Joe Dillard - 01 - An Innocent Client

by Scott Pratt

  ”Hello! Anybody home?” I flipped on the light in the kitchen.

  A huge poster had been hung from the kitchen ceiling. It stretched all the way to the floor and was at least six feet wide. It looked like something a high school football team would run through when they took the field for a game. The poster, in bright blue letters, said: Happy Birthday, Dad!

  WE LOVE YOU!

  I laughed as the three of them came around the corner from the den into the kitchen, singing ”Happy Birthday.” All three were wearing striped pajamas and grinning like monkeys. They’d tied their wrists together. The Dillard family chain gang. My self-pity vanished and I opened my arms for a group hug.

  Caroline announced that they were taking me to dinner, and they changed out of their striped pajamas. I chose Cafe Pacific, a quiet little place on the outskirts of Johnson City that served the best seafood in town. As I sat there eating prawns and scallops in an incredible Thai sauce, I looked at their faces, settling finally on Caroline’s. I’d fallen in love with the most beautiful girl in school all those years ago, and she was even more beautiful now. Her wavy auburn hair shimmered in the candlelight. Her smooth, fair skin and deep brown eyes glowed, and when she caught me looking at her I got a coy smile that brought out the dimple in her right cheek.

  Caroline has the firm, lithe body of a dancer, but it’s soft and curvy where it matters. She’s studied dance all her life and still operates a small dance studio. Lilly is Caroline’s clone, with the exception that her hair runs to a lighter shade and her eyes are hazel. Lilly is seventeen and in her senior year of high school. She wants to be a dancer, or a photographer, or an artist, or a Broadway actress.

  Jack looks a lot like me. He just turned nineteen and is tall and muscular, with dark hair and brooding eyes that are nearly black. Jack is a top student and a highly competitive athlete whose goal is to play professional baseball, and he works at it with the intensity of a fanatic. He and I have spent countless hours together practicing on a baseball field.

  He’ll hit until his hands blister, throw until his arm aches, lift weights until his muscles burn, and run until his legs give out. The work paid off in the form of a scholarship to Vanderbilt, but the scholarship paid only half his tuition. I still had to come up with twenty thousand dollars a year.

  When the waiter brought me a piece of chocolate cake, Caroline reached into her purse and produced a candle. She stuck it in the cake and lit it.

  ”Make a wish,” she said.

  ”And don’t tell us what it is,” Lilly said. She says that every year.

  I made a silent wish for an innocent client. And the sooner the better.

  Jack reached under the table and pulled out a small, flat, gift-wrapped box.

  ”This is from all of us,” he said.

  I opened the card. There was a message, in Caroline’s handwriting: ”Follow your heart. Follow your dreams. We’ll all be there, wherever it leads. We love you.” She’s as eager as I am to get me out of the legal profession. She thinks my work keeps me at war with myself—she’s told me more than once that she’s never seen anybody so conflicted. She’s been encouraging me to go to night school and get certified as a high school teacher and a coach.

  Inside the package were box seat tickets to an Atlanta Braves game in July.

  ”I cleared your calendar,” Caroline said. ”We’re all going. Don’t you dare schedule anything for that weekend.”

  ”Not a chance,” I said. It was perfect.

  We finished dessert and drove back home around nine. As I pulled into the driveway, the headlights swept over the front porch about thirty feet to the left of the garage. I saw something move. We lived on ten isolated acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake. We’d left Rio in the house when we went to the restaurant. I stopped just outside the garage and got out of the car. I could hear Rio raising hell inside.

  ”I’ll go in and turn on the porch light,” I said to Caroline. ”You guys stay in the car.”

  ”No way,” Jack said as he got out of the backseat.

  I walked around the corner towards the front with Jack right beside me. Someone stood on the porch.

  ”Who’s there?” I said.

  Silence. And then the porch light came on. Standing next to the porch swing in a pair of ratty khaki shorts and a green T-shirt that read, ”Do me, I’m Irish,” was my sister, Sarah.

  April 12

  2:00 p.m.

  By the time Landers returned to his office, the Johnson City dicks had managed to gather more information on the murder victim. John Paul Tester was a widower with one grown kid, a son who was a deputy sheriff and a chaplain at the Cocke County sheriff’s department. Tester had come up to Johnson City to preach at a revival at a little church near Boone’s Creek. He delivered the sermon, collected almost three hundred dollars from the offering plate for his trouble, and left the church around nine. Nobody had seen him since. His bank records showed that he withdrew two hundred dollars in cash from an automatic teller machine at eleven forty-five p.m. The machine was at the Mouse’s Tail. If Tester ran through three hundred dollars there and needed more money around midnight, the Barlowe woman had to have noticed him.

  The bitch lied.

  Landers spent the afternoon drafting an affidavit for a search warrant and running down a judge. All he had to do was tell the judge that the owner of the club where the murder victim was last seen had lied and was refusing to cooperate. The warrant the judge signed authorized the TBI to search the Mouse’s Tail for any evidence relevant to the murder of John Paul Tester. And since it was a strip club, the judge didn’t have any qualms about Landers executing the warrant during business hours.

  Landers planned the raid himself. About an hour before the SWAT guys were supposed to hit the front door, he’d go in to check things out, and then at the appointed time he’d signal the start of the raid. Landers was looking forward to it, especially the part about checking things out.

  A little after nine, he stopped by his place to shower and change. He put on a pair of jeans, a collared black pullover, and a jacket. He stuck his .38

  in an ankle holster, and drove out to the Mouse’s Tail around ten fifteen. It was a tacky joint, built of concrete block and painted powder blue. The front entrance was covered by a bright blue awning trimmed in black. A big gray mouse, grinning from ear to ear and with a tail that curled up into what looked like an erect penis, had been air-brushed on the side of the building that faced the road.

  There were twenty or thirty cars in the parking lot out front. Landers had to pay a ten-dollar cover to get past the blonde in the foyer. She looked like a high-end hooker, in elaborate makeup and black spandex. Huge tits. The ATM the murder victim withdrew the money from was sitting right beside the counter in front.

  Blondie buzzed Landers through into the main part of the club. It was a large, open room, about a hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On each side of the main room were what appeared to be small anterooms, the entrances covered by black curtains.

  There were three stages, each about the size of a boxing ring, set in a triangle and complete with brass poles. Each stage was framed by mirrors and occupied by a naked, gyrating lady. Cigarette smoke hung in a cloud about ten feet off the floor, and a mirror ball was throwing light around the room. The music was loud. Landers had heard the bass buzzing off the walls from the parking lot. He didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but it was by one of those dumbass black rappers.

  Landers did a quick head count. There were six people, all men, at the bar to his right and another thirty or so sitting at counters and tables around the stages. Besides the dancers and two waitresses, who were wearing extremely attractive tight white nurse’s outfits, there wasn’t a woman in the place. Landers didn’t see Erlene Barlowe anywhere.

  He took a seat at a table towards the back. The redhead onstage was magnificent. She had a gorgeous face and she kept throwing her head around and making her hair fly. Her legs were long, her ass wa
s tight, her tits were small and firm, and she could move. Landers was sitting there fantasizing about his balls slapping off of her ass when one of the nurses stopped by the table. Her little top was a zip-up that hadn’t been zipped up very far. Her tits were falling out all over the place.

  ”What can I get you, honey?” she said.

  ”Club soda. Twist of lime.” The nurse gave Landers a shitty look when he ordered the club soda. He would much rather have had a whiskey, but he never knew what might happen in a raid. He needed to stay sharp.

  Nurse Betty brought his club soda a couple of minutes later. Cost him five-fifty. She gave him an even shittier look when he didn’t give her a tip. Landers called Jimmy Brown at ten forty-five. The raid was supposed to start at eleven straight up. Landers could barely hear him over the fucking music. Brown said they were just pulling off the interstate. They’d be in position in five minutes.

  That’s when he saw Erlene Barlowe, still wearing the leather pants and cheetah top. She was standing by the bar. Nurse Betty was talking in her ear and pointing in Landers’s direction. The music had stopped and the disc jockey was telling the customers that touching the girls wasn’t allowed. Erlene spotted Landers and headed straight for him.

  ”Are you here to arrest me, handsome?” she said when she got to the table. ”Or are you just a bad boy looking for a good time?”

  ”You remember the guy I was asking you about?

  The dead guy who wasn’t here? He withdrew some money out of your ATM out there in the lobby last night.”

  ”Well, I swan, honey. I must have just missed him somehow.”

  ”My name isn’t honey. It’s Landers. Special Agent Landers. And you’re about to find out how much I hate it when sluts lie to me.” Landers took out his phone and dialed Jimmy Brown. ”You guys ready?”

  ”All set. Standing outside the front door.”

  ”Go.”

  There was a scream from the lobby, and the door banged open. SWAT guys in black combat gear and helmets came rushing in. They looked like fucking Navy SEALs. They had their weapons up and were yelling.

  ”Police! Get on the floor! Get on the floor!”

  Landers stood up and pointed his .38 at Erlene Barlowe’s face.

  ”This is a raid, bitch,” he said. ”Get your hands up against that wall and don’t move until I tell you to.”

  The look on her face was priceless.

  April 26

  11:00 a.m.

  Two weeks after my birthday, I finished up a hearing on a drug case in federal court in Greeneville and had just gotten in my truck to drive back to Johnson City when I looked at my cell phone and saw a text message from Caroline: ”Call me. Urgent.”

  Caroline had taken on the job as my secretary/

  paralegal two years earlier, after we made the decision that I was getting out. Since I was taking fewer cases, I needed to cut down on my overhead. The classes Caroline taught at her dance studio were held in the evenings, so she volunteered. When the lease was up on my office downtown, I found my secretary a job at another law firm and moved the essentials out to my house. The move saved me almost sixty thousand dollars a year, and Caroline took an online course and got herself certified as a paralegal.

  She turned out to be a quick study. I still had a small conference room downtown where I met clients, but it cost me only two hundred a month.

  ”What’s up?” I said when she answered the phone.

  ”Could be good, could be bad,” she said. ”A woman named Erlene Barlowe called early this morning. She was frantic. She said the police barged into her house and arrested a young friend of hers for murder and that she needed to hire a lawyer. She kept saying the girl couldn’t have done it.”

  Right.

  ”She wants to meet with you. It’s been a long time since you’ve been hired privately on a murder case.”

  ”Billy Dockery’s mother hired me.” I’d never told anyone about Billy’s confession. Not even Caroline.

  ”You made a lot of money on that case, didn’t you?”

  ”Fifty thousand.”

  ”We could use it.”

  ”I thought we were in good shape.”

  ”We are, but a murder case? And this one could be big money, babe. It’s the case where the preacher was murdered. The one who was found in the motel room.”

  ”I don’t want to take on a murder case, high profile or not, Caroline. It could go on for years.”

  ”That’s why I didn’t make her an appointment.”

  She sounded disappointed.

  I thought about it for a minute, weighing the pros and the cons. Curiosity finally got the best of me.

  ”Ah, what the heck, it won’t hurt to talk to her.

  Call her back and have her meet me downtown at one.”

  It took me an hour to drive back to Johnson City.

  I ate a quick lunch at a cafeabout two blocks from my conference room and walked in the door about ten minutes before one. There was a woman sitting at the table waiting for me. She stood when I came in. It was all I could do to keep my jaw from dropping. She was dressed in tight black spandex pants and an orange and black tiger-striped top that nearly exposed the nipples on her very substantial breasts.

  Her hair was a shade of red I’d never seen before, on or off a woman’s head.

  ”Joe Dillard,” I said as I shook her hand. Her fingernails were at least an inch long and painted the same design as her shirt.

  ”Erlene Barlowe. You’re even better-looking in person than you are on television.” She smiled, and when I looked her in the eye, I saw that despite the shocking outfit, she was an attractive woman. I motioned towards the chair.

  ”What can I do for you, Ms. Barlowe?”

  ”Oh, honey, I have the most terrible problem. It’s just awful. A very close young lady friend of mine has been arrested for a crime she didn’t commit.”

  ”Close friend?”

  ”More like a daughter. I sort of took her in about a month ago.”

  ”Start from the beginning, Ms. Barlowe. Tell me everything you want me to know.”

  ”Please, sugar, call me Erlene. I suppose I should start by telling you that I own the Mouse’s Tail Gentlemen’s Club. My husband and I owned it together, but he passed away last year and now I’m running it. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you out there.”

  I laughed. ”Haven’t had the pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about it, though.”

  ”Doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had several lawyers come and go over the years. A couple of judges, too.”

  Which judges? I considered asking her, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. Screw them. Before long, I’d be moving on.

  ”Tell me about your friend.”

  ”Have you heard they made an arrest in the murder of that pastor from Newport? The one who was stabbed?”

  ”I think everybody’s heard.”

  ”She didn’t do it, Mr. Dillard. I’d swear it on a stack of Bibles. I want to hire you to represent her.”

  ”How do you know she didn’t do it?”

  ”Because I was with her all night. I drove her home from the club after her shift ended. She lives at my place and she never went out. She couldn’t have done it. And besides that, she’s the sweetest, kindest little thing you’ll ever meet. She wouldn’t so much as step on a bug, let alone kill a human being.”

  Erlene Barlowe had an almost mesmerizing southern drawl and a sweet kind of charm about her. The fact that she was easy to look at, even in those wild clothes, made the conversation even more pleasant. I got the sense a few times that there might be more to Erlene than she wanted me to see, but there was something about her—maybe danger—that held my interest.

  After a half hour, I glanced back over my notes.

  She said she’d taken Angel Christian, the girl who was arrested, into her home after Angel showed up here on a bus with another girl, a dancer named Julie Hayes, a little over a month ago. She said Angel reminded her of her dead husband’
s beautiful young daughter, who’d been killed in a car accident. I got the distinct impression she’d convinced herself that Angel was the reincarnation of the daughter. She said Angel had suffered some serious abuse at home and was a runaway. She mentioned something about Angel’s hands.

  I was more than a little concerned about a few things. Erlene told me that she’d initially lied to a TBI agent I knew named Phil Landers. She said Angel Christian wasn’t the girl’s real name. She said the police had obtained a warrant to take a hair sample from Angel, or whatever her name was, and one from Erlene. That meant DNA evidence would probably be involved, and DNA almost always proved to be devastating to defendants. The police obviously had witnesses or some other evidence or they wouldn’t have been able to get the warrants. And she said something about the police searching for a missing Corvette.

  But Erlene was adamant about the girl’s innocence, and if she was telling the truth, it certainly didn’t sound like Angel had either the motive or the opportunity to commit a murder. I was tempted, but not so tempted that I was willing to take on a murder case that would probably wind up going to trial. I didn’t want to waste any more of her time, and I didn’t want to just flat-out refuse her, so I decided to set the bar so high she’d either be unable or unwilling to jump it.

  ”Erlene, do you have any idea how much it would cost you to hire me on a case like this? A first-degree murder. I heard something about the death penalty on the radio, you know. And it’ll most likely go to trial.”

  ”Mr. Dillard, my husband provided well for me, both while he was alive and after he passed. Money isn’t something I’m concerned about.”

  She shouldn’t have said that. The price I had in mind immediately doubled.

  ”I’m going to be honest with you, ma’am,” I said.

  ”I’m planning to get out of this business sometime in the next year. If I took on this case, it would mean I might have to stay a lot longer than I want to.”

  ”Please, Mr. Dillard. I’ll pay you whatever you want. You’re the best lawyer around here. I’ve been hearing about you and reading about you for years.