Joe Dillard - 01 - An Innocent Client

by Scott Pratt

  ”It sounds like Mr. Dillard’s client has other ideas.”

  ”But she signed the forms,” Deacon said. ”She—”

  ”It’s not a contract, Mr. Baker. She can change her mind if she wants to. Her plea has to be willing and voluntary, and she obviously is no longer willing. I might have rejected it anyway, but it appears she’s saved me the trouble. Looks like we’re going to trial after all, gentlemen. Court’s in recess.”

  Green was almost jaunty as he stepped off the bench. He had to know that Deacon wouldn’t have made such a lousy deal if his case was strong, and if Deacon’s case wasn’t strong, that meant he might lose just before the election. If he lost the case, he’d probably lose the election, and Judge Green would be rid of him.

  I went back to the jury room and asked the bailiff to give Angel and me some privacy. She sat down at the table and wouldn’t look at me.

  ”What’s going on?” I said. ”I thought you were happy with this.”

  ”I changed my mind,” she said.

  ”Have you talked to Erlene?” She didn’t answer.

  ”I’ll take that as a yes. So Erlene told you not to take this plea?”

  ”She thinks you’re going to win.”

  ”I appreciate the confidence, but you’re taking a big risk.”

  ”You will win, won’t you? I’m innocent. Promise me you’ll win.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wished I could promise, but I’d been through enough trials to know that I could never predict the outcome.

  ”We go to trial two weeks from today,” I said.

  ”I’ll be ready. I’ll come to the jail and we’ll go over everything again. Are you sure about this?”

  ”Not really,” she said.

  I had to admire her courage, even though I thought it might be a bit on the reckless side. But what was more important was that I’d heard the magic words again: ”I’m innocent.” Once again, I believed her.

  July 14

  11:45 a.m.

  Landers quickly found out what Frankie Martin had meant when he said he and Deacon would need Landers’s help if Dillard didn’t accept the ”offer he can’t refuse.” Less than an hour after the plea bargain fell apart, Deacon had called Landers and asked him to come down to the DA’s office. When Landers walked into Deacon’s office and sat down, they told him they’d decided to go to Plan B, which was to try to get Dillard’s sister to help them by snitching on Angel.

  ”I thought of that a month ago,” Landers said. ”I already took a run at her. She turned me down, but I was planning to go back. Her attitude might be different now that Judge Glass threw the book at her.”

  ”Great minds think alike,” Baker said. ”I thought of approaching Dillard’s sister as soon as I heard about the six-year sentence. Have they shipped her off to the penitentiary yet?”

  ”Nah. It’s so damned crowded they don’t have a bed for her yet. She’s on a waiting list. The jail administrator told me she’d probably be around another month or so.”

  ”I don’t like using jailhouse snitches, but in this case, it looks like we don’t have much choice,” Baker said. ”All the polls my people have taken say the election is going to be close. I can’t afford to lose this trial.”

  ”What if she won’t go for it?”

  ”She’ll go for it. We’ll offer to let her out as soon as the trial’s over.”

  ”What about Judge Green? He’ll never agree.”

  ”Screw him. I’ll get Judge Glass to sign the agreement. He’s the one who put her in jail, and he hates Dillard. He’d love the idea of Dillard’s sister getting on the stand and frying one of Dillard’s clients. He’ll probably come to court and watch.”

  Landers smiled. ”Not bad,” he said.

  ”I didn’t get elected to this position by being stupid.”

  Landers thought of a couple of wiseass responses to the comment but chose to keep his mouth shut.

  He rose to leave.

  ”Wait just a second, Phil,” Baker said. ”There’s one more thing we need to discuss.”

  Baker didn’t come right out and say it, but over the next few minutes, he made it clear to Landers that he didn’t give a shit whether Dillard’s sister told the truth in court or not. He said he needed ”direct testimony that Angel Christian confessed to Sarah Dillard that Angel killed John Paul Tester.” Landers was authorized to offer Sarah a get-out-of-jail-free card in return for her ”truthful” testimony.

  The more Landers thought about the idea of Dillard’s sister as the star witness against Dillard’s client, the more he liked it. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Dillard’s face when his sister stepped up on the witness stand and helped the state convict Angel Christian of murder. And Dillard would have to go after sis hard on cross-examination. What a fucking show that would be.

  Since Baker gave Landers the impression he wasn’t going to be too particular about the truth, Landers figured he’d make the process a little easier. Before they brought Dillard’s sister into the interview room at the jail, he sat down and wrote out a statement, wording it in the way Landers thought would help the most. If Sarah Dillard signed the statement, Landers would leave her a copy and she could use her time in the cell to memorize it. Then, when she took the witness stand at the trial, all she’d have to do was repeat what she’d memorized. It would be perfect.

  Landers looked up and smiled when the guard brought Sarah in. She nodded in return, a good sign.

  She looked pretty damned hot.

  ”I thought it might be you,” she said.

  ”I hear you’re about to be shipped off to the pen.

  Bet you’re looking forward to that.”

  ”About as much as I’m looking forward to my next enema.”

  ”I heard what your brother did to you. It’s a damned shame. I don’t see how anybody could send their own flesh and blood to a place like the women’s prison in Nashville. Doesn’t he know how bad it is down there?”

  ”He doesn’t seem to care.”

  ”And how does that make you feel?”

  ”Pissed off.”

  ”Pissed off enough to help us?”

  ”What’s in it for me?”

  ”In exchange for your testimony, your sentence will be reduced to time served, plus you get to make your brother look bad.”

  She sat back and thought about it, but it didn’t take her long. She took a deep breath and looked Landers in the eye.

  ”Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.

  Landers slid the statement across the table, and she started to read.

  July 16

  9:20 a.m.

  Maynard Bush’s arraignment on the new charges of killing Bonnie Tate and the Bowers twins in Mountain City had taken only fifteen minutes, but it was fifteen of the most intense minutes of my life. The courtroom was packed with relatives and friends of Darren and David Bowers. Judge Glass was at his most belligerent, Maynard at his most flippant. He wouldn’t stop smiling. I wanted to crawl under the defense table and hide until it was over.

  The people of Johnson County didn’t understand that I’d been appointed to represent Maynard Bush by a heartless judge who dumped terrible cases on me for his private amusement. What they understood was that I was dressed in a suit, standing beside and speaking on behalf of a sociopath who’d killed two of their own. If they’d known that Maynard had manipulated me into helping him escape, they’d have strung me up right then and there.

  I’d parked my truck a block from the courthouse in an alley. As soon as the arraignment was over, I grabbed my briefcase and headed straight for the back stairs. Once I got to the bottom, I jogged across the spot where David Bowers was shot, got to my truck as quickly as I could, and drove the hell out of Johnson County.

  Judge Glass’s plan was to arraign Maynard in Mountain City in the morning and in Elizabethton—

  for the murder of his mother in Carter County—in the afternoon. The two towns were forty-five minutes apart. Under normal ci
rcumstances, I would’ve enjoyed the drive. The road wound through the Cherokee National Forest and along Watauga Lake, which acted as a gigantic mirror for the surrounding mountains. The views were breathtaking. There were times in the past when I might have stopped along the way to take in the scenery, but today I didn’t even notice.

  I drove all the way back home and went through the mail. There was an opinion from the Supreme Court on Randall Finch’s case. The opinion said Randall had a right to plead guilty at arraignment, and if the state hadn’t bothered to file their death notice in a timely manner, too bad. I couldn’t believe it. I’d won. For once, they put the sophistry aside and used a little common sense. I was pleased until I thought about what I’d really done—helped a baby killer escape the death penalty.

  I returned a few phone calls and drove over to Elizabethton. I tried to eat lunch at a coffee shop on Main Street, but I only picked at the food. Ever since Maynard had killed the Bowers twins, I’d lost my appetite. Food made me nauseous. And I was having trouble making myself work out. Exercise had always been an important part of my daily life. Exercise produced endorphins, and endorphins made me feel good. But I didn’t seem to care about feeling good.

  I was having more trouble sleeping than ever, and when I looked at myself in the mirror in the mornings, I noticed circles under my eyes that seemed to be getting darker with each passing day.

  After I paid the check at the coffee shop, I headed for the Carter County Courthouse, a truly unique structure. I don’t know who the architect was, but the taxpayers should have taken him out and shot him the day he decided it would be a good idea to build the jail directly above the courthouse. It may have seemed like a grand idea at the time, but the reality soon set in. The inmates quickly realized that they could flood the jail by stuffing rolls of toilet paper into the commodes. They also realized that the raw sewage overflowing and spilling onto the floors soon seeped into the courtrooms and clerks’ offices below. I could imagine some inmate having just been sentenced to ten years heading back to his cell and dropping a little shit of his own onto the judge below. It happened often enough that the place smelled like an outhouse.

  When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw an ambulance with its lights flashing near the sally port at the jail. There were also several patrol cars, all with their lights flashing. Somehow, I knew what had happened. Instead of heading inside to the smelly courtroom, I parked and walked directly towards the ambulance.

  They were bringing someone out on a gurney just as I turned up the sidewalk towards the sally port.

  Several police officers were milling around the door that led to the jail. A short, burly female paramedic with bright orange spiked hair was pushing the gurney. It was obvious that whoever was on the gurney was dead. A sheet had been pulled over the head.

  ”Step back, sir,” the paramedic said as I approached.

  ”Is that Maynard Bush?”

  ”You need to step away and mind your own—”

  I reached down and snatched the sheet back from the head. Maynard’s eyes were wide open, frozen in what must have been a last moment of terror. His tongue was black and swollen and sticking out of his mouth at a macabre angle. There was a dark bruise across his throat. I’d seen enough ligature marks to know what it meant. Maynard had hanged himself, or, more likely, someone had hanged him.

  The orange-headed paramedic was glaring at me.

  I flipped the sheet back up over Maynard’s head and glared back.

  ”He was right” was all I could think of to say.

  ”He was right.”

  I walked into the courthouse to tell Judge Glass I was leaving. He didn’t bother to thank me for representing Maynard or say anything about Maynard’s death. He just nodded his head and grunted. When I got back out to the parking lot, I noticed Caroline’s car backed in next to my truck. The door opened and she stepped out. Her eyes were red and puffy.

  ”I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, baby,” she said. ”The nursing home called right after you left.

  Your mother died a little while ago.”

  July 17

  10:20 a.m.

  We went up to the nursing home to clear out Ma’s room the day after she died. Jack had flown in on a red-eye the night before and he helped me carry the furniture out to the truck. Then Caroline and I went to the funeral home while Jack and Lilly took the furniture back over to Ma’s house. A tall, slim, bespectacled man who spoke in a quiet voice with a slight lisp showed us into the room where the caskets were kept.

  About twenty caskets were spread around the room, mahogany and teak and oak and stainless steel. The man led us first to a round table in the corner.

  ”Please, have a seat,” he said. ”Can I offer you something to drink? Some cookies, perhaps?”

  Cookies. I didn’t want any goddamn cookies. I gave him a look that would have silenced most people, but he just smiled. He set a pad of paper down on the table and produced a pen.

  ”I’ve read a lot about you, Mr. Dillard,” he said,

  ”but I didn’t know your mother. Tell me about her.”

  ”Why?” I knew he didn’t care about her or me.

  He just wanted to get as much money out of me as he could.

  ”We take the responsibility of contacting the newspaper on your behalf for the obituary,” the man said.

  ”I just need some basic information. Try to think of all the good things you remember about your mother.”

  ”She was a tough woman. She raised my sister and me all by herself after my father was killed in Vietnam. She worked as a bookkeeper for a roofing company and did other people’s laundry for extra money. She wouldn’t accept help from anyone. She didn’t say much and thought the world was a terrible place. How’s that?”

  ”Where did she go to church?”

  ”She didn’t believe in God. She thought the Christian religion was a global scam set up to control people and extract money from them by making them feel guilty. Do you think they’ll print that?”

  ”Did she have brothers and sisters?”

  ”One brother. A jerk who drowned in the Nolichucky River when he was seventeen.”

  ”And her parents?”

  ”Both dead.”

  ”Would you excuse us for a minute?” Caroline said. She reached over and took my hand and led me out the door into the lobby.

  ”Why don’t you let me handle this?” she said.

  ”I hate these jerks. Preying on other people’s misery.”

  ”You look tired. Why don’t you go out to the car and nap while I finish up here?”

  ”I can’t sleep in a bed. What makes you think I’ll be able to sleep in the car?”

  ”Please? Just try to relax. You’ll feel better. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

  I was beginning to think I was going insane. I’d been half-jokingly telling myself I was nuts for years, but with everything that had happened over the late spring and summer, beginning with Sarah’s release from jail and subsequent return, I’d found myself falling deeper and deeper into a mental abyss. No sleep. No appetite. No exercise. Nothing seemed to give me pleasure anymore, not even music. My attitude was becoming more and more fatalistic and hopeless. I had no enthusiasm and no particular interest in anything, including sex. It was as though I’d become a passionless robot, simply existing from day to day without feeling.

  I went back out to the car and sat in the passenger seat for a while. I closed my eyes a few times, but I couldn’t doze. I finally wrote Caroline a note, got out of the car, and started walking towards home. It was at least seven miles and my legs felt like lead, but I thought the exercise might help and it would give me some time to try to sort things out. At first, I tried to force myself to think pleasant thoughts. I envisioned Jack hitting home runs, Lilly dancing across the stage, Caroline’s jubilation when I brought her a quarter of a million dollars in a gym bag… .

  But after only a few minutes of walking, my mind began to flash images that w
ere much more sinister, the same images I was seeing when I tried to go to sleep night after night. Johnny Wayne Neal being gagged and dragged out of the courtroom. The bubbles rising in the headlights of my truck the night Junior Tester pushed me into the lake. The look in Tester’s eyes when he said I’d taken his daddy from him. The fantasy of clubbing him to death. The bruise on Angel Christian’s face in the photograph. David Bowers’s blood on my shirt. Maynard’s smirk, and the terrible image of his tongue sticking out of his mouth. My mother, wearing a diaper and lying helpless in a hospital bed with spittle running down her chin. And finally, Sarah. Always Sarah, when she was young and innocent. ”Get him off of me, Joey. He’s hurting me.”

  By the time Caroline rolled up next to me and pushed the passenger door open about two miles from home, I’d reached an entirely new level of self-loathing. I hated myself for putting Sarah in jail and for not being able to break through with Ma. I hated myself for helping monsters like Maynard Bush and Randall Finch and Billy Dockery and a long list of others. I was a whore, a pathetic excuse for a human being.

  ”I love you, Joe,” Caroline said as soon as I got into the car. Caroline is intuitive, especially when it comes to dealing with me. I knew what she was trying to do, but the words bounced off of me like a rubber ball off concrete. I didn’t feel a thing.

  ”Did you hear me? I said I love you.”

  ”I know.”

  ”Do you know how much your children love you?

  Jack worships the ground you walk on. Lilly thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived.”

  ”Please, Caroline, don’t. Not right now. I’m in no mood to be patronized.”

  ”What are you thinking? What’s wrong with you?”

  ”You don’t want to know what I’m thinking.”

  ”You’re mother just died, baby. You’re grieving.”

  ”My mother and I weren’t even close. All those years, all that time together. I grew up in her house.

  She raised me, Caroline, and I can’t remember a single meaningful conversation between us. Do you know what I was thinking a little while ago? In four years of high school, I played in over forty football games, over a hundred basketball games, and over a hundred baseball games, and she never came to a single one. She never saw me play. Not once.”