The Resurrection File Page 5

  “Okay, so where do you fit in this mess?” Will asked.

  “Hadley wants me to stay on with the firm—relocate up to the D.C. office,” Jacki said, a little bit more softly. “Which actually works out well, I guess, because I’m barred in D.C. And Howard works up in northern Virginia, so I would be closer to him and have a shorter commute. And what I guess I am saying is this—Will, I can’t afford to stay on with you if you’re going to go it solo now. I mean really, besides Tiny, you’ve got only one client.”

  “Jacki, listen to me. I can build up the practice in a very short period of time. I want you to hang in there with me.”

  “Will, I don’t want this to be any harder than it already is. Maybe I can help you out a little here or there, on the side. You know, if you need someone to cover for a deposition once in a while or do some legal research. But I have to stick with the firm. I know that sounds like I’m copping out on you. But my mind is made up. I’m sorry.”

  Will gazed ahead blankly and said nothing for a few minutes. Jacki had made her point. He had been her mentor and friend. As of late she had covered for him, and even nurse-maided him since his wife had died. But that was all changing now. As Will sat slumped down in the seat of his prized Corvette, his long hair whipping in the wind, he was simply tired of fighting—tired of caring.

  Finally Jacki broke the silence.

  “So, you want to know something about your sole survivor? The single client that you’ve got left?”

  “Yeah. Who’s the lucky winner?” Will asked sardonically.

  “Angus MacCameron. Reverend MacCameron to be exact. He’s the new client I took for you this morning. A little weird—he actually made me take a ‘loyalty oath’—he wanted to make sure I believed in God. I’m going to be real interested to see whether he asks you the same question.”

  Will gave Jacki a strange, puzzled look. It was the kind of look you would expect from someone at a Chinese restaurant who had just opened a fortune cookie and then read his own name inside.

  Jacki continued talking, not noticing Will’s expression. She was looking for the cross street to start leaving the city—to leave the historic district with the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old churches and the little shops and houses that were cloistered together, shoulder to shoulder—with their wood-planked front doors and black-iron door knockers—tucked up close to the cobblestone sidewalks of Monroeville.

  “So this MacCameron definitely has a one-of-a-kind case. He wants to be defended in a defamation and libel case. You’ve really got to read the Complaint to believe it. Angus MacCameron and his magazine, Digging for Truth, are both defendants. He’s alleged to have written an article that libeled this big-wig professor about an archaeology discovery,” Jacki explained. “Some kind of ancient writing found over in Israel. The plaintiff—Dr. Reichstad—has published some scholarly journal stuff about the writing—it’s apparently a two-thousand-year-old piece of papyrus. Reichstad has been saying that the fragment proves that Jesus was never resurrected. MacCameron really flipped out over that and then wrote some nasty stuff about Reichstad in his little magazine.”

  “Angus MacCameron. Why is this sounding familiar?” Will was musing.

  “I don’t know,” Jacki replied. “You sounded like you didn’t know about the appointment.”

  “I don’t remember this meeting being scheduled,” Will commented. “But Tiny was telling me about referring some new case to me. Oh man, this must be the case.” Will gave out a low groan. “You know, I don’t think Tiny has sent a decent case over to me in all the years I’ve known him.”

  “No, that’s not true. Remember that case involving the police chief—I think that one was a referral from Tiny. Remember? The city wanted to terminate him for drinking on the job.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” Will said, sounding distracted and distant.

  “What was the deal on that case?”

  “They said he showed up drunk at a bank robbery in progress.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. He was the chief of police of some small town in southern Virginia, wasn’t he?” Jacki asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Yeah,” Jacki said, “I remember that. They had the bank surrounded. A single gunman was holding some hostages. And somebody died, right?”

  “An officer died in a shoot-out,” Will responded quietly. “The board of inquiry blamed him for giving the order to go in shooting rather than waiting for the hostage negotiators. They said his drinking was a contributing factor.”

  “So how did the case end?” Jacki continued.

  “I got him his job back. There was a technical mistake in the way they fired him. We won on a procedural argument.”

  “Whatever happened to him—the police chief?”

  Will was silent.

  “What ever happened to that guy?” Jacki asked again.

  “He died.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  Will was silent again, but Jacki probed a little more. “So what was the deal with that guy? Did he stay on with the police department awhile, before he died?”

  Will didn’t respond at first. But when he did, his voice was almost inaudible.

  “After we won the case I tried to contact him. I called him at his house. He hadn’t showed up at the police station for a couple of days. He didn’t answer the phone. So I took a drive over to his house. His car was parked outside. The shades were drawn, so I couldn’t see in. I knocked on the door. No answer. I called the police.” Will paused for a few seconds. Then he concluded. “They broke down the door. They found him sitting in a chair with a glass of booze in his hand. Eyes wide open. His liver disintegrated—or he had a heart attack—something like that.”

  They were in the Virginia countryside now, and Jacki pulled the Corvette into the long driveway that led, through the arch of trees, up to Generals’ Hill.

  Jacki pulled the car to a stop near the front pillars of the old mansion, and then turned it off. She eased back in the seat for a moment. There was only the sound of the breeze rustling in the leaves, and a few birds up in the trees.

  “Can he pay? This MacCameron guy?” Will asked.

  “He’s got funding from the magazine, so he may be able to pay a fairly substantial retainer. I really didn’t talk money with him. I figured you ought to do that. His daughter, Fiona, was with him. She’s some kind of Christian singer. A very classy-looking woman. I did notice she didn’t have a wedding ring, which is interesting. Especially with a face that looks like it belongs on a fashion magazine. I got the feeling she’s sort of looking after dear old Dad. But Dad says he won’t take a penny of his daughter’s money—he insists on funding his defense himself. This guy MacCameron, he’s really a hoot. You know, a real ‘praise the Lord’ type, except I think he’s Scottish or something. And I read the article he wrote against this Dr. Reichstad; it’s something else. He brought the article with him. He really goes after Reichstad.”

  “Oh. Like how?” Will asked, trying to act uninterested.

  “Like accusing him of fraudulent scholarship in interpreting this piece of ancient writing he found. And MacCameron even implicated Reichstad in the murder of an archaeologist friend of his in Jerusalem.”

  “Boy, that’s a bad start to the case. Accusations of professional incompetence, coupled with the imputation of the commission of a crime. Classic examples of defamation per se,” Will noted. “Tiny told me J-Fox is representing the plaintiff. Arguing a case against Sherman is like getting your teeth drilled.”

  “Yeah. This Professor Reichstad must be really well-connected to snag the Sherman firm,” Jacki said, her voice trailing off. And then she added, with some genuine empathy, “Will, even if the money for your fees is there, maybe you need to let this case go. Sherman is going to try to bury you,” Jacki continued. “Once he finds out that you are on your own, and that you’re out of the firm, he’s going to smell blood—it’s going to be like a great wh
ite shark in a feeding frenzy. Not that you couldn’t handle it. But is it worth the hassle? Maybe you ought to cash in your 401(k) and just take some time off.”

  But Jacki could already see that Will was thinking about the case.

  “Anyway,” Jacki continued, “the way MacCameron describes it, this Reichstad is a media hound, and he’s clearly a public figure. So that means that your only real defense is to prove a lack of actual malice on MacCameron’s part. I mean, that’s basically what your defense would be, right?”

  Jacki’s question hung in the air as the leaves rustled around them in the treetops.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Oh?” Jacki gave Will a strange little smile. “So what’s the defense? I mean, assuming you even want to get involved in this dogfight. What would the defense be?”

  “Truth,” Will said as he reached over for the car keys and pulled them out of the ignition.

  And then added as he climbed out of the car, “Truth is always a defense to a lawsuit for libel and defamation.”

  Down at the bottom of the long, winding driveway Betty pulled up with Jacki’s car.

  “You going to be okay?” Jacki asked.

  “Sure. Me and Clarence. A man and his dog.”

  Jacki then told him, with strained optimism, “I checked on our office space. The rent is paid up through the month. The firm gave notice they were vacating. I called the landlord. I hope that was okay. I told him that you would be personally renting the space from then on. He said you can keep working out of the same office, as long as you can come up with the rent.”

  “Fine. Say hello to Howard for me,” Will said. “Tell him he is a very lucky man.”

  “Look, it will take me a couple days to clear out. So you’ll be seeing some more of me. I do think you will have to talk to Betty. She wants to know if you can afford to keep her on,” Jacki added.

  “Tell her I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do that,” Jacki called out as she made her way down the driveway. “Oh, don’t forget, you’ve got this Reverend MacCameron coming back in again tomorrow. He wants to meet you personally.”

  Will Chambers waved goodbye and trudged in the front door. Clarence, his golden retriever, came loping across the living room, his big pink tongue flapping. Will gave his dog’s head a quick pat as he headed for the liquor cabinet.

  7

  AFTER POURING HIMSELF A GLASSFUL of Jack Daniels, Will settled into the oversized chair in front of his big-screen television. He flipped through the channels and began downing the glass of whiskey in generous gulps. After losing interest in a made-for-TV movie, Will switched back to the news.

  But he found himself thinking back to the police chief in Hadleysburg. He couldn’t forget the day that he entered the house with some of the officers from the police department. He remembered the stench, and he recalled the bizarre and terrible sight of his client sitting, in full uniform, in his chair in front of the television set. There was a full glass still in his hand. His eyes were empty, fixed straight ahead. The chief’s skin was yellowish and artificial looking, with black discoloration around his lips and eyes and in the folds of his skin.

  Will got up and poured the glass out in the kitchen sink. He went to the refrigerator, found some orange juice, and poured it into another glass. And then he sat down at the table that overlooked the rolling green hills and the white-flowered mountain laurels that spotted the acres of what he used to think of as “our property.”

  No, he thought to himself, it is not “our property.” There was no “ours” anymore. It was only his. The whole world had been divided into that which was his and everything else that belonged to everyone else in the world. But us, and we, and ours, no longer existed. Audra was gone. She was no longer part of this huge house. Her perfume didn’t precede her into a room anymore. Her laugh didn’t make him smile anymore despite himself. She was not there to keep him from taking himself, or his work, too seriously. He thought about the feel of her hair when it brushed against his face. He felt the aching loss of her touches and caresses.

  He had met Audra at Georgetown during his law-school years. She was in the art department. She was an earthy blonde with a quirky sense of humor and an easy, winning smile. When he moved from his first job at the ACLU in New York to rural Tennessee for the Law Project of the South, she supported him. Audra sold her paintings at galleries in the tourist towns and taught art in the community colleges.

  But when Will was fired from that office and then finally got the job with what was then Bates, Burke, Meadows & Bates, Audra had hoped it would last. And it did, for a while. But after five years, the rest of the partners suggested that Will move up to central Virginia to open a branch office. They said it was to get him closer to D.C., where they wanted to open their third branch, but Will felt the real reason was to get him out of the Richmond office, where he had become a constant irritation to the others.

  Yet after the move to Monroeville, both Will and Audra felt an immediate sense of belonging. It was a city with a lot of charm and history. Monroeville was connected with several of the Founding Fathers. General Robert E. Lee had once marched down the street, right past the very building where Will’s office was now located. The buildings and shops had carried their age quietly and well among the pear trees that lined the streets, trees whose blossoms would draw tourists in the spring through the fall.

  But it was Generals’ Hill, situated prominently in the rolling Virginia countryside just outside of Monroeville, that most symbolized the couple’s sense of belonging.

  They had bought the dilapidated pre–Civil War mansion with the idea of restoring it. Audra poured herself into the loving reconstruction of the great house. It was small as Southern mansions go, but to them it was a thing of beauty. It had tall white columns in the front, and a huge fan-shaped window just below the peak of the roof. Inside there was a curving staircase that led to the second floor.

  Audra taught a few art classes at the local college. She split the rest of her time between the restoration of the house and painting in watercolors and acrylics in the studio that they had created in one of the extra rooms. She loved the house, but with her pacifist’s heart had tried to get Will to agree to change the name of the mansion from “Generals’ Hill” to something less warlike. But Will was too wedded to historical truth for that. The mansion had switched hands between the South and the North several times during the course of the Civil War. The name of the place was enshrined in local history. Besides, Will liked the idea of living in a house that had been near the focal point of great battles. After all, he thought, he made his living as a legal combatant in the new civil wars of justice. “Generals’ Hill” just seemed to fit. There was something poetic about living in a place with a name like that.

  But their idyllic life did not last. Audra longed for a baby but could not get pregnant. She threw herself into her painting and created a successful career as an artist. Her showings increased around the country. Tensions grew in the marriage. Audra moved out of Generals’ Hill—just a temporary separation, she told Will—but he was too proud to ask her back. He had stared at the phone a hundred times, thinking about calling her at her apartment in Georgetown, but each time he had decided against it. She would call Will from time to time. He had lived for those calls, carefully disguising how much his heart and soul were dying without her.

  And then one day the calls had stopped. When he learned of his wife’s terrible death during the robbery of her apartment, the walls of Will Chambers’ life had started crumbling down around him. More than anyone else in the world, Betty and Jacki had had ringside seats to Will’s slow-motion collapse into cynicism and booze.

  Will lost track of time as he sat at the kitchen table. But he suddenly became aware of the news report on the television. The announcer had said the words “nuclear weapon just outside New York City.”

  Will bolted up and stepped into the living room.

  The news anchor was dialogui
ng, in a steady but tense voice, with an on-location reporter outside the FBI office in New York. The reporter was talking.

  “Unconfirmed reports have come in that the rental truck was bearing Vermont license plates. Also unconfirmed, at least as of right now, is what kind of weapon the truck was actually carrying. There is no word yet on what seems to be the foremost question on all our minds: Is this rental truck, with its cargo, tied to last year’s bombing on Wall Street? Some are wondering whether today’s activities signal an all-out terrorist attack on the United States.”

  The anchor solemnly took over. “The FBI has refused up to now to specify exactly what was in the truck. However, sources in the State Department have reported that—and I am quoting here from one source—it was ‘apparently a device designed for mass destruction.’ And when we pressed the issue with one high-ranking source in that department, asking whether it was in fact a ‘thermonuclear weapon,’ that source refused to comment. Jim, are you hearing anything on that down there at the FBI headquarters in New York City?”

  “No, but there is plenty of speculation that the truck may have been carrying some type of thermonuclear device. But, of course, no one will admit or deny that,” the reporter responded.

  “Jim, what about the fact that the State Department is tied into this incident?” the anchor continued. “We usually think of the State Department as having oversight only in matters of foreign policy. But here we have it involved in domestic national security. What’s your take on that?”

  “That is one of the strange twists in an already very strange story,” the reporter said, and then glancing down at some papers in his hands, he noted, “yet we do know this. On April 1, 1999, in a move that really did not make many ripples in Washington, there was a bureaucratic reorganization of sorts. That in itself is certainly nothing new. What happened was that the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was merged with the Department of State. So ever since that time, there has been within the State Department an Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. The present undersecretary is Kenneth Sharptin. He is also doubling in his prior capacity as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Or as most folks would know it, ‘Middle Eastern’ affairs.”