I said I would.
Superior court was in session, too, the bailiff told me as we crossed into the modern section of the courthouse. “Insurance fraud. It’ll probably go to the jury today.”
In fact, I was zipping up my robe when Superior Court Judge Chester Amos Winberry tapped at my door and poked his head in without waiting for me to answer.
“What if I’d been standing here in my slip?” I asked sternly.
“I’d say when did you start wearing slips?” he grinned.
He had me there. I only own one: a black lace thing that keeps my black silk dress from clinging too tightly when I wear it to funerals; but I never thought anybody’d noticed the other times. Guess I’m going to have to start checking my silhouette against a brighter light.
Chet’s a competent enough jurist. Some of us feel he goes a little too easy on white collar crime and a little too hard on blue collars, but that’s not an unpopular mix down here. He’s getting some gray now and the laugh lines no longer go away when he stops laughing; nevertheless, at fifty he’s still a sexy man, knows it, and loves to act the cowboy. Most of the time, his wife, Barbara Jean, keeps him reined in; but she’ll never break him from calling every female “darlin’,” “honey,” or “sugar.”
“Heard you were down,” he said. “Also heard you found Andy Bynum shot dead out by the banks. Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Did you know him?”
“Hell, everybody knew ol’ Andy.” He shook his head. “Bad, sad thing. Barbara Jean’s all torn up about it. He was one of the few people that everybody listened to.”
“About what?” I rummaged in my briefcase for a legal pad and a pen in case I needed to make notes to myself.
“About everything. How ‘bout you recess at twelve sharp and let me and Barbara Jean take you out for some of the best she-crab soup you ever dipped a spoon in?”
“Can we cram that much lunch into an hour?”
“Oh, I always give my juries ninety minutes,” he said magnanimously.
“Sounds about right to me,” I told him.
We walked down a maze of short hallways and I entered the front of my courtroom from a door beside the bench.
“All rise,” said the bailiff.
• • •
Most vehicular violations follow a predictable pattern across the state and Beaufort district court began no differently. There were the usual charges of speeding, driving under the influence, driving with suspended licenses, failure to wear a seat belt or to provide proper child restraints. (That last is something I take pretty seriously. It’s one thing to risk your own life, but you don’t want me on the bench if you’re caught risking the life of a child.) One after another came calendared cases that could be duplicated from the mountains to the sandhills.
About mid-morning though, I hit something that could only occur at the coast: Felton Keith Bodie and James Gordon Bodie. Brothers. Twenty-two and nineteen, respectively. Charged with driving while intoxicated, impeding traffic, and unlawfully discharging a firearm to the public endangerment.
In simple English, according to the trooper who testified against them, he’d come across a small traffic jam off Highway 70, heading for Gloucester, shortly before midnight last Tuesday night. I’m familiar with that road and I know that stretches of it can get pretty dark and deserted. Too, there are deep drainage ditches on either side, so if anything blocks the road, it’s hard to get by.
“Please describe to the court what you found,” said the assistant district attorney.
“Well,” said the trooper, referring to his notebook in a distinctive Down East accent, “these two were operating a 1986 F-150 Ford XL pickup. At the time I arrived on the scene, the pickup was skewed across the road and blocking traffic from both directions. Mr. Felton Bodie was trying to aim a spotlight mounted on the side of the truck and Mr. James Bodie was shooting at something on the edge of the road.”
“And did you ascertain what their target might be?” asked the ADA.
“Well, I didn’t have time to see anything at first, because as I was heading over to the driver’s side of the truck, Mr. Felton Bodie yelled, ‘You got him!’ and then he jumped out of the truck and ran over to where Mr. James Bodie was wrestling something out of the ditch. They’d just got it th’owed in the back of the truck when I stepped around to the side where they were and asked them what was going on.”
At that point, the trooper glanced at me and slipped into automatic pilot. “There was a strong odor of alcohol on and about the breath and persons of both suspects. Both were glassy-eyed, talkative, incoherent of speech, and unsteady of motion.”
I nodded encouragingly and the ADA said, “Then what?”
“Then I relieved Mr. James Bodie of his rifle and took them both into custody.”
“Did either defendant make a statement?”
“Mr. Felton Bodie said they were driving home to Gloucester when they saw an alligator on the side of the road and decided to shoot it. Mr. James Bodie said they were going to skin it out and sell the skin.”
The two Bodie brothers sat at the defense table with egg-sucking looks of embarrassment on their faces.
Puzzled, I asked, “Aren’t alligators a protected species?”
“Yes, ma’am, they sure are, Judge,” said the ADA, waiting for me to step all the way in it.
I ran my finger down the calendar. “Are they being separately charged for that offense?”
“No, Your Honor,” the trooper grinned. “‘Cause it worn’t a alligator they shot and put in the back of their truck. It was a four-foot retread off’n one of them big tractor-trailer tires.”
I was laughing so hard I had to pick myself up off the floor before I could gavel everybody else in the courtroom back to order.
“Put up a big fight, did it?” I asked when the two Bodies rose to speak in their own defense.
In the end, I judged them guilty of a level five offense and gave them sixty days suspended, a hundred-dollar fine plus court costs, and twenty-four hours of community service as punishment for trying to shoot a protected species to the public endangerment. “And you’d just better be grateful there’s no law against killing retreads,” I told them.
Another dozen cases of speeding, failure to stop at stop signs or flashing red lights, unsafe movements, inspection violations, and driving without valid licenses carried us to twelve noon and lunch recess.
• • •
By 12:08 Chet and Barbara Jean Winberry and I were seated at a window table in the Ritchie House, a lovely old nineteenth-century building that had been refurbished and modernized so sensitively that it retained all its original charm and seaside grace. Despite the pricey rates, the guest suites on the second and third floor stayed booked year-round, and reservations were recommended for lunch and dinner both. Our table overlooked the marina, where several million dollars’ worth of boats were moored. April sunlight sparkled off the water and glistened on gleaming white hulls and polished teak decks.
A waitress had brought our iced tea and a basket of hot and crisp hushpuppies as soon as we sat down, and Barbara Jean had already heard my account of finding her old colleague/ally/thorn in her side—I couldn’t quite get an exact fix on their relationship, but maybe that was because she didn’t seem to have one herself.
I’ve known and liked the Winberrys six or eight years even though they’re both more than ten years older than me. Barbara Jean had inherited her family’s menhaden fish-meal factory from her father; but she spent a lot of time running back and forth between Beaufort and Raleigh when Chet was appointed to a state commission during Governor Hardison’s first term of office. The happiest day of their lives was when the governor appointed Chet a superior court judge down here in the First Division so they could both get out of Raleigh and come back to Beaufort to live full time.