Joe Dillard - 01 - An Innocent Client (30 page)

I started crawling backwards on my elbows, dragging my bleeding and useless left leg. I stared at Junior, waiting for the shot and the darkness. His eyes were wild and he was still talking, but the words had become nothing more than incoherent babble. He pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

His hand was trembling. I froze.

The next few seconds seemed to run in slow motion. Junior jerked forward as though something had struck him from behind. A puzzled look came over his face, and the gun roared. The bullet screamed past my left ear so close I could feel the shock wave from the velocity. The gun clattered to the bricks by my feet. Suddenly a huge, liver-spotted hand came over the top of Junior’s head and covered his face.

The fingers locked onto his chin and pulled straight up.

Junior went over onto his back. A man mounted him and started spraying something into his eyes.

Gray-haired man in a uniform …

It was Sarge Hurley, the ancient courthouse security officer. I saw Sarge raise a massive fist and bring it downward towards Tester’s face and heard a loud thud as fist met jaw. More uniforms, some khaki, some blue. They descended on Junior like locusts.

And then, as quickly as it began, it was over. Sarge straightened and turned towards me. He stepped over and knelt beside me.

”You all right, Dillard?”

I looked into his eyes and for the first time, I noticed they were green, just like mine. I laid my head back on the bricks and smiled. Good old Sarge, my very own geriatric guardian angel. He wasn’t even sweating.

”What took you so long?” I said. ”You let him shoot me.”

Sarge grunted. He leaned over and picked up Junior’s revolver and looked it over closely.

”I save your miserable life and all you can say is

‘What took you so long?’ I swear if he had another bullet, I might just finish the job.”

August 2

11:00 a.m.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrested Erlene Barlowe at seven a.m. on Wednesday morning, the day before Deacon Baker went up against a former prosecutor named Lee Mooney in the election.

The lab results had apparently confirmed that the blood in her Corvette was Reverend Tester’s. She called as soon as they finished booking her. She wanted me to come down to the jail.

The bullet that hit me had gone into my left quadriceps, grazed my femur, and exited through my groin muscle. The wound was what they called a through-and-through. The bullet missed my femoral artery by only a few centimeters. Had it severed the artery, I’d have bled to death on the sidewalk. Instead, they cleaned out the wound at the hospital, wrapped it, and let me go home the next day. It throbbed continuously, but considering the alternative, I wasn’t complaining. I took plenty of aspirin and used crutches to walk, and Caroline helped me keep the wound clean.

Junior Tester was arrested and charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder. He’d already been shipped down to Lakeshore Mental Health Institute in Knoxville. I had mixed feelings about Junior. While it was true that he’d tried twice to kill me and had very nearly succeeded both times, I couldn’t help thinking that he’d been a victim himself, a victim of a volatile mixture of fundamentalist extremism and parental hypocrisy. When he learned the circumstances of his father’s murder, something deep inside him had obviously snapped. And then having to sit through the trial and listen to it all again . . . I doubted very seriously that he would be held criminally liable for his actions. Like Angel, he’d been so traumatized that he probably no longer recognized the fine line between right and wrong.

I hobbled through the maze on my crutches to the attorneys’ room at the jail. Erlene Barlowe was already seated at the table. She was getting the Maynard Bush treatment—handcuffs, shackles, a chain around her waist. She made the orange jumpsuit look pretty good despite the color clash with her hair.

When I walked in, she was sitting in the same chair Angel sat in during our many talks. To my surprise, she was her usual upbeat self. It didn’t look like I’d need any tissue.

”Mr. Dillard,” she said as I sat down, ”I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you, sugar. How are you feeling?”

”Like I’ve been shot.”

”I’m so sorry, baby doll. It must have been just awful. That man was even crazier than his daddy.”

”I’m sorry to see you here, Erlene.”

”You’ve got to get me out of this, sugar. I didn’t kill that man.”

How many times had I heard that? This time, though, it was different.

”I know you didn’t.”

”Well, I swan. Did my sweet little Angel tell you?”

”I’m sorry. I can’t discuss that with you.”

She clutched her hands to her heart. ”Well, bust my shiny little buttons, honey. Angel told you and you got her out of it anyway. That’s why I hired you, you know. I knew you were the best.”

The
best.
Helping a guilty woman walk away from a murder made me the best at my profession. I wondered what I’d have to do to be the worst.

”Tell me something,” I said. ”Angel had an opportunity to make an excellent deal a couple of weeks before the trial. She rejected it. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you?”

Her smile turned from genuine to coy.

”They gave her another chance after the trial started. The district attorney was willing to dismiss the murder charge against her. All she would have had to do was tell them you committed the murder.

But she wouldn’t.”

”That’s my sweet little girl.”

”Convenient for us that Julie Hayes died when she did, huh?”

”It was a terrible tragedy. I can’t tell you how many times I begged that child to stay away from drugs. Turned out to be her undoing.”

”You wouldn’t have had anything to do with her death?”

”Why, sugar, I can’t believe you’d even ask me such a thing. But I will tell you this one teeny little secret. I
may
have
suggested to someone that Julie was a problem, and that someone
may
have
misinterpreted what I meant. I certainly didn’t mean for anyone to get killed.”

I decided to leave it at that. I didn’t want to take a chance on ending up as a witness against Erlene.

”How do you think the cops found out about your car?”

”You know, I gave that a lot of thought myself,”

she said. ”And I came to the conclusion that one of my girls must have called that nasty TBI agent. As a matter of fact, I’m certain of it. I believe I told her exactly what to say.”

”You
what
?”

She put her hands on the table, laced her fingers, and leaned towards me.

”I probably should explain something to you, baby doll. When you run a business like mine, you meet all different kinds of people. I try to be good to every one of them, so when I need something, I usually get it. Well, this time, what I needed was some real good legal advice, but it wasn’t the kind of legal advice I could get from you. So I talked to this wonderful man. He’s a lawyer, but not exactly the kind of lawyer you are. He used to help my husband out with his finances. He helped me understand some things about the law. Let’s see, what all were they? Things like double jeopardy, I believe is what he called it, and what was that other thing? Oh, yes, the Fourth Amendment.”

”Who was it?”

”I couldn’t betray his confidence, sugar pie. Let’s just say he’s a sweet, sweet man who likes to indulge in a little harmless sin on occasion. He and my Gus were real close.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I suspected Erlene had somehow been involved in Julie’s death, but I didn’t have any proof of it and doubted anybody on the planet would ever come up with any.

But this was something else, something fascinating.

”Why would you want Landers to find the car?”

I said.

”I couldn’t let Angel spend the rest of her life in prison or get the death penalty, sugar. The whole thing with that preacher man was my fault. When he came out to the club acting a fool and pawing Angel the way he did, it just flew all over me. Do you know what he said when I asked him nicely to leave? He said, ‘I want to rent your whore for the night. Who do I talk to about that?’ Why, that made me mad as fire, and I just figured right then and there that I’d teach him a little lesson. All Angel was supposed to do was go into the room and give him a drink. I was going to take care of the rest all by myself.”

”Didn’t quite work out the way you planned, did it?”

”It was
awful
. I should’ve known better than to send that sweet girl up to that motel room alone. I’ve been around the block a few times, sweetie pie, and I knew the preacher was rotten to the core, but I swan, I was so mad I just wasn’t thinking straight. I never dreamed he’d do what he did. And I never dreamed Angel would react the way she did. When she came down those steps I thought I was going to have a stroke. I went back into the room and there was all that blood. I nearly passed out. But I told myself to calm down, and I set about trying to make things right for Angel. I picked up the bottle of scotch and her purse and the knife and his wallet and then I went—”

”Hold on a minute, Erlene. Why’d you cut his, his . . . what did you call it? His twigger or something like that?”

”His terwilliger?”

”Yeah, that. Why’d you cut it off? Angel told me she didn’t do it. It must have been you.”

”I saw this TV show where a man got convicted of rape because he had the girl’s DNA on his terwilliger. I got to thinking that Angel’s DNA might be on his terwilliger, and—well, you know, if the police
did
come around and start asking questions—I didn’t want her to have to explain something like that. Besides, sugar, he didn’t need it anymore.”

I knew when I met Erlene that there was more to her than big boobs and batting eyes, but I never expected anything like this.

”What else did you do?” I said.

”Well, let’s see. Not a whole lot. I just got sweet little Virgil to do me a favor.”

”You mean he didn’t see you on the bridge?”

”Nobody saw me on the bridge, honey. I can promise you that. And I thought there was no way anyone would find the terwilliger. That was just a stroke of bad luck.”

It was almost brilliant. She’d managed to dupe the police into thinking she’d committed the murder to get Angel off, but she’d done such a masterful job of it, she might well be convicted.

”You’ve got some serious problems, Erlene. For starters, what’s Virgil going to do when the state subpoenas him to testify against you? If he gets up on the stand and lies, they’ll charge him with perjury.”

”Don’t you worry your handsome face about that, honey. I won’t be going to trial.”

”You—why not?”

”It’s that other legal thing I was telling you about.

That Fourth Amendment. You see, this lawyer, the one that likes to sin every now and then, he came out to the club one night and I asked him how I could lead a police officer to a piece of evidence and then make sure he couldn’t use the evidence later.

So he told me all about searches, and he made a
wonderful
suggestion. He said if I’d wait until the very, very last minute and then have someone make an anonymous call to that nasty old TBI agent and tell him where my car was, he’d bet anything the policeman would go tearing up there without a search warrant or anything. And you know what?

He was right as rain. That TBI man climbed over a locked gate and ignored a locked door on my barn and crawled right in through a window. The car was under a tarp in the barn, sweetie. It’s private property.”

She’d graduated from almost brilliant to brilliant.

Still, she didn’t know who she was dealing with.

”Landers will lie,” I said. ”He’ll say the gate wasn’t locked, the barn door was open, he was acting on a reliable tip, and the car was in plain view.”

She smiled and hunched her shoulders. ”Oh, sweetie, this is the best part. I’ve got everything he did on video. The lawyer told me to send somebody up there in the woods with a camera. Ronnie filmed the whole thing. I’ll bet I’ve watched it ten times.”

I stared at her for a second, not quite believing what I’d just heard. I felt a chuckle making its way up through my chest. I tried to suppress it, but the more I tried, the harder it pushed. The first one made its way out of my mouth, and then another. Within a few seconds, I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. I looked over at Erlene. She’d lost it, too. It was one of the most visceral moments of my life: Erlene and I were looking at each other, laughing uncontrollably. It was almost as good as sex.

After a couple of minutes, I managed to get at least a little control of myself.

”You know what this means?” I said through a chuckle. ”It means they won’t be able to use the car
or
anything
they
found
in
it
!”

Erlene looked like a bobblehead. ”That was just what I was trying to do, sweetie. Isn’t it
wonderful
?”

We started cracking up again.

”They’ll have less on you . . . than they had on Angel.”

”I know.”

Finally we calmed down and Erlene turned serious.

”You’ll represent me, won’t you, sweetie? You’ll handle it for me?”

I wiped a tear from my eye with the back of my hand. ”I can’t, Erlene. It’s a conflict of interest.”

”I don’t see why. They found Angel not guilty.

Her case is over, isn’t it? They can’t try her again no matter what. All you have to do is show them the videotape, and that should be the end of it. Don’t you think?”

”I don’t know. It won’t be that simple. Nothing’s ever that simple.”

”C’mon, sweetie. This’ll be a piece of cake for you.

You’re the best there is. Oh, and speaking of that, I meant to tell you the way you set them up with your sister was
brilliant
. When Angel told me about it, I thought I was going to wet my pants.”

”I didn’t exactly plan that. I’m not as smart as you are.”

”Don’t kid yourself, sugar. Now, what do you say?