by Martin Clark
“Yes, I made contact with the defendant on that day. Yes.”
“Were you on duty and in uniform?”
“I was.”
“And what were your duties on that day?”
“What are you getting at?” Dillon’s voice squeaked out of his nostrils. Evers noticed that his mouth didn’t move much when he spoke.
“Well, what were your job responsibilities that day?”
“I guess I know what you’re gettin’ around to. I’d been placed on paid leave for about a month back in February because of some complaints about my work. I was cleared by the state police regarding some evidence that turned up missing, and to be truthful about it, I lost a file and a piece of evidence involving two cousins in a knife fight. It was my error, and I owned up to it. When this happened with your client, with Mr. English, I was fully reinstated, working as a road deputy.”
Turner shook his head. “I didn’t mean to get into all of that, but thanks for the candor and background. I just wanted to note that you were working as a police officer for the county of Forsyth on the day that you encountered my client.”
“Yes. I was. I was working as a road deputy here in Forsyth County.”
“Why did you stop my client’s vehicle?”
“The defendant was driving a 2000 Ford Taurus, blue in color, which failed to stop at a traffic signal. The car was a four-door sedan.” “Sedan,” when Dillon said it, came out as “see dan.”
“I see. What sort of signal?”
“A stop sign.”
“And my client didn’t fully stop, is that what you’re saying?” Turner asked.
“Correct.”
“Where is this sign located?”
“At the intersection of East Third Street and Cleveland.”
“I see. How did you bring Mr. English to a stop?”
“I turned on my blue lights, and he pulled into a parking lot at a convenience store.” Dillon turned through some pages in his file. “Uni-Mart parking lot. The subject was initially detained at sixteen-thirty hours.”
“Was there anything else irregular or uncommon about his driving?”
“No. He just ran right through the sign.”
Turner stepped to the side of his chair. Artis looked up at his lawyer, then buried himself so far back into his seat that his head was almost even with the top of the table. “Officer Dillon, after you stopped Mr. English, did you ask to see his driver’s license and registration?”
“I did.”
The courtroom seemed quiet to Evers. It was full of people, but it seemed still. No one was moving or talking or folding newspapers or popping gum. The metal detector was mute, the attorneys waiting for their cases looked lethargic, doodling and napping and staring at the floor.
“Were they in order?”
Dillon looked at his file. “He had a valid driver’s license. The car was registered to a dealership here in town. I was concerned that, you know, it might’ve been stolen. It had dealer tags. I checked while we were on the scene, and dispatch called and everything was okay.”
Evers heard a door open, and the metal detector sound, and when he looked out over Dillon’s head, Ruth Esther had started into the courtroom. She walked about halfway into the gallery and sat down on the end of a bench, beside an obese woman wearing a black Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. The two women smiled at each other. Evers looked around the room, and stopped when his gaze returned to Dillon.
“How was it that you came to find the cocaine?” Turner asked.
“It was in the trunk.”
“I’m not sure that you understand my question.” Turner smiled and looked at the paper on the table in front of him. “Let me put it like this. Obviously, you didn’t have a warrant, correct?”
“I didn’t have a warrant.”
“Right.” Turner smiled again. Evers looked at Ruth Esther. She was wearing a silk shirt under an off-white suit. As far as Evers could tell, it was the same outfit she’d been wearing at the restaurant and at the car dealership. She opened her purse and offered the fat lady in the T-shirt a Life Saver; the lady shook her head no.
“And you didn’t have my client’s permission to go into his trunk?” Turner had taken a step back so that he was standing behind Artis.
“Right. I guess you could say that. I asked him, and he didn’t make me a reply.” Dillon turned and faced the district attorney after he answered.
“So he didn’t consent.”
“Well, you know, he didn’t refuse, either.” Dillon’s eyes and face continued to twitch away. Evers recalled placing round magnets on the utility-room floor when he was a child, lining them up so the poles pushed apart, and chasing one with the other across the linoleum.
“Officer Dillon, you and I both know this wasn’t a consent search. You would agree that he would have to give you clear and unequivocal permission to—”
Otis stood up and spoke at the same time. “Judge Wheeling, I hate to object, but I’m not sure that the officer can be called upon to decide a purely legal question. He can address factual matters, but he’s not in a position to decide the law.”
Turner started to say something, and Evers interrupted him. “There’s no need to quibble. We all know that the defendant’s consent has to be clear, and that silence is not consent. Let’s go on. Is this supposed to be a consent search? Is that where this is going?”
“No, sir,” said Otis.
“No, not at all,” said Dillon.
“Then why are we arguing about it?”
Otis shrugged. “Because we’re lawyers, I guess.”
A few spectators laughed, and Evers smiled for a moment. “Next question, Mr. Turner.”
“So it’s not a consent search, and there’s no warrant. How did you discover the drugs?”
“Well, I found them in the trunk.” Dillon’s mouth barely moved and very little sound came out of the slit in his lips. His eyes kept up the kinetic chase with the rest of his head.
“Officer, why did you think you had a right to open the trunk? Why did you look in there? That’s my question.”
Otis objected to the question, and Evers overruled him. “You’ll need to answer the question, Officer Dillon.”
“Well, you see …” Dillon looked at his notes. His voice was in the insect range, beyond human octaves, coming straight out of the middle of his face. “You see, a number of things went into the decision to search. First, it was a high-crime area. Very bad for drugs. And second, the defendant was extremely nervous. Very nervous. In fact, he never looked me in the eye but one time. And that’s the third thing. His eyes was red. Very red. And there was the car, this new car, and the fact that he wasn’t willing to let me search when I first asked made me think he was suspicious. Based on my experience as a police officer and the totality of the circumstances, I felt I had probable cause to search the car.”
“That’s it? Those are all of the factors? I want to make sure you’re telling me everything.”
Dillon stared fixedly at his notes before answering. “Well, yeah. I mean, you know … I was right. He had the dope in the car.”
“Oh, by the way. If you didn’t have my client’s consent, how did you physically get into the trunk? How did you get it open?”
“I … well, since I had what I thought was a legal right to search, I stuck my hand inside the car and just, uh, removed the keys out of the switch.”
“So Mr. English didn’t hand you the keys or open the trunk himself.”
“That’s right.”
Turner sat down in his seat beside Artis. “Okay. Let’s take the car first. You checked that out and there was nothing wrong, correct? Isn’t that what you said?”
“That’s right.”
“So that could not serve as the basis of any wrongdoing or some suspicion of a crime, could it?”
Dillon rubbed his chin. Evers noticed that his fingers all looked very similar, all about the same length and thickness. “I guess that’s true enough.”
&nbs
p; “And you thought that his presence in a certain part of town, in a certain location, just driving through, gave you a reason to search his car for drugs?”
“It’s a high drug-traffic area,” Dillon answered. He turned to look at Paul Otis again.
“But you never saw this defendant stop, slow down, signal another party or have any contact with any other person or vehicle? In fact—quite the opposite—he ran a stop sign, correct?”
“I guess.”
“Well, don’t guess. I’m correct, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“So if, for example, Judge Wheeling were driving through this area in a new 2000 Taurus, you’d assume he was carrying drugs?”
“No. I wouldn’t think that. No sir.”
“So what’s the difference?”
Dillon moved some papers around in his file. Artis looked up and saw his sister in the crowd. Ruth Esther waved at him, held her hand in front of her chest and moved it back and forth.
“Officer Dillon?”
“Well, just his look. He—”
Turner put his elbows on the table. He interrupted the gibbon’s answer. “So you’re telling us you search people based on their physical appearance?”
“No.”
“Really? Isn’t the bottom line that you thought you had probable cause to search the defendant because he was in a bad neighborhood, in a new car he lawfully and legally possessed, but he looked a little less normal than, say, Greg Brady?”
Otis half stood. “I object to that question. It’s rhetorical.”
“I don’t know a Mr. Brady, anyway,” Dillon said.
“Which part is objectionable?” Evers asked.
“The Greg Brady reference.”
“I sustain the objection, although I understand where your questions are going.” Evers looked down at Dillon. “Greg Brady is a very homogenous, wholesome character on a TV show called The Brady Bunch. There was also a movie recently, I believe.”
“Oh yeah. Thank you, sir.”
Evers began to think that Dillon was a prop, an early Nipponese failure, constructed by the same people who’d built Mothra and his brother’s dope-favorite Godzilla; his lips missed his voice, and his eyes and face were always a beat separate from each other.
“While we are on the subject,” Turner said, “what do you mean by a ‘high-crime area,’ Officer?”
“I mean there’s a lot of crime going on.” Dillon attempted a mechanical smirk. “As compared to other places.”
“I see. And you have these comparisons, correct? You can tell me, statistically, that more people have been arrested and convicted in this area, than, for example, in the Skyland Park area or around Reynolda Road?”
“No real, uh, statistics. Just what I know from experience and information.”
Evers looked at Otis, and Otis sheepishly looked back. The district attorney rubbed his brow and stared down at the table in front of him. Evers tapped Artis’ file with the eraser end of a yellow pencil.
“Tell me, then, the number of arrests you have made in this area in the last year as compared to other areas.”
“I’d say more here, around King and Cleveland, than in other parts of the city. Sure. More.”
“Who was the last person you arrested there?”
“That would be a … a Lowery guy, for stealing.” Dillon sniffed.
“You wouldn’t be suggesting that this area is a ‘high-crime area’ because a large portion of the population is black, would you?” Turner raised his voice when he asked the question.
“No sir. Not at all. Just a lot goes on there. A lot goes on in other places, too. Places with mostly whites, like Mountainview Trailer Court out off Interstate Forty—there’s always trouble with that bunch. And there’s a lot more places with real bad trouble.”
The public defender nodded his head up and down. “So really, this area, in terms of its incidence of crime, is no different than a lot of other places.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The long-fingered gibbon’s voice almost gave out midway through the sentence. He looked at the floor and slouched.
“Thank you, Officer. Those are all my questions.”
Otis made a halfhearted attempt to save Dillon. “You’ve been a police officer for over twenty years, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Almost all in the Winston-Salem, Forsyth County area?”
“Yes.” The gibbon raised up in his seat.
“And based on that experience, and the location of this car in a high-crime area, you felt that you had probable cause to search the defendant’s trunk?”
“Exactly. And I was right. He was carryin’ almost three grams of cocaine.”
Turner stood quickly and very straight, his hands by his side. “Judge, I object to the last part of the answer. It is fairly fundamental that the officer needs probable cause before he searches, not after the fact. The search and seizure is not validated because the officer violates the Constitution but happens to be correct in his guess. Bad conduct isn’t salvaged because of good results.” He sat down.
“I’ll sustain your objection, Mr. Turner.”
Otis asked Dillon about Artis’ eyes.
“They were red. Very red.”
“Thank you, Officer.”
Dillon stood up to leave, and Turner stopped him. “I’m sorry, Officer. I apologize. Just to follow up on that, you didn’t smell or see anything that would lead you to believe that drugs were in the car, did you?”
Dillon was standing in front of the witness stand. “That’s right.”
Otis pulled his chair closer to the table in front of him and took another file from the stack on the table.
“May I be excused, Judge?” Dillon asked Evers.
“Yes. Thank you for your time, sir.”
While Dillon was still walking through the gallery, Turner stood and asked Evers to suppress the cocaine, and he pointed out that the police officer did not have legal justification to look into Artis English’s trunk. “In fact, this is not even a close call. Basically, he searched the defendant’s vehicle because of the way god created Mr. English and where Mr. English chose to be. That’s about it.”
Evers glanced at Ruth Esther, saw her surrounded by punks and petty thieves, her expression composed, her hands folded in her lap. She was staring toward the front of the courtroom, but her eyes weren’t letting anything in; she was focused somewhere else, rarely blinking, looking past Evers and over his head.
Otis stood up, and he left a little bend in his back, leaned onto the table in front of him with both hands. “Judge, the state will concede that this is not the strongest case we have ever had in this court involving a warrantless search. Still, we would argue that the officer had probable cause given all of the circumstances and the officer’s training and experience.” He sat down and returned to reading the file for his next case.
“This is not a difficult decision,” Evers said. “There is no probable cause to search. The cocaine is suppressed.” Evers saw Ruth Esther get up and leave, watched her back and blond hair walk out of the courtroom. He was relieved that the case was so clear.
“Judge, on behalf of the defendant, I would ask that the charges lodged against him be dismissed.”
“There’s not much we can do without the evidence,” Otis replied.
“The charges against Mr. English are dismissed.” Evers motioned to the lawyers on either side of him. “Would you gentlemen please approach the bench?”
Otis and Turner walked up. “That was terrible, Mr. Otis,” Evers said. “What’s Mr. Dillon’s problem? It’s like he’s trying to screw up.”
Otis’ neck and cheeks turned red. “I’m sorry. I didn’t talk to him that much. I’ll mention it to the sheriff.”
Turner cleared his throat. “I really do think he doesn’t know any better. He’s not a bad guy. In fact, it would’ve been easy for him to concoct something that would win the case for him.”
“If he knew what to say
,” Evers remarked.
“I guess you’d expect that after twenty years, he could do a little better job.” Turner sounded as if he felt sorry for the gibbon.
“He’s definitely not our best officer,” Paul Otis remarked.
Two days after he let Artis English go, Evers stopped at Honey’s Qwik Stop just outside of Norton to buy beer and snacks to take to his brother’s trailer. Evers was world-weary, tired of so many things. And, he hated Norton. He wondered whether or not he would have cheated on her someday if his wife hadn’t been unfaithful. He bought a case of Michelob and opened one for the ride, almost an hour and a half of traveling in the dark. The beer was warm.
While he was driving, Evers decided that every great rock-and-roll song—or at least every song he really enjoyed—had either an organ or a saxophone in it: “Wooly Bully,” “Light My Fire,” “Louie, Louie,” “Born to Run.” Pascal would be interested in this observation; it was the kind of thing he liked talking about.
It was black and quiet when Evers got out at Pascal’s. Evers opened the door to the trailer, shouted his brother’s name and got no answer. The spring on the screen door was stretched and loose, so the door did not return to the frame, but just hung open and still. The light in the kitchen was on. Evers went into the den and switched on the television. He had left his bags and the beer in the car; there was too much to carry in one trip, and he could sleep in his underwear and use his brother’s toothbrush. Love Connection came on the screen, but the volume was turned down. Pascal had left a bag of marijuana and a pipe on a plastic tray in the floor, this despite Evers’ warnings to be more careful.
Pascal, Rudy and Henry were sitting in Pascal’s bedroom, passing a water bong back and forth and watching Fantasia. “Didn’t hear you, brother,” Pascal said when Evers walked into the room. “We’re celebrating our American president and Henry’s good luck.”
“You mean Bill Clinton?” Evers asked. “You guys just discover that Reagan’s out?”
“Bill Clinton smoked dope. Can’t be all that bad,” Henry said.
