The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (5 page)

Of course, he had not actually set eyes on the town yet, but that hardly mattered. All these little one-horse places were the same: a line of storefronts along a dusty main street, a big white church in the middle of town, a bench full of old men whittling on sticks and swapping lies, and big mongrel dogs sleeping in every patch of shade. He could write a description of it in his sleep. The only challenging bit was varying the wording so that he didn’t say the same thing in every photo caption. Readers expected all little towns to be much the same, but they also expected newspapers to come up with new ways of saying so.

A long time ago—in experiences, if not in years—Shade Baker had come from a hardscrabble farm not far from just such a dusty little burg as this, but on the Iowa prairie rather than in the Virginia Blue Ridge. He had spent a bleak childhood slopping hogs and pitching hay, while he tried to figure out a way into a different life. He read everything he could get his hands on, mostly Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Rider Haggard, but later, out of desperation, just about everything else that the little town library had on its shelves, which wasn’t much. Maybe his one-street hometown would have been enough for him if he had been the doctor’s son or the judge’s boy, but to be tied to a windswept farm where there was never quite enough of anything—especially luck—felt like penal servitude, and for most of his youth the only way out was through the pages of a book.

He wasn’t called Shade back then. Young Solomon Baker was a cadaverous, pigeon-chested boy, whose family always seemed to be listening for the cough that would signal that he, too, had the disease that was wasting away his father. When he was thirteen, his old man had finally burned away in a tubercular fever. Suddenly Solomon
was expected to assume the burden of the farm and the care of his mother and brothers, but as far as he was concerned that life would just be a wider, colder grave. A few weeks after his sixteenth birthday, he’d hopped a freight, hoping to see some of that wonderful world of adventures he’d found in books, but, from hobo jungles to sheep ranches to oil fields, nothing had ever lived up to those potboiler dime novels that had sustained him through the tedium on the prairie.

Three years later a spare, cold-eyed man calling himself Shade Baker turned up in New York, ready to chase potboilers of his own, one news photo at a time.

Life had been different in the big city, anyhow. Lots of noise and bustle, and certainly lots of adventures, if the specter of being jobless and hungry was your idea of a thrill. The works of Jack London had given him a yearning to go to sea, but he never quite made it. He had inherited his father’s frail constitution, and a diet of cigarettes and diner food had not improved it.

He coughed, and as always he felt a stab of alarm as he assessed the sound. Just the ague, he told himself. A November chill, nothing more. He bent over his scribbled description of his destination. The paper wanted material for a photo essay to accompany the spread.

Now this little town was in Virginia, so a reference to the War Between the States was in order. He ought to include a Confederate flag in a photo, if he could find one, and of course the place was encircled by mountains, so a few unflattering shots of unlettered rustics would not come amiss. He didn’t need much in the way of atmosphere, though. Just a few vistas to set the scene, before he got to the gruesome particulars of the crime itself.

Except for Henry’s reporting, which was their grace note, Shade Baker’s paper specialized in gore and melodrama, not local scenery, and in the sort of tragic, telling details that would make the paper’s subscribers hear ominous organ music as they read. The reporters
would need to talk to people in the village to ferret out those sorts of particulars. If they weren’t forthcoming, they would make them up, of course, but initially they did at least try to come up with the real story. He was a great believer in that maxim coined by Mark Twain: “Get your facts first. Then you can distort ’em as you please.”

It was a peculiar way to make a living, he supposed. At least the folks back on the Iowa prairie would probably think so, and he hadn’t gone into this line of work on purpose. He’d started with the newspaper as an office boy, running stories down to the printer, setting type when they needed an extra pair of hands, and doing whatever else anybody needed doing. His big break came when one of the regular photographers quit on a busy news night.

After he had been there long enough to know his way around, he began to hang around police stations with his camera at the ready, and he would buy a drink for a cop in a bar. This careful cultivation of sources eventually paid off, when the precinct made a mascot of him, tolerating his presence at crime scenes and tossing him the occasional exclusive photo opportunity on a lurid, but unimportant, case.

Another benefit of tagging along with the cop on the beat was the bits of insight into human nature that they tossed off in conversation. He stored up these nuggets for use in understanding future cases, and they had served him well.

Shade also learned the value of tagging along with experienced reporters, when they would tolerate him, as well as with any police officers who weren’t averse to a little favorable publicity. One of Shade’s first and best lessons on crime coverage had been the observations of an old beat cop on the behavior of the female who turns to homicide.

Women who were driven to desperation would finally fight back against the brute who terrorized them, sometimes to protect a child, but more often out of jealousy or fear of abandonment. He never
forgot an offhand remark made by Officer Ritter at the scene of one such murder. Shade had been hanging around the police station on a slow evening, hoping for just such a piece of luck, and he’d been able to coax Ritter into taking him along to the murder scene. Plying the city’s finest with whiskey was an expensive, indeed a never-ending, proposition, but he considered it a genuine business expense. It certainly paid dividends.

At the rooming house, the bruised, wretched woman, sobbing hysterically and protesting her love, had to be pulled off the body of the man she’d just shot. Shade snapped the photo of the killer weeping over her victim.

“It’s often the way,” Ritter told him. “When a brow-beaten woman finally shoots the brute, she’ll empty every chamber in the gun into her victim, and, as she fires, every single shot will be punctuated by a scream.
Bang
. Scream.
Bang.
Scream. Until the gun is empty. Of course, the poor devil has snuffed it long before she runs out of bullets.”

Shade Baker made the front page for the first time with that photo, leaving him forever grateful to murderous females. The current defendant, by all accounts a backwoods beauty, should be good for weeks of useful photographs. Sex sells. No one yet had mentioned sex in connection with the case, but perhaps they hadn’t been looking for it. He would. He always did. Hillbilly gal fights off paw’s drunken advances, perhaps? It was certainly sensational enough, and everybody knew that incest was a way of life in “
them thar hills,
” but perhaps readers would find it hard to identify with anyone in that sordid story. Some other angle, then. He would have to wait and see.

A FEW SEATS BEHIND
Shade Baker, Rose Hanelon closed her eyes and tried to sleep. For the moment, the trial and its comely heroine did not concern her.

Perhaps if Rose had been beautiful, she would have made the news instead of having to report it, watching from the sidelines, as it were, while other people had lives. But she was Brooklyn-born with the look that her grandmother called “unfortunate Irish”: a dumpling face framed by frizzy hair. That face grew rounder and more sallow with each passing year, and in her teens she developed a short-necked, full-bosomed, stubby-legged body that made her look stout even when she wasn’t. Dieting never changed her essential pudding shape, and the fierce intelligence that raged inside her unlovely form did not help her come to terms with the world. She was unfortunately too smart and too independent to be the placid little nonentity that her appearance seemed to consign her to. Too proud to curry favor with her superiors, and too contemptuous of the vapid beauties of her own age to play devoted sidekick to the class belle. Too everything.

She bested the boys in schoolwork, as if in revenge for their ignoring or tormenting her in the social sphere of life, and she worked her way up and out of the old neighborhood, because there was really no place for her within its confines. She was an ugly duckling who demanded to be treated like a swan.

There was never any question of her getting by on her looks, and while there had certainly been tepid offers of marriage from older men along the way, she had the misfortune to view romance with a masculine cast of mind: that is, regardless of her own appearance, she had craved a mate who was beautiful, an objective that is both feasible and logical for a prosperous man, but not in the realm of possibility for a dumpy little woman of moderate means. Rather than settle for what the world thought she deserved, Rose Hanelon had never married at all. Which is not to say that she had not loved, but she had been gruff about it, and sensitive to a fault, preferring to mask her devotion in hard work for the “cause” of some likely-looking fellow with half her ability. The end result never varied: a broken
heart, but at least it was a private pain, because she was careful never to let the handsome young man know he had mattered to her.

By the time Rose Hanelon was twenty-five, she had the perfect qualifications to be a national journalist: she didn’t trust anybody. She had seen too many pretty people receive unearned rewards or escape well-deserved punishment.

The defendant was a beautiful young girl. The question, then, in this little backwoods trial was not innocent versus guilty, because, in Rose’s experience, no one qualified as completely without guilt. The most innocent-seeming individuals were often simply the best liars. She settled back in her seat and stared out at the bare November fields, as bleak and ugly as Truth.

HENRY JERNIGAN’S SILVER FLASK
was empty. He’d been forced to share its contents with the rabbity man to lull him back to sleep, and thus into blessed silence. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. They would have moonshine, he supposed, where they were going. He hoped so. It was hillbilly country, after all. Practically all he knew about the back of beyond was that its populace consisted of feuding clans of slack-jawed yokels, and that they distilled illicit corn liquor in metal contraptions concealed in the woods. One might bribe a hotel factotum to obtain some.

Abingdon, their first stop, was civilized enough, he’d heard, but then it was on to Wise: a godforsaken little hamlet, no doubt, tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—
On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine . . .
That phrase again, this time set to a singsong melody. The tune jangled through his brain in time with the throbbing of his headache, and the train clattered on.

I
n death Pollock Morton would inconvenience a great many more people than he had in life.”
A good lead, he thought, maybe even worth the smudge of ink his fountain pen had made on the cuff of his one good shirt. Writing in his notebook on the train passed the time, and, though he never would have admitted it, it made him feel important. He imagined his fellow passengers watching him scribbling away, and thinking that this was not just a scrawny adolescent on his way to visit kinfolks. In truth he wasn’t all that much older than his looks suggested, but he was a college graduate, and now he had a job that made him feel entitled to the occasional flash of self-importance.

He looked up from his notes to watch the fields and woods flash by as the train rumbled along the river. The November day was dreary with its brown grass and clabbered sky, but the branches of the bare maples made a tracery of silver against the dark hills, and the mist hung between the folds of ridges, white patches on a quilted autumn landscape. The valley was tame land, sectioned into farms and villages, but its beauty lay in its setting, among wild mountains that must have looked just the same when Daniel Boone passed that way, a century and a half ago. Some of the old-timers swore they could remember when wolves and buffalo roamed these hills. He wished he could have been here then. In those days there were Indian raids and gold mines and an unbroken wilderness to be settled.
But those days were gone for good. Nowadays, some hysterical female brains her daddy with a slipper, and they call it news.

He tapped his pen on the lead sentence. Now what? At least it was a start. Most of the meat of the story would have to wait until he had seen the town and conducted some actual interviews, but he knew that a compelling beginning was essential to an in-depth story, and no matter what else he might learn, that sentence was inarguably true. The late Pollock Morton was causing a lot of trouble to a lot of people.

Twenty years ago, murdered or not, that man would have lived and died in the obscurity of his little southwest Virginia coal town, and no one past the county line would have remarked on his passing. But the world was getting smaller, what with airplanes and telephones, so that now, in a manner of speaking, the whole country was looking over your back fence. One ordinary man who could have passed through life without once seeing his name in a newspaper was now a source of wonder to thousands, and to maybe a hundred people he was a downright inconvenience.