by Scott Pratt
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’m just not used to…I haven’t talked to anyone like you in a while. Hell, I’ve never talked to anyone like you in my life. By the way, there are cops all over this place. Don’t they mind that you’re smoking dope in here?”
“They’re not on duty, man. They’re freelancing. We pay them. We can do whatever the hell we want as long as we don’t kill anybody.”
“Speaking of killing somebody….” Jack smiled again, and Birch slapped his knee and went back to his chair.
“Okay, lawyer’s son,” Birch said as he picked up the bong, lit it, and took a long pull. “You seem to be honest, and you’ve got a sense of humor. What do you want to talk about?”
“I’d just like you to tell me what you know about Kasey Cartwright and Paul Milius.”
Birch blew the smoke out slowly and set the bong back down. He picked the Solo cup up and took a long drink. Jack could smell the whiskey from five feet away.
“Kasey came out on tour last year for a while before I left Paul’s label,” he said.
“Why’d you leave?” Jack asked.
“Just a creative-differences thing, man. Happens all the time. But Kasey, she’d open the night, do about an hour, then she’d come to my bus or to my dressing room and get high with me when the show was over. Earthy chick, you know? All about what was natural, at least that’s what she wanted people to think. But she liked the retail dreams. She wanted to make as much money as she could. Wanted the fancy houses and cars and all that. She used to talk to me about it all the time. ‘What’s fair? How much can I make doing this or that? Is Paul screwing me?’”
“Was he?” Jack asked.
“Screwing her? Financially, a little I’m sure. The new ones always get screwed. Physically, definitely.”
“So he was having sex with her?”
“Absolutely, man.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Because I saw them getting it on in her trailer. I have this little habit of wandering around after shows. Harmless creepin’, you know? Helps me wind down. Sometimes I like to look in windows, check out what people are doing. I saw them doing the nasty, man, with my very own eyes. But Kasey had already told me she was doing him, which is the main reason I wandered over that way that night. I just couldn’t resist the chance of getting to see Kasey naked. Did you ever see her? I mean when she was alive?”
“All I’ve seen is pictures,” Jack said. “Pretty girl.”
“Sensuous, too,” Birch said. “But anyway, Kasey thought she was playing Paul so she could make more money. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was just an amusement to him, just a temporary thing. But ol’ Kasey, she got tired of Paul before Paul got tired of her. She started seeing Cameron Jones as soon as she turned eighteen.”
“Cameron Jones is another singer on Paul’s label, right?”
“Yeah, good buddy of mine, Cameron. Good artist, too. A little more old-school than me, not as edgy, but still good at what he does.”
“Did Paul know Kasey was seeing Cameron?”
“Yeah, yeah. Cameron said Kasey was upfront about it. It was kind of funny. What he told me was that she went all John Hancock about it. I’d never heard that phrase before.”
“Did Cameron say how Paul reacted?”
“Paul doesn’t like to lose. He didn’t get where he’s at by letting people take what he thinks is his. Cameron said Paul wasn’t none too happy about it.”
“Unhappy enough to kill Kasey?”
“I guess that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I’m sorry, but I don’t have any answers for you. Listen, man, it’s getting close to show time, so if there isn’t anything else, I need to start getting my voice warmed up and let my makeup girl put my stage face on.”
Jack rose from the couch and reached out a hand to Birch.
“Thanks,” Jack said. He didn’t say anything about sending Birch a subpoena. It might not happen, but Birch said he had actually seen Paul Milius and Kasey having sex. That was admissible in court. Jack just didn’t know whether there would be any use for the testimony. And since Cameron Jones had apparently stepped in and lured Kasey away from Paul, Cameron might be a candidate for the SODDI defense. Maybe it had been worth the time and trouble to talk to Derek Birch.
“Sure you don’t want to hit this bong before you head out?” Birch said.
“It smells really good,” Jack lied, “but I think I’ll pass.”
“That was a pretty good story,” I said as I made a U-turn at a red light and started back toward the hotel, “but make sure you don’t tell it to anyone else. Have you told Charlie?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. “We’ve both been pretty busy.”
“Don’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want Birch anywhere near the courtroom. I don’t want the police or the prosecution to get even a whiff of that story. As far as I know, they suspect that Paul and Kasey were having an affair, but they can’t prove it. Let’s keep it that way.”
CHAPTER 27
Caroline and I spent the next morning at Vanderbilt going from office to office, getting blood work done, going through the process of enrolling Caroline in the clinical trial. She was red-eyed and lethargic, largely because she’d spent much of the previous evening crying in our hotel room. She was scaared, but more than that, she was upset because she felt as though she’d let everyone in the family down by allowing the cancer to advance, as though she had any choice at all in the matter.
Late in the morning, I took Caroline back to the Opryland Hotel so that she could take a nap, and I drove to the district attorney’s office near the courthouse downtown. Their offices were on the fifth floor, and after going through security, I was directed by a middle-aged woman to a large but practical office overlooking the Cumberland River. In the office waiting for me were Ronnie Johnson, the district attorney general of Nashville, Pennington Frye, the assistant handling the Paul Milius case, and a detective named William Smiley. All three men were dressed in dark business suits, as was I. I’d had only a brief encounter with Frye at Milius’s arraignment and had never met Johnson or Smiley. We all shook hands and exchanged small talk for a few minutes while we tried to get some kind of read on one another.
“So how about this case?” Johnson said as the small talk wound down. He seemed friendly enough with his mouse colored-hair and salesman attitude. “What are the chances of getting some kind of plea worked out?”
“What’s on the table?” I asked. “Involuntary manslaughter? Negligent homicide? We might be able to talk about something like that.”
“So you’re saying he killed her by accident?” Johnson said.
“I’m not saying anything at all. I’m just asking about possibilities.”
“I don’t think we’re ready to offer anything yet,” he said.
“I’m not really looking for anything yet,” I said. “Of course, that might change if you guys drop some kind of bomb on me.”
Everyone laughed nervously. Prosecutors were required by the law to disclose everything to defense attorneys in criminal cases, but everyone knew they didn’t do it.
“Have you come across anything exculpatory?” I asked. Exculpatory evidence tended to point toward a defendant’s innocence.
“Not a thing that I’m aware of,” Johnson said. He looked at the other two men. “Penn? Bill? Anything exculpatory?”
Both men shook their heads at the same time. “I would have provided anything exculpatory,” Pennington Frye said. “I’m not one of those win-at-all-cost guys.”
That statement told me that Pennington Frye was exactly what I feared he’d be—a win-at-all-costs guy. Otherwise, he would have simply said, “No,” in response to Johnson’s question. I couldn’t really blame him, though. This was a huge case for Frye, and a huge case for their office. It involved a country music star and a celebrity record company owner, it was in the state capitol, and the media scrutiny had
been intense. I was able to avoid the media for the most part because I wasn’t from Nashville, and I could tell them to stuff themselves if they got too close. I didn’t need them. But for a public employee, a prosecutor, well…careers were made and broken on this kind of case. The only thing that would have made it even more volatile would have been if an election had been pending. Thankfully, Ronnie Johnson was only two years into an eight-year term. No election pressure on this one. Just reputation pressure, and in Nashville, reputation was important.
“It’s pretty thin for a murder case,” I said. “All you really have is the DNA match.”
“Those DNA matches are pesky things for defendants,” Johnson said from behind his wide-topped, oak desk. “And you’re right. Without it, we wouldn’t have much at all. But we have it.”
“All it proves is that he slapped her,” I said.
“I beg to differ,” Johnson said. “It also proves he was there at or near the time of the murder, which was very late at night. He was the last person to see her alive. It proves he was agitated enough to strike a young woman in the face, a woman he’d been pursuing romantically for quite some time. How big a step is it, really, to grabbing her by the neck and choking her?”
“You’re planning to get into all the sexual stuff at trial?” I asked.
“As much as the court will allow. I think it gives the case some texture, allows the jury to put things into perspective.”
“I’ll fight you every step of the way on it,” I said. “Unless you have something that proves he’d been ‘pursuing her romantically,’ as you said. Oh, and he says he didn’t do it, for what it’s worth. He’s very convincing.”
Johnson chuckled. “Let him tell it to the jury. We’ll see how they feel.”
“I understand you have a couple items in your possession that might be of interest to me,” I said.
Johnson looked at Frye and Smiley again and held up his hand as if to say, “I got this.” He leaned forward, put his arms and elbows on his desk, and folded his fingers.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re talking about a cell phone and a diary, both property of Kasey Cartwright.”
“Exactly. Can I take a look?”
Johnson shook his head. “Sorry. There’s nothing there for you.”
“How about letting me judge that for myself?”
“We’re not planning to use the diary or the phone or anything either one of them contains at trial,” Johnson said. “And because of that, I don’t have to let you examine them if I don’t want to. The rules don’t require it, and I’m not going to do it.”
“But you have them in your possession?” I asked.
Johnson nodded.
“Then I’ll file a motion and ask the judge to order you to let me examine them.”
“File away, Mr. Dillard. We both know the judge will tell you you’re not entitled to them. But I will tell you this—the information contained in the diary and the cell phone is more damning than exculpatory. Your client is a vulgar womanizer. But the diary is hearsay, and it would be impossible to authenticate the cell phone messages since your client used a prepaid, disposable cell when he communicated with the victim. The cell her grandmother gave us is also a pre-paid. I assume your client gave it to her. But again, we’re not going to use them. Do you have anything specific for Detective Smiley or Mr. Frye?”
“I don’t believe I do,” I said, thinking the meeting was about to be cut off.
“Then I’m going to ask them to excuse themselves so you and I can talk privately,” Johnson said.
A couple minutes later, Frye and Smiley were gone, and the door had been closed tightly. Johnson walked around the desk and took a seat in the chair Frye had just vacated, just a few feet away from me.
“Has Paul told you we’re friends?” he said.
“He mentioned it in passing, but we really haven’t gotten a chance to talk about it,” I said. “And I heard you call him a vulgar womanizer just a second ago if I’m not mistaken.”
“He is a vulgar womanizer, but he’s still my friend. I hate this for him. He was extremely generous to me when I was running for this office, and he’s been extremely generous to a lot of my political friends. But I hope you’ll understand, and I hope you’ll pass this along to him, that I had no choice. It was such a big stage, there was so much media interest, that I had to do it by the book. I turned everything over to Penn, and Penn and Bill Smiley presented the case to the grand jury. And I can understand why the grand jurors returned an indictment. Paul and this girl were having an affair, or at least one that had recently ended, they got into a public scrap at the CMT Awards show, the bad feelings continued and spilled over into the after-party, he went to her hotel at two in the morning and sent his driver home, and then a maid found her dead with a chunk of his skin wedged between her teeth. You were a prosecutor once, from what I understand, Mr. Dillard. What would you have done?”
I thought about saying, “I would have checked out his wife very carefully,” but I kept it to myself. I’d never been one to show any cards to the prosecution before a trial.
“It sounds like you did what you thought was right,” I said. “I’ll pass that along.”
“Thank you,” Johnson said, “and pass along the information about the diary and the cell phone. A lot of prosecutors would try to find a way to get those items into evidence. Penn wanted to try to get them in, but I intervened.” He slid up in the chair and dropped his voice, which took on a conspiratorial tone. “You know,” he said, “all I’d really need is a viable suspect. I assume you’re doing your own thorough investigation. Have you come up with anyone you think might be a candidate?”
“I…well…we’re looking at some different angles,” I said.
“Because if you were to come up with someone solid, someone we could really pin this on in such a way that they’d have no way out, I’d have no compunction about dismissing the charge against Paul and refiling it against someone else. Do you know whether Miss Cartwright was into drugs?”
“I think she maybe smoked a little marijuana, but that’s all we’ve discovered so far. Didn’t your guys investigate Kasey thoroughly?”
“To be honest, and this is just between you and me and that plastic plant over there, I don’t think Bill was as thorough as he could have been. He locked onto Paul pretty quickly and didn’t let go until he had his indictment. Once he got the indictment, well, you know how it is. Once they’re indicted and arrested, the cops turn everything over to the lawyers.”
“So what you’re telling me is that there’s a chance that Kasey may have had a drug problem and may have gotten herself killed by a dealer? Why, because she owed him money?”
“It’s certainly possible, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
Johnson stood, walked to the window, and gazed out into the blue sky above the river.
“Let’s just say you develop reliable evidence that Kasey had a drug problem,” he said. “I’d think you could do that through some of her old classmates, some of the ones who need money. Then perhaps through some extremely diligent work on the part of your investigators, you happen to develop the name of a Nashville drug dealer who was selling to Kasey. I might even be able to help you with the dealer’s name. Lord knows there are a lot of them out there on the street. Then maybe some previously unidentified hair and fiber evidence gathered from Kasey’s room is connected to this drug dealer through DNA analysis. If those things were to happen, we could have an entirely new ballgame on our hands. Entirely new. And no one but you and I would ever know the difference.”
I sat there, stunned, not knowing what to say. After a few seconds, I said, “Have you discussed this with Mr. Milius?”
“Wouldn’t be prudent,” Johnson said. “Man’s got a murder charge hanging over his head. You never know who might be listening. I believe you can go ahead and leave now, Mr. Dillard. Please give what I’ve told you some serious thought, and be sure to tell Mr. M
ilius I said hello.”
I got up and walked out of the room deep in thought. A district attorney had just told me how to fix my own case and offered to help me do it.
Now that, I thought, is a new one.
CHAPTER 28
As soon as I left the district attorney’s office, I called Caroline and drove to Arnold’s Country Kitchen on Eighth Avenue. I waited for Caroline in the parking lot, and about ten minutes later she showed up in a cab. She said she was feeling much better after the nap. We went inside the restaurant, which was housed in a garish, orange, concrete block building, and ate country food cafeteria style. It was good, too. I was glad to see Caroline load up her plate.
“So, the district attorney just offered to help me fix Paul Milius’s case,” I said to Caroline after we’d gone through the line and taken a seat in a corner near the door. “He says if I bribe some of Kasey’s old schoolmates and get them to come to court and testify that she had a drug problem, he’ll help me come up with a drug dealer here in Nashville and hang the murder around his neck. He even mentioned planting DNA evidence. Hell of a guy.”
“Why would he do something like that?” Caroline asked as she slid a piece of roast beef into her mouth.
“I got the impression they’re friends, but not the kind of friends you and I have. This is Nashville, Caroline. The state capitol. The seat of power and money in the state. Friendship here means something entirely different than it means back home. I’m out of my league.”
“You’re not out of your league,” she said. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing, really. I didn’t know what to say—I was so shocked.”
“Should you call the FBI or something? Isn’t that public corruption?”
“I suppose it was an attempt to commit a corrupt act, or at least a suggestion, but unless I follow through, nothing will come of it. And to answer your question, no, I’m not calling the FBI. I’d wind up being an informant for them, and that’s one rabbit hole I never intend to go down.”