Joe Dillard - 01 - An Innocent Client

by Scott Pratt

  ”State of Tennessee versus Sarah Dillard,” Judge Glass said. He looked at Lisa Mayes, the assistant district attorney. ”Is this Mr. Dillard’s sister?”

  ”She is, Your Honor.”

  I hoped Glass wouldn’t use his dislike for me as a reason to reject the plea agreement and give Sarah a harsher sentence. I scooted down in my seat.

  ”What did she do this time?” Glass said.

  ”She stole Mr. Dillard’s daughter’s car and a necklace that belonged to Mr. Dillard’s wife,” Mayes said.

  ”She traded the necklace for cocaine and wrecked the car.”

  ”So she’s an indiscriminate thief,” Glass said. ”She steals from everybody in the family. How’d she get the keys to the car? She break in?”

  ”No, Your Honor. As I understand it, she had recently been released from jail and Mr. Dillard had taken her in. He was trying to help her. This is how she repaid him.”

  I was hoping Glass would just go through the motions and not ask any questions. It was a run-of-themill plea. He took hundreds of them every year.

  ”This judgment form says she was charged with two Class C felonies,” Glass said. ”I read her presentence report last night. She’s been stealing and drugging for almost twenty years. Why are you agreeing to concurrent sentences?”

  ”We agreed at the victim’s request, Your Honor.

  We do it all the time.”

  ”You mean to tell me Mr. Dillard requested that she only serve three years for this? After everything else she’s done?”

  ”Yes, sir.”

  ”Where is he?”

  ”He’s probably in court somewhere.”

  ”Well, get him down here. I want to talk to him.”

  I stood, my face hot, and walked towards the front.

  ”I’m here, Judge.”

  ”Well, well, Mr. Dillard, glad you could join us, especially since you’ve been so successful at manipulating the system.”

  ”I haven’t manipulated anything,” I said. Lisa Mayes seemed surprised to see me. Sarah looked at me hopefully. I stopped just to the right of the defense table. ”I’m just not asking for blood, Judge.

  This is her first felony.”

  ”It’s her first felony conviction,” Judge Glass said.

  ”She’s been charged with felonies three times in the past, but they’ve all been reduced to misdemeanors.

  I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with that, either—did you, Mr. Dillard?”

  ”Are you accusing me of something?”

  ”You’re damned right I am. I’m accusing you of manipulating the legal system to gain favorable treatment for a member of your family.”

  ”And you wouldn’t do the same?”

  ”Watch your mouth, sir. I’m not in any mood to put up with any disrespect from you.”

  ”This district attorney, the public defender, and my sister have apparently come to an agreement they think is fair,” I said. ”I didn’t have anything to do with it. The only thing I told Miss Mayes was that I wasn’t going to insist on the maximum punishment.

  She’ll serve almost a year as it is.”

  ”Let me ask you a question, Mr. Dillard,” Judge Glass said. ”If this young lady was a complete stranger to you and she’d stolen your daughter’s car and an expensive piece of jewelry that belonged to your wife, would you be in here asking me to accept a minimum sentence? Especially with her list of priors? Tell the truth for a change.”

  ”She’s not a complete stranger, so the question is meaningless,” I said. ”And I always tell the truth in this courtroom. You just don’t like to hear it sometimes.”

  ”Watch your tone, Mr. Dillard. You’re on the verge of a contempt citation.” His voice was beginning to tremble, a sure sign that his anger was about to overcome his reason.

  ”My tone is no different than yours, Judge,” I said.

  ”Is this hearing about accepting a plea from my sister? Or is it about something else? Because if it’s about some personal animosity you hold towards me, perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from this case and let her enter her plea in front of an impartial judge.”

  Glass was a bully, and like all bullies, he became angry and confused when people stood up to him.

  He certainly had the power to put me in jail, but I knew I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. If he ordered them to arrest me, I’d just embarrass him in front of the court of appeals.

  ”Don’t flatter yourself,” he said. ”I save my personal animosity for important people. You’re certainly not in that category.”

  ”Good. Then let’s get on with it,” I said.

  ”I’m not accepting this plea as is,” Glass said. ”She can plead to two consecutive three-year sentences, or she can plead to concurrent six-year sentences, or she can go to trial. She’s not walking out of my courtroom with less than six years.”

  ”Why?” I said. That simple, three-letter word was the one I knew judges hated the most. Most of them didn’t feel like they had to explain themselves. They were judges, after all. They wore a robe, and the robe gave them the power to do pretty much whatever they pleased.

  ”Why, Mr. Dillard? Why? Because I say so. Because your sister is the scum of the earth. She won’t work, she doesn’t pay taxes, she sucks up drugs like a vacuum cleaner, and she’s a thief. She’s a drain on society, and she belongs in jail. If you didn’t want her to go to jail, you shouldn’t have reported her crimes to the police. You did call the police, didn’t you?”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. When I picked up the phone, I knew I was putting Sarah at risk of a long jail term. Hell, I’d wanted her to go to jail. But my anger had subsided, and I’d convinced myself that what she’d agreed to was more than enough.

  ”What’s the matter, Mr. Dillard?” Glass said. ”Cat got your tongue?”

  ”This is between you and the district attorney and her lawyer,” I said. ”I’m leaving.”

  ”Have a nice day,” Glass said.

  I turned and walked out the door, angry and embarrassed. I called Lisa Mayes an hour later. She said the public defender had taken Sarah into the back and explained that if she went to trial and was convicted, Judge Glass could, and probably would, sentence her to twelve years in prison.

  ”She agreed to the six,” Mayes said. ”But the judge went into his routine again about you calling the police. She’s angry at him, but she’s really pissed off at you.”

  July 5

  8:20 a.m.

  I was sitting with Thomas Walker II, an assistant district attorney named Fred Julian, and a couple of bailiffs in the judge’s office in Mountain City, getting ready to go to trial with Maynard Bush. The bailiffs were Darren and David Bowers, a pair of cheerful, inseparable identical twins in their late fifties. Every time I saw them, they were laughing. After graduating from high school in Mountain City in the late sixties and thinking they’d be drafted, Darren and David enlisted in the army so they could stay together. Darren, in his brown deputy’s uniform, was telling a war story. David, also in uniform, was sitting across the room, red-faced.

  ”We’re in this little bitty brothel in Saigon,” Darren was saying. His accent made Jeff Foxworthy sound like a city slicker. ”Been out in the bush damned near a month. Hornier than three-peckered billy goats, both of us. Davie’s drunker’n Cooter Brown, and he staggers up to this ol’ Vietnamese madame and puts his hands on his hips like John Wayne and says, ‘How much fer a fuckie suckie thar, Miss Slanty Eyes?’

  ”Now, I reckon that ol’ girl she knew a little more English than Davie figgered she did, ‘cause she give him a look that’d peel chrome off a bumper. Then she smiles at him all nice and says, ‘You beaucoup big boy?’ Davie didn’t know what she’s a-talkin’ about at first, but then she points down at his pecker and she says, ‘Show me. You big boy?’ ”

  Darren was giggling. He started to talk and then stopped and giggled some more. The memory was almost too much for him to take.

  �
�So Davie, he goes, ‘Ahh, so you want to take a gander at old G.I. Johnson, huh? You reckon it might be too big for your girls?’ So Davie, he . . . he …”

  Darren broke down again. He was laughing so hard tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  ”Davie, he just drops his fly and pulls his pecker out right there for everybody to see. And that madame, she looks down at it and then she looks back up at Davie’s face all serious, and I swear on my mama’s grave, this is what she says to him. She says,

  ‘Normal price for fuckie suckie ten dollah. But for little guy like you, I take five.’ ”

  Darren slapped his leg and roared. Laughter was bouncing off the walls as Judge Rollins walked in.

  Rollins was a no-nonsense guy who traveled the Second Judicial Circuit. He didn’t bother to ask what all the commotion was about.

  ”Go get him,” he said to the Bowers twins. ”Let’s get started.”

  Darren and David got up to go fetch Maynard Bush. He was being held in the old Johnson County jail, which was about a hundred feet behind the courthouse, across a small lawn.

  The judge sat down behind his desk and we started talking about some of the issues that would come up in the trial. After about ten minutes, I heard what had to be gunshots.

  Pop! Pop!

  There was a short pause:

  Pop!

  The second-floor window behind the judge’s desk looked out over the lawn behind the building towards the jail. I got to the window just in time to see Maynard Bush climbing into the passenger side of a green Toyota sedan. A woman was helping him get into the car. She slammed the door, ran around to the driver’s side, jumped in, and the car drove away.

  Darren and David Bowers were sprawled in the courtyard. Darren was facedown; David was lying on his back. The first thought that hit me when I realized what had happened was that they both had grandchildren.

  It took me less than a minute to run down the steps, out the back door, and across the courtyard.

  David was gasping for breath, blood gurgling from a hole in his throat. Darren wasn’t moving. I pressed my finger against his carotid. No pulse. Two officers from the jail were only seconds behind me. One of them took a look at the two fallen men and raced back inside.

  I rolled up my jacket and placed it underneath David’s feet. I took off my tie, folded it, and laid it across the wound in his throat. I put my left hand behind his head and held the tie over the wound with my right, trying to keep pressure on it to reduce the bleeding.

  ”Stay with me, David,” I said. ”You’re going to be okay. Just stay with me until the ambulance gets here.” He didn’t respond. ”David! Please, hang in there. You want to see those grandbabies again, don’t you?” His eyes flickered slightly at the mention of his grandchildren, but blood was pouring from the wound and his breath was labored. I didn’t think he was going to make it.

  Beside me, a young Johnson County deputy rolled Darren onto his back and started CPR. The deputy who’d gone back inside returned with a first-aid kit and three more officers. They helped me replace my tie with a bandage.

  ”What happened?” one of them said.

  ”I don’t know,” I said. ”I heard the shots, looked out the window, and they were down.”

  I held the bandage for what seemed like forever, when suddenly, finally, I became aware of sirens; the air seemed to explode with noise and activity. Two ambulances and a crash truck arrived from the EMS

  station, which was only three blocks away. All of them jumped the curb and pulled to within a few feet of me. Uniformed men and women began to surround me, and I stood and backed off a ways. There was nothing more I could do.

  They patched David up as best they could, strapped him onto a gurney, and loaded him into the ambulance. They did the same for Darren, but everybody knew he was already dead.

  As they drove away, I stood there in a daze. A thought began to form in my mind, and I instantly felt nauseous. Had Maynard used me to plan his escape? It was routine for attorneys to help their clients set up jail visits—but I was certain the woman I’d seen helping Maynard get into the car had to be Bonnie Tate. I hadn’t actually seen her before, but it had to be her.

  I thought about what Maynard said to me that day:

  ”I ain’t saying I want to marry you or nothing, but you’re a pretty decent dude.”

  Decent dude. I dropped my head and began to trudge back towards the courthouse. My legs felt as heavy as tree trunks. I noticed my hands and shirt were covered with blood, David Bowers’s blood.

  Decent dude. As I walked slowly through the courtyard in the bright sunshine on a beautiful July morning in the Tennessee mountains, I felt anything but decent. I felt dirty, and I just wanted it all to end.

  July 7

  11:45 p.m.

  Being a single man with a rather large supply of discretionary income, and having had the opportunity to provide certain legal services to Mr. and Mrs. Gus Barlowe in the past, Charles B. Dunwoody III, Esq., saw no harm in occasionally availing himself of the pleasures of the Mouse’s Tail Gentlemen’s Club. To his closest associates, he privately referred to his adventures at the club as slumming with the naked hillbilly girls. He wasn’t always particularly proud of the things he did there, but as he told his country club buddies, ”Pardon the pun, but sometimes a gentleman just has to let it all hang out.”

  Gus Barlowe had sought Dunwoody’s advice on a wide range of topics—most of which Dunwoody was not at liberty to discuss. Dunwoody had quickly learned that Mr. Barlowe was an enterprising gentleman who generated large streams of revenue and who required an attorney with a creative mind and a deft touch in order to dissuade curious institutional minds from examining his affairs too closely.

  Since Dunwoody’s academic and legal backgrounds were steeped in corporate law and international banking and finance, he’d been able to satisfactorily accommodate Gus Barlowe’s needs. The fact that Barlowe paid handsomely, and paid in cash, only made the relationship more palatable for Dunwoody.

  Mrs. Barlowe, who had very capably taken over her husband’s affairs since his untimely death, had made the VIP lounge available to him on a Thursday evening in July, and he’d spent two delightful hours with three of the finest-looking floosies he’d ever laid eyes on. Dunwoody had to hand it to Mrs. Barlowe—

  she had excellent taste when it came to hiring whores. It was getting rather late and Dunwoody was beginning to wind down. He’d ingested a little more cognac than usual and had made three separate trips to the bull pen. God bless Viagra.

  Dunwoody was sitting at the bar in the private room, conversing with a topless bartender named Tina, when Mrs. Barlowe suddenly appeared at his shoulder. They exchanged the usual pleasantries and she asked him whether they could talk privately for a few moments. Anything for her, Dunwoody said, and they retired to a small booth in the corner. Mrs.

  Barlowe shooed the girls away, and lawyer and strip club owner were left alone in the room.

  Because Dunwoody had done so much work for her husband, he knew he was sitting across the table from a very wealthy woman, especially if one measured by local standards. He’d never been so crass as to directly ask her late husband how he managed to accumulate such large amounts of cash, but it didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce that Barlowe must have been doing something at least marginally illegal. Dunwoody suspected Barlowe was most likely selling narcotics, but so long as he paid Dunwoody’s hefty fees and maintained a certain amount of decorum in Dunwoody’s presence, the lawyer had no qualms about camouflaging the cash.

  ”What can I do for you, madame?” Dunwoody said. He thought Mrs. Barlowe a handsome woman.

  She dressed like a tart and spoke like a farm girl, but she had a sort of crude charm about her, not to mention a delicious body, especially for a woman her age.

  ”I need some legal advice, sugar.”

  ”Charles B. Dunwoody the third, at your service.”

  ”I’m going to pick up your tab tonight, sweetie pie, s
o I can retain you for the next little while. I wouldn’t want you to think I was trying to take advantage of your good nature.”

  ”You can take advantage of me anytime you like,”

  Dunwoody said. The generous offer came as a pleasant surprise, since he was certain his tab would be in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. Privacy does have its price sometimes.

  Dunwoody must have taken too much Viagra, because in spite of the fact that he’d performed brilliantly earlier in the evening during the bull pen sessions, he suddenly found himself strongly attracted to Mrs. Barlowe. She was wearing a low-cut zebra-striped top that revealed a significant portion of her magnificent breasts. Dunwoody had to force himself not to stare, and he suddenly felt himself getting a chubby. He hoped he wouldn’t have to rise quickly from the table.

  ”I know you don’t do criminal work,” she said,

  ”but I have a difficult situation on my hands and I need a sugar plum like you to help me figure out how to handle it.”

  Sweetie pie and sugar plum. No one had ever referred to Charles Dunwoody in such a manner, and he was not a young man. Mrs. Barlowe was correct in her assertion that Dunwoody did not indulge in the vulgar practice of criminal defense. He believed the arena of criminal defense was reserved for con artists and grandstanders. Nonetheless, any attorney worth his salt who paid attention in law school was well versed in the basics of constitutional law, and as any fool knows, constitutional law is the cornerstone of criminal defense.

  ”Tell me your predicament,” Dunwoody said,

  ”and let’s see what we can come up with.”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice. Her breasts were resting on the tabletop, which made it a bit difficult for Dunwoody to concentrate.

  ”I need to know the best way to lead a horse to water and then not let him drink,” she said.

  Dunwoody began to question her, and before long was able to ascertain that Mrs. Barlowe was involved in something dicey and was attempting to manipulate a situation that could very well blow up in her face. Nonetheless, the odd couple spent a very pleasant hour together, and by the time Dunwoody left, he was convinced that he’d provided Mrs. Barlowe with some sound legal advice and had given her at least an idea of what she would have to do in order to accomplish her ends.