Ben gave me a sharp, surprised look.
“That wall’s thin between your office and the ladies’ room,” I explained, “and I was washing up in there when you and Skye were fighting about whether to fix our car or theirs.”
“We weren’t fighting, exactly.” He kept his eyes on his macaroni and cheese.
“Sounded like it to me. You wanted to fix Perez’s car and Skye insisted you fix ours.”
“I planned to fix yours,” he insisted. “I just wanted to finish theirs first. They don’t have any other way to get around.”
“I know.” I flapped one hand to pacify him. “I thought you were right and Skye wrong. And I think it was grand if you stayed late last night fixing their car.”
After that, conversation became an uphill exercise. I was glad when we all finished, shoved back our chairs, and headed home. The courthouse clock chimed nine, and the Episcopal chimes raced through “Be Thou My Vision” a minute later. At that pace, the vision would soon disappear over the horizon.
The rain had stopped at last. As we got in the car, I suggested, “Could we drive over and see where it happened?”
“Won’t be much to see.” Joe Riddley switched on the engine. “Besides, they’ll have the site blocked off.”
“I know, but I want to see it for myself. Please?”
“No. Skye was one of my best friends. I don’t want you messing around in his life.”
He was getting tired, because he’d begun to slur his words, but I was still stung. “I don’t want to mess around in his life. I just want to see where he died.”
“Not while I’m driving. You listen to me, Little Bit, and listen real good. I don’t want you fooling around with this case. You’ve got enough to do, being a judge and working at the store. Besides, cantankerous though you may be, I don’t want to lose you. You stay clear, you hear me?”
I reached out and took his hand. “I hear you, honey.”
That didn’t mean I planned to pay him one speck of attention. I’d just have to bide my time.
11
I was already upstairs undressing when the phone rang. The voice on the other end was breathy and feminine, but my mind couldn’t call up a name to match it. “Judge Yarbrough? This is Marilee Muller. I saw you at Skye MacDonald’s yesterday.”
I stood a little straighter in my petticoat. It’s not every night I talk to a television celebrity. “What can I do for you?” It was a good bet she wanted something. The last time I remembered her calling, she was ten and selling Girl Scout cookies. Maybe I’d been chosen to vote on tomorrow’s weather. I decided to vote for clear and sunny, to give folks something to hope for.
Marilee’s voice was rushed and low, like she didn’t want to be overheard. “I didn’t know who else to call. Our newsroom got a story tonight saying Skye MacDonald is dead. It’s not true, is it?”
She sounded desperate, so I swallowed my disappointment at not being selected to predict the weather. “I’m afraid so, honey. He was hit by a car sometime last evening.”
At that point she took the Lord’s name in vain, which for some reason has become the primary exclamation in her generation for everything from a panty-hose run to national disaster. Then she apologized (as if it were I, rather than God, who commanded that the name be respected) and hung up.
I was peeling off my thigh-high stockings when she called back. “I’m sorry. We got cut off.” That wasn’t true, but I had nothing to gain by calling her a liar. “You were telling me about Skye,” she went on. “That’s awful. Where was he? What happened?” Her voice was as clogged as if she’d developed a bad cold in the last four minutes.
I figured she was either asking me because she thought a judge would know more than some people, or because her newsroom had asked her to get a quote for their eleven o’clock report. Of course, there was one more possibility. It flitted through my head, leaving a clammy trail. She’d been real chummy with Skye yesterday afternoon, and pretty steamed when he brushed her off last night. Maybe she already knew all about how he died, and wanted to know how much people had figured out. Joe Riddley often says I have a suspicious mind.
I sat down on the side of my bed, trying to decide how much to tell her. On the other end of the line, she muttered “Oh, God, oh, God”—more like a mantra than a prayer.
“I don’t know a whole lot,” I began. “He was found out on a dirt road just off Warner Road, and he’d been hit with his own car.”
“His own car? Do they know who did it?” Was it my imagination, or did the line quiver with her eagerness to know?
“The police are working on that, but they haven’t named a suspect yet.”
“Will—do you know if the dealership will be open tomorrow? I—uh, I left a scarf in his office Friday, and I’d like to get it back.”
“Scarf ” my hind foot. I wondered what she’d really left. But I said, sweet enough even to please my Mama, “They’re never open on Sunday. In fact, I doubt they’ll open again until at least Tuesday or Wednesday, but I’ll sure tell Laura to look out for it.”
I expected her to hang up after that, but she had one more question. “Do you know when the funeral is? And will there be a—a viewing?” Her voice trembled on the word.
“That hadn’t been discussed when we left this afternoon. I would guess they’ll have to do an autopsy—”
“Oh,
God.
” She paid for two minutes of dead air, then sighed. “Well, thanks. I’m really going to miss him.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
“We’re all going to miss him,” I agreed, “particularly his family.” I thought we ought to enlarge the picture a tad.
After we hung up, I resumed undressing. I’d gotten down to the bare essentials when the phone rang again. This time it was a male voice I did recognize. “Judge Yarbrough, this is Deputy Adams. Can you come down to the sheriff’s detention center for a bond hearing? Entering an auto and auto theft.” That last part was the charge against the perpetrators. Deputy Adams always gave that detail, to explain why he was bringing me down there. He was one of the few deputies who remembered that my going to him, instead of his coming to me, was a courtesy.
Maybe this is where I should explain what magistrates do in Georgia. We hold probable-cause hearings to decide if there is sufficient cause for arrest and to take a case to the grand jury. We sign search warrants and arrest warrants for police officers and sheriff’s deputies. We hold bond hearings in felony cases to determine whether bail is appropriate, and if it is, we set bail. We adjudicate in issues relating to county regulations dealing with things like evictions and dumping trash. And we hold traffic court in smaller towns. We also process all the bad checks in the county—of which there are far more than you might think. However, except for the chief magistrate, we are part-timers with regular day jobs. We fit judicial work into the nooks and crannies of our days—and nights.
That night, I sure was glad we didn’t have vision phones. It wouldn’t do my judicial image much good to be caught by young deputies in pink lace undies. “Judge Stebley is taking calls today,” I informed him, hoping I sounded as dignified as if I had on my judicial robes.
“Yes, ma’am, he was, but he slipped on a wet sidewalk, fell off a curb, and broke his femur around an hour ago.”
What an everlasting day. “That must have been the ambulance we heard over at Myrtle’s. I’ll be there in a shake,” I promised. I pulled on a rust pantsuit and tied a pretty scarf around my neck. A quick dab of powder on my nose, a pat for my hair, and I was hurrying down the stairs. “Gotta go to the jail,” I called to Joe Riddley as I caught up my pocketbook.
“Want me to come with you?” I could tell from his voice he already had his shoes off.
I shrugged into my still-damp raincoat. “I’ll be fine. Back before you know it.”
Right after I got appointed, deputies used to run out to pick me up and take me home every time we had business at the jail at night. I’d finally gotten the word around that I felt comfortable driving myself, even after dark. Hopemore isn’t a hotbed of violent crime.
That night, though, as I drove through the rain-slick streets, I was glad it was too wet for pedestrians who might step up to my car at our two stoplights, and I found myself peering at every car that came close to mine. I was relieved to pull into the parking lot dotted with cruisers.
The hearing took longer than I’d predicted. The problem wasn’t the three perpetrators, all eighteen and high-school seniors. The problem was one boy’s parents. The three perps had been observed driving a car that had been reported stolen an hour before. Possibly influenced by too many movies, they’d decided to outrun the deputy rather than obey his flashing lights. After what sounded like a hair-raising chase on slick roads, they had taken off across what they presumed was an open field. The barbed wire didn’t stop them, but the cattle pond came as a real surprise.
Now they stood dripping and shivering beside their lawyers and parents. Two sets of parents were nervous, angry with their sons, and concerned to be sure they learned never to do that sort of thing again. “Throw the book at them,” one father urged.
“How could you?” demanded the other boy’s mother. Her son didn’t meet her eye.
The third set of parents, however, were furious with the deputy and me. “You have no reason to drag these decent boys to jail like common criminals,” the father ranted.
I gave him the look that used to chill my sons’ souls. “We are now in session. I’ll have you put out if you cannot control your outbursts.”
“Judges are all the same,” he muttered to his wife. “Always trying to pick on kids.”
Now I recognized the youth. He had a lengthy juvenile record for auto-related offenses, and was arrested only two months before for what he claimed was “borrowing” a car from a neighbor’s yard for an evening’s joyride. The neighbor decided not to press charges, so the case was dropped. Seeing his father’s face, I wondered if the neighbor had been intimidated.
I set bail for the two first-time offenders—to their parents’ obvious relief—and told them when to report to court. I invited the third to enjoy free room and board at the detention center without bond until his case came up. His father got right in my face and shouted, “You can’t lock my boy up with criminals.”
I pulled myself up as tall as I could get. “He needs to learn his lesson now before he
becomes
a criminal. And I’m fining you for contempt of court.” A fine wasn’t sufficient. That was one time when I wished I could lock parents up, too.
His mother caught my elbow. “He
can’t
stay in jail right
now.
My sister’s visiting from Chicago. She’s just here for the weekend.”
“She can come by and see him before she leaves.” That was the most sympathy I could muster.
I added to them all, “I hope you have to pay for that ruined car. It belonged to old Mr. Raddets, and he hasn’t a chance of buying another if you don’t.”
“We’ll see what Sky’s the Limit’s can do,” promised one of the fathers, who was taking his son home. “Maybe Skell will let them work weekends to pay for it.”
Justice in a county the size of ours can sometimes be down-home and personal.
On my way home, as long as I was out anyway, I took a longer route—one that led down the third dirt road off Warner Road, just inside the city limits. It was, as Joe Riddley had said, designed for tractors, trailers, and trucks—all much higher vehicles than mine. The two ruts were lines of slick Georgia mud interspersed with potholes full of water, and the weeds were so high and so wet that the underside of my car got real clean.
Hoping to goodness I wouldn’t skid off the road and embarrass myself by having to call my son Walker to come get me, I bumped between fields and around bends until my lights picked up yellow crime tape strung between two clumps of briers. Come summer, these bushes would be heavy with sweet blackberries. Just now they were razor-sharp ugly briers, just like the pain that shot from my stomach through my chest at the thought of what had happened there the night before.
This murder was different from others I’d been involved with. This was the first time in my life I’d poked around, as Joe Riddley put it, into the death of a friend. Most murders angered me as an affront to society. This one broke my heart.
To my surprise, as I pulled to a stop I saw a police cruiser at the side of the road. A sudden flashlight nearly blinded me. I put down my window and yelled, “It’s Judge Yarbrough. Lower that thing, please.” Whoever it was dropped the beam to the ground, and I opened my door. As heavy feet squished my way, I saw why I hadn’t picked him up in my headlights. It was Isaac James, his skin as dark as the night, dressed in black jeans, a dark turtleneck sweater, and muddy boots.
“You look like a cat burglar,” I greeted him.
He leaned in my open window, smelling of a pleasant aftershave. “You look like somebody who’s where she’s got no business being. What took you so long? Joe Riddley called half an hour ago saying I’d better get down here, you’d be tromping all over the crime scene in a few minutes.”
I opened my mouth for a hot retort, but changed my mind. Admitting one’s own weaknesses is, I have always believed, a form of strength. “My hearing took longer than I thought. What is there to see?”
“Not one blessed thing. This is the strangest case I can remember.”
“Can I take a look?”
“If you stay this side of the tape.” He opened my door and stepped back.
Walking on wet Georgia mud is a challenge. The mud was slick and gluey. Twice it sucked off a shoe and I stepped a bare foot onto the muddy ground, then had to wipe it on wet grass and shove it back in its shoe. Walking in the middle of the road wasn’t much better. Dripping grass soaked my shoes and ankles. Briers snagged my pants. Twice I slid back into the mud, adding about an inch to the sole of my left shoe.
I hobbled to the tape as uneven as a cow on a hill. Ike used his flashlight like a tour guide to point out sights of interest. First, a bright blue tarp. “Mr. MacDonald was lying down there in the road, and in spite of that gully-washer last night, the ground under him was dry, so we know he fell before the storm started. The rain may have washed away some of the evidence, but we found footprints and his car tracks going down to where the body was found.”