the parking lot, and knocked him unconscious with one punch before he hauled him off to jail.
Sarge had to be in his early seventies now. He was still tall and lean, but Mother Nature was beginning to bend him like an old poplar in a stiff wind. There were dark liver spots on his huge hands, and his upper lip had retreated until it was tight across his dentures, giving him a permanent snarl. The buckle on his gun belt was notched two inches above his navel, but he had no holster and no gun. He carried only a nightstick and small can of pepper spray.
”What’s up, Sarge?” I said as I walked through the metal detector.
”The rent,” he growled. ”I hear your boy Johnny Wayne is throwin’ in the towel today.” The sheriff’s department was a more efficient gossip pipeline than a sewing circle. Sarge always knew what was happening, sometimes
”Good news travels fast,” I said.
”Can’t believe they ain’t gonna give him the needle.”
”Hell, Sarge, he’s innocent. He’s just being railroaded by the system.”
”Innocent, my ass. Nobody you represent is innocent.”
As I started to walk past Sarge towards the elevator, he grabbed me by the arm. His gnarled fingers dug deep into my biceps.
”You know what I’d like to see?” he said. ”I’d like to see that sorry sonofabitch hanged on a flatbed truck right out here in front of the courthouse-that’s what I’d like to see. I’d buy a goddamned ticket.”
It was a sentiment prevalent in the community.
Laura Neal, Johnny Wayne’s wife and victim, was guilty of nothing more than picking a bad husband.
She was a third-grade teacher with a wonderful reputation, her parents were solid and hardworking, and her brother was a college professor. People wanted to see Johnny Wayne burned at the stake, and I had the feeling most of them wouldn’t have minded seeing his lawyer go up in flames with him.
I pulled away from Sarge and headed up the side stairwell to the second floor. There were about a dozen people milling around in the hallway outside the courtroom, speaking in hushed tones. The hallway was dimly lit and narrow. I never noticed any color in the corridor outside the courtroom. Everything always seemed black and white, like I was walking onto the set of
I stepped into Judge Ivan Glass’s courtroom and looked around. No judge. No bailiff. No clerk.
”Where’s His Holiness?” I asked Lisa Mayes, the assistant district attorney who had been assigned to prosecute Johnny Wayne. She was sitting at the prosecution table and contemplating her fingernails.
”Back in chambers. He’s not in a good mood.”
Glass had been a notorious drinker and womanizer for more than three decades. He’d been divorced twice, primarily because of his affinity for younger women, but the good people of the First Judicial District didn’t seem to mind. They elected him every eight years. Glass’s father had been a judge, and his father before him. To hear Glass tell it, the bench was his birthright.
He was known among the defense bar as Ivan the Terrible because of his complete lack of compassion for criminal defendants and because he treated defense attorneys almost as badly as he treated their clients. I got off on the wrong foot with him right out of law school. The first day I was in his courtroom, he put an old man in jail because the man couldn’t afford to pay his court costs. I knew what the judge was doing was illegal-debtors’ prisons were outlawed a long time ago-but he seemed to do whatever he wanted regardless of the law. I did some research and found Glass had been doing it for years. I wrote him a letter and asked him to stop.
He wrote back and told me young lawyers ought to mind their own goddamned business. So I sued the county for allowing one of their employees, the judge, to commit constitutional violations during the course of his employment. By the time I was done, the county had to pay out nearly a million dollars to people Glass had jailed illegally, and Glass was seriously embarrassed in the process. He hated me for it, and one of the ways he exacted vengeance was by appointing me to cases like Johnny Wayne Neal’s.
The courtroom was tense and somber. The media vultures had already filled the jury box. James and Rita Miller, Johnny Wayne’s in-laws, were sitting on the front row. Rita was crying. James looked away when I tried to catch his eye.
I walked over to the defense table to wait for the judge, who finally teetered through the door in his black robe a half hour later. His hair was snow white, medium length, and chaotic. He wore tinted reading glasses that made it difficult to see his eyes. His clerk helped him up the steps and into his chair. The clerk called the case, and the bailiffs brought Johnny Wayne in through a door to my right and led him to the podium ten feet in front of the judge.
I stood at the podium next to my client while the judge went through a lengthy question and answer session to ensure that Johnny Wayne was competent to enter a guilty plea, that he understood what was going on, and that he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Lisa Mayes, the prosecutor, then stood and read the litany of evidence that would have been presented had Johnny Wayne gone to trial.
I could hear Rita Miller sobbing uncontrollably behind me as she was forced, one last time, to listen to a detailed description of her daughter’s brutal murder while her grandson hid beneath the bed. I felt ashamed to be representing the man who had caused her such misery.
When Lisa was finished, Judge Glass stiffened.
”Johnny Wayne Neal,” he said in a voice made gravelly from booze and tobacco, ”how do you plead to the charge of first-degree murder?”
The moment of truth. The point of no return.
”Guilty,” came the answer, barely audible. I breathed a sigh of relief.
”On your plea of guilty the court finds you guilty and sentences you to life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
Glass then lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and leaned forward. His eyes bored into Johnny Wayne.
”Just for the record,” the judge said, ”I want to tell you something before they trot you off to the penitentiary for the rest of your miserable existence.
In all my years on the bench, you are, without question, the most disgusting, the most cowardly, the most pitiful excuse for a human being that has ever set foot in my court. There isn’t an ounce of remorse in you, and I want you to know that it would have been my distinct pleasure to sentence you to death if you’d had the courage to go to trial. I hope you rot in hell.”
Johnny Wayne’s head rose slowly, and he met the judge’s gaze.
”Fuck you,” he said quietly.
Glass’s eyes widened. ”What did you say?”
”I said fuck you, and the district attorney, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and this pathetic excuse for a lawyer you dumped on me, and everybody else who had a hand in framing me.” The words spilled out in a crescendo. By the time he finished, his voice was echoing off the walls.
There was a stunned silence. The judge surprised me by smiling. He turned his head to me.
”Not only is your client a coward, Mr. Dillard, he’s a stupid coward.”
”Fuck you!” Johnny Wayne yelled.
”Bailiffs!” Judge Glass roared. He half rose from his seat, like a jockey on a Thoroughbred, and pointed his gavel at Johnny Wayne.
”Take him out and gag him!”
They were on him in a second. Two of them took him down and another two jumped into the fray. I could hear the cameras clicking and people gasping as I moved out of the way. Johnny Wayne was screaming obscenities as they punched and kicked at him. The bailiffs finally got enough control so they could drag Johnny Wayne across the floor by his feet and out the door. I sat down at the defense table and wondered briefly whether I should be offended that Johnny Wayne had called me a pathetic excuse for a lawyer. I was a pathetic excuse for a human being, maybe, but I was a pretty damned good lawyer.
Everybody sat around stupidly for a few minutes until finally the bailiffs, now in a tight phalanx, dragged Johnny Wayne back into the room. They’d stuffed something into his mouth and covered it with duct tape. I wondered how it was going to feel when they ripped the tape off his neatly trimmed beard.
They pulled him upright at the podium in front of the judge.
”Mr. Neal,” Judge Glass said, ”your little outburst caused me to briefly consider rescinding your plea
