Southern Discomfort Read Online Free PDF Page B

first day on the bench."
    I'll bet.
    Cyl DeGraffenried was still an enigma to me. Very pretty, very bright. We heard that she'd graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at Duke, which made some of us wonder why she had immediately chosen to come do donkey work for Douglas Woodall, our current district attorney. She should have been clerking for one of the justices if she wanted a political career, or joined some eyes-on-the-prize law firm in Raleigh or Charlotte if she wanted to stay in North Carolina and make a million dollars before she was forty.
    She was clearly ambitious; I just couldn't define what that ambition was.
    It certainly wasn't for the title of Miss Congeniality. In her few months with the DA's office, she'd proven an implacable prosecutor with very little give in what's usually a give-and-take situation. Her rigid adherence to the letter of the law and the way she called for maximum penalties not only had a lot of us defense attorneys grumbling, some of the judges had even spoken a few private words with Douglas Woodall, too. You honestly don't need to make an example out of every shoplifter or Saturday night rowdy. Freshmen ADAs often err on the side of harshness when they first begin, but Cyl DeGraffenried just wouldn't let up.
    A loner, too, even though she appeared at all the expedient meetings, both the political gatherings and the professional. When some of us invited her to join us for drinks afterwards, she would come and smile and talk with every semblance of cordiality. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only one who noticed that she managed never to divulge any personal information and that she always left to drive back to her apartment on the other side of Raleigh alone even though she was, as I indicated before, absolutely gorgeous: long fingernails painted a soft pink, a cloud of dark brown hair, a perfectly oval face with cheekbones to kill for, a size six figure draped in softly feminine dresses or suits of tailored silk, a collection of high heels that would turn Imelda pea green.
    "I'll bet you a dollar she's a closet Republican," Minnie, my sister-in-law and a yellow-dog Democrat, said darkly when I discussed Cyl with her once. "I'll bet that's why she lives out of the district—so nobody'll know how she's registered."
    Minnie's usually a political realist, but she has a hard time understanding why any black person would, of her own volition, deliberately choose to join the same party as Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond or David Duke. For Minnie, a black Republican was hot ice and wondrous strange snow indeed.
    My guess was that if Cyl DeGraffenried were actually registered anywhere, it would be as an Independent.
*      *      *
    She read through the calendar briskly. Many of the cases had already been disposed of because Doug Woodall always dismisses a few after the calendar's printed. Before I even entered the courtroom, a dozen or more minor traffic violators had decided to plead guilty and were lined up to pay their automatic fines and leave. Others would be held over because of personal conflicts with work or child-care schedules or because their lawyers had previous commitments in other courts. Seven pages of names could dwindle to three or four in no time.
    But now all the preliminaries were done and Cyl half turned in her chair to call, "Jaime Ramiro Chavez?"
    A Mexican migrant came forward and took the place Cyl indicated behind the opposite table. His hair was neatly combed and he wore faded but basically clean jeans and T-shirt. He was charged with driving without a valid driver's license and failure to wear a seat belt. There to stand with him and speak in his behalf was a local farmer who said that Chavez possessed a Florida license but it'd been lost and he was, in fact, on his way to take the North Carolina exam when Trooper Ollie Harrold pulled him over.
    Cyl asked for a hundred-dollar fine and costs, but I was feeling sentimental.
    Jaime Ramiro Chavez.
    My