Sand Sharks

CHAPTER

3

For all these crimes it has been decreed that capital punishment shall be meted out.

—Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

When the down elevator stopped at my floor, the car was crowded. “Make room for the lady in red,” called a voice from the back.

“Thanks, Chuck,” I said as I squeezed on.

Judge Charles Teach from further up the coast is well named although he’s better looking than Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. Still there’s something piratical about those flashing dark eyes and the black-as-tar beard that he keeps trimmed to a neat Vandyke instead of the greasy curls his namesake favored. Early forties and still a bachelor, his reputation as a brilliant, hard-working jurist is tempered by his reputation as a womanizer who plays as hard as he works. And yes, there might have been some heavy breathing on both our parts one year at fall conference, but lust turned to liking before things got out of hand or into bed.

He usually shares a suite that automatically turns into party central. Indeed, when our elevator reached the lobby, two of his suitemates were there to get on. Steve Shaber and Julian Cannell, colleagues from the Fort Bragg/Fayetteville area, had commandeered a valet’s luggage cart and, judging by that large cooler and some lumpy brown paper bags, they had brought enough supplies to stock a small saloon.

I got warm hugs from both of them and even warmer injunctions to come up to Room 628 after dinner.

A couple of judges from out near Asheville were waiting for Chuck and, as we headed for our cars, they invited me to join them.

“Thanks, but I’m meeting Chelsea Ann Pierce and Rosemary Emerson over on the river,” I told them.

“Jonah’s? That’s where we’re going,” Chuck said. “You can ride with us.”

Fifteen minutes later we had crossed the causeway, and were soon driving down one of the port city’s main thoroughfares. That part of Market Street nearest I-40 begins with block after block of small businesses, fast-food joints, and cheap motels, but it winds up in the old part of town to become a beautiful divided street with stately homes on either side, historical markers, and live oaks whose limbs drip with Spanish moss and almost touch overhead to form a dark green tunnel.

The street ends at the Cape Fear River where Chuck turned left and drove along Water Street till he reached a graveled parking lot. This early in the evening there were still a few places left beneath the huge old mulberry trees along the riverbank, and he wedged his car in next to a black SUV with an NCDCJ license plate that belonged to Chelsea Ann. Across the water from us, the superstructure of the USS North Carolina was silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky. The body of the ship itself was nearly obscured by a thicket of trees.

Instead of walking along uneven cobblestones to the front entrance of Jonah’s, we took some nearby wooden steps up to the Riverwalk, a wide promenade of treated lumber that stretches about a mile, connecting Chandler’s Wharf with its shops and restaurants at the south end to the Chamber of Commerce at the north end. In contrast to the old battleship permanently moored as a museum, a modern supertanker had just cleared the raised bridge downriver.

We watched for a minute and were moving on when, from behind us, we heard a dog’s bark, then a sharp yelp and men’s voices hot with anger.

“He didn’t touch you!” cried a young man, who tugged on a retractable leash to restrain a lunging brown boxer. “Dammit all, you didn’t have to kick him.”

“Just get him the hell away from me or I’ll have you arrested,” the older man snarled.

It was Pete Jeffreys. “Frickin’ dog tried to bite me,” he told us as he mounted the steps, trailed by Cynthia Blankenthorpe.

“Like hell!” shouted the dog’s owner. “You’re the one needs arresting, kicking him like that.”

Jeffreys started to turn back and answer him, but Judge Blankenthorpe caught him by the arm. “Let it go, Pete. Don’t push it.”

Still muttering angrily, Jeffreys allowed her to lead him away. I looked back and saw the ruggedly handsome man kneel beside his dog and run his hands over its head as if to make certain nothing was damaged. There was something about the man’s face that made me look again although I was sure that he was no one I knew.

At the restaurant, the host who greeted us was a fresh-faced collegiate-looking kid who led us over to outdoor tables overlooking the river where Rosemary and Chelsea Ann were at work on frozen margaritas.

“Dave not coming?” I asked Rosemary when I realized that her husband wasn’t there.

“He’s skipping summer conference this year,” Chelsea Ann said. “It’s just Thelma and Louise this time.”

“Actually, he’s here,” said Rosemary.

“What?” Chelsea Ann stared at her in open-mouthed surprise and Rosemary flushed brick-red. Both sisters had fair skin and green eyes but Rosemary’s hair was more strawberry than golden and she reddened more easily when flustered.

“It was a last-minute change of plans,” she said.

“How last-minute?” Chelsea Ann asked tightly.

“That was who called me while we were in the Cotton Exchange. He thought we’d be eating at the hotel and he was going to surprise us, but someone told him we were over here.”

“So he’s coming?” I asked, thinking to diffuse whatever was happening between them.

Rosemary shook her head. “He thinks he may have had one too many beers to drive, so he’s going to chill out in his Jacuzzi and then grab a sandwich or something at the hotel bar.”

“Let’s hope that’s all he grabs,” Chelsea Ann muttered in my ear.

Huh? Although I knew Dave Emerson liked to flirt and talk trash to pretty women, I’d always assumed the marriage was basically strong. Certainly I’d never heard Rosemary express regret for giving up her own law career to further his while staying home to raise two high-achieving daughters. Of course, I don’t know as much about her personal life as I do her sister’s. Still…

I lifted an eyebrow at Chelsea Ann, who gave a don’t-askme-now shrug. Rosemary appeared not to have heard, so I filed it for future reference and let it go.

We weren’t the only ones who had arrived in town early and who had decided to gather there for dinner. As often happens at conventions and conferences, tables meant for four soon accommodated six, and other tables were pushed together until we had taken over the whole left front corner of the open porch. Like the Emersons, some judges were there with spouses to make it a family vacation. After table-hopping to speak to colleagues I hadn’t seen since the last conference, I came back to my original table and took an empty chair beside white-haired Fitz Fitzhume and Martha, his tall, angular, and opinionated wife, even though that left me with my back to the water.

A reedy young waiter with a weak chin arrived with the Fitzhumes’ drinks, took our orders, and agreed to bring me a margarita to replace the one I’d finished at another table.

“Kyle’s trying to break into television,” said Martha, a true people person who can’t help getting the life history of almost everyone she comes into contact with, from lawyers to janitors and certainly with the wait staff. “He got to be on-camera for a crowd scene in Dawson’s Creek.”

“And when I was a little kid, I was in a courtroom scene on Matlock,” the waiter said. “In the row right behind Andy Griffith.”

“Then you’re from Wilmington?” I asked politely.

“Myrtle Beach actually, but my aunt lives here and she knew one of the crew members on the show, so that’s how I got on.”

I’m no judge—well, no judge of acting ability anyhow—but it seemed to me that his voice was too thin and just a little too arch for anything except the lightest of comedies. He was poised to tell me the rest of his brushes with the spotlight until Martha gently reminded him that his current role was waiter and that she, for one, was hungry.

“Nice kid, but too much fluff between the ears,” said Martha. “He may sleep with a director, but that’s about as far as he’s gonna get in show business.”

“Cynic,” I said.

“Not cynical, sugar. Just realistic. Now Hank over there”—she pointed to the young man who had shown us to this part of the porch—“he wants to go into hotel management and I’d say he has the chops for it.”

Indeed, he was in the act of seating a bearded man with two young children, a girl and a boy. He brought them crayons and a coloring sheet and was fitting one of the chairs with a booster seat for the little boy when Pete Jeffreys approached the table. The father half rose from his chair to shake hands and introduce his children, who shyly ducked their heads. The headwaiter stood by discreetly until the introductions were over, then handed the man a menu and signaled for a waitress.

“Now how you finding married life?” Judge Fitzhume asked me.

“Just fine,” I lied. “And don’t you and Martha have a fortieth anniversary coming up?”

“Forty-two,” he beamed. “And it seems like only four since I got her to the altar.”

Courtly, soft-spoken, and always polite even when disagreeing with drunken felons, Fitz had announced his retirement a few months earlier. Although he would probably continue to fill in as an emergency judge when needed, he and Martha planned to spend the next year traveling around the world to visit far-flung grandchildren. They were telling me their itinerary and had gotten themselves as far as Rome when Pete Jeffreys came up with Cynthia Blankenthorpe in tow.

I have called Pete Jeffreys one of the princes of the bench, but that impression was formed at the first fall conference he attended year before last where I watched him move confidently through the halls and meeting rooms with easy charm and instant camaraderie. He had skipped last summer’s conference and I had skipped the fall, so I hadn’t seen him interact with our colleagues in over a year. Now I noticed a distinct chill when he approached our table to introduce the new judge to Fitz, and I realized that Martha had drawn back stiffly in her chair and kept her strong fingers firmly around her drink, deliberately ignoring his outstretched hand.

Dear, ever-courteous Fitz assumed the hand was meant for him and, after a slight hesitation, shook it amiably enough.

“Bastard!” said Martha when Jeffreys and his protégée had moved on.

“Now, Martha,” he murmured.

“Not you, honey,” she assured him.

Before I could ask her to explain, the deep-fried soft-shelled crabs we’d both ordered arrived, crisp and succulent on beds of baby greens.

As far as I’m concerned, blue claws are the tastiest crustacean in the Atlantic. You can have my lobsters if you’ll give me all your blue crabs, especially when they’ve just molted, before their shells start to harden.

Fitz gave a sigh of pure pleasure as his own plate was set before him, and was moved to tell his favorite crab joke.

“This was back when the world was young and urgent messages went by Western Union rather than cell phones or emails,” he said, squeezing lemon juice over a plate of buttery linguini heaped high with lumps of back-fin meat. “A man sent his mother-in-law on a vacation at the coast to get her out of his hair. Two days later, he got a telegram from the hotel manager. ‘Regret to inform you your mother-inlaw washed ashore this evening covered in crabs. What shall I do?’ ”

Everyone within earshot of his voice sang out, “Ship the crabs and set ’er again!”

“Oh,” he said. “Y’all’ve heard it before?”

Martha patted his hand. “Every time you order crabs, sweetheart.”

Across the table from me, Chelsea Ann’s blue eyes widened. “Omigawd!” she said in an awed whisper. “It’s him!”

“Who?” I asked, suddenly aware that the level of conversation out here on the deck had dropped in that electric moment of awareness that sweeps over a room when a celebrity enters. I turned in time to see a man tethering his dog to the railing by its leash. It was the same man who’d yelled at Jeffreys out in the parking lot.

By the time he had finished with the dog and joined his party at the nearest table, our group had stopped staring and the noise level had risen again.

“Who’s that?” I asked Chelsea Ann, who kept glancing over surreptitiously.

“Stone Hamilton.”

The name meant nothing to me.

Chelsea Ann couldn’t believe my ignorance. “Stone Hamilton. He plays the lead on Port City Blues. Don’t you watch it?”

I’ve never seen the program itself, but its advertising trailers are shown so often on one of the networks that I now realized why he had looked somewhat familiar. I saw that our waiter had quickly appeared at his elbow with order pad in hand even though that was probably not his table. Indeed, a waitress with jet-black hair streaked with fuchsia immediately went over and sent him packing.

Wilmington likes to bill itself as “Hollywood East,” but this was the first time I’d ever seen an actor from one of the several shows that had been filmed around town. The closest I’d come was when trying a custody case between two prominent attorneys down here last fall. Every courtroom was tied up because, in addition to the usual calendar, a show was being filmed in the courtroom next to mine. The halls were full of extra people, power cords snaked along the floor, and a couple of wardrobe racks and some odd pieces of equipment had wound up in the back of my courtroom.

The custody case was complicated by lengthy narratives to explain and rationalize lapses of judgment on both sides. After we were interrupted for a second time, I told the young man who seemed to be the crew’s gofer that he was not to come back in until I had recessed for lunch.

Minutes later, a scowling man with a ponytail of long gray hair and the attitude of a horse’s ass erupted though the side door, trailed by the younger one.

“What do you mean he can’t come back in here till lunchtime?” he snarled.

“Sir,” I said, “we’re trying a case here.”

He glared at me. “And I’m trying to shoot some very important scenes. I need access to these clothes. Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir,” I said with more courtesy than I was feeling, “but if it’s clothes you’re interested in, I’ll be glad to have you fitted with an orange jumpsuit and paper slippers if you or any of your people come back in here again before I adjourn.”

As my words sank in, the young man behind him grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Bailiff,” I said, “would you escort this gentleman out?”

Angrily ordering his flunky to wheel out the clothes racks, the director stomped away and peace reigned in my courtroom for the rest of the day. I still don’t know what show it was.

Although Chelsea Ann continued to glance over my shoulder to the Hamilton party, I found my own eyes straying back to Pete Jeffreys, who now seemed to be introducing Blankenthorpe to that bearded man with the two kids. Why did he look so familiar? Maybe the children and husband of a judge I didn’t know well?

Before I could ask someone, I noticed a familiar face at the restaurant next door.

Like Jonah’s, it, too, has open-air dining out on its porch deck and it was doing a brisk business as well, including one diner well known to me—my handsome cousin and former law partner Reid Stephenson. I had known that the Trial Lawyers Association was supposed to meet this weekend, but that was at Sunset Beach, a good forty minutes down the coast and only minutes from the South Carolina border. What was he doing up here?

His eyes eventually met mine and he lifted his glass in greeting. I gestured for him to come join us, but he shook his head and remained where he was. There were no women at his table, only men, and he knows several of the judges, so I didn’t understand his reluctance.

“Order me another margarita and don’t let them take my plate,” I told Martha. “I’ll be right back.”

I walked over to the gate onto the Riverwalk and gave Stone Hamilton’s boxer a pat on the head when he greeted me with a wiggle of his stubby tail.

Reid and his friends politely came to their feet as I joined them, even though I told them not to bother. Like the male judges in my party, they were casually dressed in chinos or khaki shorts and colorful knit golf shirts instead of their accustomed suits and ties. They pulled up a chair for me and an attorney from Fuquay-Varina said, “What are you drinking, Your Honor?”

“Margaritas,” Reid said. “Right, Deborah?”

What the hell? No one was waiting for me in my hotel room. The night was young, I wasn’t driving, and I could sleep late tomorrow.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You know everyone here, right?” my cousin asked.

I did. If not by specific names, certainly by their familiar faces. All except one, a pleasantly homely man with a long thin face made even longer by a hairline that had receded to the top of his head. Late thirties, early forties, keen blue eyes and a mouth so wide that it literally did seem to go from ear to ear when he smiled at me and extended his hand. “Bill Hasselberger, Your Honor. I’ve heard a lot about you from Reid here.”

“I hope you don’t believe everything he’s told you,” I said, smiling back. He had long thin fingers and a firm handshake that hinted at a wiry strength.

“Bill and I were in law school together,” said Reid, “and I was an usher in his wedding.”

My drink came and when the others went back to the discussion I’d interrupted—something about the association’s proposed name change—I turned to Reid and said, “So why you didn’t come over and speak to Fitz and Martha? He’s retiring this fall.”

Reid’s dad, Brix Junior, was a close friend of the Fitzhumes and they had known Reid since he was a little boy.

“I’ll catch ’em later.” He downed the rest of his drink in one long swallow. “No way I’m going over while that ass-hole’s there.”

“And which asshole would that be?” I asked.

“Jeffreys.” He spat out the name like an expletive.

Surprised, I asked, “What’d he ever do to you?”

“Drop it, okay?”

That’s when I realized that this was not his first drink. Probably not his second, either, but the hostility in his voice made me shrug and back off.

A few minutes later, I finished my own drink, said all the polite and proper things to the others, and headed back to my own group. As I passed Pete Jeffreys, he gave me a sour look and deliberately turned his back on me.

First Dwight, then Reid, and now Jeffreys?

When did I turn into Typhoid Mary?

* * *

By eleven o’clock the tables out on the porch were deserted except for a young couple on the far side, holding hands by candlelight and lost in each other’s eyes. My own eyes filled with sudden tears and I wondered if Dwight and I would ever sit like that again.

The rest of our crowd had already called it a night and Chelsea Ann and Rosemary had been urging me to leave for the last twenty minutes, but I insisted on finishing my final drink even though I hadn’t touched it lately. For some reason, those crabs and hushpuppies weren’t sitting too easy, although the four—or was it five?—margaritas might have had something to do with it. In any event, I was reluctant to move till everything settled down.

“C’mon, Deborah,” Chelsea Ann said at last. “This isn’t like you. What’s wrong? You and Dwight having troubles?”

Eventually I let them help me to my feet. I wasn’t really tipsy, but I did seem to have trouble walking. While Rosemary settled our bill, Chelsea Ann helped me down the steps to the Riverwalk. I almost made it back to the parking lot when my stomach finally rebelled.

“Oh God!” I moaned and hurried on past the steps to get as far ahead of them as I could. Even in my misery, I had the sense not to hurl into the wind. Instead I hung over the railing on the backwash side and lost both my dinner and all that tequila.

Chelsea Ann and Rosemary waited a discreet distance away till I had finished retching.

When I could finally lift my head, I noticed something odd. On the muddy riverbank only six or eight feet away from me, something bobbled on the outgoing tide, half hidden by overhanging shrubbery. In such dim light, it was almost unnoticeable amid the trash and driftwood that had collected in the branches.

It took me a minute to process what I was seeing and to realize that those two dark wet logs floating side by side were a man’s sodden pant legs. Pete Jeffreys hung face up from a low-lying tree branch, his body almost completely submerged in the water.

One crab clung to his fingers, a second scuttled up his bare arm, and as I backed away from the railing in horror, Rosemary called, “What’s wrong?”

Like another wave of nausea, Fitz’s ancient joke rose in my throat and I couldn’t stop it. “Ship the crabs and set ’im again!” I croaked.