Up Jumps the Devil

The young dog gave a startled woof and Miss Sallie said, “My goodness. He must really be late for work.”

“Telephone, Deborah,” Aunt Zell called from the doorway. “It’s Isabel.” Hambone scooted past her feet and rushed over in hopes of a frolic with his sister.

Aunt Zell handed me the phone and went out to collect her dog and exchange a few words with Miss Sallie.

“Deb’rah?” came Isabel’s voice. “Now if it’s not convenient, just say so and we’ll do something else, but the fog’s so bad and the weatherman says it’s just going to get worse and I hate for Haywood to drive in it and you did say you were going to New Bern this afternoon, didn’t you? And Kinston’s right on the way, so if it’s all right with you—”

“Sure,” I said. “I have half a day of court, but I planned to leave around twelve-thirty or one o’clock if that suits you.”

“Oh good! That’ll get us there in plenty of time. Stevie can drive us over to Dobbs.”

We settled on a meeting place and as Aunt Zell and Hambone came back into the kitchen, I told her I’d be back sometime Friday, depending on when Haywood and Isabel’s plane got in. She and Uncle Ash were going to spend Thanksgiving morning picking up pecans out at his sister’s farm near Cotton Grove, then come back to Portland and Avery’s for a full-blown turkey dinner.

For some reason the zaniest cases seem to show up in pre-holiday court sessions. Wednesday started out normally enough, but shortly after morning recess, we got Marcus Sanders, black, sixty-nine, bone skinny and still spry.

Mr. Sanders was not a stranger to my court because he was bad for augmenting his small pension with shoplifted steaks and chickens from the Harris Teeter store at the north end of Main Street, about two blocks from his house.

More than once the same Harris Teeter security guard had sat in this same witness box and testified as to how he had stopped and searched Mr. Sanders “immediately outside the store” whereupon he had discovered the stolen meats “upon the suspect’s person.”

“This time, when I tried to stop Mr. Sanders, he took off like a rabbit and when I caught up to him, he was setting on his porch swing.”

(Let the record show that while the witness is at least twenty years younger, he is also quite corpulent and probably does not run like a rabbit.)

“And did you then search the defendant?” asked Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting today.

“Yes, ma’am. He didn’t have nothing still on him, but them two packs of steaks were laying on the floor inside his screen door.”

Mr. Sanders, who was representing himself, bounced up from the defense table and said, “And you didn’t have no right. I was on my own premises.”

I cautioned him against speaking out. “You’ll get your turn.”

“No more questions from me, Your Honor,” said Tracy.

Mr. Sanders bounced back up. “When you catched up to me, where’d you find me, son?”

“On your porch.”

“On my porch,” Mr. Sanders repeated happily. “And where were them steaks?”

“Inside your screen door and fully visible.”

“But not on my person?”

“Well, no.”

The defendant turned to me triumphantly, his dark face aglow with righteous vindication. “See there, Your Honor? He says it himself!”

I seemed to be missing something in his logic. Tracy Johnson stood to elucidate.

“Your Honor, Mr. Sanders is under the impression that since he was not searched immediately outside the store and that since the steaks were not recovered from his physical person—”

“Home free?” I asked, disbelieving.

Sanders nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am, Your Honor. Home free!”

I almost hated to disillusion him. Since he’d spent the night in jail and since Harris Teeter had retrieved their steaks back intact, I sentenced him to time served and court costs.

After some public drunkenness in which all the defendants were well past fifty, the last case of the morning was larceny. Two nicely dressed white women: Josephine Reed, seventy-six, white-haired, fragile-looking; and Natalie Meadows, a sweet- faced twenty-one.

In Kmart or Wal-Mart, at Rose’s or Winn-Dixie, in fact, in any store where patrons use shopping carts, Mrs. Reed and Miss Meadows were a Norman Rockwell illustration of a dutiful granddaughter there to push the cart for her failing grandmother. They usually shopped at the busiest times. On this particular occasion, however, someone noticed that after they filled their cart, they didn’t bother to stop at a cash register before pushing that cart right on out to the parking lot.

Mrs. Reed used a cane and walked so slowly that store security had plenty of time to get a Dobbs police officer there before the women had fully unloaded their loot into the trunk of Mrs. Reed’s car. He searched the car and found items from four different stores: cartons of cigarettes, cosmetics, toys, appliances and dozens of boxes of cold tablets, aspirin and antacids. In all, the haul was worth almost two thousand, all destined for the flea market booth the two women rented once a month when their money ran out, according to the investigating officer.

I was all set to lecture Miss Meadows for using her grandmother as stage dressing for larceny when that young woman angrily denied any kinship.

“And I didn’t use her, okay? She came to me. Her own granddaughter was a friend of mine and when she moved to Florida last year, Jo asked me to take her place, okay?”