Chapter 1
The Murder
My morning newspaper was already on the breakfast table thanks to our new live-in help, Dorin and his wife, Gabriela. They migrated here from Romania. Dorin is a graduate student at Vanderbilt and the couple needed a place to stay. My wife, Sarah, was ready to let someone else do the cooking, at least for a while, and I was happy to have someone else changing the light bulbs and doing the other “man around the house” duties required to keep the family compound in fine fettle.
Unfortunately, I could not enjoy Gabriela’s wonderful breakfast. The front-page headline over the photograph of Harold T. Lansden, Esq. read “Belle Meade Attorney Murdered.” Harold Lansden, H.T. to his friends, was the senior partner in the law firm of Lansden, Tillman and Hall. The Lansdens have been prominent in the Nashville legal community for over 200 years. Their name carries a lot of weight and there had been an expectation that H.T. would not spend his life practicing law. He had his sights set on the Governor’s Mansion, but no one expected that to satisfy his political ambitions. Harold was fond of saying, “I’m the fourth generation of Lansdens in Tennessee. Four is my lucky number. So far, we have had three Presidents from Tennessee. That means there is an opening for number four!”
H.T. wore his success well. He was just short of six feet tall on a frame that could double as a men’s store mannequin. He passed up the usual dark blue suit and French-cuffed shirts worn by cut-from-the-mold national politicians. Instead, he usually wore perfectly tailored gray suits. His custom-made shirts were obligatory white but with straight collars and buttoned sleeves. It was the dress uniform of a highly confident and successful individual rather than that of a wannabe. It was a style deliberately intended to put others at ease.
H.T.’s law office location was unique but appropriate for 200 years of Nashville legal history. While most of the larger local law firms had moved to the upper floors of the city’s skyscrapers, the offices of Lansden, Tillman and Hall occupied one of the historic brownstone buildings with an entrance on both Fourth Avenue and Nashville’s notorious Printers Alley.
The Alley is home to some of Nashville’s more bawdy nightlife. In its heyday, it was strictly the Men’s Quarter where the local police unofficially condoned illegal gambling, liquor, and ladies of the night. Back then, the ground floor of the building housing H.T.’s law firm was the Alley’s most elegant saloon. The opulence wasn’t limited to the saloon. An upscale bordello occupied the building’s private upper floors attracting the state’s and city’s most powerful men among its customers, including the governor, the mayor, and the police chief. H.T.’s building, only blocks from the State Capitol of Tennessee and Nashville’s courthouse, is also home to one of Nashville’s famous ghosts, Rocky Johnson, who killed himself with a shot to the head when the saloon and whorehouse he managed was finally shut down in 1916. To this day, Rocky is said to torment building occupants by moving things around and making midnight appearances when young associates or paralegals work into the early morning hours to meet a pressure-filled deadline.
According to the story in The Tennessean, Harold T. Lansden was gunned down by an unknown assailant last night around ten o’clock when he left his office. The newspaper’s reporter speculated that some drunk had fired his weapon and accidentally ended the life of Tennessee’s likely next governor and possibly a future President of the United States. As to motive, the article suggested that his death was probably unintentional; he was an innocent bystander, a victim to the unsavory location of his law firm which placed him in the wrong place at the wrong time.
H.T. Lansden was also someone of particular importance to me. He had called me the night before and said he had a problem and needed my help. He had not wanted to discuss the details over the phone. I was to have met with him today in his office at 10:00 a.m. Unfortunately, because of his death I may never know what his problem was…. On second thought, maybe I will.
Sarah joined me in the breakfast room. She knows the current and former Mrs. Lansdens. I know Amber, the current wife, who happens to be a member of my Women’s Health Club. Sarah would take care of conveying our condolences and would find out the plans regarding a funeral or memorial service. We agreed that she and I would attend the service. We wanted to support the family. H.T. was a good friend, and I was curious. I had an uneasy feeling that his untimely death might be connected to the problem he had wanted to discuss with me.
