Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (6 page)

“I’ve got to drive to Fayetteville this morning, so I need to get on the road. Did you get a trial date?”

“November seventh,” Gina says as she pushes herself out of the chair. She is tall, perhaps five feet eight. If she owns a decent dress, she will look better than the average parent who comes into juvenile court.

“That’s not far off,” I say, having forgotten how quickly adjudicatory hearings are set in juvenile court. I walk her out to the reception area.

“I’ll call early next week. I’m going to want to see the tub and for you to show me how it happened.”

She gives me a wan smile.

“Just give me a call.”

I watch her exit through the glass double doors to the elevators and remember I didn’t give her a receipt.

“How much is this client paying you?” Julia sneers.

“A couple hundred?”

My face burns with embarrassment at the accuracy of her guess.

“Why didn’t you tell me she had been Dan’s client?” I bluster, long having subscribed to the belief that offense is more fun than defense.

Seated, Julia cocks her head at me.

“Go bellyache to him if you got a beef. I’m not paid to gossip with you guys.”

“I think I will,” I say, eager to escape. Gina doesn’t seem the type to worry about receipts anyway.

Dan’s door is rarely shut, and today is no exception. I enter to find him happily eating a bag of peanuts, his latest diet food.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he says grinning, offering me a handful of goobers.

“So let me explain.”

I look at Clan and shake my head. Incorrigible is too kind a description. Instead of diplomas on the walls, Clan has tacked up cartoons. But rather than caricatures of national figures or Arkansas politicians, bizarrely displayed around him are blown-up strips of hoary, unfunny soap operas like Rex Morgan, M.D.” Mary Worth, and Apartment 3-G. Handling mainly minor criminal offenses and a steady diet of domestic relations cases, my closest friend justifies his choice of artwork as offering cautionary tales to the dozens of tormented women who frequent his office. If his clients think they have been unlucky in love, Margo, a bitchy, but glamorous executive secretary in New York’s Apartment 3-G, has been regularly duped by the opposite sex for many years. Long-suffering and underappreciated nurse June Gale will never get that lunkhead of a doctor Rex Morgan to the altar; Mary Worth, a widow obviously celibate now for decades, fills her time by incessantly interfering in the problem-filled lives of her friends and acquaintances. The message is clear to the female visitor: if things are still this bad for women in the funny pages after all this time, they shouldn’t expect too much out of real life.

“If I had just told you about Gina’s case,” Clan says, cracking open a peanut with his left thumb, “you would have turned it down on the spot.”

I reach across the desk and take a peanut.

“You’re damn right I would have,” I complain.

“Even Legal Services turned her down on the basis of merit.”

Clan expertly skins the reddish, papery husk from the meat with his thumbnail and pops the nut into his mouth.

“Who would be better than an expert like yourself to represent her?” he says glibly.

“She’s a good kid, and I kind of believe she didn’t do it.”

One of the goobers inside the shell falls to the floor before I can extract it. I look down at the carpet and see peanuts everywhere. This must be how the diet works. It takes forever to shell the damn things, and then you lose half of what you try to eat.

“Mother of the Year material, no doubt about it,” I crack, eating the remaining nut before it disappears.

“She’s a whore dog, Clan. Not a lifestyle guaranteed to warm a juvenile judge’s heart.”

“Never convicted,” Clan says modestly.

“The Department of Human Services won’t know a thing.”

I study the cartoons behind Dan’s head. Unlike Clan and myself, the characters, despite their problems, never age.

“Two hundred dollars,” I bitch, “is all she gave me.”

Clan smiles benignly as his right hand catches in the almost empty bag.

“See, she’s just like us—just a little whore.”

Before I walk out the door to get on the road to Fayetteville, I call Amy.

“Gilchrist,” I say when she comes on the line, “I was gonna try to play it cool, but I couldn’t wait.” I don’t tell her that I’ve just interviewed a prostitute and started thinking of her.

“Men are so stupid,” Amy says cheerfully.

“I practically invite you to move in with me, and you have to think about it.”

I laugh, trying to picture her in her office. She is in the Kincaid Building two blocks west of the courthouse.

Mostly a domestic law practice. Women attorneys seem to settle into it, though she knows as much, if not more, criminal law than I do.

“Can we eat first?” I ask.

“Are you busy Saturday?”

“I have to warn you that I’m on a ten-thousand-calorie a day diet,” she says.

“You might want to check the limits on your Visa card.”

I think of her trim, compact body. Maybe she’s really fat, and it’s all being held in by a giant safety pin. I don’t think so. She didn’t have that much on last night, and what I saw looked firm.

“Where do you put it?” I ask admiringly. If I eat a single cookie, I can see the outline of it in my stomach for days.

“In my mouth,” she says.

“I’m busy right now. Call me Saturday, okay?”

“Sure,” I say and hang up, a little disappointed. I had wanted to brag that I was going to Fayetteville to represent Dade Cunningham, but maybe it will impress her more when she reads it in the papers. I stand up and retrieve my briefcase from the top of the filing cabinet, realizing I am abnormally pleased. It’s time to quit thinking Rainey and I will get back together. A part of me is still in love with her, but some things aren’t meant to be. Amy sounds like she’ll be fun. Why have I avoided younger women so religiously since Rosa died? Fear of looking stupid, I guess. Am I worried what Sarah will think? Act your age. Dad. She would like for me to be neutered, I’m sure. Poor baby. In my parents’ day, when nobody got divorced, we didn’t have to worry about our parents humiliating us quite so much. Now we act as crazy as our children. No wonder the country is on the verge of anarchy.

as dade cunningham and I come out of the Washington County courthouse into clear, dazzling October sunlight, I look around for the media, but apparently the word of his release hasn’t gotten around.

“What happens now?” Dade Cunningham whispers respectfully beside me. He is quite a specimen. Under his T-shirt his shoulders look like slabs of frozen beef. For a wide receiver he is more muscled-up than I would have imagined. His father is much darker, his features more Negroid than his son’s. Dade, I realize, looks remarkably like Jason Kidd, the incredible point guard recruited hard by the Hogs who ended up at California and turned pro after just two years. I wonder about his mother. I can’t imagine she is white, but she can’t be far from it.

“We’re going to my motel to talk.” I have checked into the Ozark Inn, a dump on College Avenue that actually looks okay on the outside. Inside, it’s better not to look too close. If cleanliness is next to godliness, the Ozark is not exactly on the highway to heaven. But for twenty-five bucks I didn’t expect the Taj Mahal, nor did I get it.

Dade nods gloomily, but based on our conversation so far, I realize he doesn’t have the slightest idea of the obstacles ahead. He will be arraigned tomorrow afternoon.

Now all we have to do is get out of here without saying anything to the media that will piss anybody off.

“If any body asks you a question,” I instruct him, “just say your lawyer has told you not to comment.”

Dade slows his long stride to match mine. He is a good three inches taller, and makes me feel as if I’m hobbling along on a walker.

“Even to my friends?” he asks naively.

“Nothing about what happened between you and Robin Perry,” I say, realizing I may be advising him to spill his guts to his coach later on today. Yet, he can’t tell his story too often, or he will trip himself up for sure.

In my room at the Ozark just down the street from the courthouse, I call Coach Carter’s office to leave my number and then Sarah to suggest we tentatively agree to meet for dinner at seven in the restaurant at the Fayetteville Hilton. I wouldn’t mind going by to see her room after all, I’m paying for it but she dismisses the suggestion.

“You don’t want to come up here,” she humors me.

“It looks like I’m doing the laundry for the whole dorm.”

Deftly, she changes the subject.

“Did you get Dade out of jail?”

“I’ll tell you all about it at seven,” I say.

“We’re going to talk right now.”

My daughter groans.

“It’ll be on the news, won’t it?”

“Probably,” I say, feeling guilty. This is supposed to be her turf now. Yet, why doesn’t she feel pride that her old man is in the news with a hot client? I guess I understand.

If love and hate are emotional kinfolks, pride and embarrassment share a common ancestor as well. It always surprises me that I want her praise and approval as much as she wants mine.

“Dade won’t be coming to dinner, will he?” she asks, her tone clearly indicating her preference.

I look over at Dade, who is pretending not to be listening I haven’t given any thought as to how he will be seen by other students. Given her own bloodlines, Sarah is hardly a racist, but she wouldn’t be wild about going to dinner with somebody who has been charged with raping a classmate. She knows all too well that the overwhelming number of the people I represent are guilty of some thing.

“No, and I may have to cancel. I’ll call if I do.”

“Okay,” Sarah says with obvious relief.

“I’ll see you at seven. You think you can find the Hilton?”

“Even I can find some things,” I say. Neither of us is noted for having a sense of direction. I hang up, thinking that Sarah has rarely displayed any subtlety in my presence What she is like with others I can only imagine.

Perhaps because of her mother’s early death, no third party has buffered our relationship. There has been no mutual interpreter. Sometimes in the past, her senior year in high school especially, emotions passed between us unfiltered by thought, creating situations that were often turbulent.

I hang up and suggest Dade call home from my room.

Collect, I tell him. I’m not getting enough to pay his phone bills, too.

Now it is my turn to eavesdrop. I am referred to as the “lawyer.” He looks over at me from the one chair in the room and says into the phone that “we’re going to talk.” I am reminded of my conversations with Sarah when she’s not in a mood to talk. Dade, I notice, is more respectful than my daughter, limiting his infrequent responses to “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am.” After a few moments, with a pained expression, he hands me the phone.

“She wants to say something to you.”

Expecting the accent of a poorly educated eastern Arkansas black woman, I am surprised to hear a rich contralto voice that rings with authority, though it still retains the drawl of the Delta.

“Mr. Page, what happens now? Is he out of school?”

“We’ll have to see about that,” I say.

“I wanted to talk to him first.” I haven’t even considered the possibility that the university would not want him to come back to school. I’ve only worried whether he will be kicked off the team.

“The incident happened off campus,” I continue “so ordinarily I would imagine it would be handled like any criminal matter. This might be different. I’ll just have to find out and let you know.”

“I’ve told Dade to do exactly what you say,” she in forms me, “but we expect you to consult with us. When will you be in your office again? I want to meet with you face-to-face.”

There is no give in this woman’s voice. No wonder Dade didn’t want to come home during the summer.

“Friday,” I tell her. Why are black women so much stronger than black men? If Roy Cunningham is in the house, he must be in the bathroom. I haven’t heard a peep out of him.

“Do you and your husband want to come over then?”

“One of us has to be in our store,” she says.

“I’ll see you Friday at ten. Roy has your card, doesn’t he?”

I find myself saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and grin at her son. After I hang up, I tell him, “Your mother doesn’t mince words, does she?”

Dade arches his muscular frame and yawns, showing strong white teeth. I doubt if he got any sleep last night.

“I’m surprised she let you off the phone so soon. She wanted me to go to Memphis so I’d be closer to home.”

“I’m from eastern Arkansas, too,” I tell him to let him know we have something in common. If you’re from the Delta, Memphis means more to you than Blackwell County.

Dade ignores my attempt at camaraderie.

“Did she sound mad?”

“A little,” I tell him.

“A rape charge is serious business.”

“Robin didn’t do nothin’ she didn’t want to do!” Dade shoots back, now rigid in the chair.

He must be scared to death. With the image of Rodney King’s beating by the LA cops forever embedded in the national consciousness, the literature of white justice is getting richer all the time. Why should he trust the system when he has up-to-the-minute documentation that it is still brutal beyond his worst nightmare? At this point I am just another white face who will be telling him what to do. I need to humanize myself to this kid if he is going to trust me. Probably he thinks of me as another coach. If he wants playing time, he’d better make me happy, and in this situation that means telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Convincing him that all I want to hear is the truth might not be so easy. I pull out a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and begin to make some notes, first establishing that he refused to give a formal statement to the police without a lawyer being present. Thank God for TV. He sounds so vehement that I find that I tend to believe he is innocent. I want to. Rape is too ugly a crime to pretend criminal defense work is just another way to make a living.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me when you first met Robin?” I suggest.