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Pearl looked at her grandmother with a surprised expression. “I just come and meet you here,” she said hastily. “When you need me to.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No. But it only a couple of bus rides.”
“But it would be far easier for me to visit you. Wait, do you have a phone?”
She shook her head.
“Okay.” He handed her a piece of paper and a pencil. “Just write your address down for me. I’ll be glad to come and meet with you there.”
She slowly wrapped her strong, callused fingers around the pencil in a way unfamiliar and almost fearful, at least to Jack’s mind. As though he had asked her to handle a viper and not an instrument of writing.
Glancing nervously at Miss Jessup from time to time, Pearl slowly formed the letters and numbers like a clumsy novice skater stumbling fretfully over the ice. Finished, she set the pencil down and slowly moved the paper across to Jack.
He glanced at the writing and his brow wrinkled in confusion.
Miss Jessup said crisply, “Her address is Sixteen Old Anna Street. No signpost, but you turn right at the big oak that’s split in half after you get off the bypass where the old fairgrounds was. House at the end of the road. Got blue shutters and a lean-to on the side. Can’t miss it. Only one other house down there.”
“I’m sure I can find it,” said Jack. “Thank you.”
Pearl rose and Miss Jessup mirrored this movement. Pearl said, “We got to get back to work.”
“I can drive you where you need to go.”
Pearl shook her head. “You got enough trouble comin’ your way as it is, without havin’ two colored women in your car.”
Jack watched them walk down the street until they turned a corner and vanished from sight.
Are you up to this, Jack Lee? Taking on the whole commonwealth of Virginia, a coal millionaire, and George Wallace? For two hundred bucks?
CHAPTER 16
THE KNOCK ON HIS OFFICE door came at just past six p.m. When Jack opened it he was gazing at two uniformed deputies, who stared cautiously back at him.
The tall, lean one had his hands on his narrow hips and had puffed out his shallow chest. The short, wide-hipped one allowed his right hand to dangle enticingly close to his holstered .38.
Sweat lacquered both their brows and fouled their shirts. The tall deputy pointed to the sign on the wall. “John Robert Lee, Esquire, Attorney-at-Law. That you, mister?”
“I’m Jack Lee, yes. And you?”
“Deputy Gene Taliaferro,” he said, tapping his chest. “And this here’s Deputy Raymond LeRoy. We the ones caught your boy after he butchered the Randolphs.” He rubbed his shoulder. “That sumbitch knocked me to the floor. He’s like an animal, but most of them are. Even the women.”
“Especially the women,” volunteered LeRoy. “You called at the station for us?”
“I wanted to speak with you as part of my investigation. Come on in.”
The men did so, wiping their boots on the doormat, and taking off their hats.
“What investigation?” said Gene. “We got the sucker. Folks rightly expect the chair for somethin’ like this, though I guess they don’t use that no more. Hope they start back up and let that boy be the first one on the hot seat. Hell, I wish they still hung ’em.”
“Have you ever done that?” asked Jack. “Hung someone for being Black?”
Gene smiled. “Hell, lawyer, that’d be illegal. And I’m a man of the law.”
Jack motioned them to the same chairs Pearl and Miss Jessup had occupied, and wondered what either man would think about sitting in chairs the women had used.
Gene said, “Hey now, ain’t they got colored lawyers for colored killers?”
