Rituals of the Season

Cyl laughed, too. “Well you know what they say—if it’s true, it’s not bragging. I was more competent. I looked at my cases with more objectivity, and I didn’t automatically assume that everything a police officer said about a perp was necessarily true.” She cut her eyes at me. “Not even when it was Major Dwight Bryant saying it.”

“I never noticed you not going for the kill,” I objected.

“That’s because dubious cases never got to court.” She took a sip of coffee and touched her napkin to her lips. “I either cut them loose because there wasn’t enough solid evidence to support a prosecution or I let their attorneys bargain down the charges.”

“And Tracy?”

“Tracy Johnson was a middle-class white girl who grew up believing that police officers are there to serve and protect people like her and her kind.”

“Tracy was no racist,” I protested.

“I’m not saying she was. I’m just saying that her innate assumptions about police probity were shaped by a set of life experiences somewhat different from mine. Different from yours, too, probably.”

Well, yes. With a bootlegging daddy and a couple of brothers who’d sowed acres of wild oats before they finally settled down? Not to mention some nieces and nephews who have played with pot, found ways to buy beer before they were twenty-one, and been arrested for vandalism? And yes, a few cases have made the paper lately where it’s clear that if law officers or prosecutors hadn’t withheld a key piece of exonerating evidence, the nonwhite, non-middle-class defendant might have walked.

“Did you like her?” I asked.

Cyl turned her coffee cup slowly around and around in her slender brown fingers as she thought about my question. “I didn’t dislike her,” she said at last. “She tried a little too hard for Doug’s approval, and if she ever disagreed with him, I never heard it. She was too politically ambitious to get on his wrong side.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, she didn’t talk about it openly, but she was keeping tabs on Doug’s game plan. When he runs for governor, I’m pretty sure she planned to run herself—become Colleton County’s first female DA.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said, “but now that you say it . . . she never missed a political luncheon and she was active in the precinct. Always ready to speak to any civic group. She really was positioning herself, wasn’t she?”

“It wasn’t all politics,” Cyl said, trying to be fair. “I do think she was totally ethical. At least by her own lights. And I don’t believe she ever consciously cut corners, but when she was convinced that the bad guys were bad, she certainly went for the slam dunk.”

“Like Doug.”

Cyl wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I saw you checking out his row of trophy pins last night.”

“Did you ever ask for the death penalty?”

“No. Doug always took those cases.”

I realized that we’d never actually discussed the question before. “You for it or against it?”

She seemed surprised that I’d ask. “For it. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know, Cyl. It bothers me that there are guys sitting on North Carolina’s death row for murders they committed when they were seventeen. I guess I go back and forth.”

“Why? When you’ve got a mad dog ravaging through the flock, you don’t hope you can train it not to kill. You put it down. Don’t you?”

“Maybe. If you’re sure it’s really mad and that it’s the one that did the killing.”

“It’s never been shown that North Carolina’s put someone innocent to death.”

“Maybe not, but a lot of death penalties have been reversed or commuted on solid grounds.”

“Which only proves that the system works.”

“We don’t know that it’s always worked. And you’re not going to sit there and tell me it’s administered fairly.”

“I’ll give you that,” she conceded. “Money, race, and class do make a difference, but just because some killers don’t have to pay with their lives doesn’t mean that the ones who do get death don’t deserve it.”

“Reid says Tracy was looking into the Martha Hurst conviction.”

“Who’s Martha Hurst?”

“One of Doug’s little gold nooses. Before your time,” I said. “Doug prosecuted back when he was an ADA under Wendell Barham. Martha Hurst was a woman who beat her stepson to death with her own softball bat.”

“Black or white?”

“White. It was Doug’s first capital case. His first death penalty. She’s supposedly scheduled to die in January.”

Cyl frowned. “And Tracy was questioning it?”

“Who knows? Reid’s dad defended the woman and Tracy asked to see his files. She was going to say why tomorrow.”

Cyl set her coffee cup down softly on its saucer. “I told you Tracy and I weren’t close and that we didn’t talk all that much? One thing we did talk about, though—we hated those stupid pins. We both thought that asking for the death penalty and getting it was too serious to be treated like another macho contest.”