Between Black and White (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers #2)(14)

Tom took a couple more steps and finally saw General Helen Lewis slumped in a jury chair with a file jacket in her lap. She wore a black suit, and her lips were painted bright red with lipstick. Scratching one stockinged calf with the toe of her other foot—her heels were lying in a pile underneath her chair—Helen smiled at him. “Tom McMurtrie.”

“Helen,” Tom said. “Been a long time.”

Over the years Tom had run into Helen Lewis at various seminars put on by the American Bar Association, where they both had been speakers. Though not friends, they had developed a mutual respect for the other’s abilities and reputation. He extended his hand, and she stood to shake it, looking him directly in the eye. Her handshake was firm, and her eyes were the greenish-blue color of the Gulf.

“Are you lost, Tom?” she asked, her bright-red lips curving into a grin. “You are a long way from Tuscaloosa.”

Tom chuckled and then turned away from her. “This setup is interesting,” he said, pointing at the witness box. “I haven’t seen anything like it. In every courtroom I’ve ever been in, the witness stand has been adjacent to the judge’s bench. Here, it’s—”

“Right in the center of the room,” Helen finished his thought, and walked toward the witness chair.

Tom noticed that she made no move to put her heels on. Her comfort level made him a bit uneasy. It was as if she were walking around in her own home. She stopped when she reached the witness box and turned to him.

“Front and center, facing the jury and the judge.” She paused, smiling. “I think it’s the way a courtroom should be. Everything that’s important happens right here,” she said, patting the back of the chair. “All testimony. All evidence.” She paused. “Everything else is just for show.” She stepped toward Tom, the smile gone from her face. “You’re here because of Bo Haynes, right?”

Tom nodded.

“You taught him in law school, didn’t you? He was on one of your trial teams.”

Again, Tom nodded. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“Not really,” Helen said. “I just know a lot about Bo Haynes. He’s the only black trial lawyer in town, and he’s very good. He used to do a lot of criminal defense back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and we had dozens of cases against each other.” She paused. “I always do a study of my opponents when I face them in court.”

“And what did you learn about Bo?” Tom asked, smiling at her. But the gesture wasn’t returned. Helen’s emerald eyes blazed with intensity.

“Having grown up in Giles County myself, I knew a lot already. I was just starting in the DA’s office here when Bo was an all-state football player at Giles County High. I remember when Bear Bryant came to Pulaski to watch him play. You woulda thought the president was in town. Police escort to the stadium with sirens blaring. State troopers everywhere. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen.”

Tom smiled, thinking of a similar scene from his own past. “The Man knew how to make an entrance.”

“The Man,” Helen mocked. “I think I’ve heard Bo call him that too. The Man. Is that an inside thing?”

Tom shrugged. “I guess. If you played for Coach Bryant or spent any time around him, he was . . . the Man. It’s a hard thing to describe.”

“Whatever,” Helen said, waving a hand in the air. She returned to her seat in the back row of the jury and crossed her legs. Again, Tom was taken back by the familiarity with which she treated the courtroom. “Anyway, everyone in Pulaski followed Bo’s college career. It was hard not to. The local newspaper always mentioned how many tackles he had made in a game, stuff like that. The articles stopped after he blew his knee out.” She paused, squinting up at him. “The rest I learned from doing a little digging. Law School at Alabama, where he was on your national championship trial team. Clerked a summer at Jones & Butler, the law factory in Birmingham. Then back here after law school. Hung a shingle on First Street a block north of First National Bank, and he’s been in that same office for the past twenty-five years.” She paused, chuckling with what sounded to Tom like admiration. “Starting out as a black lawyer in this town in the mid-’80s was not much different than being a female prosecutor. Not many of us around. In Bo’s case, none. He cut his teeth on criminal defense and workers’ comp cases and then started attracting the lucrative personal injury plaintiff cases by the mid-’90s.”

“I always thought it was strange that he came back here,” Tom said, purposely testing Helen’s knowledge, as he had learned the answer to that riddle himself last year.

“Not to me,” Helen said. “Or to anyone else in Pulaski.” She cocked her head at Tom. “And I think you might be playing possum with me, Tom. I think you know the reason too.”

Tom kept a poker face, giving away nothing. Helen Lewis was a different animal. Unlike almost every other lawyer he’d been around for the past several decades, male and female alike, Helen paid Tom no deference for being a longtime law professor. She didn’t address him as Professor, as so many of his colleagues did, and she didn’t seem awed in the least by his association with Coach Bryant.

“Why don’t you remind me?” Tom asked.

Keeping her head cocked to the side, Helen glared up at Tom. “Because ever since he was five years old, Bocephus Haynes has claimed that Andy Walton and twenty members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered his father. Bo came back to Pulaski for revenge.” She paused, crossing her arms across her chest. “And early last Friday morning he got it.”