“That’s right.”
“Are you ready, Mr. Lanier?”
“Just a second, Judge,” Lanier said as he huddled with Lester Chilcott. They whispered for a while, obviously in disagreement. Jake listened hard but could not decipher anything. He kept his eyes on his notes, on his chosen twelve, knowing he could not keep them all.
“Gentlemen,” Judge Atlee said.
“Yes sir,” Lanier said slowly. “We’ll strike numbers five, sixteen, twenty-five, and twenty-seven.”
The air left the room again as every lawyer and the judge struck names from makeshift charts and moved the higher numbers up the ladder. Judge Atlee said, “So, it looks like our jury will consist of numbers one, two, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-six, and twenty-eight. Does everyone concur?”
The lawyers shook their heads in agreement without taking their eyes from their legal pads. Ten whites, two blacks. Eight women, four men. Half had wills, half did not. Three had college degrees; seven finished high school; two did not. Median age of forty-nine, with two women in their twenties, a pleasant surprise for Jake. Overall he was pleased. On the other side of the table, Wade Lanier was too. The truth was that Judge Atlee did a fine job of eliminating those who might possibly begin deliberations with preconceived notions or prejudices. On paper, it appeared as if the extremists were gone, and the trial was left in the hands of twelve people who appeared to be open-minded.
“Let’s pick a couple of alternates,” His Honor said.
At 7:00 p.m., the new jurors gathered in the jury room and got themselves organized, according to Judge Atlee’s instructions. Because he had been the first one selected, the first name called, the first to be seated, and because he gave every indication of being an amicable type with an easy smile and kind word to all, Mr. Nevin Dark was elected foreman of the jury.
It had been a very long day, but an exciting one. As he drove home, he found himself eager to chat with his wife over a late dinner and tell her everything. Judge Atlee had warned them against discussing the case with each other, but he didn’t say a word about spouses.
40
Lucien shuffled the deck and deftly dealt ten cards to Lonny and the same to himself. As usual now, Lonny slowly lifted his cards from the top of the folding table and took forever arranging them in his preferred order. His hands and words were slow, but his mind seemed to be clicking right along. He was up thirty points in this their fifth game of gin rummy; he’d won three of the first four. He was wearing a saggy hospital gown and an IV hung just over his head. A nicer nurse had given him permission to leave his bed and play cards in front of the window, but only after Lonny had raised his voice. He was sick and tired of the hospital and wanted to leave. But then, he really had no place to go. Only the city jail, where the food was even worse and the cops were waiting with questions. In fact, they were waiting just outside his door now. Thirty kilos of cocaine will always create problems. His new pal Lucien, who said he was a lawyer, had guaranteed him the evidence would be tossed on a motion to suppress. The cops had no probable cause to enter Lonny’s room at the flophouse. Just because a man gets hurt in a bar fight does not give the police the right to rummage through his locked living quarters. “It’s a slam dunk,” Lucien had promised. “Any half-assed criminal lawyer gets the coke thrown out. You’ll walk.”
They had talked about Seth Hubbard, with Lucien throwing in all the facts, gossip, fabrications, speculations, and rumors that had been roaring through Clanton during the past six months. Lonny claimed to be only mildly curious, but he seemed to enjoy listening. Lucien did not mention the handwritten will, nor the black housekeeper. Expansively, he recounted Seth’s amazing ten-year run from a man broken by his second nasty divorce to a high- flying risk taker who parlayed his own mortgaged property into a fortune. He described Seth’s zeal for secrecy, his offshore bank accounts and maze of corporations. He told the amazing historical anecdote of Seth’s father, Cleon, hiring Lucien’s grandfather Robert E. Lee Wilbanks to handle a land dispute in 1928. And they lost!
Lucien talked almost nonstop in an effort to gain Lonny’s trust, to convince him there was no harm in telling secrets from the past. If Lucien could open up so completely, then Lonny could too. On two occasions during the morning, Lucien had gently poked into the business of Lonny knowing anything about Ancil, but neither punch had landed. Lonny seemed to have no interest in that subject. They talked and played throughout the morning. By noon, Lonny was fatigued and needed rest. The nurse enjoyed telling Lucien to leave.
He did so but was back two hours later to check on his new friend. Lonny now wanted to play blackjack, at a dime a hand. After half an hour or so, Lucien said, “I called Jake Brigance, the lawyer I work for in Mississippi, and I asked him to check out this Sylvester Rinds guy you mentioned. He found something.”
Lonny put his cards down and gave Lucien a curious look. Deliberately, he said, “What?”
“Well, according to the land records in Ford County, Sylvester Rinds owned eighty acres of land in the northeast part of the county, land he had inherited from his father, a man named Solomon Rinds, who was born about the time the Civil War started. Though the records are not clear, there’s a good chance the Rinds family came to own the land just after the war, during Reconstruction, when freed slaves were able to obtain land with the help of carpetbaggers and federal governors and other scum that flooded our land back then. It looks as though this eighty acres was in dispute for some time. The Hubbard family owned another eighty acres that adjoined the Rinds property, and evidently they contested this property. The lawsuit I mentioned this morning, the one filed in 1928 by Cleon Hubbard, was a dispute over the Rinds property. My grandfather, who was the finest lawyer in the county and well connected, lost the case for Cleon. I gotta figure that if my grandfather lost the case then the Rinds family must have had a pretty strong claim to the land. So Sylvester managed to hang on to his property for a few more years, but then he died in 1930. After he died, Cleon Hubbard obtained the land from Sylvester’s widow.”
Lonny had picked up his cards and he studied them without seeing them. He was listening and recalling images from another lifetime.
“Pretty interesting, huh?” Lucien said.
“It was a long time ago,” Lonny said, grimacing as pain rippled through his skull.
Lucien plowed ahead. With nothing to lose, he was not about to relax. “The strangest part of this entire story is that there is no record of Sylvester’s death. There’s not a single Rinds now living in Ford County, and it appears as though they all left about the time Cleon Hubbard got his hands on the property. They all vanished; most fled to the North, to Chicago, where they found jobs, but this was not uncommon in the Depression. A lot of starving blacks fled the Deep South. According to Mr. Brigance, they found a distant relative over in Alabama, a man named Boaz Rinds, who claims that some white men took Sylvester and killed him.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” Lonny asked.
Lucien stood and walked to the window where he gazed at a parking lot below. He debated telling the truth now, telling Lonny about the will and Lettie Lang and her ancestry: that she was almost certainly a Rinds instead of a Tayber; that her people were from Ford County and had once lived on the land owned by Sylvester; that it was highly probable Sylvester was in fact her grandfather.
But he sat back down and said, “Nothing really. Just some old history involving my kinfolks, Seth Hubbard’s, and maybe Sylvester Rinds’s.”
There was a moment of silence in which neither man touched his cards. Neither made eye contact. As Lonny seemed to drift away, Lucien jolted him with “You knew Ancil, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Lonny said.
“Tell me about him. I need to find him, and quick.”
“What do you want to know about him?”
“Is he alive?”
“He is, yes.”
“Where is he right now?”
“Don’t know.”
“When did you last see him?”
