by Scott Pratt
After he died, Erlene left the photograph hanging right where it was. She even started blowing kisses herself.
When Angel showed up on the bus with Julie Hayes, Erlene’s teeth near fell out of her mouth.
Angel looked so much like Alyse that Erlene swore they could’ve been sisters, maybe even twins. When she first laid eyes on Angel, she heard Gus’s voice:
”She’ll come someday. You wait and see.” Erlene knew she had to take Angel home with her. It was like having a piece of Gus back in the house all over again, like Gus himself had sent Angel to comfort her. And doing for Angel, helping her, did comfort Erlene. It was healing, that’s what it was; it helped heal some of the pain of losing Gus and a lot of what she’d carried around ever since the doctor told her she’d never be a mother.
After Angel had been with Erlene only a little while, during some of those moments when they’d curl up on the couch in front of the fireplace and watch a movie, Angel started to open up a little and told Erlene some of the terrible things that had happened to her. That’s when Erlene knew she was right. She knew Gus—or God—had sent Angel to her. She didn’t really care which. Angel was the daughter she never had. She was meant to take care of her.
The girls showed up between four and four fifteen.
Erlene told them to sit at the bar. As soon as Julie dragged in—late, as usual—Erlene stood on the other side of the bar and gave them a little speech.
”There was a detective from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation here around noon. He was asking about a murder. He had a picture of the man who was killed, and he thinks the man was here last night. He may even think one of us had something to do with it.”
Erlene paused for a skinny minute and looked at their faces. She set such high standards for her girls.
They had to dress a certain way when they came into the club and Erlene was real particular about their makeup and the way they wore their hair.
When Erlene mentioned murder, the girls’ mouths dropped open and they started looking at one another.
”Is that the murder they’ve been talking about on the radio?” Heather said. ”They’re saying the man was a preacher. It made me think of that guy last night who was spouting—”
Erlene held up her hand.
”I haven’t heard anything on the radio,” she said,
”but I want all of you to forget about that man last night. He wasn’t here. I want every one of you to look at me, right now, and listen real carefully to what I’m saying. He wasn’t here. When the TBI man comes back here or if he comes to your place and starts asking you questions, he’s going to show you a picture. And you’re going to tell him that the man in the picture was not here. Do all of you understand that?”
Everybody but Julie nodded. Julie looked at Erlene and said, ”So you’re telling us to lie to a cop about a murder? Isn’t that illegal or something?”
Julie had become a problem again. A gorgeous green-eyed redhead was great for business, but she was back on the cocaine and she was getting worse by the day. She was always late, always distracted, and she did outrageous, vulgar things sometimes when she danced.
Julie had also had a huge crush on Gus, even though he was old enough to be her granddaddy, and she was jealous. Erlene finally had to fire her last year after she caught her snorting cocaine in one of the storage rooms. Julie made a huge, ugly scene and was hollering at the top of her lungs when she stormed out of the club. Erlene didn’t hear a word from her for eight months, and then maybe two months ago she called Erlene up, all sweet and apologetic. Julie told Erlene how sorry she was about Gus and said she was clean as a whistle and wanted to come back to work. She was in Texas at the time, and Erlene’s head told her to let Julie stay in Texas, but her heart said Julie was just a lost young girl who needed a job. And she was good for business.
”Nothing will happen if we stick together,” Erlene told them. ”Do you girls have any idea what getting caught up in a big murder would do to this business? People would stay away from this place in droves. We’d all wind up on the street, including you, Miss Julie. All that money you’ve been making? Gone.
”Besides, I’m sure nobody in this room killed that gentleman, and I doubt very seriously if any of you has any information that would help the police. The man was a drunken fool. Every one of you saw the way he acted. He probably went somewhere else after he left here and ran into somebody who wasn’t as tolerant of his behavior as we were. So why do we need to get involved in it? If the detective asks you, just tell him the man wasn’t here and let him move on to people who can help.”
”Where’s Angel?” Julie said. ”She’s the one who waited on him.”
”Angel’s at home. She and I have decided that she’s not really cut out for this business. Don’t worry about Angel. She won’t say a word.” Erlene paused for a minute and looked at all of them again. ”Girls, are we all on the same page?”
They all sat quietly, but they were nodding. Erlene knew mentioning the money they were making would get their attention, and besides, she treated them good. She expected a little loyalty in return.
”Julie?”
Julie popped her gum and shrugged her shoulders.
”All right, then, let’s get ready to go to work.”
April 12
6:00 p.m.
After I left the nursing home, I spent the next hour driving to Mountain City to stand next to a client who was entering a guilty plea to a reduced charge of negligent homicide in what had originally been a second-degree murder case. My client, a thirty-yearold man named Lester Hancock, had come home unexpectedly one evening to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. Lester had initially handled the dispute admirably. He simply told his buddy to get the hell out of his house and never come back. His friend left but returned fifteen minutes later and began yelling insults at Lester from the road in front of Lester’s house. Lester yelled back. His friend grabbed a baseball bat from the bed of his pickup and started towards the house. Lester stepped out on the front porch and blew a hole in him with a black powder rifle. He probably would never have been charged had he not dragged the man inside his house and then lied to the police about the way things really happened.
The drive was spectacular in April. The mountain peaks reflected off of the shimmering water of Watauga Lake, and the mountains themselves were coming to life. Dogwood, redbud, Bradford pear, and azalea blossoms dotted the slopes with pink and white. As I wound slowly through the beautiful countryside, I thought about the question Ma had asked me earlier: ”What did Raymond ever do to you?”
Almost immediately following the rape, I started overreacting to anyone whom I perceived was trying to bully me. Over the next year, I got myself thrown out of school three times for fighting, and I was only in the third grade. I was afraid of being left alone and had nightmares all the time.
The nightmares eased after a while, but then, when I was in the eighth grade and just starting to hit puberty, I threw my helmet at a football coach who grabbed my face mask and screamed at me when I made a mistake on a play during practice. The helmet hit him in the head. They threw me off the team and out of school for a month.
My freshman year in high school, during the time when the hormones were pouring and I felt like I wasn’t in control of anything, including my own body, I went days without sleep and fell into deep depressions. It was the first time I remember having the dream of floating down the turbulent river towards the waterfall.
And then, during my sophomore year, I met Caroline. She was beautiful, smart, funny, and optimistic, and at first, I had a lot of trouble believing she wanted to have anything to do with me. But she did. She saw something in me that I didn’t see, and while I didn’t understand, I was grateful. She’d flash a smile at me or give me a sideways glance and wink and my heart would melt. Gradually, the nightmares stopped and for the next few years, I actually started to enjoy life.
Caroline and I were inseparable all through high s
chool. We both worked hard. I was an athlete, she was a dancer, and we were both good students. We both had part-time jobs. I worked on the weekends stocking groceries at a supermarket and she taught dance to kids at the studio where she took lessons.
Caroline’s father was a long-haul truck driver who was hardly ever home and her mother was almost as emotionless as mine, but she never complained about either one of them. We had each other, and that seemed to be enough.
The only serious problem we had was around graduation time. Caroline wanted to get married—
and so did I—but I had something else I wanted to do first. I had trouble explaining it to her, but I wanted to join the army. Caroline said I was crazy, that I was somehow trying to forge a bond with my dead father. She was probably right, but it didn’t matter. I’d made up my mind. I enlisted a month after I graduated from high school and left for boot camp the same week Caroline entered college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She said she’d wait for me, and she did. I wrote to her almost every day and I came home to see her every time I went on leave, but it was the longest three years of my life.
By the time I got out of the army, Caroline was almost finished with her undergraduate degree in liberal arts. We were married in her mother’s Methodist church in Johnson City the same weekend I got back, and I enrolled in school at U.T. in the fall. Caroline went to work part-time at a dance studio owned by a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. She taught jazz and tap and acrobatics and choreographed routines for the dance recitals. I majored in political science and knew what I wanted to be. I was going to be a prosecutor. I was going to put people like my uncle Raymond in jail.
Marrying Caroline was the best decision I ever made. She was so beautiful, so full of life, and she taught me the most important lesson I’d ever learned—how to love. Over the next two years, we had two healthy children, and Caroline helped me learn how to raise them. She nudged me when I needed nudging, held me back when I needed holding back, and did her best to keep my outlook optimistic.
Unfortunately, I brought more than my duffel bag home with me from the army. The Rangers are gungho, small-unit specialists who pride themselves on being able to fight in virtually any environment on a moment’s notice. I trained all over the world for three years but didn’t see any combat until two months before my enlistment expired when my unit was sent to Grenada. Terrible images from the short but bloody battles I fought there haunted me through college and law school. I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, covered in sweat, with my wife talking softly to me, trying to calm me down.
As with Sarah’s rape, I eventually managed to suppress the memories, at least most of the time. I even managed to make excellent grades and graduate from both college and law school, despite the fact that I always held a part-time job and was doing my best to be a good husband and father along the way.
I kept myself so busy I didn’t have time to think about the past. I don’t think I slept for seven years.
By the time I graduated from law school, my son, Jack, was just entering kindergarten. When I interviewed for a job at the district attorney’s office back in Washington County, I was disappointed to find that the starting salary for rookie prosecutors was less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and that it would take me at least ten years to get to the fifty-thousand-dollar range. It seemed like such a waste to have spent all that time and effort for so paltry a salary. Caroline was starting up her own dance studio and we knew she wouldn’t make much money. I figured I could make at least twice what the DA was offering by practicing on my own, even as a rookie, so I set up shop in Johnson City. I told myself that after I’d made some serious money and gained some experience, I’d close down the office and go to work for the district attorney.
I immediately started taking criminal defense cases, reasoning that the experience would help me later when I went to the DA’s office. I put the same amount of sweat and effort into my law practice as I’d put into being an athlete, a soldier, and a student, and I soon became very good at it. I found that the law offered a great deal of leeway to an astute and enterprising mind, and I learned to take on even the most damning evidence and spin it to suit my arguments. Within a couple of years, I started to win jury trials. The trial victories translated into publicity, and I soon became the busiest criminal defense lawyer around. The money started rolling in.
I defended murderers, thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, white-collar embezzlers, wife beaters, and drunk drivers. The only cases I refused to take were sex crimes. I convinced myself that I was some kind of white knight, a trial lawyer who defended the rights of the accused against an oppressive government. And along the way, I made an unfortunate discovery. I learned that many of the police officers and prosecutors who were on the other side weren’t much different than the criminals I was defending.
They didn’t give a damn about the truth—all they cared about was winning.
Still, the thought of moving to the prosecutor’s office was always on my mind. But the money kept me from it. I was taking good care of my wife and my kids. I took pride in being a provider. I took pride in being able to give my children things and opportunities I never had. Before I knew it, ten years had passed.
And then along came Billy Dockery.
Billy was a thirty-year-old mama’s boy charged with killing an elderly woman after he broke into her house in the middle of the night. He was long-haired, skinny, stupid, and arrogant, and I didn’t like him from the moment I met him. But he swore he was innocent, the case against him was weak, and his mother was willing to pony up a big fee, so I took it on. A year later, a jury found him not guilty after a three-day trial.
Billy showed up drunk at my office the next afternoon and tossed an envelope onto my desk. When I asked him what was in it, he said it was a cash bonus, five thousand dollars. I told him his mother had already paid my fee. He was giddy and insistent.
I knew he didn’t have a job, so I asked him where he got the money.
”Off’n that woman,” he said.
”What woman?”
”That woman I killed. I got a bunch more’n this.
I figger you earned a piece of it.”
I threw him and his money out onto the street.
There wasn’t any use in telling the police about it.
Double jeopardy prevented Billy from being tried again, and the rules about client confidentiality meant I couldn’t divulge his dirty little secret anyway.
Prior to Billy, I did what all criminal defense lawyers do—I avoided discussions with my clients about what really happened. I concerned myself only with evidence and procedure. But when Billy slapped me in the face with the truth, I realized I’d been fooling myself for years. I realized that my profession, my reputation, my entire perception of myself was nothing more than a facade. I was a whore, selling my services to the highest bidder. I wasn’t interested in truth; I was interested in winning, because winning led to money. I’d completely lost my sense of honor.
When that realization hit me, I wanted to quit practicing law altogether. But my children were in high school and would soon be going off to college. Caroline had managed our money well, but we didn’t have enough stashed away to allow me to quit outright. So Caroline and I talked it over, and we decided I’d keep going until the kids had graduated and gone on to college. After that, we’d figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
I immediately began to cut back on the number of cases I took. The death penalty cases I was doing these days were all appointed, payback from judges for the days when I was spinning facts and helping people like Billy Dockery walk out the door. Now my son was in college and my daughter was a senior in high school. In less than a year, I hoped to finish up the cases I had and walk away from the profession that Uncle Raymond, at least indirectly, had led me to.
By the time I got back from Mountain City, it was almost dark. So far, my birthday had been a bust.
Joh
nny Wayne had been gagged, I’d practically fallen apart in Ma’s room, and the flashback of Sarah’s rape kept playing over and over in my head. And I couldn’t reach Caroline or either of the kids on my cell phone. I’d called ten times on the way back down the mountain.
I finally pulled into the driveway and pushed the garage door opener. There wasn’t another car in sight.
Rio, my young German shepherd, came bounding out of the garage and started his daily ritual of running around the truck. I’d rescued Rio from a bad situation when he was only two months old. I was his hero. When he saw me pull into the driveway every day, the excitement was too much for his young bladder. As soon as I got out of the truck, he peed on my shoe.
Where could they be? I didn’t see my son’s car.
When I’d talked to Jack on the phone last week, he promised to come to dinner with us on my birthday.
I thought seriously about backing out and going somewhere to drown my sorrows but decided I’d go in and see if they left me a note. Surely they wouldn’t forget my birthday. These were the people I loved more than anything else in the world. They’d never forgotten my birthday. They always made a big deal out of it.
Caroline hadn’t said anything that morning, but I’d left at five thirty and showered at the gym after I worked out. She and Lilly were still asleep when I walked out the door. Maybe they did forget.
Or maybe something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. I rubbed Rio’s ears for a minute and walked up and opened the door that led to the kitchen. It was dark inside. I let the dog go in ahead of me. It was quiet.