The Grantville Gazette Vol 5 Part 12

Arnold Bellamy looked a little frustrated. "It's seeing underneath what you see on the surface."

"Can you give me a concrete example of it. Something that I would understand?"

He twisted his pencil in his fingers for a few minutes. "In the spring of Natalie's junior year, I accompanied her to a program of the mathematics honor society on campus. You must understand that at the time, while I was getting my secondary certification, I had very little money, almost all of which came from tutoring. Natalie had suggested that if she mentioned to others how much I had a.s.sisted her and said that I was right there, I might find some additional pupils."

I just bet that's what Nat was thinking. Carol kept this opinion to herself.

"In any case," Arnold said, "she was standing at the end of the buffet table, looking like herself. That is, her hair should have been trimmed three weeks earlier, part of her dress was too loose, part of her dress was a little too tight, and while it was sensible of her to have worn winter boots with grip soles, considering the weather, all of the other women present were wearing heels."

"Quite recognizable," Carol said.

"The woman next to her was the wife of Professor Cornaro. She was generally considered to be an attractive woman. I began to ask myself why, and look for the underlying patterns. Finally, I decided that Mrs. Cornaro's configuration was designed to display clothing well. Her shoulders were comparatively broad, her body had few protrusions, and the proportions of the upper and lower torso did not interrupt the line of the fabric."

"I see." Carol was having some trouble maintaining an appropriately solemn face, but she managed.

"Then I looked at Natalie in more detail, and began to diagnose the structural pattern of her body that underlay the poor fit of the clothing she was wearing. I was making reasonably good progress on doing this when the c.o.c.ktail hour ended and people sat down for the meal."

"Too bad the a.n.a.lysis had to be cut short," Carol cooed.

"I did, in fact, get three new people to tutor, so the evening worked out very well," Arnold continued. "But thereafter I found that I had increasing difficulty in maintaining a properly professional att.i.tude when I worked with Natalie. Having, ah, once visualized her component parts."

"I'm sure you did your very best to maintain an appropriate detachment," Carol said deadpan. As a matter of fact, she was sure of it. Arnold being the kind of guy he was.

"The results of having done it once were occasionally seriously embarra.s.sing. I found that I was continually tempted to repeat the process, although there was no real need for me to do so once I had the data. But that is the essential procedure I am trying to apply to this ma.s.s of economic data, for each section of the evidence," Arnold said. "To look at the surface and see whether or not it conforms to the substratum. If not, to determine what the contours of the substratum are."

"Honestly," Carol said to Ron that evening, "it had to be the most convoluted description of the process generally known as 'undressing her with his eyes' that I have ever heard in my life."

Ron Koch shouted with laughter. "We all know that the honorable Arnold Bellamy would never have been known to do such a thing. Of course we do."

"Having been known to do something is a different thing from having done it," Carol said. "That's what evidence is about."

February, 1635 Being patient might have worked. By the late winter of 1635, they were indeed very close to being able to spring the trap on Horace Bolender and his a.s.sociates.

Except that Horace attempted to contest Fran's divorce suit and obtain custody of Dustin and Damien.

Which resulted in Fran calling Laura Jo and spilling the beans in regard to Horace and Dan having set up Sheryl with Drachhausen.

Upon which Laura Jo sent the younger children down to Kamsdorf to stay with Sheryl and called Preston Richards.

She didn't even try to bargain for a reduced sentence in exchange for turning state's evidence.

As Tony Adducci commented more than once, when you came right down to it, if country music didn't say it all, it said all that was necessary. And it dealt with people and their emotions and feelings. It was never about economic development scams any more than it was about Catholic canon law. He had found another clear exception to the principle that country music said it all.

And he still hadn't found a song that matched, "Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen."

Part III: Full Faith and Credit September, 1634 "The court will adjourn until one o'clock P.M." Judge Maurice t.i.to rose from the bench.

In the courtroom, an elderly man rose, pulling himself up by the handle bars of his walker. "Your Honor, may I have the privilege of speaking with you and the parties' attorneys in chambers before the court resumes its session? The matter concerns both a point of law and a point of fact which appear to me to be relevant to the case currently before the court."

t.i.to looked down. It was rare for Thomas Price Riddle, Esquire, to make such a request. The frail father of Chief Justice Charles Riddle had been eighty years old when the Ring of Fire occurred. He was training most of Grantville's new lawyers, but he almost never took an active part in judicial proceedings. This morning he had attended in his capacity as mentor and shepherd to several of the students who were reading law under his guidance, to watch Laura Koudsi, the first of his students to complete her training from start to finish since the Ring of Fire, handle her first divorce case. There was no apparent reason for him to intervene in Murphy v. Murphy, so whatever concerned him must be urgent.

"Request granted, Mr. Riddle" he said briefly.

In the greater privacy of his chambers, he asked, "What's bothering you, Tom?"

"Some of this morning's testimony. In relation to other information in regard to the case that is general public knowledge. At least it is general public knowledge if a person has lived in Grantville long enough."

"In what way?"

"Do I have your permission to begin with something that may seem quite irrelevant at first?" Tom Riddle asked. "And that you all"-he included the two attorneys in his gesture-"bear with me for a while if I seem to be a maundering old man?"

"I've never heard you maunder, Tom, but I will certainly bear with you as long as you wish," t.i.to answered. He was all too well aware that his own background for the job he held was far less comprehensive in the way of legal education than that of Grantville's senior lawyer. Ten years on the Fairmont police force and teaching several courses in criminal justice to aspiring candidates for law enforcement jobs at the Tech Center did not equate to full preparation to handle civil cases and domestic issues. He relied heavily on digests and summaries.

As had Sheldon Francisco during the two previous years, before he moved to the State of Thuringia-Franconia's Department of Justice. Sheldon had taught a couple of courses in business law at the Tech Center before the Ring of Fire. Neither of them were lawyers. Just, in this world, judges.

Grantville's legal system was to a considerable extent a thing of baling wire and binder twine, duct tape and expedients. The town had not been the county seat. No courthouse. No a.s.sociated personnel. At the time of the Ring of Fire, the town had exactly one practicing lawyer, Chuck Riddle. Mike Stearns had appointed him chief justice for the NUS, now the state. As such, he could not really provide guidance to the judges in Grantville's own court system, since the court over which he presided was the only avenue of appeal for the decisions its judges handed down.

Thomas Price Riddle, the intervener, was the chief justice's father. Martin Riddle, the prosecuting attorney, was his son. Martin had been in his third year of law school. The legal counsel to Ed Piazza, the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, was Chuck's daughter Mary Kathryn, who had been in her first year of law school. It was practically incestuous. It was also unavoidable until such time as Grantville produced more lawyers. With the result that Tom Riddle, aged eighty and already unwell, did his best to become a law school faculty. Which he had been doing, now, for four years. To a dozen or so students, most of whom had other full-time jobs, and who, half-trained or not, were subject to being called away for months at a time for such projects as the special commission sent to Franconia in 1633.

"As a younger man, as you know, I practiced law under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for some years."

The other three nodded. One of the additional obligations that Tom Riddle had a.s.sumed was presiding over some of the inevitable courts-martial that had occurred during the past four years. He had provided advice and counsel to the judges and attorneys alike during others.

"That is not directly relevant," Riddle continued, "except that those years of practice took me for quite some time to Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. Occasionally to nearby installations, including the Rock Island a.r.s.enal. I was in the Middle West long enough to become familiar with the legal systems prevailing there. These were not always the same as West Virginia law, by any means. And under the 'full faith and credit' provision . . ."

As the older man spoke, Maurice t.i.to's stomach cramped, clenched, and began to sink down toward his knees. He had a premonition that whatever came next was not going to be good. He nodded his head.

Laura Koudsi looked totally bewildered.

Johann Georg Hardegg looked totally apprehensive.

Riddle continued. "The newspaper coverage of the shooting at the Central Funeral Home during Juliann Stull's funeral in July included a statement by Patricia (Fitzgerald) Murphy to the effect that the first time Dennis Stull proposed to her was in 1965."

t.i.to nodded.

"You were not in Grantville in 1965. Your family lived in Fairmont, and if I recall correctly, you were about eight years old?"

"Yes," t.i.to said. "I turned eight in October of that year. Although at that time my family was living in Clarksburg. We didn't move to Fairmont until I was fourteen."

"My hypothesis applies, though. You have no family connections in Grantville other than those arising through the fact that you married Renee Warner. And in 1965, you were neither old enough nor in a position to be aware of most of what was happening in Grantville." Riddle leaned back in his chair.

"Perfectly true," t.i.to said.

"Attorney Hardegg, representing Francis Murphy, was certainly not in Grantville at the time, considering that he was born in 1598 in Saalfeld in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg."

Johann Georg Hardegg inclined his head.

"And," Tom Riddle smiled at his former student, "Laurie here would not be born for another thirteen years."

She blushed a little. She realized that she probably knew even less about the gossip that had been current in Grantville in 1964 and 1965 than Maurice t.i.to did. Her parents, in fact, were more or less the judge's contemporaries, and thus probably not fully conversant with the gossip of the time. Her father Simon was t.i.to's own age and her mother Dina wouldn't have been more than five or so.

"I haven't spent much time on 'full faith and credit' with my students," Thomas Price Riddle said. "I feel a little bad about this, Laura. You may end up feeling that I've really pulled the rug out from under you and your client. But, a small West Virginia town stuck in the middle of Germany in the 1630s-I really didn't antic.i.p.ate that you and the other upcoming young lawyers would need it. I've been trying to concentrate on things you could reasonably expect to encounter, on the predictable. But this is neither expected nor something that I would have predicted. Therefore," Riddle continued, "there are a couple of things that the court may need to take into consideration."

"Let's begin with some history," Tom Riddle said, looking at the three of them. "The starting point is that Pat Fitzgerald was absolutely crazy about Dennis Stull."

"That certainly seems to have been the case," t.i.to grinned.

"Her eighteenth birthday was December 29, 1964. On the morning of that day, she got out of bed, packed a suitcase, hitchhiked to Fairmont, and used nearly every cent she had saved from a part-time job to buy a ticket to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Dennis Stull was stationed. What little money she had after that, she used to phone him long distance from Pittsburgh and say when she would arrive. Within a couple of days, this was general knowledge in Grantville. Given the way that her parents were ranting and raving, it would have been almost impossible for anyone to have missed it. I was practicing in Morgantown at the time, but my sisters Stella and Myra were still living in Grantville and I heard a lot about it. Hearsay, of course, but I believe substantive enough to justify having the court pose some questions to the plaintiff."

"We are now getting very close to the essential point?" t.i.to asked.

"Yes. To the best of my knowledge, Pat lived with Dennis Stull for well over a year that first time, for several months in Fort Leavenworth and subsequently, until he was sent to Vietnam, in Davenport, Iowa, while he was stationed at the Rock Island a.r.s.enal. Both Kansas and Iowa are states that do recognize common-law marriage. Moreover, the law of Kansas worked on the theory that if it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, it was jolly well a duck, even if thoughts wandering around inside its head might have been to the effect that it intended to be a pheasant. Numerous couples, over time, have been very surprised to discover that after a sojourn in Kansas they were now married. It may be prudent of the court to determine whether or not the plaintiff and defendant in Murphy v. Murphy were ever legally man and wife before issuing a divorce decree."

Maurice t.i.to's stomach turned a few somersaults, crunched up into knots, and refused to even think about consuming the cold cuts and cheese on rye sandwich he had brought for his lunch.

"Thank you," he said to Riddle. "I dismiss the attorneys to confer with their clients."

"You are quite welcome," the older man said, and left to join his little flock of baby lawyers at the Thuringen Gardens, to which they transported him by wheel chair.

Maurice t.i.to sat there, looking at his lunch pail. He finally decided to risk eating the apple.

Thinking, as he did so, that given its symbolism, it was a remarkably appropriate fruit for the occasion.

Johann Georg Hardegg, of the firm of Hardegg, Selfisch, and Krapp (with branches in Saalfeld, Rudolstadt, Jena, and most recently Grantville) had taken the task of representing Francis Xavier Murphy in this divorce suit. Not because he necessarily expected to be paid, given Murphy's reputation, but because it had seemed to be an uncomplicated case that would bring him a little more name recognition, and hopefully a few more clients, as the firm set up its new branch.

After all, he had been a.s.sured over and over, the up-time matrimonial law was nowhere near as complex as that of the German states in the 1630s. There were civil licenses to be obtained, a ceremony to be performed by a duly licensed civil or ecclesiastical authority, and the filing of the certificate. It was quite simple and forthright. On one given day, a couple was not married; on the next, after those steps, they were. There were no legally binding betrothals to worry about; none of the difficulties that made practice before an Ehegericht, a consistorial marriage court, so wearisome in the Lutheran princ.i.p.alities.

He was feeling sadly disillusioned as he ate his ample lunch.

Thomas Price Riddle, upon returning from lunch, was separated from his students by the bailiff, who requested that he speak with the judge again.

"The court will now come to order," the bailiff intoned solemnly. "All rise."

Maurice t.i.to entered from his chambers and took his place on the bench.

"I have taken the liberty," he announced, "with the consent of the attorneys representing both parties, to request the presence of Thomas Price Riddle, Esquire, as my a.s.sociate on the bench in the hearing of this case."

That caused a considerable rustle among those present in the court. Particularly the newspaper reporters, who regarded Murphy v. Murphy as a sufficiently luscious tabloid case even without new and unexpected developments.

Riddle, in robes, joined t.i.to.

t.i.to looked at Laura Koudsi and advised her that the court found itself in need of additional information and would wish to swear her client to testify for informational purposes.

Laurie looked at Pat. Pat said, "Okay by me."

"We have no objection, your honor," Laurie said, "although I, um, think that this isn't quite the way things are done usually. That is, I would like to state for the record that this isn't the way things are done usually."

t.i.to had no wish to be harsh with her. "We grant this is an exception to normal procedure," he stated. "An exception I am making for the reasons that were presented in chambers and will soon become apparent to the court for the record."

"What happened when I went out to live with Dennis?" Pat asked in some bewilderment. Laurie had tried to explain the legal points to her during the last half hour of the lunch break, but the only thing that had gotten through was that she might not be divorced from Francis today, which had caused an outburst of pa.s.sionate sobbing. Once her attorney had dried her eyes and had her blow her nose, she had ended up more confused than ever by Laurie's attempts at further explanation.

"Yes, please," Maurice t.i.to stated. "Just a brief statement, please."

"Well, I left here-left Grantville that is-on my eighteenth birthday. The buses were really slow because of the weather. I missed a couple of transfers, so I didn't get into Leavenworth until New Year's Day. That was three days later. I got off. Dennis was there, waiting for me. He'd been there to meet every bus that came in for thirty-six hours. I couldn't call again and tell him where I was because I didn't have enough money and it wouldn't have done any good if I had because he was at the bus depot waiting for me."

"Continue, please," the judge said.

"I got off. We kissed each other for a while. Then we went to look for my suitcase, but it hadn't come in on the same bus. Before we went to ask about it, Dennis said that he wasn't going to have anyone looking at me crossways. He took a box out of his pocket and it had a wedding and engagement ring in it. Just dime store, but he put them on, and said that we could sort out the rest of it later, but I should wear them. After that, we kissed each other a little more. Then we went to the baggage office."

Maurice t.i.to's stomach was performing multiple gymnastic stunts. He was seriously wishing that he had not eaten even the apple.

Thomas Price Riddle's face was totally impa.s.sive.

"Continue, please," Maurice t.i.to said.

Pat took a deep breath. "The man at the depot said he would call when my suitcase arrived. Dennis gave his number at the barracks, but a different address, because when I said I was coming, he had subleased a little apartment from a guy who was being transferred out on short notice. Then we went to the car he had borrowed, and stopped at a drug store so I could get a toothbrush and stuff, which he had to pay for because I didn't have any more money, and we went to the apartment. We got out of the car. The apartment was up above a garage. Dennis knocked on the kitchen door of the house and introduced me to the landlady, who gave me a second key. Then he went to return the car to the guy he had borrowed it from while I took a bath."

"How did he introduce you to the landlady," Thomas Price Riddle asked.

"As his wife. Well, I mean, he could hardly have said that I was his squeeze or whatever they called it back then. She was a very respectable-looking woman," Pat said.

"Thank you," Maurice t.i.to said once more. Then, "How long did you continue living in this apartment?"

"Until July. Dennis was real busy, of course. There wasn't any point in sitting around by myself in the apartment all day, every day. I thought about getting a job, but he said that he was able to cover the rent and it would be better, since I'd left Grantville in the middle of the school year, to go back to high school there and finish up. There were so many military families in Leavenworth that the school system was fairly accommodating. They got my transcripts in a hurry, tested me in for placement, and turned me out in June with a GED high school diploma. That was a whole year faster than I'd have been able to do it here."

Thomas Price Riddle intervened once more. "Do you still have a copy of this diploma?"

Pat nodded.

The court reporter reminded her to reply verbally.