“And this was a lawyer. An angry young man who bore a grudge. There’s no use to run if you’re still pursued. Much better to make your creditors think you’re dead. And if young Enright was going to fake his death, what better sweetness than to have his revenge at the same time? Initiate another quarrel with the man he hated, then flee.”
Maverick surveyed the jurors, hardheaded lawyers who looked skeptical. And flee without his horse? they were clearly thinking.
“And leave with his lover. Yes. I hate to suggest scandal, but look at the facts. Mrs. Lawrence rode north. Not the direction she would normally take, but the direction from which young Enright came. They met, he cut himself and dripped blood on the saddle, and they rode away, Enright laughing to himself.”
These jurors were lawyers, and not used to sitting silent in a courtroom. One said, “That’s a fanciful picture, Maverick,” and his neighbor added, “What about the watch he left behind? His most treasured possession. He wouldn’t have run off without it.”
The watch in question dangled from Maverick’s hand. “This watch? The one he inherited from his grandfather? Look at the inside of the case, gentlemen. This watch has a manufacturer’s date of 1838. It’s very young for a treasured family heirloom.”
He handed it across, and the jurors inspected it eagerly. Some looked at the defendant with new expressions, while others narrowed their eyes.
Bill Harcourt declined rebuttal argument. The verdict was swift. The jurors didn’t even leave their box, only huddled together, then one stood to say, “Your Honor, we find the defendant not guilty.”
The chief of police sputtered, but the new judge assured him that the verdict was as legal as a poll tax. The room surged around John with congratulations. It was important that nearly every lawyer in town had participated. They would spread the word. There might be speculation that the attorneys had protected one of their own, but not the kind of presumed guilt that would have dogged John Lawrence without this proceeding.
Besides, in the Republic of Texas there were rumors much more damaging to reputation than that one had killed a man. That suspicion added a touch of stature.
The men gradually cleared out of the offices. John declined offers of celebration until, with glances, the men understood that Bill Harcourt was lingering too. The men had a friendship to repair.
When the men were alone, John still sitting on his rickety wooden chair, Bill leaning back against the desk, Bill said simply, “Forgive me?”
John laughed. “I thought no one might volunteer to prosecute me, then there’d have been no trial and no exoneration. I owe you more—”
“Well, you know my passion for justice,” Bill said archly.
“I do, actually.”
Bill gave his friend a sidelong glance. “Stealing a man’s livelihood, and his wife, and not being content with that, wanting to take his reputation as well, I call that worse than rustling. And” — his voice rose a little — “to do it while we were rotting in that hole. If you had killed him I’d call it just.”
“When we were marched out of the courthouse on September 11...”John began.
It was a date that would speak an entire narrative for the rest of their lives.
“—we were told we’d be released at the border. Then wondered whether we’d be murdered. Just coming back here seemed a dream of paradise. But I didn’t have waiting for me what many of you had.”
The childless marriage between John and his wife was, at least to the public eye, a cool one. And the names he had murmured in his sleep in Perote Prison had not been women’s names. Bill wondered if young Henry knew the truth. If he did, he would keep it to himself. To Bill, a man’s personal life and preferences were his own business, but here on the western frontier, a suggestion of unmanliness could ruin a man.
“After our year on the brink of death,” he said, “other things seemed like small considerations.”
John fingered the only exhibits from the hasty trial. “You introduced the only evidence in the trial,” he said slowly. “This ledger. The first pages are in my writing, true, but then there are some pages torn out.”
“Are there? Perhaps Enright wanted to put some space between your accounts and his.”
John went on, in his quiet, lawyerly way. “The entries in the back are in the same handwriting, true, but no one has compared that writing to some of the pleadings Enright filed. The way you handled things, there wasn’t time for that kind of investigation.” Harcourt didn’t answer. “And as for that watch, who knows whether that’s the same one Enright carried or where it came from?”
“You’re right. Perhaps Enright planted it there to implicate you, because he couldn’t bear to leave behind the real one.”
John gave him a look rather than an answer. “My point is that there wasn’t time tonight to — to place this evidence here. It must have been done before I was accused. Even before I...”
Bill didn’t want to hear a confession. “Maybe I was protecting myself,” he said. “He trifled with more than one practice, and maybe with more than one wife. Or maybe I just took the opportunity while the rest of you went about your legal business to give the young man a stern lecture and run him out of here. Then made sure there’d be no accusations over his absence that could be sustained.”
These would have been interesting speculations, between two other men. But these two knew the truth. John finally stood and walked close to his friend. “I know how fierce a litigator you are. It must have hurt you,” he said, “to lose this trial.”
“Lose?” Bill looked genuinely surprised. “You forget. The oath I look was to see justice done. I consider this trial one of my most significant victories.” They went out together, into a new town.
William Harcourt — Bill — was induced to serve one term as judge, which he performed to universal respect, but declined reappointment. The end of his tenure coincided with the end of the Texas Republic. In the Mexican War that followed, he and his wife did well in cotton for uniforms. He was a colonel in the War Between the States, which touched Texas but lightly. He lived through turmoil and transformation and rebirth, and closed out his life toward the end of the century he had made his own, to great local renown, never having resumed the practice of law.
Nor did he and his old friend John Lawrence ever tell anyone each other’s secrets.
Phyllis Cohen
Designer Justice
from The Prosecution Rests
Never long on patience, Harold Vekt was beginning to think about giving up. His feet hurt and his beer-laden bladder was trying to get his attention.
His luck, he decided, stank. Forty minutes had passed since he’d positioned himself behind the hedges leading to the elaborate teak-and-glass entryway of the Waterside Club, on the edge of the river that divided the city. Every departing couple had been ushered into a taxi hailed by one of the plushly uniformed doormen, or into a limo that glided up to the entrance at just the right moment.
Half of the women wore furs, although the night was mild. Many of the men, and some of the women, carried leather briefcases. All were well dressed and well groomed. Jewelry with possibilities showed on all the women and many of the men.
Didn’t any of them live within walking distance?
He was about to take a chance on assuaging his bladder in the hedges when the door opened once again and a baritone voice declared, “No thank you, Antonio. It’s a fine evening. We’ll walk home.” Vekt gritted his teeth and zipped up.