Joe Dillard - 01 - An Innocent Client

by Scott Pratt

  April 12

  8:45 a.m.

  An hour later, I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot at the Washington County Courthouse in downtown Jonesborough. It’s a postcard-pretty little town, the oldest in Tennessee, nestled in the rolling hills ninety miles northeast of Knoxville. I looked across the street at the International Storytelling Center, which was built a few years ago and brings Jonesborough a limited amount of national acclaim.

  Every October, thousands of people gather for a huge storytelling festival. I smiled as I thought about the irony of having a storytelling center so near the courthouse. There were whoppers being told in both places.

  As the raindrops patted against the windshield, I opened the console, took out a bottle of mouthwash, and gargled. I’d gotten in the habit of carrying the mouthwash with me because my mouth seemed to stay dry and bitter during the day, especially when I had to go in front of a judge or jury. The dryness was accompanied by a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach and a nagging sense of impending doom. It would disappear sometimes when I was with my family, but it was never far away. At night, I kept having a dream where I was on a makeshift raft without a paddle, floating down the middle of a wide, raging river that was rushing me towards a deadly waterfall. I couldn’t get to the side of the river, and I couldn’t go back upstream. I’d wake up just as I went over the falls.

  I put the cap back on the bottle and took a deep breath. Showtime. I climbed out of the truck and walked up the courthouse steps, through the foyer, and up to the security station.

  The security officer was John Allen ”Sarge” Hurley, a gruff but good-natured old coot with whom I traded friendly insults every chance I got. Sarge was legendary around the sheriff’s department for his bravery and machismo. My favorite story about him was the time Sarge single-handedly apprehended a notorious armed robber named Dewey Davis after Davis held up a grocery store on the outskirts of Jonesborough. A much younger Sarge, responding to a robbery-in-progress call, showed up just as Dewey was walking out the front door of the Winn-Dixie carrying a shotgun. As the story goes, Sarge jumped out of his cruiser oblivious to the shotgun, ran Dewey down in the parking lot, and knocked him unconscious with one punch before he hauled him off to jail.

  Sarge had to be in his early seventies now. He was still tall and lean, but Mother Nature was beginning to bend him like an old poplar in a stiff wind. There were dark liver spots on his huge hands, and his upper lip had retreated until it was tight across his dentures, giving him a permanent snarl. The buckle on his gun belt was notched two inches above his navel, but he had no holster and no gun. He carried only a nightstick and small can of pepper spray.

  ”What’s up, Sarge?” I said as I walked through the metal detector.

  ”The rent,” he growled. ”I hear your boy Johnny Wayne is throwin’ in the towel today.” The sheriff’s department was a more efficient gossip pipeline than a sewing circle. Sarge always knew what was happening, sometimes before it happened.

  ”Good news travels fast,” I said.

  ”Can’t believe they ain’t gonna give him the needle.”

  ”Hell, Sarge, he’s innocent. He’s just being railroaded by the system.”

  ”Innocent, my ass. Nobody you represent is innocent.”

  As I started to walk past Sarge towards the elevator, he grabbed me by the arm. His gnarled fingers dug deep into my biceps.

  ”You know what I’d like to see?” he said. ”I’d like to see that sorry sonofabitch hanged on a flatbed truck right out here in front of the courthouse—that’s what I’d like to see. I’d buy a goddamned ticket.”

  It was a sentiment prevalent in the community.

  Laura Neal, Johnny Wayne’s wife and victim, was guilty of nothing more than picking a bad husband.

  She was a third-grade teacher with a wonderful reputation, her parents were solid and hardworking, and her brother was a college professor. People wanted to see Johnny Wayne burned at the stake, and I had the feeling most of them wouldn’t have minded seeing his lawyer go up in flames with him.

  I pulled away from Sarge and headed up the side stairwell to the second floor. There were about a dozen people milling around in the hallway outside the courtroom, speaking in hushed tones. The hallway was dimly lit and narrow. I never noticed any color in the corridor outside the courtroom. Everything always seemed black and white, like I was walking onto the set of 12 Angry Men.

  I stepped into Judge Ivan Glass’s courtroom and looked around. No judge. No bailiff. No clerk.

  ”Where’s His Holiness?” I asked Lisa Mayes, the assistant district attorney who had been assigned to prosecute Johnny Wayne. She was sitting at the prosecution table and contemplating her fingernails.

  ”Back in chambers. He’s not in a good mood.”

  Glass had been a notorious drinker and womanizer for more than three decades. He’d been divorced twice, primarily because of his affinity for younger women, but the good people of the First Judicial District didn’t seem to mind. They elected him every eight years. Glass’s father had been a judge, and his father before him. To hear Glass tell it, the bench was his birthright.

  He was known among the defense bar as Ivan the Terrible because of his complete lack of compassion for criminal defendants and because he treated defense attorneys almost as badly as he treated their clients. I got off on the wrong foot with him right out of law school. The first day I was in his courtroom, he put an old man in jail because the man couldn’t afford to pay his court costs. I knew what the judge was doing was illegal—debtors’ prisons were outlawed a long time ago—but he seemed to do whatever he wanted regardless of the law. I did some research and found Glass had been doing it for years. I wrote him a letter and asked him to stop.

  He wrote back and told me young lawyers ought to mind their own goddamned business. So I sued the county for allowing one of their employees, the judge, to commit constitutional violations during the course of his employment. By the time I was done, the county had to pay out nearly a million dollars to people Glass had jailed illegally, and Glass was seriously embarrassed in the process. He hated me for it, and one of the ways he exacted vengeance was by appointing me to cases like Johnny Wayne Neal’s.

  The courtroom was tense and somber. The media vultures had already filled the jury box. James and Rita Miller, Johnny Wayne’s in-laws, were sitting on the front row. Rita was crying. James looked away when I tried to catch his eye.

  I walked over to the defense table to wait for the judge, who finally teetered through the door in his black robe a half hour later. His hair was snow white, medium length, and chaotic. He wore tinted reading glasses that made it difficult to see his eyes. His clerk helped him up the steps and into his chair. The clerk called the case, and the bailiffs brought Johnny Wayne in through a door to my right and led him to the podium ten feet in front of the judge.

  I stood at the podium next to my client while the judge went through a lengthy question and answer session to ensure that Johnny Wayne was competent to enter a guilty plea, that he understood what was going on, and that he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Lisa Mayes, the prosecutor, then stood and read the litany of evidence that would have been presented had Johnny Wayne gone to trial.

  I could hear Rita Miller sobbing uncontrollably behind me as she was forced, one last time, to listen to a detailed description of her daughter’s brutal murder while her grandson hid beneath the bed. I felt ashamed to be representing the man who had caused her such misery.

  When Lisa was finished, Judge Glass stiffened.

  ”Johnny Wayne Neal,” he said in a voice made gravelly from booze and tobacco, ”how do you plead to the charge of first-degree murder?”

  The moment of truth. The point of no return.

  ”Guilty,” came the answer, barely audible. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  ”On your plea of guilty the court finds you guilty and sentences you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”


  Glass then lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and leaned forward. His eyes bored into Johnny Wayne.

  ”Just for the record,” the judge said, ”I want to tell you something before they trot you off to the penitentiary for the rest of your miserable existence.

  In all my years on the bench, you are, without question, the most disgusting, the most cowardly, the most pitiful excuse for a human being that has ever set foot in my court. There isn’t an ounce of remorse in you, and I want you to know that it would have been my distinct pleasure to sentence you to death if you’d had the courage to go to trial. I hope you rot in hell.”

  Johnny Wayne’s head rose slowly, and he met the judge’s gaze.

  ”Fuck you,” he said quietly.

  Glass’s eyes widened. ”What did you say?”

  ”I said fuck you, and the district attorney, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and this pathetic excuse for a lawyer you dumped on me, and everybody else who had a hand in framing me.” The words spilled out in a crescendo. By the time he finished, his voice was echoing off the walls.

  There was a stunned silence. The judge surprised me by smiling. He turned his head to me.

  ”Not only is your client a coward, Mr. Dillard, he’s a stupid coward.”

  ”Fuck you!” Johnny Wayne yelled.

  ”Bailiffs!” Judge Glass roared. He half rose from his seat, like a jockey on a Thoroughbred, and pointed his gavel at Johnny Wayne.

  ”Take him out and gag him!”

  They were on him in a second. Two of them took him down and another two jumped into the fray. I could hear the cameras clicking and people gasping as I moved out of the way. Johnny Wayne was screaming obscenities as they punched and kicked at him. The bailiffs finally got enough control so they could drag Johnny Wayne across the floor by his feet and out the door. I sat down at the defense table and wondered briefly whether I should be offended that Johnny Wayne had called me a pathetic excuse for a lawyer. I was a pathetic excuse for a human being, maybe, but I was a pretty damned good lawyer.

  Everybody sat around stupidly for a few minutes until finally the bailiffs, now in a tight phalanx, dragged Johnny Wayne back into the room. They’d stuffed something into his mouth and covered it with duct tape. I wondered how it was going to feel when they ripped the tape off his neatly trimmed beard.

  They pulled him upright at the podium in front of the judge.

  ”Mr. Neal,” Judge Glass said, ”your little outburst caused me to briefly consider rescinding your plea agreement and forcing you to go to trial. But I think this punishment is more appropriate for a man like you. You’re going to die in jail, but before you die, I think you have plenty to look forward to. A handsome young man like you, with a pretty potty mouth like yours, will undoubtedly enjoy tremendous popularity in the general population at the penitentiary.

  I’m sure you’ll be a favorite among the sodomites.

  The sentence stands. Life without parole. Get him out of here.”

  My last image of Johnny Wayne was of his being dragged backwards across the floor, refusing to walk, tears streaming down his face and onto the silver tape stretched across his mouth. The worst part of it for him, though, had to be the fact that his jumpsuit had become terribly wrinkled during the fight with the guards.

  I ducked out through a side door to avoid the media, went down the stairs, and headed back through the security station. Sarge was going through a woman’s purse. As I walked by, he handed her the purse and headed straight for me.

  ”Hey, Dillard, you hear about the murder?”

  ”What murder?”

  ”They found some guy in a room up at the Budget Inn stabbed to death. Somebody cut his dick off. A cat found it this morning out by the lake.”

  ”I didn’t do it, Sarge.” I kept on walking, but I could hear him laughing.

  ”Maybe you’ll get to defend the killer,” I heard him say. ”Yeah, maybe the killer’ll be just like ol’

  Johnny Wayne. Innocent. Railroaded by the system.”

  April 12

  10:00 a.m.

  Special Agent Phillip Landers’s cell phone rang a little before ten a.m., just as he was wrapping his mouth around a breakfast burrito at Sonic. Bill Wright, the Special Agent in Charge of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation office in Johnson City, was calling. Bill was Landers’s boss. Not that the brown-nosing jerk should have been the boss. Landers should have been the boss. By his own account, he was, by far, the smartest, hardest-working, best-looking TBI agent in the office. He knew he’d get his chance soon, though. Wright was about to retire.

  ”There’s a body at the Budget Inn,” Wright said as Landers chewed slowly and stared at a teenage waitress on a pair of roller skates. ”Male. Stabbed to death. That’s about all I know. I already called forensics. They’re on the way.”

  The Johnson City police didn’t have any forensics people on the payroll, so murders were often passed along to the TBI. Landers took his time finishing his burrito. No big rush. The guy was already dead.

  There were six city cruisers in the Budget Inn parking lot when Landers pulled in a half hour after he got the call. All of the cruisers had their emergency lights on, as though the cops who drove them were actually doing something. The patrol guys never ceased to amaze Landers. They’d stand around for hours at a crime scene, fucking off, trading gossip, and hoping for some little tidbit of information they could share with each other. If they were really lucky, maybe they’d get a glimpse of the body and could go home and tell their wives or girlfriends the gory details.

  Landers opened the trunk, lifted out a couple of pairs of latex gloves, and walked up the stairs to room 201. It was overcast and drizzling outside, but it still took his eyes a second to adjust to the dim light in the room. As soon as he cleared the door, he could smell blood. His eyes moved to the left. Jimmy Brown, a big, dim cracker with a butch haircut who had worked his way up through patrol and was finally, after twenty years, an investigator with the Johnson City police, was leaning over the bed. Beneath him was the body of what appeared to be a male whale. A very pale male whale. He was buck naked, lying flat on his back. His legs were splayed and his arms went straight out from his shoulders.

  Spread-eagled. He was covered in dark dried blood.

  ”So much for death with dignity, huh?” Landers said.

  Brown looked at him deadpan. He didn’t even smile. How could he not smile? That was pretty fucking funny. Landers chalked it up to petty jealousy.

  ”Where’s the forensics team?” Brown said.

  ”On the way. Should be here in an hour or so.”

  The TBI’s East Tennessee forensics guys and girls scrambled out of Knoxville, ninety miles to the west.

  They were responsible for covering the entire eastern half of the state. Landers knew they’d show up in their fancy modern mobile crime scene van dressed in their cute little white uniforms. Thanks to the CSI television shows, they all thought they were stars.

  ”Who’s the pretty boy?” Landers said.

  Brown stepped back away from the body and pulled out his notepad.

  ”Signed in as John Paul Tester and gave a Newport address, confirmed by registration in the glove compartment of his car. His wallet’s gone, if he had one.

  Manager says he checked in late yesterday afternoon, said he was here to preach at a revival, and asked where he could get a good hamburger. The manager told him to go to the Purple Pig. We’re getting a driver’s license photo from the Department of Safety so we can take it down there and ask around.”

  Landers wondered why Brown needed the notepad to impart such a brief summary. The guy was really thick. Landers began to walk around the bed, looking at the dead whale. There were dozens of stab wounds, most of them concentrated around the neck and chest.

  ”Preacher, huh? Looks like somebody didn’t like the sermon.”

  ”That’s the least of it,” Brown said. ”His dick’s gone.”

  ”Jesus! Really?” Landers
hadn’t noticed with all the blood. He looked between the whale’s legs and there was nothing but a mess of dark red goo. Whoever cut it off had to work for it. Landers figured it had been quite a while since the whale had seen his own dick.

  ”And get this,” Brown said. ”Some woman called the sheriff’s department this morning. She lives out by Pickens Bridge, and her cat brought her a little gift. Turned out to be a human penis. Probably belongs to this guy.”

  His logic was astounding. ”Any idea how long he’s been dead?” Landers said.

  ”He’s cold and stiff. I’d say more than eight hours.”

  ”Security cameras?”

  ”Just at the front desk. Nothing in the parking lot or anywhere else.”

  A patrol officer knocked and walked in. He was carrying an eight-by-ten photo of the dead guy. He handed it to Brown, who handed it to Landers.

  ”Are you here to help or are you just sightseeing?”

  Brown said.

  ”Your wish is my command, at least until the case officially gets dropped in my lap.”

  Brown gave him an eat-shit look. ”Why don’t you take this down to the Purple Pig and ask around?”

  ”Done,” Landers said. ”Anything else?”

  ”I don’t think so. I’ve got people running down the woman who was on duty last night, canvassing the rooms, and working the Newport angle. You say forensics is on the way. I think we’ve got it under control for now.”

  ”Cool. I’m off to the Pig.”

  Landers walked down the steps and past the patrol guys and got into his car. He recognized a reporter from the Johnson City paper loitering outside the entrance. Her name was Sylvia something. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she wasn’t hideous, so Landers got back out of the car and went over to shoot the shit with her for a couple of minutes. He leaked her a little tidbit about the missing dick, thinking it might be worth a blow job somewhere down the line.

  As he made his way south down Roan Street, Landers kept glancing at the photo of the dead preacher. He had reddish hair, semi-decent features, and wide sideburns that ran to the bottom of his ear lobes, a la Elvis Presley. Not a bad-looking dude, but damn sure not in the same league as Landers.