Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

“And you should mind your own shop. I don’t need your advice.”

“So you’re going to ignore him.”

“Ignore who? Far as I’m concerned, he never called.”

Someone banged on the door, and it opened. A police officer named Harold “Bull” Deakins walked in. He and Landers were drinking buddies, legendary carousers. Deakins’s nickname was well deserved. His shoulders barely fit through the door.

“They told me I’d find you down here,” he said to Landers. Landers’s eyes didn’t move, and neither did mine. Deakins stopped short. “Everything all right with you boys? Are we playing nice?” His voice did nothing to break the tension.

“Your buddy and I were just talking about arresting innocent people,” I said, still locked onto Landers. He stared back, saying nothing.

“Watterson saw Erlene Barlowe on the bridge that night,” I said. “She was alone. My client wasn’t around. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Landers said. “For all I know, you put the guy up to it. For all I know, you paid him to say he saw the Corvette.”

“Sorry,” I said, “that’s more along the lines of something you’d do.”

“You know something, Dillard? You’re wasting your breath talking to me. My job was to investigate this case and make an arrest, and that’s what I did. Now my job is to go to trial, testify, and make sure your client gets what she deserves — a needle in her arm.”

He started packing up his little box as Deakins loomed over my shoulder. I turned to leave. As I was walking out the door, I stopped and faced Landers. He finished putting items in the box, picked it up off the table, and looked at me.

“She’s innocent,” I said. “She didn’t kill anybody.”

His shoulders lifted the slightest bit. What was that? A shrug?

“Are you listening to me? She didn’t kill anybody.”

He knew it. He looked back down at the table, and I walked out the door.

June 25

1:00 p.m.

I’d been going down to the jail to see Angel once a week, but the conversations I’d had with her were more personal than professional. I’d already heard her version of what happened the night Tester was killed, so I spent the time trying to get some background information out of her. She was reluctant, but during the second visit she decided she trusted me enough to tell me her real name and where she was from.

I gave the information to Diane Frye. She’d been working for weeks, and I’d also sent Tom Short, a forensic psychiatrist I used on occasion, down to the jail to interview Angel three times. I set up meetings with both of them on the same afternoon.

Diane had traveled to Oklahoma and Ohio, running down witnesses and documents. I was anxious to hear what she had to say. When I walked in, the conference room table was covered in papers.

“Your chickie is a ghost,” Diane said in her Tennessee drawl. She’s nearly sixty, but she styles her light brown hair short and spiked. She was wearing her perpetual smile and her favorite casual outfit, a bright orange Tennessee Volunteer T-shirt — she’s a rabid fan — khaki shorts that exposed knobby knees and varicose veins, and orange high-top Converse basketball shoes.

“No social security number, no driver’s license, no school records, no credit history, no nothing. She doesn’t exist, at least not on paper. But I’ve talked to everybody I could find and I think I’ve got everything pretty well organized. At least you’ll know a little more about what you’re dealing with.”

Diane said Angel was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 15, 1989, to a young woman named Grace Rodriguez. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption the same day to the Columbus Freewill Baptist Home for Children. Angel was adopted five months later by Airman First Class Thomas Rhodes and his wife, Betty. They named her Mary Ann Rhodes.

Diane had flown out to Oklahoma City to talk to Angel’s adopted parents. They told Diane that when they adopted Mary, they thought they were unable to have children of their own, but Ms. Rhodes became pregnant a year later. She subsequently had three more children.

“They said they treated her like a princess,” Diane said. “The mother called her a thieving, ungrateful little wench. She said her husband kept a stash of cash in a box in the ceiling, and Angel apparently cleaned it out before she left. But I always leave a card and tell people if they have any other information to give me a call. A couple hours after I left, I got a call on my cell phone. It was one of their daughters, a seventeen-year-old named Rebecca. She was scared to death and I didn’t get to talk to her for long, but she said her parents didn’t tell me the whole story.”

Diane paused and stared up at the ceiling. She loved drama.

“What?” I said. “C’mon. Out with it.”

“She said her daddy did bad things to Angel.”

“What kind of bad things?”

“Sexual abuse. She said it went on for years, and she thinks Angel finally just had enough. She also said her mother used to beat Angel pretty badly.”

“I wonder why Angel never told anyone.”

“The mother is a religious freak. Their living room looked like a sanctuary. She said she home-schooled the kids and was particular about what they were allowed to watch and read. I got the impression she didn’t even allow them to have friends. Angel probably didn’t have much of an opportunity to tell. Either that or she was just scared. Her sister told me Angel tried to run away a couple of times and the police had to bring her back, so I went down to the Oklahoma City police department and got copies of the reports. The first time, she only made it ten blocks. She locked herself in the bathroom of a convenience store. The police came and took her straight home. She took off again in a couple of years later. They found her walking along the highway about seven miles from her house. The police took her home again. If she told them about the abuse, they didn’t believe her.”

Diane then turned her attention to Erlene Barlowe. I’d asked her to quietly check into a few things, and I’d paid her out of my own pocket.

“No criminal record. Her husband was the sheriff of McNairy County from 1970 to 1973. He resigned under some pretty suspicious circumstances and went into the strip club business. She was with him every step of the way until he died of a heart attack last year. She doesn’t seem to have any enemies, at least none I could find. I talked to a couple of her employees. They’re flat-out loyal.”

“Corvette?”

“No Corvette. Or I guess I should say no record of a Corvette.”

“And what about Julie Hayes?”

“Very naughty girl. Three drug possessions, two misdemeanor thefts, three prostitution convictions. Most of the arrests are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Nobody had anything good to say about her. She’s a mess.”

“You talk to her?”

“I tried. The first time I went out to her place she was so stoned she could barely speak. The second time she told me to piss off, so I pissed off.”

An hour later, I drove over to meet with the forensic psychiatrist I’d hired to examine Angel. Tom Short was head of the psychiatry department at East Tennessee State University, a short, wiry academic who seemed to spend a lot of time in a world no one else understood. I’d met him at a death penalty seminar in Nashville five years earlier where he taught a class on the role of psychiatric evaluation in mitigation. I’d used him in seven cases since then, and we’d become friends. I’d never placed a lot of faith in psychiatry before I met Tom, but his uncanny ability to diagnose personality disorders and psychotic illnesses made a believer of me. I trusted him completely.