Weak Flesh (36 page)

But still, it wasn’t right what Joe done. Now there was nothing left but to try and get back some dignity.

And make him think twice about hurting a girl like that.

#

The Machado house squatted on several acres of land off the main road to Placer Hills. Alma was used to walking the distance, for she’d done it several mornings a week during the four months she’d been employed by the Machado family.

This early evening, however, the trek seemed longer. She felt the heavy reminder of Joseph’s betrayal in the weight of the pistol grinding into her leg. The hem of her dress dragged in the dusty ruts. She’d begun to sweat and dark circles dampened her long-sleeved frock even though the delta breeze had cooled off the hot June day. Although she was a sturdy girl used to lots of hard work, her face was red with the exertion and the seriousness of her errand.

The sun had nearly dipped below the mountains before Alma came round the bend to the outbuilding where the Machados stabled their horses. She spied Mr. Machado’s fancy automobile beside the barn, but that didn’t mean nothing. He hardly ever rode the contraption, was always out on one or another of his horses. The animals were all he seemed to think about – that and the farm land.

She peeked into the stable and sure enough the horse and carriage were gone. Tonight was Miss Phoebe’s and Mrs. Machado’s night out with their lady friends. That meant Joe was alone.

Good. It was high time they had a talk.

She rapped softly on the door at the back of the house where she entered when she came to work. Mrs. Gulley was usually here then, but not this late at night, of course. Alma hesitated before continuing through the mudroom and into the kitchen. The house was eerily silent.

She tiptoed to the area that Mrs. Machado called the “sitting room,” although not much sitting happened there ‘cause no one ever visited the Machados that Alma could see. This room was empty too.

“Joseph,” she called softly.

No answer.

She reached down to unstrap the pistol and dangled it nervously in her left hand hidden behind her skirts. She couldn’t have said what she intended to do with the gun if someone had asked her at that moment. Alma hardly knew her own dark thoughts most of the time.

Scare Joe, she might’ve said. Make him say he was sorry. Or give her a few soft words to fill the sad, empty hole left inside her by his deceit and betrayal.

Despair washed over her for a moment, crumbling her resolve. What had she gotten in her head?  Wasn’t nothin’ Joe was scared of. For more than twenty-five years he’d lived with his pa and that awful excuse for a ma and his strange older sister. Wasn’t any gun gonna frighten Joe Machado.

Suddenly shaking, like a fit coming on, started in her knees and spread up through her gut to her wrist where the gun dug into her hip, her fingers numb as they gripped the handle. She turned to go, feeling like a stupid little girl gone on a useless errand.

She was an idiot, a great big dumb fool who didn’t know when a man was lying through his teeth and gussying up to her with sweet words – words like a rose among the thorns. She couldn’t even tell a falsehood from the truth.

A crash sounded from upstairs, and she jumped around like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers, her eyes wide and fixed on the stairs. They led up to the second floor landing and the bedrooms of the Machado family. She knew exactly which one was Joe’s because she’d been there once – only once – when his folks and sister Phoebe were gone to San Francisco.

Loud footsteps clumped down the stairs. Her eyes grew wide and she raised the pistol. Out of fear?  Surprise?  She couldn’t hardly remember why she was here.

“What the hell . . .?” Joe said from the doorway.

And then Alma fired the pistol without a single thought passing through her mind except a vague sense of alarm. Even as she dropped the pistol and backed out of the door, a niggling thought lodged in the back of her brain.

Joe, clutching his shoulder and starting to fall. And a faint thud from somewhere in the house.

But then panic took over and she raced into the woods as fast as she could go and didn’t stop running, terror and fear nipping at her heels, until she reached the turn in the road that led to Placer Hills. There she sank down to her knees in the damp leaves and nettles by a giant pine and clutched her head in her fists.

“Screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail” –
Macbeth

Chapter 1

Blast it!  Malachi Rivers tightened both fists on the defense table’s rough surface and scanned the newspaper article again. A “clear admission of guilt”? 

Alma Bentley tentatively touched his jacket sleeve. “I know it were wrong, Mr. Rivers. But the lady reporter – she was so nice, I . . . I thought it’d be all right to talk to her.”

Malachi couldn’t expect his client, a poor, unschooled girl, to understand what her public confession meant. But this Knight woman knew exactly what she’d done.

And Jesus!  How was he to extricate Alma from the tangle of her own loose tongue? 

Taking a deep breath, he relaxed his grip, turned to his left, and forced an encouraging smile. “Don’t worry, Alma. We’ll figure it all out.” 

Because today was merely the arraignment, few observers graced the gallery of Judge Underwood’s tiny courtroom. In good time, onlookers would congregate in droves to gawp at a woman on trial for murder. But not today. These sedate proceedings held little scandal for the public’s need for drama.

Calmer now, Malachi watched District Attorney Charles Fulton strut down the courtroom aisle. He paused beside the defense table, clapping a friendly hand on Malachi’s shoulder.

“Good morning, counselor.”  The district attorney made a moue that was a cross between a smile and a smirk.

Malachi had little respect for Fulton, but he pasted on a pleasant expression and nodded politely. “Charlie.”

The attorney’s face tightened as a flush crept up his neck to contrast starkly against the stiff white starch of his collar. Malachi smiled widely. The prosecutor enjoyed the veneer of formality and hated the shortening of his given name.

Fulton took his seat at the prosecution table, where his protégés hovered on each side of him, like eager courtiers at the feet of a king. The two assistant district attorneys were young and ambitious, and their presence today was a mere show of power aimed at intimidating the defense.

Malachi’s client, a small, dark-complexioned woman, hunched defensively in her chair, her eyes alarmingly round as she focused on the prosecutor’s table.

Malachi leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Hold your chin up, Alma. You don’t want to appear guilty.” 

Alma’s plain face scrunched as if she were in pain. “But I am guilty, Mr. Rivers.”

“Shh, don’t say such things.”  He swiveled around and frowned sternly as she ducked her head. He touched her arm, compelling her to look up at him. “Do you understand?  Never speak of anything resembling guilt. Never think of it.”

Alma nodded mutely and continued to worry her small, rough hands as she perched quietly at the edge of the wooden chair. Malachi sighed inwardly. Once the jurors appeared, his client’s behavior in court might well turn out to be the most damning evidence against her.

As he’d advised, Alma wore a modest suit, but the cuffs were frayed and the hem unfashionably short where her scuffed boots showed beneath the skirt. A woman with an ordinary face and a timid air, she hardly looked capable of fostering passion, yet alone of murdering a man.

But she had. She’d confessed as much to him. Worse, she’d admitted it to a reporter who’d recorded her statement for all the community to read.

Malachi looked straight ahead at the magistrate’s podium where the United States and Bear State flags flapped gently in the breeze from an open window. Glancing to his right, he observed the prosecuting attorneys hunched shoulder to shoulder, whispering to one another as if the fate of the world lay in their scheming.

Hardly even the fate of the county, Malachi thought. Just one small woman shabbily dressed.

In contrast to his client, the prosecutors looked like wealthy businessmen in their formal day attire of winged-collar shirts, cut-away morning coats, and striped trousers. District Attorney Charles Fulton swept his icy blue eyes over Malachi and inclined his head in a condescending nod. The two baby-faced attorneys leaned forward, no doubt to catch a glimpse of the famous Malachi Rivers.

He suppressed a guffaw. Time was when he’d been flattered to draw the attention of the likes of those three. He was a whelp then, a few years out of law school, and uncommonly successful.

But within a few more years he’d met Constance and his notoriety had gone to his head with ugly and disastrous consequences.

Malachi fiddled with his notes, but he wasn’t nervous, merely eager to begin the trial, for he knew exactly how he would present his case to acquit his client of a murder charge. And in the process he intended to legalistically whip the tar out of Charlie Fulton.

Little doubt existed that Alma Bentley was indeed guilty of the crime of which she’d been accused. The defense’s strategy lay in the why. And it was with this why that Malachi believed he could save her from the gallows.

A hush came over the room. Malachi rose to his feet along with the other court officers. Judge Phineas T. Underwood huffed slowly into the room from a door at the front and sank into his seat behind the podium.

A large, florid-faced man, he peered over the tops of his spectacles and cleared his throat with a guttural sound. He produced a cigar from beneath the folds of his robe, clipped the end, and placed the cigar in his mouth, chomping down hard on it. A prop, Malachi knew, for in the five years he’d been practicing law in Bigler County, he’d never once seen the judge smoke. For all his outward slovenliness, Judge Underwood was a stickler for courtroom decorum.

“Sit down, sit down,” Underwood muttered, waving his arm across the room. “Bailiff, read the charges.”

A thin, wiry man, Jacob Streetman scratched his chest beneath his uniform before he gazed at the paper shaking in his palsied hand. Streetman had been closing in on eighty when Malachi set up residence in Bigler County. The man’s ancient, weathered face bore the look of a hound dog Malachi’s father had once owned, defeat and life’s vagaries carved in the crevices.

“The defendant will rise,” intoned Streetman.

Malachi grasped Alma’s arm and assisted her to her feet. She wavered beneath his hand and he held her elbow more firmly. “Courage, Alma.”

“State your name for the court,” Streetman directed.

“Alma Bentley,” she whispered in a gravelly voice, as if speaking louder might suck the wind out of her thin frame.

After the court ascertained that the defendant was represented by counsel, the bailiff began the formal reading of the charges to which Alma must plead.

“How do you answer to the charges brought against you?” the magistrate asked.

After a long pause, Malachi whispered in her ear. “You must say the words aloud, Alma. ‘Not guilty.’”

She began shaking her head, a dubious frown distorting her features. “But . . .”

“Not guilty,” he repeated. “Trust me.”

Alma entered the plea, although to anyone not completely half-witted, she appeared far from innocent.

Guilt stamped her face like a shiny penny.

#

Pain pounded in Emma Knight’s temples like clash cymbals. Sitting at the massive desk installed by the previous owner of The Placer Gazette, she picked up the letter from the desktop and held it between a thumb and forefinger as if it were some loathsome bug.

She glanced balefully at it. Despite Mr. Rivers’ fiery accusations, Emma had no intention to – how had he put it? – yes, here in the second paragraph:  “write about weddings and tea parties and leave the weighty business of news publishing to men folk.”

Insufferable man!  Emma had heard dark rumors about Rivers’ past and his questionable law practice before he’d fled San Francisco. Of his consorting with unsavory elements. Those charges, coupled with the contents of his letter, confirmed her opinion that he was a crass, lowborn individual. Despite his phenomenal success as an attorney, in her mind he bore none of the marks of a gentleman.

She tossed the offending letter onto her desk.

From the press machinery room at the front of the office, she heard old Thomas Gant, her compositor and printing press operator, setting the type for the weekly issue. When she’d arrived this morning, she’d found him hovering over a selection of cast metal sorts.

“Morning, Miss Knight,” he’d greeted her cheerily even though the hour was unspeakably early.

Thomas’ employment was one of the reasons she hadn’t yet purchased a Linotype machine for The Gazette. Although acquiring the Linotype was imperative to her ambition of producing more than a single weekly and one weekend edition of the paper, she wasn’t sure he could adjust to the new keyboard.

Hearing the soft jangle of the bell at the entrance to the outer office, Emma rose, put on her jacket, and walked out of the back room to greet the visitor. The sun shone through the wide glass window, shadowing the person’s face, and it was a moment before she recognized him.

“Uncle Stephen, what a delightful surprise!”

A stout, round-faced version of her father beamed at her. “Emmie, m’dear.”  Stephen Knight held both her hands in his and twirled her around so he could examine her. In the eyes of her uncle she could do no wrong.

Emma laughed delightedly and planted a kiss on his cheek. After they’d settled into her office, her uncle on a stiff-backed Ingram chair she’d brought from home, and she behind her desk, she satisfied her curiosity. “To what do I owe this surprise visit?”

“Oh, this and that. Business, here and there.”

“I thought you had minions to take care of your business interests,” she teased.

“Ah, but this investment,” – he gestured broadly around the room to indicate the entirety of The Gazette – “attracts my special concern.”  His green eyes twinkled. “Involving as it does a partnership with my favorite niece.”