No Defense (23 page)

“LuAnn,” he called after me. “Would you give
me a-”

I ran into the kitchen, where I couldn’t
hear what else he had to say.

That night I dreamed I was lying in the back
seat of my father’s 1969 gold Chevy Impala. The car swerved back
and forth over the double yellow line on the steep, narrow,
two-lane road to my parents’ house at Clark Lake. My father turned
his head 180 degrees around to smile or look at me as he talked.
When I tried to move, I couldn’t; when I tried to speak, he
couldn’t hear me. Still I screamed, “Stop, stop, please Daddy,
stop!”

In my dream, I could hear a car coming from
the other direction, its horn honking at us. My father got back in
his lane momentarily, just long enough to avoid crashing into the
other car. As the car passed, I could see that the driver was
Eddie.

“That boy tried to run us over,” my father
said. He talked, smiled, and drove faster and faster.

“Remember how when you were little, LuAnn, I
used to drive with no hands?” he said. “You’re not too old to get a
kick out of that, are you, sweetie? Watch. Watch Daddy. But don’t
tell your mother.” He took his hands off the steering wheel and
held them up, turned around, and smiled again. The car went
completely out of control.

I awoke right before we crashed. The clock
showed it was six o’clock, too close to my seven o’clock wake-up
time to get back to sleep. I sat up in bed and pulled my legs
toward me, covering them with the front of my over-sized T-shirt.
Tight as a cocoon, the white cotton shirt held my knees close to
the skin of my stomach and chest as I rocked slowly back and
forth.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Chip Tuckahoe, a former charter member of the
Coffee Club and a family friend, held the job of county attorney
for twenty-five years before stepping down to spend more time at
home in nearby Cullman with his ailing wife Betty. Ironically, it
was Chip’s decision to leave the prosecutor’s position that gave
Junior Fuller the opportunity to take the job when he moved back to
Tallagumsa. On August 22, 1978, a grand jury, at Junior’s urging,
indicted my father for murder. On August 25, Daddy hired Chip to
represent him.

Buck had wanted my father to choose one of
the more flamboyant, well-known Birmingham lawyers, but when Daddy
interviewed one of them and gave him the same run around he’d given
me and everyone else, the lawyer refused to represent him.

Chip Tuckahoe, on the other hand, like me,
accepted my father’s position. Chip wanted the case. I was Newell
Hagerdarn’s daughter. What choice did we have but to trust him?

A week after the indictment was handed down,
Chip, a short, pugnacious man with thick, wavy brown hair, arrived
at Daddy’s office for their second meeting, the purpose of which
was to assess the legal avenues available for avoiding or
substantially delaying the trial.

Unable to function very effectively for the
past week, I had decided to skip work and join them. For the
meeting I wore cut-off jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. They
didn’t care what I wore, and the idea of dressing up, or doing
anything requiring thought or effort, depressed me.

My father, on the other hand, looked fit and
relaxed as he took his seat behind his large mahogany desk. Chip
and I pulled up two red leather chairs across from the desk and sat
down facing my father. Two walls of the spacious comer office were
taken up by windows; the other two were covered with photographs of
my father with various state and federal politicians, shaking
hands, eating, fishing, hunting, and partying, and a large
collection of family photos. Through the windows I could see the
Newell Hagerdom County Courthouse where the grand jury had charged
Daddy with two counts of murder. There, tomorrow’s arraignment and
any future trial would be held.

“Our best bet,” Chip explained once the
meeting began, “and I really believe we have a good chance at this,
is to get the charges dismissed based on the fact that it’s been so
long since the crime occurred. It’s practically unheard of to try
someone fifteen years after a crime was committed.”

“I thought Junior said there was no statute
of limitations on murder. I remember he said so at his press
conference after he got the indictments,” I said.

“That’s absolutely true,” Chip said. “Our
arguments here are based on your rights to a speedy trial, a fair
trial, and to due process, Newell. The State totally fucked up the
case-excuse my French, LuAnn-but they didn’t even try to pursue the
matter when they should have. And the feds covered up all the
evidence they had, purposefully concealing it from the State and
everyone else. You didn’t do anything to obstruct the case. Jesus
Christ, you gave evidence to the FBI agents who were in town. And
where’s the physical evidence now, the guns, the shells? Are the
witnesses alive? I can’t believe everything and everyone is intact
after fifteen years. And I doubt they can prove that whatever
evidence they do have was handled properly from the time of the
crime until the date of the trial. I’ve had plenty of cases
dismissed in instances where the trial came just a few months after
the crime and the police couldn’t establish chain of custody.
Fifteen years is unheard of.

“Usually the court won’t stop a case to hear
these arguments,” Chip continued, “but this is so unusual, and the
legal arguments so complex, that I think we could postpone the
whole trial for arguments and briefs and appeals, maybe take a
whole year just for that.”

“What about the claim made in several
editorials that the trial has to go forward to prove the system
works, to provide justice where justice was denied?” my father
asked. “That would suggest there wouldn’t be the kind of delay
you’re talking about.” He picked a cigar from the gilded box on his
desk, removed the cellophane wrapper, and reached for his
lighter.

“There is no way in hell a court will have
this trial and cause a lot of hysteria and pain if there’s even one
chance in a thousand that a court will later rule there didn’t need
to be a trial. Besides, it’s not 1963. The law now is pretty
favorable toward minorities; the community is too. That era is
behind us, a question for the history books, not the courts.”

“I suppose you’d remind the court that this
case is eating up the soul of our town,” my father said, puffing on
his cigar until it lit. “It’s not healing old wounds but ripping
them open again.” He offered a cigar to Chip.

“Thanks,” Chip said, taking a cigar out of
the box and lighting it. “I like that, Newell,” he said, scribbling
on his yellow pad with one of the fifteen or twenty perfectly
sharpened number two pencils he kept in his briefcase. “The soul of
our town,” Chip repeated approvingly.

“I’ve been a politician so long I can come
up with something that pulls on the heartstrings on just about any
subject,” my father said dryly. “Now, what else is there?”

“We can try to fashion something like what
worked two years ago after the State got indictments for the murder
of Willie Edwards. That murder was in 1957, after the Montgomery
bus boycott. The defendants were charged with holding a gun on
Willie Edwards until he jumped off the Tyler Goodwyn Bridge. There
was overwhelming evidence that the defendants had killed him
because they mistook him for a black fellow who they’d heard was
dating a white woman.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “One of Ben
Gainey’s FBI documents said maybe the daughter of whoever killed
Turnbow and Johnson was dating one of them. Have you looked into
that?”

“I will,” Chip said, writing again.

“That’s a big fat waste of time,” my father
said. “Don’t bother.”

There was a knock at the office door. “Yes?”
my father called.

Sheriff Bev Carter, dressed in his official
blue uniform and hat, took a step inside. “Afternoon, y’all,” he
said. “Chip asked me to come by and talk some about my grand jury
appearance.”

“Can’t we do that after the arraignment?” my
father asked. “We’ve got a lot to cover today, and I’ve got town
business to attend to as well.”

“Fine with me,” Chip said.

“Just let me know when you need me,” Bev
said. He closed the door behind him.

Daddy pushed a button on his intercom.
“Franny,” he said, “get me a cup of coffee. Any for you, Chip?
LuAnn, honey?”

We both shook our heads.

“Just one,” he said into the intercom.

“So what happened in the case you were
telling us about?” my father asked. “The one at the Tyler Goodwyn
Bridge.” He leaned way back in his chair and listened.

“Old Judge Embry down there is an ornery
geezer who never even got to the questions of delay we’ve been
discussing. He just quashed the indictments twice, ruling that the
state hadn’t specified a cause of death. Believe it or not, he held
that merely forcing a person to jump from a bridge does not
naturally and probably lead to the death of such person. So no
crime.”

My father leaned forward. He looked
surprised.

“That’s pretty revolting,” I said, “but I
guess we have to use whatever we can to get Daddy out of this.
Could you fashion some kind of argument like that, Chip?”

“I’m working on it,” Chip said. “We can move
for a change of venue too-that’s the place the trial occurs-arguing
you couldn’t get a fair trial here.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked. “Daddy’s
more popular here than anywhere else in the state. Why move
it?”

“Good point,” Chip said. “Maybe you should
consider law school, LuAnn. Frankly, the only reason to try to move
the trial would be to add to the delay.”

There was a quick knock. The door opened
before anyone could answer. Franny came in, nodded at us, and put
down the coffee on Daddy’s desk pad. She stirred it once, took the
spoon, and left.

“Go ahead, Chip,” Daddy said.

“We can also delay the trial some by moving
to suppress any physical evidence they have. We don’t know what
that is yet, but even if they have the gun or the shells, we’d make
the same chain-of-custody arguments we would use to argue you can’t
get a fair trial,” he said.

Chip pulled a book of Alabama statutes from
his briefcase and opened it to a page marked with a slip of paper.
“We could even challenge the grand jury. Maybe one of them was
unqualified to serve under the Alabama code or maybe one of them is
related to you within the fifth degree. I’ve never tried that
argument, but if you want time, motions can give it to you.
Probably a year, even two.”

“What if none of that works and he has to go
to trial?” I asked.

“We can drag out the jury selection. Finding
a panel we can accept could take months. Some people nowadays are
even hiring jury consultants to help pick a favorable jury, though
I doubt that’s necessary here. Then there’s trial preparation and
the like--takes months. One problem with delay, one real big
problem, is you are not supposed to get out on bail after your
arraignment. These are capital offenses.”

The hair stood up on my arms.
Capital
offenses
.

“Bobby Lee wouldn’t keep me in jail and you
know it,” my father said. “Ricky wouldn’t either.” Bobby Lee and
Ricky were two county judges.

“Are they the only possible judges for
tomorrow?” I asked.

“They sure are,” Chip said. “I went by this
morning to check. You’re probably right, Newell, and since nobody
tried to rest you after the indictment I doubt they’ll try to lock
you now.”

“
Doubt
?” I repeated, worried that
Chip wasn’t absolutely sure.

“I just don’t know what Junior wants to do,”
Chip said. “I’m surprised he brought this damn case in the first
place. I wouldn’t have, not in a million years.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “He wants to
make a big name for himself and run for office or get a federal
judgeship. Just indicting Daddy has gotten him more publicity than
he could have hoped for otherwise.”

“The boys’ families will be breathing down
Junior’s neck, urging him to have you put in jail immediately. And
I saw that the NAACP has a few people in town,” Chip said. “I’m
sure they’d like you in jail as of yesterday. One of them was
outside the courthouse this morning with a petition to have the
name changed.”

“Any signatures?” My father smirked. “I’m
sure as hell not going to sit in jail for something I didn’t do for
some cause. What else do we have to cover today, Chip?”

“Not much,” Chip said.

“If Daddy ever has a trial, what are the
chances of conviction?” I asked.

“Zero to none,” Chip said, smiling. “First,
as far as anyone can tell, they’ve got a real circumstantial case.
Juries don’t like that. And around here, as you just pointed out,
your father is a very popular man. It shouldn’t be hard to get an
acquittal unless there are blacks on the jury. Even then we’d get a
hung jury, not a conviction, and I don’t think Junior would try you
twice.”