Sand Sharks (7 page)

“Everybody pretends that the new name better describes what we do,” Bill said, “but we all know that it’s because ‘trial lawyers’
has become a dirty word.”

True. They’re constantly being slimed by certain probusiness elements who oppose big judgments against corporations and their
insurance companies, never mind whether said corporations are grossly negligent or merely indifferent to the possible harm
their protocols might cause.

I waited until the frittata was out of the oven and we were seated at the table with heaped plates to say, “So, Bill, how
come we never met when you were on the bench?”

Reid kicked me under the table, but Bill flashed another one of those warm smiles, this time with a hint of mischief. “Actually,
we did meet. Fall conference one year and here last summer a couple of years ago.”

“Really?”

“Reid had told me all about you, so I knew who you were, but I guess I was just part of the crowd. Hard to get your attention
with Chuck Teach there, and then the next summer—”

Reid’s fork, laden with cheese and tomatoes, paused in midair. “You and Judge Teach hooked up?”

“It was nothing more than a few drinks and dinner,” I said.

“Yeah? Does Dwight know?”

“Who’s Dwight?” Bill asked, proffering the coffeepot.

Reid held out his cup for a refill. “Dwight Bryant. Her husband.”

“You’re married now?”

I wiggled my left hand to show him my rings. “Going on seven months.”

“Well, damn!” he said with a laugh. “I finally get a chance to register on your radar and it’s half a year too late. Is he
with you this week?”

I shook my head. “No, he had a seminar up in Virginia.” I took another bite of that delicious mixture of eggs and herbs and
cheese. “I don’t mean to be tactless, but was it hard leaving the bench?”

Reid rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Deborah.”

“It’s okay, pal,” Bill said. “I’m pretty much over it. Yeah, I liked being a judge, so I was sorry to leave, but it wasn’t
leaving the bench itself that I minded so much as the way I was pushed off.”

“Pete Jeffreys?”

“You got it. It was a bad time all around and he played into it. My wife and I were going through an ugly divorce, so he started
a rumor that she kicked me out because I was gay and that I made a couple of DWIs go away for some gay friends. You know how
hard those things are to stop once enough people believe it. You don’t need any fire if there’s enough smoke. And I did dismiss
a DWI for a friend who happens to be gay, but it was for cause and thoroughly justified. My dismissal rate for DWIs was a
lot lower than his is.”

“He doesn’t just dismiss the cases in open court either,” said Reid. “It’s an open secret that one of his big-donor attorney
friends has a drawerful of blank dismissal forms that Jeffreys signed for him.”

I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been.

Like it or not, I doubt if there’s a courthouse in the state where that hasn’t happened.

“The worst of it is that he’s lazy,” Bill said. “Sitting on a bench is a damn sight easier than maintaining an office, chasing
down cases, and working actively for a client who may or may not pay you for your services. I’m absolutely convinced that
the main reason he ran for judge wasn’t the prestige and certainly not because he could make a difference, but because of
the salary and the pension plan and it’s a first step toward higher office. He shoots from the hip with his rulings and half
the time he doesn’t bother to read the whole case file. Just last fall, he put a guy on probation who was already on probation
and hadn’t once reported to his probation officer. If he’d read the file, he would have seen an escalating pattern of criminal
behavior—robbery, car theft, and a felony breaking and entering that was really a burglary because he broke into an occupied
home at night.”

“Why didn’t Jeffreys keep him in jail for that?” I asked, since even first-time burglaries carry hefty jail time.

Bill shrugged. “He pleaded to the lesser charge and Jeffreys hadn’t read the file.”

“Is this the case where the guy left court and then murdered a girl?”

Grim-faced, Bill nodded. “Two days later he carjacked a waitress who was working her way through college. Raped and killed
her and put her body in the trunk, then drove around for three days, using her credit cards and checkbook before he was picked
up and they opened the trunk. He’ll probably get the death penalty when it comes to trial, but Jeffreys ought to be charged,
too. Of course, he blames the DA and the probation officer for not alerting him to the guy’s record, but it was all there
in front of him if he’d bothered to read it.”

“And now he wants to run for superior court,” Reid said, hotly indignant on his friend’s behalf.

“I guess everyone knows there’s no love lost between the two of you,” I said.

“After the way he helped screw up my life? Not that my ex didn’t do her share, too. She never exactly said I was gay, but
she never came to my defense either. She just gave a little martyred smile and let the allegations stand so that our so-called
friends wouldn’t blame her for catting around the courthouse on me.”

“She’s an attorney, too?”

He nodded. “That’s why I moved down here. I had to go back into practice, and I wasn’t going to stand up in a courtroom and
call him ‘Your Honor’ after what he’d done. Besides, I didn’t want to keep running into my ex or one of her lovers every time
I crossed the street. They’ll both get theirs one of these days but I wasn’t going to stay there and wait for it.”

“As far as Jeffreys is concerned, your wait’s over,” I said, speaking more flippantly than I felt. “He got his last night.”

“Huh?” said Reid.

“Someone strangled him last night in the parking lot near Jonah’s and threw him in the river.”

I kept my eyes on Bill’s face as I described the scene. The news seemed to surprise him, but then most lawyers have trained
themselves to contain their emotions and to cultivate a poker face.

Both asked a dozen or more questions. In the end Reid leaned back in his chair and lifted his coffee cup as if toasting his
friend. “They say you can’t go home again, but maybe now you can.”

“Not while Lisa’s still there,” Bill said grimly.

“One down, one to go.”

“Don’t joke,” I told Reid. “Once the police come up with a list of his enemies and learn that Bill was in the vicinity, they’ll
want to know what time y’all left the restaurant last night.”

“Us? Oh hell, Deborah, you know we didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

“Well, as long as you can alibi each other,” I said. “You did drive back here together, right?” I said.

There was a split-second silence as the two men locked eyes.

“Actually,” said Bill, “we were in separate cars. Reid said he’d get the check and I needed to pick up some half-and-half
for breakfast, so I left first and got here about thirty minutes before he did.”

“Where were you parked?”

“Up Ann Street, across from Jonah’s.”

“Did you see Pete Jeffreys in the parking lot?”

“No. When was he killed?”

I had to admit that I didn’t know. The last time I’d noticed him was right after I came back from talking with Reid. My cousin’s
hostility to Jeffreys had been enough to make me look around for him to see if he’d suddenly sprouted horns and a tail. I
now realized that the sour look he’d given me was probably because he’d seen me at Bill Hasselberger’s table.

As we ate, our talk turned from murder to gossip about mutual friends.

“So ol’ Fitz is finally retiring?” Reid said.

“And he’s being honored at a reception tomorrow night,” I told him. “Why don’t you come?”

“Maybe I will,” he said and entered the information as to where and when on his BlackBerry.

We’d finished eating and Reid began to make noises about getting down to Sunset Beach before lunch, so I thanked Bill for
his hospitality and drove back to Wrightsville Beach.

I was halfway there before it hit me. Why had it taken Reid so long to pay the check that he’d gotten back to Bill’s house
a half hour after Bill?

The municipal laws of all well-regulated states have taken care to enforce this duty: though providence has done it more effectually
than any laws, by implanting in the breast of every parent that insuperable degree of affection, which not even the deformity
of person or mind, not even the wickedness, ingratitude, and rebellion of children, can totally suppress or extinguish.

—Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780)

T
he SandCastle Hotel is as friendly to children as it is to judges. The decor in the spacious lobby is vivid turquoise and
coral with terra-cotta tiles and couches upholstered in soft sand-colored leather. Bowls of taffy wrapped in wax paper twists
sit on the registration counter. A floor-to-ceiling saltwater aquarium filled with exotic and colorful sea creatures lines
the wall of a hallway that leads to the restaurant. In the middle of the lobby itself, beneath the large circular skylight,
is a round shallow tank that holds an inch or two of white sand and six or seven inches of water. It’s chest-high to a four-year-old
and kids are encouraged to touch the living sand dollars, sea urchins, snails, and skates or watch a school of tiny minnows
dart through the water.

Adults can play there, too.

When I returned to the hotel that morning, the first person I recognized was pudgy-faced Bernie Rawlings from Lafayette County,
who stood by the tank running his fingertips through the wet sand with a dreamy expression on his face. He wore sandals and
a white tennis shirt and his bald head was covered by a blue cotton hat that matched his blue shorts. He smiled when he saw
me. “This reminds me of when I was a boy and we’d come down from the hills in the summer to rent a place on the beach. My
dad would set up a small tank so we could catch fiddler crabs and snails and minnows. He had a shore guide to marine life
and we’d spend the week trying to identify everything. It was always sad when we had to leave and put them back in the ocean.”

“We must have had that same book,” I said. “My mother was always trying to get us interested in nature. Only instead of a
tank, we used a plastic shower curtain.”

“Shower curtain?”

I nodded. “My brothers would scoop out a hole in the sand and we’d line it with an old shower curtain. That’s where we’d put
the things we found. Like you did. Only we had to empty it out every evening so the tide wouldn’t take it away.”

We were joined by a pudgy-faced child in shorts and tank top who looked exactly like Bernie except that he was only half as
tall and he had a headful of hair that was cut in a modified mullet. He also had a clump of taffy in each hand and was busily
stuffing his cheeks full.

I was about to tell Bernie how much he and his son looked alike when he said, “Emily, this is Judge Knott.”

The girl stared at me unblinkingly as Bernie finished the introduction, her mouth too full to speak.

Bernie tried to interest her in the hermit crab that was moving its heavy whelk shell ponderously over the sandy floor of
the tank, but she handed him a wad of wax paper wrappers to dispose of and said, “Can we go back upstairs now? I wanna watch
SpongeBob
.”

“Honey, you watched that thing three times on the drive down. Look! These are live ocean animals. Starfish! Horseshoe crabs!”

She scowled. “You promised! Momma said.”

Bernie sighed. “Okay, okay. Go ring for the elevator.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “What can you do with ’em at this age?
And I did promise my wife that I’d amuse Emily so that she could have the day to herself to shop and go out with some of the
other wives.”

“You’re a good husband,” I said, feeling charitable.

He beamed and hurried after his bratty daughter while the pragmatist whispered in my ear, “
Good husband, stupid dad.
”

Some of my brothers claim that I was spoiled, being the only girl and the youngest after a string of eleven boys, but no way
would my parents have let me program their free hours like that.

I lifted a scallop from the shallow tank and waited till it slowly, cautiously opened a narrow crack to reveal a ring of shiny
blue metallic eyes.

My earliest memory of the beach was of sitting in the gentle waves at Harkers Island. I was probably three or four at the
time, so the older boys were either married or working summer jobs. The younger ones were there, though—Zach and his twin
Adam, and Will, the oldest of my mother’s four children. If Jack was there that week, I can’t remember, but Seth, who’s five
up from me, was my protector when the others wanted to dunk me or hog the inner tubes we used as floats. Ben was there, too,
but he was always pestering Daddy for the car keys so he and Seth could go juking at Atlantic Beach.

If Mother had hoped to turn any of us into marine biologists with her shower curtain aquarium and the
Golden Guide to Seashores
, it didn’t work. I doubt if any of my brothers could tell a lettered olive from a tulip shell anymore, but when it was time
for the hermit crab races, Will had an unerring knack for finding the fastest.

Check out all the whorled shells in a tidal pool till you find one inhabited by a hermit crab. Draw a big circle in the sand,
put your crab in the center, ante in a dime. If your crab makes it out of the circle first, you take the pot. Losers go back
in the water, winners are kept until deposed.

At five or six, I looked for crabs with the biggest, prettiest shells and usually came in last, but Will always put his money
on one that had taken over the shell of a lightweight moon snail. One summer he found a crab that won so consistently that
we stopped racing with him. Next day, he made a big show of throwing his champion back into the water and hunting for another.
We lost two rounds to his new contender before it dawned on us that it was a ringer he’d thrown back, not the champ. Daddy
made him give our money back, but I overheard him tell Mother, “Takes after his daddy, don’t he?”