“Then why is the FBI askin’ questions?”

“I ain’t seen no FBI.”

“Not yet, but they called me two days ago. They had your name. Look, Simeon, you get your ass busted by the Feds, and you and Lettie can forget about a jury trial in this county. Can’t you see this, man? Front-page news. Hell, everybody in town is talkin’ ’bout Lettie and Mr. Hubbard’s will anyway. You screw up, and you get no sympathy from any jury. I’m not even sure the black folk’ll stick with you. You gotta think, man.”

The Feds, Simeon almost said, but he held his tongue and continued looking through the window. They rode in silence until they were close to his home. To spare him the indignity, Ozzie allowed him to get in his truck and drive. “Be in court at 9:00, Wednesday morning,” he said. “I’ll get Jake to handle the paperwork. We’ll bump it down the road for a while.”

Simeon thanked him and drove away, slowly.

He counted eight cars parked in his driveway and around his front yard. Smoke lifted from the grill. Kids were everywhere. A regular party as they closed ranks around their dear Lettie.

He parked on the road and began walking toward the house. This might get ugly.

16

Since the arrival of Mr. Hubbard’s last will and testament two weeks earlier, the morning mail had become far more interesting. Each day brought a new wrinkle as more lawyers piled on and scrambled for position. Wade Lanier filed a petition to contest the will on behalf of Ramona and Ian Dafoe, and it proved inspirational. Within days, similar petitions were filed by lawyers representing Herschel Hubbard, his children, and the Dafoe children. Since petitions were allowed to be liberally amended, the early drafts followed the same basic strategy. They claimed that the handwritten will was invalid because (1) Seth Hubbard lacked testamentary capacity and (2) he was unduly influenced by Lettie Lang. Nothing was offered to substantiate these allegations, but that was not unusual in the suing business. Mississippi held to the practice of “notice pleading,” or, in other words, just lay out the basics and try to prove the specifics later.

Behind the scenes, Ian Dafoe’s efforts to convince Herschel to join ranks with the Wade Lanier firm proved unproductive and even caused a rift. Herschel had not been impressed with Lanier and thought he would be ineffective with a jury, though he had little to base this on. In need of a Mississippi lawyer, Herschel approached Stillman Rush with the idea of representing his interests. As the attorneys for the 1987 will, the Rush firm was facing a declining role in the contest. It would have little to do but watch, and it looked doubtful Judge Atlee would tolerate its presence, even from the sideline, with the meter ticking, of course. Herschel made the shrewd decision to hire the highly regarded Rush firm, on a contingency basis, and said good-bye to his Memphis attorney.

While the contestants of the will jockeyed for position, the proponents fought among themselves. Rufus Buckley made an official entry into the case as local counsel for Lettie Lang. Jake filed a trivial objection on the grounds that Buckley did not have the necessary experience. The bombs landed when Booker Sistrunk, as promised, filed a motion to remove Jake and replace him with the firm of Sistrunk & Bost, with Buckley as the Mississippi attorney. The following day, Sistrunk and Buckley filed another motion asking Judge Atlee to remove himself on the vague, bizarre grounds that he held some sort of bias against the handwritten will. Then they filed a motion requesting a change of venue to another, “fairer” county. In other words, a blacker one.

Jake spoke at length to a litigator in Memphis, a stranger connected by a mutual acquaintance. This lawyer had tangled with Sistrunk for years, was no fan, but had come to grudgingly admire the results. Sistrunk’s strategy was to blow up a case, reduce it to a race war, attack every white person involved, including the presiding judge if necessary, and haggle over jury selection long enough to get enough blacks on the panel. He was brash, loud, smart, fearless and could be very intimidating in court and out. When necessary, he could turn on the charm in front of a jury. There were always casualties in a Sistrunk trial, and he showed no concern for who got hurt. Litigating against him was so unpleasant that potential defendants had been known to settle quickly.

Such tactics might work in the racially charged atmosphere of the Memphis federal court system, but never in Ford County, not in front of Judge Reuben V. Atlee anyway. Jake had read and reread the motions filed by Sistrunk, and the more he read the more he became convinced that the big lawyer was causing irreparable damage to Lettie Lang. He showed copies to Lucien and Harry Rex, and both agreed. It was a boneheaded strategy, guaranteed to backfire and fail.

Two weeks into the case, and Jake was ready to walk away if Sistrunk stayed in the game. He filed a motion to exclude the motions filed by Sistrunk and Buckley, on the grounds that they had no standing in court. He was the attorney for the will proponents, not them. He planned to lean on Judge Atlee to put them in their place; otherwise, he would happily go home.

Russell Amburgh was discharged and disappeared from the matter. He was replaced by the Honorable Quince Lundy, a semiretired lawyer from Smithfield, and an old friend of Judge Atlee’s. Lundy had chosen the peaceful career of a tax adviser, thus avoiding the horrors of litigation. And as the substitute executor or administrator, as he was officially known, he would be expected to perform his tasks with little regard for the will contest. His job was to gather Mr. Hubbard’s assets, appraise them, protect them, and report to the court. He hauled the records from the Berring Lumber Company to Jake’s office in Clanton and stored them in a room downstairs next to the small library. He began making the one-hour commute and arrived promptly each morning at ten. Luckily, he and Roxy hit it off and there was no drama.

Drama, though, was brewing in a different part of the office. Lucien seemed to be acquiring the habit of stopping by each day, nosing around in the Hubbard matter, digging through the library, barging into Jake’s office, offering opinions and advice, and pestering Roxy, who couldn’t stand him. Lucien and Quince had mutual friends, and before long they were drinking pots of coffee and telling stories about colorful old judges who’d been dead for decades. Jake stayed upstairs with his door closed while little work was being done downstairs.

Lucien was also being seen in and around the courthouse, for the first time in many years. The humiliation of his disbarment had faded. He still felt like a pariah, but he was such a legend, for all the wrong reasons, that people wanted to say hello. Where you been? What’re you up to these days? He was often seen in the land records, digging through dusty old deed books late in the afternoon, like a detective searching for clues.

Late in October, Jake and Carla awoke at 5:00 on a Tuesday morning. They quickly showered, dressed, said good-bye to Jake’s mother, who was babysitting and sleeping on the sofa, and took off in the Saab. At Oxford, they zipped through a fast-food drive-in and got coffee and biscuits. An hour west of Oxford, the hills flattened into the Delta. They raced along highways that cut through fields white with late cotton. Giant, insect-like cotton pickers crept through the fields, devouring four rows at a time while trailers waited to collect their harvest. An old sign announced, “Parchman 5 Miles Ahead,” and before long the fencing of the prison came into view.