The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  Dismemberment will almost always trump hormones.

  So while the Palazzo girls were ahead of their age both physically and socially, the only overt male attention they received came from a handful of other extended family members who attended the school. At least half were cousins, and the others tended to be cocky and crude.

  Therefore, most of the guests at DeBrocco’s shop that day were adults, contributing to the growing pile of money-stuffed birthday cards primarily as a gesture of respect to Leo.

  Yet Leo looked uncomfortable, partly because the music the twins had selected was vexing to his ears. He was also aggravated by the inevitable surveillance, occasionally peering out of the one large window and shaking his head at the row of unmarked police vehicles occupying most of an adjoining block.

  “Bastards,” he muttered. “You’d think they’d at least leave us some place to park.”

  Of course, Leo was well aware that he and his associates attracted lawmen the way dogs attract ticks in summer. He had chosen DeBrocco’s to host the party for precisely that reason—the local, state and federal police already knew that it was occasionally used as a mob meeting place, and thus they could learn nothing new. The last thing he wanted was for them to aggravate and titillate the neighbors in his upscale subdivision.

  “Last time I checked, there was no law against giving my grandkids a birthday party,” he said to DeBrocco. “They’re just trying to bust my balls. Screw them.”

  Around four, when the girls had begun tearing open the stack of envelopes with squeals of delight, Castelli and about a half-dozen others shut the door of Denny’s office on the giddy scene outside.

  Since most of the family members who mattered were already there, Leo reasoned, why not have a meeting?

  Denny had a personal interest in this small gathering, because his future with the organization was uncertain. Not that he would ever be laid off or fired—a made gang member has a job for life—but the word was out that the feds were close to bringing down the shaky underpinnings holding up his phantom business. It was probably time to shutter DeBrocco’s and transfer Castelli’s money-laundering arm somewhere else.

  Not the most ambitious soldier in Castelli’s army, Denny had come to regard his peculiar status as the Maytag Man with equal parts boredom and comfort. The idea of being thrust out onto the front lines chilled him.

  But Leo didn’t address this issue during the brief meeting, most of which concerned the Northwest Extension disaster of the previous year.

  “We’ve been able to make up the difference for Carmine,” Castelli said, “but it took a bite out of us. We got overhead, just like any other business. We got people on our payroll, even though we don’t really got a payroll.”

  His gaze moved pointedly around the room, lingering briefly on each of the men who were, in effect, his employees.

  “So what we gotta do is get off our asses and get a connection down south somewhere where we can dump the waste and make more money. We might have something going on in this backwater county in Virginia, but it’s tricky. When you get into landfills, you’ve got to deal with government.”

  He went on to explain that three of the five members of the Randolph County Board of Supervisors were pro-landfill—or at least able to consider it the lesser of two evils. Two were against.

  “They’re going to be kicking it around most of the year,” Castelli said, “and we expect a vote around the fall. The thing is, we have to stay way in the background on this. The last thing those guys in our corner need to hear is that people like us are behind the deal. That’s a tough sell. So we’re fronting some of the money for another company that’s got no baggage, and they’re getting the land from a local.”

  “With all due respect,” said Chuck Melfa, “what’s this got to do with the rest of us?”

  “I’m open to some deals. If you sweeten the pot for me month-to-month, I’ll see that you get cut in on the profits when this goes down.”

  Then the excited voices of Adrianna and Alessia penetrated the closed door, and the bass thump of the music started up again.

  Across the room from Leo, Vince Palazzo smiled.

  “I better get out there before they tear Denny’s place down,” he said.

  The men stood up to leave, but Castelli laid a hand on Denny’s shoulder.

  “I got something I want to talk to you about.” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  URBAN MURDER, SMALL TOWN JUSTICE

  It was mid-April before Wardell Franklin finally got the opportunity to face judge and jury in the Randolph County Courthouse.

  He was escorted down from Lynchburg by Sheriff Inge himself, accompanied by Henry Massenburg, and spent the night before the trial as the only guest of the Randolph County jail. “Did you and Wardell have a nice chat last night?” Fogarty asked Massenburg as they walked into the courtroom.

  “Naw, he didn’t have much to say,” the deputy replied. “I thought maybe we could share a little crack, but he said he didn’t have any on him.”

  The courtroom was almost full by the time Circuit Court Judge Norman Booth entered from a door behind the bench. It was mostly an older crowd, because the trial started on a Wednesday when most Randolph Countians were working or home with small children, and it was obviously an effort for some of the creakier spectators to obey Bailiff Richard Goodwin’s order to “Please rise.”

  Like Friday night high school football, the local courts offered the closest thing to entertainment in Randolph County. Better yet, they were free.

  Franklin’s attorney was Albert Ritchie from Richmond, best known in the capital for standing six-seven and once playing a reserve role on the University of Virginia basketball team. He was court-appointed, but saw a murder trial as a positive addition to his resume, win or lose.

  He had wanted to dress Franklin up in a suit and tie, but the chief jailer balked at that.

  “If he were to escape,” Ritchie was told, “we wouldn’t want him to blend in so easily.”

  Therefore, the defendant sat slouched in a front bench in his orange jail jumpsuit. Ritchie thought of raising an objection with the judge, then decided it would be counterproductive so early in the proceeding.

  Jury selection the day before had been somewhat ego deflating for Eddie Fogarty. More often than not, prospective jurors asked if they might be affected by pre-trial publicity answered, “What publicity?”

  “Well, the local newspaper, for one,” Knight tossed back at one Conway farmer.

  “I never read that rag,” the farmer replied.

  Perhaps out of boredom, the local citizens seemed anxious to serve on the jury. They actually did know very little about the case and showed great disinterest in whether one Richmond thug had shot another. Good riddance.

  For them, it was just something different to do, and it made them feel important.

  In his opening statement, Knight used this hyper-local perspective to his advantage.

  “You might feel that this case has nothing to do with you,” he said, pacing back and forth before the jury seats, “but it does. There have been too many times when out-of-town thugs and killers have brought the dead bodies they created to our area to dump, like bags of garbage. That, to me, shows an appalling lack of respect for our county. It wastes the time of our law enforcement people, it puts our citizens at risk, and this is a chance to demonstrate that we won’t put up with it.”

  Sheriff Inge, seated nearby, nodded his head.

  “Also, ladies and gentlemen, justice is justice, whether a crime happens here or in Richmond or in Timbuktu. Now some of you are thinking it’s just one drug dealer killing another, but that’s a slippery slope.”

  Knight, who always practiced his opening statements on his wife, allowed his voice to rise.

  “Murder is never, ever, okay. And you’re going to hear eye-witness testimony that the victim, Theo Moore, was not in the same class as the men who kidnapped and killed him. He was no drug dealer, an
d he didn’t deserve that kind of fate.”

  Fogarty, sitting next to Randolph County Administrator Johnnie West, whispered, “If Barney doesn’t get a murder conviction, he’s going for a lesser charge of littering.”

  When his turn came, Ritchie took the unusual tactic of laying out a Plan A and Plan B simultaneously.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, bending down slightly from his great height, “you’re going to hear from one of the men in the car that night, and he’s going to tell you that he saw Wardell Franklin pull the trigger. But there were three men running through that field, and Mr. Franklin wasn’t the only one with a reason to fire those shots. No murder weapon was ever recovered.”

  “Mr. Morgan, the state’s witness, has admitted that he woke up from dozing in the back seat of that car and saw what happened to Mr. Moore from a distance. It was a cornfield, which must have made it hard to see through the plants. Can we be sure that he knows for sure who pulled the trigger?”

  So much for Plan A—his client was innocent by reasonable doubt. But if that didn’t work…

  “And even if Mr. Franklin did shoot Mr. Moore,” Ritchie continued, “it does not rise to the level of first-degree murder. We will hear testimony that my client was thoroughly intimidated by his employer, a Mr. B. T. Dawkins. He knew that if Mr. Moore escaped, his boss would be extremely upset. He also knew that some of those who upset Mr. Dawkins were never heard from again.”

  “Mr. Moore’s escape was sudden and unexpected, but if Mr. Franklin was the only person in the car with him, it was his responsibility. He knew that if Mr. Moore escaped, his own life was in danger.”

  “I’m not telling you that what happened to Mr. Moore, whoever shot him, was right. But it was not premeditated.”

  The first witness was Dr. Nathan Upshaw, chief medical examiner for several Southside counties, who testified that Moore had received a .9mm slug in his upper back and another in the back of the head.

  “Was the wound to the back enough to kill him?” Knight asked in cross examination.

  “It’s hard to say,” Upshaw told him, “but the second one—the one to the back of the head—certainly was.”

  “And from your examination, that second shot appeared to have been fired from close range?”

  “Yes.”

  “Execution style?”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  The commonwealth’s attorney was obviously taking dead aim at Ritchie’s Plan B.

  This was Fogarty’s first murder trial, and he was enjoying it immensely.

  He loved the courtroom, which looked like something out of a John Grisham novel. Fat pillars framed the judge’s bench, former church pews served as seats for the spectators; the wooden floors were cracked and worn. Paintings of every Circuit Court judge since Jefferson’s day lined the institutional white walls, none of them smiling.

  Court cases provided all the quotes a reporter could stuff into his notebook, without the need to ask any questions himself. Someone else did that, and everything that was said was libel-free.

  True, some murder trials could be a grind, grueling days eaten up by jargonize expert discussions of this or that bloodstain and where it was found, the significance of fingerprints or footprints or tire marks. In this instance, none of these factors existed. Basically, the verdict would revolve around the testimony of Lamond Morgan.

  Ritchie had flirted with the idea of summoning forth some members of the Richmond underworld who could testify to the fierceness of B.T. Dawkins when he felt he had been disappointed. But that would ultimately reflect badly on his client. Why would he go to work for such a terrible person?

  Another possibility was Cilla Moss, the woman for whose sake Theo Moore ultimately gave his life, but Ritchie learned she had died of an overdose two months earlier.

  So it was all up to Lamond, who took the stand after most of the spectators and lawyers took their lunch break at either Sugar’s or the Railroad Diner.

  “Sugar’s in heaven right now,” Johnnie West said as he and Fogarty stood in a line outside.

  If nothing else, Barney Knight had won the attire competition—unlike Wardell Franklin, Lamond Morgan did wear a suit, and looked good in it.

  Prodded occasionally by a helpful Barney Knight, he relayed pretty much the same story he had told Fogarty. The original intent was only to scare Theo and that involved a ride outside the Richmond city limits as far as Randolph County. The car pulled over about two miles outside of Jefferson Springs so that Eugene Brown could relieve himself. Theo Moore took the opportunity to try and escape. Lamond looked outside and saw Franklin in pursuit of Moore, whom he then shot in the back. Moments later, there was another shot.

  “Why didn’t they just leave the body in the cornfield instead of dumping it over by the Hardees?” Knight asked.

  “Because Eugene and Wardell were scared they might have left some evidence there. They couldn’t find one of the shell casings.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We just put Theo in the trunk until they found a good place to dump him out.”

  Knight seemed to consider this for a moment before telling the judge, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Ritchie then walked up to confront Lamond as if he were stepping to the foul line in a close basketball game, his face stern but confident.

  “Mr. Morgan,” he said, “you have testified that you saw Mr. Franklin shoot Mr. Moore in the back, am I right?”

  Lamond nodded.

  “And that is, indeed, the same man seated over there, the defendant.”

  Again, Lamond bobbed his head.

  “Could you speak up, Mr. Morgan?” Ritchie said. “The jury needs to hear you.”

  “Yes sir,” Lamond replied.

  “And you also saw Mr. Franklin shoot Mr. Moore in the head, to finish him off?”

  Lamond paused.

  “Not really,” he said. “It was too far away.”

  Fogarty looked over at Barney Knight in time to see him wince.

  “So is it possible that Eugene Brown might have taken the gun from my client and fired that shot?”

  “I guess,” Lamond said, his voice having lost its former authority.

  “And having just woken up, looking out through sleepy eyes, through a cornfield, at a distance of maybe fifty yards, how could you possibly tell that it was Wardell Franklin and not Eugene Brown who was in pursuit of the victim?”

  “Because of that limp,” Lamond said. “Wardell limps. He took a bullet in his kneecap a few years ago. He was too gimpy to catch Theo, so he had to shoot him.”

  Barney Knight almost leaped from his seat.

  “Your honor, can I approach the bench?”

  He, Booth and Ritchie whispered for a few moments, out of earshot of Fogarty.

  “Can I go up there?” he asked West.

  “Not unless you want Richard to shoot you,” West replied.

  After about ten minutes, Booth announced a brief recess. When he and the attorneys returned, Barney Knight stood up again and asked Franklin to walk up to the bench and back.

  “Objection!” shouted Ritchie, even though he’d known that was coming. “Mr. Franklin’s physical condition proves nothing about his guilt or innocence.”

  “Based on the testimony of the last witness,” Booth said, “I have to disagree.”

  “See you in appeals court,” Ritchie muttered as he sat down.

  “What was that?” Booth thundered from his perch on the bench.

  “Nothing, Your Honor,” Ritchie said meekly.

  So Wardell Franklin did walk from the defendant’s dock to the bench and back, followed closely by Henry Massenburg, Bailiff Richard Goodwin keeping a hand on his shoulder holster. The defendant tried mightily to make his walk appear normal—but as his attorney, a former athlete, knew quite well, a serious knee injury can never be disguised.

  Then Franklin sat, and Ritchie had no further questions of Lamond Morgan.

  The
closing argument for both attorneys was essentially a rehash of their opening statements, although a chastened Ritchie focused almost exclusively on the second-degree murder option. Then the jury took the case around four—and some food sent over from Sugar’s—and disappeared into an inner room.

  It was close to eight when the jury foreman finally emerged. The bone of contention, it appeared, had not been Wardell Franklin’s guilt or innocence, but whether to convict him of first-or second-degree murder.

  Ultimately, it was the second bullet, the one in the head that made the difference. In the end, it just seemed too improbable to the jury members that Franklin would have shot Moore in the back, then handed the gun off to Brown for the coup de grace. Once Moore was down and wounded, there was no reason to kill him—and yet he was dispatched from close range.

  “We find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder,” the foreman intoned.

  After Fogarty finished talking with both attorneys, Ritchie vowing to appeal and Knight repeating his send-them-a-message speech, Johnnie West walked over to him and said, “It’s a shame there isn’t a place to get a drink in this town. Anybody up for driving to Lynchburg or over to I-95?”

  “I think I can help you,” Fogarty said.

  And so he, West, Knight and Randolph County Attorney Grits Hinson walked down the street to the Echo building, where they sat in Tucker Daniel’s office and drank the two bottles of homemade wine J. W. Rivers had delivered the previous December.

  “I forgot I had this stuff,” Fogarty said as he poured four glasses.

  The extra four months on the shelf had only given J. W.’s concoction more of a bite.

  “It’s a good wine,” Hinton quipped after a shiver and a cough, “but not a great wine.”

  The four men sat there and told stories until both bottles were gone. And for the first time since his arrival in Jefferson Springs nearly a year earlier, Eddie Fogarty felt at home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  MENTORING ZOE