“And did you then search the defendant?” asked Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting today.
“Yes, ma’am. He didn’t have nothing still on him, but them two packs of steaks were laying on the floor inside his screen door.”
Mr. Sanders, who was representing himself, bounced up from the defense table and said, “And you didn’t have no right. I was on my own premises.”
I cautioned him against speaking out. “You’ll get your turn.”
“No more questions from me, Your Honor,” said Tracy.
Mr. Sanders bounced back up. “When you catched up to me, where’d you find me, son?”
“On your porch.”
“On my porch,” Mr. Sanders repeated happily. “And where were them steaks?”
“Inside your screen door and fully visible.”
“But not on my person?”
“Well, no.”
The defendant turned to me triumphantly, his dark face aglow with righteous vindication. “See there, Your Honor? He says it himself!”
I seemed to be missing something in his logic. Tracy Johnson stood to elucidate.
“Your Honor, Mr. Sanders is under the impression that since he was not searched immediately outside the store and that since the steaks were not recovered from his physical person—”
“Home free?” I asked, disbelieving.
Sanders nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am, Your Honor. Home free!”
I almost hated to disillusion him. Since he’d spent the night in jail and since Harris Teeter had retrieved their steaks back intact, I sentenced him to time served and court costs.
After some public drunkenness in which all the defendants were well past fifty, the last case of the morning was larceny. Two nicely dressed white women: Josephine Reed, seventy-six, white-haired, fragile-looking; and Natalie Meadows, a sweet-faced twenty-one.
In Kmart or Wal-Mart, at Rose’s or Winn-Dixie, in fact, in any store where patrons use shopping carts, Mrs. Reed and Miss Meadows were a Norman Rockwell illustration of a dutiful granddaughter there to push the cart for her failing grandmother. They usually shopped at the busiest times. On this particular occasion, however, someone noticed that after they filled their cart, they didn’t bother to stop at a cash register before pushing that cart right on out to the parking lot.
Mrs. Reed used a cane and walked so slowly that store security had plenty of time to get a Dobbs police officer there before the women had fully unloaded their loot into the trunk of Mrs. Reed’s car. He searched the car and found items from four different stores: cartons of cigarettes, cosmetics, toys, appliances and dozens of boxes of cold tablets, aspirin and antacids. In all, the haul was worth almost two thousand, all destined for the flea market booth the two women rented once a month when their money ran out, according to the investigating officer.
I was all set to lecture Miss Meadows for using her grandmother as stage dressing for larceny when that young woman angrily denied any kinship.
“And I didn’t use her, okay? She came to me. Her own granddaughter was a friend of mine and when she moved to Florida last year, Jo asked me to take her place, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and sentenced them each to jail, ten days of active time with another ninety days suspended under the usual conditions.
“Jail?” protested little Mrs. Reed, glaring at me over her bifocals. “But I’m a senior citizen.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No discounts for seniors.”
Haywood and Isabel’s son Stevie, home from college for the Thanksgiving weekend, met me in chambers after adjournment at twelve-thirty.
“You sure you don’t mind driving them?” he asked. “Gayle and I were going to Raleigh, do some Christmas shopping and maybe catch a movie, but we could wait and go tomorrow.”
I told him not to be silly and we went down to the parking lot where his parents were waiting. Isabel looked appropriately glitzy in gold stretch pants, gold purse and shoes, and a bright green, hip-length sweater ornamented with pearl drops, oversized rhinestones, and gold beading.
In his matching green sports jacket, string bolo tie, and porkpie hat, Haywood looked more massive than usual as he stood beside my sleek little Firebird.
“I don’t know, shug,” he said doubtfully. “I’m almost afraid I might break it.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” said Stevie. “Deborah could drive y’all’s car and then you wouldn’t have to ride all scrunched up.”
“But how’ll you get home?” asked Isabel.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told him.
Stevie laughed and just stood there. He knows he’s my favorite nephew.
I sighed and handed over my keys. “If there’s the least little dent, the tiniest scratch, I will personally come over to Chapel Hill and bang you out with a rubber mallet.”
We transferred my things to the capacious trunk of Haywood and Isabel’s living room on wheels, a ten-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis with broad leather seats and lots of legroom, which is a real necessity since Haywood has lots of leg.
As we drove through Dobbs, Haywood and Isabel asked if I’d heard anything more about Billy Wall.
“Nothing except Dwight’s pretty sure he lied about paying Mr. Jap. They can prove he has a lot more cash than he ought to have.”
“But he ain’t said he did it?” asked Haywood.
“No. And they let him out on bond.”
“Poor boy,” said Isabel. “He’s really messed up his life, hasn’t he?”
It was hard to talk and drive, too. The fog was as bad as I could ever remember, thick and soft and cottony white. Visibility was severely limited and I couldn’t relax till we finally got off the two-lane road and onto Seventy East’s four lanes. Even then I didn’t feel comfortable enough to go faster than fifty.
“Hope they don’t cancel our plane,” Isabel said anxiously from the backseat. “Zach says Adam’s worried they may cancel his.”
“Might not be a bad thing if they did,” said Haywood. “Something’s eating on that boy. I believe he loved congregating together with us this visit, but I got the feeling his life’s real flusterated right now. You don’t know what it is, do you?”
“What do Daddy and Seth think?” I hedged.
“They think the same thing,” he answered obscurely.
“He’s probably been out in California too long,” said Isabel. “People out yonder just don’t think like we do. It’s probably messed up his judgment, don’t you reckon?”
Somehow California and its citizens got her off on the people moving into a recently built subdivision over near Robert and Doris.
“I never saw such long names as is on those new mailboxes. Half of them’s nothing but vowels and the other half’s all consonants. They need to shake ’em up in a box and start over.”
“You think maybe Adam’s got a health problem?” said Haywood.
“—and of course Doris could find fault with Jesus Christ if he came back to earth, but it bothers me, too, to see people out cutting their grass on Sunday morning. ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’ That means going to church. It don’t mean cutting grass or building garages or painting porches. Somebody needs to tell them that’s not the way we act down here.”
I resisted asking why the Sabbath injunction never seemed to include cooking a big Sunday dinner and washing up the dishes afterward. Cooking and doing dishes probably fall under the ox-in-the-ditch exemption.
“Maybe it relaxes them,” I said. “Some people like to cut grass better than play golf.”
“I just hate to see our ways changing,” said Isabel as she rummaged in her gold purse for the little notebook she uses to record their gambling wins and losses. “You see that in the paper how they’re going to plunk down a Food Lion over by the Interstate, just four miles from us? And one of them new people said she was counting the days ’cause she has to drive twelve miles to shop right now. Like twelve miles is a trip to China! How come she didn’t move to North Raleigh if she wants to live next door to a grocery store?”