Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(54)

“Why didn’t you kill him?” I said. “Why didn’t you have Ronnie pay him a visit?”

“I did have Ronnie pay him a visit,” she said. “He put on a ski mask and performed a little surgery. The doctor no longer has all of his equipment.”

“Ronnie castrated him?”

“No. He removed his terwilliger with a scalpel. And he didn’t leave it there so the man could have it reattached. He put it in the burn barrel out back of the club.”

“Terwilliger” was Erlene’s pet name for a man’s penis. She’d removed one herself from a preacher who had raped one of her girls not long before I first met her.

“No problems with the police?” I said.

“They came around, but Ronnie’s a pro. He didn’t leave anything behind for them to make any connections to us.”

“And that wasn’t enough for you?” I said.

“Not near enough, sugar. Not as far as I was concerned. But I had to wait for the right time, and it had to be the right girl. I thought Sheila Self was the right girl, but she turned out to be ...how should I put this? Less reliable than I thought she’d be. Poor thing. She’s been through so much I should have known better, but she was a student at the university, and that was the key to this whole thing.”

“How? What difference did it make that she was a student?”

“I’m not the brightest bulb, but I’m not the dullest, either,” Erlene said. “I figured the best way to get back at the university was by doing two things. Embarrassing them in front of God and everybody and suing the pants off of them, no pun intended. I started researching suing universities and I learned about this Title IX. Do you know what Title IX is, sweetie?”

“I do. It protects women from discrimination on college campuses. It also protects them from sexual assault, or at least it’s supposed to.”

“That’s right, so when a call came into the escort service looking for a girl to dance at a party for football players on campus, I immediately thought of Sheila and I thought we could pull this off.”

“What, exactly, did you tell her to do?”

“I told her to go to the party, to be friendly, and to go into the bathroom and take just a little GHB. GHB loosens a person up, you know what I mean, sweetie? It lowers people’s inhibitions. Then I told her to come out, start her show, and to make sure she touched several of them. I told her to scratch a few of them lightly and get some DNA under her fingernails. I told her to give free lap dances if she had to, to run her fingers through their hair. And then I told her to leave, wait an hour, and call the police and tell them she’d been raped. But she drank beer and took ecstasy and had sex with her worthless boyfriend before she went to the party, and then she took too much GHB. Apparently, she was barely able to do anything at all. She wound up leaving, but she doesn’t remember any of it. She wound up getting picked up by a cop later and told the cop she’d been raped.”

“Gang raped?” I said.

“I didn’t say anything about gang raped, and I didn’t say anything about black players. She and the investigator cooked up every bit of that later. I had no way of knowing he’d do something so stupid and hateful, but in a way, it’s helped our case because the university is about to pay out a bunch of money. They’re terrified those boys might get convicted and if they wait, they may have to pay a bunch more.”

“Who’s going to get this money, Erlene?”

“The lawyer I hired out of Nashville will get forty percent, the greedy pig. Sheila will get seventy percent of what’s left, and then I plan to take a cut.”

“So Sheila made up the story about being gang raped, and the cop turned it into a black on white thing?”

“Sheila says he’s a full-blown racist, but she doesn’t have any love for black men either. She was assaulted by two black boys in high school and when she retaliated, she was the one who wound up getting sent off to juvy.”

“Yeah, I heard that story,” I said. “She took a butcher knife to a fellow student. That’ll get you sent off every time.”

“They were harassing her, feeling her up,” Erlene said. “Don’t take their side.”

“I’m not. So the big question for me is, what is Mike Armstrong’s angle in all this? How have you gotten him to continue with this prosecution? He doesn’t have diddly as far as evidence goes.”

“Everybody has their skeletons,” Erlene said. “I’m good at finding them. I put a private investigator on him as soon as he was appointed to the district attorney’s office. Just in case. You never know when some good, old-fashioned dirt might come in handy. I do the same thing with judges and assistant DAs, the chief of police, and even the sheriff. Anybody that might be a potential threat to me and my being able to make a living, I have a file on them. I started doing DAs after that terrible man Deacon Baker charged my Angel with murder and then turned around and charged me when you got Angel off.”

“You said the sheriff. Do you have a file on Leon?”

“Of course. I have some wonderful movies of him and me together doing some things I’m sure he’d rather not become public knowledge.”

“You might be the most devious person I’ve ever met,” I said.