Sycamore Row - John Grisham

5
By noon Monday the entire bar association of Ford County was buzzing with the news
of the suicide and, much more important, with the curiosity of which firm might be
chosen to handle the probate. Most deaths caused similar ripples; a fatal car wreck,
more so for obvious reasons. However, a garden-variety murder did not. Most murderers
were of the lower classes and thus unable to fork over meaningful fees. When the day
began, Jake had nothing—no murders, no car wrecks, and no promising wills to
probate. By lunch, though, he was mentally spending some money.
He could always find something to do across the street in the courthouse. The land
records were on the second floor, in a long wide room with lined shelves of thick plat
books dating back two hundred years. In his younger days, when totally bored or hiding
from Lucien, he spent hours poring over old deeds and grants as if some big deal was in
the works. Now, though, at the age of thirty-five and with ten years under his belt, he
avoided the room when possible. He fancied himself a trial lawyer, not a title checker; a
courtroom brawler, not some timid little lawyer content to live in the archives and push
papers around a desk. Even so, and regardless of his dreams, there were times each year
when Jake, along with every other lawyer in town, found it necessary to get lost for an
hour or so in the county’s records.
The room was crowded. The more prosperous firms used paralegals to do the research,
and there were several there, lugging the books back and forth and frowning at the
pages. Jake spoke to a couple of lawyers who were doing the same—football talk
mainly because no one wanted to get caught snooping for the dirt on Seth Hubbard. To
kill time, he looked through the Index of Wills to see if any Hubbard of note had handed
down land or assets to Seth, but found nothing in the past twenty years. He walked
down the hall to the Chancery Clerk’s office with the thought of perusing old divorce
files but other lawyers were sniffing around.
He left the courthouse in search of a better source.
It was no surprise that Seth Hubbard hated the lawyers in Clanton. Most litigants,
divorce or otherwise, who ran afoul of Harry Rex Vonner were miserable for the rest of
their lives and loathed everything about the legal profession. Seth wasn’t the first to
commit suicide.
Harry Rex extracted blood, along with money and land and everything else in sight.
Divorce was his specialty, and the uglier the better. He relished the dirt, the gutter