by Scott Pratt
“We find the defendant not guilty.”
I watched Dockery pat his lawyer on the back and walk out the door arm in arm with his mother.
The son of a bitch had gotten away with it again.
Wednesday, August 27
I fumed all the way home, muttering to myself about what an idiot Alexander Dunn had been. When I pulled into the driveway, the garage door was open. My wife must have forgotten to close it again. She always does. I parked my truck in the driveway and walked inside. As soon as I opened the door, I heard the sound of hard nails skidding across the wood floor. Rio, my German shepherd, came barreling around the kitchen counter, headed straight for me. I was carrying a bottle of water in my hand, and when he jumped up to greet me, his snout sent the bottle flying across the kitchen floor.
“Shit, Rio,” I said as I walked towards the counter. “Why are you always so damned excited to see me? We’re together all day every day.”
The tone of my voice frightened him, and he lowered his head and slinked away. As I turned to reach for a paper towel so I could wipe up the spilled water, I scraped my shin on the open door of the dishwasher. I cursed again and reached down and slammed it closed.
“Where have you been?”
Caroline walked into the kitchen with her perpetual smile on her face. We’d been high school sweethearts, and twenty years of marriage hadn’t dimmed our passion. I always looked forward to getting home to my leggy, tanned, athletic wife. I loved her soft brown eyes and her thick auburn hair. But at that moment I wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries.
“Caroline, why do you leave this goddamned dishwasher door open all the time?” I snapped as I knelt down and started wiping up the spilled water. “I just cracked my shin on it again. I’ve asked you at least a hundred times to close the fucking dishwasher.”
I looked up. She’d stopped in her tracks and was glaring.
“Why don’t you watch where you’re stepping?” she said sarcastically. “Are you fucking blind?”
When the word fuck came out of either of our mouths, it was a signal to the other that an immediate choice had to be made. Caroline could walk away and leave me alone until I calmed down. She usually did. Or she could stand and fight. This time, the battle was on.
“And why can’t you close the fucking garage door?” I said, still wiping. “Were you born in a barn? All you have to do is push a button and it closes itself.”
“What difference does it make whether the garage door is closed?” she snarled.
“It keeps some of the heat out, and when we keep some of the heat out, the air conditioner doesn’t have to work so hard. And when the air conditioner doesn’t work so hard, it saves us money! But you don’t ever think about that, do you? The money we have isn’t going to last forever, especially if you keep pissing it away doing stupid shit like leaving the garage door open.”
“So you’re saying I’m going to drive us into bankruptcy by leaving a garage door open? Sitting around the house for a year has driven you crazy, Joe.”
I straightened up, wadded the paper towel, and tossed it in the wastebasket under the sink.
“Screw you,” I said as I walked past her towards the bedroom. I grabbed a pair of shorts, some socks, and a T-shirt from the dresser and my running shoes from the closet and went back to the bathroom to change. Just as I finished tying my shoes, Caroline appeared.
“So do you want to tell me what’s going on with you?” she said.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“You haven’t been in the house five minutes and you’ve already terrified Rio, slammed the dishwasher, and sworn at me for leaving a garage door open. Something’s going on. Where have you been for the past two days?”
I looked up at her. The anger was gone from her face, and the tone of her voice told me she was genuinely concerned.
“I went to Jonesborough to watch Billy Dockery’s trial,” I said.
“I knew it,” she said. “I’ve been reading about it in the newspaper. I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away. Is it still going on?”
“No. They acquitted him again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prosecutor do a poorer job of trying a case.”
“Come on out to the kitchen table,” she said as she reached out and took my hand. “Let’s talk.”
I followed her and sat down. She went to the refrigerator, pulled out two beers, and came back to the table.
“You’re miserable,” she said. “You’re bored. I think you feel like you’re wasting your life, and it’s time to do something about it.”
She popped the top on a can of Budweiser and handed it to me.
“I’m not miserable,” I said. “I’m just a little upset. Seeing Dockery walk out the door today made me sick to my stomach.”
“So why don’t you do something about it?” she said.
“Do something? Like what?”
“Why don’t you go back to work? I remember when we were young you talked about going to work for the prosecutor’s office. Why don’t you give Lee Mooney a call and see if he can find a place for you?”
The suggestion took me by complete surprise. Even sitting there watching Alexander Dunn botch a trial, knowing I could do much better, going back to practicing law hadn’t entered my mind. I’d quit a year earlier after spending more than a decade as a criminal defense lawyer. I made a lot of money, gained a lot of notoriety, and was good at what I did, but the profession eventually burned me out mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Friends and acquaintances had always asked me, “How can you go into court and represent someone who you know is guilty?” My answer was always that my job was to make certain the government followed its own rules and to hold them to their burden of proof. It didn’t have anything to do with guilt or innocence. I convinced myself for years that I was doing something honorable, that I was an important cog in the machine that called itself the criminal justice system. But over time, and especially after I realized I’d helped Billy Dockery escape punishment for murdering a defenseless elderly woman, I began to regard myself as something much less than honorable. It had been a little more than a year since I’d helped two women walk away from a charge of murdering a preacher. The preacher’s son tried to kill me in the parking lot outside of the courthouse, and he nearly killed my wife in the process. That was enough.
I’d worked hard my entire life and had accumulated a fair amount of money, so I took a break, thinking I might eventually teach at a university. For the past year, I’d divided my time between watching my son play baseball for Vanderbilt University in Nashville and watching my daughter perform at football and basketball games as a member of the University of Tennessee’s dance team. When I was home, I piddled around the house, worked out at the gym, ran miles and miles along the trail by the lake, and played with the dog. I enjoyed myself most of the time, but Caroline was right: I was bored, and I missed the excitement of playing such a high-stakes game.
“I don’t know, Caroline,” I said. “It got pretty bad there towards the end. Do you really think I’m ready to go back?”
“If we were sitting here talking about going back into criminal defense, I’d say no. But I think you’d like prosecuting. You’ve always had a little bit of a hero complex. Putting bad guys behind bars might be right up your alley.”
“You’re ready to get me out of the house, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re tired of looking at me.”
“How could I be tired of looking at you? You’re gorgeous. You’re big and strong and you’ve got that dark hair and those beautiful green eyes. You’re eye candy, baby.”
“That kind of flattery will definitely get you laid.”
“Seriously,” she said, “I’m not tired of anything. I could live this simple little life we have now until they put me in the ground, but I know you, Joe, and you’re just not happy. You have too much drive to be a professional piddler.”
“So you think I should just call Mooney up and say, ‘Hey, how
about giving me a job’?”
“Why not? The worst he can say is no, but I think he’d be glad to have you.”
I smiled at her. Caroline had a way of making me feel like I could conquer the world. She’d always had more confidence in me than I had in myself.
“Okay,” I said. “If you really think it might be right for me, I’ll give it a shot. I’ll call Mooney first thing in the morning.”
She stood and pursed her lips slightly. The next thing I knew she was pulling her shirt over her head. She slipped off her bra and turned towards the bedroom, dangling the bra from her fingertips as she looked at me over her shoulder.
“Now that’s what I call eye candy,” I said as I put down the beer and followed her. “Wait up. Let me help you take off the rest.”
Friday, August 29
I felt the welcome coolness of air-conditioning on my face as I opened the door and stepped out of the oppressive heat and humidity. It was a room the owner of the restaurant—a man named Tommy Hodges who fancied himself a local political insider—reserved for special customers, people he believed had power or privilege. It had its own entrance at the side of the one-story brick building. I was forty-one years old and had practiced law in the community for more than a decade, but I’d never set foot in the place.
The room was small and dimly lit, dominated by a single table, large and round with a scarred blue Formica top. All four walls surrounding the table were decorated with autographed photos of state and local politicians. Lee Mooney, the elected attorney general of the First Judicial District, was examining a photograph of himself as I stepped through the door.
Mooney was fifty years old, a lean, striking man with gray eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and a handlebar mustache. I’d called him on Thursday morning and asked him whether he might consider hiring me, and he asked me to meet him at Tommy’s place the next day. He turned his head when he heard the door open and grinned.
“Joe Dillard, in the flesh,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s been a long time.”
At six feet, five inches, Mooney was a couple of inches taller than me. As his fingers wrapped around my hand, his white teeth flashed and his eyes locked onto mine. He held both my gaze and my hand a bit too long.
I was suspicious of all politicians, but because I’d practiced criminal defense law for so long, I was especially suspicious of the ego-filled megalomaniacs who typically sought the office of district attorney. A Texas A&M grad, Mooney had gone from ROTC cadet to officer training to the judge advocate general’s office in the Marine Corps. He retired five years ago after the marines passed on the opportunity to promote him to full colonel. His wealthy wife had persuaded him to move to northeast Tennessee, which was her childhood home, and he immediately hired on as an assistant with the local DA’s office. Before I stopped practicing law, I tried half a dozen criminal cases against Mooney. I remembered him as a formidable adversary in the courtroom with an almost pathological fear of losing. I’d suspected him more than once of withholding evidence, but I wasn’t ever able to prove it.
Mooney quit the DA’s office two years ago when he smelled blood in the water. Word around the campfire was that his predecessor—a pathetic little man named Deacon Baker—had lost control of his own office and, Mooney must have sensed, lost the confidence of the voters. Mooney resigned and immediately announced he was running against his boss in the August election. When the last murder case I defended blew up in Deacon Baker’s face just before the election, Mooney buried him.
“So what have you been up to for the past year?” Mooney said as we sat down.
“As little as possible.”
“How’s your wife? Is it Caroline?”
“Right. She’s fine, thanks for asking.”
“I’ve read about your son in the newspaper. He’s some ballplayer.”
“He’s worked hard.”
“Have you missed it? Practicing law, I mean.”
“Some,” I said. There was a seductive element to defending people accused of committing crimes, especially when the stakes were at their highest. Having the fate of a man’s life depend on both the intensity of your commitment and the quality of your work was often alluring.
Tommy Hodges, the slight and balding owner of the restaurant, showed up carrying two glasses of water and a pad.
“Don’t I know you?” he said to me.
“I don’t think so.”
“Sure you do,” Mooney said. “This is Joe Dillard, the best trial lawyer who ever set foot in a courtroom around here.”
Hodges’s eyes lit up.
“Oh, yeah!” he said, pointing at me. “I remember you! That murder, the preacher, right? That was something. Big news.”
“Yeah,” I said, “big news.”
“I ain’t heard of you since. Where you been?”
“Sabbatical,” I said.
“What?”
“Tommy,” Mooney said, “how about a couple of club sandwiches and a couple of Cokes? Is that okay with you, Joe?”
“Sure.”
He kept fiddling with a saltshaker with his right hand. After Hodges left, Mooney regarded me with a puzzled look.
“I always wondered why you were on the other side,” he said as soon as Hodges left the room. “I thought you would have made a great prosecutor.”
“The reason isn’t exactly noble. It came down to money. When I graduated from law school, I wanted to work for the DA’s office. I even went for an interview. But the starting salary was less than twenty-five grand, and I already had a wife and two kids to support. I figured I could make double that practicing on my own, so I told myself I’d learn the law from the other side and then try to get on with the DA after I made some money.”
“And before you knew it your lifestyle grew into your income.”
“Exactly.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“A combination of things, I guess. It always bothered me that I knew my clients were lying to me, or at least most of them. And I was constantly at war with somebody—cops, prosecutors, judges, witnesses, guards at the jails, you name it. I got tired of it. But the bottom line, I think, was that I felt like I was doing something wrong.”
“Wrong? How so?”
“Some of the people I helped walk out the door were guilty. They knew it, and so did I.”
Mooney shifted in his chair a little and looked down at the saltshaker. “You defended Billy Dockery once, didn’t you?” he said.
“He was the beginning of the end of my career as a criminal defense lawyer,” I said.
“Alexander Dunn told me you were at his trial.”
“I was curious.”
“How’d Alexander do? It was his first big felony trial.”
“The odds were against him.”
There wasn’t any point in telling him that Alexander was terrible and that he constantly referred to Cora Wilson as “the victim in this case” instead of by name. Even when he did mention her name, he referred to her twice as “Ms. Williams” instead of “Ms. Wilson.”
“So what are you really looking for, Joe?”
“It’s pretty simple. I want to do something that keeps me interested, and I want to do something that doesn’t make me feel like puking every time I look in the mirror.”
Mooney sat back and smiled. “You looking to make amends?”
“Maybe. Something like that.”
“You have to understand that Baker didn’t leave me with much,” he said, speaking of his predecessor. “He was so paranoid that he ran off every competent lawyer in the office. All that’s left are a bunch of kids learning on the fly.”
“Do you have anything open?” I said. I knew the budget in the DA’s office was tight. State legislators tend to look at the criminal justice system as a bastard stepchild, a necessary evil, when it comes to funding.
“Not right now,” Mooney said, “but I’ll make room for you if you can wait a couple of weeks. I was planning to fire Jack Moseley as soon as I
could find someone to replace him.”
“Jesus, Lee, I don’t want to cost anybody their job.”
“Moseley’s a drunk. Shows up late for work half the time, doesn’t cover his cases, pinches the secretaries on the ass. Last month he disappeared for three days. We found him holed up at the Foxx Motel with a gallon of vodka and an empty sack of cocaine.”
“I don’t remember reading about that in the paper,” I said.
Mooney winked. “Sometimes what the people don’t know won’t hurt them. I would’ve fired him months ago if I’d had another warm body. The job’s yours if you want it.”
“Exactly what would I be doing?”
“I’ve been thinking about that ever since you called. The best use for you would be to work the violent felonies, the worst ones. Murders, aggravated rapes, armed robberies. Dangerous offenders only.”
I let out a low whistle. “Some job description.”
“You really want to do something that makes you feel good? Here’s your chance. You can make sure dangerous people wind up in jail, where they belong. I’ll keep your caseload as light as I can so you can do it right.”
“I guess it’ll include death penalty cases,” I said. I’d spent a great deal of my legal career trying to ensure that the state didn’t kill people. If I took this job, I knew I’d soon be making some difficult choices.
“We haven’t had a death penalty case since Deacon left the office,” Mooney said. “What’s the point? The state’s only executed one person in forty years, and there’s nobody in Nashville raising hell about it. I guess the legislature wants to have the death penalty in Tennessee but not have to worry about enforcing it.”
“It’ll change soon,” I said. “We have a tendency to be bloodthirsty.”
“Look at it this way: You’ll be doing the same thing you did so well for all those years, practicing criminal law. The difference will be that you’ll be working with the good guys, and you’ll have the manpower and resources of the great state of Tennessee behind you. The pay is good, there’s no overhead, and you get four weeks of vacation, state health and retirement benefits, the whole ball of wax.”