Sycamore Row

the front window, spoke to Clapp by radio, and Clapp could not see his shadow inside. Wearing gloves and disturbing nothing, Erby began in one of the storage rooms. It would take hours and he was in no hurry. He opened drawers, looked at files,dates, names, and so on, and in doing so touched documents that had not been touched in weeks, months, maybe years. Clapp moved his car to a lot on the other side of the square and walked through the alleys. At 1:00 a.m., Erby opened the rear door and Clapp entered the building. Erby said, “Every room has file cabinets. Looks like the current files are kept in the lawyers’ offices, some by the secretaries.”
    “What about these two rooms?” Clapp asked.
    “The files date back about five years. Some are retired, some not. I’m still looking. I haven’t finished the second room. There’s a large basement filled with old furniture, 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, pitch-black, 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 officesneeded 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 popped on a grill. A large man with an enormous belly held a spatula like a weapon and talked to two men sitting on stools. There was little doubt as to who was Fat Benny.
    A sign said, “Order Here.”
    “What can I do for you?” the cook said with a friendly smile.
    She gave him her best smile and said softly, “I’d like a