Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

Caroline hadn’t said anything that morning, but I’d left at 5:30 a.m. and showered at the gym after I worked out. She and Lilly were still asleep when I walked out the door. Maybe they did forget.

Or maybe something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. I rubbed Rio’s ears for a minute and walked up and opened the door that led to the kitchen. It was dark inside. I let the dog go in ahead of me. It was quiet.

“Hello! Anybody home?” I flipped on the light in the kitchen.

A huge poster had been hung from the kitchen ceiling. It stretched all the way to the floor and was at least six feet wide. It looked like something a high school football team would run through when they took the field for a game. The poster, in bright blue letters, said:

Happy Birthday Dad!

WE LOVE YOU!

I laughed as the three of them came around the corner from the den into the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday.” All three were wearing striped pajamas and grinning like Cheshire cats. They’d tied their wrists together. The Dillard family chain gang. My self-pity vanished and I opened my arms for a group hug.

Caroline announced that they were taking me to dinner, and they quickly changed out of the goofy pajamas. I chose Cafe Pacific, a quiet little place on the outskirts of Johnson City that served the best seafood in town. As I sat in the restaurant eating prawns and scallops in an incredible Thai sauce, I looked at their faces, settling finally on Caroline’s. I’d fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen all those years ago, and she was even more beautiful now. Her wavy auburn hair shimmered in the candlelight. Her smooth, fair skin and deep brown eyes glowed, and when she caught me looking at her I got a coy smile that brought out the dimple in her left cheek. Caroline has the firm, lithe body of a dancer, but it’s soft and curvy where it matters. She’s studied dance all her life and still operates a small dance studio. Lilly is Caroline’s clone, with the exception that her hair runs to a lighter shade and her eyes are hazel. Lilly is seventeen and in her senior year of high school. She wants to be a dancer, or a photographer, or an artist, or a Broadway actress.

Jack looks a lot like me. He just turned nineteen and is tall and muscular, with dark hair and brooding eyes that are nearly black. Jack is a top student and a highly competitive athlete whose goal is to play professional baseball, and he works at it with the intensity of a fanatic. He and I have spent countless hours together practicing on a baseball field. He’ll hit until his hands blister, throw until his arm aches, lift weights until his muscles burn, and run until his legs give out. The work paid off in the form of a scholarship to Vanderbilt.

When the waiter brought me a piece of chocolate cake, Caroline reached into her purse and produced a candle. She stuck it in the cake and lit it.

“Make a wish,” she said.

“And don’t tell us what it is,” Lilly said. She says that every year.

I made a silent wish for an innocent client. And the sooner the better.

Jack reached under the table and pulled out a small, flat, gift-wrapped box.

“This is from all of us,” he said.

I opened the card. There was a message, in Caroline’s handwriting: “Follow your heart. Follow your dreams. We’ll all be there, wherever it leads. We love you.” She was as eager as I to get me out of the legal profession. She thought my work kept me at war with myself — she’d told me more than once that she’d never seen anybody so conflicted. She’d been encouraging me to go to night school and get certified as a high school teacher and a coach.

Inside the package were box seat tickets to an Atlanta Braves game in July.

“I cleared your calendar,” Caroline said. “We’re all going. Don’t you dare schedule anything for that weekend.”

“Not a chance,” I said. It was perfect.

We finished dessert and drove back home around nine. As I pulled into the driveway, the headlights swept over the front porch about thirty feet to the left of the garage. I saw something move. We lived on ten isolated acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake about five miles out of the city. We’d left Rio in the house when we went to the restaurant. I stopped just outside the garage and got out of the car. I could hear Rio raising hell inside.

“Go in and turn on the porch light,” I said to Caroline. “You guys stay in the car.”

“No way,” Jack said as he got out of the back seat.

I walked around the corner toward the front with Jack right beside me. Someone got out of the porch swing and stood.

“Who’s there?” I said.

Silence. And then the porch light came on. Standing next to the swing in a pair of ratty khaki shorts and a green T-shirt that said, “Do Me, I’m Irish,” was my sister Sarah.

April 12

11:00 p.m.

By the time Landers returned to his office, the Johnson City detectives had managed to gather more information on the murder victim. John Paul Tester was a widower with one grown kid, a son who was a deputy sheriff and a chaplain at the Cocke County sheriff’s department. Tester had come up to Johnson City to preach at a revival at a little church near Boones Creek. He delivered the sermon, collected almost three hundred dollars from the offering plate for his trouble, left the church around nine, and nobody had seen him since. His bank records showed that he withdrew two hundred dollars in cash from an automatic teller machine at 11:45 p.m. The machine was located inside the Mouse’s Tail. If Tester ran through three hundred dollars there and needed more money around midnight, the Barlowe woman had to have noticed him.

She lied.

Landers spent the afternoon drafting an affidavit for a search warrant and running down a judge. All he had to do was tell the judge that the owner of the club where the murder victim was last seen lied and was refusing to cooperate. The warrant the judge signed authorized the TBI to search the Mouse’s Tail for any evidence relevant to the murder of John Paul Tester. And since it was a strip club, the judge didn’t have any qualms about Landers executing the warrant during business hours.

Landers planned the raid himself. About an hour before the SWAT guys were supposed to hit the front door, he’d go in to check things out, then at the appointed time he’d signal the start of the raid. Landers was looking forward to it, especially the part about checking things out.

A little after nine, he stopped by his place to shower and change. He put on a pair of jeans, a collared black pullover and a jacket, stuck his. 38 in an ankle holster, and drove out to the Mouse’s Tail around 10:15. It was a tacky joint, built of concrete block and painted powder blue. The front entrance was covered by a bright blue awning trimmed in black. A big gray mouse, grinning from ear to ear and with a tail that curled up into what looked like an erect phallus, had been air-brushed on the side of the building that faced the road.

There were twenty or thirty cars in the parking lot out front. Landers had to pay a ten-dollar cover to get past the blonde in the foyer. She looked like a high-end hooker, elaborate make-up and black spandex. Huge breasts. The ATM machine the murder victim withdrew the money from was sitting right beside the counter in front.

Blondie buzzed Landers through into the main part of the club. It was a large, open room, about a hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On each side of the main room were what appeared to be small anterooms, the entrances covered by black curtains. There were three stages, each about the size of a boxing ring, set in a triangle and complete with brass poles. Each stage was framed by mirrors and occupied by a naked, gyrating lady. Cigarette smoke hung in a cloud about ten feet off the floor, and a mirror ball was throwing light around the room. The music was loud. Landers had heard the bass buzzing off the walls from the parking lot. He didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but it was one of those lame rappers.