Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (26 page)

“I’m not going to my mother-in-law’s,” I said. “I’ll call Bates.”

I called the sheriff, who had become my biggest admirer since the court hearing with Judge Glass. He agreed to post two deputies, in two cruisers, at my house until Natasha was arrested. I was still scared, but at least I breathed a little easier.

Monday, November 3

First thing Monday morning, I waited for Alexander Dunn in the parking lot in back of the courthouse. It was chilly, the sky fast moving and slate gray. He got out of his black 700-series BMW wearing a navy blue suit covered by a tan, calf-length trench coat. His hair was slicked back, as always. His gloved right hand held an expensive black leather briefcase.

“You’ve got diarrhea of the mouth,” I said as soon as he shut the door. “Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused? How could you be so fucking stupid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dunn said as he pushed past me and started towards the courthouse.

“I’m talking about running your mouth to the media. I’m talking about interfering with a murder investigation. I’m talking about obstruction of justice.”

He stopped and turned, a smug look on his face.

“Are you referring to the story in the paper yesterday morning about your proposed deal with a murderer?”

“What do you get in exchange for doing something like that? Brownie points? Will she make you look good somewhere down the road? Do a feature on you? Will she turn her back if you make a mistake? Tell me, Alexander, what’s the trade?”

“You obviously said something to someone you shouldn’t have,” Dunn said.

“I didn’t say a word to anybody. The only people who knew what was going on were you, Lee, Jim Beaumont, and me.”

“Then Beaumont said something to someone, or he leaked it himself.”

“It wasn’t Beaumont.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Beaumont’s a decent human being, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for you.”

“Fuck you, Dillard.” Dunn turned and started walking away.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said, catching up to him and leaning against him with my shoulder. “What’s the price for betrayal? Did she give you thirty pieces of silver? A blow job? I swear, if you weren’t Lee’s nephew, I’d kick your ass all over this parking lot.”

“Speaking of kicking ass, Lee got a call from the Crossville district attorney’s office late Friday,” Dunn said as he continued to walk. “Have you been to Crossville recently, by any chance?”

He caught me totally off guard. After a long silence, I said, “What I do outside the office is none of your business.”

“It seems that one of the probation officers down there—I believe he’s dating your sister—got beaten up pretty badly. He had to be hospitalized overnight.”

“Is that a fact?” I said stupidly, unable to think of anything else.

“Yeah, it’s a fact. You know what else is a fact? He told them you did it. He doesn’t want to press charges for some reason, but why would he tell them something like that?”

“I guess he doesn’t like me.”

“Imagine that. Lee isn’t very happy about it. And who can blame him? A member of his office, an assistant district attorney, going into another district and committing a crime. It’s embarrassing. It’s disgusting. It’s … it’s downright
shameful
, is what it is.”

We reached the door to go upstairs to the office, and I broke away from him and headed for the front of the courthouse. He was having entirely too much fun at my expense; I didn’t want to listen to any more of it.

“He also said you had someone else with you,” Alexander called as I walked away. “My guess is it was your buddy Fraley.”

I ignored him and walked up the sidewalk to the corner and turned left towards the front steps. As I walked through the front door of the courthouse, I saw Sarge Hurley, the seventy-something security officer who’d saved my life a year and a half earlier. I’d stopped by to talk to Sarge a couple of times since I started working for the district attorney’s office. He hadn’t changed a bit. Still tall and lean with thinning silver hair, liver spots, and hands as big as country hams. Still had the youthful sparkle in his eye. Still carried his can of pepper spray, and he was still a living, breathing oracle of courthouse gossip. He started smiling as soon as he saw me.

“Well, I’ll be damned, if it ain’t Mike Tyson,” he said. “Or since your first name’s Joe, maybe I should call you Joe Louis.”

I was horrified. How could he possibly know? Had Alexander Dunn broadcast news of my trip to Crossville over some private law enforcement network?

“What are you talking about?”

He was frisking a skinny teenager. “I hear you got a right hand like a jackhammer and you’re mean as a goddamned badger.”

“Who told you that?”

“Little birdie in a tree. No, that’s a damned lie. It was a fat birdie; ain’t no way he could sit in a tree. You didn’t think you could do something like that and the news not get out, did you?”

Fat birdie. Fraley. It had to be Fraley
.

“I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about, Sarge.”

He released the teenager and walked over and put his arm around my shoulders as I headed for the steps.

“Hell, son, I’m proud of you,” he said. “Any man that would beat on a woman deserves exactly what you gave him. I wish I coulda been there to help you, though the way I hear it, you didn’t need help.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Don’t spread it around.”

He let out a rich laugh. “Too late for that, counselor. Word’s already spread like jelly on a biscuit.”

On the way up the stairs I dialed Fraley’s number.

“Thanks a lot,” I said when he answered.

“For what?”

“How many people have you told about what happened the other night?”

There was a long silence. “Just a couple.”

“Great. In case you didn’t know it, what I did was against the law. It’s called battery.”

“What you did was
karma
,” he said. “What goes around comes around. Eye for an eye, all that shit. It was justice. And you did it with such
conviction
. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would’ve never believed it.”

“You need to tone it down. Mooney already knows about it. He’ll probably fire me as soon as I walk in the door.”

“Shit, I didn’t mean to cause you any—”

“Not your fault,” I said. “Somebody from the Crossville DA’s office called him.”

“Are they going to prosecute you?”

“I don’t think so. Just let it die down, okay? No more stories.”

Rita Jones was at her post in the reception area, smacking a piece of gum and wearing a turquoise sweater that clung to her like cellophane.

“Mr. Mooney would like you to come to his office,” she said. I noticed Alexander Dunn standing by the coffee pot, acting as though he weren’t paying attention.

I walked straight back to Lee’s office. His assistant waved me through without saying a word. I found him sitting at his desk, framed by the American and Tennessee flags, reading the newspaper. It seemed that every time I went into his office, he was reading the newspaper. Did he do anything else?

“Close the door and have a seat,” he said without looking up. His tone was firm and businesslike, unfriendly.

I set my briefcase on the floor and took a seat across from him. He folded his paper, removed his reading glasses, and sat there pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

“Alexander was just in here,” he said. “He says you accused him of leaking information to the newspaper.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Didn’t waste any time, did he?”

“He said you threatened him.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“I knew there would be some resentment when I hired you, but I thought you were confident enough to overlook it.”

“There’s a difference between resentment and sabotage,” I said. “That article could have a tremendous effect on my case.”

He held up his hand. “I know. I know it could affect your case. Do you have any proof that it was Alexander who leaked it?”

“No, but there were only four people who knew what was going on: me, you, Beaumont, and Alexander. Beaumont had no reason to leak information to the press, I didn’t do it, and I don’t think you did. That leaves Alexander.”

“There are dozens of ways it could have gotten out. One of the guards at the jail might have overheard Boyer and Beaumont talking. One of Beaumont’s partners, one of his secretaries, a paralegal, anybody. He might have discussed it with Dunbar. Someone in our office might have overheard you talking on the phone. There’s just no way to be sure it was Alexander. Now, I want the two of you to cease fire, and I want you to make an effort to control your temper.”

As I sat there listening to him, I began to remember a few of the other reasons—besides money—that I never quite made it down to apply at the district attorney’s office. Interoffice politics. Nepotism. Lectures from the boss. It all seemed so silly, so ridiculous.

“I don’t think I have much of a temper,” I said.

“Really?” His brows rose and he began fingering his mustache. The habit was starting to annoy me.

“It takes a lot to set me off, Lee.”

“So what set you off last Wednesday?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. I got a call from the district attorney in Crossville.”

“Yeah, Alexander mentioned something about that.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

I looked down at my hands, suddenly ashamed. I felt like a schoolboy in a principal’s office.

“There’s this guy, Robert Godsey, used to be a probation officer here. He and my sister started dating. It got pretty serious, and then Godsey decided to transfer down to Crossville, where he grew up. So my sister follows him down there. And then Wednesday night I get a phone call and this woman tells me that Godsey has beaten my sister up. So I go. And when I saw her … I don’t know, Lee … I just snapped. Her eye was swollen shut and her lip was split and she had marks on her throat where he’d choked her. I went over to his house. I tried to convince myself just to talk to him, maybe scare him a little, but when I saw him standing in the door all I could think about was Sarah and how she looked, and I guess I sort of went off on him.”

“Sort of? You broke his nose and a couple of ribs.”

I shook my head. There wasn’t much I could say.

“The DA didn’t mention anything about him beating up your sister,” Mooney said. “I guess that’s why he’s not going to pursue it in court.”

“I’m sorry, Lee. I didn’t mean to cause you any problems.”

“He said someone else was with you. Who was it?”

“Just a friend. I’d rather not say. I called him and asked him to go. He was doing me a favor.”

He leaned forward on his elbows and rested his chin on his fists. “I like to keep a low profile, Joe. I like for my employees to do the same. This isn’t defense work, where you have to get yourself in the newspapers and on television to be noticed. The cases come to us whether we get publicity or not. You’ve handled yourself pretty well up to this point, but lately I see you making some questionable decisions. That little show in the courtroom the other day with Natasha, while amusing to some, was embarrassing to me. You had no business approaching her in the courtroom. And now you’ve gone to another district and assaulted a man, and I get a telephone call from an outraged district attorney who wants to know what the hell kind of people I’m hiring. This job is hard enough without having to deal with that kind of bullshit.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I apologize.”

“I knew Godsey when he was here, and I thought he was a jerk. And I know Alexander’s a snit, but my wife loves him and I’m stuck with him. Now, I don’t want to give you an ultimatum, Joe, but I don’t want to see any more of this kind of behavior. Do I make myself clear?”

I was so embarrassed I couldn’t look at him. I nodded.

“Good. Leave the door open on your way out.”

Thursday, November 6

Two days later, I found myself standing with my hands against a gray block wall while a uniformed guard ran his hands up and down my arms, my back, stomach, chest, and legs. He clipped my driver’s license and my bar card to a visitors’ log and took my photograph. When he’d met all of his security requirements, he led me silently down a dim hallway, through a door made of steel bars, and into a poorly lit room with a round steel table in the center. There were four plastic chairs at the table, and I sat down. I’d been in hundreds of similar rooms, rooms painted in neutral colors and stained by nicotine and mildew. The musty air smelled of a mixture of floor wax and hot dogs. I could hear trustees rolling lunch carts down the hallway towards the cell block.

I sat nervously picking at my fingernails until I heard the unmistakable sound of shackles tinkling as the inmate shuffled towards the room. There was the sound of a muffled voice, then the metallic clang of the key turning in the lock. The door opened and a short-haired, fierce-looking female guard stepped through. She raised her nose as if to sniff me, then moved her head to the side, signaling her ward that it was okay to walk in. Without saying a word, the guard stepped back out and locked the door.

I looked at the forlorn figure before me and reached for her. Sarah, cuffed and shackled, fell into my arms and wept. I stroked her hair and listened to her desperate sobs. All I could say was, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

When the tears finally subsided, we sat across from each other at the table. The jail uniform was green-and-white striped. It looked like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. Her face was badly bruised again, her nose swollen and purple. There was a bandage over her right eyebrow and deep scratches just beneath her throat. Her boyfriend, Robert Godsey, was lying in a hospital bed only a few blocks away with a fractured skull. His condition had been upgraded from critical to serious, and from what I’d been able to learn from the nurse on the hospital ward, it appeared that he would be okay.

“How did you get in here?” Sarah said quietly. I noticed she was clutching a wadded-up piece of tissue in her hand. “They don’t let the inmates have visitors for a week when they first come in.”