Dying Declaration (25 page)

40

“JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION,”
Charles whispered to his client.

“Black,” Buster said. He gave Charles a look of disdain. “Chocolate, bro. Dark chocolate.”

Charles resented the comment. Was that what Buster’s lingering hostility was all about? A lack of trust because Charles’s skin color and pedigree were too light?

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask,” the big man snarled. “’Sides, what difference does it make?
Gage
busted me, not his partner.”

Charles just shook his head. “It changes
everything
,” he whispered emphatically.

“Next witness,” Silverman called out.

“The defense calls Dr. Frederick Ryder.”

At hearing his name, an unimpressive-looking man in the second row rose and proceeded to the front of the courtroom to take the oath. He was a short man with an uneven gait and an enormous head balanced on a pencil-thin neck. His sport coat hung limply on his thin, pear-shaped body, and he seemed ill at ease as he took his place in the witness box. He settled in and pushed his thick glasses to the top of his hawklike nose, an annoying habit that would be repeated many times during pressure-filled situations. He placed his folder of charts on the rail in front of the witness box, crossed his legs, and glanced nervously from Charles to the judge and back to Charles again.

It was on this quirky little man, this pencil-pushing statistician from Old Dominion University, that Charles pinned all of his rapidly fading hopes for an early release of Buster Jackson. And even if Ryder performed like a champ, Charles would still need a minor miracle to blunt the impact of an African American partner being part of the decision to stop Buster.

In a soothing monotone, Ryder shuffled through his charts and, at Charles’s prompting, explained his methodology. He had been asked to conduct a scientific sampling of investigative stops at the Virginia Beach oceanfront to determine if there was a pattern of racial profiling, he testified. Using the students in Charles’s class as guinea pigs, they had recreated the scenario of Buster’s stop, as closely as possible, a total of fifty-six times over the last fourteen nights.

Four times a night, the statistician said, a student would drive down Atlantic Avenue in front of a parked Virginia Beach police cruiser and pick up a couple of other students who had been loitering the sidewalk. The driver would then drive once around the block and drop these same students off again, within viewing distance of the beach police, at approximately the same location. The cars would of course change, depending on the students involved. But more important, the race of the students would vary as well. Black drivers would pick up black passengers, and white drivers would pick up white passengers.

Based on this study, Ryder concluded that racial profiling was indeed occurring at the beach, and he had the charts to prove it. Chart one, a colorful pie graph, showed the total number of times white students performed this routine (42) and the total number of white students who were pulled over as a result (11). A second chart, equally colorful, showed the total number of times black students did this (14) and the total number of times the blacks were pulled over (7). Chart three was the punch line: Whites had a 26 percent chance of being pulled over for this conduct; blacks had a 50 percent chance.

In other words, Ryder said, blacks were almost twice as likely to be pulled over and searched for suspicious conduct. This was “unequivocal evidence of systemic racial profiling” in the informed opinion of Dr. Ryder. He pushed his glasses up with an index finger, his eyes darting from Charles to the judge.

“Dr. Ryder, were you able to determine if any of these instances involved Officer Gage?”

“Um, yes, I was. The students would always check the badges and identify the officers who had pulled them over.”

“How many of these instances involved Officer Gage?”

Ryder shuffled loudly through some papers, dropping a few on the floor. Bending over to retrieve them, he bumped the mike in front of him, causing it to squeal. “Sorry,” the PhD said. He found his page and looked back up at Charles, tilting that massive head to the side.

“Four involved Officer Gage.”

Charles stopped pacing, paused, then asked, “How many involved blacks and how many involved whites?”

Thankfully, that information was on the same sheet of paper. “Three stops were blacks; only one was the stop of a white student.”

Charles knew there were still unanswered questions.
How many times did Gage see a white student do this and not stop him? How many times did he see a black student do this and not stop him?
And Charles knew that the Barracuda was chomping at the bit to ask these and other similar questions. In fact, Charles was counting on it. She might be surprised at the answers, so long as his quirky little witness could remember the script.

“Pass the witness,” Charles said.

By late morning, Tiger had grown tired of the tweety birds chirping all around him. He stood outside in the play area, trying hard to ignore Joey and his chorus as they periodically filled the air with tweets. He also tried not to think about his dad,
though he couldn’t help but get his hopes up based on what Stinky had said that morning. While he would miss the Pretty Lady,
it would be great to be back home with his mommy and daddy, wraslin’ his dad on the living room floor. Time seemed to crawl as he dreamed his happy thoughts in the midst of the annoying birds chirping nonstop on the playground.

Since Tiger wanted to be left alone, he waited in line for a turn on one of the precious few swings. It seemed that the girl occupying this particular swing would never leave, and it only inspired her to swing longer when she saw Tiger waiting patiently. And just as she finally did get off, after swinging for what seemed like hours, trouble showed up in the person of Doughy Joey.

Though he hadn’t even been waiting in line, or really anywhere near the swing as far as Tiger could tell, Joey suddenly pushed himself in front of Tiger and plopped his big bottom down in the leather swing that Tiger had been waiting for.

“Hey!” Tiger protested. “I was waitin’ for that.”

“Tweet-tweet,” Joey said.

“Stop it,” Tiger said, “and wait your turn.”

“I ain’t waitin’ for nobody who’s got a drug dealer for a dad,” Joey said as he began to pump his legs to get the swing going.

This made Tiger furious. His dad might be in jail, thanks to the stupidity of that mean lawyer lady, but he sure wasn’t no drug dealer. And Tiger wasn’t about to let some fat dough boy say he was. Tiger was on the verge of tears, and he fought the urge to run away. But he also felt the anger well up inside him, overtake the fear, then dictate his next move.

“Take it back!” Tiger yelled. “Take it back!”

Joey might be bigger and stronger, but right now Tiger was a lot madder. And Tiger had seen enough fistfights to know that when five-year-olds fight, the meanest and maddest kid usually won.

Joey dragged his feet and stopped the swing. He got up and took a few steps toward Tiger, looking down his nose at his skinny little foe.

“Make me,” Joey sneered.

And Tiger almost did just that. He was so mad. He almost punched the big kid’s lights out right on the spot. But looking up at Joey, who seemed to have grown six inches in the few seconds since he had gotten off the swing, Tiger had a sudden change of heart.

“I’m tellin’,” he said, and he turned to find Miss Parsons.

Before Tiger could even finish his turn and show his back to his plump foe, Joey shot both of his short, pudgy arms out and popped Tiger hard on the shoulders. This caught Tiger by surprise, and it caught him just as he was turning. Before Tiger knew what hit him, he was sprawled out on the ground.

Someone yelled, “Fight!” as Tiger popped back up, fists raised, facing Joey, who now seemed to have grown another few inches. Tiger’s lower lip was thrust out, his bony knees were shaking, and his eyes were watering as Joey slowly advanced. Tiger resisted with all his might the urge to turn tail and run, instead choosing to backpedal slowly, fists raised, looking as mean as possible despite the tears and shakiness of his limbs. Joey circled and stalked; Tiger retreated and cried.

After ten or fifteen seconds—the longest ten or fifteen seconds of young Tiger’s pitiful life—he heard the angry and welcome voice of Miss Parsons cutting through the crowd. “Boys!” she cried. “Stop it right now!”

Tiger gladly put down his fists without ever having to use the deadly weapons. He was just thankful that Miss Parsons had intervened before somebody—namely him—got hurt. Miss Parsons grabbed both Tiger and Joey by the arm and started yanking them inside. By the time the smoke had cleared, both kids were facing some serious time-out, though Joey definitely got the worst part of the noisy lecture. Miss Parsons even made both boys apologize, Joey for his thoughtless remarks about Mr. Hammond,
and Tiger for his generally unchristian conduct. Then Tiger and Joey were sent to separate rooms, all by themselves, and instructed to think about their sorry behavior.

Tiger thought about survival. He had finished crying for now, but he was still scared to death of Joey. Though Tiger was no great fan of time-out, at least he was safe while he served his time in solitary confinement. If he were put back into the general day care population, Joey would surely be out for blood, and there would be no guarantee that the chirping would have died down from the others anyway. No sir, the best plan for survival would be to figure out a way to spend the rest of the day on time-out, unpleasant as that might be. By tomorrow his dad would be home, and he could put all this day care stuff in his rearview mirror.

After about half an hour of supposedly pondering his sins, Tiger looked up to see Miss Parsons entering the room. He tried to look dejected.

“Have you learned your lesson, young man?” Miss Parsons asked.

“Have you learned your lesson, young man?” Tiger repeated in a mocking tone.

This seemed to pretty much stop the day care teacher in her tracks. She looked at Tiger suspiciously. “Do you need some more time in time-out?”

“Do you need some more time in time-out?”

That did it. Miss Parsons regained her composure and unleashed another stern lecture. “I know you’re going through some tough times right now,” she scolded, “but that’s no excuse for this kind of behavior.” She promised Tiger that he would spend all day on time-out if he didn’t change his attitude.

Tiger could hardly suppress a smile. The plan seemed to be coming together quite nicely.

Charles watched an angry Barracuda stalk forward, notepad in hand. This was not going to be pretty.

“Have you ever even met Officer Gage before today?” she asked Dr. Ryder in an accusatory tone.

“No.”

“So you have no idea what was going through his head the night that he pulled Buster Jackson over, do you?”

“No.”

“Did you hear his testimony earlier this morning, where he enumerated his reasons for stopping Buster Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear him say that race was not even a factor?”

“Yes.”

“Are you calling him a liar?” With this question, the Barracuda pointed sideways at Officer Gage, causing Ryder to make eye contact with the officer. Ryder’s finger nervously and instinctively went to the glasses, pushing them to the top of his nose.

“No, I’m not saying that.”

Charles tried to catch his witness’s eye so he could give him a reinforcing look.
Show a little backbone, Professor.

“The fact is, Officer Gage happened to be right, didn’t he? I mean, this man—” the Barracuda pointed at Jackson—“had a whole car full of drugs, didn’t he?”

Charles shot to his feet. “Objection, calls for speculation. How could this witness possibly know?”

“My point exactly,” the Barracuda shot back. “But since defense counsel concedes it, I’ll withdraw the question.”

Charles sat back down, feeling suckered.

Crawford walked over and picked up the charts that Ryder had used during his direct examination. “Now, with regard to the fifty-six reenactments, if I can call them that, shown on these charts, how many were done in front of Officer Gage?”