An Absence of Principal (25 page)

He rarely escaped the feeling that he was being recognized by someone; by someone who read the newspaper six months ago and had seen his photo splashed all over the front page. Or by someone whose husband or wife worked at the school district and had heard the rumors about him. Or worse, a former student who had remembered him, and held him in high regard ever since she had been a student in his hallways a decade or two earlier.

“I need your right hand, Mr. Doggett,” the woman behind the counter said. The familiarity that sounded when she said his name made it obvious to him that the woman had been a student several years ago. He thought he even recognized the way she said, “Mr. Doggett.” It sounded the same way it had every time any of the hundreds of children had used it through the years.

She rolled his fingertips through the printing kit, smudging all ten, one at a time, with the blackness that would forever document Doggett’s plummet in life.

“Miss, can you tell me what it is I am being arrested for?” He knew he had been told when the authorities arrived at his mother’s house in Tulsa, but the shame, and accompanying adrenaline flow that rushed through him when he was bound and taken, had washed away any memory of the moment.

“Possession of an unregistered fire arm, material witness in a murder investigation,” the woman behind the counter said.

Doggett sat expressionless. The words he heard humbled him all the more. Had he become a murderer?

“Someone thinks I killed someone?” Doggett asked. There was no anger or contempt in his voice. Only concern and shock and disbelief. He knew he had fallen far. Until today, he hadn’t really realized with an open and clear mind just how far.

“Yes, Mr. Doggett, a man named Junior Walker, from Odessa. But I really can’t say anything more, sir. When we’re finished here, you’ll be taken to a room where everything will be explained to you,” she said.

Doggett offered a simple thank you, barely audible.

“You can use this to wipe the ink from your fingers,” she said. The woman behind the counter had given him paper towels and hand sanitizer to rub off the fingerprint ink. When she did, she looked at him with what Doggett thought might have been a look bordering on compassion.

“Do I know you?” he asked her.

She took the paper towels from him and helped him wipe away the final trace of the ink on his fingers.

“You wouldn’t remember me,” she said. “It was a long time ago; I was just a kid.”

Alex sat on the ledge over the canyon for hours. She spent the early part of the day shivering with fear and chill, and the afternoon baking and sweating. The approaching evening would bring not just several minutes of bone chilling cold but several hours worth. She remembered what the Texas-Mexico desert was like and had spent weeks in training with DEA in these parts. Nothing ever hardened your exterior to cold. Heat you could get used to. Cold penetrated your core.

She had no idea where she was in relation to the DEA camp in which she had spent those miserable weeks, but chances were she was far, far from a place that, even though she despised it while there, she would give anything to be back now.

The sun dropped below the mountain to her southwest and almost immediately the air temperature plummeted several degrees. It didn’t take long in the desert.

It was a good hour into her first full night on the ledge when Alex heard the unmistakable sound of car tires on gravel. The vehicle to which they belonged stopped in the distance, and she could hear someone get out and walk around. As best as she could calculate, the car had come to rest maybe 100 or 150 feet from where she was on the ledge.

Whoever had exited the vehicle had now returned to it. It sounded as if the car had come to a rest directly above her. She looked up and saw the beam of a headlight. Just one. Maybe not a good thing, she thought.

Alex heard more noises above her, a shuffling sound, then something she couldn’t quite place. At times it sounded like the person above her had crawled on the ground, maybe underneath the car he or she had been driving.

A moment later she was startled when there came a sound just to the right of her right shoulder. There was just enough light to see that whoever was above her had intended to come there for her. The noise was a rope being lowered. On the end of the rope were two large knots, or makeshift handles, and a loop at the end of the rope in which she could secure her footing.

She stood idly for several moments frozen and unknowing what her next step would be. A man above her began cursing in Spanish and the rope began shaking. Now, she was certain she didn’t want to put her foot in the loop. But where else was there to go? What else was there for her to do? And how did the cursing Mexican above her know she was there and who she was?

A shot rang out in the night air, and with it came the realization that if she chose not to plant her foot in the loop of the rope, the next round of gunfire would be headed downward, in her direction.

The jailer led Ben to an interrogation room adjacent to the processing area.

“Step in here, Mr. Doggett,” she said. She let him go ahead of her. He was not handcuffed nor were his ankles bound.

Doggett did as he was told and stepped into the interrogation room.

Sitting across the table from him he saw Tony Nail, a man whose life he knew he had changed. With him was Garrison Trask, a man Doggett recognized from the newspapers. The Midland sheriff was sitting next to the attorney and his client when Doggett walked in.

“Good morning, Ben,” Nail spoke first.

“Tony,” Doggett said, acknowledging Trask and the sheriff’s presence with a nod of the head.

“Mr. Doggett, I’m Garrison Trask, Tony’s attorney. You may or may not know that for the last several days, I have been defending Tony on charges that he murdered Junior Walker on May 28. You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”

He sat silently for several seconds before speaking, looking directly at Trask, with only occasional glances at Tony and the sheriff.

“I called the police,” Doggett admitted. “I told them Tony had been in Odessa that night, and that he’d made frequent trips to Odessa and was known to hang out with the ‘wrong’ crowd.”

Trask was stunned. He had speculated Doggett had known something all along, but that he fingered Nail for a crime that he had no proof he committed was an entirely different story. No way he would have imagined it.

Doggett’s status in the community carried a certain amount of added weight and significance. When he told the cops that he felt his janitor was involved because he knew he hung with the wrong crowd, they listened to what he had to say.

“You’re telling me, then, that you implicated my client for a crime of which you have no idea whether he is guilty?” Trask asked. “Do you know how serious that is, Mr. Doggett?”

“Yes, I do. I didn’t then. I do now,” Doggett said.

“Why, Ben?” Tony asked.

“Selfish interests,” Doggett said. “I’ve been sick. For months. My life, my marriage, they’ve all come undone. I don’t have a job any more. I am an alcoholic, and I have an addiction to gambling. And somewhere in my sickness, I guess there was a part of me that wanted you to have done the murder, or at least take the fall for it. I convinced myself you were guilty.”

“There’s no excuse for falsely implicating my client, Mr. Doggett. I’m sorry for your personal situation, but you have cost my client, me and the United States government a lot of money. Not to even mention what you have done to Tony’s character.”

“I understand that,” Doggett said. “I’m willing to pay restitution. They can add it to the list of everything else I’ve done wrong recently.”

Trask was now even more stunned. Doggett’s latest admission told him Doggett had had no idea if Nail was guilty when he accused him.

“But why, Ben?” Tony asked again.

Doggett would have to spill it all now, something he didn’t particularly relish with a sheriff sitting next to him. But he had never been one to not take responsibility for his actions. He did it. He was guilty. He didn’t need a lawyer to drum up some false story about being innocent of perjuring himself. Or of taking and selling drugs. Or of stealing money and not registering his handgun.

“My life was going along pretty well earlier this year, Tony. You may remember,” Doggett said. “I had it all. Beautiful wife. Loving family. Nice home. Great job. The respect of my peers. I think some people might have even mentioned my name when it came time to finding a successor to Superintendent Martin whenever he decided to step down. That’s all gone now.”

Doggett rubbed his face trying to find the words, and a half-ounce of self-respect, but found nothing. Trask stared intently at Doggett. Nail’s look was more one of disbelief. The sheriff sat calmly by, wondering what Doggett’s next words would be.

“And then,” Doggett continued, “in the flash of a few short days, maybe a couple of weeks, one bad decision after another and everything I had was gone.”

“What happened first to lead to all of this, Mr. Doggett?” Trask asked.

“It was the gambling, no doubt,” Doggett said. “I remember sitting at my computer one day in my office and one of those annoying pop-up ads came up. I had just gotten out of a particularly tough meeting downtown, and I figured, what the hell, I’ll just click and see. I filled in my name, credit card, all that stuff. I don’t know why I did it. I had never before done anything so careless. But I have a history of addiction and addictive personality disorder in my family. Seemingly normal folks all over my family tree who are professionals and functioning, valuable members of their community who, with just a little slip, begin a big fall. I had been to Vegas on occasion and decided I would never go back because I had found myself way too fond of the Black Jack table. I’d had some success during my visits. I clicked on the Black Jack option and began playing. Then I began winning. In one afternoon, I had won five thousand dollars, and I’m telling you, that will make a man think about Lady Luck and his ability to get the best of her. It will make a weaker man think he can go on doing that forever.”

The sheriff continued to study Doggett. He had long been an admirer of the principal and had always respected him from a distance. It was no secret in the community that the sheriff was a poker player and a darn fine one. He’d won a state Hold ’Em Championship several years running when he was younger, and he knew how easy it was to get the fever.

“That first day I won about $5,000, and it went right into my bank account just like the web site said it would. Man, I was feeling good. Good about me, and my marriage. Good about everything. I went into work the next day, and I felt so good I gave my secretary a little hug, and it … it lasted a little longer than it should have, and bam, in my weakening emotional frame of mind, it was an instant physical attraction. I can’t explain it and don’t care to remember much about that and how it went wrong so fast. When a man hurts his family because of an irrational and sudden attraction to another woman, it hurts to talk about for a lot of reasons. When a man does that, when he cheats on his wife with another woman, he cheats on more than just his wife.”

“What’s all this have to do with blaming me for Junior Walker’s death, Mr. Doggett?” Nail asked.

“I’m getting there, Tony.”

Doggett paused again, reflecting on the hurt and shame he had brought to his family just through the illicit affair with Shanna.

“One thing led to another with Shanna, and … I became suddenly so sickened with what I had become that it drove me back to the online casino, and that’s when everything really started going bad for me. Here I had gone from being recognized and honored by my peers, then winning $5,000, and the next day having an illicit affair with my secretary, and tanking at the online casinos. Went from $5,000 to $10,000 down in three days. Before long I found myself in such financial trouble that all I was doing was playing to try to recoup some of what I’d lost. The more I played, the more I lost.”

The losing plummeted Doggett into a dangerous mix of remorse, depression and self-pity. He had gone from being on top of the world to being in survival mode in the span of two weeks. Doggett told Trask, Nail and the sheriff how, as he wallowed in self-pity, his sole focus in life was to find a way to return the money he lost, gambling away his family’s finances.