I told her of Tracy’s last remarks. “What if she was talking about herself, not me? What if Don Whitley was the somebody right under her nose? He’s sort of cute and nice and he’s generated several drug cases for Doug’s office this year, so they’ve been thrown together a lot, preparing for court.”
“But didn’t you say she made some snide remark about Dwight? About the disparity between an attorney with a law degree and a deputy with only a high school education?”
“That could’ve been about herself and Don Whitley, too.”
I described Whitley’s beery gloom at Jerry’s, the last place he’d been seen. “He said that Tracy was the reason he was taking courses out at the community college. Maybe he was trying to improve himself for her.”
Por snorted. “Like an associate degree in criminal justice would be enough for Tracy? I’m sorry she’s dead and it’s horrible that she was shot, but let’s not forget that she could be a real snob at times.”
“I know, but young as Whitley still is, he could go on for a regular BA. Hell, he could even go over to Eastern for a law degree. Hector Woodlief was almost fifty when he passed the bar.”
“So if he was doing all that for her, would he’ve killed her?”
“Maybe she dumped him.”
Unspoken came the thought that if he really was her lover and the father of her baby, maybe that’s what they’d fought about. Maybe he wanted it and she didn’t.
Or vice versa.
A lot of pregnant women have been killed by their husbands or mates these past few years.
I was dying to tell Por about Tracy’s pregnancy so that we could thrash it out together. We’ve always bounced ideas and theories off each other, shared the good gossip, or asked for the other’s take on something. It felt like a betrayal not to confide in her now the way I usually did, but a promise is a promise. To avoid temptation, I switched the subject to Cyl DeGraffenried and we spent the rest of our time together dishing about Cyl’s sudden engagement, my wedding, and if Carolyn Deborah would arrive on her twenty-eighth due date in time to qualify as a tax deduction.
I left as Brack drove into Por’s driveway and went straight back to the courthouse. If I couldn’t talk to Portland, I could certainly talk to Dwight, right?
Wrong.
“Sorry, Judge, honey,” said Bo Poole, who will never let me forget that someone once called me that my first year on the bench, “but he went to have lunch with Terry Wilson. Want to leave him a message?”
“That’s okay. I’ll see him tonight.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a knowing grin. “I bet you
Everybody’s a comedian.
In a special hearing that afternoon, I was asked to terminate visitation rights for an allegedly abusive mother. What made it weird is that this wasn’t an uneducated woman stressed out by a dead-end life with no options. This was the daughter of a fairly wealthy family with lots of resources. Indeed, it was the grandparents who were actually fighting the termination because the little three-year-old boy was their only grandbaby and they didn’t want to be dependent on the goodwill of their former son-in-law for access to him. They had hired the best civil attorney in town, my cousin John Claude Lee, to defend against Millard King, attorney for the plaintiff.
Most times, small-town life can be as comforting as a woolly blanket on a cold winter night, the way it lets you snuggle down with people and places you’ve known forever.
It can also be as smothering as waking up with that blanket tangled around your restless body.
Whether personal or professional, I was beginning to feel as if every time I turned around these days, I was faced with a conflict of interest. It wasn’t just the judgment I’d made this morning about a friend’s son that troubled me. No, it was the way I had been less open with my oldest, dearest friend because of my promise to Dwight. It was having to deny my usual need to satisfy my admittedly nosy curiosity because of this new commitment to him. For the last two months, as old loyalties and old priorities shifted and realigned to accommodate the new, it felt to me like I was trying to cross the moving floor of a carnival funhouse.
And now here I was being asked once again to walk that tricky line between judicial objectivity and family ties.
I offered to recuse myself, but Millard King professed himself satisfied with my ability to judge fairly on the merits of the facts.
The father accused the mother of neglect and physical abuse and of putting the child in harm’s way every time she was left alone with him.
While not specifically denying those allegations, John Claude argued that the grandparents would make sure their daughter was never alone with him and that any future visitations would take place in their home.
The father, an earnest young executive for Progress Energy, did not have his ex-in-laws’ deep pockets, but he did have Dr. David Merten, a well-respected pediatric radiologist, whose show-and-tell consisted of a series of X- rays that documented at least three, and possibly five, separate fractures of the young child’s bones. Dr. Merten had a well-timbred speaking voice and his vivid blue eyes flashed expressively as he laid out the dates for these X- rays and explained how unusual it was that an otherwise normal and healthy child should have so many greenstick fractures.
Pointing to faint shadows that may or may not have been earlier fractures and speaking in layman’s terms, he said, “Children of this age heal so quickly that it’s impossible to say for sure that some of these were indeed fractures, but here, here, and here, there can be no question that the bones were cracked. Fortunately, none of the boy’s growth plates have yet been damaged, but should that occur, the bone might well stop growing so that the arm or leg would be shorter or would grow crookedly.”
The X-rays of each undeniable fracture had been taken at the time the child suffered the “accidents,” and those accidents corresponded to dates he had been in the custody of the sulky-looking woman who now sat beside John Claude at the defendant’s table.
Despite my ties to John Claude, it was a no-brainer. The mother gave a “whatever” shrug when I ruled to terminate her visitation rights, but her parents, seated behind her, looked devastated.
