Sycamore Row - John Grisham

typewriters, law books, and more files, all retired.”
They found nothing of interest in the second room. The files were the typical
assortment of retired cases one would find in any small-town law office. At 2:30, Erby
carefully climbed the steps of the retractable stairs and disappeared into the attic. Clapp
closed them behind him and went to the basement. The attic was windowless, pitchblack,
and lined with neat rows of cardboard storage boxes stacked four-deep. With no
chance of being seen from the outside, Erby increased the glow of his penlight and
scanned the boxes. Each had a code handwritten in black marker: “Real Estate, 1/1/76–
8/1/77”; “Criminal, 3/1/81–7/1/81”; and so on. He was relieved to find files dating
back a dozen years, but frustrated at the absence of any related to wills and estates.
Those would be in the basement. After rummaging down there for half an hour, Clapp
found a stack of the same types of storage boxes marked “Probate, 1979–1980.” He
pulled the box out of a stack, opened it carefully, and began leafing through dozens of
files. Irene Pickering’s was dated August 1980. It was an inch and a half thick, and
tracked the legal work from the day Hal Freeman prepared the two-page will that Irene
signed on the spot through the final order dismissing Fritz Pickering as her executor. The
first entry was an old will prepared by the lawyer in Lake Village. The second was a
handwritten will. Clapp read it aloud and slowly, the scrawl at times difficult to
decipher. The fourth paragraph contained a $50,000 bequest to Lettie Lang.
“Bingo,” he mumbled. He placed the file on a table, closed the box, gently put it back
in its place, backtracked carefully, and left the basement. With the file in a briefcase, he
stepped into the dark alley, and after a few minutes called Erby on the radio. Erby
eased out of the rear door, stopping only to quickly relock the dead bolt. To their
knowledge, they had disturbed nothing and left no marks. The offices needed a good
cleaning to begin with, and a bit of dirt off a shoe or some rearranged dust was not
going to attract attention.
They drove two and a half hours to Jackson and met Wade Lanier at his office before
6:00 a.m. Lanier had been a courtroom brawler for thirty years, and he could not
remember a more beautiful example of “the smoking gun.” But the question remained:
How best to fire it?
Fat Benny’s was at the end of the paved section of a county road; beyond it was all
gravel. Portia had been raised in Box Hill, a dark and secluded community hidden by a
swamp and a ridge with few whites anywhere near. Box Hill, though, was Times Square
compared to the forbidding, backwater settlement of Prairietown on the backside of
Noxubee County, less than ten miles from the Alabama line. If she’d been white, she
would have never stopped. There were two gas pumps in the front and a few dirty cars
parked on the gravel. A screen door slammed behind her as she nodded to a teenage boy
behind the front counter. There were a few groceries, soft drink and beer coolers, and in
the rear a dozen neat tables all covered with red-and-white checkerboard tablecloths.
The smell of thick grease hung heavy in the air and hamburger patties sizzled and