Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

“What’s the matter, Mr. Dillard?” Glass said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“This is between you and the district attorney and her lawyer,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

“Have a nice day,” Glass said.

I turned and walked out the door, angry and embarrassed. I called Lisa Mays an hour later. She said the public defender had taken Sarah into the back and explained that if she went to trial and was convicted, Judge Glass could, and probably would, sentence her to twelve years in prison.

“She agreed to the six,” Mays said. “But the judge went into his routine again about you calling the police. She’s angry at him, but she’s really pissed off at you.”

July 5

8:20 a.m.

I was sitting with Thomas Walker II, an assistant district attorney named Fred Julian, and a couple of bailiffs in the judge’s office in Mountain City, getting ready to go to trial with Maynard Bush. The bailiffs were Darren and David Bowers, a pair of cheerful, inseparable identical twins in their late fifties. Every time I saw them, they were laughing. After graduating from high school in Mountain City in the late sixties and thinking they’d be drafted, Darren and David enlisted in the army so they could stay together. Darren, in his brown deputy’s uniform, was telling a war story. David, also in uniform, was sitting across the room red-faced.

“We’re in this little bitty brothel in Saigon,” Darren was saying. His accent made Jeff Foxworthy sound like a city slicker. “Been out in the bush almost a month. Hornier than three-peckered billy goats, both of us. Davie’s drunker’n Cooter Brown, and he staggers up to this ol’ Vietnamese madame and puts his hands on his hips like John Wayne and says, ‘How much fer a roll in the hay thar, Miss Slanty Eyes?’

“Now, I reckon that ol’ girl she knew a little more English than Davie figgered she did, ‘cause she give him a look that’d peel chrome off a bumper. Then she smiles at him all nice and says, ‘You beaucoup big boy?’ Davie didn’t know what she’s a-talkin’ about at first, but then she points down at his crotch and she says, ‘Show me. You big boy?’”

Darren was giggling. He started to talk and then stopped and giggled some more. The memory was almost too much for him to take.

“So Davie, he goes, ‘Ahh, so you want to take a gander at old G.I. Johnson, huh? You reckon it might be too big for your girls?’ So Davie, he… he…” Darren broke down again. He was laughing so hard tears were streaming down his cheeks.

“Davie, he just drops his fly and pulls it out right there for everybody to see. And that madame, she looks down at it and then she looks back up at Davie’s face all serious, and I swear on my mama’s grave, this is what she says to him. She says, ‘Normal price ten dollah. But for little guy like you, I take five.’”

Darren slapped his leg and roared. Laughter was bouncing off the walls as Judge Rollins walked in. Rollins was a no-nonsense guy who traveled the Second Judicial Circuit. He didn’t bother to ask what all the commotion was about.

“Go get him,” he said to the Bowers twins. “Let’s get started.”

Darren and David got up to go fetch Maynard Bush. He was being held in the old Johnson County Jail, which was about a hundred feet behind the courthouse, across a small lawn.

The judge sat down behind his desk and we started talking about some of the issues that would come up in the trial. After about ten minutes, I heard what had to be gunshots.

Pop! Pop!

There was a short pause:

Pop!

The second-floor window behind the judge’s desk looked out over the lawn behind the building toward the jail. I got to the window just in time to see Maynard Bush climbing into the passenger side of a green Toyota sedan. A woman was helping him get into the car. She slammed the door, ran around to the driver’s side, jumped in, and the car drove away.

Darren and David Bowers were sprawled in the courtyard. Darren was face down, David was lying on his back. The first thought that hit me when I realized what had happened was that they both had grandchildren.

It took me less than a minute to run down the steps, out the back door, and across the courtyard. David was gasping for breath, blood gurgling from a hole in his throat. Darren wasn’t moving. I pressed my finger against his carotid. No pulse. Two officers from the jail were only seconds behind me. One of them took a look at the two fallen men and raced back inside.

I rolled up my jacket and placed it underneath David’s feet. I took off my tie, folded it, and laid it across the wound in his throat. I put my left hand behind his head and held the tie over the wound with my right, trying to keep pressure on it to reduce the bleeding.

“Stay with me, David,” I said. “You’re going to be okay. Just stay with me until the ambulance gets here.” He didn’t respond. “David! Please, hang in there. You want to see those grandbabies again, don’t you?” His eyes flickered slightly at the mention of his grandchildren, but blood was pouring from the wound and his breath was labored. I didn’t think he was going to make it.

Beside me, a young Johnson County deputy rolled Darren onto his back and started C.P.R. The deputy who’d gone back inside returned with a first-aid kit and three more officers. They helped me replace my tie with a bandage.

“What happened?” one of them said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard the shots, looked out the window, and they were down.”

I held the bandage for what seemed like forever, when suddenly, finally, I became aware of sirens; the air seemed to explode with noise and activity. Two ambulances and a crash truck arrived from the EMS station, which was only three blocks away. All of them jumped the curb and pulled to within a few feet of me. Uniformed men and women began to surround me, and I stood and backed off a ways. There was nothing more I could do.

They patched David up as best they could, strapped him onto a gurney, and loaded him into the ambulance. They did the same for Darren, but everybody knew he was already dead.

As they drove away, I stood there in a daze. A thought began to form in my mind, and I instantly felt nauseous. Had Maynard used me to plan his escape? It was routine for attorneys to help their clients set up jail visits — but I was certain the woman I’d seen helping Maynard get into the car had to be Bonnie Tate. I hadn’t actually seen her before, but it had to be her.

I thought about what Maynard said to me that day: “ I ain’t saying I want to marry you or nothing, but you’re a pretty decent dude.”

Decent dude. I dropped my head and began to trudge back to the courthouse. My legs felt as heavy as tree trunks. I noticed my hands and shirt were covered with blood, David Bowers’s blood. Decent dude. As I walked slowly through the courtyard in the bright sunshine on a beautiful June morning in the Tennessee mountains, I felt anything but decent. I felt dirty, and I just wanted it all to end.

July 7

11:45 p.m.

Being a single man with a rather large supply of discretionary income, and having had the opportunity to provide certain legal services to Mr. and Mrs. Gus Barlowe in the past, Charles B. Dunwoody III, Esq. saw no harm in occasionally availing himself of the pleasures of the Mouse’s Tail Gentlemen’s Club. To his closest associates, he privately referred to his adventures at the club as slumming with the naked hillbilly girls. He wasn’t always particularly proud of the things he did there, but as he told his country club buddies, “Pardon the pun, but sometimes a gentleman just has to let it all hang out.”

Gus Barlowe had sought Dunwoody’s advice on a wide range of topics, most of which Dunwoody was not at liberty to discuss. Dunwoody had quickly learned that Mr. Barlowe was an enterprising gentleman who generated large streams of revenue and who required an attorney with a creative mind and a deft touch in order to dissuade curious institutional minds from examining his affairs too closely. Since Dunwoody’s academic and legal backgrounds were steeped in corporate law and international banking and finance, he’d been able to satisfactorily accommodate Gus Barlowe’s needs. The fact that Barlowe paid handsomely, and paid in cash, only made the relationship more palatable for Dunwoody.