The Trials of Nellie Belle

by Sydney Avey

“The attorneys are looking up some fine points of law in preparation for tomorrow. The jurymen are upstairs playing poker, and the witnesses have had to seek other accommodations.” Ross leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the ottoman.

  “The docket is a heavy one this term. Didn’t you represent the defendant in every case the court tried last term?” asked Nellie.

  “I did, and it cost me money, worry, and a sullied reputation.”

  “How’s that?” Nellie took a seat beside Grandma Erwin, who planted herself nightly on the red velveteen settee. The old lady dropped her knitting in her lap in expectation of a good yarn.

  The last of the sun caught the faded lace curtains through the crusted windowpane and dipped below the dunes across the highway. Mr. Norris entered the darkening parlor and bent down to light the fire logs stacked in the cast-iron grate. Ross waited until the innkeeper retreated, the floor-boards creaking under his cautious feet.

  Mrs. Erwin fixed her rheumy eyes on the defense attorney. After retrieving a cigarette from a monogrammed case, Ross held the case out to the ladies. The old lady wrinkled her nose and Nellie shook her head politely. The gentleman lit his cigarette, drew smoke into his lungs and held it there. Nellie could almost taste the tang of tobacco, a remembrance of kissing John. As she grew older, the filter on her memory seemed to thin, and recollections passed through unbidden. The fire in the hearth caught and crackled in symphony with the ticking wall clock. Mr. Ross blew smoke rings and began his tale.

  “A man in jail asked to see me. Unwashed, unshaven, dressed in a ragged pair of overalls, he was. Accused of bootlegging.”

  Nellie composed her face in an expression of devout interest.

  “He wasn’t your regular bootlegger. He’d been peddling his moonshine to get a little money to feed his family, but he hadn’t been very successful. At one time, the fella owned a prosperous farm up river, but he mortgaged the property to invest in a machine some engineer invented to separate fine, old gold from the black sand that is up and down the coast here.”

  “I remember that.” Nellie leaned back against a tasseled satin pillow on the settee. “As I recall, that enterprise failed.”

  Tapping the thin mustache that framed his upper lip, Ross drew a finger alongside the carefully clipped facial hair to the raised corner of his mouth. “Your recollection is accurate, Mrs. Scott.”

  Nellie met the glow in his amber-colored eyes with a slight play of amusement across her lips. Over the years, she had so disciplined her smile that she had no laugh lines.

  “Let the man continue his story.” Mrs. Erwin poked an elbow into Nellie’s side, jutted her chin at Mr. Ross, and resumed working her knitting needles.

  Ross took in smoke from his cigarette in small puffs. The exhaled fumes curled around his words. “I agreed to take his case, figuring the ends of justice would be better served if we turned him loose to care for his family. In payment, he offered me his only possession, a two-year-old black Mexican bull. I declined and told him he could pay me when his ship came in. He told me some cock-and-bull story about a bunch of money he was in line to inherit from an estate being settled in the east. The upshot of it all, I hauled his sickly wife and his five kids into court to gain the jury’s sympathy.”

  Nellie tightened her lips into a line that underscored the sad truth of an all too common situation. Mr. Ross took a final draw on his cigarette and placed it in a small crystal ashtray balanced on his knee.

  “The DA pushed hard for a conviction, but I got him off.”

  The cigarette burned into the filter and went out. The cooling remains produced an acrid stench that set Nellie’s nose to twitching. Mr. Ross emptied the contents of the ashtray into his palm. He got to his feet and tossed the ashes into a potted plant near the door. Then he pulled a handkerchief scented with sage and eucalyptus oil from his pants pocket and wiped his hands. Carefully refolding the linen square, he returned it to his pocket and began to pace.

  “He insisted I take the bull in payment. He was leaving the county, he said, and he had no more use for the animal. So I hired a guy to drive the bull up to the Kentuck Slough, where I was running some cattle. It took the guy four days to do the job, and it cost me twenty dollars.”

  “Four days to run your gentleman cow up to the slough?” The old lady cackled. “Your man must have stopped at every watering hole along the way, if you get my meaning.”

  “Oh, I do Mrs. Erwin. It gets worse.” He rubbed his hands together and the pungent odor of spicy herbs filled the room.

  Nellie’s nose picked up the pleasing scent and her empty stomach began to raise a ruckus.“Do go on with your story, Mr. Ross.”

  Mr. Ross stretched his arms out wide and arched his back, as if to summon the gods of gab. “Ah,” he said when a joint in his shoulder popped. “Well, about six weeks after I got home a young man comes into my office and tells me he’s there to collect damages from me. Seems he lives out by Kentuck Slough and has a bed of choice strawberry plants in full bloom, tightly fenced to keep the chickens and rabbits out; a fence that bull of mine tore through to get to the strawberries, and that cost me another twenty-five dollars. You keeping track of what I’m spending here?”

  Nellie pulled a steno pad out of her leather satchel bag and began a tally.

  “I called a butcher friend of mine and told him to go get the bull and render him into some nice cuts of meat, but he couldn’t find the animal. Next thing I know, I got a daddy and his little girl in my office with a sob story about a bull that chased her up a tree and kept her there all day. When her daddy came home to an empty house and no supper, he heard her cries and went to her rescue. That bull charged him, chased him through a flock of clothes hanging out on the line, and the upshot of this was a forty-dollar payoff.”

  The old lady guffawed and set her knitting needles on either side of her head, pretending to be a charging bull. Nellie added forty dollars to her tally.

  “I called another butcher, but his luck was the same. No bull. Then Hans Johnson presents himself and owns up to having shot my bull through the eye. Killed him dead.”

  The old lady slapped her knee and her knitting tumbled to the floor. The needles, which had long since slipped out of the barely started work, rolled off the thick Persian rug and clinked across the polished wood floor. Ross retrieved one escaped needle and waved it in her direction.

  “Turns out, Hans was out courting. It was dark when he started home through the pasture. Wouldn’t you know it, that bull came charging out of nowhere. Hans ran, tripped over some tree roots, and, as luck would have it, found a hollowed-out tree stump to hide in.”

  The clock on the wall chimed six times, and Mr. Norris entered the parlor to pull the chains on fussy table lamps scattered about the room. Ross headed for the decanter of sherry and bottle of scotch Mr. Norris left on the cocktail cart under the clock. He handed the ladies cordial glasses of sweet liquor and returned to the cart to pour himself a heavy-bottomed glass of scotch straight up. On his way back to take his seat, he paused beside Nellie and rested a hand on the back of the settee, just behind her shoulder.

  Despite the barrier of the settee back, Nellie could feel the heat radiating from the attorney’s body, damp with the exertion of orating in a feverish room. It was not an unpleasant feeling. She twisted in her seat to look up into his face and gave him a half smile that signaled he’d best return to his chair.

  Ross whirled around slowly, splashing a bit of Scotch from his glass as he pantomimed the action of his words. “Hans reached for the revolver he always carried. When he caught a flash of the animal’s eye, he aimed and he shot.”

  Nellie wondered if you could actually drop a bull with a revolver and what caliber bullet would be required. She thought better of raising the question.

  “I told Hans to go back, skin the animal, and keep the skin as a memento of his bravery.”

  “That afternoon, Hans returned with a man who owned a large blooded stock farm down the sloug
h and claimed that Hans had dispatched his prize cow instead of the bull. It seems that Hans’s sweetie sent him home with a couple of quarts of syrup in an open container.

  “Picture this. While Hans is running from the charging beast, syrup slops onto his shirt. He drops the container and shinnies a dead tree trunk so he can drop down into the hollow. Well, the syrup on his shirt gets smeared all over the tree trunk.” Ross paused to grin and nod vigorously.

  “A sticky situation, if ever I heard one.” The old lady bounced up and down in her seat. Nellie took a look at the tally and gave a low whistle. “I hope sweeter times are ahead for you, Mr. Ross.”

  Ross barreled ahead. “It’s dark out. Hans wrestles his revolver out of its holster. The bull stops to lick syrup from the container, but Old Bessie wanders over, attracted by the syrup on the tree trunk, and bam! Hans drops her dead. That cost me seven hundred dollars.”

  “Ho, ho!” Old lady Erwin pounded her tiny hand on the sofa.

  Nellie crossed her legs at her ankles and wiggled her foot. “Dare I ask what happened to the bull?”

  “I gave a cowboy a ten to hunt down the bull and kill it. But guess what?”

  “He never found the scoundrel.” Mrs. Erwin hooted.

  “I cannot imagine.” Nellie sneaked a look at her watch.

  “The cowboy found that bull dead in the slough. Apparently, the dumb beast devoured the syrup container along with the syrup, and it didn’t go down so well.”

  “He died of the bellyache?” Mrs. Erwin slapped her knee. “Well, don’t that beat all.”

  Nellie handed a list of the damages to Mr. Ross. “I can see that you are poorer for this misadventure. This will give you the bellyache.” The sum was seven hundred and eighty dollars. They all had a good laugh before heading into the dining room for dinner. As they went, Mr. Ross leaned over and whispered in Nellie’s ear. “I hear we are having steak tonight.”

  R

  A week later, Nellie sat at a small secretary desk in the parlor, catching up on her correspondence. The front door blew open, and Mr. Ross hurried inside, shaking water off his hat. He removed his raincoat and draped it above the puddle of water where the other guests’ rainwear hung in a convivial circle around the coat tree.

  Across the room, a candle danced breezily on the cocktail table. A bottle of scotch and an old fashioned glass waited for the attorney. Grandma Erwin rocked by the fire, an afghan tucked across her knees against the cold that crept in through the windows, a book in her lap. Mr. Ross poured his drink and came to stand in front of the fire. He lifted the glass in Nellie’s direction.

  “Would you like to hear the sequel to the bull story?”

  Nellie laid her pen down on the letter she had been writing to Opal and turned around in her seat. Her writing hand found its way to the tight place on her shoulder at the base of her neck. Massaging the sore area, she nodded.

  “Did you two happen to notice the man I left the hotel with earlier this afternoon? That was Davis.”

  “The down-at-the-mouth bootlegging farmer who saddled you with a bad-tempered bull?” Nellie asked.

  “The very same. He came back to pay me for representing him. I told him about the bull episode, and you know what? In addition to my original fee, he paid all the expenses I accrued.”

  The old lady’s mouth dropped open. “Where did he get the money?”

  “His ship came in, just as he said it would. He inherited money from a family estate. Set his family up in Portland, and came here immediately to square things.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Nellie stood up and began to gather her papers and pens. “Men with money never pay their debts.”

  After spending the day transcribing the testimony of others, Nellie was ready to have her own say about what she had observed over the years. “The courts are full of rich men who claim they cannot pay their promissory notes.”

  In the alcove by the parlor, someone dropped a record onto the Victrola, and strains of “Farewell Blues” snaked long fingers around the polished wood doorframe. Ross threw his head back and drained the last of his libation. Smells of whiskey and candle wax, mixed with the sultry sounds of smoky jazz, served only to ruffle Nellie’s ire. “If you told us he put his wife and children to work to pay for his foolish wager, that I would believe.”

  Ross spoke slowly. “The courts are not ‘full of dishonest men,’ but of men who disagree, Mrs. Scott. I find that most are honest; my man Davis for example. So state your case.”

  “That oil magnate you defended, he has dodged his creditors in the courts for the past fifty years. You can’t seriously contend he hasn’t sufficient money to pay his debts.”

  “Go on.” He folded his arms across his chest.

  Nellie walked around the settee that stood between her and the defense attorney. “The automobile manufacturer who has made driving cheaper than walking. He refuses to pay for patents he can well afford.” She folded her arms underneath her breasts. That action had the unintended effect of lowering the neckline on the dress she had donned for dinner with the judge, an old friend about to retire from the bench.

  Mr. Ross reddened and cleared his throat. He held up a hand to stop her, but she charged ahead.

  “Old man Carson who invented the copper ore roaster—the wealthy copper companies used his patent for years and let him nearly starve to death before the court finally awarded him a judgment of millions.” Her voice rose. “I tell you, rich men pay only when the court compels them.” The forefinger that wagged in the air she brought quickly to rest on her collarbone.

  “And yet,” Mr. Ross jumped in, “the minute Davis came into possession of his money, he drove one hundred and fifty miles to pay his debt.” He tapped his finger on the table to emphasize his point. He looked down at Nellie, six feet of smiling confidence, and delivered his summary. “He is an honest man, and so, I contend, are the majority of men.”

  Mrs. Erwin nodded her agreement and pointed toward the cocktail cart, indicating her wish for a glass of sherry.

  Nellie stood her ground. “If that were so, your caseload would be considerably lighter.”

  Ross’s mouth dropped open. First, a choking sound, and then full-throated laughter filled the room. Mrs. Erwin covered her mouth and giggled. Nellie tried to hold her stern expression, but could not help herself. She laughed with them.

  The dinner bell rang, and Mr. Ross escorted Mrs. Erwin to the dining room. Nellie retrieved her papers and climbed the stairs to her room to refresh her makeup before the judge called for her. Having a few minutes to spare, she sat down on the corner of the bed and recorded the conversation in her diary. Perhaps a day would come when she would have the leisure to write about all she had seen and heard in and around the court. Who would believe it?

  The wall clock downstairs chimed. By now, Judge Acker must be waiting for her. Nellie checked her face in the mirror, ran her fingers across her cheekbones, and drummed the skin around her eyes lightly with her fingertips. Silly to think she could smooth the years away, but this little ministration refreshed her. What could the retiring judge possibly want to talk to her about?

  18 - Last Chance Romance

  18

  Last Chance Romance

  Judge Acker’s hand at the small of her back guided Nellie into the warm interior of Tuckaway’s Seafood Restaurant. They sat at a small table for two where they could look out over the Rogue River while they chatted companionably.

  “I had no idea this was here.” Nellie slipped a napkin onto her lap and looked over the elegant menu.

  “My little secret.” The judge winked. “I recommend the Chinook salmon.” Two wine glasses and a dusty green bottle appeared. “And a glass of Riesling perhaps?”

  Nellie’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Another little secret. The owners keep a few bottles from my private collection on hand for me.”

  “You are full of secrets, Judge Acker.” The waiter splashed a small amount of sweet wine into her goblet and fil
led the judge’s glass. The judge reached across the table and patted Nellie’s hand. “You know, our professional relationship is coming to an end. From now on, please to call me Willem. And I hope I may call you Nellie.”

  Nellie raised her glass. “To your retirement, then. Willem.”

  The waiter lit the votive candle at the center of the table, and two plates of hearty grilled salmon steaks with crispy skin arrived. Across the room, a tuxedoed gentleman took a seat at a baby grand piano, and, before long, strains of a Brahms sonata gentled the air.

  “Have you thought of retiring, Nellie?” Rich juices from the fish pomaded Willem’s generous lips. Nellie drew her napkin across her mouth and dabbed away fatty residue that once protected the king salmon in the cold river.

  “No. I would have no idea what to do with myself. What are your plans?”

  He held up a finger while he finished chewing a buttered roll. “Bread and butter! I read an article in the Tribune that says fat is our dietary hard coal, and bread the perfect vehicle for butter.” He smacked his lips. “But to your question. My wife and I always planned to travel after I retired, but you know she died a few years ago.”

  “Yes, I heard that. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  A few fish bones and curls of skin were all that remained on their plates. The waiter collected the used dinnerware and reset the table for dessert. “Coffee and cake?” he asked the judge.

  “Please.” As soon the waiter left them alone, Willem leaned forward. “I’m known for being direct. I’m sure you’re aware.”

  Oh my. Nellie glanced at his wine glass. It was still half full. Whatever he was about to say, it wouldn’t be the wine talking. “You are forthcoming; I will say that.”

  The waiter poured rich black coffee with a flourish and set down two small dishes of pineapple upside-down cake.

  “Oh, my favorite.” The judge rubbed the palms of his hands together. “Is this the recipe?”

  “That won the Hawaiian Pineapple Company award?” the waiter asked? “The very same I’m proud to say.”