The Great Divide (19 page)

“Darren Wilbur.”

The smirk poked up one puffy cheek. “The Wilbur boy’s got himself a fancy-pants lawyer, huh.” He dropped his eyes to the papers in his hand. “Well, he’s gonna need one.”

“What are the charges?”

“Armed robbery.”

Oathell gasped and would have launched off the bench, except for Deacon’s reaching over and placing one hand on his leg. Steady.

Even so, the sergeant looked Oathell’s way. And grinned. His
teeth were as brown as his eyes. “Yeah, he came screaming and shouting his way into the 7-Eleven over by the highway. Waving this big old pistol around, looks like a cannon in the videotape.”

Marcus nodded, giving the statement calm thought. “You caught the whole thing on tape?”

“Sure did.”

“And Darren’s face is clearly visible?”

“Naw, the boy’s so tall he stepped outta the shadows and just sorta loomed over that poor girl at the counter. Scared her to death, having him wave that cannon—”

“And the video has him screaming and shouting at her, isn’t that what you said?”

“Foulest language I ever heard.” Another smirk in Oathell’s direction. “Judge is gonna love it.”

“I’m sure the judge will,” Marcus replied, still very calm. “Especially once I put Darren on the stand and let the jury hear how bad his stutter is.”

The man shifted around fast enough for his belly to bounce off his belt. “What’s that?”

“Didn’t your arresting officer mention that fact? Or maybe he didn’t even bother to notice. All he wanted was a big black man to collar and close the case.”

“That boy has a stutter?”

“Why don’t we bring him out,” Marcus replied, “and let the
man
speak for himself.”

Richards weighed twice what Marcus did, him with the beefy red arms sticking out of his short-sleeved shirt, the knuckles on his hands scarred and twitching. But all he said was, “Jimbo, run on back and bring out that Wilbur boy.”

“Sure, Sarge.”

All eyes were on the pair now, and everybody in the room heard Richards say, “I heard about you. You’re that Glenwood fellow.”

“That’s right.”

“Sure.” The smirk again. “Word’s gotten ’round about you. How you done got your tail whipped over Raleigh way. So you figure you can move in here, start playing your big-city games, is that it?”

Marcus said nothing.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Richards gave a wet chuckle. “I give you about a week.”

Darren appeared in the doorway leading back to the pens, wearing a T-shirt so tight his muscles looked carved onto the cotton itself. The cuffs on his hands glinted like pure evil, enough to have Oathell wishing he had a gun. Instead, he swallowed down the rage, rose, and walked over, all calm on the outside.

“O-Oathell, y-you g-g-g-g …” Darren swallowed and tried again, but like always when he was excited, the words just wouldn’t come.

“It’s okay, little brother.” Silly thing to be saying to a man towering up there near the ceiling. But Darren was his little brother and always would be. “Everything’s fine.”

“B-b-but I d-d-d-didn’t d-d-d …” The effort to shape that short little word twisted his head up and to one side.

“I know you didn’t. Just hang on, man. We got us some help this time.”

Marcus said, “Screaming and shouting, isn’t that what you said, Sergeant?”

The sergeant snarled, “Jimbo, take off those cuffs.”

“I assume you’re going to be dropping all charges,” Marcus said.

The policeman’s face was a choleric red. “Don’t you go assuming a thing, city boy. Not even how long we’re gonna let you hang around these parts.”

Marcus raised one hand, motioning Oathell and his brother and the reverend out of there. Oathell didn’t need a second invitation. He grabbed his brother’s arm, like holding on to warm granite, and pulled him forward. “Let’s go, Darren.”

Marcus said to the sergeant, “Nice to know I can count on the local police to do their job.”

“Sure can, city boy.” The sneer was pure wicked. “Any time you need an escort outta town, you give me a holler.”

A
NORTHEAST WIND blew in with the dawn, lacking its customary burden of cold hard rain. Marcus stepped out onto the veranda and breathed in the Atlantic’s salt-laden gift. Although the ocean lay a hundred and fifty miles farther east, the cry of gulls seemed to mingle with the cardinals and jays. A third breath, and he sensed that summer was now gone. The humid sweltering heat might return for a day, causing the earth to shimmer in abject apology for the discomfort it caused. But from now on the day’s heat would come as a visitor, not reign as king.

By nine-thirty the house was a hive of activity. Deacon Wilbur was completing the kitchen trim and cabinets. Darren had arrived with him, and been set to sanding the sweeping banister and oak stairs leading to the second floor. The sanding machine with its high-pitched whine was like a toy in the young man’s massive hands. Another painter, a friend of Deacon’s with the worst overbite Marcus had ever seen, was hauling tarps upstairs to drape and paint the hall and guest bedroom. Deacon had reserved the master suite for himself later that same afternoon. There was a new air to the work, a sense of haste Marcus had not noticed before. One that suggested the job was nearing completion.

By ten Marcus had met with four new clients. Two were from the church. Two had driven over from Princeville, a place of dark hovels and deep despair since the previous year’s floods. Although his conference room and office were essentially ready, the doors were not hung and the furniture remained stacked in the garage. Netty fielded calls and ran the fort from her front room while Marcus held his preliminary interviews in the kitchen. If any of his clients minded discussing
legal problems while seated at a breakfast table with Deacon perched on a ladder ten feet down the hall, they kept it to themselves.

Just before eleven Netty stuck her head in the doorway. “Call for you.”

Marcus was wrapping up work with partners in a produce cooperative being threatened by a supermarket chain. “Take a message.”

“It’s the Stanstead woman.”

Marcus was already up and moving for the door. He passed Netty fast enough to ignore her smirk and the remark, “I hear she’s right fetching.”

Marcus went to his corner cubbyhole and picked up the phone. “Kirsten?”

“I have the lawyer’s name.”

“Excuse me?”

“You asked me to find a D.C. lawyer who worked with China. I have a name.”

“Oh.” He marveled at his own disappointment. “Right.”

“His name is Ashley Granger. I’ve called and he’s in the office all day.” A pause. “I also have some more files ready for you.”

“Great.” He was struck by a thought so sudden he could not help smiling. “I’ll come up this afternoon and pick them up.”

“What?”

“I need to meet this Granger face-to-face.” Forging on before she could formulate a refusal. “I’ll stop by Richmond on the way. So it’ll be late by the time I see Granger. I’ll call and ask if he can fit me in at the close of business. How about meeting me for dinner afterward?”

“I … ” The pause was so long Marcus had already accepted the turndown. Then a small voice said, “I’ll try to rearrange something and be here.”

Marcus hung up the phone, then stood staring out the window, seeing only light. A voice behind him said, “So we’re off to the big city again, are we?”

He nodded, as much to a jay’s laughing call as the question.

O
N THE BEST OF DAYS
the journey to Richmond took just over two hours, the journey from there to Washington two hours more. The weather and the traffic were both with him, the afternoon beautiful and the roads quiet. Just over the Virginia border, Marcus spotted his first autumn foliage. A copse of sycamore and elm, hidden eleven
months of the year within a larger grove of pine and scrub, shouted defiant joy at their sudden independence. He slowed and gave them silent homage, then continued with good memories for companions.

Autumn had been his grandmother’s season. She was in truth a perennial, a woman who managed in all seasons, no matter how harsh or dry. But autumn was when she most thrived. Strange how a woman housebound by age and poverty and a crippled husband could so dearly love life. But she had. Especially in the cool dry months before winter’s onslaught.

It began when the first wild berries ripened. The house smelled of cinnamon and clove and molasses and equally dark Caribbean rum and baking. Maude Glenwood did not drink liquor, but she was not averse to using it as a spice. She made all manner of berry pies with graham-cracker or sugar-cookie crusts, and sold them at the Farmers’ Market. She had a name as a pie maker, as she did for being sparse with words. Marcus could recall dawn-lit journeys into Raleigh, where all the pies would be sold before the first customer arrived, taken by other farmers carting produce. On such September days they made the trip and returned before the sun cleared the treetops, and never said a single word between them.

With the changing of the leaves, Maude started on her faces. She was very particular about her artistic elements. From an entire bushel of leaves Maude might elect to use a dozen. She would glue together the coppery hues, using cardboard for a backing, with elm for a beard and acorns for eyes and bone-white birch bark for teeth. Pressed dogwood blossoms made hats for the ladies. Woven straw caps for the men. The faces sold almost as fast as the pies. Through his grandmother’s nimble fingers, Marcus lived and breathed and feasted upon autumn’s awesome splendor.

His grandfather had finally passed away the October of Marcus’ first year of law school. The night Marcus arrived home for the funeral, he had watched his grandmother bake the entire night before the service. The two best pies, one of blackberry and one of brown sugar and apple, had been set upon the shelf over her husband’s empty seat by the back sash window. They had still been there when Marcus departed four days later. Maude Glenwood saw no need to explain the pies. Marcus felt no need to ask.

The people who had come for his grandfather’s funeral were mostly farmers and church friends, eastern folk who valued silence
more than words. There had also been a remarkable number of black people in the congregation, a startling fact in a county where there was little social mingling between the races, especially in church or in grief. Marcus recalled the funeral as a quiet and watchful time, one he had spent wondering if somewhere in Maude’s own silence she was glad to be rid of the burden.

The last night before his return to Pennsylvania, as they sat on the veranda and listened to the crickets and the owls, his grandmother had said the house would be overquiet without her two fine men. For Maude Glenwood it was quite a speech. Five weeks later she passed away in her sleep, departing as silently as she had lived. The day after that second funeral, Marcus returned to the cemetery and blanketed her grave with the last of autumn’s finery.

M
ARSHALL
T
AUB’S OFFICE
was located in a Richmond strip mall between a pool hall and Bubba’s Barbecue Palace. Marcus walked in, passed through the empty receptionist’s office, and knocked on the inner door. “Mr. Taub?”

The voice was familiar, yet crisper and far more alert. And wary. “Who wants to know?”

“My name is Marcus Glenwood.” The back office was marginally neater than the man’s home, and smelled far less nasty. “I’m an attorney in Rocky Mount.”

Marshall Taub wore a frayed white shirt, no tie, and suspenders. He squinted and asked, “Have we met?”

Marcus hesitated only an instant. “I don’t do much business in Richmond.”

“You look familiar.”

“We spoke on the phone. I called you at home.”

“Oh. Right.” Clearly he was accustomed to forgetting what happened after he left the office. “What brings you up this way?”

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure, take a load off. Sorry about the mess. Secretary’s on a long lunch break.” A trace of a smile. “Like about eight months now.”

“I know what you mean.” The chair back creaked in a threatening manner, so Marcus kept his weight well forward. The carpet was lime green shag, the desk a metallic tan that matched the filing cabinets. “I make do with a part-timer.”

Rheumy eyes that would have better suited a man twice his age
gave Marcus a swift inspection. “Funny, I figured you for a partner in some corporate-law outfit.”

“I was, until about eight months ago.”

“Which one?”

“Knowles, Barbour and Bradshaw.”

Eyebrows jiggled. “Musta been nice. What happened, they pass you over for a partnership?”

“Something like that.” Outside the back window a Budweiser truck unloaded crates into the pool hall next door. “I’m entering suit in federal court against New Horizons.”

Marshall Taub leaned back until he was jammed up tight against the wall. “You don’t say.”

“We have reason to believe they had a hand in kidnapping a woman researching illegal labor practices.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.” No hesitation there. “Not that they would engage in improper labor practices, or that they’d kidnap somebody who got in the way of the next almighty dollar. What was she, a union activist?”

“No. Just an academic.”

“Doesn’t matter. If she stood between them and profit, they’d clean her clock.”

“I read the transcript of your own case.”

“Buried me in appellate court.” The voice turned gravelly. “Worst thing I ever did was take that case.”

“I’d like you to testify. I’m going to try to build a case on past practice.” This meant attempting to bolster his case by showing how the company’s previous actions formed a consistent pattern. “It’s a long shot, but the best I have.”

“No problem.” The eyes glimmered with a trace of old life. “Love to tell my tale to another jury.”

“I imagine the defense will bring up …” Marcus hesitated, then trod delicately. “All the unsavory details about you that they can.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’ve got a lot left to lose.” He brought his chair forward and leaned over his desk. “Speaking of which, you better be ready. They’ll do their dead-level best to roast you over a hot fire.”