Blood of Angels
Page 1
BLOOD of ANGELS
A Novel
REED ARVIN
your spirit is great
it will live forever
Contents
CHAPTER 1
I am the Assistant district attorney of Davidson County,Tennessee,…
CHAPTER 2
I leave the 222 West Building in downtown Nashville in…
CHAPTER 3
It’s fifteen minutes before nine the next morning when I…
CHAPTER 4
“That didn’t go well.”
CHAPTER 5
The weekend comes, and I miss Jazz like hell. This…
CHAPTER 6
Hovering over our heads like the angel of death is…
CHAPTER 7
we show up at the office about 3:30, half expecting…
CHAPTER 8
Dr. Tina Gessman, staff psychologist for the Metro Davidson County…
CHAPTER 9
I have a smashed nose. Not bad smashed—not boxer…
CHAPTER 10
As a senior Prosecutor with Carl, I have enjoyed one…
CHAPTER 11
We sit inside Rayburn’s car back at 222 West, but…
CHAPTER 12
By morning the rain clears out, leaving behind a stifling,…
CHAPTER 13
Banana. cup of Peet’s . Daily Zoloft. Breakfast, in other words.
CHAPTER 14
Monday. Eggs, Bacon; coffee, immaculately prepared, then the blue pill.
CHAPTER 15
Rita West and I are seated in the hallway outside…
CHAPTER 16
Six o’clock the next morning, Tuesday. The Tennessean, open to…
CHAPTER 17
Rhonda Hartlett, Tamra’s mother, wears a blue, kneelength dress, high…
CHAPTER 18
Coffee and Zoloft, but no run. There are two days…
CHAPTER 19
I head to Paul Landmeyer’s office, hoping to get a…
CHAPTER 20
That night, I don’t sleep well. I wake in the…
CHAPTER 21
The unofficial “Paul Landmeyer Saved Our Asses” party—precursor by only…
CHAPTER 22
I make it back to 222 West just before 7:00 a.m.,…
CHAPTER 23
My hand is on the cell phone before I’m fully…
CHAPTER 24
When I killed Wilson Owens, he died according to the…
CHAPTER 25
We cling to each other, waiting for the ambulance. Jazz…
CHAPTER 26
Bridges and Fiona sit at the opposite end of the…
CHAPTER 27
The Scar, Sarandokos assures Me, is something he can make…
CHAPTER 28
The thirty-six-foot boat cuts a clear path through the water,…
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY REED ARVIN
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
CHAPTER
1
I AM THE ASSISTANT district attorney of Davidson County, Tennessee, and on May 18, 2004, I killed Wilson Owens. He was determined, and I was willing. We were like lovers, in that way. Wilson pursued me with a string of petty thefts and miscellaneous criminal acts—working his way through his lesser loves—until he could wait for our union no longer. On that day—three years, two months, and eleven days before his own death—Owens killed Steven Davidson, the manager of the Sunshine Grocery Store in east Nashville. The moment Wilson’s bullet entered Davidson’s chest, the dance between us began.
I mention these names because it’s important in my line of work that they are remembered. Both are dead, and both are lamented by their families. Ironically, both have gravestones in the same cemetery, Roselawn Memorial Gardens, in east Nashville; Wilson is buried underneath a flat, nondescript stone inscribed only with his name and the duration of his life. A hundred and fifty yards away, Davidson lies beneath an ornate, marble monument paid for by his numerous friends, fellow churchgoers, and family.
Wilson was what society calls a bad man. The truth, as usual, is more complex. What is certain is that his life went off the rails as a teenager, when his father—a man to whom the notion of family responsibility was as alien as a day without alcohol—took a final uppercut at his mother and walked out the door. From those sullen seeds Wilson grew, nurtured in the subculture of the Nashville projects, until he emerged, at eighteen years old, already twice a father, already once a felon. His destiny was sealed, as was mine.
I was born to kill Wilson Owens as surely as he was born to be my victim. This is clear only in retrospect, of course. When I was growing up in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a civilian airplane mechanic who worked at McConnell Air Force Base, the idea that I would one day kill a man was as distant from my mind as India. My father’s world was full of wrenches, grease, and secondhand tales of pilot braggadocio. I loved that world nearly as much I loved my father. In those days of blissfully low security, I would ride my bike from home to the base, wave at the bored guards, and screech to a halt outside the hanger 3, where my father worked. I would watch him clamber inside one of the huge General Electric engines hanging under the wing of a tanker, or, perched on his shoulders, I would peer inside the still-warm tailpipe of an F-15 fighter. He and the other workers wore flattop haircuts, black shoes, and the gray coveralls of Faris Aircraft, the company that subcontracted the overflow aircraft maintenance work at the base. I wore my hair the same way, even though in the early eighties this had all the cachet of a funeral director. It didn’t matter. To identify with my father and the easygoing men of his world was all that mattered.
My mother lived in an entirely different world, one which I generally viewed with suspicion. A legal secretary, she worked in the grandly named but decrepit Century Plaza Building, an aging structure with noisy plumbing and elevators with doors that had to be manually pulled shut. The few times I went there—no more than five or six in my entire childhood—confirmed to me that the world of suits, ties, and paper-pushing was greatly inferior to the vibrant, masculine world of my father. My father’s coworkers were muscular, told dirty jokes, and had eyes that sparkled when they roughhoused. The men of my mother’s world all seemed slick, dark-haired, and smiling with secret agendas. That my mother seemed so completely at home in this world haunted me then, and now that I occupy the same world myself, haunts me still. To my surprise, I am more my mother’s son than my father’s, although physically I am his younger picture. I have his photograph before me now, as I sit at my desk at the DA’s office on a gray, August afternoon. He is bare-chested, his wide-open smile pointed at the camera, a cigarette in his left hand, ready to fix any airplane that happens to roll by. Looking at his smile, I can almost believe he could fix the world.
On the day he died—having fallen thirty-eight feet from the wing of an AC-130 Hercules onto the griddle-hot asphalt beneath the plane, breaking his neck as cleanly as a chicken’s wishbone—the world as I had known it ceased to exist. I spent the next year or so trying to bring him back, which my current profession has long since taught me is impossible. But at eighteen, the answer to my problems seemed to involve smoking a good deal of dope, drinking beer, and arguing with my mother over the direction of my life. Predictably, I wanted to join the military. She wanted me to go to college and become a lawyer. The compromise was inevitable: I agreed to go to college if I could be in ROTC, which paid my tuition in exchange for two years of active service. Since my father left us little, my mother could hardly refuse. I enrolled at Wichita State, and somewhere between marching for ROTC and an English class I found the part of my mother inside my
self that I had denied. I was a hell of a student and a hell of a recruit. I put the two together, traded two more years of active duty with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for law school, and in 1992 walked out of Vanderbilt Law a second lieutenant ready to fulfill my commitment to the army.
My time in JAG’s Corps offered definitive proof that of every ten people who join the military because they think it will keep them out of trouble, two are probably deluding themselves. There are thousands of admirable men and women in the army, but they don’t interface with the JAG’s Corps. My clientele bore a remarkable resemblance to the very people I would later prosecute when I returned to Nashville to take a job in the DA’s office. I began with smaller cases, like insubordination, forgery, and failure to pay child support. Eventually, I was given more responsibility, taking on cases regarding drugs, rape, spousal abuse, and, on one occasion, even murder. Looking back on it, I can see that Wilson Owens and I were moving up the ladder of serious crimes together, although on different sides of the law. Destiny was pushing us toward each other and the moment of our consummation. By the time I met Owens, I felt I had known him all my life.
Moments of destiny rarely announce themselves. Even a few hours ago—just before all hell broke loose—I had no idea that the death of Wilson Owens was about to explode back into my life like a car wreck. I was back at my alma mater, Vanderbilt Law, pitching the DA’s office as a career to the third-year students. This was a fool’s errand, since the starting salary is thirty-nine thousand a year, with raises of two thousand for each year’s service. After nine years, an impressive string of victories, and recently becoming lead prosecutor on capital crimes, I now am the proud possessor of a fifty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year salary, about twenty thousand a year less than the students before me at Vanderbilt hoped to make their first year out. In other words, I might as well have been asking them to join the circus. But I was enjoying myself anyway. I wore my best suit—the light wool Joseph Abboud I save for closing arguments—and the black Magli shoes, for which I paid nearly a week’s salary. The irony that I bought these clothes for the Wilson Owens closing argument—it was broadcast on Court TV, and I didn’t want to look like a cliché of the old-fashioned southern lawyer—had not yet descended on me. The students who looked down at me from their plush theater seating had a lot to learn, too. They didn’t yet know that they would eventually become as familiar with the case of Tennessee vs. Owens as their own names, as would the students of every major law school in the country. Destiny was marching toward us, and we didn’t have a clue.
I made my points well, stressing that there was more to life than money. “Working for the DA’s office is a passion, not just a career,” I said. “The DA’s office is a family, where people take care of each other. It’s a great place to work, and I’ve never regretted my decision.” The crowd looked bored, so I changed my approach. I turned off the lapel microphone and stuffed it in my coat pocket. I stepped off the podium and walked up to the front row of students, stopping in front of a cute brunette wearing thin, wire-rimmed glasses. “How much are you going to owe when you graduate?” I asked. Silence settled on the crowd as the topic turned to one they truly cared about: student loans.
“Eighty-one thousand dollars,” the girl said.
Nervous laughter spread across the room. “Eighty-one thousand,” I repeated. “So why would somebody with that much debt want to work at the DA’s office? You make a lot more in torts, helping people sue each other over their imagined slights. Maybe go for malpractice. You could make TV ads begging out-of-work women watching Jerry Springer to give you a call about the pain in their sciatica.” More laughter now, and I could tell I was hitting home. “Or maybe you could get a little DUI work. I could read your ad in that little window above the urinal at my favorite bar. It’s the Willie Sutton principle: Why do lawyers advertise in bars? It’s where the drunks are.” I had them now; they were laughing, letting down their guard. “Look, if you want to be a hamster on a wheel, fine. I just don’t see the point of getting a law degree to do it.” I paused, letting my point sink in. “You want to know what I did last Friday? I sat in my office with a mother and a father whose son was murdered in a gang fight. The kid wasn’t in the gang; he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. There he was, walking down the street in the projects, and somebody says something, and the kid tries to defend himself, and things get out of hand. And now her son is dead. This kid’s parents sat in my office wanting something so pure and beautiful that the word sits lovely in my mouth: justice.”
Every eye was locked on me now, soaking in my words. I loved this part of it, the drama, the wordplay, like an actor with a well-written script. “So they come to me to make their world right again,” I said. “I imagine that while I was talking to that family, somewhere in the Seagram’s building there was a lawyer making several times more money than I did that day. Maybe he was making sure that a big real estate deal had all its i ’s dotted and its t ’s crossed, so nobody got sued later over parking lot rights. He wants to make sure nobody gets a dent in their Mercedes. And you know what? That lawyer can kiss my ass.”
Sporadic applause broke out over the room, which was all the victory I would have, and all I needed. I had held them in my thrall for a while, like the experienced prosecutor I was, but I knew the spell would be broken as soon as the show was over. I was talking now for my own amusement, so I saw no reason not to enjoy myself. “Look,” I said, “I know about the loans. You kidding me? I did it the hard way. I graduated from this auspicious institution courtesy of ROTC, baby, which meant I owed the U.S. Army four years in JAG Corps to pay my debt. And yeah, they make the lawyers go through basic training, just like everybody else. Compared to that, you guys are getting off cheap.” I stuck my hand in my pocket, the trademark “aw shucks, Atticus Finch” move that worked so well at disarming juries. “Thing is,” I said, “you can hunt clients—do the whole, join the country club, hand out business cards, kiss-ass rigamarole—or you can do something with your life that matters. You can put away the bad guys, and that still gets me up in the morning like the very first day I signed on with the DA. That’s the kind of law I’m proud to practice. I get to set the balance of scales back to where they belong. That’s power. If that sounds like something you want to try, I’m glad to hang around for a while and answer questions. Thanks for your time.”
More applause broke out, but it was short-lived, and within a few seconds the students began gathering their belongings. Thirty-nine thousand a year. Probably about the size of their first year’s mortgage payments. I watched the crowd file out, until the last student slung her book bag over her shoulder and left. I turned and shrugged at Louis Donahue, the instructor of Criminal Procedure II. “This time they stayed to the end,” I said, smiling. “Last year a half dozen walked out halfway through.”
Donahue laughed. “We had somebody from Baker and Stewart in here last week. He was handing out business cards like candy. I had to escort him out of the room so he wouldn’t get trampled.”
“Yeah, well, the dark side is strong.”
“Ever think about crossing over? A defense attorney armed with what you know could be a millionaire in five years.”
“Do I think about it? Just every day, Louis. Just every damn day.”
Donahue smiled. “See you next year, Thomas.”
I picked up my jacket. “Thanks, Louis. See you then.”
I left the Vanderbilt Law School Building and walked across the small parking lot to my pickup. Halfway across I reached in my pocket and turned on my cell phone, which I had switched off just before I began my speech. It rang five seconds later. “Dennehy,” I said.
“Thomas?” It was the voice of Jeff Stillman, a young assistant who had just joined the office a few months earlier. “You got to come in, like now.”
“Hold on to your pants, Stillman, I got to go by and pick up my daughter a birthday present.”
“I think you’re going to want to do
that another time.”
“You’re probably wrong about that.”
“Listen, Thomas, I’m serious. The DA wants you here ASAP.”
“What’s the big deal?”
Stillman’s young, ambitious voice said eight words: “Have you ever heard of the Justice Project?”
THERE ARE FOUR of us in the room. Along with myself, there is David Rayburn, the district attorney. Rayburn is fifty-two years old, wears his dark, gray-streaked hair combed back, and is a career politician. His wet dream is to shake the U.S. attorney general’s hand, a desire soon to be fulfilled since he just wrote a one-thousand-dollar check to the Committee to Reelect the President. He is not in any practical sense a lawyer, but he is a talented administrator, which is actually more his job. Also in the room is Carl Becker, my partner and a towering figure in Nashville legal circles. A prosecutor for thirty-one years, Carl has worked with me for the last seven. I learned the intricacies of criminal procedure at his feet, and he was an affable teacher. He is loved everywhere he goes, and hasn’t paid for a drink for a decade. If I have a hero in my life, it is Carl. He is a little more than a week from a much-earned retirement, which he looks forward to with the same anticipation he would living in a dry county. He is wearing his trademark gray suit, of which he owns five identical copies. He accentuates this sameness with a spectacular collection of ties, my favorite of which is a Christmas version featuring a holiday pattern made up of—only upon the closest inspection—tiny reindeer caught in flagrante delicto. This bit of X-rated absurdity is typical of his sense of humor, which is prurient, utterly male, and one of the things I will miss most when he’s gone. Two years ago every prosecutor in the office attended mandatory PC sensitivity training, after which, Carl stood up and said in a loud, clear voice, “Jesus Christ, I need a drink.”