An Absence of Principal (11 page)

Ben quickly tossed his belongings in his suitcase, being careful not to forget anything. He heard soft weeping from Shanna, still crouched, fetal-like, in the corner.

“I’m leaving. I won’t come back,” he assured her. She said nothing and just continued her soft sobbing.

“I’m sorry, Shanna,” Doggett said. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

Had it been a different situation, Ben figured Shanna would have come out of the bathroom and told him not to leave. Begged. Pleaded even. But Ben knew now that there was quite possibly no one left in his world who cared about him at all. Angela and the kids hadn’t called him in two weeks. And why should they, the way he had destroyed their lives. With Shanna crying in the bathroom, there was no one left who would even know he was gone.

Ben walked into the darkness of the apartment complex parking lot and found his car. He had just enough Corona in his system to have a good buzz for a couple of hours down the road. He pointed his car in the direction of Oklahoma. Once the beer wore off he knew he was home free. No one would suspect him of anything. Not Ben, a college-degreed educator; a public school administrator. Were it not for Angela and the messy divorce that was no doubt looming, he could easily go anywhere and simply start his life over. In a heartbeat, that’s precisely what he had to do. It may have been only a momentary whim, a fleeting thought turned into an action that would change everything in his life. And he was just irrational enough at this point that he felt that such a change would fix everything that had happened. Ben Doggett, he thought, would cease being the old Ben Doggett from this moment forward. He would simply start over. That should fix everything. Well, everything except his self-esteem, which took a hit right between the eyes every time he remembered that he had done a drug deal with a complete stranger and then stole sixty large in bags of dirty money from the worthless Junior Walker. The now dead, worthless Junior Walker.

In those moments that Ben wanted to believe everything was going to be all right, something always seemed to jump up and bite him, reminding him that it would be a long, long time before anything was right again.

The next morning broke dreary and cloudy in Midland, the way things broke for most anyone left in Ben’s path these days.

Angela arrived at her lawyer’s office for a scheduled appointment. It was 10:15 before it became clear that the other party in the divorce proceedings had no intention of appearing.

“Any idea where your husband might be?” Tom Chaney asked Angela.

“I haven’t seen him or talked to him in a couple of weeks. If I had to guess, he’d be at his mistress’s apartment,” Mr. Chaney.

“Where would that be, I wonder?” Chaney asked.

“Don’t get me to lyin’,” Angela said. “I don’t make it a habit of checkin’ in on my husband’s lady friends.”

“Is this not the first time?”

“I have no idea, Mr. Chaney. I’ve never noticed anything until recently.”

Angela picked up the phone and tried to call Ben.

“No answer,” she told Chaney as she excused herself to step into the hallway and leave a voice mail that was better left in private.

At a rest stop on the interstate, twenty miles north of the Texas-Oklahoma border, Ben Doggett rolled over at the sound of a Barry White song, his voice mail alert tone.

He recognized Angela’s number. When he saw it, he didn’t know what it was about, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

“Ben, where are you? I have been waiting at Tom Chaney’s office for 30 minutes. This is the day we’re supposed to sign the divorce papers and like always, you let me down again. You’d best call me when you get this.”

Ben looked for a water bottle in the console of his Honda to try to wash back the dryness in his mouth from the beers he had when he pulled over at the rest stop six hours earlier. His shirt was untucked and wrinkled, his pants undone just enough to let his middle aged beer belly (a fairly recent acquisition) spill over. He was somehow able to avoid detection by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and catch a decent night’s sleep. He would spend the rest of Monday morning making his way to his hometown of Tulsa. With the exception of his mother he was no longer close to anyone there, probably for the best since no one there would want to know him these days. All he could think about was what an ideal place Tulsa, his hometown, would be for a new start to his new life.

CHAPTER 8
 

“I
’ve always loved my freedom, never taken it for granted,” Tony told Trask and Alex. “Even so, I never loved it like I do now. Not when I realize it could be taken from me. I still don’t know how I got here.”

Garrison had rarely heard a client proclaim his innocence so steadfastly as Nail. Rarely were any of them actually as innocent as they claimed to be.

“Tony, I’m not going to let you go to jail. Alex and I won’t let that happen. We know you didn’t do it. We believe that,” Garrison said.

Tony expressed reservations in Alex’s attitude, which wavered from day to day. Some mornings she seemed to believe what he said, other mornings he wasn’t so sure. But if Tony had learned anything in life it was not to judge people based on their appearances or even their attitude. He didn’t know anything about Alex’s life. Why she might have been less receptive to his story or what she had been through to get her to this point.

“She just seems like she’s not in our corner sometimes,” Tony said.

“Don’t you worry about that. She’s working for me. She’s had some bad things go down recently and she’s seen some pretty rough stuff. Being ex-DEA, she’s not easily persuaded into buying a person’s innocence,” Garrison said. “She thinks if you’re near dope, chances are you have something to do with the crime. Any crime that happens. I’m talking her out of that belief by having her be involved in your case, Tony. I know you didn’t murder Junior Walker, but I need more clarity about what you were doing in Odessa the night of the murder. We can’t find anyone who says you were with them that night.”

Tony rarely talked about himself. He knew whatever he offered up was between him and God. The fact that he spent his time in Odessa ministering to others was only part of the story. When Tony would get off work at school in Midland he often drove to Odessa where he worked a second job as a night supervisor of a non-profit that helped teach work skills to the developmentally disabled. He would then minister on the streets, late into the night.

Tony would often work in the back room, hands-on, with clients making boxes and stacking hangers. The center helped about forty people, paying them each a small wage based on their motor movements. He made it a regular habit of visiting with every one of the clients individually.

“Mr. Nail!” a Hispanic man who suffered from Down Syndrome would shout out every night when Tony walked in. Another man with a mild disability but plenty of emotion reached for a hug every time Tony walked into The Big Room, what the clients called the area where the work was done. A woman in a wheelchair would cry when she saw Tony come in, a cry of love just at the sight of him.

Garrison told Alex what he saw the night he went to the center with Tony, who had been a bit reluctant to take his attorney to his second job, even though Tony considered it his first job. Tony’s custodian job paid the bills; his work at the center and ministering on the streets fed his soul.

“There were probably thirty-five, forty people working the night I visited. They were doing mostly stuff that would be menial to me and you,” Garrison said. “But they were all happy. When Tony came in, they would only get happier. We walked up to each workstation. He introduced me to each person there, but here’s the best part: He knew all of them by name; every one of them. It was incredible. This working elementary school janitor with not one secret job but two. And all the time he has away from his day job, he works to help others. People like that don’t kill other people, Alex.”

She smiled and agreed with Garrison’s assessment. It was hard even for her to think a person of that background was guilty of a drug-related murder. It’s not as if she hadn’t seen stranger story lines, but Tony did seem like the real deal.

When Tony sat down with Garrison and Alex the next morning, the subject grew more difficult.

“As good as you are, as nice and as genuine, and as believable as you are, the jury will convict you unless you have a viable alibi. You’ve already told us you weren’t in Odessa that night to minister. You told me you weren’t over there for your second job at the center. Why were you there, Tony?”

As strong as Tony felt about not talking about what he did that was good in life, he felt equally strong about not falsely implicating others.

“You’ve gotta trust me on this, Tony. If you do not tell me what’s up with your trip to Odessa that night, I don’t know how much we can help you,” Garrison said.

Tony stared at Garrison. Helpless. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything.

“You’re my friend, Tony. If you know something, or if you’re hiding something, it can be detrimental to any hopes of freedom you might have.”

Garrison now knew Tony was hiding something. He just didn’t know what.

“Did you kill Junior, Tony?”

“No. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’d never kill.” Tony’s voice was as loud as Garrison had ever heard it.

Garrison knew Tony well enough to know, too, that when Tony was that adamant about something, he was being truthful. Garrison had heard him be forceful when both of them were kids in the neighborhood. Hearing it again, he remembered back to those days. He didn’t recall details, but he remembered Tony was always the stand-up guy among his circle of friends. The good kid on the block that you could always count on to be honest. And Garrison remembered that when Tony was pushed into a corner about something, he was steadfast in his belief about it and often raised his voice.

“I remember, Tony, when we were kids, I always believed you. You were always the one person I never doubted,” Garrison said. “And I remember why. You were always so convincing. When you believed something, we all believed it. And in you. We could hear it in your voice. The conviction. I hear that again now, Tony.”

Tony was trembling slightly. He gulped and looked away from Garrison’s stare.

“What are you keeping from me, Tony? What are you hiding? Who are you hiding?”

Tony said nothing and continued to stare out the window, away from Garrison’s penetrating eyes. Eyes that were famous to other litigators, to witnesses on the stand, and to women – his wife, Lucy Hannah, in particular, who would tell anyone who would listen, it was Garrison’s eyes that first attracted her to him. They could bore a hole into your soul.

When Garrison looked at Tony, when he pressed him harder on who or what he was hiding, he thought – he knew, in fact – he noticed a tick; a slight flicker of the eyelid and an avoidance of eye contact. It took a seasoned attorney to notice something of that sort, but Garrison knew he saw it.

“Who did this, Tony? I think you know,” Garrison pushed. “You know, don’t you?”

“Leave me alone,” Tony said, jumping up from his chair and running out the front door of Garrison’s law firm.

Garrison followed him out the door. He urged Alex to stay inside.

“I’ll handle this,” he told her.

Garrison walked into the parking lot and found Tony leaning over the hood of his car, his forehead resting on his arm.

“Tony. You have to tell me,” Garrison said. “If you want to keep on preaching to those people in the streets who have heard so much and whose lives you’ve changed, you’ve gotta talk. If you want to keep on helping the people at the center, helping them learn new things and helping them earn a living and lead better lives, you’ve got to be straight. Come clean with me, man.”

Tony looked at him.

“How did I end up in the middle of this?” Tony asked. “I’ve tried so hard to stay clear of the wrong and now I get thrown into the middle of this and I didn’t even do anything.”

“Who did, Tony?”

He looked down at the ground, still unable to meet Garrison’s eyes for any length of time.