“
“So what do you want to know?” I asked.
“For starters, what are you hearing about him that we’re not being told?”
“This is all hearsay,” I warned him. “I don’t have any names or dates, but I guess they all happened in his home district.” Without naming any of my sources, I then repeated Reid’s allegation that Jeffreys had given signed DWI dismissals to at least one attorney in the Triad, an area centered around Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem. I told him about the dirty campaign he’d run to oust Bill Hasselberger and his plans to run for the seat currently held by Tom Henshaw, someone else I didn’t know.
“I’ve also heard he could be bribed in custody disputes, and he was the judge that gave probation to the carjacker who raped and killed his victim and then drove around with her body in the trunk for three days. I don’t know if any of my colleagues were related to the victim, but I can ask.”
“About Judge Pierce,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Is she, um, involved with anybody right now?”
I laughed. “Sorry. That’s something you’ll have to ask her yourself.”
“I think I’ll take that as a probable no.” He gave me his card and told me to call any time of the day or night.
During our talk, people from the School of Government had been setting up the conference registration table, laying out our information packets and our name tags. I paused to speak to one of the interns and to read the schedule newly posted on the message easel. As I had told Reid, our president was hosting a reception tomorrow night on the other end of the beach in honor of Judge Fitzhume on his retirement. If I knew this crowd, the tributes would turn into a roast.
The hands of the lobby clock were now straight up on noon and there was an empty hole in my stomach where Bill Hasselberger’s frittata had been hours earlier.
Taking the path of least resistance, I strolled down to the hotel restaurant, pausing on the way to enjoy the beautiful, translucent jellyfish that floated dreamily through the floor-to-ceiling tank that lined the wall. Sea anemones swayed back and forth from their anchorage on a mini coral reef while small colorful fish darted in and out of the crannies. For one brief moment, I considered the possibility of an oversized fish tank at home. Not a whole wall like this, of course. Maybe more like a room divider. Then I remembered what a pain it had been to clean and care for the small tank I had briefly owned as a child, a hand-me-down from Adam and Zach, so on second thought, why didn’t I just enjoy these fish while I was here?
“One?” asked the hostess when I entered the restaurant.
Before I could nod, Beth Keever waved at me from across the room to indicate an extra chair at her table. As efficient as the chief judge from Cumberland County is, I was not particularly surprised to see the rest of the education committee there. Beth smiled as I joined them and pulled out a legal pad. “We were hoping you’d turn up. We decided that if we met here and now, we could have the rest of the afternoon off.”
“Fine with me,” I said. I’d been wanting a chance to get down to the Cotton Exchange. “But my notes are up in my room.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “If we miss something, you can tell me later.”
They had finished eating and were ready to get down to the business of setting the agenda for the fall conference up in the mountains and for the new judges’ school at the School of Government. Suggestions flew back and forth as to topics and speakers. I wanted a session on domestic violence and Fifth Amendment issues. Resa Harris wanted to address the growing backlog of cases, a backlog that was aggravated by too many motions to continue. When the subject of custody and visitation came up, I said, “Not to get too far off the subject, but have any of y’all heard that Pete Jeffreys took bribes in some of his custody cases?”
There was a moment of awkward silence before one and then another nodded.
“Me, too,” said Roberta Ouellette, a fiftyish colleague who serves in the same district as Jeffreys. “Last winter, a year ago. I’m told that’s how a man got primary custody of his four-year-old son even though his second wife didn’t want the child in her house full-time. Nobody’s saying something bad might not have happened if he’d stayed with the mother, but the stepmother’s a smoker and she left her lighter where the child could get it.”
Judge Ouellette’s green eyes darkened. “Last I heard, the child’s already had two plastic surgeries on his face and he’s lost the use of three fingers on his right hand. But at least he’s back with his own mother.”
Heavy sighs ran around the table. Of all the heartbreaking issues we deal with, those involving young children are the hardest. Most judges take this part of the job with utmost seriousness, so seriously that in districts that have a court solely devoted to family issues, few can stand the rotation for longer than a year or two before begging to be assigned elsewhere. We know that our decisions can affect a child’s psyche, his personality, the kind of adult he grows up to be, and it hurts to hear that some decisions can be bought and sold like sticks of butter or a sack of potatoes.
“I was hoping he’d be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy,” said Dale Stubbs of District 11, quoting a Louisiana governor.
That got him a wry smile. We all know that minor sexual misconduct will usually get you censured or removed from the bench quicker than major judicial malfeasance.
“What about the carjacker that he let out on probation without noticing that the guy was already in violation of an earlier probation?” I asked. “Any of y’all know the girl that got killed?”
“No, but it was really sad,” Ouellette said. “She was on her way back to class after a fitting of her wedding gown when he grabbed her.”
Despite Beth’s attempt to get the meeting back on track, the others wanted to hear my account of last evening. None of them had been at Jonah’s, but they were sure Jeffreys’s death must have been a stranger killing because none of our fellow judges could possibly be a murderer.
