Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 5

Do not make any display of affection for even your dearest friend; kissing in public, or embracing, are in bad taste.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Jerry’s Steak & Catfish House is popular with our district bar association. The food is good, the prices are reasonable, and, best of all, its location out in the country, heading for the county line, makes it fairly convenient for everyone in the two counties that comprise our judicial district.

As usual, Jerry had given us the large private room upstairs. The front glass wall lets us look out over the main pond where a lot of his catfish are raised. In the middle of the pond, a large Christmas tree cast colorful lights across the surface of the dark water. Inside the restaurant, three more trees shimmered in the softly lit rooms and were refracted by each windowpane and bit of glassware. The tree by the front door was decorated in cow ornaments of every description, from delicate hand-blown glass Holsteins to sturdy plastic Belted Galloways. The one at the foot of the staircase was devoted to fish ornaments, interspersed with an occasional clamshell angel or gilt-rimmed sand dollar that had been brought back from the coast by dedicated patrons. Those two trees were artificial, but the third was a real ten-foot fir decorated in hundreds of small clear lights and red velvet bows of varying sizes. It stood at the top of the stairs, where this year’s president of the association, my cousin and former law partner John Claude Lee, waited to welcome us individually.

In honor of the season, the tables on the upper level were covered with dark red cloths. Each round table held a centerpiece of votive candles, holly, and cedar; and because Jerry’s something of a romantic under his tough exterior and this dinner was, after all, to celebrate an impending wedding, clusters of fresh mistletoe hung above each table as well. The fat white berries gleamed translucently in the candlelight.

Jerry’s place will never be mistaken for a trendy New York bistro, but stepping into its friendly, down-to-earth warmth after a chilly walk across the windswept parking lot was like slipping into a cozy hand-knitted sweater.

Our regular meetings usually throb with hearty laughter and boisterous talk, but tonight, even though Dwight and I were almost the last to arrive, the room was subdued. Plenty of talk, not much laughter.

“Sad business about Tracy and her little girl,” John Claude said in greeting us. His wife Julia, tall and patrician, presented a cool cheek for us to kiss, then clasped my arm more warmly than usual. “It is awful. Especially now, here at Christmas. I just hope it won’t put a damper on the wedding. Everyone’s so worried about that. You know how happy we’ve all been for both of you.”

I took Julia Lee’s words with a big block of cow salt as we headed for the open bar set up beyond the tree. Dwight might be a well-respected lawman among my peers, but for some of those peers, the respect was tinged with condescension, the respect an elitist might give to a good plumber or electrician—fine to share a beer and sandwich with in the kitchen while he fixes the thing you couldn’t, fine to play the good ol’ boy with at a ball game or when shooting a game of pool down at the local bar, but not someone you’d necessarily bring home for cocktails in the living room.

Even Tracy had alluded to Dwight’s lack of formal degrees. Never mind that his Army intelligence tours overseas and in Washington probably equaled a college education. Attorneys and judges don’t usually marry sheriff’s deputies. They’re supposed to marry another attorney, a doctor, a successful business owner, or a college professor. Dwight had a personal letter of appreciation from a former president of the United States hanging on his office wall, but he didn’t have that piece of paper signed by the president of a medical or law school hanging right beside it.

Despite the glasses that were raised in our direction as we crossed the room, there were probably several who thought that this marriage was unsuitable, especially a couple of those who’d put the moves on me in years past. But hey, I’ve been raising eyebrows all my life. Why should my final choice of men be any different?

And yet . . . ? Here in this roomful of bar members, I suddenly realized that part of the vibes I attributed to them might actually derive from that last one-on-one with Tracy last week. She had annoyed me by asking whether Dwight’s job wasn’t going to compromise my courtroom objectivity, but before that, there had also been a throwaway remark about lawmen with only a high school education. Didn’t the disparity bother me?

Distracted by all that was going on in my life at the moment, I had been much too full of love and joy to take offense. Instead, I’d laughed as I gathered up my papers to leave. “My daddy quit school in sixth grade to start making moonshine and most of my brothers are farmers or blue-collar tradesmen. Where’s the disparity?”

“I guess you’ve never worried about public opinion anyhow, have you?” she’d said, and then came that question about whether I could stay fair when judging defendants arrested by Dwight’s subordinates.

That’s when I’d snapped at her. I might not sweat the white-glove upright-pillar-of-society stuff in my personal life, but I do take my job pretty damn seriously. I’d sworn an oath to that effect on my mother’s Bible and I would bend over backwards not to break it.

Avery and Portland Brewer were tending bar when we got there. He was dapper in a black shirt and red tie; she was absolutely huge in a shapeless black suit brightened by a gold-and-silver Christmas scarf.

“If I can’t drink it, I can at least play in it,” she said.

“Hang in there,” I told her. “By New Year’s Eve, you can drink all the champagne you want.”

She gave a long-suffering grimace. “No, I won’t. I’m going to breast-feed, remember? So there goes another dry year.”

Avery mixed me a bourbon and diet Pepsi while Portland poured Dwight a beer and said, “Tracy’s baby. Did she suffer?”

“I really don’t think so,” he answered, and I hoped he wasn’t just trying to spare Portland’s feelings. “It looks like she was knocked out on impact and never regained consciousness.”

Portland touched her swollen abdomen protectively. “The only good thing in this whole sorry business is that Tracy didn’t know. She didn’t, did she?”

“No way,” Dwight assured her.

Tears glistened in Portland’s eyes. “I’ve never seen or held this baby, but I already love it so damn much that if anything happened to it—”

Avery put his arm around her. “Nothing’s going to happen, honey.”

She gave him a shaky smile. “I know that. I do know that. I said if.”

As we moved away from the bar, we were given hugs and handshakes by every other person, but Dwight was also questioned about what, if any, progress had been made on finding Tracy’s killer.

“Don’t let this one get away,” said Doug Woodall when he and Mary Jess intercepted us.

“Not if I can help it,” Dwight said. “I’m going to need to talk to you Monday, see what cases she was working on. And I hear she got a death threat recently.”

“That was just some loser mouthing off. But anytime, Bryant. My office is at your disposal.”

“Come on, sugar,” Mary Jess told my groom. “I see some mistletoe over there and I intend to get me a big ol’ kiss. You don’t mind, do you, Deborah?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Not a bit,” she said cheerfully as she hauled Dwight away. “You can kiss Doug, if you want.”

He cocked his head at me and we both laughed. Before I could ask him anything, though, two of my fellow judges came up to wish me well and to rehash the elections just past. Now that judges in North Carolina run on a nonpartisan ticket, politics is marginally less divisive, although all of us know who’s liberal and who’s conservative, who’s for the death penalty and who would be happy to have it abolished.

The jury was still out for me on that point. Putting a killer to death winds up costing the state more than giving him life imprisonment, and only the most naive think of it as a deterrent anymore. Too, I’m beginning to get a little uneasy with the idea of my state acting purely for revenge, especially when it doesn’t administer the death penalty fairly. On the other hand, every time I start thinking it should be abolished completely, along will come the murder of a child or an old woman that’s so flat-out brutal that the details can’t be printed in a family newspaper, and I’m right there with the old eye-for-an-eye and a-life-for-a-life attitude.

My subliminal thoughts on the death penalty were suddenly interrupted when, through a sober-suited group of attorneys, I spotted a smiling brown face. She came straight to me and I stared in disbelief. “Cyl?”

“Hey, girl,” she said, laughing at my total surprise.

I gave her a hug. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I heard it was a party, and since you won’t come to Washington, I decided Washington better come to you.”

Cyl DeGraffenried is all things black and beautiful. Top five percent in her law class at Duke, too. Doug really hated it when she left his office a year ago last fall and joined a prestigious black lobbyist firm in D.C.

“You came all this way for me?” Our friendship had gotten off to a rocky start, but we’d since shared so much that I knew we’d always be tight.

“Well, you and Grandma. She threatened to disown me if I didn’t come visit now, since I can’t be here for Christmas.”

Cyl wore a deep purple silk pantsuit, nipped to accentuate her tiny waist. White silk scarf, chunky gold jewelry, and a haircut to die for. I knew I looked just fine in my own caramel-colored wool dress, knee-high brown boots, and a great-aunt’s topaz brooch and earrings, but she was so polished and urban that I felt just a touch of country dowdiness.

“How long are you down for?” I asked.

“Only for the weekend. I fly back after church tomorrow.”

“What do you mean you can’t be here for Christmas? Are you telling me you can’t come to our wedding either?”

She shook her pretty head. “Sorry, but I think I’m going to be in Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin? You ‘think’?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Then come for breakfast tomorrow morning. We can’t talk here and it sounds like we’ve got some serious catching up to do.”

We’d barely set the time before someone came up behind me and put his hands over my eyes.

“Guess who, darlin’?”

For a moment, my mind blanked and then I laughed. “Brix Junior?”

I turned around to see for sure and was caught up in a warm hug by my mother’s first cousin. Reid’s dad was Stephenson tall, with a rangy athletic build and snow white hair. Handsome as ever. Reid will look just like him at that age.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “They still letting you into these dinners?”

“Don’t be pert, darlin’,” he said. “I may be retired but I’ve kept up my membership and soon as I heard they were throwing this thing for you tonight, I told Jane we had to come.”

“Is she with you?”

Brix Junior nodded toward a clump of women over near the windows and yes, there was Jane with Julia Lee.

“You both look marvelous,” I said honestly.

“Retirement agrees with us,” he said complacently. “Course, Jane sits on as many boards and foundations as she ever did, but it’s a poor week I don’t get in at least five rounds of golf.”

Brix Junior had always been popular with his colleagues, and they came crowding around to see him. As he turned to hold court, he said, “We’re staying with Zell and Ash tonight, so we’ll see you for lunch tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? Stricken, I remembered that Aunt Zell had extracted a promise that Dwight and I would come for Sunday lunch tomorrow, a date I had forgotten to calendar. Breakfast with Cyl, lunch with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, supper here at Jerry’s again tomorrow night? With all this social eating, I was going to have to let out some seams if I wasn’t careful.

John Claude took his place at the head table and rapped his empty glass with a fork to get our attention. “If everyone will be seated, our waiters are ready to take your orders.”

I looked around for Dwight and found him rubbing lipstick from his face. “How many women have you been kissing?” I asked him.

“Not me,” he protested. “I was ambushed.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I reached for his handkerchief and took care of a spot he’d missed, then smoothed his brown hair where someone had ruffled it.

We were directed to the head table and I made sure I wound up on Doug Woodall’s left. I figured that if Julia Lee kept Dwight occupied on my other side, I might could sneak in a few questions.

Someone had gone to the trouble of creating little individual menu cards with wedding bells, my name and Dwight’s, and tonight’s date printed across the top.

Across the room, I saw Reid seated with Jane and Brix Junior. He looked awful, and when our eyes met, he gave a shamefaced nod.

After the waiters had taken our orders, John Claude again called for our attention.

“This is not a regular business meeting,” he said, “but before we get into the festivities, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the tragic death of one of our own. As you all know, Tracy Johnson, one of our assistant district attorneys, was shot last night by an unknown assailant as she drove home with her daughter, Mei. Let us close our eyes and observe a moment of silence for those two lives that are lost to us forever.”

Again, brief images of Tracy tumbled through my mind from the years I had known her—her clear intelligent eyes, her frown when I ruled against her, her quick nod of satisfaction when I found for the State, the time I bought a pair of black high heels she’d wanted but regretfully opted not to buy because of her height, her delight when we surprised her with that baby shower, her tenderness when strapping Mei into the car seat, her dismay when she realized that her favorite white silk blouse had a pureed-spinach stain that wouldn’t come out.

“Judge Parker, would you lead us in prayer?” John Claude said softly.

Luther Parker rose to oblige. He had run against me and won in my first election to become our district’s first black judge. Reared up in an AME church down in Makely, he knew all the words and phrases, and from him they sounded genuine and sincere as he prayed for Tracy and Mei, then for Dwight and me, and finally for all of us gathered together in this place.

“Amen,” he said and whispered amens rustled around the room.

John Claude rose with his wineglass in hand. “There will be time for speeches after dinner,” he said, “but for now, let’s lift our glasses to Deborah and Dwight and to many long years together.”

Everyone smiled and lifted their glasses.

“Hear! Hear!”

“Cheers!”

“Much happiness, guys!”

The waiters returned with our food and soon we were cutting into perfectly grilled steaks and baked potatoes. The tables gradually became lively with talk and laughter, and when Julia Lee started telling Dwight about something that her poodle CoCo had done, I took a sip of my Merlot and turned to Doug Woodall.

“Refresh my memory,” I said. “Who prosecuted the Martha Hurst case?”

Doug frowned. “Martha Hurst?”

“Brix Junior defended her a few years back. She’s on death row, scheduled to die next month unless the legislature imposes a moratorium. At least that’s what Tracy told Reid when she asked to see Brix Junior’s case file on Hurst. Why would she be interested in a case that happened before she joined your staff?”

“I didn’t know she was.”

“She didn’t ask you about it?”

He shook his head, and for the first time I noticed tiny flecks of silver in his thick dark hair.

“That was back when Wendell Barham was still DA, right?” I said.

“Right.” Doug’s hand strayed to the collar of his jacket, where his thumb and index finger slowly rubbed the left collar point. “But Barham didn’t work the case. I did. It was my first death penalty win. First and only woman, too.”

My own hand started for his collar. “May I?”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure.”

I lifted it and saw the row of tiny gold nooses pinned there near the seam line.

“How many now?” I asked. Doug had just won his third term of office and part of his appeal was his strong advocacy of the death penalty for particularly heinous crimes.

“Six.” His face turned grim. “And when Bryant arrests whoever did Tracy, I’ll put in my order for number seven.”