The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Henry Jernigan was all polite astonishment. “The refined young lady killed her father over a curfew?”

  The authority shook his head sadly, obviously sorry that he had ever attempted to plow the stony field of this discussion. “Well, we don’t know that she killed him at all,” he said. “There were no witnesses. As I said, the case is just about to go to trial. It will all turn out to be some tragic misunderstanding, like as not.”

  Jernigan nodded. With his luck, that would indeed turn out to be the case. Still, with backwoods justice, you never could tell what the outcome would be, guilt notwithstanding. In 1916 they had hanged a circus elephant at the railroad yards in Erwin, Tennessee, less than a hundred miles from his current destination. He had heard of the case when he interviewed a Tennessee congressman, and ever since then he had dined out on that story, dramatizing the incident for his listeners over cigars and brandy, and always ending with the solemn admonition: “So, gentlemen, if you are ever charged with murder in the great state of Tennessee, do not plead elephant. It is not a valid defense.”

  He wrenched his attention away from the amusing elephant story and back to the matter at hand. “Still, you say the young woman was arrested, so there must be some reason to assume her guilt. I don’t recall your saying exactly how the old man met his end.” He already knew the answer to that, but he needed the quote. Besides, a bit of local gossip could put an unexpected twist on a story. You never knew what sort of embellishment you could get from a local talemonger.

  “Head wound,” said the local expert. “They found a big bruise on his temple, and the coroner reckoned that it might have been made with Mr. Morton’s own shoe.”

  Henry considered this piece of information. Why couldn’t the murder weapon have been a lady’s slipper? Surely a high-heeled shoe would have more dramatic effect in a news story. Aloud, he said, “Well, that seems to narrow things down quite a bit, my friend. The man’s own shoe. That’s hardly the weapon of choice for a burglar. Was anyone else on the premises besides the pretty little schoolmarm?”

  “A younger sister, nothing but a kid. Now there was the mother, of course. They say that there was no love lost between them, but after thirty years and six young’uns, I can’t see her smiting her man in a fight. Folks around liked him well enough, and even if she didn’t, she came from a family with lawyers and sheriffs among ’em. Besides, she had stood him all those years with Christian fortitude.”

  Jernigan smiled. “Ah, but the worm sometimes turns, my friend,” he murmured. And look out when they did.

  In Jernigan’s experience the modern Medea generally betook herself to the offices of whatever lawyer was currently fashionable with her social set. In Philadelphia, he had known many of those society lawyers since childhood, and this acquaintance had served him well. Had he charted his life’s course more wisely, he might have been one of them.

  HENRY

  Henry Jernigan had been destined for better things than a job as a newspaper hack. His father had been a prominent banker in Philadelphia, with family money compounded by a judicious marriage to the plain but well-pedigreed woman who in 1895 became Henry’s mother. He had grown up in the family’s stone fortress on Greene Street in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, with equally wealthy neighbors who were shipbuilders, physicians, and businessmen.

  Henry’s parents, intending for their only child to take his rightful place in society, had sent him to the Germantown Academy with the scions of the city’s other prominent families, where he showed early promise. He had been an editor of the Academy Monthly. He joined the debate team and the swim team, and he won a prize with his senior essay. He played guitar with the Mandolin Club and sang baritone in the Glee Club. When he graduated from the Academy in 1913, Henry Jernigan seemed well on his way to living up to his parents’ aspirations.

  They sent him on to Haverford College to complete his gentleman’s education, but he hadn’t overtaxed himself there, because, after all, his position in life was assured. In hindsight, he realized that this had been a mistake. The world was changing. He should have applied himself to the study of law, or better still medicine. Doctors never lacked for work—how true that became a few years later.

  Bring out your dead.

  But at the time he had thought it would be easy enough to follow in his father’s footsteps and take a position at the bank. He dabbled in English literature, and wrote for the college literary magazine; he took electives in French, Greek, and art, and he managed to graduate with a less than stellar record, but the time had been pleasant, and he had acquired a veneer of sophistication.

  If you needed a few lines from The Iliad rendered from their original Greek, Henry could rise to the occasion. In a gentlemanly battle of bon mots, Henry would not be found wanting. At the drop of a cocktail shaker, he could discuss art or music or fashion—not with any originality, of course, but he could keep up his end of a conversation.

  This all-too-liberal arts education and a singular lack of ambition rendered him insufficiently prepared for an executive position at his father’s bank, and Henry felt he had a soul above a mere clerkship, which prevented him from starting out in the lower echelons of banking. His father suggested that he might put his degree to good use by doing a bit of teaching, but after a year of toiling among the adverbs at the South Philadelphia High School for Boys, he went abroad—not entirely by choice.

  It had seemed like such a trifle at the time. An old friend from the academy was launching an avant garde publication: he called it Philadelphia’s answer to Max Eastman’s magazine, The Masses. There would be a fashionable mix of the arts and socialist philosophy, opposing the European War and advocating higher wages and more rights for workers. Would Henry contribute a piece to the new venture?

  Henry would and did. Flattered to be considered one of the new aesthetes, he dashed off an ironic little essay criticizing, as he put it, America’s intrusion into Europe’s family squabble. He even illustrated the article with a pen and ink drawing, showing the body of a soldier, sprawled a few feet from an open trench in No Man’s Land. The caption read: “It’s Over, Over There.”

  For weeks after its publication, Henry Jernigan had dined out on his new fame as a man of letters. The idyll had ended with a subpoena. The magazine had run afoul of the newly passed Espionage Act, and those contributors who had blatantly opposed the war were charged with treason. While Henry considered his options, the news broke that Victor Berger, the editor of the Milwaukee Leader, had been convicted under the Act, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  The Jernigans, consulting with the family lawyer, decided not to risk a trial. Henry would go abroad until the crisis had passed.

  It was September 1918. The British had crossed the Hindenburg line, and the war in Europe was drawing to a close. It was safe once more to travel—not, perhaps, to the countries of Europe, but at least the seas would no longer be dangerous. Anything was safer than staying in Philadelphia and standing trial.

  Henry had not wanted to do the Grand Tour, anyhow. In the waning days of the Great War, such an effete journey would have seemed frivolous, even callous. Besides, a war-ravaged country was hardly the place for an idyllic sojourn.

  So Henry set out for the Orient. There was a current passion for all things Japanese, and he longed to experience the wonders of that culture firsthand. Perhaps he would study woodblock printing, or master the language and translate verse.

  The ship was just navigating the Panama Canal when the telegram arrived, saying that his father was ill. By the time they reached the International Date Line, people in Philadelphia were dying by the hundreds, but Henry Jernigan sailed on.

  IN HIS SEAT by the window, Shade Baker, with his stick-insect legs stuck under the seat in front of him, had balanced a notebook on the suitcase in his lap, so that he could try to get some work done. Within a day of reaching his destination, he’d have to telegraph stories and captions back to the newspaper, so he thought he’d steal a march
on his fellow journalists by getting some of the preliminary material out of the way now. There was no sense in wasting all these hours of enforced idleness on the train journey. Neither the scenery nor his fellow passengers interested him in the least. He occupied himself by describing the town where the crime had taken place.

  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 com
e 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.