Southern Discomfort Read Online Free Page B

what Dr. Bhagat called it. I thought it was too much tension over Ginger's wedding myself. Sometimes you have to wonder about these foreign doctors. Am I wrong? But Ralph swore by him. Anyhow, when he went to him with the flu, if that's what it was, Dr. Bhagat said his liver was a little enlarged and his blood pressure was high, but his heart was just fine. Maybe if he'd gone to an
American
doctor..."
    She shrugged and shook her head sadly.
    As a lawyer, I should be inured to how people can go on and on with the most intimate details of a loved one's final days. Nevertheless, I was relieved when Julia Lee came over to wind it all up. She really is wasted as John Claude's wife. She should have been running a corporation somewhere. No detail was too small to escape her notice.
    "Don't you want to take some of those cucumber sandwiches?" she asked. "You've paid for them."
    I looked around for Aunt Zell. It's her refrigerator.
    Julia correctly interpreted. "Zell already left and she said for you not to bring home anything you weren't going to eat yourself. She's put Ash on another diet. He ate too many chimichangas when he was in Mexico and she doesn't want him tempted."
    She gave my hips a critical glance. "The Martha Circle usually gives Lu Bingham whatever's left over, if the client doesn't object. She can give you a receipt for the IRS."
    Put like that, there was no way I could gracefully claim some of those yummy little cucumber sandwiches. Already Lu was piling them into a capacious cardboard box.
    "The kids at our day care love it when I scrounge party food," she said.
    She popped a cucumber sandwich into her mouth and happily licked the mayonnaise from her fingers.
    Sheer willpower—okay, sheer willpower and Julia's basilisk eyes—kept me from wrestling her to the ground for one.

CHAPTER 2
LAYOUTS AND ELEVATIONS
    "The elevation of any object is its vertical distance above or below an established height on the earth's surface."
    District court is the workhorse of North Carolina's three-tiered system of justice. On top, the Appellate Division has our supreme court with seven justices and a court of appeals where twelve judges, sitting in panels of three, act as intermediate appellate courts to take some of the load off the justices.
    Next comes the Superior Court Division. Except for a few special categories of cases, superior courts handle all felonies, any criminal
de novo
trials bucked up from below, and any civil disputes involving amounts over $10,000.
    At the bottom are the magistrates and judges of the District Court Division.
    Sooner or later, every judge has to run for office, but magistrates are appointed for two-years terms and they screen out a lot of the really petty stuff, since they're the first to hear someone who's just been booked. Like the old justices of the peace, they can accept certain misdemeanor guilty pleas and admissions of infractions, settle small claims, and issue warrants. (A magistrate is also, to my private disappointment, the only civil official who can perform marriages. I'd love to be able to marry my nieces and nephews.)
    District court judges get all the rest of the non-jury trials. In addition to juvenile court, we conduct preliminary hearings to determine probable cause in felony cases, we have original jurisdiction over misdemeanors, and we adjudicate civil cases involving less than $10,000. Last year 130,000 cases were filed in superior court; 2.3
million
were filed in district court. Superior court has 77 judges; district court 165—you figure it out.
    Considering our caseload, you'd think that judges out here on the barricades of justice would have a few perks, right? If not a personal secretary, at least access to a pool of clerical staff?
    Uh-uh. We don't even get a paralegal to look up statutes or precedents.
    No personal offices either. When I arrived at the courthouse on Tuesday morning, I robed myself in one of the small bare chambers not being used that day by Ned