by Scott Pratt
She was gone again, this time for a much shorter time.
“Please hold for Mr. Browning,” she said, and the line clicked.
“Reduced to making threats, are we?” a snide, hostile voice said.
“Why the hell won’t you talk to me?” I said. “I’m trying to investigate a murder case that involves the husband of one of your most important clients, and you can’t even give me a few minutes of your time?”
“I wasn’t at the Plaza Hotel the night Miss Cartwright was murdered,” Browning said. “I have witnessed absolutely nothing that would be of any value to anyone in this case. I have heard absolutely nothing that would be of any value to anyone in this case. I am not under subpoena, and I haven’t been ordered by a judge to speak to you. Anything you might want to ask me about Mrs. Milius would be covered by attorney-client privilege. So we really have nothing to talk about.”
“You’re married, right?” I said.
“What? What kind of question is that?”
“Does your wife know about you and Lana?”
“I should inform you that our firm records the calls on these telephones,” he said.
“Good. That’s good. So if anybody listens to this, your partners will find out that you’re having sex with a client, a married client. Partners tend to frown on that kind of thing because it creates conflicts of interest out the wazoo. But that isn’t why I called. The main reason I called is to let you know that I’m onto you, Mr. Browning.”
“Onto me? How frightening. I’m trembling in fear.”
“You should be because I’m going to mess you up. I hate guys like you. I hate smug, morally bankrupt, big-city lawyers who think they can get away with anything.”
“And exactly what do you think I got away with, Mr. Dillard?”
“You’re trying to get away with murder, for starters. You set up Kasey Cartwright’s murder, and you’re going to try to hang it around Paul Milius’s neck. I think you’re going to steal as much of Paul’s money as you can. I’m onto you, though. You’ll be in prison before you know it.”
I hung up the phone and smiled. The whole call was a shot in the dark, a bluff. I had no idea whether anything I said to him was true. But after the things both Michael Pillston and Alex Pappas had told me, I thought it was worth the shot. The guy would do something, and with a little luck, maybe he would make a mistake.
CHAPTER 31
Michael Pillston looked at his lover and tossed a mixing spoon down on the counter in disgust.
“I can’t believe it,” Michael said. “I forgot to buy cocoa when I was at the store. I can’t make this dish without it, so I guess I’m going back down the mountain.”
“No biggie,” Lenny Brown, also a chef, said. “I’ll ride with you.”
Michael and Lenny had met at a seminar in Nashville back in the summer and had begun dating. It had gone quite well thus far. They had many common interests—not the least of which was cooking—and their temperaments seemed to be well suited for each other. Michael was a bit more aggressive, Lenny a bit more passive, but they were both romantics, and they adored classical music. Michael was an excellent cellist and Lenny was an orchestra-caliber flutist. Their idea of a perfect evening was to cook a nice meal, drink a couple glasses of wine, and then play music together.
And tonight was to be another perfect evening. It was Valentine’s Day, a Friday, their first together, and they were spending it in a chalet on Campbell Loop Road in the Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg. They were planning a meal of porterhouse steak with red peppercorn jus, a fennel and radicchio salad with lemony olive vinaigrette, horseradish mashed potatoes, roasted mushroom with spicy breadcrumbs, and a triple-chocolate tart. They were planning to wash all of this down with a couple bottles of Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon, and both of them were halfway through their first glass. Tomorrow, they would get up around ten, prepare and eat a leisurely brunch, and then spend the afternoon skiing.
“It’s still snowing,” Michael said as he looked out the kitchen window. “Not as hard as it was, but it’s still coming down.”
“Thank goodness for all-wheel drive,” Lenny said as he pulled his coat from the closet near the front door.
Michael did the same, and they went out into the breezy night and climbed into Michael’s three-year-old Volkswagen. They didn’t notice the battered, four-wheel drive pickup that was backed into an old logging road just up the street.
Carl Browning, attorney at law, was behind the wheel of the pickup. The truck belonged to Paul Milius’s corporation and was used to take care of the livestock and tend the grounds at Xanadu. He had placed a GPS tracking device in Pillston’s car two days earlier after Pillston had mentioned spending Valentine’s Day in Gatlinburg to Lana. Browning had followed the couple to their Gatlinburg chalet earlier that day using the tracking device, and then he’d gone back down the mountain to a busy restaurant parking lot, where he’d quickly stolen a license plate and attached it to the truck he was driving. Michael Pillston would die tonight. Browning had never killed anyone himself, but tonight that would change. Pillston was talking to Joe Dillard. Dillard said on the phone that Browning had “set up” Kasey Cartwright’s murder and was framing Paul Milius. Lana said that information had to have come from Michael Pillston. Alex and Tilly were gone. It had to have been Michael. Dillard had interviewed him, and Michael was always lurking, Lana said, always listening and watching.
Browning had driven back up the mountain thinking he would wait for Michael Pillston and his lover to go to bed and then break into the chalet and shoot both of them with the .38-caliber pistol Lana had stolen from a drawer in Michael’s bedside table, but now they were on the move, and another plan was forming in his head.
The snow earlier in the evening had left the roads in the mountains barely covered. It wasn’t terribly slippery, but the roads were slicker than normal, and these roads were dangerous under the most benign conditions. They were narrow and wound through the mountains like tangled snakes, full of sharp curves, steep grades, even switchbacks. As Pillston’s Volkswagen pulled onto the road and disappeared around a corner, Browning fired up the pickup, locked it into four-wheel drive, and pulled out of the logging road. He caught up to Pillston, who was driving slowly and carefully, in less than a minute. When Pillston pumped his brakes and slowed before a switchback, Browning pulled the wheel slightly to the left and hit the gas. His bumper struck the Volkswagen high on the trunk. The car spun off the road and disappeared immediately. Browning stopped the truck, got out, and walked over to the spot where Pillston went over the side. He could hear the car, still crashing through underbrush, trees, and rocks as he walked up, and then, as he looked over, it stopped, and he could see headlights several hundred feet below. Browning looked around and listened closely. He could see no other traffic, could hear no one coming.
He climbed back into the truck and headed back for Nashville, satisfied that no one in Pillston’s car could have survived.
PART III
CHAPTER 32
The last eight weeks leading up to the trial of Paul Milius were torturous for me, largely because I felt so guilty about the death of Michael Pillston back on Valentine’s Day. The news had reported that Pillston and his boyfriend, Lenny Brown, were killed in an accident. I’d asked Leon Bates to check with the sheriff in Sevier County, and Leon had done so. When he called me back, he said that it appeared Pillston and Brown had left their chalet while they were in the middle of cooking a meal, perhaps to go and get something they’d forgotten. Both men had low amounts of alcohol in their bloodstreams, and the police found two open bottles of wine in the chalet, but there was no alcohol in the car. The damage to the car had been catastrophic, as had been the damage to both Michael and Lenny’s skeletal systems. It had been snowing; the roads were slick. It was dark. Everything led to the conclusion that they’d been killed in an accident, but I couldn’t help feeling as though I was responsible after what I’d said to Carl Browning. I’d wanted a r
eaction from him, and I was afraid I’d gotten it. What was worse was that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it unless I wanted to kill Carl Browning. That, of course, was out of the question.
We kept digging, but as the trial date drew nearer, I became less and less optimistic. We had no real defense other than Paul’s denial, and Paul was going to make a bad witness. I felt like we had to put him on the stand. I’d always believed that juries wanted to hear “I didn’t do it” from the mouths of defendants, but some defendants were so unlikable that putting them on a witness stand was a huge risk. Paul Milius was one of those defendants. I could lead him through the direct examination and make him look presentable, but Pennington Frye, if he was worth a tinker’s damn, would make him look terrible on cross-examination. He’d paint him as a money-grubbing, power-hungry schmuck, and that’s pretty much what he was. Frye would also hammer him about being in Kasey’s room that night. I could try to rehabilitate him in front of the jury as best I could, but I wasn’t confident about it.
We also had no other suspects besides Lana, and I couldn’t use anything Alex Pappas or Tilly Hart had told me without having them sitting on the witness stand in front of the jury. Jack and Charlie had run down every contact we could find for both of them, and we’d come up empty. I’d even paid a Spanish-speaking, former FBI agent $50,000 to nose around Ecuador for two weeks, and all he came back with was a nice tan and a long sigh.
On the other hand, the prosecution hadn’t had any luck coming up with any admissible evidence of the affair between Paul Milius and Kasey Cartwright. I didn’t know whether Ronnie Johnson had run interference, whether the country music artists who had knowledge of the affair had refused to talk to the police, or whether they simply hadn’t tried all that hard. It had actually been a bit of a fluke that Jack had run across Derek Birch, and I doubted that Birch would have spoken to the police voluntarily, so maybe we were in the clear on that part of it. It wasn’t a home run, but it left the prosecution without a clear motive.
The trial was due to start in a week, and we were in court dealing with last-minute matters, not the least of which was a motion in limine I’d filed. In limine is a Latin term meaning “at the start,” or “on the threshold.” A motion is just a request. My motion in limine requested that Judge Graves exclude any evidence relating to Paul Milius’s sexual activities, including, but not limited to, extramarital affairs that had led to children born out of wedlock. I didn’t want the prosecution parading a line of women onto the witness stand who would testify they had slept with Paul Milius. The primary argument in excluding the evidence was that its probative value was grossly outweighed by the prejudicial effect it would have on the jury, and there was plenty of case law to back me up. But Pennington Frye had filed a written response, arguing that any evidence he presented regarding Paul Milius’s infidelities was evidence of his character, that his character was certainly relevant in a murder trial, and that the judge should allow him to call witnesses to prove infidelity.
“How many witnesses would you have, Mr. Frye?” Judge Graves asked after court was called to order and he had formally entered the written motion and response into the record.
“I could bring dozens,” Frye said, “but I’m willing to cut it down to six if Mr. Dillard will stipulate in front of the jury that his client has cheated on his wife with at least twenty different women and has four children out of wedlock for whom he pays child support.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I won’t stipulate a thing. None of it is relevant, Your Honor, and even if you found it to be relevant, it would be so prejudicial you’d have to exclude it. He’s on trial for murder, not for adultery.”
“But would you not agree that this adultery, especially in such excess, is evidence of his character?” the judge said.
“It might very well be,” I said. “So he’s a lousy husband and a womanizer. His libido is overactive, and his morals are questionable. That makes him a fine political prospect, but it doesn’t make him a murderer. If they had some evidence that he was having an affair with the victim, it might be different because it might be used to prove motive in regards to jealousy or rage or rejection, but as far as I know, there isn’t going to be any evidence presented of an affair between Mr. Milius and Miss Cartwright.”
“Is that right, Mr. Frye?” the judge said, looking over his reading glasses. “Do you have any evidence that there was a romantic relationship or sexual relationship between the defendant and the victim?”
“There are certainly plenty of rumors,” Frye said.
“Rumors are not admissible.”
“I know that, Judge. It’s frustrating because I’m convinced they were having an affair and that Miss Cartwright had broken it off not long before she was killed. But I don’t have a tape or a video or an eyewitness.”
“Then you’re out of luck,” Judge Graves said. “If the evidence you have of Mr. Milius’s sexual misconduct could somehow be connected to the victim, then I’d let it in. But the fact that he’s apparently been out chasing every skirt between Nashville and Timbuktu for the past several years isn’t really relevant to this case, and like Mr. Dillard said, it would be highly, highly prejudicial. So I’m going to exclude any testimony, or even any mention, of Mr. Milius’s adulterous conduct from the trial of this case. Am I clear on that, Mr. Frye?”
“Yes, your Honor.”
“Mention it and I’ll grant a mistrial immediately.”
“I understand,” Frye said.
I packed up my briefcase and headed toward the side exit that Pennington Frye had showed me back on the first day I’d come to court while the horde of media scrambled out of the courtroom behind me.
“Doesn’t really matter that he excluded it,” Frye said as we walked down a narrow back hall.
“Really? Why’s that?” I said.
“These reporters will have it all over the news, all over Twitter, all over Facebook, all over the blogs in ten minutes,” he said. “Everybody has a smart phone. There is absolutely no way you’re going to get a clean jury pool.”
CHAPTER 33
We spent two days picking a jury, the part of trial work I’d always found most grueling. When we were finished, we had eight men and four women, which I considered a victory. There were two African Americans (one woman and one man), one Mexican American man, and nine Caucasian Americans (three woman and six men.) They ranged in age from twenty-six to sixty-two, and they were a fairly intelligent group, which I also considered a victory. Prosecutors were notorious for dumbing down juries, for looking for simpletons with the hang-’em-high syndrome. I thought this group would at least listen to what I had to say, but as I’d learned over and over during my career as a trial lawyer—you just never, ever knew what a jury would do.
Prior to jury selection, Judge Graves had given a stern warning to everyone in the jury pool about using their cell phones during the selection process or the trial. He told them they would be sequestered, and he told them he would have their phones confiscated at the beginning of the trial and returned to them after the verdict. He also told them they would go straight to jail for contempt of court if any of them were caught even sniffing a smart phone while the trial was going on. I could see the changes in their faces while the judge talked to them. Some of them were visibly shocked, even terrified, at the idea of having to be without their phones for a few days. I even saw two women crying. And it made for some nice theater when the judge asked if anyone needed to be excused from jury duty. Dozens of them came up and made some of the lamest excuses I’d ever heard, (“I think my brain might be shrinking,” was the best), but eventually, we managed to get it done.
After the clerk handed out buttons for the jurors to wear and a short break, Judge Graves told Pennington Frye to make his opening statement. Frye stood and straightened his tie. What follows is a boiled-down version of what he said:
“This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen. Let me first set the stage. Paul Milius, th
e defendant, is the owner of Perseus Records, one of the most successful recording companies in the world. The victim, an eighteen-year-old country music artist named Kasey Cartwright, had been discovered by the defendant and had signed a record deal with his company. On the night of December tenth, there was a Country Music Television Awards show at the Bridgestone Arena in downtown Nashville. During that show, the defendant was seen arguing with Kasey Cartwright backstage. The argument became so heated that Miss Cartwright actually threw a full glass of iced tea into the defendant’s face.
“After the show was over, both the defendant and Miss Cartwright went to an after-party at an upscale downtown restaurant. The victim left early and was taken by limousine to the Plaza Hotel downtown, where her record company had booked a room for her. A little later, the defendant had his driver drop him off in the parking lot of the Plaza Hotel. The defendant instructed his driver to go home and then walked up to Kasey Cartwright’s room at approximately two in the morning. There is absolutely no doubt of that. The defendant was the last person to speak to Kasey Cartwright—the last person to see her alive.
“Kasey Cartwright was found dead in her room the following morning. An autopsy determined that she had been struck in the face and strangled, and a small piece of skin was found wedged between two of her teeth. That skin was removed and tested for DNA. The DNA test revealed that the skin wedged in Kasey Cartwright’s teeth belonged to the defendant. He had a small wound on his hand consistent with the circumstances I just described to you. He has admitted being in the defendant’s room. He has admitted to slapping her. But he says he didn’t kill her.
“The proof might be simple, but it is irrefutable. Paul Milius became enraged at Kasey Cartwright, he slapped her, and he strangled her. It was a classic crime of passion, one that cost a promising young star—a beautiful, innocent young girl—her life. Once you’ve seen the proof, there will be no doubt in your minds, and you’ll be comfortable in doing your duty, which will be to find this man guilty of second-degree murder.”