Margaret Maron: Bootlegger’s Daughter

“Who’s up there?” they shout. “Anybody there?”

The mewing cries continue, and it almost breaks the heart of the older man because now he’s surer than ever what it is up there crying. Half a lifetime ago, he listened to cries just that pitiful as his only baby son wasted away from diphtheria in his cradle.

As he mounts the steps, a stench meets his nose.

Carrion. And body wastes.

Part of the tin roof has collapsed at the gable end of the loft overlooking the creek, so there’s enough light to see clearly.

The cries come from a very young infant strapped in a molded plastic carrier. She’s soaked in her own urine and stinks of putrid diapers, but that’s not what makes the men want to retch.

It’s the white woman who lies on the stone floor beside the baby.

She’s face up. Her body is clad in the long-sleeved black jersey, white jeans, and flat-heeled slippers the radio said she’d been wearing when she disappeared three days ago.

Blowflies are thick all over her pretty face and maggots are already working the clots of blood and brains beneath her long dark hair.

Hs green-and-vermilion topknot was as colorful as a parrot’s, and in Colleton County’s courtroom that afternoon, with its stripped-down modern light oak benches and pale navy carpet, a cherryhead parrot couldn’t have looked much more exotic than this Michael Czarnecki.

Nineteen years old. Tattooed eyeliner on bloodshot eyes. Stainless steel skull-and-crossbones dangling from his left ear-lobe. His jaw was purple from where it’d banged the steering wheel when he ran off the road a little past three that morning, and he was still wearing black skinny-legged jeans and the electric orange-and-green “Boogie On Down To Florida” sweatshirt he’d had on when the state troopers plucked him off 1-95 and perched him in our brand-new jail.

From his own perch, the black-robed judge frowned down at Czarnecki like an elderly cowbird while Assistant District Attorney Kevin Foster read the charges: speeding 74 in a 65 zone, driving while impaired, simple possession of marijuana.

“You got an attorney?” asked Judge Hobart, who knew quite well that he’d appointed me that morning when the calendar was first called and that this was why I was now seated at the same table with the defendant.

I stood up. “Your Honor, I represent Mr.-” I glanced again at the court calendar in my hand and tackled the unfamiliar name with more confidence than I felt. “Mr. Zar-neck-ee.”

“Zar-n’kee,” my client corrected me shyly.

“Not representing him too well, Miss Knott, if you can’t even say his name right,” the judge sniffed. “How does he plead?”

I’d worked it out with Kevin before lunch. He’d knocked a 78 down to 74 and had thrown out a piddling seat belt violation and two charges of reckless and endangering, but we were stuck with DWI and simple possession. And I was stuck with punk hair, “Boogie On Down To Florida,” and a judge with many, many axes to grind.

I-95 passes straight through the middle of Colleton County, North Carolina, linking Miami to New York. I’ve never actually looked into the wording of the billboard law that regulates signs along a federally funded highway, but it’s lax enough that farmers here can rent their roadside land to advertise the locations of factory outlets that sell towels and sheets, name-brand clothing, and, of course, cheap cigarettes.

Despite the tourist dollars, our stretch of I-95 would be a no-exit tunnel if Harrison Hobart had his druthers, and he normally throws the book at any Yankees who stray off the interstate and into his court. Fortunately, it was only a week till the May primary, so Czarnecki, who was boogie-ing on back up to Teaneck, New Jersey, got lucky. His outlandish hair, his satanic earring, and his smartass sweatshirt afforded so many opportunities to zing me, that Hobart finally let the kid off with a ninety-day suspended and a two-fifty fine.

Did I mention that Harrison Hobart’s seat is up for election?

Or that I’m one of the candidates?

I hadn’t really planned to run for judge. Not consciously anyhow, but it must have been lurking down deep in my subconscious because something snapped last winter. It wasn’t even my case. I was sitting there on the lawyers’ bench at the front of Courtroom #2 that rainy January morning, waiting to try and keep Luellen Martin out of jail one more time even though she was nearly seven months behind in her restitution payments and her probation officer was ticked because she’d skipped a couple of reporting sessions as well. Luellen works out at the towel factory and makes enough money to get her hair fixed every week, keep up car payments on a Hyundai, and trundle her kids down to Disney World over the Christmas holidays; but she couldn’t ever seem to get up the monthly hundred dollars she was supposed to be paying various complainants after bouncing checks all over town last spring.

A jury case was in session; Reid Stephenson defending an impassive-looking black man.

“What’s the charge?” I whispered to Ambrose Daughtridge, who was also waiting for a case to be called. I should have known. After all, Reid was not only my cousin, he was also one of my partners.

“DWI, wouldn’t take the Breathalyzer,” Ambrose whispered back.

Refusal to take a Breathalyzer test’s not a real smart decision under the usual circumstances. As the examining officer explained, “I tried to tell him that if he didn’t take the test, God himself couldn’t let him drive for twelve months in the State of North Carolina.”

“And did he understand?” asked Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting the calendar that day in a navy blazer and red wool skirt. She’s tall and slender with blonde hair clipped shorter than most men’s. Quite pretty actually, except that she keeps the good bones of her face obscured by businesslike hornrimmed glasses.

“Objection,” said Mel. “Calls for a conclusion.”

“Sustained.”

Tracy had graduated from law school only six months earlier, and it still needled her a bit whenever an objection to one of her questions was sustained. She pushed her oversized glasses up on her nose and hurriedly restated. “Did you ask Mr. Gilchrist if he understood that if he didn’t take the test and was found guilty, he’d automatically lose his license for a year?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the officer. Sanderson. Late twenties, spit and polish uniform. Always sits at attention. Even when he’s trying to convey more-in-sorrow-than-anger earnestness. “I did everything but beg him to take that test. I told him even if he didn’t pass, he could probably get a limited permit. But if he didn’t take it, he was going to be walking for twelve months. He didn’t say nothing ‘cept ‘Huh!’ ”

“ ‘Huh’?” asked the judge. Perry Byrd that day. Well into his third term of office.

“That’s all he’d say, Your Honor,” Sanderson said. “Every time we asked him anything, that’s all he’d say; ‘Huh!’ Real cocky-like.”

No law officer says uppity anymore. Not in open court anyhow. Cocky’s the new code word in the New South.

Judge Byrd nodded and laboriously made a notation on the legal pad in front of him. At fifty-two, Perry Byrd’s peppery red hair had a hefty sprinkle of salt in it. Broad strapping shoulders on a six-foot-two build, and the florid face of an incipient stroke victim. He also had a prissy little high-pitched voice and, even talking under his breath, everyone sitting near the front, including the jury, could hear his absent-minded “cocky-like” as he wrote.

Reid looked over at the lawyers’ bench and he rolled his eyes at Ambrose and me.