First Kill All the Lawyers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  A Samantha Adams Mystery

  By Sarah Shankman

  Copyright 2013 by Sarah Shankman

  Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1988.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Sarah Shankman and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Impersonal Attractions

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  To Harvey Klinger

  Author’s Note

  The people listed below have been very helpful to me in the writing of this book, and I would like to thank them.

  In Atlanta, for advice and information, Carmen Alonso, J.D., Dr. Kenneth Alonso, Alfred W. Brown and Brown’s Guidebook: Atlanta, Robert Coram, and Chuck Perry. For continuing encouragement and a home, Cliff Graubart and the Old New York Bookstore.

  In Virginia, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and its director, William Smart, and staff for residencies that have given me the gift of time.

  In New York, Harvey Klinger, my agent, and Jane Chelius, my editor, were wonderful. Every writer should be so lucky as to have two such as these in her corner.

  “The first thing we do,

  let’s kill all the lawyers.”

  —Shakespeare

  Henry VI, Part II,

  Act IV, Scene ii

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  A Samantha Adams Mystery

  Sarah Shankman

  One

  Billy Gene Chandler was mean as a junkyard dog,” George said. “Wasn’t worth the powder it would’ve taken to blow him to kingdom come.”

  Samantha Adams smiled at her uncle across the dining table. She could feel him warming up, and once he got started, he could really tell some stories.

  “Why didn’t somebody do something about Chandler?” she asked. “Turn him in? Report him?”

  George Adams shrugged. “To whom?” And then he waggled his fork at her. “If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’ve forgotten more about the South than you’ve relearned in these few months you’ve been back.”

  “You’re never going to forgive me for moving to California, are you?” She tilted her face toward the ceiling. “No more than he’s going to forgive the engineers for building the interstates through the city, is he, God?”

  “God’s not going to help you with the big things if you go bothering him with the small fry all the time,” volunteered Peaches as she entered the dining room. She peered at Sam’s water glass, then into the silver water pitcher. “More water?”

  Sam laughed. “Just because I don’t drink anymore doesn’t mean I want the whole Chattahoochee River poured down my gullet every day, thank you.”

  “And God doesn’t like ugly,” Peaches sniffed, then proceeded to clear the salad plates.

  “Now, Peaches,” Sam protested.

  “Don’t ‘Now, Peaches’ me. You heard what I said. He doesn’t like ugly.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant.” Peaches stood her ground, one hand on a bony hip. “Now, just drink your water and let’s change the subject.”

  It made Peaches cranky when Samantha referred to her alcoholism, to what Peaches called her “being bad to drink.” After all, Sam, who had first come to live with them as a young girl, was in part her creation. She didn’t like anyone, including Sam herself, badmouthing her handiwork.

  “Tell them to leave you be. Shame on you two, ganging up on her,” said Horace as he entered the room carrying a platter of fish.

  “That’s right.” Sam nodded.

  “And I guess you’ve been standing in the kitchen twiddling your thumbs and eavesdropping,” Peaches said.

  Horace’s eyebrows rose a hair, but only a hair, for this routine between the Johnsons, man and wife, was well rehearsed.

  “George! Are you going to answer my question or not?” Sam demanded.

  “My dear, I’m sorry.” He shook his white head in mock seriousness. “In all this commotion, I’d almost forgotten it.”

  Sam reached across the wide dining room table with a heavy silver serving spoon and rapped her uncle on the knuckles. “Quit playing with me. Now, why didn’t any of the good people of Raritan County turn Sheriff Billy Gene Chandler in to the district attorney—or call the governor’s office? There must have been someone they could have reported him to if he was as awful as you say.”

  The look bounced from Peaches to Horace to George, then back the other way.

  “Don’t just roll your eyes at one another. Spill it,” said Sam.

  “Is that how you earned their praises at the Chronicle? Saying things like ‘spill it’? That kind of talk may go over big in San Francisco, but you’re going to have to develop a more ladylike style if you ever expect to make it in Atlanta,” George said.

  “I imagine the folks downtown at the Journal-Constitution like Samantha’s style just fine,” said Horace as he boned the fish Peaches had cooked to perfumey perfection. “Otherwise, why would they have stolen her away from that paper in ’Frisco?” He smiled at Sam. “Don’t you listen to your Uncle George.”

  “Will I never be free of the tyranny of my help?” George asked of no one in particular.

  And no one answered, for the relationship among George and Peaches and Horace required no response. They had lived together like family in this split-timber Tudor mansion on Fairview Road for almost fifty years.

  “Horace, maybe you can answer my question, since George obviously isn’t going to,” Sam persisted. “He was telling me about Sheriff Billy Gene Chandler from down in Raritan County, and I asked him why nobody reported him for being so corrupt.”

  “’Cause it wouldn’t have done any good.” Horace placed fish and vegetables on Samantha and George’s plates and placed the plates carefully before them, a style of service he’d adopted to accommodate George’s rapidly failing eyesight. “Here’s some more wine for you, George,” he said, replacing the glass precisely at the one o’clock position. Then he continued, “It’s never done any good to complain about lawmen. They just do what they gonna do anyhow.”

  Samantha shot her uncle a questioning look, then realized he couldn’t read it from that far away—but she was wrong. As his vi
sion dimmed, George Adams was honing his already sharp intuition.

  “No, Sam, Horace doesn’t mean just blacks. White folks would gain nothing either by complaining.” Race had always been so negligible an issue in this household that the mention of it was not an impoliteness, as it would have been in many quarters.

  “That’s right,” Horace continued. “Puff adders like that Sheriff Chandler, they’d just as soon poison their own kind. Fact, what I heard about him with women, he didn’t discriminate when it came to color.”

  “Now, don’t go talking about that, ’specially at the dinner table,” Peaches warned, all the while busying herself brushing at imaginary crumbs so she wouldn’t miss a word.

  “What about women?” Samantha’s curiosity sat up.

  “Sheriff Chandler was known for a peculiar way of gaining the attentions of those whom he fancied,” George explained. “When he took a shine to a lady, if she didn’t return his interest, he just locked her up.”

  “He what?”

  “Yep. Then sent his deputy out for a moonpie and a long RC Cola while he had his way with her.”

  “And those people put up with that?”

  “Those people are afraid, Sam. They’re terrified of men like Billy Gene Chandler—and with good reason. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since you got me off on this subject. Rural sheriffs in this state rule their counties like fiefdoms. Once in office, they’re there for life. You cross the man, and you’re either going to have to pay the price, settle with him somehow, or move out—fast. There’s a lot of ignorance and in-growth in these little backwater places. They take care of things in their own way.”

  “I can’t believe I grew up not knowing this. What was I thinking about when I was a girl?” But she had known some of it, if only subliminally.

  “Boys,” Peaches answered. “Pajama parties. Nail polish. Normal things.”

  Sam ignored her. “What do you mean, ‘take care of things in their own way’? Like how?”

  “You name it—murder, rape, robbery. They keep it all very close to home,” George said.

  “By that you mean it never makes the papers.”

  The other three exchanged looks.

  “Makes the papers! Why, Sam, it never gets to trial. Most of the time charges aren’t even pressed. Rural justice is much more primitive than that.” George sipped his wine. “A man kills someone, let’s say. Now, unless the one who was killed deserved killing in the sheriff’s eyes, then within a year that murderer is going to find himself dead too, unless he has the good sense to move out.”

  “George, you are making this up,” Sam protested. “Why, all this reeks of the Old South. This is the New South, darlin’. Don’t try to tell me nothing’s changed while I’ve been away. I can see changes everywhere I turn.”

  And that, in part, was true. But deep down, Sam knew that many things about the South had not changed and never would, and that was in part why she had returned to it. One of the things she’d always said, as a stranger in the even stranger land of California, was that she’d never regretted growing up Southern. Most certainly the South had its dark side, and she was among the first to point out its obvious flaws. But it had its charms, too, its gentility, its beauty, and, not least, its humor—none of which she had ever seen the likes of in all her travels. And although the Kmarts and the tract houses and the McDonalds in some ways made it look like other places, it wasn’t.

  “Unfortunately, some things that ought to change don’t,” George answered her charge.

  “So you’re going to sit here and tell me that most of the justice in this state is still dealt out catch-as-catch-can by a handful of fat rednecks?”

  “Well, I don’t imagine they’re all fat, and as you’ll remember we mostly call them crackers, but yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “And no one does a thing about it?” Sam demanded.

  “Well, only every once in a while. And usually only when it can’t be helped. I mean, the mess Sheriff Chandler got himself in had nothing whatsoever to do with local folks—that was on account of the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  “Because he was…”

  “Because he was helping some boys fly such bodacious amounts of cocaine into his county that the hillsides were beginning to look like winter in Vermont.”

  “And you think corruption like this goes on throughout the state?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I know so,” George said. “My esteemed fellow partners at Simmons and Lee didn’t give me that gold watch when I retired for being stupid.”

  “So you agree with me there’s a story there?”

  “Of course there’s a story. But what I am trying to impress on you in my humble, inarticulate way is that you would most likely get yourself killed investigating it.”

  Sam ignored that little bit of business since they both knew that George Adams was one of the most gifted orators ever to address a Georgia courtroom.

  “Now you should listen to him,” said Horace, reaching in to remove Samantha’s empty plate.

  “Horace, maybe you could just hold up cue cards for Sam.”

  Horace went on as if George hadn’t spoken. “You don’t want to be messing around with country lawmen. That is bad business.”

  “I don’t know why she wants to be poking around in such troublesome things anyway,” Peaches put in. “Why can’t you write about nice things?”

  “I did that story about your reading program,” Sam reminded her.

  Peaches sniffed. “I hope you didn’t do it just because you thought it would shut me up.”

  “No, I did it because it’s something worthwhile that people ought to know about. But you know that was way out of my territory. One doesn’t investigate things that are nice.”

  “Well, you ought to.”

  “Next thing you know, Peaches, you’re going to tell me that my place is in the home.”

  That was a joke of long standing, for the Adams home, which Peaches ruled as housekeeper, was frequently the last place one would find her. Having returned to school and graduated from college in her early forties, Peaches had never looked back once she got going and was now, among other things, one of the mainstays of the city’s Each One Teach One campaign against illiteracy.

  And Sam knew that Peaches was as proud of Sam’s professional accomplishments as if she were her own daughter, but it was Peaches’ way to grumble. It was the Adams way to tease, so Sam kept going. “Or you’re going to try to get me married off again. Sure you don’t want me to find myself a nice doctor or lawyer and settle down?”

  “That’s okay. You just go right ahead and make fun of an old woman,” Peaches said.

  Horace played an imaginary violin behind Peaches’ back.

  “I see you there, Horace Johnson!” She swatted at him without turning around.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Horace asked. “Witches have eyes in the back of their heads.”

  “Go right on ahead. But one of these days she’s going to wake up dead and be sorry she didn’t do something normal.” Peaches turned and pushed through the swinging door. “Doctor, lawyer, indeed,” she grumbled as she went. “That wouldn’t kill her, at least.”

  “Why don’t you say what’s on your mind, Peaches?” Sam called after her.

  “Speaking of lawyers,” George said, shoving back from the table, “if I could interrupt you, there’s something I want to talk about, Sam. Horace”—he nodded at the other man—“thanks for the lovely dinner. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to move into the library where we can hear ourselves think.”

  *

  The room was warm and comfortable, its walls lined with cherrywood bookshelves that Horace, whose hobby was woodworking, had built years earlier. There wasn’t room for another volume here; the shelves were jammed with George’s collection of first-edition fiction and a vast assortment of oversized travel volumes. His law books were in his study; more bookcases lined hallways and bedroom walls through
out the large three-story house.

  Horace had laid a fire in the glass-screened fireplace, for even though it was early April and the air was heavy with the scent of Atlanta’s famous azaleas, dogwood, and wisteria, this particular evening there was a bit of a nip in the air. And Horace, who like George was almost 70, knew all too well that the older folks got, the colder their bones.

  Samantha sat in one of a pair of brown leather easy chairs and gazed with affection at her uncle, who sat in the other. He had always been her favorite relative, and she his. When her parents had died in the 1962 plane crash near Paris that killed 122 members of the Atlanta Art Association, other aunts and uncles and family friends had offered to take her in, but it was George who had prevailed.

  “I need her as much as she needs me,” he’d said, and the others had acquiesced. These two had always had a special bond. In fact, it had been George rather than Samantha’s father who had chosen her name—at the time hardly a popular appellation for a little Southern belle.

  “Sam Adams is a venerable choice,” George had said at her christening. And it was also a legitimate family name, the Atlanta Adamses tracing their ancestry back to that Boston clan, which made Sam a member of the DAR as well as a Daughter of the Confederacy. “Besides, I looked up Samantha, and the name means listener,” her uncle had said. “God knows we could use somebody in this family who can do that.”

  So it was natural that George and Peaches and Horace had adopted the favored but orphaned Samantha. They had held her hand through her grief and delighted as she reclaimed a personality filled with light and joy. Sometimes, said George, too much joy; when Sam reached the full riotousness of adolescence, he’d remodeled the second floor of the house and banished her, her dogs, her telephone, her rock and roll, and her wild band of giggling girlfriends upstairs.

  George had taken her everywhere with him, including to Europe twice before she was fifteen. He wanted her horizons to have no limits. When it was time for college, she’d sent off for all the catalogs, and she and George had visited schools on both coasts. Then, having taken a good look, she’d decided, much to George’s delight, to stay home. Atlanta’s Emory University had been good enough for her uncle; it was good enough for her. She made dean’s list her freshman year—and then that following summer, she met Beau. Only six months later, she’d fled to California and Stanford, taking George’s heart with her. That had been almost twenty years ago.