by Scott Pratt
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 toward the ambulance.
They were bringing someone out on a gurney just as I turned up the sidewalk toward 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 hung himself, or, more likely, someone had hung 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 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 any more, 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 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 were 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.”
“You’ve been thro
ugh a lot in the past few months,” she said. “We’ve all been through a lot.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. Jack distracted me for a couple of hours by taking me out to his old high school baseball field. I didn’t hear her say anything, but I felt sure it was at Caroline’s suggestion. I’d bought a pitching machine a couple of years earlier, and I fed balls into the machine while Jack pounded them over the fence. Watching him hit a baseball was a truly beautiful thing to me. He was so quick, so powerful, so fluid. He was so much better than I ever was, and watching him gave me more pleasure than I’d had in months. The sun and the exercise felt good, and by the time we got back to the house, I was feeling a little better.
But then the night came, and with it, another bout of sleepless self-flagellation. We drove to the cemetery at eleven the next morning. I felt like a dead man walking when we climbed the hill to the gravesite. It was overcast and drizzling rain. There was a crowd of people there. I sensed their presence, but I couldn’t really see them. It was as though they were all standing in a bank of thick fog.
And then I caught a glimpse of Sarah. Caroline had called the sheriff’s department and made arrangements for them to bring her to the funeral. She arrived in the back of a cruiser, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and handcuffs and shackles. The deputy who brought her up wouldn’t let her under the tent with Caroline, Lilly, Jack, and me, so she ended up having to stand outside with the others in the rain.
Caroline had contacted Ma’s best friend, a woman named Katie Lowe, to give the eulogy. I sat there, not really listening, until she began to talk about Elizabeth’s children. I heard some things about my mother that I hadn’t known before, things that Ma had told Katie about Sarah and me. One of them was that Ma had been so proud of me when I graduated from law school that she cried. I’d never seen my mother cry, and I’d never heard her say a word about being proud of me.
When the service was over, the deputy took Sarah by the arm and led her straight back down the hill. I watched as she climbed awkwardly into the back seat of the cruiser. I felt tears forming in my eyes as the cruiser pulled away and I turned to Ma’s casket. I put my palms on it and stood there, not knowing what to say or do, embarrassed to be showing weakness in front of my children. I stood there until the crowd had dispersed and then, for some reason I didn’t understand, I felt the impulse to bend down and kiss her casket. I’d kissed her at the nursing home, but not until she was too far gone to feel it. When I kissed her casket, I realized that I hadn’t ever given her a meaningful kiss. The thought made it almost impossible to keep from breaking down.
I leaned against the casket with my shoulders shaking and tried to compose myself. She’s gone and you’re still here, I said to myself. She’s gone and you’re still here. You’re alive. You have people who love you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself…
Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It was a phrase I’d heard many times, straight from my mother’s mouth, and as I stood there leaning against her casket, I knew I had try. The same people who loved me also depended on me for strength and support. I couldn’t let them down.
“Goodbye, Ma,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
I took a deep breath, straightened up, wiped the tears from my face with the back of my hand, and lifted my chin. I put one arm around Caroline and the other around Lilly, and nodded to Jack.
Together, the four of us walked back down the hill toward the car in the drizzling rain, and went back to our lives.
PART III
July 24
6:15 a.m.
Agent Landers woke up in a foul mood, knowing he had to spend the next few days in a courtroom on a case he might lose, even with Dillard’s sister’s testimony. Just as he was starting to get in the shower, his cell phone rang. Who calls at six-fifteen in the morning? The caller ID said the number was blocked. What was the point in a caller ID if the person on the other end could block it? Cell phone company morons.
“Landers.”
“I have some information for you.” It was a female. Landers could barely hear her.
“Who is this?”
“I used to work for Erlene Barlowe.”
“How’d you get my cell phone number?”
“Julie Hayes gave it to me. I was going to call you sooner, but when she got killed, it scared me.”
“So why aren’t you scared now?”
“Because I’m gone.”
“Tell me your name.”
“Can’t do it. You’re making a mistake. Angel didn’t kill anybody.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was there that night. I know what happened.”
“Are you saying Erlene killed him?”
“I don’t think you even have to ask me that question.”
“If you know something, we can protect you. You need to come back and sign a statement and testify.”
“You didn’t protect Julie.”
“You’re not helping me if you won’t come in.”
“I can help you find something you’ve been looking for.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ll give you a hint. It’s red and has four wheels.”
“The Corvette?”
“I knew you were smart.”
“Where is it?”
“In a barn.”
“Stop playing games with me. Where’s the car?”
“Do you have a pen and a piece of paper? You’re going to need to write this down.”
Landers called Frankie Martin and told him he wouldn’t be around for jury selection in the morning, but he didn’t tell him why. Landers could tell from the tone of Martin’s voice that he was angry, but Landers wasn’t about to tell Frankie or anyone else where he was going. He’d been jerked around enough on the Angel Christian case. If the girl on the phone was sending him on a wild goose chase, he was going to be the only one who knew about it.
Landers made the drive down I-181 from Johnson City to Unicoi County in thirty minutes. It was already 78 degrees and there was a thick mist hanging over everything. It was going to be hot and humid. He took the Temple Hill exit and turned onto Spivey Mountain Road.
Two miles up the mountain, Landers came to an unmarked gravel road, right where the anonymous caller said it would be. He turned right and followed the gravel road through a gulley and along a tree-covered ridge. After a mile, he came to a cattle gate that was secured by a padlock. He climbed the gate and followed the trail on foot through a stand of white pine for another quarter-mile. As he broke into a clearing, Landers spotted the barn a hundred yards to his right. So far, it looked like the caller was telling the truth.
Landers pulled his gun and walked slowly up to the barn. He saw something move in the woods to his left and froze. Must have been a deer. He peeked through the wooden slats until his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness inside. Sure enough, there it was. A vehicle covered by a tarp. The barn door was padlocked, so Landers crawled in through an open window, walked over to the car, and lifted the tarp. A Corvette. A beautiful, red Corvette. And he could make out dark stains on the passenger seat. The mother lode. Finally.
Landers pulled a notepad from his pocket and wrote down the vehicle identification number, climbed back through the window, and jogged all the way back to his car. Sweat was pouring off of him. As soon as he got to a spot where he had a cell phone signal, he called his boss and told him what he’d found. Bill Wright said he’d arrange for two agents to secure the property. No one would go in or out until Landers did what needed to be done. Wright also said he’d call the forensics team. They’d be on the way soon.
Landers drove back down the mountain and straight to the tax assessor’s office at the Unicoi County courthouse. They’d just opened and there was no one there besides Landers. The woman who worked there helped him find the property he’d just left on one of the tax maps. From that, learned that the taxes on the property were paid by a corporation called Busty Gals, Inc.
Landers got
back into his car and drove to the TBI office in Johnson City. On the way, he called the Tennessee secretary of state’s office in Nashville and asked them to fax him a copy of Busty Gals, Inc.’s corporate charter. The incorporator was HighRide, Inc., a Delaware corporation not registered to do business in Tennessee. A phone call to the Delaware secretary of state’s office confirmed what Landers suspected. Erlene Barlowe owned HighRide, Inc., which meant she also owned Busty Gals, Inc. Landers faxed the Corvette’s VIN number to the National Auto Theft Bureau, an arm of the insurance industry that tracked nearly every car in the country. The Corvette was also registered to HighRide, Inc. That explained why Landers hadn’t been able to get a hit from the Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicles.
Landers used all of the information he’d gathered to draft an affidavit for a search warrant for the barn. He didn’t mention the fact that he’d trespassed onto the property on Spivey Mountain. The way he drafted the warrant made it look as though he’d done some excellent police work, which he figured he had. He found Judge Glass in his office at eleven-thirty, and the judge signed the warrant
Landers was scheduled to testify in the Angel Christian case in the afternoon, but depending on what forensics found in the barn, he knew his testimony might have to change. He kept up with the radio traffic, so he knew the forensics team hit the barn a little before 1:00 p.m. He headed down to Jonesborough to talk to Deacon Baker.
July 24
9:00 a.m.
I found out Sarah was going to testify against Angel less than a week before the trial, when the district attorney faxed me an amended witness list and a copy of my sister’s statement. I didn’t believe a word of what I read. The statement had been taken by Phil Landers.
