Free Bad To The Bone by Katy Munger Page A

populating the earth.
    By the next night, I was sitting in a
country diner twelve miles east of Raleigh staring at the
scrawniest woman I had ever seen. Her dark hair was wound into a
protruding bulb on top of her head and she wore a black dress with
white cuffs. I felt like I was having dinner with Olive Oyl. I
resisted the urge to eat spinach, and ordered a plate of
chicken-and-dumplings instead.
    My companion was picking at a salad that
looked as if it had been hanging around for a week hoping to be
noticed. We discussed Bobby for a few minutes, but when it became
apparent that the court reporter didn't know he now had a steady
girlfriend, I steered the subject to Price versus Bledsoe.
    "It was an awful case," she told me. "Judge
Poe even ordered a sealed courtroom. Price's lawyer argued that his
client's public position would attract the media, to the detriment
of the child. Judge Poe agreed."
    "So you could technically get in trouble for
talking to me?" I asked.
    The woman nodded. "More than
technically."
    "Then why are you doing it?"
    She pushed a mushy tomato around. "You said
that this was about Robert Price's arrest for murder? Right?"
    "Right."
    She looked around to see if anyone could
overhear her. "I just don't believe he could do something like
that," she whispered. "Even if he is a you-know-what. I mean, he
may be colored, but he is well-educated. He sounds just like you
and me."
    Well, not quite. He had at least four years
of higher education on both of us—and it showed. But who was I to
quibble?
    “To be perfectly honest," the court reporter
added, "he is quite a nice-looking man. Considering. I can even see
how the wife might have crossed that line, you know?" She raised an
eyebrow at me and I nodded. "I mean, marrying someone not of her
own color and all."
    She looked around the diner again. Matched
sets of sturdy country folk sat quietly, downing their quotas of
starch and fatty meats. No one wore a white hood over his head, so
I guess she felt safe enough to continue.
    "My ex-husband would kill me for saying so,"
she whispered. "But for a colored man, Robert Price was deeply
concerned about his daughter. More than the mother, if you ask
me."
    I could tell she was at war with her own
bigotry. She had been raised to distrust and fear anyone different
from her, especially black men, but being tell and awkward— not to
mention homely—she probably didn't dig petite blonds much either.
Especially ones who twitched their butts like lightning bugs in
heat.
    "What made you feel Price was a good
father?" I asked.
    "A couple of things," she said. "He agreed
to the child support amount immediately, though it was quite high.
And when the wife said she wanted alimony as well, so she could
stay home and take care of the little girl, the husband agreed to
that. But," she paused for dramatic effect, "he wanted it
stipulated that she could not engage nonfamily baby-sitters for
more than ten hours a week."
    "In other words, he didn't trust her to stay
home with the kid?"
    "He did not."
    "It sounds like the mother was going to get
full custody."
    "She was. At first. But then something
happened to change that."
    "What?" I asked as I worked on a small
mountain of fried okra. Some people won't touch okra. They claim
it's hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. Naturally, most
of these people are men.
    The court reporter nibbled on a carrot as
she thought about my question. "I guess everything changed when
Price's lawyer called a man named Joe Scurlock to the stand. There
was a big old bunch of excitement at Miss Bledsoe's table, and then
her lawyer jumped up and demanded a sidebar conference. Judge Poe
listened for a moment, I couldn't hear a word myself, and then she
called a recess and everyone trooped back to her office. Except for
me, I'm sorry to say. The whole thing was off the record."
    I was disappointed and my face showed
it.
    "When they came back," she said, anxious to
help, "Robert Price's lawyer made a