High Country Fall

“He hit himself?”

“No, ma’am. The handle is made of a spongy black rubber with so many tiny holes that it didn’t yield fingerprints. The prints we found were on the shaft and head.”

“So no fingerprints of my client on the hammer, no spatters on my client’s clothes, which would have happened if he’d been the one to use that hammer—”

“Objection,” said Burke. “Is counsel asserting that she’s an expert in blood spatters?”

“Withdrawn,” said Delorey.

She had made a plausible explanation for the blood, but what couldn’t be explained away was the rest of Fletcher’s testimony. The statements he had taken from the various participants that evening and the next morning made it quite clear that Daniel Freeman had not gone to the Ledwig home to help repair the deck. He had gone to try and change the ultimatum the doctor had laid down to Freeman and his daughter when they told him she was pregnant and that they wanted to marry immediately.

Over his dead body, Ledwig had reportedly said. He told them he would arrange for an abortion and ordered her never to see the baby’s father again. If she refused to comply, he would see to it that Freeman’s scholarship at Fletcher-MacLeod was revoked. He would also cut her allowance immediately, stop paying her tuition, and would forbid her to come to the house or to see her younger sister for so long as the younger daughter expected his support.

Now, young women have been getting pregnant without benefit of clergy for as long as the world has been turning, and fathers have been angry and threatened to kill the man or kick out the daughter for just as long, but in this day and age? When illegitimacy carries few social stigmas in most circles beyond a shrug and a sheepish smile? It puzzled me that a man of Dr. Ledwig’s presumed intelligence and education would try to employ heavy-handed patriarchal power instead of psychology and common sense.

All of the statements Fletcher had taken were evasive about the reasons for the doctor’s opposition to Freeman until he read aloud Freeman’s statement taken Friday afternoon. “‘I told Dr. Ledwig that if my racial designation bothered him so much, I’d change it to white and the baby could go down as white, too, and he said that there’d never been a drop of nigger blood in his family and he’d be damned if it was going to start with his first grandchild.’”

I wasn’t the only one whose eyes automatically swung to Daniel Freeman in fresh appraisal of his brown hair, his hazel eyes, his summer tan as Fletcher continued reading from the young man’s statement.

“‘Yes, it made me mad, and yes, I wanted to punch him out, but I didn’t. And I didn’t go out there yesterday to pick a fight. I thought maybe if he’d had time to calm down, I could make him see how stupid this whole race thing is. But when I got there, he was already down on the rocks, and no, I did not hit him with the hammer or push him off the deck.’”

I understood now why Burke had decided to go for voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Murder, especially murder in the first degree, requires strong elements of hatred and premeditation—the classic “malice aforethought” so dear to television cop shows. Voluntary manslaughter places partial blame on the victim, who inflames the passions of his killer, who then kills in the heat of the moment.

Ms. Delorey did not put her client on the stand, but in her closing argument to me, she insisted that Dr. Ledwig’s words were not enough to goad her client into killing.

Mr. Burke made a more convincing argument that they were.

“The State is not insisting that Mr. Freeman is a cold-blooded murderer, Your Honor. He’s a good student, has never before been arrested, never even had a speeding ticket, but when Dr. Ledwig demanded that his daughter abort their child, effectively murdering their baby, when Dr. Ledwig taunted him and called him a nigger, the worst insult a white man can hurl at a man of African descent, Mr. Freeman lost it. He grabbed up that hammer and he struck his tormentor down; then, no doubt appalled by what he’d done, he pushed Dr. Ledwig over the edge of the deck, hoping that the fall would cover up the wound.”

I found that there was indeed probable cause to bind Mr. Freeman over for trial in superior court and continued his bail at the twenty-five thousand Judge Rawlings had thought sufficient.

It was almost four o’clock, but with ADA William Deeck back at the prosecutor’s table, we got through all the rest of the items on the calendar before I adjourned for the day.

CHAPTER 7

The twins had left me a note— Back between 11 and 12 and we’ll bring supper. XXX I guess they thought a greasy late- night snack would make up for the dirty coffee mugs and sticky smears I found on the dining table when I let myself into the condo and eased the strap of my laptop off my weary shoulder onto the only clean corner of the table.

As a Luddite friend keeps reminding me, a pad and pencil only weigh about six ounces; my laptop weighs seven pounds and felt like seventy that last flight of steps. Yeah, yeah, I could have left it locked in Rawlings’s office at the courthouse, but I wanted to check my e-mail, something I hadn’t had a chance to do all day and something that can’t be done with a pad and pencil.

I put the dirty mugs and sugar-encrusted spoons in the dishwasher, wiped down the table, and plugged my modem cord into the kitchen phone jack. One of these days I’m going to look into wireless communication, but for now, I keep a twenty-five-foot phone cord in my laptop case.

Along with offers of Viagra, penile implants, breast enlargement, pornographic photographs, free septic tank inspections, and the opportunity to help a general’s son fleece the Nigerian government of several million dollars, I found messages from Portland, my sole attendant if the wedding actually came off (“The way this baby’s kicking I don’t think I’m going to last till December. What about Halloween?”), from my cousin Beverly (“Forgot to tell you that there’s no garbage pickup. You’ll have to use the county’s waste site on Ridge Road.”), and a one-liner from Dwight (“You get there okay?”).

I had my finger poised over the delete button for a message entitled “Want to party?” when I noticed that the unfamiliar sender had an NC.rr.com in the server tag. It was a woman Will had brought to one of the weekly family music sessions we hold at a cousin’s barbecue house out near the farm. So many of us play the fiddle, guitar, banjo, or harmonica that even though none of us go every single week, there’re usually at least six or eight who show up after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to eat barbecue, play and sing the old songs, or, as Haywood puts it, just fellowship together.

Your brother Will says you’re up here alone this week? I know this isn’t much notice, but we’re having a party tonight and would love to have you join us. You probably don’t remember us, but Will invited us to sit