The Guthries were both in their mid-thirties. They had a nine-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter. Mr. Guthrie looked somewhat familiar. I seemed to recall him sitting in the witness stand to testify, but for what? Something criminal? My memory was that he’d sat up resolutely and spoken confidently. Today, he had a half-sheepish, half-defiant look about him.
His wife was suing for a divorce from bed and board (which in North Carolina is basically a court-approved legal separation) on the grounds of mental and physical cruelty. She asked for retention of the marital home, custody of the two minor children, child support and post-separation support—what used to be called temporary alimony. Whatever Danny Guthrie had done to her, it was still a burr under her saddle. According to the papers before me, she’d filed her complaint almost a full month earlier, yet, as she took the stand, I could see that she was madder than hell and it was scorched-earth/sow-the-land-with-salt time.
My friend Portland led her through a recap of marital frictions, all the ordinary, but nonetheless irritating, things that finally drive a spouse to say “Enough!”—his disregard for her plans, his lack of involvement in their children’s school activities, his excessive drinking, his erratic work hours.
That was when I realized why Danny Guthrie looked familiar. He was a former K-9 officer with the Fayetteville Police Department, now working dogs for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“And when did you realize that your differences were completely irreconcilable, Mrs. Guthrie?” asked Portland Avery.
“It was sometime after midnight, the seventh of August. Or more accurately, between the hours of one a.m. and five thirty-eight on the morning of August eighth,” Angela Guthrie answered crisply.
“That’s remarkably precise,” Portland said. “Would you elucidate?”
Green eyes flashing, Mrs. Guthrie described how her husband hadn’t come home from work that evening, despite their earlier agreement that they would get up at dawn the next morning and drive to the mountains for a family vacation.
“A vacation that was supposed to give us a chance to relax together and learn to be a family again,” said Mrs. Guthrie.
Instead, ol’ Danny and Duke didn’t come rolling in until well after midnight.
“Duke?” I asked.
“His dog. A Belgian Malinois.”
As a judge, I’ve attended impressive demonstrations of what Malinois can do for law enforcement agencies. They’re built like a sturdy, slightly smaller German shepherd and they’re intelligent enough to understand several different orders. According to their handlers though, they have to be carefully trained to control a natural tendency toward aggressiveness.
Upset and angry, Mrs. Guthrie had smelled the whiskey on her husband before he got halfway across the kitchen.
“What did you say or do at that point?” asked Portland.
“I was really frosted that he didn’t come home in time to help me get ready for the trip and now he was so drunk he wouldn’t want to get up till late. Plus he’d been too drunk to drive, so we’d have to go get his car before we could get started. I just let him have it with both barrels. I told him exactly what I thought of him and his adolescent behavior,” said Mrs. Guthrie, beginning to steam up all over again.
“And what did Mr. Guthrie say or do?”
“He never said a word. Just stood there swaying back and forth till I quit talking. That’s when he looked at Duke, pointed at me and said, ‘Guard!’ and then staggered off to bed.”
“What did you do next?”
“Nothing!” she howled, rigid with indignation. “Every time I tried to stand up, the damn dog started growling down deep in his chest. I sat there for four hours and thirty-eight minutes till my son came downstairs and I could send him back up to get Danny.”
The bailiff and a couple of attorneys on the side bench were shaking their heads and chuckling.
Okay, I’m not proud of myself. I snickered, too. As a feminist, I was appalled. But as someone who grew up with a houseful of raucous brothers and dogs (dogs that half the time showed more sense than the boys), the thought of that dog and this woman eyeing each other half the night? I’m sorry.
Danny Guthrie misjudged my laugh and when he took the stand to tell his side of the story, he’d regained most of the easy confidence I remembered. He seemed to think I was going to be one of the guys, in full sympathy with what he clearly considered a harmless little prank.
“I’m no alcoholic,” he said earnestly. “See, what happened was, our unit had just gotten a commendation for rounding up eight drug runners and we went out to celebrate. Yeah, I probably should’ve called her, but I didn’t realize how late it was. Then I got home and I was really stewed. All of a sudden, that vodka hit me like a ton of bricks and she wouldn’t shut up. All I wanted was to get away from her nagging tongue and go to bed. I honestly don’t remember telling Duke to guard her. And it’s not like he bit her or anything.”
“But would he have if she’d tried to leave the room?” I asked.
“Maybe not bite exactly, but he’d of done whatever it took to hold her there.”
“You’re an officer of the law,” I reminded him. “Didn’t it occur to you that your wife could have had you arrested for false imprisonment? That you could be sitting in jail for a hundred and twenty days?”
“It was just a joke!” he repeated. “She doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
“Well, in this case, I’m afraid I don’t either. What’s the difference between what you did and hiring a man with a gun to keep her sitting there? And what happens when it’s your weekend to have the children and you’ve been out celebrating? Would you have Duke guard them?”
Apprehensive of where I was going, Guthrie swore he never drank a drop when he was in charge of the children, that he would never put them in jeopardy.
When I asked Mrs. Guthrie the same question, she grudgingly admitted that he was, on the whole, a decent father. Not terribly attentive, but certainly never mean to them or physically abusive in any way.
In the end, despite an eloquent argument from Brandon Frazier, I granted the divorce from bed and board and gave Mrs. Guthrie most of what she was asking for.
* * *
The Colleton County Sheriff’s Department is located in the courthouse basement and as soon as I’d adjourned court and stashed my robe, I went downstairs to give Dwight the swim trunks he’d left at my house on Sunday and which I’d forgotten to give him when he was out yesterday.
The shifts had just changed and he sat at his desk in short sleeves, his tie loosened and his seersucker jacket hanging on the coatrack. Labor Day might be the official end of white shoes for women, but Dwight never puts away his summer clothes till the weather starts getting serious about colder temperatures.
“Any luck with that man in the room next to Lynn Bullock’s?” I asked idly. “The New Jersey license plate?”
We’ve known each other for so long and he’s so used to me asking nosy questions about things that are technically none of my business that half the time he’ll just go ahead and answer.
“Connecticut,” he said now, distracted by a report he was reading. “No help at all. Turns out the guy’s a sales rep for a drug company, on his way home from a sales conference in Florida. Got in around ten, left the next morning before nine. Says he didn’t see or hear anything and probably didn’t.”
Dwight signed the paper he was reading, closed the folder, tossed it into his out-basket, then leaned back in his chair and propped his big feet on the edge of his desk.