Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

  The jury looked at Reid expectantly, but Judge Byrd motioned to the bailiff. “Head ’em out, Mr. Faircloth.”

  Eight women, three of them black, and four men, one black, stood up and followed the elderly bailiff out through the right rear door. I was interested to see that the one black man was James Greene, formerly a deputy on the town police force and now head of his own small security service.

  Why in God’s name, I wondered, had Reid left him on the jury? I could tell it was likely to be after lunch before the court would get to Luellen’s case, but a freezing rain was falling outside and there was nowhere else I needed to be right then, so I settled back on the bench.

  When the door closed behind the last juror, Judge Byrd called for motions and Reid asked for dismissal for lack of evidence. I’d come in late, so I couldn’t tell if there was merit to what would be an automatic motion on Reid’s part, even had his client been falling-down drunk.

  “Denied,” Byrd squeaked in his little high voice. “Will there be evidence for the defense?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, there’ll be evidence.” Reid sat down and conferred with his client until the bailiff had finished bringing the jury back in.

  Ambrose looked at his watch, sighed, and wandered out to the hall where other lawyers paused to exchange pleasantries as they passed from one courtroom to another, keeping check on how much longer it’d be before one of their cases was called. Earlier that morning in Courtroom #3, I’d pled two young men guilty to taking a deer illegally and got them off with a $150 fine and ninety days suspension of their hunting licenses. (“They were real respectful and cooperative,” the game warden testified.) And I’d helped an elderly grandmother avoid a fine for writing worthless checks on what she’d thought was still a joint account with her sailor grandson. (He’d gotten married in San Diego and had closed the account without telling her.) Nothing else was on my court schedule that day except Luellen Martin’s hearing.

  While I sat there, her probation officer came in with a steaming white foam cup and sat down at the end of the bench beside me. The smell of hot chocolate mingled with the sweet floral perfume she wore. Either I’m getting older or probation officers are getting younger. I know they have to be twenty-one and college graduates, but in her blue print jersey with its broad, white, lace-edge collar, this one looked like a yuppie teenager. No wonder Luellen kept skipping her probation meetings.

  “Call your first witness, Mr. Stephenson,” Judge Byrd directed.

  Reid had only one, the defendant himself.

  Gilchrist appeared to be in his midthirties, quite dark, close-clipped wiry hair, neatly dressed in a blue turtleneck sweater, a brown corduroy jacket, and blue jeans. A self-employed plumber who lives here in Dobbs, he told his story quietly and with no apparent emotion, almost as if he were describing something that had happened to a stranger.

  But his eyes were wary.

  On the Thursday in question, he said, he’d worked all day on some frozen pipes over in the next county. He’d had a bad cold all week and was running a fever; so before he went to bed that night, he’d mixed himself a homemade toddy.

  “I waited till after my three daughters had gone to bed because my wife and me, we don’t hold with drinking in front of the girls.”

  At Reid’s prodding, Gilchrist indicated that he’d poured about two fingers of Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey into a pint Mason jar, then added honey and lemon juice. (Too bad he hadn’t bought George Dickie or Jim Beam, some brand name that didn’t carry such a load of drunken images.)

  He’d sipped the toddy while watching the late-evening news and had then gone to bed. Two hours later, he’d been awakened by a phone call from his sister, who worked a night shift at a convenience store over in Widdington, about twenty miles away. Her car wouldn’t start and there was no one else she could call, so Gilchrist had hauled himself out of bed, sleep-drugged, stuffy head, low-grade fever and yes, a debatable quantity of that homemade toddy, and had driven over to pick her up. He’d taken her to her house out in the country about three miles from Dobbs and was on his way back to his own house when the trooper pulled him.

  According to his testimony, he’d cooperated up to the point they tried to administer the Breathalyzer. “I walked the line, touched my nose and did all that stuff, but when they wanted me to blow on the tube, I said I wanted to call my lawyer and they said they’d get to that.”

  He then described how Sanderson and the arresting officer, Davis, kept pressing him to take the test. When he refused and repeated his request to call a lawyer, they started filling out the Alcohol Influence Report. “That’s when I just quit talking and said whatever I thought they wanted me to say because I didn’t want to get them mad at me.”

  It sounded logical. On the AIR form, the question about calling someone is down near the end. If Gilchrist had gone into a passive mode of answering yes or no according to what he thought the troopers wanted to hear, it was quite likely that he’d automatically answered no at that point.

  Gilchrist’s testimony also disputed Sanderson’s version of filling out the report. According to him, Davis had read the questions and Sanderson had filled in the blanks. “They said I had that paper and was reading along with ’em, but they never gave it to me till they said I had to sign it, so I did.”

  On cross-examination, Tracy tried to rattle Gilchrist about how many inches of Georgia Moon he’d actually poured into that Mason jar, but nothing got beneath the unemotional surface the black plumber had learned to present to white officialdom.

  “I bought that bottle at the ABC store back before Christmas,” he said, quietly underlining the assertion that he was no habitual drinker. “It’s still got almost a third left in it.”

  On redirect, Reid said, “How old are you, Mr. Gilchrist?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “How long you been driving?”

  “Since I was sixteen.”

  “Ever been arrested before?”

  “No.”

  “No speeding tickets, no DWIs?”

  “No.”

  “Defense rests, Your Honor.”

  The jury was taken out again. Once more Reid asked Judge Byrd to dismiss and once more the motion was denied. Then Perry Byrd mechanically ran over the usual points he planned to touch on in his instructions to the jury. “Any requests for further instructions?”

  “No, Your Honor,” Tracy said.

  “No further requests,” said Reid.

  The jury filed back in and seated themselves with a friendly, interested air. This was only Tuesday, the first day they’d actually sat on a case, and they weren’t yet jaded. Reid had a warm avuncular smile on his face as he went over to address them, and several smiled back tentatively.

  “Now’s when we bring out our closing arguments,” he said and delivered a short and eloquent speech about the burden of proof being on the state. His argument, of course, was that all the state really had was the defendant’s refusal to take the Breathalyzer and the account of the arresting trooper who’d stopped Gilchrist at 2:30 in the morning, a sick man on his way back to bed after performing a Good Samaritan deed for his sister.

  “A dark moonless night, ladies and gentlemen, on a winding stretch of deserted highway. Two cars meeting each other. Trooper Davis says he observed my client weaving back and forth over the center line and he had what? Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds to observe all this?”

  “Don’t forget, ladies and gentlemen, that Trooper Davis is an experienced officer with nearly ten years as a North Carolina highway patrolman,” said Tracy Johnson. I decided those ugly glasses were a smart touch. They neutralized both her prettiness and her inexperience and lent a tone of judicial competency as she ran over the case again and asked for a guilty decision.

  In persnickety tones more suited to explaining Parcheesi rules, Judge Byrd instructed along predictable lines: the jury was not to consider what they’d like the law to be, but what it is; yes, there’s a presumption of innocence and the s
tate must prove guilt, but not beyond all doubt, he told them, leaning heavily on the all, merely beyond reasonable doubt. He read them the law on DWI, told them their possible verdicts, then sent them off to deliberate.

  It was 12:15.

  I’d hoped to slide Luellen’s case in before the lunch recess, but Ambrose Daughtridge had poor-mouthed about his schedule enough that Tracy called his case next, so Reid and I splashed across the street in the freezing rain to Sue’s Soup ’n’ Sandwich Shop for a bowl of her homemade Brunswick stew. The little shop was crowded and steamy and permeated with the wonderful smells of hot coffee, toasted bread, and fragrant meats. We had to wait a few minutes for one of the tiny booths that lines the wall opposite the long Formica lunch counter.

  Reid was torn between optimism for his client’s case and disgust that Gilchrist had even been charged. He’d managed to keep on the panel a sharp-eyed middle-aged woman who’d worked as an auto insurance adjuster, and he seemed to think that she was the natural choice for foreperson, someone who’d see this case for what it was and bring in a quick not guilty.

  I hate to lick the red off anybody’s candy cane and kept my mouth shut.

  “What?” he asked.

  “She’s never going to get elected foreperson,” I told him. “James Greene is.”

  “What you talking? She’s white, she’s educated, she’s sharp-”

  “She’s a woman,” I interrupted. “And a civilian.” Our stew arrived, hot and thick, and I added a heavy sprinkle of black pepper. “James Greene may be a black man, but he’s still a man and an ex-police officer. The other men’ll vote for him to show they’re not bigots and he’ll toss around enough jargon that the women will defer to his expertise.”

  “Yeah?” Reid crumbled saltine crackers over his bowl and stirred them in as he considered how Greene’s being foreperson would affect Gilehrist’s chances. “Well, hell, he knows even better than the Webster woman that it’s all a crock of shit. Everybody sitting in that courtroom knows that Davis wouldn’t have pulled Gilchrist that night if he’d been white. Green’s just some extra insurance I slipped past little Tracy.”

  “God takes care of fools, drunkards and brand-new ADA ’s.” I reached for the pepper shaker again, but Reid pushed it away.

  “You’re gonna wreck your stomach,” he warned. “What’d I forget?”

  “There’s talk that James Greene wants the security contract for that new pharmaceutical plant over in Cotton Grove.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too. So?”

  I swallowed a meltingly tender chunk of beef. “So Owen Barfield’s one of the owners.”

  Dismayed enlightenment broke on Reid’s face. “And Owen Barfield is Judge Perry Byrd’s brother-in-law,” he groaned.

  “Bingo!” I said. “What better way to get the word to Owen that Greene’s Security Agency is absolutely colorblind when it comes to providing security than for James Greene to be foreman of a jury that convicts a black man when there are good grounds to let him ofi?”

  Reid pushed aside his stew. His appetite seemed to have suddenly disappeared. “You’ve got a weird mind, Deborah,” he said, frowning at me. “That’s too goddamned Machiavellian. Greene wouldn’t-”

  “How ’bout a nice slice of pie?” asked our waitress as she paused at our booth to top off our cups with more coffee. “We’ve got deep-dish apple or there’s one piece of pecan left.”

  Pecan pie’s my absolute favorite and I do indulge in the wintertime-after all, what are bulky sweaters for?-but good as Sue’s is, it doesn’t hold a candle to my Aunt Zell’s, and I don’t squander those five hundred calories on anybody else’s.

  “I’ll take the apple if you’ll melt me a little cheddar on the top,” said Reid, who wore a bulky red sweater vest under his gray tweed sportscoat.

  I was wearing a cropped green jacket over a soft challis skirt with a wide tight belt that registered every ounce I ate, so I passed.

  The rain had slacked off by the time we got back to the courthouse, but it had washed away most of the sand that a janitor had sprinkled earlier and the wide marble steps were glazed in a thin coat of ice. Reid took my arm as we started up. “How you gals walk around on those stilts in good weather beats me, but why you don’t break your neck in winter…”

  Since my beautiful black leather boots had sensible one-inch heels, I knew his grousing was just to cover his worry.

  “Maybe the jury will come back as soon as court reconvenes,” I comforted, patting his hand. A quick return would mean acquittal.

  It was nearly three before the jury brought in their verdict. I’d gotten Luellen another stay of active time, and though Judge Byrd gave her a stiff lecture-“You know what suspended means, Miz Martin? You under some kind of impression you don’t have to go to jail if you don’t keep to the terms of the judgment on you?”-he did allow her one more chance to set up a regular schedule of restitution payments with her parole officer.

  Machiavellian or not, James Greene had been chosen foreman and the jury did deliver a guilty verdict. Reid and I-and maybe the wary-eyed Gilchrist-were the only two not surprised. (Later, the bailiff showed Reid the ballots that had been thrown in the trash can. On the first vote, the count had been seven to five for acquittal.)

  Perry Byrd tried hard not to beam as he sent for Gilchrist’s driving record. Despite the plumber’s testimony, he wanted to see for himself; and when it was brought to him, Byrd frowned and muttered to himself in those carrying undertones, “I don’t believe this man’s gone twenty-one years with no tickets.”

  Even under uniform sentencing, a judge has much leeway. The punishment for a first DWI conviction with no priors could be as light as court costs and a few hours of community service. Gilchrist’s was near the maximum: 120 days suspended for three years upon payment of a $250 fine and court costs, plus forty-eight hours of active jail time.

  Reid was appalled, but still game. “Your Honor,” he said, “my client operates a one-man business for his livelihood. We request that he be allowed to wait till the weekend to activate his jail time.”

  “Denied!” said Judge Byrd. “Bailiff, take the prisoner in custody.”

  Okay, so Gilchrist probably would’ve blown a ten. Big damn deal. It wasn’t his choice to go out that night and it wasn’t like he’d deliberately gone and driven recklessly on a crowded highway or anything. Even Trooper Davis admitted he’d been well below the speed limit.

  Normally, mean-minded judicial pettiness sends me right up the wall; that frigid January day it sent me right over to the election board where I filed for Harrison Hobart’s seat.

  I really wished it could have been Perry Byrd’s.

  2 i just came home to count the memories

  The County Democratic Coalition was holding a candidates’ forum at West Colleton Senior High, a sprawling two-story “educational plant” built by integration back in 1969.

  It took fifteen years and the threat of cutting off federal funds to make the county finally admit that separate wasn’t equal. All those shabby old black schools had to be closed because no white tax-paying parents would stand for sending their children there. I shake my head sometimes to hear people fume about the evils of bussing and the benefits of neighborhood schools. You didn’t hear any of that kind of talk back when I was in seventh grade and it was black kids being bussed miles past white schools.

  We arrived a little before six, and the early May sun was still high in the clear blue sky. It streamed in through floor-to-ceiling cafeteria windows and further brightened tables already cheerful with red-checked biodegradable paper tablecloths. Clusters of red, white, and blue balloons were tethered at each table, and red-white-and-blue crepe-paper bunting draped the head table. Very colorful. Very patriotic.

  Lest anyone forget why we were there though, a partisan mural hung on the wall behind the head table. An art teacher here at West Colleton had painted a lifesize donkey kicking the butt of an elephant whose eyeglasses looked suspiciously like those worn
by North Carolina ’s senior senator.

  Supper was the usual pork barbecue, cole slaw, hush puppies, and sweet iced tea. I’d graduated from West Colleton, and Knotts had farmed around here since the late 1700s, so the crowd was friendly. Lots of hugs and howdies. For moral support, I sat at a table with John Claude Lee and Reid Stephenson, my two partners; Sherry Cobb, our legal secretary; and their significant others, which in Reid’s case seemed to change with the moon. A couple of my brothers and their families were there, too.

  Not Daddy though.

  He wasn’t real thrilled when I went to law school and he’s sat on his hands ever since I announced for judge. Being the only daughter after a string of sons, I was supposed to wear frilly dresses and patent leather Mary Janes till I grew up and married somebody who’d worship at the foot of my pedestal the rest of my natural life. He swears he isn’t chauvinistic; but truth is, he doesn’t approve of ladies messing with politics. (Daddy’s like Jesse Helms that way. Neither one of them’s ever met a woman. All females are ladies unless they’re trashy and immoral, in which case they’ve got other labels.)

  I try to take into account that he’s an old man now, someone from another era. He says that’s disrespectful. People say I’m natured more like him than Mother, another reason I stayed in town with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash after Mother died. Keeps us from snarling at each other. This way I can stay polite and respectful.

  Most of the time.

  The evening followed predictable lines once they got rid of the feedback squeal in the sound system: a welcome by the president of the Democratic Women, an invocation by the minister of Cotton Grove Presbyterian, then some brief remarks by our U.S. House incumbent. It’s a safe seat. Down at the grass roots level, there’re still a lot of farmers, and ninety percent of Colleton County farmers are yellow dog Democrats when it comes to local politics.

  We faced the flag for the pledge of allegiance, then sang “God Bless America,” which usually evokes muddled memories. Grade school assemblies get mixed in with cozy feelings from when “thru the night with the light from above” was the blissful security of the hall light that shone through a crack over my bedroom door until I fell asleep.