As if attracted by their focus on him, Kane turned his head in their direction. His gaze was intent but unreadable. Regina swallowed hard and looked away. She didn’t risk another glance until after the judge mounted the bench and the formalities began.
She didn’t know a great deal about lawyers and courtrooms, had never had occasion to find out. There was a certain fascination about it now, since it was Kane’s element, though it still looked like some kind of complicated game with more rules than strictly necessary. She had been following events, watching as Melville Brown helped seat the jury, then took a parade of witnesses through different business practices, good and bad, in the funeral industry. Most of this background was familiar to her, but it was fascinating to watch the details become public knowledge.
Melville was easygoing in his manner, but highly competent. Under his prodding, the testimony had unfolded with logic, down-to-earth clarity and a series of minor revelations that, in accumulation, were slowly building an impressive case against Berry Association, Inc. Still, it seemed that something was missing. It was almost as if everything was going too smoothly.
Melville assumed the lead today, also. The first witness on the stand was a custodian for a funeral home in Mississippi. His testimony illustrated the fact that Gervis’s company didn’t always provide the services, or even the same casket or vault, that appeared on the invoices submitted to customers. This had been a hotly debated issue the day before and was no different now. The legal debate and procedures over it came to an end, however, and the witness stepped down.
The next person called was Lewis Crompton.
Melville took Mr. Lewis through a short history of his family’s ownership of Crompton’s Funeral Home, then went over a few questions to portray his commitment to quality service at reasonable prices. Kane’s grandfather sat on the stand relaxed and at ease, looking every inch the distinguished gentleman. His voice was a deep, rich baritone. He was neither aggressive nor defensive, but stated his case with calm certainty.
“Mr. Crompton,” Melville said, “will you tell the court and members of the jury just why you saw fit to bring suit against Berry Association, Inc.?”
Mr. Lewis inclined his white head. “I filed suit for one reason. Because they were trying to run me out of business.”
“What led you to that conclusion?”
“I had evidence that they were deliberately lowering prices in unfair competition.”
“And how were they able to do that?” Melville studied his case notes while he waited for the answer.
“By volume purchasing. A consolidated funeral operation like Berry’s, with several hundred homes, is able to buy caskets and other merchandise at lower prices, just like the discount chains.”
“Isn’t this their right, to buy cheap, then lower prices?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Mr. Lewis agreed, “if what they’re doing is giving people a break by passing along the savings to the consumer. But that’s not what’s happening. The Berry homes, and others like them, cut prices long enough to get rid of the competition until family-owned homes like mine are forced out. They concentrate their attention on a single region at a time, so they wind up with a cluster of funeral homes in that particular area. After they gain a monopoly, then they suddenly jack up prices. When it’s all over, the cost of a funeral is as much as fifty percent more than it was before, and there’s not a thing anybody can do about it.”
“Just how would you characterize this method of doing business.”
“Sheer chicanery followed by price gouging. That’s the best I can say about it in present company.”
Laughter rippled over the courtroom. Melville waited until it subsided before he spoke again. “And is this taking place only in Louisiana?”
“No, sir, not by a long shot,” Mr. Lewis said with an emphatic shake of his leonine head. “It’s everywhere. Consolidation is just getting heated up. Less than twenty percent of the country’s funeral homes are involved right now, but more are being sucked into the conglomerates every day. Service and personal concern with a community’s grief are out the window when the corporations come into it. What becomes important is profits, the almighty bottom line. Some so-called ‘Death Care’ chains like Berry’s are such big business they’re traded on the New York Stock Exchange.”
“So your concern in this is to protect your customers?” Melville smiled as he spoke, his brown eyes lighting with warmth.
Mr. Lewis looked rueful. “I’d like to claim that, and it was certainly on my mind in the beginning. I’ll have to admit, though, that it’s become a bit more personal. In fact, you could say it’s come down to a private war between Berry and me.”
The rumble of laughter was louder this time, and the judge frowned it into silence. When Melville could be heard again, he said, “Why has it become so personal?”
“I don’t much care for the way he fights.” The glance Mr. Lewis threw at Gervis was tinged with challenge.
“Have you encountered personal danger?”
“I have, along with the lady I was with at the time. There have been other threats, other injuries, as well.” The glance of the older man touched Kane, then reached to the back row to where Regina sat with her son beside her.
The defense objected to that remark, and the judge ruled in their favor. Melville seemed satisfied to abandon that line of questioning. After a few more minor points, Mr. Lewis was turned over to the opposition.
“Well now, Mr. Crompton,” the head of Gervis’s entourage of lawyers said with a patronizing smile, “I understand you’ve been taking care of the funeral needs for the people of Tunica Parish for many years. Is that correct?”
“It is.” Mr. Lewis watched the other man, his manner alert but confident.
“In this capacity, you’ve been privy to any number of family secrets. Would that be a fair statement?”
“I suppose it might.”
“Yes or no, please.”
“Yes.”
“You consider that you are a safe repository of these secrets?”
“Yes, I hope so.”
“In fact, you’ve been known to honor certain rather irregular requests from time to time. Is this not true?” The New York lawyer turned his back and walked away as he spoke.
Mr. Lewis frowned, but answered in the affirmative.
“On one occasion, you falsified the birth date of a lady to prevent it from being known that she’d lied about her age for years. Is that correct?”
Mr. Lewis sat with his lips tightly pressed together. The lawyer turned to face him, waiting in what appeared to be a game of wills, a test to see who would break the silence. It soon became plain that it would not be the man on the stand.
“I must insist on an answer!” the lawyer snapped, his face red at being forced from his position of strength. “Did you, or did you not, falsify records to keep the woman’s true age from her friends, neighbors, and even her husband, who was younger by several years?”
Mr. Lewis’s voice seemed to thicken and his speech to slow as he said deliberately, “I’ve been known to omit the truth in order to protect the honor of a lady.”
“In other words, yes.”
The man on the stand agreed with a sigh.
“You have a soft spot for the ladies, don’t you?”
Melville entered an objection to that question, and it was sustained. The lawyer pursed his lips, then rephrased the question, saying, “Would you agree it’s justified to say that the fair sex has, on occasion, imposed on your good nature and natural respect for their kind when it comes to requests for favors?”
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re trying to say,” Mr. Lewis returned.
“Let me put it plainly, then, Mr. Crompton,” the lawyer said with a thin smile. “Have you ever buried someone in the wrong place at a woman’s request?”
The buzz of comment that swept through the room had a titillated edge. It seemed obvious, from what Regina could hear, that it wasn’
t so much Mr. Lewis granting such a request that interested the onlookers, but rather for whom he had done the favor.
Mr. Lewis tilted his head and waited while the judge pounded his gavel for order. When the courtroom quieted again, he said with dubious frankness, “I guess maybe it all depends on what you mean by the wrong place.”
“Did you, or did you not, bury an empty casket at the monument bought and paid for by the woman’s lawful husband, then, in the dead of night, bury the woman herself at the side of another man?”
“Oh, that’s what you’re driving at,” Mr. Lewis said in his most countrified Southern manner. Smiling genially, he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands across his midsection. “In that case, I guess I’ll have to answer with a yes.”
The muttering in the courtroom grew louder. Regina, who had come to know Mr. Lewis fairly well, gave him a wary stare. The defense lawyer apparently had no such misgiving, for he pounced on the admission of guilt.
“You don’t consider that as heinous conduct, a direct violation of your much vaunted ethics?”
“Can’t say as I do,” Mr. Lewis said after earnest reflection. “I didn’t take payment for it, you know. And since it wasn’t public knowledge until this minute, I don’t see that it hurt a soul.”
“You don’t see it as a gross betrayal of the husband who paid for the interment, a man who had expected to sleep for all eternity beside his lawfully wedded wife?”
“Well,” Mr. Lewis said, lifting a finger to rub the side of his nose, “that’s just it.”
The lawyer sighed. “What is?”
“She wasn’t.”
“She wasn’t what?”
“His wife.” Mr. Lewis’s smile was patient, earnest.
“That is patently ridiculous. We have already established the fact the woman who died was married to the man in question.”
“Well, yes,” Kane’s grandfather allowed, then turned to look up at the judge. “Perhaps I could tell a little story about that, Your Honor, so everybody will be sure to understand?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Gervis’s lawyer said with some stringency. “What we want to know is why you failed to bury the client in the correct plot.”
“I’m trying to tell you she wasn’t just a client,” Mr. Lewis complained. Rearing back in his chair and turning toward the bench, he said in appeal, “Judge?”
“Proceed,” the judge answered with a casual wave of one hand.
The lawyer swung around in outrage. “This is highly irregular, Your Honor. I must insist the witness be instructed to answer the questions in the prescribed manner.”
The judge leveled a narrow look through his bifocals at the man before him. “The prescribed manner,” he drawled, “is whatever I decide it is at any given time. Right now, it’s a story.” He turned away. “Mr. Crompton?”
Mr. Lewis nodded his appreciation, but refrained from any show of triumph. “Well, it all started back during the last year of the Great Depression. A local girl ran off with the town bad boy. Her folks chased after them and caught up with the pair in Arkansas. The girl’s father and her two brothers were upset over the incident, and they took it out on the boy, left him lying half-alive on the side of the road while they brought the girl back home. After a while, a hobo came along—there was a lot of that kind back then. He found the boy, patched him up, took care of him, dragged him on a train when one came along. When the boy woke up and came to himself, it was weeks later and he was in California. The boy wrote to his girl right off, but she didn’t answer.”
“If this touching tale is going somewhere,” the lawyer said through tight lips, “I would appreciate it if you’d get to that point.”
Mr. Lewis inclined his head. “Just hold your horses, I’m getting there. So the boy and the hobo just kept going then, riding the rails, working a little here, a little there—until along came the big war, World War II. The boy joined up. He was trying to outrun his sorrow over losing the only girl he’d ever love, see, didn’t care whether he lived or died, so he became a hero, decorated and everything. After the fighting was over, he went to work in the oil fields. He worked so hard, took such chances, he became a millionaire by the time he was forty. That was fine, but he couldn’t forget the girl, so he came back to Turn-Coupe with all his money. But the girl had become a woman, had married another man, and had a beautiful daughter who was almost a teenager by that time. Turned out she’d been told our hero died in Arkansas. She had grieved for him, then gone on with her life.”
Mr. Lewis paused, glancing over the courtroom with a faraway look in his eyes. The crowd was quiet, waiting. After a moment, he went on again.
“Now this bad boy turned millionaire had himself a secret. He knew that he and the woman had been married, and this marriage had never been legally dissolved. That made the woman a bigamist and her child illegitimate. He could cause a stink and ruin the lives of the woman, her husband and her daughter, or he could keep quiet. He wrestled with himself over the decision, but finally decided to hold his peace. He never married, wound up dying of a heart attack after a few years. You don’t hear much about men dying of broken hearts, but I can tell you that some do, some do.”
“Mr. Crompton,” the counselor for the defense said wearily, “if you could just give us some idea of what this has to do with the burial?”
“I’m about to do that,” Mr. Lewis said, lifting an aristocratic hand. “Now this woman the millionaire loved knew, of course, how things were, how they’d been. She’d been tempted to run off with the man who came after her, but she was a fine, honorable woman. She kept the wedding vows she’d made in error, loved the man she married the second time around the best she was able. Still, there was always an emptiness in her life. When she found out she was dying of cancer, she came to me, asked me to bury her beside the man who was her real husband. Seemed like a good thing to me, so I did it. And if that’s wrong, then I’m sorry, but I’d do the same again.”
“You’re asking the court to believe you falsified official records and risked your business reputation out of mere sympathy?”
“You could put it that way.” Mr. Lewis’s expression turned grim. “What’s more, I don’t take kindly to you bringing it up in public court so all the sacrifice those two people made while trying to do the right thing was for nothing.”
“A noble attitude,” the defense lawyer said with a jeer in his voice. “But if you expect us to believe this fantastic tale, I think you’ll have to give us the name of this female paragon whose dying wish you’re supposed to have granted.”
Lewis Crompton said nothing. Sitting like a statue with his lips pressed together, he only stared straight ahead. The spectators’ voices rose to a loud hum.
“Come now, Mr. Crompton, we’re waiting. What was the woman’s name?”
The defense lawyer’s tone was unbearably pompous. It was plain to see he thought he had won, either because he figured the man on the stand couldn’t name the woman whose story he had told, or else because he would refuse to do it. Whichever it turned out made no difference, it seemed, as long as victory was in his grasp.
Then Lewis Crompton sighed. His lips moved in an apparent answer, but the words were little more than a whisper.
“Louder, please, so the court can hear. Who was this woman?”
Kane’s grandfather looked up at the lawyer then, his gaze clear and direct. When he spoke, the words were precise and perfectly audible, though edged with pain.
“The lady,” he said, “was my wife.”
Pandemonium broke out. Much of it came from amazed conjecture, but the majority expressed anger with the defense for forcing Mr. Lewis to expose his family secrets. The people of Turn-Coupe who had driven to Baton Rouge to follow the trial were angered by the condescending attitude of the lawyer and callous trading in their private scandals.
Regina ached for the ignominy Mr. Lewis had been forced to endure, would have done anything to prevent it, even as she admired the way he h
ad turned the tables on the defense by making a triumph out of what was supposed to be his breach of conduct. For this was obviously, allowing for the distortions of gossip, the same story Vivian Benedict had told her, the one Slater had come across and passed on.
Gervis, caught in the fallout from his muckraking tactics, was whispering in vicious fury to his team of expensive lawyers. That his underhanded trick had backfired on him gave Regina a rich sense of rightness and jubilation. This was what justice felt like, then. She’d never have guessed.
Order was restored shortly. The defense, in temporary disarray or perhaps fear of further revelations, allowed that they were finished with Mr. Lewis. He stepped down and walked with dignity to resume his place at the plaintiff’s table.
There was a brief consultation between Mr. Lewis, Kane and Melville. Then Kane rose to his feet. He glanced toward where Regina sat, then turned and faced the bench. Though the room had already begun to settle down, it grew quieter still. Kane waited until it was perfectly silent, then he spoke into it with grim and intimidating authority.
“At this time,” he said, “the plaintiff calls Miss Regina Dalton to the stand.”
20
This was not supposed to happen. Regina had not agreed to testify. She had told Melville everything she knew about Gervis’s nefarious business operations and turned over the computer disk taken from his study, which held accounting information, private letters and memos to back up what she said. That was supposed to be the end of it. There were other witnesses who, under Melville’s guidance, could tie up the loose ends of the case as well as she could.
Surprise for the abrupt change of plans held her in paralyzed stillness. It was only as Betsy poked her in the ribs and nodded toward the witness stand that she forced herself to move.
Her knees trembled as she walked to the front of the courtroom. Her heart pounded so hard against her breastbone that she thought her blouse front was fluttering because of it. As she passed the table where Gervis sat, she met his malevolent stare. Strangely, her nerves settled a fraction. His venomous resentment filled her with bitter certainty that what she was being asked to do was right.
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