An Innocent Client jd-1

by Scott Pratt

“And then you heard about the murder and put two and two together?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I understand,” Landers said. “So why have you suddenly changed your mind? Why are you coming forward now?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. I dream about that woman on the bridge every night. I’m afraid you may have arrested the wrong person. My conscience just can’t bear it.”

  Landers sat back and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. A steady pressure was beginning to build just beneath his temples.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me, Mr. Watterson?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Would you be willing to give me a written statement if I need one?”

  “I guess I could if I have to.”

  “Would you be willing to testify in court?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Landers wrote down Watterson’s address and phone number and told him he’d be back in touch. If Watterson was telling the truth, Erlene Barlowe could well have tossed Reverend Tester’s private part into the lake. Maybe even the murder weapon. Landers wrote himself a note to have the sheriff’s department drag the lake under the bridge again. They’d already done it once, after the cat found the dick, but they hadn’t come up with anything.

  Since Watterson said the woman on the bridge was alone, Angel Christian was either still at the club or Erlene had taken her home. Either way, it probably took Angel out of the picture so far as the murder was concerned. Deacon Baker — that imbecile. Landers told him he was pulling the trigger too early. He told him the case was thin. Now it looked like Watterson might be right — they arrested the wrong person.

  Landers sat there trying to decide what to do. He could go out and take a written statement from Watterson and add it to the district attorney’s file, but if he did that, Dillard would be entitled to a copy of the statement and Deacon would accuse Landers of sabotaging the case. Payback would be hell. Landers figured the better option would be to tell Deacon about Watterson’s call and force him to decide what to do. Landers had a pretty good idea what Deacon would say. He wasn’t one to openly admit a mistake.

  Landers called Deacon’s office, and for once, he was in. Landers told him about Watterson and the woman on the bridge.

  “Doesn’t sound like a very reliable witness to me,” Deacon said. Landers knew it. He knew Deacon would say something like that.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” Landers said. “If Erlene Barlowe was standing in the middle of the bridge that night and she was alone, we probably arrested the wrong person.”

  “I don’t recall any of the Barlowe woman’s DNA being found on the victim,” Deacon said, “and it had to be dark out there. No way this guy could make a positive ID.”

  “You didn’t hear his description. It was her.”

  “So? What do you want me to do, Phil? You want me to publicly announce that we charged the wrong person with first-degree murder? What do I say? Oops? Gee, we’re sorry? Six weeks before an election? You’re out of your mind.”

  “So you’re asking me to ignore a material witness in a murder investigation.”

  “I’m asking you to ignore an unreliable and irrelevant witness who will do nothing but muddy the water and give Dillard more ammunition when we go to trial. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got the right person. Her DNA was found on the body, she had contact with the victim earlier that evening, we have a witness who says she left the club at the same time as the victim, and she’s refused to talk to us. And what if we did dismiss on the girl and arrest Barlowe? What evidence do we have that she committed the murder?”

  “She lied to me from the start, and I can’t quit thinking about that car. Watterson said he saw a red Corvette on the bridge.”

  “Then find it! But until you do, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop trying to help the other side! ”

  With that, Deacon hung up. Landers wadded up his notes and tossed them in the trash.

  June 23

  3:30 p.m.

  On Monday, I called Phil Landers’s office to set up a time when I could take a look at the physical evidence they intended to present at Angel Christian’s trial. It was my right as a defense attorney and I was always diligent about doing it, but the meeting loomed like a dentist’s appointment for a root canal.

  The bad blood between us went back more than ten years, to when I first began practicing criminal defense law in Washington County. Landers had been sleeping with a woman who’d just gone through an acrimonious divorce. The woman told Landers her ex-husband was a small-time pot dealer and asked Landers to arrest the guy as a favor to her. She gave Landers the make and model of her ex’s car and told him which bar her ex was likely to be hanging out in. She said if Landers would just wait in the parking lot outside the bar for her ex-husband to leave, he’d be sure to make an arrest for driving under the influence and probably find more than a little marijuana.

  So Landers did what she asked. He waited in the parking lot until the ex left and then, when the guy didn’t give him a legitimate reason to stop his vehicle, Landers made one up. He arrested the man for DUI, searched the car, and found an ounce of marijuana.

  The ex-husband, a man named Shane Boyd, hired me to represent him. He had no idea he’d been set up until his ex-wife grounded their teenage daughter for staying out too late on a Saturday night two weeks after he was arrested. The girl was angry, so she called Shane and told him that both she and her boyfriend had heard her mother and Landers talk about the set-up. The teenagers came into my office and signed sworn affidavits. I filed a motion to suppress all of the evidence based on Landers having had no legitimate reason to stop the vehicle.

  When it came time for the hearing, Landers got on the witness stand and lied. He denied he even knew Shane Boyd’s ex-wife. He said he stopped my client’s vehicle “because he failed to activate his turn signal before making a left turn.” I knew TBI agents didn’t routinely make traffic stops, and so did the judge. I called the daughter and boyfriend to the stand and subpoenaed Shane’s ex-wife. She was afraid of getting charged with perjury, so she admitted the affair with Landers, admitted she’d asked him to arrest her ex, but swore she never dreamed he’d do it.

  The judge was so outraged that Landers had committed perjury in his courtroom that he dismissed the case and wrote a letter to Landers’s supervisor at the TBI, but nothing happened. It was my first reality check when it came to cops committing perjury. Since then, I’d questioned everything Landers did in every case I had that involved him. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t have any problem letting him know it.

  We set our evidence meeting for three-fifteen, but knowing Landers would enjoy making me wait, I didn’t show up until three-thirty. He wasn’t there, so I sat down at the table and fumed for a little while. I was about to leave when he finally walked through the door in his expensive gray suit, carrying a cardboard box under his arm. Landers is around my age, a couple of inches shorter than me, in pretty good shape, and has blue eyes and short brown hair. I suppose he’s handsome — he certainly thinks he is — but there were dark circles under his eyes and I could smell booze on him. It was the kind of smell you can’t shower off, the kind that comes from your pores.

  “You’re a half-hour late,” I said as I stood up.

  “Yeah?” he said with a smirk, “sue me.”

  He started taking things out of his cardboard box, the last item being a photograph of Angel. She was sitting at a table looking up at the camera, and she had what appeared to be a nasty bruise on her left cheek. The photograph was dated two days after Tester’s murder. Angel hadn’t mentioned anything to me about the police taking her picture, and the photograph wasn’t in the initial packet of discovery material I’d picked up from the D.A.’s office. As soon as I saw the photo, I knew I’d need to file a motion to keep them from being able to use it at trial. Unless they had some concrete proof of how Angel got the bruise, the photo could unfairly
prejudice a jury.

  “So I hear Bill Wright’s about to retire,” I said, trying to keep things civil. “Who’s next in line?”

  “No such thing as next in line,” Landers said. “The job will go to whoever the suits think is best.”

  “Who do you think it will be?”

  “What do you care?” He looked at me as if I were a fly on his wrist, nothing more than a nuisance.

  “Just trying to make a little friendly small talk. No point in us being at each other’s throats all the time.”

  He raised his nose in the air like he was sniffing me. It wrinkled, as though he found the scent repugnant.

  “Hate to disappoint you,” he said, “but I don’t think me and you will ever be friends. I don’t like lawyers, especially defense lawyers who do everything they can to get criminals off on technicalities.”

  “You misunderstand my role,” I said. “I just try to make sure you guys follow your own rules. If you were in the same boat as my clients, you’d want everybody to play fair, wouldn’t you?”

  “If I were in the same boat as your clients, I’d sink it and swim away. Now are you going to look at this stuff, or did you get me down here to chit-chat? Because to be honest with you, I’m not in a real chatty mood today.”

  I slid the items across the table and looked them over.

  “Why’d you take this picture?” I said, holding up the photo of Angel. “And what’s it doing in your evidence file?”

  “Why do you think I took it? Look at her. Somebody cracked her in the face. We’re gonna show it to the jury.”

  “Any proof of how she got the bruise? What if she slipped on a banana peel?”

  “She can explain it on the witness stand.”

  “ If the judge lets it in.” I tossed the photo back onto the table. “I’m going to file a motion to keep it out.”

  “You see?” Landers said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This photograph was taken two days after the murder. Her hair was found on the dead guy, and she just happens to have a nasty bruise on her face. The logical conclusion is that she got the bruise during a struggle with the victim. But then you come along and want to keep the jury from finding out about it.”

  “Is this all you’ve got?” I said. “I see some photos of Tester, a photo of what looks like a shriveled penis, a photo of Angel, a couple of hairs, a couple of lab reports, and some bank records showing that Tester withdrew money from the strip club’s ATM. Is that it?”

  “It’ll be enough to convict that little tramp of murder.”

  “It’s not enough to convict her of simple assault.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Landers said. “You just keep thinking that way.”

  “The evidence in this case is as weak as any I’ve ever seen.”

  “Since when is DNA evidence weak?’

  “Her hair probably got on him while he was groping her at the club,” I said.

  “Maybe. You can go ahead and try to sell that to the jury, but the fact is that her hair was found on his corpse in his room.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Our witness says your girl and Barlowe followed the victim out of the club that night. They were the last people to see him alive.”

  “Your witness is a lying prostitute with a drug problem.”

  “And your client is a mystery woman who was working in a strip club. A stranger. Not from around here. Jury won’t exactly love her, especially when they see that bruise on her face.”

  “You don’t have a murder weapon or a motive.”

  “Don’t need either one. We’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to get a conviction. And you know what? I think something else will come up before this is over.”

  “Something else already has come up. You’ve heard of Virgil Watterson, haven’t you? I think you talked to him this morning.”

  There was a long, tense silence.

  “How would you know that?”

  “He called me first. He described what he saw on the bridge that night. He said he thinks you guys arrested the wrong person. Just trying to do the right thing, you know? I told him he should call you and tell you what he saw and maybe you’d try to make it right. He called me back after he talked to you. Said you didn’t sound all that interested in his information. I should’ve known better.”

  “He’s not reliable. He waited two months before he even bothered to call.”

  “He’s worried about his marriage.”

  “It was dark out there, after midnight. No way he could have made an identification.”

  “He saw Erlene. She was alone. He saw the Corvette. It’s consistent with what Julie Hayes is saying. What’s the matter with you? You guys should be taking a closer look at Erlene Barlowe.”

  “And you should mind your own shop. I don’t need your advice.”

  “So you’re going to ignore him.”

  “Ignore who? Far as I’m concerned, he never called.”

  Someone banged on the door, and it opened. A police officer named Harold “Bull” Deakins walked in. He and Landers were drinking buddies, legendary carousers. Deakins’s nickname was well deserved. His shoulders barely fit through the door.

  “They told me I’d find you down here,” he said to Landers. Landers’s eyes didn’t move, and neither did mine. Deakins stopped short. “Everything all right with you boys? Are we playing nice?” His voice did nothing to break the tension.

  “Your buddy and I were just talking about arresting innocent people,” I said, still locked onto Landers. He stared back, saying nothing.

  “Watterson saw Erlene Barlowe on the bridge that night,” I said. “She was alone. My client wasn’t around. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Landers said. “For all I know, you put the guy up to it. For all I know, you paid him to say he saw the Corvette.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “that’s more along the lines of something you’d do.”

  “You know something, Dillard? You’re wasting your breath talking to me. My job was to investigate this case and make an arrest, and that’s what I did. Now my job is to go to trial, testify, and make sure your client gets what she deserves — a needle in her arm.”

  He started packing up his little box as Deakins loomed over my shoulder. I turned to leave. As I was walking out the door, I stopped and faced Landers. He finished putting items in the box, picked it up off the table, and looked at me.

  “She’s innocent,” I said. “She didn’t kill anybody.”

  His shoulders lifted the slightest bit. What was that? A shrug?

  “Are you listening to me? She didn’t kill anybody.”

  He knew it. He looked back down at the table, and I walked out the door.

  June 25

  1:00 p.m.

  I’d been going down to the jail to see Angel once a week, but the conversations I’d had with her were more personal than professional. I’d already heard her version of what happened the night Tester was killed, so I spent the time trying to get some background information out of her. She was reluctant, but during the second visit she decided she trusted me enough to tell me her real name and where she was from.

  I gave the information to Diane Frye. She’d been working for weeks, and I’d also sent Tom Short, a forensic psychiatrist I used on occasion, down to the jail to interview Angel three times. I set up meetings with both of them on the same afternoon.

  Diane had traveled to Oklahoma and Ohio, running down witnesses and documents. I was anxious to hear what she had to say. When I walked in, the conference room table was covered in papers.

  “Your chickie is a ghost,” Diane said in her Tennessee drawl. She’s nearly sixty, but she styles her light brown hair short and spiked. She was wearing her perpetual smile and her favorite casual outfit, a bright orange Tennessee Volunteer T-shirt — she’s a rabid fan — khaki shorts that exposed knobby knees and varicose veins, and orange high-top Converse basketball shoes.r />
  “No social security number, no driver’s license, no school records, no credit history, no nothing. She doesn’t exist, at least not on paper. But I’ve talked to everybody I could find and I think I’ve got everything pretty well organized. At least you’ll know a little more about what you’re dealing with.”

  Diane said Angel was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 15, 1989, to a young woman named Grace Rodriguez. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption the same day to the Columbus Freewill Baptist Home for Children. Angel was adopted five months later by Airman First Class Thomas Rhodes and his wife, Betty. They named her Mary Ann Rhodes.

  Diane had flown out to Oklahoma City to talk to Angel’s adopted parents. They told Diane that when they adopted Mary, they thought they were unable to have children of their own, but Ms. Rhodes became pregnant a year later. She subsequently had three more children.

  “They said they treated her like a princess,” Diane said. “The mother called her a thieving, ungrateful little wench. She said her husband kept a stash of cash in a box in the ceiling, and Angel apparently cleaned it out before she left. But I always leave a card and tell people if they have any other information to give me a call. A couple hours after I left, I got a call on my cell phone. It was one of their daughters, a seventeen-year-old named Rebecca. She was scared to death and I didn’t get to talk to her for long, but she said her parents didn’t tell me the whole story.”

  Diane paused and stared up at the ceiling. She loved drama.

  “What?” I said. “C’mon. Out with it.”

  “She said her daddy did bad things to Angel.”

  “What kind of bad things?”

  “Sexual abuse. She said it went on for years, and she thinks Angel finally just had enough. She also said her mother used to beat Angel pretty badly.”

  “I wonder why Angel never told anyone.”

  “The mother is a religious freak. Their living room looked like a sanctuary. She said she home-schooled the kids and was particular about what they were allowed to watch and read. I got the impression she didn’t even allow them to have friends. Angel probably didn’t have much of an opportunity to tell. Either that or she was just scared. Her sister told me Angel tried to run away a couple of times and the police had to bring her back, so I went down to the Oklahoma City police department and got copies of the reports. The first time, she only made it ten blocks. She locked herself in the bathroom of a convenience store. The police came and took her straight home. She took off again in a couple of years later. They found her walking along the highway about seven miles from her house. The police took her home again. If she told them about the abuse, they didn’t believe her.”