Gary Alexander - The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Harcourt, who had mastered his anger completely, smiled. “Oh, John and I have had many months to discuss every topic.”

The young man — Harcourt was beginning to think it a good idea to learn his name — gave him a frank look before regaining his smile. Then he turned it on John, who stood shuddering with fists clenched. He didn’t have his friend Harcourt’s composure. Like many mild men, he was not used to his own anger and couldn’t master it quickly.

“You and I still have much to discuss,” the young man said as he left the office, greeting the other lawyers affably on his way out. He didn’t glance back at Madelyn, whose hand had removed itself from his arm in an instant when Bill had appeared.

“William,” she said graciously, extending her hand to him.

So the three of them stood and chatted, as if nothing had just happened. Bill chatted amiably with Madelyn, but noticed that her other hand never extended to her husband’s arm. John and Bill had been released from confinement at the same time, but obviously, John had needed less time to reacquaint himself with his wife and had been out in the world sooner.

Speaking of the last few days, Harcourt said to his former chain mate, “I felt like an amputee, with only my own two legs to account for. I had forgotten how to walk alone.” John laughed, and laughter came from the doorway too. The three lawyers there knew exactly what he meant.

After a minute John took up his office, and his wife left alone.

Henry, the former clerk, had taken over William Harcourt’s old office. Harcourt glanced into it, but showed no inclination to enter. “No, don’t bother, Henry. You keep the desk. Let’s wait to see whether I need it or another.”

The other attorneys went off to the courthouse, but Harcourt demurred. In their absences, he owned the offices. He wandered into John’s, or the office that had been John Lawrence’s, wondering how it was changed. On the desk, he found a ledger book. John had always been very careful in his accounts. Harcourt leafed through it, noting columns of income and brief notations of services performed. Then the writing changed, though still recording similar transactions. Obviously, the young Austin lawyer had taken over John’s account book, along with other parts of his life. Harcourt leafed through the book to the blank pages at the end, then sat musing.

As he had said, nature hates a vacuum and rushes to fill it. But nature has even stricter rules against two bodies occupying the same space.

The Texas Republic was short-lived (1836–1845), but no one living in it knew it would be. For all they knew, they had founded an enduring nation. Mexico, on the other hand, never acknowledged the sovereignty of the new country, still considering it a rebel province of its own. Its army continued to make raids into Texas, designed to humiliate more than to conquer. The Mexican President, Santa Ana, hated Texas, and no part of it more than San Antonio, the scene of his triumph at the Alamo, but which had shrugged off that tragedy to become the largest, most thriving city in Texas. The Alamo was in fact already a tourist destination, the shrine of Texas liberty. Two Mexican raids into San Antonio had wreaked havoc, and the second had accomplished its strange goal. Mexican soldiers had captured the courthouse and every lawyer in town, marching them deep into Mexico and captivity in the castle of Perote.

In Mexico, the imprisoned lawyers had often speculated on the nature of life in their absence. “I think people will be more civil to each other,” one man had ventured. “They’ll have to be, won’t they, without courts to resolve their disputes?”

Samuel Maverick had shaken his shaggy head. “They’ll kill each other,” he’d intoned in his slow, gloomy voice, so suited to a courtroom. “The town will devolve back to the frontier. The law is what protects us from chaos, and none of us is very far removed from chaos.”

In the darkness of the dungeon, Harcourt’s voice had come slyly, like one of the vermin that crept through their sleeping straw. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me until now that we were upholding civilization, like Atlas. I couldn’t have borne up under the strain.”

John Lawrence’s laugh had been the first, followed by general hilarity, which they cut off quickly at the sound of an outer door. The Mexicans hated nothing so much as laughter from their captives.

Back in town now, on his second day home, Bill Harcourt wondered which of their speculations had been true. He dropped in on his friend the general store keeper, a onetime ranch hand who was smarter than his lot in life and had seen the need for mercantilism. His store prospered in dry goods, hardware, and feed. Prospered enough that he could sit on the porch and tell an old friend what life had been like in his absence.

“Oh, there was a mite more killing than usual, that’s true, but hardly any that didn’t need it. And we still had police, of course. There was no breakdown in law — no more than ordinary. A few folks had to sit in jail longer than they would have, I suppose, but no one had much sympathy for them. Two or three had their hangings delayed for want of a trial, but they seemed satisfied to wait.”

“But the ordinary civil disputes,” Bill questioned, “what did people do when they could no longer cry, ‘I’ll see you in court’?”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “They fought, of course. Sometimes right here on this street. Unless the dispute was between women, then they went at each other in slyer and more crippling ways. But mostly, men settled their differences the time-honored way.”

“Trial by combat,” Bill mused. He could see it taking place as if in front of him. “Older than law. And a good fist fight is much quicker and more satisfying than a trial, for both the participants and the spectators.”

“Yup,” the shopkeeper said complacently.

For the rest of the day and the next, Bill stayed away from his old friend John, and from the courthouse. In the last year and a half, his comradely desire to spend time with his colleagues had been more than satisfied. Instead, he walked around the town, refamiliarizing himself with the houses and buildings and trying to ignore the insubstantial quality they seemed to have now. He resumed acquaintances with his children and had long, quiet talks with his wife. In his absence, his wife had acquired more cattle and hired a man to plant more acres. She had done more than get by, enough so that he could wander about like a kept man for another week or more, and Bill didn’t mind a bit. His wife’s resourcefulness meant he didn’t have to return immediately to the practice of law, and he felt no desire to do so. The old forms seemed strange to him, empty rituals. He picked up a deed in his old office and found its language ridiculous.

William Harcourt might never have tried a case again if not for the murder.

In the days of the Texas Republic, adventurers and settlers created a nation from their imaginations and faulty memories. Squatting in buildings that had housed the governments under Spain and then Mexico, they made institutions out of a traveler’s fever dream of history. Their court system borrowed from England and stole from Spain, with bits of French thrown in for flavor. The beauty of this system was that a hometown lawyer could always claim he was working in one tradition or another, while the arcana of the law discouraged new competition.

But with all the hometown lawyers gone for so many months, inevitably a few others had moved in, down from Austin or over from Nacogdoches. Common sense would say that these were not the brightest lights of their local bars. No one would leave a thriving practice to move into a town whose own lawyers might return any day. On the other hand, San Antonio was a booming town and needed legal transactions. A few out-of-town lawyers took the gamble, including the young dandy whom Bill had attacked in John’s office. The young fellow turned out to have a name, Luke Enright. They would put it on a cheap tombstone if his body turned up.