Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (27 page)

“I told them I was your lawyer,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “They don’t know me here.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen, Joe. You have to believe that.”

“I do. I believe you. But you’re going to have to tell me exactly what happened so I can figure out the best way to handle it.”

She took a deep breath, and I saw tears gathering in her eyes. She started to speak, then stopped and cleared her throat. She wiped her eyes and nose with the tissue.

“We both came home from work yesterday a little after five. I fixed him some supper, but he wouldn’t eat. He was pacing around the house and kept disappearing into the bathroom. When he came out the last time, I saw a tiny white flake in his nose, and I knew. I knew he was using cocaine. I’ve used enough in my day to recognize it. No appetite, can’t sit still, irritable—he had all the symptoms.

“So I tried to talk to him about it. I asked him if there was anything he needed to tell me, if he was having problems at work, if he felt like things weren’t going to work out between us. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about, so I mentioned the flake in his nose. He went berserk on me.”

“That’s obvious,” I said. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“They took me to the emergency room before they brought me here,” she said. “My nose is broken, and they had to stitch the cut over my eye where he hit me with the fireplace poker.”

The thought of my sister being beaten with a fireplace poker by an oversize brute enraged me, but I kept my mouth shut. The last thing Sarah needed was for me to start yelling or preaching or saying, “I told you so.”

“How many times did he hit you?” I said.

“I don’t know. A lot. When he hit me with the poker it knocked me backwards and I fell across a coffee table onto the hearth. There was one of those little shovels that you use to clean out the ashes in the fireplace, and I picked it up and swung it at him. It hit him in the side of the head and he fell. His head hit the stone, and he just lay there. I tried to help him, but he wouldn’t wake up, so I called nine-one-one.”

She dropped her head into her hands and began to weep again. I stood up and rubbed her neck, but it was obvious that the kind of pain she was experiencing was beyond anything I could hope to assuage.

“Sarah, did you tell all of this to the police?” I said.

What she had described was clearly a case of self-defense. The force she’d used in defending herself was reasonable under the circumstances, especially considering the history of the relationship and the fact that she was being attacked with a fireplace poker. The facts wouldn’t even support aggravated assault, let alone the attempted second-degree murder charge that had been filed against her.

She nodded. “I told them exactly what I told you.”

I moved back around the table and sat down.

“Listen to me,” I said. “It happened. You can’t change it now. What you can do is fight with all of your strength to make sure this doesn’t ruin the rest of your life. They’ve charged you with attempted second-degree murder, which tells me that something isn’t right. It’s a class B felony; maximum sentence is thirty years. Your bond is three hundred thousand, cash only, which is ridiculous under these circumstances. It’s also more than I can raise right now, so you’re going to be stuck here for a while. But I’m going to hire you a lawyer, a damned good one, and we’ll make sure this turns out the way it should. In the meantime, I’m going to go talk to the district attorney and find out what the hell’s going on.”

“I know what’s going on,” Sarah said. “It’s Robert’s father. He has a lot of money and he has a lot of influence around here. He’s a close friend of the district attorney’s. He brags about it all the time.”

“Great. Small-time politics and criminal justice. My favorite combination.”

Her face was battered and bruised, her green eyes glistening with tears, and my heart ached for her.

“I’m scared, Joe,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

I reached for her hands. “I know you’re scared. But have faith. I’ll make sure you get out of here. I promise.”

Less than an hour later, I walked into the reception area of the district attorney’s office in Crossville carrying the photos Fraley took the first night Godsey attacked Sarah. I also had more photos stored in my camera’s memory, photos I’d taken just before I left the jail. I’d never met District Attorney General Freeley Sells and knew nothing about him. I’d called from the car and told his secretary I needed to see him and that I’d be there in just a few minutes. As I rounded a corner, I saw a plump woman wearing a high-necked green dress who looked to be in her mid-fifties. She eyed me warily as I stood in front of her desk.

“I’m Joe Dillard,” I said. “I called earlier.”

“Mr. Sells is busy.”

“Then I’ll wait.”

“He’s going to be busy all day.”

“Then I guess you and I will get to know each other pretty well, because I’m not leaving until I talk to him.”

There was a door with Sells’s name on it directly behind her desk, and I could hear someone talking. I walked around the secretary’s desk, knocked twice on the door, and opened it. I could hear her babbling behind me, but I didn’t care.

Freeley Sells was just hanging up the telephone when I walked through the door. His head was shaved and he had a bushy mustache. He reminded me of G. Gordon Liddy. He was wearing a gray suit with an American flag lapel pin just like the one Lee Mooney wore all the time. He stood as I approached.

“Who in the hell do you think you are, barging in here like this?” he said. He was short and wiry, and I could see a thick vein bulging in the middle of his forehead.

“My name is Joe Dillard.” I didn’t offer my hand. “I apologize for the intrusion, but I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“I know who you are, and I know what you want to talk about. I don’t have a damned thing to say to you.”

“Why are you holding my sister on a charge of attempted second-degree murder when any fool can see that she acted in self-defense?”

“Your sister nearly killed a resident of this district, a man who happens to be from a fine Christian family. Not to mention that she has a record longer than my leg.”

“My sister defended herself against a man twice her size who was using her for a punching bag. He hit her with a goddamned fireplace poker before she finally hit him back. And this wasn’t the first time he’s done it.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Are you referring to the other recent incident in which Mr. Godsey was badly beaten? He said you were the one who did it.”

“I don’t care what he said. He got what he deserved, both times.”

I held the photos of Sarah up so he could see them. He glanced at them, but quickly looked away.

“These are from the first time,” I said. “I just took some more. This one was even worse.”

“You can tell it to a jury, Mr. Dillard. A Cumberland County jury who won’t appreciate some drug-addled harlot coming into their county and attempting to kill one of their own.”

“I don’t give a damn where the jury’s from. There’s no way they’ll convict her. Did he tell you he was hopped up on cocaine?”

“The jury will convict her if I have anything to do with it,” Sells said. “I intend to try her, convict her, and send her to the penitentiary, where she belongs. Now, I’ve got work to do, Mr. Dillard. It’s time for you to leave.”

I stood there staring at him. “You have work to do? What kind of work? Is there someone else you need to railroad?”

“Get the hell out of here!” Sells roared.

I smiled at him. “You know something?” I said. “I’m going to enjoy this. I’m going to enjoy showing people that you’re nothing more than a corrupt hick.”

I spun on my heel and walked out the door, hoping I could get out of the district before he thought up a reason to have me arrested. My heart was pounding as I jogged through the courthouse lobby and out the front door to my truck.

Once I cleared the county line, I started thinking about Sarah. I’d been around the legal system long enough to know that if a prosecutor was bent on convicting someone and he had a judge in his pocket who would let him bend the rules, the chances of beating him at trial were slim.

Sarah was in real trouble this time. If I lost this fight, she was likely to lose the rest of her life.

Friday, November 7

The next morning, my cell phone rang at six. I’d been up for a half hour, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to come up. The sky was just beginning to brighten, and as I looked out over the back deck I could begin to make out the silhouettes of the trees along the ridgeline to the east. I walked over to the counter where the phone was charging and looked at the caller ID. It was Leon Bates.

“We need to have a sit-down,” Bates said.

“When?”

“This morning. Right now, if you can. It’s pretty important.”

“Where?”

“Someplace private. I don’t want nobody seeing us or hearing what I have to say.”

“How about here? There’s nobody here but Caroline and me, and she won’t be awake for a couple of hours.”

While I waited for Bates, I threw on some clothes, a jacket, and a pair of gloves. The temperature was in the low thirties, but the wind was calm. I thought it might be best if Bates and I took a walk around the property. That way Caroline wouldn’t be disturbed when Rio inevitably started barking.

I called the dog, walked outside, and stood at the head of the driveway. Bates showed up in his black Crown Victoria a few minutes later.

“You up for a walk?” I said.

“Damn straight. Just let me grab my gloves. Is that dog going to tear my leg off?”

“Not unless I tell him to.”

We walked down the driveway and behind the house, through the backyard, and onto a walking trail that I’d carved out of the woods several years earlier. Many of the trees had lost their foliage, and they covered the ground like a vast green carpet. Dampness from recent rains gave rise to a slightly musty odor, an odor that always reminded me of playing in the woods behind my grandparents’ home when I was a child. Rio ran ahead of us, lifting his leg next to tree trunks and chasing squirrels.

“Nice place,” Bates said. He was wearing his dark brown cowboy hat, an image he often liked to portray to the media.

“Thanks. You should come out sometime and bring the wife. We’ll drink a few beers and swap a few lies.”

“I might just do that. How’s the missus?”

“Doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”

“That cancer’s a demon. Both of my grannies died from it. My great-uncle, too. The more they learn about it, the more it seems to spread.”

I nodded my head in silence. Surely he didn’t come all the way out here to talk about cancer.

“I heard about your sister,” Bates said. “Sounds like a bum rap to me.”

“It’ll turn out okay. The DA down there is a jerk, but we’ll figure out a way to beat him.”

The woods were damp and cool, and I could see Bates’s breath as we walked slowly along the path. The sun was just clearing the hills to the east, and streaks of pale yellow light were filtering through the branches and the few remaining leaves on the trees.

“So what brings you out here so early in the morning?” I said.

“Afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

“How bad? The way things have been going lately, I’m not sure I can handle much more.”

“There’s a problem in your office. A serious problem. I need to be sure I can count on you before I make another move.”

“Count on me for what?”

“To carry the prosecution through. To do what’s right. It ain’t gonna be easy.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what it is?”

“You give me your word you won’t say anything to anybody?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good enough for me. I’ve got Alexander Dunn on tape and on video collecting two thousand dollars in extortion money from a man who runs a little gambling operation out in the county.”

I stopped in my tracks, stunned. Alexander? He was an asshole, but I didn’t think he was a criminal. And I didn’t think he needed money.

“Sorry to drop it on you like this,” Bates said. “I need to move on Alexander while it’s fresh, but I ain’t gonna do nothing unless I know you’re with me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble wrapping my mind around this. You say you’ve got Alexander on tape? You set him up?”

“Yeah,” Bates said with a slight chuckle. “He walked right into it. He’s got no idea.”

“How did this come about?”

“About a year ago I busted a bookie named Powers, big operation, especially for this part of the country. He was booking around fifty thousand a week. About a month after that I popped a casino that was set up in a big boat out on the lake. They’d run up and down the lake all night, gambling. Busted the operator and all the players.”

“I remember both of them,” I said. “It was all over the news. That’s when I knew you were either crazy or serious about what you were doing. The cops and the prosecutors around here have always left the gamblers alone.”

“What you didn’t hear about was that three or four months after the arrests, after the cases went to criminal court, they wound up getting dismissed at the recommendation of the district attorney’s office. The first case, the bookie, walked because Alexander Dunn told the judge that the sheriff’s department had illegally wire-tapped the bookie’s phone.”

“Did you?”

“Maybe, but we weren’t gonna use any of it in court. We got enough information from the tap that we started putting pressure on some of the players and went at him that way. Then we set up a sting and popped him when he paid off a winner. I don’t even know how Alexander found out about the tap.

“Then the second case got dismissed because Alexander told the judge we’d illegally obtained a search warrant for the boat and that the boat may have been in another county when we did the raid. Hell, I didn’t know the county line ran right down the middle of the goddamned lake, but it seemed to me like Alexander was looking for ways to get the cases dismissed instead of helping us put these guys in jail, where they belonged. Even the customers walked.”