”You mean to tell me Mr. Dillard requested that she only serve three years for this? After everything else she’s done?”
”Yes, sir.”
”Where is he?”
”He’s probably in court somewhere.”
”Well, get him down here. I want to talk to him.”
I stood, my face hot, and walked towards the front.
”I’m here, Judge.”
”Well, well, Mr. Dillard, glad you could join us, especially since you’ve been so successful at manipulating the system.”
”I haven’t manipulated anything,” I said. Lisa Mayes seemed surprised to see me. Sarah looked at me hopefully. I stopped just to the right of the defense table. ”I’m just not asking for blood, Judge.
This is her first felony.”
”It’s her first felony
”She’s been charged with felonies three times in the past, but they’ve all been reduced to misdemeanors.
I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with that, either-did you, Mr. Dillard?”
”Are you accusing me of something?”
”You’re damned right I am. I’m accusing you of manipulating the legal system to gain favorable treatment for a member of your family.”
”And you wouldn’t do the same?”
”Watch your mouth, sir. I’m not in any mood to put up with any disrespect from you.”
”This district attorney, the public defender, and my sister have apparently come to an agreement they think is fair,” I said. ”I didn’t have anything to do with it. The only thing I told Miss Mayes was that I wasn’t going to insist on the maximum punishment.
She’ll serve almost a year as it is.”
”Let me ask you a question, Mr. Dillard,” Judge Glass said. ”If this young lady was a complete stranger to you and she’d stolen your daughter’s car and an expensive piece of jewelry that belonged to your wife, would you be in here asking me to accept a minimum sentence? Especially with her list of priors? Tell the truth for a change.”
”She’s not a complete stranger, so the question is meaningless,” I said. ”And I always tell the truth in this courtroom. You just don’t like to hear it sometimes.”
”Watch your tone, Mr. Dillard. You’re on the verge of a contempt citation.” His voice was beginning to tremble, a sure sign that his anger was about to overcome his reason.
”My tone is no different than yours, Judge,” I said.
”Is this hearing about accepting a plea from my sister? Or is it about something else? Because if it’s about some personal animosity you hold towards me, perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from this case and let her enter her plea in front of an impartial judge.”
Glass was a bully, and like all bullies, he became angry and confused when people stood up to him.
He certainly had the power to put me in jail, but I knew I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. If he ordered them to arrest me, I’d just embarrass him in front of the court of appeals.
”Don’t flatter yourself,” he said. ”I save my personal animosity for important people. You’re certainly not in that category.”
”Good. Then let’s get on with it,” I said.
”I’m not accepting this plea as is,” Glass said. ”She can plead to two consecutive three-year sentences, or she can plead to concurrent six-year sentences, or she can go to trial. She’s not walking out of my courtroom with less than six years.”
”Why?” I said. That simple, three-letter word was the one I knew judges hated the most. Most of them didn’t feel like they had to explain themselves. They were judges, after all. They wore a robe, and the robe gave them the power to do pretty much whatever they pleased.
”Why, Mr. Dillard? Why? Because I say so. Because your sister is the scum of the earth. She won’t work, she doesn’t pay taxes, she sucks up drugs like a vacuum cleaner, and she’s a thief. She’s a drain on society, and she belongs in jail. If you didn’t want her to go to jail, you shouldn’t have reported her crimes to the police. You did call the police, didn’t you?”
As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. When I picked up the phone, I knew I was putting Sarah at risk of a long jail term. Hell, I’d wanted her to go to jail. But my anger had subsided, and I’d convinced myself that what she’d agreed to was more than enough.
”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 Mayes 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,” Mayes said. ”But the judge went into his routine again about you calling the police. She’s angry at him, but she’s
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 damned near 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 fuckie suckie 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
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 his pecker 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 for fuckie suckie 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.
