A Darker Justice

by Sallie Bissell

  He took out Clootie’s wallet and looked at the Commit Your Life To Jesus card again. Not much had ever come of his own commitment to Jesus, but maybe things had changed. Shoot, maybe Jesus had given him this get-out-of-jail-free card. Maybe his salvation lay not at the end of that narrow gospel road, but at some exit off I-85, the one that would bring him closest to Mary Crow.

  Deckard County Courthouse

  Tuesday, October 8

  “Can you show us the Popsicle man, honey?” Mary Crow sat cross-legged on her office floor, close beside Jasmine Harris, a five year old who had lately reverted to the babyish habits of wetting her pants and sucking her thumb. Though the child was of normal height and weight, her huge brown eyes and doleful face reminded Mary of children she’d seen in advertisements beseeching aid for Zimbabwe or Somalia. Jasmine, however, was American. She came from the projects of south Atlanta and the chief disaster she and a number of other project children had suffered was a forty-one-year-old white male named Dwayne Pugh, aka The Popsicle Man.

  “Come on, Jasmine. Don’t you stop talkin’ now.” Danika Lyles, the young attorney who worked as Mary’s assistant, spoke more gruffly to the child. “You be doing just fine til we ask you that question.”

  Jasmine stuck her thumb firmly in her mouth and stared at the photos of four white men spread out on the floor. For a long moment she did nothing but noisily work her jaws, then she began to edge one tiny finger up on the corner of the photograph third from the left.

  Mary held her breath. For weeks, Child Protective Services had brought Jasmine here to be interviewed; for weeks, they’d come up against this block. The child was bright, and answered their questions willingly . . . until asked to identify Pugh. Then she would stare at his photograph transfixed, as if the man’s very image rendered her speechless with terror. Now, as they neared the end of Pugh’s trial, Mary needed Jasmine to do more than suck her thumb as she stared at a picture. Mary badly needed Jasmine to tell the jury exactly what Pugh had done.

  “Look carefully, Jasmine,” Mary coaxed. “Are you sure this is the man who gave you all those Popsicles?”

  Jasmine sucked louder, then she moved her finger away from the corner of the photo and tapped it on the man’s right eye.

  “Good, baby!” Danika knelt on the floor. “Now tell us what he did. Tell us how he hurt you.”

  Jasmine stared at the photo, then, suddenly, she began to scream. Not weep. Not cry. But scream, like a small helpless animal twisting in some predator’s claws. The gooseflesh rose on Mary’s skin as she reached instinctively for the terrified child, who climbed into her arms with a death grip of her own.

  “It’s okay, Jasmine,” she whispered, the odor of feces drifting up as the child helplessly filled her diaper. “He’s not going to hurt you any more. I promise. Never, ever again.”

  Jasmine shrieked on. Mary began to rock her back and forth, singing an old Cherokee song about how the rabbit lost his tail. As Mary sang, Danika silently scooped up the photographs and set them face down on Mary’s desk. By the time Mary had sung the rabbit song twice, Jasmine had grown quiet.

  “Guess what, Jasmine,” murmured Mary. “We sang the bad man away. He’s not here anymore. You want to turn around and see?”

  “No!” Jasmine howled, shaking her head.

  “Okay.” Mary kissed her. “You don’t have to. You want to go back to Mrs. Williams?”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “Okay. Here we go.” Mary got up and carried the child over to Augustina Williams, a sweet, bosomy woman who served as Jasmine’s caseworker.

  “She’s going to need some diaper attention,” Mary said softly, handing the child over to Mrs. Williams.

  “Don’t she always.” Mrs. Williams rose from her chair, Jasmine clinging tightly to her neck.

  “Thank you for coming, Jasmine,” said Mary. “You did a good job.”

  When the two left the room, Mary walked over to her desk and turned over the photograph Jasmine had finally mustered the courage to touch. A flaccid-faced man with thickish lips and receding blond hair, Dwayne T. Pugh had originally been ticketed by the Deckard County cops for vending food without a license. When one officer climbed in the back of his ice-cream truck and found several tiny pairs of Winnie-the-Pooh underpants stuffed among the ice cream sandwiches, business picked up. They arrested Pugh and got a warrant to search his home, a pricey condo in upscale Avondale Estates, far beyond the means of most ice-cream vendors. That search turned up only one thing of interest: a key to a small, run-down house near Georgia Tech. When the officers went there, they walked into two rooms of state-of-the-art servers, then three rooms full of video tapes so sick they made the vice cops queasy. But what had gotten Dwayne T. Pugh remanded to the custody of Deckard County was his basement. A long cinder-block room with a rusty drain in the middle of the floor, it held an array of expensive video-taping equipment and two large cages. In one barked a pair of snarling Dobermans; in the other huddled Jasmine, nude and sobbing in her own excrement. Dwayne T. Pugh had earned his posh condo and a seven-figure bank account filming Bankhead children for an Internet porn business called ‘Chocolate Non-Pareils.’

  “Don’t you think she did better?” Danika asked hopefully.

  “Well, she kind of identified Pugh,” replied Mary, her heart just now slowing from Jasmine’s outburst. “She’s nowhere near taking the stand.”

  “You keep on her, she’ll quit that screaming. She just needs to toughen up.” Danika, who’d dribbled her way out of the projects on a basketball scholarship from UCLA, had less sympathy for the little girl, maintaining that the only way to survive the projects was to become tougher than the projects themselves.

  “Danika, we’re supposed to help the victims of crimes, not traumatize them further.”

  The tall, stork-like woman snorted. “Better to traumatize one and keep twenty more out of that basement.”

  Mary started to caution her zealous young colleague again, but suddenly the opening strains of the William Tell Overture erupted from the desk. She reached over and grabbed her new cell phone—one of twenty that the new DA had passed out to his staff, “So we can be in touch at all times,” he’d said. “24-7.”

  As she fumbled with the unfamiliar buttons, an instant e-mail message appeared on the screen.

  MY OFFICE. NOW. MOTT.

  Sighing, Mary looked at Danika. “I’ve got to go see Mott.”

  “You want me to call Jasmine’s mother? Set up another interview?”

  “No. Come over to my house tonight. We can go over the evidence files and see if there’s anybody else we can pull out of the hat.”

  “Seven?”

  “Seven’s good,” said Mary, fighting a deep, sucking feeling of defeat as she headed toward the door.

  When Jim Falkner had, on the advice of his cardiologist, retired, Hobson Mott, or more correctly, Mrs. Hobson Mott, had completely re-done Jim’s office, swooping down on the room with a decorator and two suitcases full of upholstery samples. Within a week Jim’s old red leather armchairs had been replaced by calfskin ergonomic seating systems. The Georgia Code Annotated now resided on chrome bookshelves, and where Jim had once sprawled at a battered mahogany desk, Hobson Mott perched behind a glass-topped table that seemed to float in mid-air. To Mary, going to Mott’s office felt like reporting to the bridge of the spaceship Enterprise. Mott, however, was no Captain Kirk. Originally from Chicago, Mott had spent his college years playing basketball for the chair-throwing Bobby Knight. Still obsessed with the game, a crop of gold trophies sprouted from his credenza and he often referred to court with terms like “a slam-dunk case” and “an air-ball defense.” Mary had heard that he’d hired Danika not because of her stellar law credentials, but because he needed a good center for the department basketball team.

  She tapped on the open door. “You wanted to see me?”

  Mott raised his eyebrows. Although he was tall and broad shouldered, he had an unfortunate cast to his
skin that made him resemble one of the clay heads over in Forensic Anthropology.

  He motioned her forward. “Come in, Ms. Crow.”

  Closing the door behind her, she perched on the ergonomic chair that most closely approximated her favorite seat during Falkner’s tenure. She gave a tiny sigh. How they all missed Jim! Though the Deckard County DA now had a much trendier office, the Deckard County ADAs had sought justice much more happily when sloppy old Jim was in charge. They could do nothing about that, though. If the voters of Atlanta elected a jackass, you dealt with it or sought employment elsewhere.

  “How’s the Pugh case going?” Mott demanded.

  “Okay.”

  “Virginia Kwan throwing you any curves?”

  “Not really. I moved to allow taped testimony, given the age of the witnesses. Kwan objected, saying her client has the right to see his accusers. Judge Cate sided with her.”

  “You’ve gone up against Kwan before, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve beaten her once.” Mary remembered the last time she faced off against Virginia Kwan, a diminutive woman who wore stiletto heels and was nicknamed “Dragon Lady” by the denizens of the courthouse. She’d won, but it had been a hard trial, and the next day Virginia had sent her a dozen yellow roses, with a card that read Your greatest foes are also your best teachers. Next time, Virginia.

  “You know, Ms. Crow, I really feel like this case could set the tone for my administration.” Hobson Mott took off his glasses and gave her a square, mahjong-tile grin. “A slam-dunk conviction would make the African-American population of Deckard County aware that I’ll take their cases just as seriously as Falkner did.”

  “I may not get a slam-dunk conviction, Hobson.” Mary grimaced as she recalled Jasmine’s scream of pure terror. “I’ve got a mighty reluctant witness.”

  “The Harris girl?”

  Mary nodded. “Danika and I have worked with her for weeks. She still can’t look at Pugh and maintain any kind of control.”

  “Control?” Hobson scowled.

  “Bowel control. Jasmine Harris has diarrhea every time she sees Pugh’s photo. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her on the stand.”

  Hobson looked squeamish. “But you’ve built your whole case around her testimony.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, again feeling as if she were being sucked down into a dark hole. “I have.”

  “Ms. Crow, I don’t know if you realize this, but the Pugh case has become one of enormous importance, with huge amounts of publicity. You should be steam-rolling toward a conviction, not wringing your hands over whether your witness can handle the stress of testifying.”

  “She’s five years old, Hobson. Pugh’s already traumatized her back into diapers. I’m not going to turn her into a total basket case for five minutes of testimony. I’ve established the paper trail, the cyber connections. The jury gets it.” She spoke with a confidence she did not truly feel.

  Hobson squinted at her as if he’d discovered some kind of lesion on her nose. “You know, Ms. Crow, when I came on board here, you were the number one ADA. Falkner’s big three-point shooter. You wouldn’t have hesitated to question the devil himself if you thought it would win your case.”

  “The devil wouldn’t shit his pants, Hobson . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He sat back and smirked condescendingly. “Look, I know the last year took a toll on you—”

  “Are you speaking of Irene Hannah’s death?”

  “Yes. I know you sought professional help in trying to overcome that trauma.”

  Mary’s cheeks grew hot. Almost a year ago the FBI had asked her help in protecting her friend Irene Hannah from a white supremacist group. She had failed. Irene had died. Ultimately, she had sought psychiatric help to work through her grief. Never, though, had she allowed it to affect her work. “And your point is?”

  “Frankly, I think the pressure of that and this case has combined to affect your judgment.” Hobson tapped another brass basketball that served as a paperweight. “I can’t believe you would even consider not calling this girl to testify.”

  “She’s a kindergartner, Hobson.” Mary stared at him, incredulous. “That’s coloring books and Sesame Street and . . .”

  “Popsicles?” Hobson interjected.

  Mary sat back. Dwayne Pugh had used Popsicles to lure little Jasmine into his truck. He would use Popsicles to lure other children if she couldn’t put him in jail. Maybe Hobson and Danika were right. Maybe she had gone soft. Maybe she ought to gleefully sacrifice one Jasmine to save twenty of her playmates. “Yes,” she admitted, her voice flat. “And Popsicles.”

  Hobson leaned forward in his chair, now looking like a triumphant dummy from the forensics lab. “See what I mean, Ms. Crow? I wonder if you have the guts for this anymore.”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Then put Jasmine Harris on the stand, and question her as you would any other witness.”

  “But—”

  “That’s an order, Ms. Crow,” Mott interrupted. “Jasmine Harris goes on the stand.”

  Mary stared at him, again longing for the sloppy honor of Jim Falkner’s administration. “Anything else?”

  He smiled thinly. “Just win this case, Ms. Crow.”

  “I’ll do my best.” With a single withering glare, she rose and let herself out of the office, leaving the new Deckard County District Attorney contemplating all the votes he would garner on the back of one five-year-old child.

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  A DARKER JUSTICE

  A Bantam Book

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  Copyright © 2002 by Sallie Bissell.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001037894.

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