The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Do you see anything?”

  She pointed. “There’s a black and white cat just went under the steps over there.”

  They looked at each other and laughed. Carl shook his head ruefully. “So, no headless horsemen or spooks in sheets parading up and down Main Street?”

  She laughed. “Nary a one, Carl.”

  “Well, as long as you’re here, I might as well give you the ten-cent tour.” He steered her gently to the sidewalk in front of a shabby one-story building. “That house there is the Mortons’ place. In there is where Erma’s father died.” He said it offhandedly, but he was watching her carefully for a reaction.

  She looked at the dingy little building and the leaf-swept yard. “I wish I could help you, Carl.”

  “I must have sounded awful selfish about this, Nora. I’m trying to strike that delicate balance between ruthless and no-account, and I’m new at it, so sometimes I may put a foot wrong. But what matters more than me is the truth. If that young woman is being hounded for something she did not do, I’d like to set things straight if I could. I know that this case is already bringing trouble to the community, with all these backwoods stories the big-city dailies are running. It would be worse if this was all done at the expense of justice.”

  “I thought the famous reporters were all taking her side.”

  “Well, they are, but they seem to think that the only way they can see to help her is to make everybody else in the county look bad. Or maybe they’re not even trying to help at all. Maybe they just flipped a coin, picked a side, and started slinging mud to liven things up.”

  Nora shivered a little in the cold sunshine as a gust of wind found the passage between the hills. She wanted to leave. All she felt from the house and its surroundings was a tightening in her throat and the weight of misery, such as anybody might have felt, knowing what had happened in that place. “It doesn’t happen very often,” she said at last. “Sometimes I’ll touch something that belonged to a person, and I’ll get a flash of a vision, or maybe I’ll see things that other folks don’t, but I can’t make it happen, Carl. Mostly I just wish it wouldn’t happen at all. But these folks are nothing to do with me. I’m sorry for their trouble, and I hope that justice is done, but I can’t say what that would be.”

  “Let’s go on back, then,” said Carl. “I just wish I knew for sure, that’s all.”

  As they started back to the car a little girl in a red coat came running around the side of a house and nearly collided with Nora. She shook the white blond curls out of her eyes and peered up at the unexpected obstacle. “You’uns seen my kitty?”

  Nora, who was only twelve herself, never saw any reason to treat children like adorable little pets, and she never would. “Was your cat a white one with black spots? Yes? Well, he’s over yonder under the steps of that house. Do you need help to catch him?”

  Carl glanced over at the post office. “Don’t be long, Nora. I’m just going to run over there and buy some stamps in case they want me to mail a story back to Johnson City instead of phoning it in to a rewrite man.”

  He hurried away, and Nora and the girl in the red coat walked toward the house with the wooden steps and a crawlspace underneath. “You seen my spotty cat?” the girl asked.

  “Just a minute ago,” said Nora.

  “I miss him.”

  “Did he run away then?”

  “Naw. He got runned over last summer. I got me a yaller cat now. But Spot was better. I still see him sometimes.” She looked up at Nora with a wide-eyed expression that grown-ups would mistake for innocence. “You seen him, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “You see other stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got me an Indian chum, down by the river now and again.”

  Nora nodded. “I see them, too, sometimes, up home.”

  “Do you get scared of ’em?”

  Nora considered it. “Not any longer. I guess they scared me when I was little. But they can’t hurt you. Mostly they’re sad. Tell me what else you see.”

  The little girl narrowed her eyes. She looked up at Nora with a shrewd expression that belied her blond innocence. “You’re wanting me to tell you about Mr. Morton what’s dead, ain’t you?”

  Nora took a deep breath. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

  “Just the one time. You know—since.”

  “Yes. Since he died. Did you speak to him?”

  The child shrugged. “He was down by the river, and I was looking for my kitty. I wouldn’t have gone near him, except he seemed right happy. More so than he had been when he was living, I reckon.”

  “Did he say anything to you about how he died?”

  “I didn’t care about that. T’ain’t our business. But he was glad. He said he had been wanting for a long time to go over the river and get shut of his family, and now he could. Said he was right glad to go. And I stood there and watched him walk right across the top of the water and into the sunshine and gone. Ain’t seen him since.”

  HENRY STIFLED A YAWN. He had eaten very little for lunch, and the courtroom was not overly warm, but still he could barely keep his eyes open. The witnesses had a tendency to speak in a monotone, and they generally confined themselves to short answers, so there wasn’t much worth staying awake for. He thought that something as momentous as a trial, which could cost the defendant her life, ought to be more interesting than they generally were.

  He had to stay awake, though, because he lost the coin toss. At the end of lunch, Henry had said that he saw no point in both of them having to suffer the tedium of the afternoon session, and so they flipped for it, and he lost to Rose. He wondered where she was. She ought to be out interviewing local citizens for fresh perspectives on the Morton family, but he suspected that she was either napping or writing another interminable letter to that oafish pilot she doted on. Odd how someone as cynical as Rose could have such a blind spot.

  She ought to be figuring out a way to interview the defendant, since the competition had paid for exclusive access to that story, but while court was in session, that was not an option. He didn’t see them in the courtroom, either. They had come to town early, completed the interviews, and raided the family album for photos. Now those lucky stiffs were back in New York, composing their stories in comfort, based on reports fed to them by phone or wire from somebody still here in town. He wondered how they had managed that. Of course, if you could buy access to the defendant, you could certainly bribe some local deputy or a lesser reporter to cover the case for you.

  Henry yawned again. Since there were no windows in the courtroom, he could not tell if the light was fading yet. A glance at his watch ought to give him a good idea of whether or not it was nearing dusk, but he preferred the evidence of his own senses. Surely the judge would adjourn soon.

  ONLY HIS CONCERN for Cousin Araby’s car had kept Carl’s eyes on the road during the drive back to Wise.

  Nora was looking out the window, staring at the rock and mud of the barren hillside as if it were a scenic landscape. She twisted the woolen glove in her lap. “I told you, Carl. He’s gone, and she didn’t ask him about what happened that night. But it sounded like there was discord in the family. He was glad to get away.”

  They didn’t talk much the rest of the way down the mountain. Carl was too intent on the road, trying to make it back to the courthouse with all the speed he dared in a borrowed car. It was quarter past one when he parked the car on the side street across from the courthouse, and hurried Nora up the stone steps before she’d even had time to admire the building.

  “We’ll take your suitcase over to Cousin Araby’s after court is adjourned this afternoon,” Carl told her. “I cannot afford to miss any more of the testimony.”

  Nora nodded. “I’ve never been to court before.”

  “Well, I didn’t reckon you had. Nothing to it, though. It’ll put you in mind of church, Nora. You sit there in the pew and folks talk at you. The man in the pulpit is the judge inst
ead of the preacher. And off to the side, there’s a kind of a choir loft, but those fellas won’t be singing. They’re the jury.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Carl pushed a shock of hair back from his forehead. “I wish I knew, Nora. This is just all I know to do in the way of a long shot. Just sit there beside me in court and listen to what the witnesses are saying. And if you see anything or think of anything that might shed some light on the matter, then tell me afterwards. All right?”

  She nodded, and followed him across the tiled hallway and up the wide stairs with the wrought-iron banister. Court was already in session, but Carl eased open the door and they slipped into the back of the room and up a narrow staircase to the balcony where there were still a few empty seats.

  Nora sat very still beside Carl, straining to hear the faraway voices. She couldn’t tell much about people’s facial expressions from so far away, but their gestures or the set of their shoulders often conveyed the same meaning. The witness was an older woman, who seemed nervous in front of the large crowd. Nora didn’t like her much, but perhaps the woman’s fear of appearing in such circumstances had made her seem distant and cold.

  After watching her for a few moments, Nora began to look at the spectators on the main floor. Most of the spectators were male, mostly local farmers and businessmen, but throughout the courtroom she saw a smattering of men in dark suits, balancing notepads on their laps: the reporters were there in force. She felt a little shiver of pride to think that Carl was one of these important people. She stole a glance at him. He was listening intently to the testimony, which was a relief, because she was afraid he’d be staring at her, waiting for her to come up with some mental feat to save the day. But it wasn’t going to happen. She got no sense of anything beyond what anyone else could see.

  Except . . .

  She had leaned over the balcony railing to peer at the other observers of the trial, and on the aisle in a middle row, she caught a glimpse of a red dress. No, not a dress. A robe? She looked closer. A little Asian girl with a fringe of straight black hair and heavy spectacles stood between two spectators’ benches, watching the man in the dark suit take notes on the proceedings. She was wearing a long red flowered robe and high wooden sandals. Nora was more interested in the girl’s exotic costume than she was in whether she was visible to anyone else present.

  From time to time the child would step out into the aisle and kneel down to examine what the journalist was writing on his notepad. Nora could tell that the man didn’t know she was there.

  She turned to ask Carl if the little girl was somehow connected to the case, but before she could get his attention, she glanced back at the journalist, and she saw that he was alone. She scanned the rest of the courtroom for the little girl, but there was no sign of her.

  Nora took a deep breath. Just as she had thought: the child had been a vision. But a useless one. This Oriental girl had no bearing on the murder trial in Wise County.

  Carl leaned close and whispered, “Did you see anything?”

  Nora shook her head. “Nothing that matters.” But she wondered why a little Asian girl was there with an American reporter.

  HENRY

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1923

  Henry might have stayed in Japan forever, siphoning small amounts from his trust fund and supplementing his income with occasional travel articles for American publications, but on a mild September afternoon in 1923, that world ended, too.

  September 1 was a Saturday, and many of Henry’s journalist acquaintances and his friends in the diplomatic corps were lingering at mountain resorts to escape the heat of a Tokyo summer. He might have cadged an invitation to spend a few days as a guest with someone prosperous enough to have a summer home in the mountains, but he had work to do in Tokyo. A dwindling supply of money had become, if not an issue, at least a cloud on his horizon, and he had begun to take more small assignments that journalist friends steered his way, often when it involved some minor formal event that they could not be bothered to cover.

  One such assignment was now keeping him tied to the city while his compatriots idled in their cool aeries. The new Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was having its formal opening that day, and Henry, who was presentable enough for a gathering of dignitaries, had been asked to attend the luncheon and to write it up for a vacationing journalist who had no desire to leave the resort on Sagami Bay to return to the sweltering city for a tedious luncheon to which the American ambassador had already sent his regrets.

  Henry didn’t mind the last-minute assignment. The money would be useful, and the food good. Besides he was curious to see the “Maya Revival Style” that the Chicago architect had chosen for the structure, apropos of nothing as far as Henry could tell. He had watched the hotel’s construction, which had been going on even before his arrival in Japan, and he wondered why Wright had thought that a Mexican pyramid with terraces and a reflecting pool was a suitable design to erect in the capital of Japan. Perhaps a tour of the structure would dispel his doubts about it.

  He was happy to be paid to see it firsthand, and Ishi, too, had wanted to go. She expressed this wish not with the squealing delight one might expect of a young girl, but with her usual hedgehog solemnity at the prospect of finding another object of study. He wondered what she would think of a building so alien to her own culture: a bathtub for every room instead of one big pool for everyone to bathe in. She didn’t believe him when he told her that. Well, they wouldn’t be getting a peek at the guest quarters, but as a treat for her, he asked her parents if he might take her along as his interpreter. His Japanese was passable these days, and of course the luncheon speeches would be in English, but he wanted to know what a Japanese person would really think of Mr. Wright’s design. Most Japanese people would mask their real opinions with polite and noncommittal phrases, but Ishi might tell him the truth.

  Henry promised Ishi’s parents that he would give her lunch, and that he would have her back in the early afternoon to begin her lessons. At ten o’clock that morning they set off in an electric streetcar in a rainstorm, the tail end of a typhoon that had swept in farther north. Just past eleven, the sun came out, and they spent a peaceful half hour across the street from the new hotel, strolling in Hibiya Park, admiring the late summer flowers and watching the people on the paths, while Ishi began a favorite game of theirs, quizzing him to see if he knew the names of the plants.

  Sometimes Ishi wore Western clothing—the same sort of dress and coat one might see on a little girl in Philadelphia—but today, perhaps because they were attending a meeting of foreign dignitaries, she was wearing a bright red kimono of ro silk, and a white obi patterned with embroidered cherry blossoms. Henry had noticed that in Japan only little girls and elderly women wore red. In the years between youth and old age, Japanese women wore more subdued colors. Soon enough, Ishi would lose the freedom of childhood, when her life would be governed by the dictates of giri, the social obligations and the demands of a formal education, and then he would lose his little hedgehog companion forever.

  He would miss her.

  It was nearly noon when Henry and Ishi crossed the street to enter the Imperial Hotel, walking past the long reflecting pool in the courtyard and into the cavernous lobby with its angular ceiling arches and the strange Mayan-inspired floor tiles. They were scarcely ten feet from the entrance when the rumbling started, and the floor shifted beneath them like a swinging bridge. After five years in Japan, Henry recognized the signs immediately, but Isihi reacted even more quickly, grabbing at his sleeve and shouting, “Jishin!”

  Earthquake.

  He knew that she was trying to drag him outside again. He thought that the hotel would be a safe refuge, but he followed her anyway. The Japanese, who endured hundreds of minor earthquakes every year, had learned centuries ago to build their dwellings of lightweight materials—a wooden frame, paper screens, woven rice-plant floor mats, and very little furniture. Such a home, designed to collapse witho
ut killing its inhabitants, could be easily replaced if the inevitable fires that followed the quakes destroyed it. That was the negative aspect of their architectural anti-earthquake scheme: the Japanese cooked on hibachi, open charcoal fires, and when these overturned in an earthquake, the flimsy wooden structures went up like tinder.

  When the ground begins to shake, the Japanese instinct is to run outside—to a bamboo grove, if possible—to wait out the quakes and its aftershocks in an open area, where nothing can fall on you. In the last half century, under Western influence, Japanese architecture had changed, but the old traditions survived.

  So they ran.

  The shaking lasted less than a minute, and by then they were back across the street in Hibiya Park, where there was nothing to fall on them. The little café within the park was on fire, but otherwise, the grounds looked just as they had before. They walked over to a small pond and sat down to take stock of what was happening.

  Henry was looking back across the street at Frank Lloyd Wright’s new building. If it collapsed, he realized that he would indeed have an eyewitness news story for which the world would pay him handsomely. Except for a few fallen stone statues by the courtyard reflecting pool, the hotel had withstood the quake intact, but many nearby structures had collapsed into rubble, and there were plumes of smoke rising from two of the neighboring buildings: the electric company behind the hotel and an insurance building beside it. The electric streetcars had stopped, meaning that the power lines had been broken by the earthquake. It occurred to Henry then that the water mains, buried deep underground, had probably also been destroyed—which meant that the fires would rage unchecked.