The Promise of the Pelican by Roy Hoffman

Author:Roy Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781956763096
Publisher: Arcade Crimewise
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

25

CODE OF ALABAMA

HE HAD TRIED TO SELL the law books upon his retirement but now it seemed like buena suerte, he said to Lupita after their Spanish lesson, “good luck.” The multiple volumes of the Code of Alabama had filled his office shelves for decades and were a steal, he realized, for what he was asking. After three months with no inquiries, he decided to offer them for free to a lucky young lawyer. Still, no takers. “Mr. Weinberg,” a friend of Vanessa’s told him, “everything’s online now.”

Margery had insisted there was no room at the house and encouraged him to talk to a decorator who inquired about them for a couple wanting “handsome book bindings to line their library shelves.” “Tell them to learn how to read and get some damn books of their own,” he’d responded. He’d filled six boxes with his precious friends—how often they’d helped him see the way through a defendant’s predicament—and set them behind the forgotten stationary bike and water skis in the far recesses of the garage.

He needed them now. Blue pixels on a gray screen were insubstantial, evanescent. Around him was the weight of the law.

As he dug them out he recalled their smell. He took out one volume, ran his hand over the maroon binding, cracked it open, pressed his nose into the crevice, breathed in the paper and stitching. His office high up in the Alabama Trust Building opened around him, at its entrance Miss Matilda, his lifelong secretary, with her soft sole therapeutic shoes and blue sack dress and forbidding voice to those who might attack him.

He had pieces of paper stuck in the pages, marking old cases, charges, strategies, defendants, in his cryptic shorthand. CapM— Man—capital murder-manslaughter—Greg Hills. Hills had been a small-time boxer who killed a stevedore named Jerry in a bar fight by the docks. The men began a disagreement while drinking, started to “take it outside,” as the bartender testified, when Jerry jumped Greg. “You sonuvabitch,” Greg yelled, “I’ll kill you,” and punched Jerry twice in the face. Jerry fell to the floor, fatally cracking his skull. That Greg in the past had delivered fatal blows to two other men did not help the defense. Hank got him off the capital charge, though, with a reduced sentence for manslaughter, at least two jurors looking like they’d been in bar fights themselves.

Earl and Martha Stokes, ABF. Accomplice before the fact.

The Stokeses, who were black, had been charged with aiding the murder of a white man, Jack, whose neighbor, Mo, also white, said Jack had been sleeping with his girlfriend and blasted him with a shotgun loaned to him by the Stokeses. Martha had taken the shotgun to Mo’s, as Mo’s own shotgun was being repaired for a faulty firing pin. The prosecution argued that the Stokeses had a vow to take down Jack for their own reasons—they claimed he’d stolen their land. “A vendetta of three against one,” the DA said. “They all knew what the shotgun was for.

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