Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All

by Scott Pratt

  “You’re kidding. He went to a conference last week. He didn’t say anything to me about going on vacation this week.”

  “He’s the boss. I guess he can do whatever he wants.”

  Tanner and I make our way downstairs to the courtroom, and I take a seat in the jury box. The place is full of defense lawyers and prosecutors, most of whom have no business with the court; they’re there just to see if a battle erupts. There are about thirty people in the gallery, two television news camera crews, and a smattering of reporters. The atmosphere is tense and subdued. I look around and see Ray sitting in the back row. Toni isn’t with him. Ray won’t let her come. He’s told me he’s too ashamed.

  Judge Green enters the courtroom and his clerk calls the case of State of Tennessee versus Raymond Miller. Ray walks slowly, almost unsteadily, toward the front, wearing a black suit, a black shirt, and a black tie. His hair, which has grayed significantly over the past six months, is pulled back tightly into a ponytail. His forehead is deeply lined, his eyes dark and intense. His back looks to be as wide as a sheet of plywood. He attempts to stand straight at the defense table, but I notice he’s swaying slightly. He stares at Judge Green. Tanner silently rises from his seat at the prosecution table.

  “Mr. Miller,” Judge Green says, “you’ve been charged with contempt of court in the presence of the court based upon your failure to show up at the appointed time and your failure to notify any court personnel. You’re here today for a plea deadline. I see you haven’t hired counsel.”

  “I don’t need counsel,” Ray says curtly.

  “You know what they say about the man who represents himself in court,” the judge says. “He has a fool for a client.”

  There is a lingering silence in the courtroom, and as I sit there watching, I imagine that the entire building is shuddering, as though it’s trying to shake off the tension inside. Ray’s jaw tightens, and his chin juts forward. He begins to speak, very slowly.

  “Because of you, I’ve lost nearly everything I’ve spent my life working for.” His speech is almost imperceptibly slurred. Only someone who has spent as much time with Ray as I have would notice. He continues, “I’ve also lost my livelihood, my reputation, my—”

  “Anything that’s happened to you, you’ve brought on yourself,” Judge Green interrupts.

  “I’m not finished!” Ray roars, and Judge Green, suddenly intimidated, seems to sink in his high-backed leather chair.

  “What you’ve done to me is inexcusable. I’ve done everything in my power to try to put a stop to it, but you just won’t quit. You’re a pathetic excuse for a man, an embarrassment to the judiciary, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand here and let you call me a fool!”

  “You’re in contempt again,” Judge Green says, trying unsuccessfully to look brave. “Bailiff, take Mr. Miller over to the jail.”

  “You’re right about that.” Ray lets out a sardonic chuckle. “I have more contempt for you than you could ever imagine.”

  Ray’s right hand slides quickly inside his jacket. When it reappears, it’s holding a revolver. Without saying a word, he points the pistol at Judge Green.

  Boom!

  The shot is deafening in the confined area of the courtroom. I see smoke pour out of the gun barrel and I freeze, unable to believe what I’m witnessing. Ray pulls the trigger a second time, and another ear-splitting roar reverberates off the walls. I glance at Judge Green. He’s scrambling to get beneath the bench. I’m conscious of women screaming, men yelling, bailiffs dashing forward. I start climbing over the two rows of seats in front of me, yelling Ray’s name.

  A bailiff moves to within five feet of Ray, his gun pointed at Ray’s head.

  “Put the gun down! Now!” the bailiff screams. Another is approaching from the rear.

  Ray looks at the bailiff. Then he looks back at the bench, where Judge Green—dead, wounded, or cowering—has disappeared.

  Then Ray looks at me.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” he says calmly. “I didn’t deserve this.”

  He opens his mouth wide, inserts the pistol barrel, and, before I can get to him, pulls the trigger.

  9

  Katie Dean awoke to a house filled with the smells of clean cotton sheets and pillowcases, coffee brewing, and sausage frying. Sunlight was spilling through her window upstairs, and when she lifted her head to look outside, the view nearly took her breath away. The mountains to the east were dazzling with color—deep reds, brilliant oranges, and golds. It looked as though they’d been covered with a gigantic, multicolored quilt. She pulled the covers back and looked around at her new bedroom. The walls were plaster and had been painted gold. The hardwood floor next to the bed was covered by a dark orange woven rug. There was a small closet just off the foot of the bed and a chest of drawers against the wall near the door. Framed photographs of Katie’s mother and brothers and sister covered the chest and a small nightstand next to the bed. Some of her drawings had been hung on the wall by the window. She walked to the closet in her stocking feet and saw that her clothes had already been unpacked and were hanging neatly in a row.

  Katie slowly descended the stairs. When she was halfway down, she saw him for the first time. His bed had been rolled into the living room. His head was turned away from her, toward a television set. He was covered from the neck down with a sheet and blanket. All Katie could see was his hair, which was the same color as that of the bright red squirrels that lived in the trees in her yard back in Michigan. Katie stopped, sat down on the stairs, and watched him through the railing.

  Lottie walked into the den from the kitchen a few seconds later. She noticed Katie immediately.

  “I knew the smell of sausage would bring you outta that bed. Come on down here and meet Mister Luke.”

  Lottie reached her hand upward from the bottom of the steps, but Katie hesitated.

  “Don’t be scared now, child. Like I told you last night, Luke’s a special boy.”

  Lottie’s voice and manner were soothing, so Katie stood and took her hand. Lottie led her to the side of the bed. Katie noticed it was just like the bed in which she’d lain for two months at the hospital.

  “Mister Luke,” Lottie said, “this is Miss Katie. Ain’t she just a beautiful angel?”

  Katie looked curiously into Luke’s brown eyes. He was small and incredibly thin, his skin as pale as the white sand beaches on the shores of Lake Michigan. The boy’s eyes widened, his body began to jerk, and he let out a strange, guttural wail.

  “See? He’s happy to meet you,” Lottie said.

  “Hi,” Katie said softly as Luke continued to squirm. She was a bit uneasy, because she’d never seen anyone quite like Luke. He obviously couldn’t talk or move around on his own. The noises he made were unsettling, and the jerky motions were almost frightening, but Katie continued to smile.

  “You go back to watching your TV now,” Lottie said to Luke. “I’m gonna get this young lady some breakfast. I’ll bring yours in directly. The two of you can get acquainted later on.”

  Once again, Lottie took Katie by the hand and led her into a small kitchen surrounded by windows that overlooked the back of the property and the mountains beyond.

  “Do you know where you are, honey?” Lottie said.

  “Tennessee,” Katie said quietly.

  “Gatlinburg, Tennessee. One of the most beautiful places on God’s green earth.” Lottie pointed out a side window. “That’s Roaring Fork Road, and just a few miles over that ridge is the town of Gatlinburg.”

  Lottie waved a hand toward the mountains.

  “And all of that, as far as the eye can see, is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We live right on the border. Now you just sit yourself right down here and let me get some food into you. We believe in a good breakfast around here.”

  Katie watched in fascination as Lottie piled two eggs, two sausage patties, fried potatoes, and a slice of tomato on her plate. On another plate was a biscuit. Next to it was a small bowl of
gravy, a saucer with a stick of butter on it, and a jar of blackberry preserves. On yet another plate was a mixture of apple and banana slices and grapes, flanked by a tall glass of orange juice.

  “Dig in, child. Don’t be shy.”

  Katie began to eat, slowly at first, but then with more purpose. She didn’t remember the last time she’d had a decent meal, let alone enjoyed it.

  “Good?” Lottie said as she dropped a fried egg and a couple of sausage patties into a blender.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Katie said, nodding her head. “This is the best sausage I’ve ever had.”

  “Most everything is fresh,” Lottie said. “We buy fresh sausage from Mr. Torbett. He’s our closest neighbor; lives up the road a ways. The eggs come straight from the henhouse out back. Potatoes and tomatoes come from the garden. And your aunt Mary makes the best biscuits this side of the Mississippi.”

  “Where’s Aunt Mary?” Katie said.

  “She’s at work. She’s a nurse down at the hospital, you know. They let her work a special shift so she can spend more time with Luke. She leaves here at three in the morning and gets back home a little after noon.”

  Luke let out a loud wail from the den.

  “I’m coming, baby,” Lottie called as she pushed the button on the blender. “Just one second.”

  “How old is he?” Katie said.

  “Luke? He’s seven.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He has cerebral palsy,” Lottie said. “It’s a sickness that keeps him from being able to do things other folks do. But we don’t look at it as something that’s wrong with him. He’s just another one of God’s beautiful creatures. And don’t you go letting him fool you. He may not be able to walk and talk like other folks, but he’s a smart young gentleman. And sweet? That boy’s sweeter than those grapes you’re eating.”

  “Will he get better?” Katie asked.

  “No, honey. Your aunt and her husband, God rest his soul, took Luke to doctors all over the country. They took him over to Duke University and up to the Mayo Clinic and a couple of places in between. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  As Lottie talked, she poured the sausage and egg paste from the blender onto a plate. She looked up to see Katie staring at her.

  “He likes the taste of meat,” Lottie said, “but he can’t chew it himself and he doesn’t swallow real good. I’m just getting it to where he can handle it. We do the same thing with vegetables and fruit, pretty much anything he eats.”

  “So he’s like a baby?” Katie said.

  “I suppose he is. He’s as helpless as a baby. He wears diapers, and we give him a sponge bath every day. He don’t ever get outta that bed. But we don’t talk to him like a baby. We talk to him like any other seven-year-old boy. And those sounds he makes, he’s trying to talk, but the muscles in his mouth and lips don’t work good enough to form the words. But me and your aunt Mary can understand him. You will, too, soon enough.”

  Katie took one last bite of the fruit and set her fork on the plate.

  “Finished?” Lottie said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “C’mon in here with me. I’ll show you how to feed Luke.”

  Katie spent the rest of her first morning on the farm exploring her new surroundings. To her delight, she found that the barn out back was home to a black-and-white border collie named Maggie, three calico cats named Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and a billy goat named Henry. There were five Black Angus cattle in a fenced-in pasture with a stream running through it and six chickens in the henhouse—five hens and a rooster named Ernie. Every animal on the property was named except for the cattle.

  Aunt Mary arrived home shortly after noon and, after feeding Luke, gave Katie a tour of the outer edges of the property. Every time Katie looked at her, she saw Mother. She was there in Aunt Mary’s mannerisms, in her way of speaking, in the way she moved. The thought crossed Katie’s mind that had Aunt Mary not been such a kind and gentle person, her similarities to Mother would have been painful.

  The property was beautiful—twenty-five acres of rolling pasture and five more of wooded land that bordered the national forest. The stream dissected the property from the northeast to the southwest, and the mountains rose like great sentinels all around.

  “They’re spectacular, aren’t they?” Aunt Mary said when she noticed Katie staring up at the peak of Mount LeConte. They were rattling along through the pasture in an old green pickup truck that Aunt Mary had backed out of the barn.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Katie said.

  “But they can be dangerous, too. You have to respect the mountains, Katie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As they topped a small ridge heading back toward the house, Katie noticed movement to her left. She looked toward a logging road that led back into the heavy woods and the mountains and saw a line of trucks heading down toward Roaring Fork Road. She counted ten of them, large trucks like those that carried soldiers in the movies, with huge tires and covered in canvas. At the front of the line was a Jeep with a star on the door and a bar of lights across the top.

  “What’s that?” Katie asked, pointing in the direction of the convoy.

  Aunt Mary’s face turned cold.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “If you ever see them again, you just act like they’re not even there.”

  10

  The immediate aftermath of Ray Miller’s public suicide was confusion, followed by the horror of realization. Numbed and silent, I moved slowly across the courtroom floor to where his body lay, and I knelt beside him. Ray had dropped straight to the ground between the prosecution and defense tables, partially on his side, his open eyes staring blankly ahead, his face frozen in a look of eternal defiance. The gun lay at his side, and a dark pool of blood spread slowly on the gray carpet beneath his head.

  Judge Green emerged from his hiding place a few moments later. The first bullet had struck his high-backed chair an inch from his right ear; the second had actually caught the sleeve of his robe. But the judge was unscathed, and he soon began muttering to himself as he leaned against the wall and walked stiffly toward his chambers. I noticed that nobody went to Green’s aid, at least not until the emergency medical people showed up. One of the paramedics found him later, sitting on the toilet in his private bathroom, fully clothed, babbling about miracles and the mysteries of life.

  The sheriff’s department quickly learned that Ray had managed to get the gun into the courtroom by avoiding the security station. He simply walked in a back door of the courthouse—a door frequently used by attorneys and county government employees—and came up the stairwell past the property assessor’s office. That door is now locked, so that anyone entering the courthouse has to pass through the metal detectors. Too little. Too late.

  The medical examiner found a note in Ray’s pocket. It was a long and rambling good-bye to Toni and Tommy, but it established a reason, at least in Ray’s mind, for his suicide. He believed the two million dollars in insurance money his wife would collect would take care of his family far better than he could. Toni told Caroline that Ray had owned the policy for ten years, so the two-year suicide clause standard in life insurance contracts had long expired. Toni has become an instant millionaire, but I know she would gladly trade every dime for an opportunity to turn back the clock and save her husband.

  I’m standing now at the back of a hearse in the immaculate burial ground at the Veterans Administration at Mountain Home. It’s two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and dozens of people are milling around beneath an overcast sky. A brown canopy has been erected over Ray’s grave. I’m one of eight pallbearers. Jack has driven up from Nashville and is standing next to me, and across from him stands Tommy Miller. Tommy, tall and lean and dark haired, has adopted the affect of a zombie. I haven’t heard him utter a single word since we arrived. His cheeks are without color, his dark eyes empty and trained on the ground.

  The group of pallbearers stands silently as the fun
eral home director slides Ray’s casket out of the hearse. We carry the flag-draped casket solemnly through the crowd toward the tent. As we place the casket on the stand above Ray’s grave, I hear Toni sobbing behind the black veil she’s wearing. Jack and I step out of the tent and stand next to Caroline and Lilly. Caroline is sniffling into a pink handkerchief.

  “This is terrible,” she whispers. “So senseless.”

  A debate has been raging in the legal community over the past few days. Who’s to blame for Ray Miller’s killing himself has been the central question. Many blame Ray, reasoning that his aggressive style in the courtroom and his bravado with judges made him an inevitable target for someone like Judge Green. Had he kept his head down, played nice, and got along like nearly everyone else, he wouldn’t have found himself in such a desperate situation. It’s as though they believe he got what he deserved.

  Others, of course, blame the judge. There’s little doubt that his vicious campaign against Ray was personally motivated and largely unfounded. Nearly everyone believes that had any other lawyer made the same mistake Ray made, nobody outside of the judge’s office would have heard about it. But Ray had been suspended, jailed, and bankrupted. The local media sharks had gone on a feeding frenzy, and Ray was the bait fish of the month. His reputation had been shattered.

  Then there are those who call Ray a coward. He didn’t have to kill himself, they say. He could have taken his medicine, apologized to the judge, gone through a bar hearing, and he would have been back practicing law within a year. I find myself empathizing with Ray on that point. I’m a proud man, just as he was. If a judge had taken away my ability to earn a living and care for my family and the media had ruined my reputation without giving me a chance to defend myself, I might have considered doing the same thing Ray did. The only difference, I think, is that I wouldn’t have missed when I fired the shots at the judge.

  A minister is talking, saying something nonsensical about a basket representing Ray’s life and that he had filled his basket to overflowing with love for his family and friends, service for his clients, and genuine feeling for his fellow man. He’s speaking in banal generalities. It’s obvious the minister didn’t know Ray.