No Defense

by Rangeley Wallace

  The dogs barked, then left my side and trotted between the rows of lights to the entrance I’d just come through. Roland ran in the door, panting.

  “I saw you come down here. Is something wrong, LuAnn?”

  “Who’s with the children?” I asked.

  “Your sister. What’s the matter?”

  “I guess you’ll know soon enough. The story about the murders is coming out today and it blames Daddy. Ben called here to tell me.” I walked around the barn, up and down the narrow aisles created by the strings of lights. I unscrewed three of the burned-out bulbs, looked at them in the palm of my hand, then threw them as hard as I could against the wall. They exploded, one after the other. The German shepherds ran back and forth between me and Roland, barking wildly.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Roland said.

  “Maybe it is,” I said. “For me.” I walked to the door and tried to pass through.

  Roland grabbed my arm. “Do you believe what Dean Reese said?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “No,” he answered.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Come on, nobody in town believes that crap,” he said.

  “But most of the world will believe whatever they hear on the news. I would if I weren’t his daughter.”

  I shook loose from Roland’s grip and pushed aside several strings of lights so that I could get by them and lean against the barn wall. Then I slid down to the ground and called the dogs to me by snapping my thumb and finger together and patting my thigh. One of the German shepherds passed through the curtain of hanging lights in front of me and lay down beside me with his head in my lap. I put my head on the dog’s back.

  “I am at a loss,” I said in a whisper. “A complete and total loss.” I smoothed away the tears as they fell faster and faster onto the dog’s back. “And I’m so damn tired of crying. That’s all I do anymore, and I don’t see life getting any easier any time soon.”

  “It will,” Roland said. “I promise. When my mother died two years ago I didn’t think I could stand it. Every day for months I woke up with an awful sadness in me. And your father isn’t dead. He’s in some trouble, but that comes with the territory. He can take it.”

  “I can’t! I can’t!” I cried. “Oh Roland, I need to go home,” I said quietly. “Could you get the children and my stuff and bring the car, please? I’ll wait here. I just can’t go back over there. Tell Mother I’m sick or something. If Jessie wants to stay with Mother or Jane I guess that’s okay. I know-you could give everyone the news.”

  “No thanks,” he said. He tightened his ponytail and left without a fight. I suppose he didn’t have the heart to argue with me.

  I didn’t want to watch the ten o’clock news, but I had to.

  “New information reveals an FBI coverup of an informant’s involvement in the Tallagumsa 1963 civil rights murders,” the anchorman reported. “Three local men have been identified as suspects in the two unsolved murders. The Washington Star has reported that Dean Reese, a former Tallagumsa resident and an FBI informant, was involved in the murders of Jimmy Turnbow and Leon Johnson when the young men were on their way to integrate the university in August 1963. Before Reese’s suicide, he informed the FBI that Newell Hagerdom, then the sheriff of Tallagumsa, and Floyd Waddy were in the car with him when the shots were fired.” The anchorman recapped the FBI documents I’d read that day at the Steak House and explained that the FBI had purposely failed to share that information, as well as other evidence, with state authorities. In closing, he detailed my father’s political history and mentioned that a reporter from Washington who was living in Tallagumsa had reopened the case.

  The phone rang. I didn’t answer. When the ringing stopped, I took the headset and stuffed it in my pajama drawer. I took one of the Valium tablets Dr. Stuart had given me a week earlier to help me sleep. Around three in the morning I got up, drank some soda water, and checked on the children. They were sleeping soundly, exhausted from the day at the Bullock farm. I took another Valium and fell asleep again.

  I awoke neither upset nor calm. I felt as though someone was pushing a pause button between each thought and action, leaving me curiously unconnected-not only to my surroundings but also to myself It wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than the alternative.

  I got Jessie to school without falling apart. In the car I told her that some of the people who didn’t want her grandfather to be elected governor were saying some bad things about him and that it was normal in an election and not to worry about it.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Like he’s a bad guy, stuff like that,” I said.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Can Julie come over today?”

  I didn’t take my usual parking space in front of the Steak House. A news truck from Channel Six in Birmingham was parked there, and inside the restaurant foyer I could see six men waiting. At least one of them held a video camera. Another had a still camera slung around his neck. What to do? Go home, wait in the car until they left, go to the beauty parlor and get a wig? There were no easy outs. This was what I had to look forward to for the indefinite future. I drove around the block again and decided I had no choice. I had to face them. I parked half a block away. At the sight of me walking up the sidewalk, the crowd of newsmen dashed out of the foyer and surged around me.

  “Good morning,” I said when they blocked my path. Three microphones were thrust in my face.

  “Mrs. Garrett, any comment on your father’s role in the deaths of Leon Johnson and Jimmy Turnbow?” one asked. At the same time another asked, “Is your father resigning from his office as mayor?”

  The video camera was on me; a still camera clicked various views of me. My heart beat faster and faster. Thankfully, I had on sunglasses. Hopefully, it would be difficult to tell how upset I was.

  “All I can tell you now is that my father was not in any way involved in their deaths,” I said. “He is innocent. He will not resign. You should direct any further questions to his office. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go to work.”

  Two of the reporters tried to ask another question at the same time. “Will he drop out of the gubernatorial race?” one asked. “How does it feel to have this happen after you raised the money for the Turnbow-Johnson memorial?” another yelled.

  I pretended I didn’t hear the questions, pulled open one of the double-glass doors to the Steak House, and went inside.

  Estelle was at the cash register, checking out a short line of breakfast customers. In the front dining room, there were two tables of strangers whom I assumed were reporters. Everyone in the room stared at me. I walked through the dining room toward the kitchen, nodding at people, saying hello, acting as if this were any old morning. I heard Estelle ask Doris to take over the register. She followed me back.

  “Poor baby,” she said, hugging me after we’d both passed through the kitchen doors.

  Roland was cooking at the grill. He blew me a kiss. “Feel better?” he asked.

  “Better than I thought I would, I guess. I got Jessie to school. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m not hysterical. Are those reporters out there, Estelle?”

  She nodded.

  “If they eat or order coffee or something, they can stay. If they come in and bother people, or just sit and sit, you can ask them to leave. Be polite. I don’t want or need to read about anyone here getting in a fight with any reporters. Call the sheriff’s office if you have any problems. Everybody back to work.”

  I went up to my little office and sat at my desk. It was past time to type the list of today’s specials, but the surge of adrenaline I’d received when confronted by the reporters outside had ebbed, and I was suddenly both emotionally and physically drained. I rested my head on my typewriter and then, remembering all the nosy reporters who could see me through my glass-walled office, sat up.

  While typing the first few lines of the specials of the day, something caught my eye, and I looked u
p. Eddie was walking up the hallway toward me. He hadn’t set foot in the restaurant since he left home. I pretended I didn’t see him, walked quickly and quietly down the steps from my office, and tried to hide by scrunching down in a booth in the back dining room. He wasn’t far behind me. A moment later he stood looking down at me.

  “Here to gloat?” I asked, sitting up.

  “No, LuAnn, I’m not,” he said. “I’m here to see if you’re all right, if there’s anything I can do. I tried to call after I saw the news.”

  “It’s a little late for your concern,” I said. “You left me. You’re living with another woman. You probably think it’s funny that Daddy’s being crucified by Ben.” I glared at him, stood up, and walked away toward the rear kitchen doors.

  “LuAnn,” he called after me. “Would you give me a-”

  I ran into the kitchen, where I couldn’t hear what else he had to say.

  That night I dreamed I was lying in the back seat of my father’s 1969 gold Chevy Impala. The car swerved back and forth over the double yellow line on the steep, narrow, two-lane road to my parents’ house at Clark Lake. My father turned his head 180 degrees around to smile or look at me as he talked. When I tried to move, I couldn’t; when I tried to speak, he couldn’t hear me. Still I screamed, “Stop, stop, please Daddy, stop!”

  In my dream, I could hear a car coming from the other direction, its horn honking at us. My father got back in his lane momentarily, just long enough to avoid crashing into the other car. As the car passed, I could see that the driver was Eddie.

  “That boy tried to run us over,” my father said. He talked, smiled, and drove faster and faster.

  “Remember how when you were little, LuAnn, I used to drive with no hands?” he said. “You’re not too old to get a kick out of that, are you, sweetie? Watch. Watch Daddy. But don’t tell your mother.” He took his hands off the steering wheel and held them up, turned around, and smiled again. The car went completely out of control.

  I awoke right before we crashed. The clock showed it was six o’clock, too close to my seven o’clock wake-up time to get back to sleep. I sat up in bed and pulled my legs toward me, covering them with the front of my over-sized T-shirt. Tight as a cocoon, the white cotton shirt held my knees close to the skin of my stomach and chest as I rocked slowly back and forth.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Chip Tuckahoe, a former charter member of the Coffee Club and a family friend, held the job of county attorney for twenty-five years before stepping down to spend more time at home in nearby Cullman with his ailing wife Betty. Ironically, it was Chip’s decision to leave the prosecutor’s position that gave Junior Fuller the opportunity to take the job when he moved back to Tallagumsa. On August 22, 1978, a grand jury, at Junior’s urging, indicted my father for murder. On August 25, Daddy hired Chip to represent him.

  Buck had wanted my father to choose one of the more flamboyant, well-known Birmingham lawyers, but when Daddy interviewed one of them and gave him the same run around he’d given me and everyone else, the lawyer refused to represent him.

  Chip Tuckahoe, on the other hand, like me, accepted my father’s position. Chip wanted the case. I was Newell Hagerdarn’s daughter. What choice did we have but to trust him?

  A week after the indictment was handed down, Chip, a short, pugnacious man with thick, wavy brown hair, arrived at Daddy’s office for their second meeting, the purpose of which was to assess the legal avenues available for avoiding or substantially delaying the trial.

  Unable to function very effectively for the past week, I had decided to skip work and join them. For the meeting I wore cut-off jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. They didn’t care what I wore, and the idea of dressing up, or doing anything requiring thought or effort, depressed me.

  My father, on the other hand, looked fit and relaxed as he took his seat behind his large mahogany desk. Chip and I pulled up two red leather chairs across from the desk and sat down facing my father. Two walls of the spacious comer office were taken up by windows; the other two were covered with photographs of my father with various state and federal politicians, shaking hands, eating, fishing, hunting, and partying, and a large collection of family photos. Through the windows I could see the Newell Hagerdom County Courthouse where the grand jury had charged Daddy with two counts of murder. There, tomorrow’s arraignment and any future trial would be held.

  “Our best bet,” Chip explained once the meeting began, “and I really believe we have a good chance at this, is to get the charges dismissed based on the fact that it’s been so long since the crime occurred. It’s practically unheard of to try someone fifteen years after a crime was committed.”

  “I thought Junior said there was no statute of limitations on murder. I remember he said so at his press conference after he got the indictments,” I said.

  “That’s absolutely true,” Chip said. “Our arguments here are based on your rights to a speedy trial, a fair trial, and to due process, Newell. The State totally fucked up the case-excuse my French, LuAnn-but they didn’t even try to pursue the matter when they should have. And the feds covered up all the evidence they had, purposefully concealing it from the State and everyone else. You didn’t do anything to obstruct the case. Jesus Christ, you gave evidence to the FBI agents who were in town. And where’s the physical evidence now, the guns, the shells? Are the witnesses alive? I can’t believe everything and everyone is intact after fifteen years. And I doubt they can prove that whatever evidence they do have was handled properly from the time of the crime until the date of the trial. I’ve had plenty of cases dismissed in instances where the trial came just a few months after the crime and the police couldn’t establish chain of custody. Fifteen years is unheard of.

  “Usually the court won’t stop a case to hear these arguments,” Chip continued, “but this is so unusual, and the legal arguments so complex, that I think we could postpone the whole trial for arguments and briefs and appeals, maybe take a whole year just for that.”

  “What about the claim made in several editorials that the trial has to go forward to prove the system works, to provide justice where justice was denied?” my father asked. “That would suggest there wouldn’t be the kind of delay you’re talking about.” He picked a cigar from the gilded box on his desk, removed the cellophane wrapper, and reached for his lighter.

  “There is no way in hell a court will have this trial and cause a lot of hysteria and pain if there’s even one chance in a thousand that a court will later rule there didn’t need to be a trial. Besides, it’s not 1963. The law now is pretty favorable toward minorities; the community is too. That era is behind us, a question for the history books, not the courts.”

  “I suppose you’d remind the court that this case is eating up the soul of our town,” my father said, puffing on his cigar until it lit. “It’s not healing old wounds but ripping them open again.” He offered a cigar to Chip.

  “Thanks,” Chip said, taking a cigar out of the box and lighting it. “I like that, Newell,” he said, scribbling on his yellow pad with one of the fifteen or twenty perfectly sharpened number two pencils he kept in his briefcase. “The soul of our town,” Chip repeated approvingly.

  “I’ve been a politician so long I can come up with something that pulls on the heartstrings on just about any subject,” my father said dryly. “Now, what else is there?”

  “We can try to fashion something like what worked two years ago after the State got indictments for the murder of Willie Edwards. That murder was in 1957, after the Montgomery bus boycott. The defendants were charged with holding a gun on Willie Edwards until he jumped off the Tyler Goodwyn Bridge. There was overwhelming evidence that the defendants had killed him because they mistook him for a black fellow who they’d heard was dating a white woman.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “One of Ben Gainey’s FBI documents said maybe the daughter of whoever killed Turnbow and Johnson was dating one of them. Have you looked into that?”

 
“I will,” Chip said, writing again.

  “That’s a big fat waste of time,” my father said. “Don’t bother.”

  There was a knock at the office door. “Yes?” my father called.

  Sheriff Bev Carter, dressed in his official blue uniform and hat, took a step inside. “Afternoon, y’all,” he said. “Chip asked me to come by and talk some about my grand jury appearance.”

  “Can’t we do that after the arraignment?” my father asked. “We’ve got a lot to cover today, and I’ve got town business to attend to as well.”

  “Fine with me,” Chip said.

  “Just let me know when you need me,” Bev said. He closed the door behind him.

  Daddy pushed a button on his intercom. “Franny,” he said, “get me a cup of coffee. Any for you, Chip? LuAnn, honey?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “Just one,” he said into the intercom.

  “So what happened in the case you were telling us about?” my father asked. “The one at the Tyler Goodwyn Bridge.” He leaned way back in his chair and listened.

  “Old Judge Embry down there is an ornery geezer who never even got to the questions of delay we’ve been discussing. He just quashed the indictments twice, ruling that the state hadn’t specified a cause of death. Believe it or not, he held that merely forcing a person to jump from a bridge does not naturally and probably lead to the death of such person. So no crime.”

  My father leaned forward. He looked surprised.

  “That’s pretty revolting,” I said, “but I guess we have to use whatever we can to get Daddy out of this. Could you fashion some kind of argument like that, Chip?”

  “I’m working on it,” Chip said. “We can move for a change of venue too-that’s the place the trial occurs-arguing you couldn’t get a fair trial here.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked. “Daddy’s more popular here than anywhere else in the state. Why move it?”