'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
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
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
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
