Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

“Guess.”

“Fifty?”

“Higher.”

“Eeeeeh,” she said. “Sixty?”

“You’re way low. Jack it on up.”

“Stop it, Joe. Seventy-five? No, you look smug. I don’t even know if I can say it. A hundred?”

“You’re almost halfway.”

Her jaw dropped. “You’re not serious,” she said. I don’t think she knew it, but she was bouncing in her chair like a schoolgirl.

“Dead serious. Half way.”

“T-t-two twenty?”

“Almost there. Add thirty more.”

“Two fifty?” She said the words as though she were dreaming.

“Bingo! And what do we have for the lady who guessed a quarter of a million dollars, Don Pardo?” I reached down, grabbed the bag, and slammed it on the table. Champagne spewed from Caroline’s mouth.

“Is that what I think it…? No, it couldn’t possibly…” She reached out and opened the bag. “Joe! Is this real?”

“Scout’s honor,” I said, holding my hand across my heart.

She began jumping around the deck like a cheerleader. She ran around the table and grabbed me by the neck. She hugged me so hard I almost choked.

“Ease up a little, Caroline. I’d like to live to spend it.”

She stopped in her tracks, walked back to her seat, and took a deep breath.

“I’m going to hyperventilate. I’m going to pee my pants. Tell me how this happened.”

“There isn’t that much to tell. The woman came in and I talked to her for a while, then I went down to the jail and talked to the girl for a while. I actually said the words, Caroline. I actually said, ‘A quarter of a million dollars, cash, up front,’ and she didn’t flinch. I called her after I went to the jail and she paid me.”

“I want to kiss your whole face right now,” Caroline said. “I want to gobble you up. I want to have your babies.”

“We have enough babies.”

“Oh, Joe, this is unbelievable. This takes so much pressure off of us.”

“It’s a double-edged sword. You know that.”

She was on me before I got the last syllable out of my mouth. She kissed my forehead, my lips, my eyebrows, my ears.

“I have to tell someone,” she said when she stopped kissing my whole face. “Where’s my phone? I have to tell my mother.”

“Don’t do that, you’ll be on the phone for an hour. Drink your champagne and let’s just enjoy it for a minute. I have a feeling I’m going to earn every dime of it.”

I watched her as she sat grinning in the flickering light of the lamps. She peeked into the bag again.

“Can I touch it?”

“Knock yourself out. It’s your money now.”

She was as pleased as I’d ever seen her, and nothing could have given me more satisfaction.

“Joe, what a relief. Now… what are we going to buy?”

“What are you talking about? You’re supposed to be the miser. We’re not buying anything. We have everything we need.”

“Let’s splurge just a little. We have to buy something.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we do.” Her eyes were bright with mischief. “Then we have to go somewhere.”

“No.”

“We have to go to the Caymans or something when the trial’s over. You’ve always wanted to go there. Stop being such a killjoy.”

“Why don’t we worry about what we’re going to do with it tonight?”

“I know exactly what we’re going to do with it. We’re sleeping with it. It doesn’t leave my sight until I get it in the safety deposit box tomorrow morning. Then I’ll figure out what to do from there. Tell me about the girl. What’s she like?”

“She’s… sweet,” I said. “She seems like a really sweet kid.”

“Is she as pretty as me?”

“Not even close.”

“Good answer.”

She held out her empty champagne glass, and I refilled it. She raised the glass.

“Here’s to pretty girls with rich friends.”

“Cheers.” I took a big swallow of the champagne.

“When’s the arraignment?”

“Monday. Nine o’clock in Jonesborough. Let’s talk about something else. It’s a beautiful evening. I’m sitting on a candlelit deck overlooking the water with a beautiful, slightly intoxicated woman. I’ve just made more money in one day than most people make in five years. Law and disorder and murder do not seem to be appropriate topics of conversation.”

“You’re right.” Caroline rose from the table and reached for my hand. “Come with me.”

She led me inside to the bedroom.

“This is heavy,” she said, nodding toward the bag in her hand. “Delightfully heavy.”

She tossed the bag of money into a corner, pushed me onto the bed and began to slowly unbutton her blouse. Caroline is the only woman I’ve ever slept with. We’ve been together for so long that when it comes to making love, she knows exactly which buttons to push.

And for the next hour, she pushed every one of them.

April 27

6:00 p.m.

Agent Landers ran three miles a day, at least five days a week. It kept his body tight and helped with the hangovers. The day after he arrested the girl, he was running along Watauga Avenue in Johnson City thinking he would’ve much rather had sex with that kid than arrested her. Man, she was hot.

She was also smart enough not to talk. Landers spent an hour in the interrogation room with her after he arrested her. All she’d say was that she wanted to talk to a lawyer.

Deacon Baker, the district attorney, had called Landers down to his office a couple of days before the arrest. Baker was nothing but a fat, stupid little prude, but he’d somehow managed to get himself elected, so he was calling the shots. Deacon told Landers he was getting a lot of pressure to make an arrest. The victim’s son was a chaplain and deputy sheriff in another county and he’d been calling three times a day. The victim also had a cousin who lived in Carter County and was active in the Republican Women’s group over there, and she’d been calling. Big deal, Landers told Deacon, let them call.

Landers didn’t have much evidence. The night they raided the Mouse’s Tail, they’d interviewed forty people. Nine of them were employees, the rest were customers. Only one person said she recognized Tester, a stripper named Julie Hayes. She said Tester came in around nine, stayed until almost midnight, and got hammered in between. She said he was quoting scripture one minute and getting lap dances the next, and that he took a special interest in a waitress named Angel Christian. Hayes said the preacher and Erlene Barlowe had about a five-minute conversation around eleven-thirty. As soon as they were done talking, she said the preacher went out the front door and Barlowe and Angel went out the back. Neither Barlowe nor Angel came back to the club that night. She also said that up until the day the preacher was murdered, Barlowe drove a red Corvette. The next day, she was driving the black BMW.

Nobody else in the place gave them anything they could use, which made Landers wonder whether Julie Hayes was telling the truth. Maybe she had some kind of grudge against Barlowe, or the girl, or both. But Landers wrote out her statement and she signed it. She said she was willing to testify.

The forensics team found some hair on Tester’s shirt, so Landers took the Hayes girl’s statement and parlayed it into a search warrant for Erlene Barlowe’s house the next day. He also persuaded the judge to sign an order saying that both Erlene Barlowe and Angel Christian had to give him hair samples. They hadn’t found a thing in Barlowe’s house, not even so much as a porn video. Landers took a photograph of the girl, though. She had a nasty bruise on her face.

There was no sign of a red Corvette. Landers ran Erlene Barlowe’s name through every database the TBI had. No Corvette registered to her anywhere.