A Southern Girl (43 page)

“Coleman, we have a problem. Can you come to my office … now.”

Harris’s office is decorated in early Audubon. There are stuffed ducks mounted on the walls, numbered prints of geese in flight purchased, I should say ransomed, at inebriated Ducks Unlimited auctions, decoys of mallards, widgeons, and woods, photographs of hunting trips in which he and his fellow assassins display their limits, enough ducks to denude Nebraska. The only paper weight on his desk is a lead crystal swan.

As I enter, Harris is sitting behind his desk in a serious frame of mind. Because his client chairs are high-backed, I am not immediately conscious of another presence. His eyes dart to the chair before him and I now see Carlton Middleton, the city attorney, seated with his frail legs crossed effeminately and his delicate hands folded in his lap.

“Hi, Carlton, don’t get up,” I say, bending slightly to shake his hand. He greets me only with a smile that is too broad. I take the companion client chair beside him.

Harris, nodding toward him, says “Carlton has come here as a friend. Tell him, Carlton.”

“Council meets tomorrow night,” he says in his sibilant lisp. “You may have seen the agenda in the paper.”

“I read it not fifteen minutes ago,” I reply.

“Then you know that they were scheduled to approve you fellows on the Arts Center legal work.”

“Were?” I say, catching a whiff of the ill wind Harris has been inhaling.

“In their work session last week I detected some wobble in a couple of councilmen who have been solidly with us. I did some checking and because I’m no longer confident we would win a showdown vote I thought it best to delay. I recommended to the mayor that they table it. I told him my office needed more time.”

“Harris told me that Cathcart hasn’t given up lobbying on this. Do you think he got to them?”

There is an awkward stillness as he and Harris exchange glances. Harris drops his gaze, fidgeting with the edge of his desk blotter.

“I don’t think Cathcart has made headway,” says Carlton softly.

“Then what?” I ask. Harris isn’t looking at me.

“Let’s put it this way,” Carlton continues. “There is some concern in City Hall that you may be contemplating litigation against the city.”

“I am?”

“Coleman, are you aware of the fact that the city chartered the St. Simeon Society? Granted, it was in 1766, but it happened.”

“I was not aware of that,” I admit.

Carlton steeples his fingertips near his chin, his elbows resting on the padded arms of his chair. “Nor was I,” he says. “But it’s my job to be on the lookout for things that could involve the city in court and after I read Scott Edwards’s column about your troubles with the Society, I checked it out. Sure enough …”

“I’m sorry, Carlton,” I say. “I’m at the tail end of a very long day and none of this is fitting together.”

“Very simple,” says Harris, suddenly glancing up. “The city chartered the Society. Any suit against the St. Simeon will inevitably bring the city in as an additional defendant. The city is reluctant to have as its attorneys on the Arts Center project a law firm, one of whose senior partners is suing it.” He looks to Carlton. “Does that pretty well sum it up?”

Carlton nods, and now both his and Harris’s eyes are riveted on me.

“Ridiculous,” I say. “I denied any intent to sue anyone and Edwards printed it.”

“But you left the door open, or he did.”

“He did,” I say flatly.

“Also,” says Carlton, “you’ve been seen around the courthouse with that ACLU woman. That hasn’t done much to reassure anyone.”

“The most expensive lunch I’ve ever eaten,” I say weakly. “So what do you want me to do?”

Harris speaks. “Why not call Scott Edwards, tell him that as a result of his article there seems to be some lingering confusion as to your position, and that you categorically deny any intent to sue the St. Simeon now or
at any time in the future. Tell him you’ll sign an affidavit. Hell, make it as strong as you can.”

“That would do it,” says Carlton. “That would dispel the rumors, which I don’t mind saying are rampant.”

“Are you sure this isn’t some smoke being blown by Cathcart in hopes of starting a fire?” I ask.

“Well,” says Harris, “if it is, it’s working. By tomorrow night we would have had the contract and now we won’t.”

Carlton interjects. “Cathcart has been beating it like a drum, I’ll admit. To be totally upfront with you, it was he who suggested I research the relationship between the Society and the city. He wants this contract in the worst way.”

“So do we,” says Harris. “And too much work has gone into it to let it slip through our fingers now. Right, Coleman?”

I nod but remain silent.

“Any chance of council awarding this tomorrow night?” Harris wants to know. Carlton shakes his head, a quick flutter. “Then we have some time. We’ll get right on it.”

We rise and shake hands. Harris walks Carlton to his door, his meaty arm slung around Carlton’s slender shoulder, stressing how appreciative Carter & Deas is for the continued support of the city attorney’s office. As Carlton retreats down the hall, Harris closes the door and turns to me.

“Well, counselor, why don’t we get Scott Edwards on the phone right now?” Harris is not a procrastinator.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

“What’s to think about? We’ve got to clear this up.”

“I’ve got to clear it up,” I correct, “and I need to think when I’m not so tired.” A half truth. Although fatigued, I am thinking fine. I am also thinking delay.

“Old buddy,” he says, “you can stew on this next week, next month and next year but it isn’t going to change the outcome. Let’s call Edwards.”

“No,” I say firmly.

“Now Coleman, listen to reason, for Chrissake. I’ve wined and dined those councilmen until I’ve committed damn near every menu in Charleston to memory. The firm’s future is on the line here.”

“What about Allie’s future?”

He looks at me, stunned, like I’ve just changed the shape of my nose in his presence. “It’s a fucking dance!” he exclaims.

“You’re going,” I say, my voice diminishing as his rises.

“Yes, I’m going,” he rasps.

“Carolyn’s going?”

“Of course.”

“I’m going, Steven’s going, Adelle, Christopher—they’re going.”

Harris shakes his head, exasperated. “It’s still a dance against a multimillion dollar contract. I’ll give her my invitation.”

“You’re only saying that because you can go.”

“Maybe so,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry for losing my temper. Take it home, sleep on it. We’ll figure something out.”

“Yeah,” I say meekly, “I’ll sleep on it.”

“In the meantime I’m going to find out for myself what’s going on in City Hall.” Harris sets his jaw in a way I recognize. He will stalk those councilmen like he stalks ducks; patiently, and early in the morning.

I drift back to my office, my weariness unrelieved and my spirits lower than they have been since the night of the vote. On my desk rests a folder labeled “St. Simeon Loophole,” a puny folio indeed. Recent nights and a complete Saturday devoted to research have yielded scant information. When great-ancestor Alston and his cohorts decided to take it underground, they buried it.

My probe began at the offices of the
Sentinel,
in its archives room. The room is not the same one I visited, many years ago now, to find the photograph of my irate grandfather giving F.D.R. hell. I examined microfiche until the room spun around me. As in most cities, Charleston’s daily paper has survived a forced march through rugged terrain littered with the corporate corpses of its predecessors. In the journalism thicket of the 1800s, competing publications waged a war of attrition where survival demanded, as with the
Sentinel
in 1896, one straggler to climb upon the back of another.

The records dating from that merger are complete, but virtually silent as to the Society. Indexed references to “St. Simeon Society, The” revealed decade-long gaps during which, if indexed accurately, there was no mention at all. The sole exception to this remarkable lacunae were posthumous acknowledgments of membership, as predictable as a mortality table, found in the obituaries of Charleston’s elite. So faithful were
these recitations that I soon developed, during frivolous moments of flagging concentration, a mental image of these dead members greeting one another in the great beyond, escorting newcomers from the Pearly Gates through a divergent canopy, hunter green in color, to the waterfront corner of heaven restricted to St. Simeons.

But the
Sentinel
search was not wholly fruitless. In 1923, the paper’s endorsed candidate for mayor was attacked by his opponent as an aristocrat out of touch with the people. Exhibit A in the opponent’s indictment? The mayor-elect’s alleged membership in St. Simeon. In 1934, a fire broke out in the kitchen when the caterer for the Ball placed a cardboard crate too near a flaming gas jet on the stove. Two fire trucks reported, one fireman quickly subdued the blaze, and the guests, who had crowded into the parking lot, returned to the building without missing, as the tongue-in-cheek report stated, “two foxtrots and a tango.” In keeping with the treasured conspiracy of silence, the paper divulged no names of attendees.

The years prior to 1896 were tough sledding. No indexes exist for fallen standards like the Charleston
Mercury,
the
American,
or the
City Gazette.
Where old copies survive, there is no alternative to reading them cover to cover, an impossible task given my time. No book or treatise on the Society has been published, so I cannot go to school on the labors of some historian. The St. Simeon is like a giant luxury liner, regal and imposing and drawing volumes of water in displacement, but wake-less minutes after passing, so that no one not on her decks can prove she exists.

The library of the Historical Society abounds with genealogies, the kind which fascinated Allie as a girl. Their authors, driven from the first recorded sentence toward the foregone conclusion that they indeed hail from a long and storied line, are eager to recount any brushing their ancestors had with the St. Simeon. I examined eight or ten of these during an inclement Saturday but found nothing to aid my quest for a loophole. In the Lesesne tome, I learned of a claim for the record in consecutive attendance: fifty-four years by one Dr. Rawlston Lesesne between 1871 and 1924, but in that no attendance records are kept I would not be surprised to find the same boast in several others had I the time to read them. I left the library tired, discouraged, and with my nose firmly pressed to the marmoreal surface of an impenetrable wall.

Today, the day following Carlton’s visit, has been less frenetic. I have had time to read the paper and eat lunch. It is mid-afternoon when I
return to the office. Dottie hands me a message to call Leslie McKeller, who reports on City Hall for the
Sentinel.

“That’s got to be about the council meeting tonight,” I say, handing the message back. “Harris is handling it.”

“That’s what I told her,” says Dottie. “She insisted she needed to talk with you.”

“Is Harris in?”

“I saw him twenty minutes ago.”

I walk the hall to Harris’s end. He is just completing a call from an insurance adjuster, politely declining another low-ball offer to settle a serious personal injury. They’ll end up giving Harris his demand. He knows it, they know it, and I know it. His approach is simplicity itself: set a reasonable figure and don’t budge. I once saw him turn down a $50,000 offer because it was a thousand short of the minimum he told them he had to have. That case was twelve years ago and sent a strong message to the insurers, underlined and capitalized when the jury brought in a verdict for $178,000. I stop in front of his desk, feeling the stare of every waterfowl in the room.

“What do you make of this?” I ask, dropping the message on his desk.

He rubs his chin as he thinks. “I better return this one.”

“That was my reaction, but Dottie says she asked specifically for me.”

He reaches for the phone, jabbing the numbers with his meaty fingers. “Leslie McKeller, please … Leslie? Harris Deas. You all ready for the council meeting tonight? … Yeah, I’ll be there. Listen, I’ve just been handed a message for Coleman to call you and I was wondering if there is anything I can do to help. I’m our point man on the Arts Center; I’m assuming it has something to do with that.”

Harris nods several times as he listens, rolling his eyes as Leslie evidently runs through preliminaries. Then he stops. His head is quite still and his eyes are animated. “I see now,” he says, “why it was important for you to speak with him. Can I get back to you? … Half hour? … Thanks.”

“Bad news?” I ask.

He covers his face with his hands and mutters, “The worst. Leslie’s been doing her job, dammit. The word is out on the reason for tabling the contract at tonight’s hearing. She and Scott Edwards are working on this together now and she’s trying to reach you for comment.”

“What a bite,” I say.

“What an opportunity,” he counters. “Now’s a great time to clear the air. Call her back and tell her it’s all a big misunderstanding. If you’d rather, I’ll call and say it for you.”

“I’m still not prepared to do that,” I say.

“Well, perhaps you need to get prepared,” he says. “Coleman, they’re running another story tomorrow, this time reporting the fear in City Hall that you’re coming after them. This entire thing is getting ridiculous.”

I pick up the lead crystal swan paperweight from the desk, palming it from one hand to the other and avoiding eye contact. He rises, walks briskly around his desk and shuts the door to his outer office. “Sit down, partner,” he commands.

“You know,” he says, seating himself opposite me and waxing into a tone relaxed on its surface but undergirded with impatience, “you haven’t been yourself for some time now. Are you aware of that?”

“Yeah,” I acknowledge, still holding the swan.

“What is it, some mid-life thing?”

“I’m stumped,” I admit. “Can’t put my finger on it.”

“Have you thought about some counseling?”

“Let’s just say I haven’t done anything about it.”