A member of the Black Caucus momentarily halted the line in front of Frances, and Lu, who would seize an opportunity with the best of them, slid into the gap. Crumbs of pecan puffs showered down the front of my robe as she gave me an enthusiastic hug. "We're so proud of you! And it's going to be such great publicity having a judge out there swinging a pick."
For a moment, I thought she'd said "picket" even though she, of all people, would surely know that judges can't walk a picket line.
She grinned at my bewilderment. "When you spoke to the volunteers of WomenAid in May. Remember? You said you sure wished you could take time off from campaigning and pitch in. Here's your chance. Saturday morning, seven o'clock. While it's still cool. Don't forget to bring your own tools."
(Stevie chose that moment to turn his camera back on my face just as it was beginning to sink in that I was going to have to put my muscles where my mouth was. My brothers think it's a real funny four-second sequence.) * * *
By five-fifteen, the reception was finally winding down and Frances and I ran upstairs to pick up our briefcases and get out of our robes.
Hers was a cool summer-weight—winning two elections must give a judge the confidence to buy a second robe. As she unzipped, she said, "Didn't anybody tell you judges aren't supposed to make campaign promises?"
Promises made in the spring have a way of coming due in the fall. I knew that. But this was only summer.
"It wasn't really a promise. Besides," I sighed, "I thought they'd be finished building before I finished campaigning. If Perry Byrd hadn't up and died—"
"—you could've got credit for singing with the angels? Without having to show up for choir practice?" She shook her head and laughed. "Child, you really are a politician!"
Back downstairs, the Marthas were packing their left-overs in Tupperware boxes, and after I thanked Frances again and said goodbye, I went over to the table and yielded to the temptation of a single pecan puff. It tasted like fluffy buttered air.
"You didn't eat a bite," said one of the Marthas at my elbow. "Let me fix you a plate."
"Fat cells are just as fluffy as pecan puffs," warned my internal preacher, who also keeps a running total of calories consumed and energy expended.
"Better not," I said regretfully, fishing for her name.
Gladys. Gladys McGee. A sweet face, nondescript body, appropriately Martha-like in a beige-and-rose two-piece dress. The wife—no, the widow of one of Dobbs's independent businessmen. Insurance? Real estate?
Accountant. That was it. Ralph McGee, CPA. A small office next door to my bank, two blocks down Main Street from the courthouse. He'd kept the books for my brother Herman's electrical contracting business. A bit of a domestic bully, I seemed to recall. Gladys had been an attractive blonde once. She couldn't be much past forty, but her hair was now that indeterminate color between light brown and gray. Despite low-keyed makeup, she looked older than forty, and there were deep lines beside her mouth and around her eyes. Continuing grief? Maybe Ralph hadn't left her very well off? And wasn't there a daughter?
The teenage girls who'd helped earlier were gone now like a chattering flock of bright-feathered birds, but among them had been Herman's Annie Sue and a pretty honey blonde.
"That wasn't your Cindy I saw before, was it?"
The worry lines smoothed and Gladys was pretty again when she smiled with maternal pride. "Don't they grow up fast?"
"She's gorgeous!" I said, with only a little exaggeration. I recalled now that Annie Sue had grumbled about how strict her friend Cindy's dad was. Even stricter than Herman, who half the time acted like it was the 1890s if Annie Sue could be believed.
Still smiling, Gladys went back to packing up the pecan puffs. "She's a little headstrong, but a good child, too. It's so easy not to be these days, am I wrong? I'm sure you see plenty of that in court. It's been hard on both of us, losing Ginger and Ralph in the same month—"
Ralph I knew about, but who the hell was Ginger? Then I remembered that Cindy had an older sister.
—much too young, of course, but she and Tom had been sweethearts since eighth grade and we promised that if she'd at least finish high school, we'd give them a nice wedding right after graduation. And then, only two days after they got back from their honeymoons—"
I knew what was expected of me. "It's been such a shock to everybody. Ralph was still young, wasn't he?"
"Only forty-six," Gladys agreed. "But then they always say that the younger you are, the more serious a heart attack is."
I tried to sound concerned and interested. "And he'd never had any heart trouble before?"
"Not a bit." She snapped the lid shut on the pecan puffs and one of her friends took the box and added it to a growing pile of plastic containers at the end of the table. "He'd had some summer flu—least that's what Dr. Bhagat called it. I thought it was too much tension over Ginger's wedding myself. Sometimes you have to wonder about these foreign doctors. Am I wrong? But Ralph swore by him. Anyhow, when he went to him with the flu, if that's what it was, Dr. Bhagat said his liver was a little enlarged and his blood pressure was high, but his heart was just fine. Maybe if he'd gone to an American doctor..."
She shrugged and shook her head sadly.
As a lawyer, I should be inured to how people can go on and on with the most intimate details of a loved one's final days. Nevertheless, I was relieved when Julia Lee came over to wind it all up. She really is wasted as John Claude's wife. She should have been running a corporation somewhere. No detail was too small to escape her notice.
"Don't you want to take some of those cucumber sandwiches?" she asked. "You've paid for them."
I looked around for Aunt Zell. It's her refrigerator.
Julia correctly interpreted. "Zell already left and she said for you not to bring home anything you weren't going to eat yourself. She's put Ash on another diet. He ate too many chimichangas when he was in Mexico and she doesn't want him tempted."
She gave my hips a critical glance. "The Martha Circle usually gives Lu Bingham whatever's left over, if the client doesn't object. She can give you a receipt for the IRS."
Put like that, there was no way I could gracefully claim some of those yummy little cucumber sandwiches. Already Lu was piling them into a capacious cardboard box.
"The kids at our day care love it when I scrounge party food," she said.
She popped a cucumber sandwich into her mouth and happily licked the mayonnaise from her fingers.
Sheer willpower—okay, sheer willpower and Julia's basilisk eyes—kept me from wrestling her to the ground for one.
CHAPTER 2
LAYOUTS AND ELEVATIONS
"The elevation of any object is its vertical distance above or below an established height on the earth's surface."
District court is the workhorse of North Carolina's three-tiered system of justice. On top, the Appellate Division has our supreme court with seven justices and a court of appeals where twelve judges, sitting in panels of three, act as intermediate appellate courts to take some of the load off the justices.
Next comes the Superior Court Division. Except for a few special categories of cases, superior courts handle all felonies, any criminal de novo trials bucked up from below, and any civil disputes involving amounts over $10,000.
At the bottom are the magistrates and judges of the District Court Division.
Sooner or later, every judge has to run for office, but magistrates are appointed for two-years terms and they screen out a lot of the really petty stuff, since they're the first to hear someone who's just been booked. Like the old justices of the peace, they can accept certain misdemeanor guilty pleas and admissions of infractions, settle small claims, and issue warrants. (A magistrate is also, to my private disappointment, the only civil official who can perform marriages. I'd love to be able to marry my nieces and nephews.)