Alex Cross's Trial

Her passing set up the first decent breeze I’d felt all day.

    “You can introduce us some other time,” Nate said. His voice was deep, his enunciation precise. I shook his hand warmly and clapped his shoulder.

    “I don’t know what elixir you’re drinking, Nate, but you look younger than you did the day Colonel Roosevelt drove us up old San Juan Hill.”

    “The only medicine I take is good old-fashioned hard work. The kind the Lord intended a man to make with his days. Maybe a little taste of ’shine once in a while, for a chaser.”

    I nodded, but then I looked into his eyes. “What brings you here, Nate? What’s so urgent?”

    “I’m here with a serious proposition. I wouldn’t bother you, but it’s something I believe only you can do.”

    Whatever the favor he was about to ask of me, I was fast losing the desire to hear about it. A sad tale, surely—hard times, ill health, someone’s poor relative left penniless and in need of free legal assistance.

    I tried to keep my voice gentle. “I’ve taken on about all the cases I can handle for a while.”

    “Oh, this is not a law case .” He flashed a particularly charming smile. “Perhaps I should have mentioned that I came here today directly from the White House. This isn’t my proposition. This is a request from the president.”

    I was astonished. “Roosevelt sent you here? To my home?”

    “The man himself.”

    Chapter 13

    THE FIRST TIME I EVER LAID eyes on Theodore Roosevelt—God, how he hated the nickname “Teddy”—I was surprised by how much he resembled the cartoons and caricatures with which the papers regularly mocked him. And now, on this fine summer day in the White House, I saw that the thick spectacles pinching his nose, the wide solid waist, and the prominent potbelly had only become more pronounced since he took up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Roosevelt jumped up from his desk and charged across the room toward me before his assistant, Jackson Hensen, could finish his introduction.

    “Captain Corbett, a pleasure to see you again. It’s been too long.”

    “The pleasure is entirely mine, Colonel… uhm, Mr. President.”

    “No, no, no. I’ll always prefer Colonel!”

    The president waved me over to a green silk sofa near his desk. I sat, trying to contain my excitement at being in the Oval Office, a room that was airy and beautifully appointed but a good deal smaller than I would have imagined.

    A door to the left of the president’s desk glided open. In came a tall Negro valet bearing a tea tray, which he placed on a side table. “Shall I pour, sir?”

    “Thank you, Harold, I’ll do my own pouring.”

    The valet left the room. Roosevelt went to a cabinet behind his desk and took out a crystal decanter. “Except I’ll be pouring this . What’ll it be, Captain, whiskey or wine? I’m having claret myself. I never touch spirituous liquors.”

    That is how I wound up sitting beside TR on the green sofa, sipping fine Kentucky bourbon from a china teacup embossed with the presidential seal.

    “I presume our old friend Nate Pryor has given you some idea why I wanted to see you,” he said.

    I placed my cup on the saucer. “He actually didn’t say much, to be honest. Only that it was to do with the South, some kind of mission. A problem with the colored people? Danger, perhaps.”

    “I’ve been doing a little checking on you, Ben. It just so happens that the place you were born and raised is the perfect place to send you. Assuming you agree to this assignment.”

    “Mississippi?”

    “Specifically your hometown. Eudora, isn’t it?”

    “Sir? I’m not sure I understand. Something urgent in Eudora? ”

    He walked to his desk and returned with a blue leather portfolio stamped with the presidential seal in gold.

    “You are aware that the crime of lynching has been increasing at an alarming rate in the South?” he said.

    “I’ve read newspaper stories.”

    “It’s not enough that some people have managed to reverse every forward step the Negro race has managed since the war. Now they’ve taken to mob rule. They run about killing innocent people and stringing ’em up from the nearest tree.”

    The president placed the portfolio in my hand.

    “These are papers I’ve been collecting on the situation: reports of the most horrible occurrences, some police records. Things it’s hard for a Christian man to credit. Especially since the perpetrators of these crimes are men who claim to be Christians.”

    My first thought was that the president was