by Scott Pratt
“I have a little money stashed away,” he said. “I ain’t too happy about wasting it on something like this, but I’ll do it if I have to.”
“Maybe we can get it back for you if the judge dismisses the petition, but if he doesn’t, you’re in for a long, difficult journey through the court system. Are you prepared for that?”
Roscoe nodded his head slowly.
“I think you’d be surprised at how well prepared I am, Mr. Dillard. As a matter of fact, I’m certain of it.”
Chapter 6
CHARLIE arrived home that night a little before seven. The sun was dropping steadily toward the mountain peaks to the west. Buck Mountain had finally awakened fully from its winter sleep. Bright green leaves covered the trees that encircled Charlie’s home; the laurel bushes and undergrowth were thick and lush. A stiff, cool breeze rustled through the canopy as she walked toward the back porch. She heard her mare, Sadie, whinny in the barn.
Sitting in a chair on the back porch was Jasper, Charlie’s uncle. His dog, a massive, Irish wolfhound named Biscuit, was lying at his feet. Jasper was whittling a branch down to a sharp point. He was three years younger than Charlie’s father, a quirky man whose daily attire consisted of green coveralls that zipped up the front, an Atlanta Braves baseball cap and a pair of black work boots. He was tall and gangly with closely-cropped, black hair and hazel eyes.
Jasper had been married once, for two days, to a red-haired girl of Irish descent named Rachel Dearring. He kept a photograph of her on a bureau by his bed. After a weekend honeymoon in Boone, North Carolina, Jasper was driving back toward Buck Mountain when he lost control of his car on a rain-slicked curve near the Tennessee - North Carolina border. The car tumbled down a slope into a ravine and came to rest on its top in a creek. Jasper crawled out of the car without a scratch, but his eighteen-year-old wife, his Rachel, was killed. Jasper moved back in with his parents and never left. Both of his parents had since died, leaving just Charlie and Jasper on the small farm.
“What’s gonna be on the table this evenin’, Peanut?” Jasper said as Charlie approached. Some people called her Charleston. Nearly everyone else called her Charlie. Jasper was the only person who called her Peanut. He said it fit her – a little salty with a tough shell.
“I’ve got a couple of those trout you caught thawing in the refrigerator,” Charlie said. “Thought I’d fry some potatoes and onions, boil some greens and make some hushpuppies. How’s that sound?”
“Like a little piece of heaven. I fed and watered that nag for you.”
“Thank you, Uncle.”
Jasper didn’t often feed and water Sadie. If he’d done so, it usually meant he’d done something else, something Charlie wouldn’t be pleased about. She walked past him, through the screen door and the mud room and into the kitchen. She set a bag of groceries and a gallon of milk on the counter near the sink and looked around. As soon as she spied it, she understood why Jasper had fed the horse. Sitting in the middle of the kitchen table was a plastic, green, round-bellied Buddha about eighteen inches high.
“Uncle! Come here!”
The door opened and Jasper sauntered in with a sheepish look on his face.
“What’s this?” Charlie pointed at the Buddha.
“That there is a far-Eastern religious artifact,” Jasper said.
“It looks like molded plastic to me. Where did it come from?”
“Found it at a garage sale in Hampton this morning.”
“Have you converted to Buddhism?”
“Don’t reckon I have.”
“Then why is it here?”
“Just kind of struck me. You know I’ve always been interested in the different ways the human race expresses spirituality.”
The statement was dubious. Jasper had hundreds of “artifacts” around the house that he’d collected over the years: wooden angels, plastic crosses, ceramic statues of Christ, prints and images of God and Satan, and dozens of bibles. He also had copies of the Koran, books about Hinduism, the Mormon faith, Catholicism and the religions of American Indian tribes. He even had books on astrology and scientology. He had statuettes of cows, statuettes of patron saints, statuettes of Nordic gods, Greek gods, and Roman gods. He also had stacks and stacks of old National Geographic magazines, Life magazines, and newspapers. He claimed to have read everything, but Charlie didn’t believe him. He didn’t read very often, and when he did, it was usually trade magazines about one of his other obsessions – taxidermy. Jasper was a master taxidermist; he’d been doing it since he was a boy and made a decent living at it. People came from hundreds of miles away to have him preserve and mount their deer and bear and fish and fowl. He was part mortician, part sculptor and part painter. He spent hours every day in his shop, which was housed in an old chicken coop near the barn that Jasper had expanded and remodeled. He never allowed anyone else to go in there. The only time Jasper had ever spoken harshly to Charlie was one day when she was very young. She walked unannounced into his shop, stood marveling at his creations, and was greeted with anger. Jasper had yelled at her about privacy and his right to practice his craft free of the prying eyes of children. He’d shoved her out the door. She hadn’t set foot in his shop since, and to her knowledge, neither had anyone else. Jasper did business with his customers on his cell phone – he was a throwback, but he loved gadgets – and kept the door to his shop padlocked when he wasn’t working. A large sign on the door said simply, “Keep Out.”
“You’re going to have to find another place for Mr. Buddha,” Charlie said. “I’m not going to look at that green belly every time I sit down to a meal.”
Charlie picked the Buddha up off the table and handed it to Jasper.
“Where else am I gonna put it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Put it in your room, in the den, in your shop.”
“Ain’t much room in any of those places.”
“Your hoarding is getting out of control, uncle. The house looks like a junkyard. You won’t throw anything away. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to move in here.”
“You’re exaggerating, Peanut. It ain’t that bad.”
“Really? Where are we going to put Daddy when he gets out of jail? You’ve already filled Grandma’s room up with junk, and she’s only been gone for three months.”
“It ain’t junk.”
Charlie felt her face flush. “It’s all worthless! What you call religious artifacts I call trinkets! And all these old magazines and newspapers? What good are they? You go to garage sales and you bring all this mess in here, but nothing ever goes out. You barely have room on your bed to sleep. The place is closing in on me. I feel like I can’t breathe.”
“It ain’t junk,” Jasper said quietly. He was looking at the floor. “Everything I bring in here means something to me.”
Charlie was immediately ashamed for raising her voice. Jasper was one of the most unusual people she’d ever known. He was an obsessive-compulsive, pretty much a recluse, and he skinned and mounted animals for living, but at his core, he was decent and kind. He’d always been good to her.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“It’s okay, Peanut. I just can’t help myself sometimes.”
“I’ll get supper started.”
Charlie opened the refrigerator and bent down to retrieve the trout from the meat drawer. She heard Jasper shuffling off through the kitchen. She unwrapped the fish and pulled a frying pan from the drawer beneath the oven. She set it on top of the stove and walked to the pantry for some flour. When she turned back toward the stove, she glanced at the table.
There, sitting in the same spot from which she’d removed it a few minutes earlier, was the green Buddha.
Chapter 7
JOHNNY Russo looked around the parking lot nervously. It was a little after ten at night, a light drizzle was falling, the street in front of the restaurant was quiet. Johnny was sitting in a two-year-old Cadillac Escalade that had been r
ebuilt entirely from stolen parts and was untraceable. The New Jersey plates had been stolen off of a Toyota parked in a lot in Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, two hours earlier. In the passenger seat was Johnny’s best friend, Carlo Lanzetti. At twenty-three, Carlo was the same age as Johnny. He was a giant of a young man, almost six-and-a-half feet tall, two-hundred fifty pounds of human-growth-hormone-induced muscle. Johnny and Carlo spent two hours in the gym every day and an hour in the tanning bed. Johnny didn’t like the steroids that Carlo called “juice.” He’d tried HGH, but it made him irritable and made his testicles shrink. He was five-feet-eleven, a hundred and eighty pounds, plenty strong, but Carlo was massive. Carlo was a beast.
“What’s he doing in there?” Carlo asked. He was nervously tapping his fingers against the dashboard.
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Don’t start with the stupid.”
“The man walks into a building,” Johnny said. “There’s a big sign up there, all lit up, see it? Boticelli’s Restaurant. You know it’s a restaurant. I know it’s a restaurant. What do people do in restaurants? They eat. You know this. So why do you have to ask a question like that? If you don’t already know the answer, you’re stupid. And if you do already know the answer, then why ask the question? It’s stupid.”
“But why is it taking him so long? That’s all I’m asking. Why is it taking him so long to eat?”
“Maybe he doesn’t eat like you. Maybe he eats with a fork and a spoon instead of a shovel. Maybe he doesn’t suck the food up like a vacuum cleaner. Maybe he actually chews it.”
“And maybe you should shut your mouth before I crush you like a bug.”
“You see, Carlo? There you go again. That’s what I’m talking about when I say you got no social skills. That’s your problem. Any time there’s some little argument or somebody disagrees with you in any way, the first thing you want to do is resort to violence. How many times have I heard you say, ‘I’ll crush you like a bug? I’ll cave your skull in. I’ll break every bone in your body.’ You just can’t go around saying stuff like that all the time. You can’t do business that way. People are scared of you.”
“You got that right. People are scared of me and they should be. You’re scared of me.”
“Nah. You know I ain’t scared of you.”
“Now you’re lying. You’re sitting there and you’re telling me a big, fat lie. You lie to me all the time. If your lips are moving, you’re lying.”
Johnny’s cell phone buzzed and he looked down.
“It’s Mucci,” he said. “Leonetti just gave the waiter his credit card. He’ll be out soon.”
The man they were waiting for was Anthony “Skinny Tony” Leonetti, a forty-five-year-old associate in Philadelphia’s Pistone family. Leonetti was a small-time drug dealer and a hopeless gambler.
“I don’t want to end up like this guy,” Carlo said. “Almost thirty years he’s been on the streets humping and he’s never been made. A guy like that? They oughta show him a little respect, at least make him a soldier, give him a couple of rackets.”
“I know, but he’s a thief.”
“Yeah, but what I’m saying, if they would’ve given him a racket or two, helped him make some decent money, maybe he wouldn’t have stolen from them.”
Two weeks earlier, someone had broken into a stash house and stolen two kilos of pure heroin owned by Pistone capo Andrew Mangione. It didn’t take the wiseguys long to learn that Skinny Tony was suddenly putting out significantly more product than usual, and that he hadn’t purchased any product recently. Skinny Tony was the thief. Three days later, a contract was given to two upstarts, Johnny Russo and Carlo Lanzetti, on the recommendation of Pistone soldier Robert “Bobby Big Legs” Mucci, who also happened to be Johnny Russo’s second-cousin on his mother’s side. Mucci was inside the restaurant, two tables away from Leonetti, and was keeping Johnny and Carlo updated via text messages. It was nothing unusual. Both Leonetti and Mucci were regulars at Boticelli’s.
Johnny watched as Carlo got out of the Escalade and walked to the dumpster in the corner of the parking lot. Leonetti’s red Buick was parked less than ten feet from the dumpster, one of only six cars left in the lot. Carlo disappeared into the dumpster’s shadow. Johnny knew he was pulling a black ski mask over his face, pulling the hood up on his black sweatshirt with “Temple” emblazoned across the front, tying the string tightly beneath his chin. Johnny knew Carlo was carrying a pistol, a clean, silenced piece that would soon be cut up into pieces and resting at the murky bottom of the Delaware River.
Less than five minutes later, Leonetti walked around the corner of the building with his wife. Johnny started the Escalade’s engine, left the lights off, and slowly pulled out of the spot he’d backed into. He saw Carlo, a shadow emerging from a shadow. Carlo covered the ten feet in three steps. Leonetti’s left hand reached for the door handle on the driver’s side. Johnny heard two dull pops and saw the muffled flashes. Leonetti dropped. Johnny reached across and opened the passenger door. A few seconds later, Carlo climbed in.
Johnny could hear Leonetti’s wife screaming as they pulled out of the lot. Carlo pulled the ski mask off.
“Let’s drop off the car and the gun and go to Mario’s,” Carlo said. “I’m craving a calzone.”
Chapter 8
IT only took a short time for the news to get around that I was supervising a new lawyer, which resulted in a telephone call from the General Sessions Court judge’s office. The judge wished to appoint Charlie to a criminal case, his secretary told Caroline. The public defender’s office had already represented the client once and did not feel they should represent him again, so they needed a private lawyer to fill the void. The judge felt that Charlie, under my supervision, would be perfect. I called Charlie and asked her to accompany me to the courthouse in Jonesborough. The secretary told Caroline that the case was a “run of the mill stalking case, nothing too serious.” The defendant’s name was Clyde Dalton. We walked into the courtroom and sat down at the defense table just as the bailiff was saying, “the Honorable George Lockhart presiding.”
Judge Lockhart was elderly – seventy-eight to be exact. The sleeves of his black robe were frayed and he had the sleepy-eyed, droopy face of a porch hound. He sat down in the high-backed chair behind the bench, folded his hands in front of him, and closed his eyes, just as he always did. Everyone else went on about their business. A group of lawyers crowded around the prosecution table. The buzz in the room always reminded me of a hornet’s nest.
A serious-looking woman with thick glasses and black hair was sitting next to us. She was in her mid-thirties, and she had a stack of manila files in her lap. Her name was Martha Moore. She worked for the probation office and was wearing the same indifferent look on her face that all probation officers wore in court.
“Know anything about a defendant named Clyde Dalton?” I asked her.
“The stalker?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“I’ve never supervised him, but one of my colleagues has in the past. I know enough to tell you with some confidence that he’s crazier than an outhouse rat.”
“Crazy how? Are we talking legitimate mental illness or redneck crazy?”
“Paranoid schizophrenic crazy. Manageable with medication, but without it he tends to cause problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“He’s mainly a pest. Fixates on women and sends them love letters scribbled on toilet paper, envelopes, brown paper bags, anything he can find to write on when the mood strikes him.”
“Is he violent?”
“Not that I know of.”
Charlie was looking toward the bench. Judge Lockhart’s head was in his hands. She leaned toward Martha and me, nodded her head at the judge and said, “What’s he doing?”
“Dying slowly,” Martha said.
The door to the holding area opened and a lean, skin-headed man wearing an orange, jail-issued jum
psuit walked in. A bailiff was at his shoulder. He was cuffed and shackled and looked like he had no idea where he was. The bailiff stood at the podium next to the skinhead and cleared his throat loudly, but Judge Lockhart didn’t move. The bailiff did it again, and the judge’s eyelids separated so slowly they appeared to have been glued together.
“That’s him,” Martha said to me. “That’s your boy.”
I tapped Charlie on the arm and we got up and walked to the lectern “Excuse me, judge,” I said. “I understand you’ve appointed my young associate to a case. She’s here if you’d like to do the arraignment.”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Dillard,” Judge Lockhart said. “And this young lady is… who is she?”
“Charleston Story.”
“Yes, yes, Charleston Story. Good morning, Miss Story. Welcome to my world.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Charlie said. “Glad to be here.”
“Wish I could say the same. Let’s see, I have just the case for you.”
He turned and leaned toward his clerk and said something I couldn’t hear. The clerk reached into her stack and pulled out a warrant.
“The public defender has a conflict of interest so I have to appoint a private attorney to represent this man,” the judge said. “Since you’re the new kid on the block, it goes to you.”
Several of the lawyers in the room snickered.
“Are you up to it, Miss Story?”
“I hope so,” Charlie said.
“Clyde Dalton,” the judge said in a loud voice. “You are charged with aggravated stalking. This pretty young lady here is going to be your lawyer, and since she’s new to the profession, this handsome gentleman standing next to her is going to help her with your case. Do you understand that?”
