by Scott Pratt
I turned and looked at him, thinking I should probably keep my mouth shut. But the anger was sizzling, Hillbilly’s advice was echoing, and I couldn’t restrain myself.
“DuBose hired you?” I said. “What were your qualifications? Inbred ingrate? Is your mother your cousin? Do you read above a first-grade level? Doesn’t everybody start in the jail and then move out to patrol? Joe’s been dead two years and you’re still here. You must be a real mover and shaker.”
He grabbed a handful of my hair, slammed my forehead into the metal cell door, and punched me in the kidney. The blow to my head and the punch took me to one knee, but I managed to get back to my feet.
“I’m going to beat this charge,” I said through clenched teeth, “and then I’m going to come back here and stomp your ass. I’m sure you’ll still be around.”
He spun me around, pushed me flat against the cell door, and stuck the index finger of his right hand into my forehead just above my nose. The other guard who had walked with us had stepped to the side a few steps. I glanced at him but couldn’t read anything on his face.
“You ain’t gonna stomp nobody,” the DuBose hire hissed, “and you need to remember something. I fucking own you when you’re on this block.” The volume of his voice was building slowly. His face was turning pink; the veins in his neck and forehead were bulging. He was putting on a show for all of the inmates on the cellblock who were watching and listening. “This is MY block!” he yelled. “MY FUCKING BLOCK! You disrespect me on MY FUCKING BLOCK and I’m going to FUCK YOU UP! I’m going to put you in the FUCKING hospital. You got that, you pansy-ass, criminal-loving faggot?”
I thought “criminal-loving” must be a reference to my career as a defense attorney, and in that moment, it actually amused me. I suppose it was the completely overwhelming nature of everything that had happened over the past few days—the feelings of total helplessness and humiliation, the fear, the confusion, the anger—coupled with his ugly, spitting, yelling, redneck presence in my personal space that caused me to suddenly react without giving any thought to the consequences.
I truly didn’t care what happened when I head-butted him. I moved my head quickly to the side, which caused his finger to slip off my forehead and caused him to move a bit closer to me, and I slammed my skull into the bridge of his nose as hard as I could. I felt the cartilage in his nose give, saw the shower of blood, and within seconds, the two of them were on me, quickly followed by two more. They beat me savagely. Luckily, I was either knocked out or I passed out from the pain in less than two minutes.
A week later, after the arraignment, Grace Alexander showed up unexpectedly in the afternoon. I was in an “admin”—an isolation cell—chained to two thick, steel rings sticking up out of a concrete floor, when she arrived. I was sitting on the floor, but there was a concrete bench that served as a bed that ran along one wall and she sat down on it next to me.
“No wonder I had such a hard time getting in here to see you,” she said. “I had to practically get a court order. What happened?”
I lifted my head slowly. It hurt to breathe, let alone speak, but I managed to say, “You told me to get a cell to myself.”
“What? What are you talking about? Who did this?”
“A guard did it,” I said. “A couple of guards, maybe three or four. I’m not really sure. But I started it. It was the only way to guarantee a cell to myself. I had to fight the guards.”
“Fight the guards?” she said. “You mean physically fight them? You’re supposed to be a lawyer. Lawyers fight with principles and words.”
“This isn’t court,” I said, “and I’m an inmate, a prisoner. I’m not a lawyer in here. After you left last week when I was still at Blount County, I went back to my cell and asked my cellmate how I could get a cell to myself. He told me that if I start messing with the guards they’ll put me in a cell by myself so there won’t be any witnesses when they come beat the hell out of me. He said I have to fight them and fight hard, but if I chill out after a while, they’ll eventually quit beating me. They’ll also leave me in a cell by myself. It’s a respect thing. I don’t really understand it yet, but I’m working on it.”
“You should be in a hospital,” she said. “I’m going straight to the sheriff.”
“No, don’t do that. You’ll ruin what little I’ve managed to accomplish so far. These guards won’t respect me if you go crying to the sheriff. And I don’t need to be in a hospital. They know what they’re doing. I’m bruised all over, but there isn’t anything life-threatening. None of them want to get caught up in a killing.”
“So this is how you . . . how you—”
I managed to crack a smile.
“I did it all for you, my dear. Just so we could be alone.”
I started to chuckle but my ribs were bruised so badly I couldn’t. I must have cringed because her eyebrows curled into a look of sympathy.
“I heard what happened after court your first day,” she said. “Serving you with divorce papers when you walked out of the courtroom. That was really low, even for Clancy. They couldn’t have done it without his prior knowledge and approval.”
“He’s capable of much worse.”
“I wasn’t all that familiar with the situation between you and him,” she said, “so I did some research yesterday. I’m not sure I could have done what you did. It took a lot of courage.”
It was almost intoxicating, having her in the cell close to me. She was wearing clothes that were less formal than what she’d been wearing when I met her in Blount County and when she came to court—tight, faded jeans tucked into midcalf leather boots, a purple blouse, a white scarf tied loosely around her neck. Her hair was down, falling loosely in waves to her shoulders. The glasses still gave her a librarian, prudish kind of look, but she was a pretty prude. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, her fingers long and slim. And she smelled so good, so fresh, like a flower, lilac maybe. The combination of the look and the smell represented to me the freedom I’d taken for granted such a short time earlier. Grace Alexander became, in that brief encounter that day, a symbol of hope, and I think I began to love her for it.
“Courage?” I said as I pulled myself back to the moment. “I’m not sure courage is the right word. I was angry more than anything because of what he’d done to my uncle. I was reckless sometimes. It seems to be part of my nature.”
“You ousted him from the DA’s office. The red bandana campaign was a stroke of genius.”
“He beat himself,” I said. “He didn’t take his opponent Morris seriously because he’d become so arrogant. He certainly didn’t take me seriously. He regarded me as an insect, something to squash. He still does. Do you know he used to keep a miniature replica of an electric chair on his desk?”
Grace shook her head.
“Can you imagine? That’s the way he thinks of himself, though. Judge, jury, and executioner. I assume you’ve been in his new office?”
Grace nodded. “Sure. Plenty of times.”
“No electric chair?”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Then Blackburn must have told him to tone it down. He hasn’t changed at all, though. I could see it in his eyes in court. He’s going to do anything he can to convict me and send me to prison for the rest of my life.”
“Speaking of, I got a partial witness list from him this morning.”
“Yeah? Who’s on it?”
“Your wife, for starters. Your secretary, the victim’s mother, a Knoxville cop named Olivia Denton, another cop named Bob Ridge, an FBI agent named Paul Freeman, a man named James Tipton, Junior, a man named Hobart Godsey, plus the medical examiner and any other experts they might call.”
“I wonder how they got to James Tipton,” I said.
Tipton being on their list wasn’t good. I’d thought he would be a witness for me, that he would come in and tell the jury th
at I’d tried to hire him but then I’d called it off.
“He’s the former client, right? The one you went to see?”
“Right. There’s no way he would come to them voluntarily. I was going to ask you to interview him and consider calling him as a witness. I wonder what in the hell he’s going to say.”
“I’ll put an investigator on it and find out,” she said.
“And who is Hobart Godsey?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just got these names. I was hoping you could help me out.”
“No idea,” I said.
“There’s something else I’ve found that bothers me,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve told me you don’t hunt. You don’t own a rifle, have fired one only a few times, and you don’t ever hunt.”
“Right, so?”
“The FBI found a tree stand in your garage when they searched your house. It’s on Clancy’s discovery list. He’s going to introduce it at trial.”
“What? A tree stand? In my garage? Where in my garage?”
“Doesn’t say exactly. Why would you have a tree stand in your garage?”
“I don’t. I mean, I didn’t. There was no tree stand in my garage.”
“You haven’t been in the house all that long, right? Any chance it was left by the former owners?”
“It was new. We bought it new. I’m telling you, there was no tree stand in my garage. They must have planted it.”
“Who? The FBI? We’re not really going to go down that road, are we?”
“Whoever is trying to frame me for this murder must have planted it,” I said.
“Fine, think about it some more and we’ll talk about it again soon. In the meantime, I know a lot of lawyers don’t like to do this, but I’d like to hear the truth from you, Darren. Tell me everything. Exactly the way you remember it.”
I leaned back against the concrete, took as deep a breath as I could without cringing, and started talking. I told her the whole story, from the meeting with Jordan to being arrested at the restaurant. When I was finished, she put her hands on her knees, dropped her chin, and started staring at her boots.
“As I see it, then,” she said, “our defense will be—and this is the macro version—that Jalen Jordan threatened to kill your son during a conversation you and he had at your office. He then went to your son’s school and waited until your mother picked your son up, and then he followed them to your mother’s house. You were already alarmed, but when you found out he had followed your mother and Sean to your mother’s home you became even more terrified. In a moment of desperation, you went to James Tipton’s house—a former client whom you knew to have violent tendencies—and you gave him fifty thousand dollars to kill Jordan. The next morning, however, you went back and called the whole thing off because, as I understand it, your mother told you to and you came to your senses. After that, you hid out for a couple of days and by complete coincidence, somebody else killed Jordan. Is that right?”
“That’s pretty much it,” I said quietly.
“And you also let Tipton keep the fifty thousand dollars.”
“I did.”
I shook my head and took a slow, deep breath. For the millionth time, I asked myself, What were you thinking? How could you possibly have wrapped yourself up in this? The facts were an absolute nightmare for any lawyer, any defendant. If I’d been representing someone who told me a similar story, I’d have started talking to him or her about making the best deal possible and entering a plea.
“Do you realize how difficult this is going to be, Darren?”
“I know it looks bad, but I’m innocent. I didn’t do it. That’s a fact . . . the most important fact.”
“Do you have any idea who killed Jalen Jordan?”
I shook my head. “I don’t. I really don’t.”
“Then we’re in for a war,” she said, “and to be honest, if I was betting, my money would be on Ben Clancy. But I took it upon myself to put a bug in the ear of a friend of mine at the Knoxville News Sentinel.”
She reached into her briefcase, pulled out a section of the newspaper, and held it up for me to see. A banner headline on the front page said “Did Accused Lawyer Shoot Serial Child Killer?”
“They’re going absolutely crazy over this,” Grace said as I skimmed through the story. It speculated that Jalen Jordan was the only suspect in the murders of the two boys and that the FBI had evidence in its possession that was taken from Jalen’s van and matched the boys’ DNA. “Every paper, every television station, the Internet, it’s going viral.”
“That’s nice,” I said, “but the accused lawyer didn’t shoot anybody.”
She folded up the paper, looking slightly offended, put it back in her briefcase, and stood to leave.
“It’s a start toward jury nullification,” she said. “A damned good start. And you’re welcome.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I’d been in jail for exactly two weeks before my mother was able to get in to see me. She came into the visiting room at the Knoxville jail with the skin on her face looking a bit loose and shadowy circles beneath her eyes. She was on the other side of a piece of Plexiglas and we had to speak through old, hand-held phone receivers that crackled and cut out completely on occasion. As soon as she saw me, tears fell from both of her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” I said. “This is hard enough.”
“You look terrible, Darren. What are they doing to you in here?”
“Nothing I haven’t deserved. And you don’t look so good yourself.”
“What are they doing? Are they beating you?”
“Not so much now,” I said. “The news coverage about Jalen Jordan has eased things up a lot.”
“Why haven’t you called me?”
“Because I only get out of the cell for about a half an hour a day, and every time I get out they tell me the phones aren’t working. Besides, it’s ridiculously expensive and we both need to accept that I’m in here for a long time. We need to deal with it. Calling you would only make me miss being free even more than I already do.”
“Please call me once in a while,” she said. “I want to hear your voice.”
I nodded and asked the question that had been tormenting me. “How’s Sean?”
She looked down and folded her hands together.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Katie won’t let me see him.”
“Miserable bitch,” I said. “Small-minded, cheating, geezer-screwing bitch. I can’t say it surprises me, though. Do you plan to do anything about it?”
“Of course I’m going to do something about it. Sean needs me now more than ever. Can you imagine what Katie is saying about you? She’ll have him thinking you’re Hitler reincarnated before it’s over.”
“He doesn’t know who Hitler is, Mom.”
“Well, Godzilla reincarnated then. Or some kind of evil dragon.”
“Do you know the process? You have to file a petition in juvenile court and ask the judge to order Katie to let you see him. You’ll have to hire a lawyer.”
“I’ve talked to more lawyers in the past week than I care to remember. They’re really sleazy, Darren. Are you like that?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I try not to be sleazy, but sometimes it just sort of comes with the territory.”
“I’ve spoken to a couple of lawyers besides the people I talked to about being able to see Sean. I think I can hire somebody for you.”
“Don’t even tell me their names,” I said. “I have a perfectly good lawyer, and she’s free. You’ve met her, right? You’ve talked to her a couple of times.”
“I have . . . I’ve met her and she seems very bright and very capable. But she’s so young.”
“I was young when I got Uncle Tommy out of prison.”
“You had help, though. You had Richie.”
“She has help, too, Mom. First of all, she has me. I’m not exactly in my right mind these days, and I realize that, but I still have a lot of experience as a lawyer and I can help her out if she needs it. There are also older lawyers in her office. I know a couple of them and they’re very good. If she needs help with something, I’m sure all she has to do is ask. And they have their own investigators. I think she’ll do a good job. She’s already tried fifteen cases and she’s been on the job only three years. Most lawyers don’t try fifteen cases in their entire careers. And the last thing I want you doing is spending your life’s savings on lawyers. Do you know how many miserable scumbags have come into my office over the past seven years depending on their mommies to pay their way out of trouble? I’m not going to be one of those guys.”
We sat there looking at each other for a few minutes, mother and son, barely able to comprehend the situation that faced us. Thinking about what Katie had done made me want to scream, to jump up and start destroying everything around me, but I knew it would result only in my being thrown into the admin cell for a couple of days. And at some level, I’d known Katie would do what she’d done as soon as they led me out of the restaurant in handcuffs. She had seized the high ground now and was lobbing artillery shells on me. She’d blow me to bits if she could. Had the situation been reversed, I like to think I would have put Sean’s needs first and I would have made sure he had contact with his mother. But the situation wasn’t reversed. It was what it was and I had to accept it. Besides, when I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t want Sean seeing me confined by the concrete and the steel and the bars and the windows. I didn’t want to talk to him through an ancient phone. He wouldn’t have understood why I couldn’t lift him in my arms and kiss him on the cheek and hug him like I always had. He wouldn’t understand why his dad couldn’t leave and come home with him. As I thought about him, tears began to well in my eyes and I swallowed hard. Don’t show weakness. Don’t ever show weakness.