MacPherson's Lament

He eased himself down on the park bench and began massaging his calf. The right one, he thought. I must remember which one to limp on. Aloud he said, “That darned calf muscle. It’s an old football injury from my days on the varsity at Georgia Tech.” (Well, he had attended Georgia Tech, and he had played varsity in high school, so it was almost true.)

Caroline pushed her dark bangs away from her forehead. Her lovely, vacant face furrowed with concern. “Gee, can you walk on it, Doug?”

“I can manage,” he said, still a trifle breathless. “I probably ought to take it easy for a while, though. Wouldn’t want to tear the muscle.”

He allowed Caroline to put her shoulder under his arm and guide him along, as he hopped and limped back to the car. “Well, I guess that puts the kibosh on running for a while,” he remarked, trying to mute the cheerfulness in his tone. “Maybe I could teach you to play bridge this week instead.”

Caroline wrinkled her nose. “Yecch! I hate card games. They’re so dreary.”

Doug felt a pang of disappointment. He quite enjoyed a rousing game of bridge, and what’s more he was good at it. He and Margaret almost always won a prize at the-he choked off the memory in mid-thought. That was the old Doug MacPherson, he reminded himself. If he was going to start over, he couldn’t live in the past. Besides, with Caroline there were better things to do than play cards. He pictured poor Margaret at home, watching soap operas and counting the goldfish, and sighed to himself, thinking how close he had come to death from sheer boredom.

“The leg feels better now,” he told Caroline. “Let’s try it again.”

I was sitting around watching the phone not ring and wondering if one could have an early hamburger in lieu of Scotland’s very civilized afternoon teatime when the door to the outer office banged, and a beautiful blonde walked in. Oh, goody, I thought. Can fistfights and shots of rye be far behind? Alas, women’s lives never live up to men’s fantasies.

She was very pretty in a wholesome track-team sort of way, with short-cropped hair and blue eyes that didn’t have time to be charming because they were boring into you for analysis. I endeavored to look pleasant, but since she was probably the sort of person accustomed to being fawned over, my effort made little impression. “May I help you?”

She frowned in my direction and then looked wildly around the office. “Good grief! Edith hasn’t resigned, has she?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I assured her. “But she isn’t here. I’m Elizabeth MacPherson. Can I help?”

She stopped pacing for a moment and stuck out her hand. “A. P. Hill. I’m your brother’s partner. I guess you know that.”

I nodded. What I didn’t know was whether Bill had confided his current legal difficulties to her. “He’s in the courthouse, I think. Mr. Trowbridge called with another legal question.”

A. P. Hill rolled her eyes. “I knew Bill should never have taken that stupid job. He’ll end up spending all his time ferreting out answers to useless questions-and he’ll neglect the real practice. I can’t stick around to keep him working on more productive matters because I have an out-of-town trial to deal with.” She sighed. “How is he?”

“Oh, he’s keeping busy,” I said somewhat evasively. “How is your case going? I heard it was a murder trial.”

“It’s a tough one,” she said. “Of course, it’s my first real trial, which makes it even more difficult for me.”

“They trusted you with a murder trial?” I didn’t mean to sound unflattering, but I wouldn’t want to risk my life in the hands of a novice attorney.

“Nobody else wanted to take it.” She shrugged. “By the time I’m through, it’ll hardly pay minimum wage. But I thought that if I did well for Tug Mosier, I could get myself noticed in local legal circles.”

“How’s the plan going so far?”

“I haven’t evolved any brilliant schemes for the defense. He was drunk at the time he supposedly killed his girlfriend, so I had a doctor give him a regression-therapy drug to see if it would help him recall the events of that night.”

“What if he remembered doing it?”

A. P. Hill fiddled with a pencil from the desk. “I would have pleaded diminished capacity, I guess. It certainly wouldn’t be first-degree murder. I was hoping he’d remember not doing it. It could have been a burglar, you know. I needed some kind of evidence that somebody else could have done it.”

“Reasonable doubt?”

“Yes. And I got it. Under sedation, Tug remembered a guy named Red going home with him. After that, he just stared at the wall and wouldn’t talk. I thought about trying again, but then I remembered one of my law professors saying that you don’t really want to know if your client is guilty, because it will detract from the zeal of your defense of him.”

“But I thought the whole point of the sedation was to find out if he did it.”

“Well, it was, but when I heard him mention another man at the scene of the crime, I thought the safest thing was to go with that. All I have to do is suggest to a jury that Red could have done it, and then they can’t convict Tug.”

“They can’t?”

A.P. groaned. “Of course they can. The jury can do whatever it wants. It’s my job to persuade them that they aren’t sure enough to convict Tug.”

“It would be interesting to know if he did it or not,” I mused. “Do you have the paperwork on the case?”

“Copies in the file cabinet. Why?”

“I thought I’d take a look at the autopsy report. I’m a forensic anthropologist.”

A. P. Hill did not look particularly impressed by this announcement. “I’ll get it for you,” she said. “Just leave it on my desk when you’re through. I have to go.” She scribbled a telephone number on a note pad and wrote Powell beside it. “That’s the phone number of the motel I’m staying in. I moved out of the old one because they kept forgetting to give me my messages.”

“I’ll see that Bill gets this,” I promised.

“Thanks. While you’re at it, tell Bill to start boning up on discrimination law in his copious free time. When this trial is over, I’ll have a new case for us.”

“A new client?”

She grinned. “Yeah. Me. We’re suing the National Park Service.”

Before I could ask her what she meant by that, she was gone. I started to leaf through the stack of papers. The case seemed rather ordinary, I thought. Very tragic for the family of the victim, but not exceptional for an attorney or a policeman. It was the sort of case you read about in small-town papers every Monday morning: drunken good old boy kills his girlfriend. I thought prison might not be such a bad idea for Tug Mosier. He didn’t seem to have any other prospects.

I hadn’t got very far in the case file when the phone rang again.

“Bill MacPherson, please,” said a voice like old razor blades.

“I’m sorry, he’s not here. May I take a message?” I didn’t want to talk to this voice long enough to explain who I wasn’t. He sounded like the kind of man who thinks female and secretary are synonymous anyhow.

“This is Agent Runge of the State Bureau of Investigation. When do you expect Mr. MacPherson to return?”

“Any time now,” I said as pleasantly as I could while my blood froze. “Shall I have him call you?”

“You do that.” He barked out his number and then hung up without saying goodbye. He probably thought I was scum just because I answered the phone for one of his suspects. I actually felt guilty when I hung up. In fact, I think if the agent had walked in at that point, I might have confessed to two robberies and an earthquake. I’ll bet Mr. Runge is pretty darned good at his job.

I made a note to Bill to call SBI Agent Runge at the number given. Do not whimper into phone, I added. I thought Bill ought to be warned.

Things were getting serious, though. It looked as though we were running out of time. I called some more moving companies and finally found one who remembered the old ladies. Yes, they had gone out to the Phillips Mansion and packed up all the furniture. Where had they taken it? I asked breathlessly, ready to solve the