by Scott Pratt
Kay stands. I’m sure he wants to get out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. I also stand and turn to look at Dillinger. I want to apologize to him on behalf of the state of Tennessee, on behalf of the entire U.S. criminal justice system. But he’s already out of his seat, heading for the door. He slams it as he leaves, and the bang rips through the courtroom like a gunshot.
“Bailiff!” Judge Green shouts. “Stop that man and bring him back here.”
I fix a stare on the judge as the bailiff hurries out the door. I hear shouting in the hallway. Thirty seconds later, the bailiff walks back through the door, holding Dillinger by the elbow. The look in Dillinger’s eyes is one of fear and humiliation.
“Bring him to the lectern,” the judge says.
Dillinger stands before Judge Green, looking down at the lectern.
“You’re in contempt, Mr. Dillinger. Your punishment is a hundred-dollar fine, payable in the clerk’s office before you leave the building. If you don’t pay it, I’ll have you arrested and jailed. Go back to Canada where you belong, sir. The Canadian government may allow you to invade the privacy of others to your heart’s content, but this is the United States of America. We don’t tolerate such behavior.”
Dillinger’s shoulders drop, and he walks out of the courtroom like a condemned man. As soon as he leaves, I speak up.
“In light of your ruling, Judge, the state moves to dismiss the indictment against Mr. Carver.”
“Really, Mr. Dillard? You mean you don’t plan to appeal?”
He’s smug. He knows an appeal will take two years. Even if his ruling were reversed—and I feel certain it would be—so many things can happen in two years. Evidence is lost. Witnesses die or move away. They become uncooperative. After what Dillinger’s been through today, I’m certain he won’t return in two years.
“No, Judge. I’m not going to appeal.”
“Very well. Case dismissed. Costs taxed to the state. Mr. Carver, you’re free to go.”
6
Katie Dean spent two months in the hospital after she was nearly murdered by her father. The blast entered the right side of her chest, smashed her sternum and several ribs, and blew out a large part of her right lung. She didn’t remember what had happened for at least two weeks after the shooting. There was only blackness—a vast hole in her life. She didn’t even remember dreaming.
When she had finally healed enough to leave the hospital, Katie’s aunt Mary took her to the cemetery. It was mid-October 1992. The weather had turned cold, the wind was howling in off Lake Michigan, and leaves were falling from the trees and swirling in the air like giant, colored snowflakes. Katie’s mother, along with Katie’s brothers and sister, were buried side by side. She knelt and laid fresh cut flowers in front of the headstone that marked her mother’s grave, and she wept so hard her stomach cramped. She couldn’t believe she’d never see them again. She couldn’t believe what Father had done. She wished he’d killed her, too.
Father’s grave wasn’t there. Aunt Mary said he’d been placed in another cemetery. Katie didn’t ask where it was. Mother always said he was sick, but Katie couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive him for what he did.
Aunt Mary was Mother’s older sister, and she bore a striking resemblance. She was slender, not very tall, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a kind face. She looked tired most of the time, as though she never got enough sleep. Mother had taken Katie and her brothers and sister to Tennessee to visit Aunt Mary once, not long after Aunt Mary’s husband was killed in a logging accident. She lived in a farmhouse at the base of a mountain near a place called Gatlinburg. Katie was just a little girl, but she remembered they went there late in May, right after Kirk and Kiri got out of school for the summer. Aunt Mary was pregnant.
It was the first time Katie had ever seen the Great Smoky Mountains and the purple haze that hung over them in the evening. They were so beautiful. She would go out onto the front porch in the evening and sit for hours, just looking up at the massive humps and gentle slopes shrouded in mist. Sometimes after dark the mountains would sparkle with tiny lights, as though thousands of fairies were flying among the leaves on the trees. The image made her think of magic kingdoms, filled with wonder and mystery.
Aunt Mary took Katie back to her farmhouse in Tennessee the day after she visited her family’s grave sites. Katie supposed Aunt Mary was the only person in the family who wanted her. Father’s parents had both died of cancer before Katie was born. Mother’s mother died of an aneurysm in her lung when Katie was nine. Her grandpa Patrick was still alive, but he’d married another woman and was living in Oregon.
Katie was sitting in the front seat beside Aunt Mary in the car on the way to her house. They crossed into Tennessee near a town called Jellico. Rain was beating against the windshield, and the tires on the tractor trailers were throwing up huge plumes of water like geysers. Darkness was falling.
“Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “we don’t have much, but what we have is yours. You’re my daughter now.”
Katie scooted over and buried her face in Aunt Mary’s shoulder. She started to cry.
“There, there now,” Aunt Mary said. “Everything’s going to be all right. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you, child, but you have to keep on going. God chose you to go on living. He chose you, Katie, and for a reason. We don’t know what His reason is yet, but you have to be strong. It’s what God wants, and it’s what your momma would have wanted.”
Katie had thought a lot about God when she was lying in the hospital, after Aunt Mary told her that everyone in her family was dead. She was angry with Him. Katie and her mother and brothers and sister had gone to church every Sunday morning, and every night since she could remember, Katie knelt down next to her bed and prayed before she went to sleep.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
At the end of the prayer, she always asked God to bless Mother and Father, her sister, and her brothers. If there was anyone she knew who was sick or having problems, she’d ask God to bless them, too. She never asked Him to bless her; she thought it would be selfish. She never asked Him for a thing. Maybe she should have asked Him to keep her family safe.
When they finally arrived in Tennessee in the middle of the night, Aunt Mary and Katie carried their things inside. The house was dark except for a lamp near the front door. The hardwood floors creaked under Katie’s feet with every step, and the wind was rattling the shutters outside the windows. The house smelled odd, like a doctor’s office.
A light came on down a short hallway to Katie’s right, and a door opened. A black woman stepped into the hall and walked toward them. The woman stopped and looked down at Katie. She smiled. She had the darkest eyes and the whitest teeth Katie had ever seen, and her face was as shiny and round as a ceramic dinner plate. She was much bigger than Aunt Mary. Her hair was wrapped in a blue bandanna, and she was wearing a faded blue flannel robe.
Katie heard a muffled sound coming from the other side of the door. It sounded almost like a sheep bawling.
“Welcome home, Mary,” the black woman said to Aunt Mary. They embraced.
“It’s good to be here,” Aunt Mary said.
Aunt Mary put her hand on Katie’s shoulder. “This is Katie,” she said. “Katie, this is Lottie, my good friend.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Katie,” Lottie said in a soft, smooth, Southern way. She knelt down and hugged her. “You’re gonna be real happy here. Real happy.”
Katie heard the sound coming from behind the door again—“nnggghhaaaaah”—and looked nervously up at Aunt Mary.
“He knows you’re here,” Lottie said to Aunt Mary. “He’s missed you something terrible.”
“Why don’t you take Katie upstairs and get her settled?” Aunt Mary said. “I’ll look in on him.”
Lottie picked up Katie’s suitcase with one hand, wrapped
the other around Katie’s hand, and led her toward the stairs. Katie looked back over her shoulder and saw Aunt Mary disappear into the same room from which Lottie had emerged. She heard the bawling sound again, this time much louder.
“That’s Luke,” Lottie said as they made their way slowly up the stairs. “He’s a special boy. I expect you’ll meet him tomorrow.”
7
“I gave these damned things up a long time ago,” Ray Miller says as he blows a smoke ring toward the night sky and leans against the rail on the deck. “Now look at me.”
Dinner was awkward. Caroline fixed lasagna and salad, and she and Toni chatted while we all downed a couple of glasses of wine. After dessert, Ray stepped outside to smoke, and I tagged along to keep him company. I don’t know how much he had to drink before he came over, but he seems lethargic and distracted. He hasn’t uttered a complete sentence since he walked in the door.
I, too, lean against the rail, not knowing what to say. I know all about the turmoil surrounding his life, but I don’t know whether he wants to talk about it. I finally decide to breach the line.
“So, how are you holding up?” I try to be nonchalant as I search out the Big Dipper to the north. I hear him take a short breath, as though I’ve startled him.
“You don’t want to know,” Ray says. He’s a substantial man, and his voice is a deep baritone.
“Sure I do, Ray. I’m your friend, remember?”
Ray takes a long drag off the cigarette. The smoke rises slowly around his tired face, framing it eerily for a brief moment before disappearing into the darkness.
“We got a foreclosure notice in the mail this afternoon,” he says. “We’re three months behind on the mortgage.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I’ll loan you some money.”
“I appreciate it, but I don’t borrow money from my friends.”
“You’ll pay it back.”
“You don’t understand, Joe. I’m three months behind now. It’s going to be at least another six months before I can get a hearing in front of the board. If I get my license back, which isn’t guaranteed by any means, it’ll take me another six months to get back on my feet. The mortgage is twenty-five hundred a month. You want to loan me thirty grand that I won’t be able to pay back for a year or two?”
“Sure. Caroline has taken good care of our money. I can handle thirty grand.”
“Thanks, buddy,” he says, “but I can’t accept. I just can’t. I wish I’d had your foresight. Saved a bunch of money, you know? God knows I’ve made a lot of it in the past fifteen years. But I grew up with nothing, and I’ve always wanted Toni and Tommy to have the best of everything. Nice home, nice cars, nice clothes, good food. And Christmas? I’m a damned fool at Christmastime. Toni calls me Santa.”
“I know,” I say, smiling at the thought. Ray spends thousands on food and gifts for underprivileged families every year. He donates to churches and welfare organizations. “I’ve seen what you do at Christmas.”
“I’m not that far in debt except for the mortgage, but Tommy’s college expenses ate up almost all of our savings.”
Duke University’s baseball program gave Tommy a scholarship that paid for half of his tuition and his books. But Ray pays the rest: the other half of the tuition, Tommy’s food and clothing, his car and insurance and gasoline, the rent for his apartment, his walking-around money. Ray has told me that it costs him nearly forty thousand dollars a year to keep Tommy in school at Duke.
“If it weren’t for Toni’s job, we’d starve,” Ray says.
I shake my head and sigh. “Amazing, isn’t it? The power that one man can have over another just because he wears an ugly black dress.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about killing him. I’d like to kill him slowly.”
His tone is ominous. I decide to change the subject.
“Isn’t there anything else you can do for a while? For money?”
“Like what? I’ve been on the front page of the newspaper four times already. Green’s got everybody thinking I’m some kind of criminal, a whack job lurking in the shadows, just waiting for my opportunity to take down the entire system. Nobody around here is going to hire me. Besides, the only thing I know how to do is practice law.”
“I heard about Tommy having to leave Duke.” I look over at Ray. “I’m sorry, Ray, truly sorry.”
Ray’s shoulders slump forward and his head drops. I can hear him breathing slowly in the stillness.
“That’s the worst part of all this,” he says. “The effect it’s having on my wife and son. Tommy acts like it’s no problem. He hasn’t complained, hasn’t said a word about it other than to tell me he knows I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“And Toni? Everything good with her?”
“I think it’s beginning to wear on her. I’m not exactly a joy to live with these days, and she loves the house. Losing the house will tear her up. And the thought of her being torn up tears me up.”
I look at him and see a tear glistening on his cheek. He wipes it away with the back of his hand.
“Jesus,” he says. “I’m acting like a child.”
“Don’t apologize. I probably would have fallen on my sword by now.”
Ray turns toward me. His eyes lock on to mine briefly, then drop toward the ground.
“Do you remember a couple of years back?” he says, his head still down. “I think you’d just started at the DA’s office. Judge Glass had charged Sheriff Bates with contempt over something stupid, and your office refused to prosecute. Didn’t you handle that in court?”
I remember it vividly. Judge Ivan Glass, the cranky, seventysomething judge, was presiding over an afternoon hearing two years ago when a question arose about a policy at the sheriff’s department. Judge Glass told a bailiff to telephone Sheriff Leon Bates and order him to come to court to testify and clear up the matter. Sheriff Bates politely told the bailiff he was busy. Judge Glass told the bailiff to call back and tell the sheriff if he didn’t come to court immediately he’d be charged with contempt. The sheriff told the bailiff to tell the judge to kiss his biscuits, and the judge filed the contempt charge. When the day came for the hearing, I went into court, and on behalf of the district attorney’s office, told Judge Glass he had no authority to order the sheriff into court, that the charge had no basis in law or fact, and that the district attorney’s office refused to prosecute the case. The courtroom was packed with Bates’s political supporters, and Judge Glass was forced to back down and drop the charge against the sheriff.
“Yeah, I handled it,” I say.
“I hate to ask you, but what are the chances of your doing the same thing for me? I have to go in front of the son of a bitch on Monday.”
“Who? Judge Green?”
“Plea deadline on the contempt charge. All you’d have to do is go in there and say the DA’s office refuses to prosecute. It’s a bullshit charge and everybody knows it.”
“I’ve already talked to Mooney about it. I begged him. He doesn’t want to get involved.”
“Why?” Ray says. “What’s the difference between me and Bates? What’s the difference between Glass and Green?”
“Think about it.”
Ray flips the ashes off his cigarette and puts the butt in his pocket. He pauses for a long moment.
“Oh, I’ve thought about it. Believe me.”
“Bates is probably the most popular sheriff we’ve ever had in this county,” I say. “Mooney helped Bates out, hoping it would benefit him politically somewhere down the road. That’s all it was.”
“And Green has already announced he’s not going to run for another term, assuming someone doesn’t kill him before this term expires. So there’s no upside for Mooney if he gets involved.”
“Exactly. I’m sorry, Ray.”
“Forget it.”
“Take it to trial. Surely a jury will see what’s happening and do the right thing.”
“I appreciate the advice,�
�� he says, “but if you can’t help, I’ve got something a little more dramatic in mind.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll see on Monday,” he says, and he turns and walks back into the house.
8
“Aren’t you coming to see the show?”
I look up from an attempted murder file into the face of Tanner Jarrett. He’s wearing his perpetual smile.
“What show is that?”
“Ray Miller’s in court. Judge Green sent word that he’s going to call Miller up first thing.”
“Yeah, I was planning on coming down.” I’ve been thinking about what Ray said, about his doing something dramatic, all weekend.
“I hate this,” Tanner says. “It’s a lousy case, and Miller seems like a good guy. Being the new kid on the block sucks sometimes.”
“Why don’t you just walk in there and tell Green there’s no case and refuse to prosecute? Show everybody you’ve got some balls, son.”
“Mooney and my dad would both cut them off as soon as I walked out of the courtroom,” Tanner says. “I’ll leave that kind of stuff to you old guys.”
I stand and smile at Tanner. “Is Mooney coming?”
“He took a week of vacation.”
