Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (10 page)

After the court enters Dade’s not-guilty plea, we get a January 7 trial date and are excused from the courtroom.

I ask Cash when he’ll have time to talk, and he tells me to come to his office in half an hour. Cash is young and he dresses well. His gray suit is a worsted wool herringbone that fits him like a glove. It doesn’t hurt that he is my height minus about twenty pounds. He can’t be more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. Probably a real eager beaver.

A gaggle of reporters and TV camera persons are on us immediately when we exit the courtroom, but I give them virtually the same brief comment that I did going in, “My client is not guilty of any crime. Any sexual contact between him and the complaining party was completely consensual. We are not going to try this case in the media, and we don’t expect the prosecutor to do so either.

That’s all we’ll have to say until after the trial.” I look around for the green-eyed reporter from the ten o’clock news, but she may not be out of bed yet.

“Dade, are you still a Razorback?” a woman hollers at him as we push our way out the door.

I have directed him not to answer, but I notice he shrugs his shoulders, indicating he has no idea.

“Dade, is it true that you met with Coach Carter last night?” the same reporter persists, preceding us down the steps onto College Avenue. Young, with her long hair pulled back, and wearing a blue suit, she may be a reporter for the Traveler, the university newspaper, or for the New York Times. These days everybody looks high school age to me.

Afraid that Dade will talk, I say quickly, “We are not taking any more questions. Let’s go, Dade.”

Damn if she doesn’t follow us to my car around the corner on Center.

“Dade, are you still in school?” she asks twice.

I almost lose my cool. In the past I’ve had a weakness for women TV reporters. Fortunately, this girl is not my type. Too young, even for me. Still, I admire her persistence.

Dade looks at me as if he wants to respond, but I shake my head. I don’t want him to say anything that will piss off Carter or the university. If we appear to put pressure on them publicly, it will surely backfire. Carter may need Dade, but not if he starts shooting off his mouth.

For reasons of space, I presume, the prosecutor’s office is a block away in a four-story redbrick building with arches but no steeples. Cash comes sooner rather than later, and we are ushered into his office, which, if not a cubbyhole, is surely not the prosecutor’s.

“I’d like to see Dade’s file,” I say immediately.

“I can’t give it to you today,” he says, avoiding my eyes, his voice sounding mechanical.

“I just want to see the girl’s statement,” I reply, feeling myself already getting angry.

“I can’t do it,” he answers, sounding no different from a million bureaucrats I have encountered in my lifetime.

Suddenly, I get it. Somebody has contacted his boss, who has put him on a leash so short his feet don’t even touch the ground. I’d go to the judge, but there’s nothing in the rules of criminal procedure that says I’m entitled to see the file five minutes after the arraignment.

“What if Dade agreed to give you a statement this morning? Can’t I at least read what the girl said?”

Cash, his face stiff as poker, says, “Mr. Cross will be back in forty-eight hours. You’ll have to talk to him.”

I look at a picture of his wife or girlfriend on his desk.

Young and pretty, like him. Ordinarily, I could work up a little sympathy for him but not today. His rashness has caused all kinds of trouble.

“I thought he was going to be gone another week,” I say, not bothering to hide the contempt for this kid I’m beginning to feel in my panic.

Coach Carter can’t wait two more days. He probably is feeling too much pressure already.

y I stand up.

“Let’s go, Dade,” I say, trying to get out of here before my tongue gets the better of me. Cash is humiliated enough already. Anything I say will get back to Cross, and I don’t want to alienate him before I’ve had a chance to talk to him. Cash shrugs, knowing he can’t very well protest my lack of cooperation.

I find a phone and call Carter in his office and explain what has happened. He doesn’t seem as upset as I thought he would a sign, I’m afraid, that he has already made up his mind, or that somebody has already made it up for him.

“I’ll have a statement out about Dade’s status before practice this afternoon,” he says curtly.

My fears are confirmed.

“It still doesn’t change the facts. Dade’s innocent until proven guilty, and that’s the way the system ought to work on campus as well.”

Carter pauses as if this statement is so naive that he won’t dignify it by responding.

“I’ve got to get off,” he says abruptly and hangs up.

In the Blazer, driving back to the campus, I try to put the best gloss on things I can.

“I don’t think he’ll take away your scholarship until the case is tried. The worst he’ll probably do is suspend you from the team.”

Dade looks out the window on Dickson Street at the D-Lux. Best cheeseburgers in Fayetteville. I spent many pleasant hours drinking beer there my senior year. He says glumly, “I might as well transfer.”

He still hasn’t got it in his head that he may be transferring to the Arkansas State Penitentiary next semester.

Yet, it’s better that he not get depressed. He won’t be any help, and I will need all I can get before this case is over with.

“Don’t start getting your head down, Dade,” I warn him.

“If you start acting like you’re guilty, that’s what people will believe. I can’t have you acting all down-in the-mouth in public. Even if things don’t go our way at first, we’ve got to keep fighting. I think eventually you’re going to be cleared. If it takes a trial, so be it. Next year this time will just be a bad dream.”

His attractive face still somber, he asks, “Do you really believe that?”

I stop at the light at the intersection of Arkansas and Dickson at the edge of the campus. Hell no, I don’t. If he weren’t black, I might. How many blacks in Arkansas have ever won a rape trial involving a white woman?

None that I know of. The best thing we can do is to keep this case from going to trial. And while that’s possible, it seems like a long shot.

“Sure I do,” I lie glibly.

“It doesn’t really matter what Coach Carter does today. You and I are in this for the long haul.” If by some stroke of luck this case has a happy ending, I hope he remembers that. I let him out at the jock dorm after getting his promise to keep his mouth shut and to call me as soon as he hears from Carter.

I head back downtown to Barton Sanders’s office. This is the kind of case where insiders have a distinct advantage. I know there are attorneys up here who have represented athletes, and I need to pick their brains. I suspect, however, they have more to do today than spoon-feed me on how to help my client.

Barton can be counted on to be behind his desk on Mountain Street, just a block from the courthouse, and I am received without a wait. Extending his small, pudgy, ink-stained hand to me, he asks immediately, “Did you get hold of Carter?”

I sit down across from him, my eyes already glazing over at all the abstracts that surround him. How does he read this stuff day after day?

“We met last night,” I say, and bring him up to date. Barton listens wideeyed as a child. Clearly, this is what he would like to be doing in stead of getting filthy rich. At my request, he makes phone calls to three attorneys who have represented jocks in either disciplinary proceedings with the university or criminal cases. Typically, nobody is in his office. You can never find a lawyer when you need one, I think glumly. I should have gotten Barton to call one of these guys night before last, but my ego told me I didn’t need any help. I ought to call Roy Cunningham and punt this case. I don’t know what I am doing. Worse, I don’t know where to start.

Over lunch at a cafe two doors down from his office, I ask Barton, “Are there some more buttons I should be pushing?”

Our waitress is an elderly woman who takes our order and kids with Barton, an obvious regular. After she leaves, he says, “I think you’re stuck for the moment. I wouldn’t want to be Carter right now for love or money.

He’s got to dump his best player on the eve of the Tennessee game. What I’ve heard in the last twenty-four hours is that if he leaves Dade on the team, he’ll be crucified. Five years ago maybe he could have gotten away with it; now, it’s a different ball game. The talk is that the university got such a black eye after the ninety-one incident that it can’t afford to do nothing. And since Dade’s already been charged, that makes it ten times worse.”

I am eager to talk, but a client of Barton’s comes over, and invites himself to sit down and proceeds to discuss some land transaction near Beaver Lake for an entire hour. Barton looks at me apologetically, but he must be on this guy’s clock, because he pays his client the same rapt attention he gave me in his office. Finally we escape, with me somehow stuck with the check. I catch up with Barton on the street, thinking I am out of my league up here.

“I’m really sorry,” Barton says sincerely, his warm puppy eyes moist in the bright noontime glare.

“There’s a few million dollars involved on this deal, and I couldn’t blow him off.”

A few million. Is that all?

“He wasn’t worried about confidentiality,” I mutter, although I couldn’t understand a thing they were talking about. I’d still be trying to pass the real property course if Barton hadn’t tutored me. Of course, I helped get him through trial advocacy. Hardly tit for tat, given our incomes now; but if he thinks he owes me, I won’t discourage him.

“He probably thought you were an associate and were charging the firm,” Barton says, laughing, as we return to his office. While he picks up his messages, I marvel at all the wasted space. He is by himself, and yet he has a small office building all to himself. On the walls are photographs of the area including Beaver Lake, the President’s retreat for a couple of days his first summer in office, and numerous aerial shots of the Ozarks. Knowing Barton, I suspect he is trying to figure out a way to buy northwest Arkansas for himself and his clients and lease it to the rest of the state.

One of the pink slips is from a lawyer Barton called to help me, and from his desk he gets him on the speakerphone, explaining who I am and what is happening in Dade’s case. I have never heard of Bliss Young, but then, I doubt if he has heard of me.

After a few inane pleasantries, I blurt, “Is there any body I should be calling? What should I be doing now?”

Bliss Young snorts, “Helping Dade pack his bags probably. If he hadn’t been charged, his chances of playing might have been even, but his luck ran out when Mike Cash got hold of him. All you can do now is to prepare for trial. If Carter doesn’t throw him off the team, the university will.” I listen impatiently while Young in great de tail tells me a story about his representation of a student athlete before the university judiciary board.

“Now that’s a three-ring circus,” he says.

I draw my finger across my neck. Barton nods, but he can’t shut this guy up. He drones on for ten minutes non stop about the lack of due process. God, lawyers like to hear themselves talk. Finally, when he pauses to take a breath, I tell him I’ll take a rain check, but that I have an other appointment.

Pissed at being interrupted, he hangs up abruptly, and I apologize to Barton.

“I wasn’t trying to hack the guy off, but I’m looking for some way to deal with Carter.”

Barton nods sympathetically.

“I know you’re frustrated,” he says, “but I think there’s not much you can do now except wait for him to make a decision.” We are like housewives in a TV soap opera who can do nothing but wring their hands until the next commercial. He offers me a cup of coffee.

“What’s the prosecutor’s name? Cross?” I ask, deciding to move on to a more promising subject.

“Tell me about him” “Yeah, Binkie Cross. He must give a lot of money to the Razorback Club,” Barton says, his tone slightly aggrieved.

“He always gets better seats than I do.”

I stir my coffee, envying the paneling in Barton’s office.

He has enough wood in here for me to build a new house. Money and influence. Where you sit at Razorback games depends on the generosity of your contributions to a private organization whose books haven’t been open to the public and your friendships with Jack Burke and others who control it.

“Somehow, I’m not terribly surprised.”

“Even if I could put two words together in public without sounding like I had an IQ of 4,1 wouldn’t be the prosecutor for love or money,” Barton needlessly confesses.

“You’ve got all these groups up here—gays and lesbians, environmentalists, foreign students. They’ve always got a beef about something, and the media loves to stir ‘em up.

Binkie always looks stressed out at bar meetings. Lot of toes to avoid. I hear he may not run again.”

That’s the trouble with power. You exercise it, and people get pissed off.

“So, he’s not real crazy about his job, huh?” I say, encouraging him.

“Or Binkie,” Barton hoots from behind his desk, “thought he was gonna be a hero and just prosecute drug cases and regular crime stuff. Bullshit! Last month at the Washington County Bar Association luncheon he said half the people in Fayetteville want the other half in jail.

One group wants to impeach him for not prosecuting gays under the sodomy law; gays want him to arrest that same group for harassment. The pro-choice people want injunctions against the right-to-lifers, who want them charged with murder. By the time you get through trying to pacify all the special-interest groups, it’s already five o’clock. I thought he was gonna cry.”

Sounds like of’ Binkie might like to avoid a trial. Barton, I decide, likes gossip more than I remember.

“What else have you heard about the girl?” I ask, not worried I’m taking up his time. He obviously can afford it.

Barton fingers his tie, a plain brown number that looks like a long dirt stain against his starched white shirt.

“Not much about the girl, but her father is rumored to be a big contributor to the Razorbacks. They say he gives so much that if he wanted, he could sit in Nolan’s lap during basketball season. Big Baptist, too. One of the leaders in driving the moderates out of the seminaries. They tell me a liberal Baptist these days is one who thinks Jesus might have sported a beard.”