A Southern Girl (50 page)

Within minutes of rising to his feet Morrison shows himself a spin master worthy of the advanced billing, leading the rapt jurors through the night of the arrest and Swilling’s protestations of innocence. He wisely omits his client’s exact words, testified to by the arresting officers and reported in the newspaper, tastefully edited: “Hey, muthafuckas, whatchoo hasslin’ me fo; I been playin’ basketball; I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no drugs.”

Morrison leads them through Swilling’s account of his detainment in the bullpen and his subsequent “torture” by the defendant police officers. He weaves a chilling tale of spiked white fury, black vulnerability, and patent, gloating indifference by white supervisors to the pounding being administered in the holding cell. In this civil trial, he does not need the unanimity demanded of criminal verdicts, giving him greater latitude in playing the race card to trump the outnumbered whites. If black experience holds black jurors together, he’ll break the bank and he knows it.

I am behind and to one side of Natalie, having found a spot at the wall to back into. As Morrison parades his sad horribles before the jury like crippled, sack clothed mourners in a funeral cortege, I picture her nudging and prodding him on with her body English, restrained only with discipline and by the press of those flanking her, exhorting him to grip the city’s jugular and not be shaken free.

In rebuttal, the city’s lawyer, Meg Brandon, offers its review of the evidence, as close to Swilling’s as the Cooper River is to the Nile. Swilling, the city contends, was beaten unconscious by a man named Gaston Halleck, arrested hours earlier and the only other occupant of the bullpen when Swilling was placed inside. To prove its claim, the city produced Halleck, its star witness during the trial, who swore he had first delivered a fierce blow to Swilling’s temple, knocking him out, and proceeded to do the balance of his damage as Swilling lay helpless on the floor. “That’s why,” testified Halleck, “the po-lice didn’t hear nothin’. I stayed real quiet so I could work him over good.”

Halleck’s motivation in assaulting Swilling stemmed from a drug deal. One of Swilling’s runners had inflicted a recent wound to Halleck’s attrited pride by selling him some Sweet ’n Low at a price substantially higher than
market, and that night at the jail Halleck dealt with the rip-off according to the law of the streets. During Halleck’s testimony, Morrison fought to suppress any reference to “a drug deal” as prejudicial to his client’s cause and the judge agreed. Halleck had been allowed to say only that he and Swilling had had “an argument.”

“I thought ’bout chokin’ him to death,” Halleck forthrightly admitted on the witness stand, “but I been knowin’ him a while. We has some good times in the old days.”

The key question was why Halleck would come forward with such an admission, and the answer lay in the twenty-to-life sentence he had just drawn from a jury for armed robbery. Halleck had little to lose by coming forward. Swilling lacked the contacts in the penitentiary system to have Halleck killed and Halleck, a two-time loser, had plenty of protective friends waiting for him at the big house.

As if his confession were not enough to seal Swilling’s fate, Halleck had a parting gift for his old friend. Weeks after the beating, as Halleck and Swilling awaited their respective trials, Halleck on the armed robbery and Swilling, once released from the hospital, on the drug charges that constituted the basis for his original arrest, they had a conversation through intermediaries in the jail. Swilling told Halleck that he planned to get a hot-shot lawyer to sue the city for negligence in failing to protect him from Halleck in the bullpen. Halleck then, according to Halleck, told Swilling such a case lacked sex appeal and that if he really wanted to stick it to somebody he should claim the police did it.

“I was kind of jokin’ with the dude,” Halleck testified for the city. “How’s I to know he’d do it?”

As Meg Brandon rests the city’s case, Morrison jumps up for his final run at the jury. Gone is his judicious reserve, the “come, let us reason together” demeanor that characterized his earlier appeal. His eyes flash, his arms wave and he moves toward the jury box like a jaguar famished for meat.

“Why,” he demands, “did Gaston Halleck come before you with such bald-faced outlandish lies? He said it was because he has nothing to lose by telling you the truth. I’m here to tell you that a man like Halleck, a liar with a record as long as your sleeve, wouldn’t know the truth if he found it in his pocket. That truth is that the city can still make life better for Gaston Halleck in two ways; first, it can recommend he be placed in an
alternative to maximum security where he will enjoy conjugal leave privileges. For any of you who don’t know that term, it means the chance to be alone with his wife or lover at certain intervals. And secondly, it can recommend that he receive favorable consideration on the day, mercifully far into the future, when he comes up for parole. That is why he has agreed to perjure himself for the city.”

It has been a clash worth the time of every professional here, and as the jury files out and Judge Tyler announces a recess until a verdict is delivered, predictions fly across the courtroom like Frisbees.

“Get ready for a tax hike,” says Boyd Rollins, a CPA standing next to me. “The city’s self-insured and we’re going to take it on the chin.”

“No way,” counters Walter Ford from the other side. “I was here for Halleck’s testimony and let me tell you he had that jury by the short hairs. When he told about suggesting the whole thing to Swilling they looked over at that black bastard like he’d spit on the Pope. He’s got no chance.”

Ford is not a lawyer. No one who is would deny the first law of juries: when they’re out, anything can happen. The crowd begins to thin, expecting no rapid decision. Scott Edwards is up front, pad in hand, interviewing both sides. Summations and jury instructions have consumed the afternoon and I have no appointments. I edge forward, counter to the flow of those leaving, to where Natalie is engaged in debate with one of the blue suits. He departs as I approach.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” she says pleasantly. “What did you think?”

“Morrison’s good,” I say. “Real good.”

“Good enough?”

I shrug. Not having attended the trial as it progressed I am in no position to judge critical factors like credibility of witnesses. Conversely, Natalie has been here every day.

“What’s your guess?” I ask.

“Verdict for the city. Just a hunch.”

“Want to stake a lunch on it?”

“You’re betting on Swilling?”

“On the system. Slimeballs like him have a karma when it comes to taking advantage, especially when they can afford legal talent like Morrison.”

“Well,” she says, folding her arms and grinning, “isn’t this a role reversal for the books?”

“I’m not ready to fill out a membership application for the ACLU, I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“And I’m not ready to join … what is it I’m not ready to join?”

“United Daughters of the Confederacy?”

“Yes, that,” she says, laughing. “That man I was talking with a minute ago was trying to entice me into the pool they have going. Pick the verdict and come closest to the time the jury’s out and win a hundred bucks.”

“How are the bets running?”

“The money’s on a decision for Swilling; nobody thinks it will come quickly.”

“Then we have time for me to buy you a drink,” I am surprised to hear myself say.

“I’d like that,” she says, “but are you sure you should be seen with me? Last time it caused you problems.”

“There’s an Irish pub down the block. I could follow you from a safe distance.”

Together we stroll down Broad Street. A day that began as a harsh afterthought of winter has ripened into a redolent prelude to spring. The outrunners of nature’s marshaling bounty are borne on the wind from the sea. Delicate brines lift across awakening marshes, whisked ashore to rustle among jasmines, pears and redbuds in a sibilant reminder that it is once again time to stir, to lend their fragile incense to the perfume of renewal.

At the pub I suggest we continue on and she agrees. We turn on State Street, lined by ever-vigilant palmettoes and late-sleeping crape myrtles. At Queen we turn east to the river, drawn toward Waterfront Park by the scents of spring like two hungry children following a spiced aroma to a cooling apple pie.

From the river’s edge we watch the patient migration of freighters in the channel, outlined by running lights and moving with ghostly caution in the accumulating dusk. Up river, the twin spans of the Cooper River Bridge loom in the twilight, giant superstructures festooned between land masses beginning to twinkle with lights. In the park to our right some young boys are playing with a football so dark it seems invisible, lending a surreal touch to their efforts to throw and catch it.

We are standing before bronze topographical displays of Charleston’s four centuries, each emblazoned with history.

“Look,” says Natalie, pointing to the nearest bronze relief, “the major events are in braille as well.”

“Of course,” I say. “We were afraid that without that you might sue us on behalf of Charleston’s blind.” She turns slowly toward me, her expression unreadable in the dimness. “That’s a joke,” I add, uncertainly.

“You still think I’m unreasonable,” she says.

“Don’t you still believe I’m a wimp?”

“A nice wimp,” she says. “I had fun on Saturday. How about that drink you promised?”

Magnolia’s is nearby and compensates for swarms of tourists by serving excellent food. In its bar we sip cocktails, a vodka martini for me and a Manhattan for her.

“Adelle seems nice,” she observes from the blue.

I nod. “We laugh over the irony of our children dating after all these years.”

“I read Chris is quite the tennis star,” she says.

“The kid’s got a hundred mile an hour serve that will blow the gut off your racquet if you stick it out there. Allie won’t play with him.”

“Oh, why not?”

“She’s too competitive and he cuts her no slack.”

“Are they … serious?”

“I doubt it,” I say, popping a beer nut into my mouth. “He’s her first serious love interest but what she’s really serious about is college and beyond. It’ll pass.”

She is a long way from the jeans and boots of this past weekend. I am struck by her sophistication in the pallid light of this bar. Sitting across the small table, one hand languishing in her lap and the other demurely holding the stem of her glass, she assumes an aloofness I associate with trendy east side haunts in New York or the international milieu of Georgetown. There is an other-worldliness to her here, something vaguely European, as if at any moment she could crook her finger to beckon a tuxedoed sommelier and order, with equal ease, a scarce Bordeaux, the czar’s preferred vodka or the Pope’s reserved Chianti. Under her placid reserve, on the surface not the least threatening, I sense a certain ruthlessness, a near
cousin to the efficacious lawyer who entered my office that first day, with a duality like a feline that purrs in social settings such as this but is fierce and lashing when provoked, able to puncture with a glance any nascent stirring of sentimentality as unaffordable in her bottom-line world. “Get to the point,” such women seem to say, “or get lost.” I see Natalie in that arena, giving as good as she gets and demanding the check as she leaves.

“Why Charleston?” I ask.

“Why not Boston or Chicago?”

“Yeah. Why come here?”

“You won’t like my answer,” she says, looking away momentarily.

“In that case, I can guess. You came here because this is a greenhouse for civil rights violations, a veritable cornucopia for ACLU wrong-righters.”

“Something like that. I warned you wouldn’t like it. It was between here and some dreadful two-step town in Texas.”

“Poor, pitiable Texas.” I raise my glass in a toasting motion.

“But I’m starting to like it here,” she hastens to add.

“Why? Having to step over sprawling constitutional iniquities on the way to the bus stop must wear you down.”

“You realize,” she says, “that I’m tolerating your sarcasm only because you were nice to me at the Cup.”

“Payback is hell.” My vodka, so cold in descent, has metabolized into a charged mass, fissioning forth waves of cheer. I am enjoying myself, but wary enough to realize that poking fun at her is a risky zero-sum game.

“You went to Columbia?” I ask, unwilling to push her further.

“For law. NYU undergrad.”

“How was it, NYU?”

“Good education. I spent all my time studying. The GPA’s required by law schools like Columbia are so high.”

“So, no sorority life at NYU, eh?”

“No social life worth mentioning. I think I had one date my freshman year.”

“And your parents lived … where?”

“When I entered college, in Illinois. By the time I left my dad lived in Ithaca and my mother had moved to White Plains.”

“Divorce?”

“A classic meltdown. I think my dad became involved with a coed but I’m not sure. Nor was Mother, but that didn’t stop her from alleging it.”

“So then you split your visits between two cities.”

“Actually, I saw more of New York. Whenever I went to see either of them it was one recrimination after another so I stopped going.”

“And holidays?”

“Went to shows, toured the art galleries, museums, libraries. You have to try to become bored in New York. Have you spent any time there?”

“One summer,” I reply, summoning our passing waiter for some mineral water. “I interned on Wall Street the summer before I graduated from law school; a small firm in the Irving Trust Building. I don’t see how those people stand it.”

“The city or the practice?”

“The city I liked. I shared an apartment on the upper east side with some guys from college. I learned the subway system in a day and after a week I had learned to fold the Wall Street Journal just right, so I could hang on one of those metal grips and read on the trip downtown.”

Natalie laughs, my description evoking apparent recognition of this tribe of business warriors for whom the Journal, held in crisply folded squares and read in the stroboscopic flicker of tunneling trains, stood as a totem during my time in New York. Serious young men, thin and neatly dressed and commonly wearing wire-rimmed glasses, boarded crammed cars and by this singular shibboleth identified those with whom they might ultimately, with the timing critical to bulls and bears, rub elbows in the same clubby confines of some mid-town smoking room, its members fraternally wealthy and still glued to the Journal.