van Wetter’s case never called to account for the missing weapon?” he said.

The old man stood still, waiting.

“Why was the prosecutor in Mr. Van Wetter’s case never called to account for the missing bloodstained clothing?”

Weldon Pine stared across the room as if across a great distance. As if he were watching a dark sky rolling in.

“What efforts,” my brother said, “did you make to locate Mr. Van Wetter’s uncle, Tyree Van Wetter?”

The old man looked away from my brother then, taking in each of us around the room.

“What efforts did you make to ascertain Mr. Van Wetter’s whereabouts on the night Sheriff Call was murdered?”

The old man watched the storm coming in, and then, helpless against it, he suddenly slipped through the door, as if stepping inside his house to wait it out. My brother continued to ask his last questions in Weldon Pine’s absence.

“What efforts did you make,” he said, “to secure a change of venue for Mr. Van Wetter’s trial?”

Later in the afternoon, Mr. Pine reconsidered. His secretary called my brother and said that he was welcome to see Hillary Van Wetter again.

Ward went alone into the prison, and was back in the car in ten minutes, carrying Hillary’s signed request for a change of attorneys in his shirt pocket. Without Charlotte in the room, Ward said, Hillary was a more reasonable man.

E
ARLY THE FOLLOWING WEEK
, an Orlando attorney on retainer to the
Miami Times
filed a form with the court and became
Hillary Van Wetter’s attorney of record, replacing Weldon Pine.

Weldon Pine was informed of this action by mail, and appeared in the doorway of my brother’s office on a Friday afternoon, his shirtsleeves buttoned at the wrist, pale and damp with sweat, holding the notification in his hand.

Yardley Acheman looked up from the magazine in his lap, stared at the old attorney a minute, then went back to his reading. Weldon Pine walked in, uninvited, and had a look around. He seemed huge. My brother replaced some papers he’d taken from two boxes behind him and stood up. We were raised to be respectful of our elders.

“Mr. Pine,” he said.

The old man didn’t answer at first; he was still taking in the room and the furniture and the three people in it. Charlotte was not there that afternoon; she had gone to Jacksonville to buy a dress.

“I have practiced the law more years than you been alive,” Weldon Pine said slowly, speaking to us all. “I have been a good friend to the court.”

He came in another step or two, the fan on the floor blew the papers he was holding back over his hand.

“I defended every type of criminal personality there is, and until yesterday afternoon …” He paused, taking a moment to reflect on the moment the papers had arrived. “ … no client, no court, no judge has ever asked me to remove myself from a case.” His voice had begun to shake.

“That is an amazing statistic,” Yardley Acheman said, still looking at his magazine.

The old man considered him again, considered us all. The only noise in the room was the fan.

“And now,” he said, “people that don’t know who I am are saying I don’t know how to do my job.” My brother
stood by the corner of his desk and waited for the rest, but the old man seemed out of things to say.

“Nobody has to know,” Yardley Acheman said, closing the magazine and sitting back in his chair. “It’s only as public as you make it.”

The old man waited. The fan moved across the room, ruffling the papers in his hand again.

“In forty-six years, this never happened once.…”

Yardley Acheman shrugged. “People change attorneys all the time.”

“They don’t change Weldon Pine,” the old man said.

Yardley said, “Who’s going to know?” He looked quickly at my brother, and then said, “We don’t need a lot of people poking around into Hillary Van Wetter’s business right now, so unless you want to raise hell about it in court …”

“I want to keep hold of what’s mine,” the old man snapped. “I worked for it all my life.”

“We don’t want what’s yours,” Yardley Acheman said.

“There is nothing you have that we want.”

The old man looked at the papers in his hand, and then, without changing expression, dropped them on the floor. He turned and walked out without another word.

His footsteps on the stairs were unsure; I pictured his death grip on the handrail. “Nothing to worry about,” Yardley said.

My brother got up and went to the window to watch Weldon Pine walk to his car.

“We’ve still got it all to ourselves,” Yardley said. My brother did not answer. “Take my word for it, the man is not going to contest this in court. He doesn’t want to paste it in his scrapbook that he’s incompetent.”

“You never know,” Ward said. “He seems hard-headed.…”

Yardley Acheman said, “He isn’t that kind of hard-headed, not when it threatens him.”