Sycamore Row - John Grisham

Death by deposition continued on Wednesday as Jake took charge and quizzed
Herschel Hubbard for several hours. The morning session dragged on with stultifying
dullness, and it didn’t take long to establish that Herschel had accomplished little and
taken few chances in his career. His divorce had been the most exciting event in his life.
Such hot topics as his education, work experiences, businesses, former homes and
apartments, relationships, friends, interests, hobbies, religious convictions, and political
leanings were covered in depth and proved to be stunningly boring. Several of the
attorneys nodded off. Portia, in her third day of real legal action, struggled to stay
awake.
After lunch, the lawyers reluctantly returned to the courtroom for another session.
Jake managed to liven things up a bit when he began trying to pin down how much
time Herschel had spent with his father in the past several years. Herschel tried to give
the impression he and the old man were close, but had trouble recalling specific visits. If
they spoke so often on the phone, what might the phone records reveal? Jake asked.
Any cards and letters from Seth? Herschel was sure he had them but he wasn’t so sure he
could produce them. His lawyers had instructed him to be as vague as possible, and he
succeeded beautifully.
On the subject of Lettie Lang, Herschel claimed to have been around her quite often,
during his many visits to see his beloved father. In his opinion, Seth was quite fond of
her. He admitted he never saw them touch in any way, but there was something in the
way they looked at each other. What, exactly? Not sure, but just something between
them. She was always listening, always in the shadows trying to eavesdrop. And as his
father got sicker, he depended more and more on Lettie, and they grew closer. Jake
asked if he was suggesting they were intimate. “Only Lettie knows that,” Herschel
replied, implying, of course, the obvious.
Portia fumed as she glanced around the table. She assumed that every person there,
except for Jake, believed her mother was sleeping with a withered and decaying old
white man, and doing so to get his money. But Portia kept her head low, and, as a
professional, maintained a poker face as she filled another page with notes that would
never be reviewed.
Seven hours of probing were more than enough to establish Herschel Hubbard was a
less than interesting person who’d had a strained and distant relationship with his
father. He was still living with his mother, still reeling from a bad divorce, and, at the
age of forty-six, barely surviving on the income from a student hangout. What Herschel
desperately needed was an inheritance.
As did Ramona. Her deposition kicked off at 9:00 on Thursday morning, and by then
the lawyers were cranky and fed up with the case. Spending five consecutive days in
deposition was a rare event, though not unheard-of. During a break, Wade Lanier told a
story of deposing a dozen consecutive witnesses over ten straight days in an oil spill
case in New Orleans. The witnesses were from Venezuela, most did not speak English,
and the interpreters were not that fluent. The lawyers partied hard every night, suffered