Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (40 page)

“She admits she wasn’t hurt,” Dade responds, glowering at me.

If he looks this angry in court, we won’t have a chance.

“She’ll testify you threatened her and it would have been dangerous for her to resist.”

Hands on his hips, Roy mutters, “Whose side are you on?”

To keep from launching into a sermon, I place my palms flat down on the table, and my fingers almost stick to the surface. This table must serve as the family dining table for Roy and Lucy more often than not.

“My job right now is to give you the best advice I can. If I thought Dade could beat this charge, I’d be the first to say so.”

“You’re selling my boy out!” Roy cries, his face anguished

I feel certain he would like to fire me, but at this late date the judge wouldn’t permit Dade to get another lawyer. The bell on the front door jingles loudly, and Roy stalks off to the front, followed by Dade, who is furious with me. Somehow, I have to make Lucy trust my judgment. I wait until Dade clears the doorway and then I whisper, “The reason I took this case was that I hoped I could get it dismissed and you’d hire me as Dade’s agent when he turned professional. I know that wasn’t the most noble reason on earth for undertaking to defend him on his rape charge, but you need to understand that it was in my interest to try this case. The truth is, the closer the trial gets, the less likely it is that Dade will escape serving some significant time. I can’t in good conscience tell him to go to trial. The only way to avoid that risk is to accept the prosecutor’s offer and concentrate on getting this behind him as soon as possible.”

Lucy shakes her head in apparent disbelief.

“So that was your motivation?” she asks, her eyes suddenly bright with tears.

“You were out to exploit him from the beginning

“For God’s sake, Lucy!” I cry, feeling my face burning.

“I’m no different from any other lawyer in this state.

If I can make a buck, I’ll do it. If there’s something wrong with that, you’re going to have to put most of this country out of its misery. All I’m trying to say is that Dade should take this offer and then get on with his life.

The prisons are filled with people who either entered into a plea bargain or wish they had. If you’re looking for a hero, I nominate the man who’s prosecuting Dade. After this morning, I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for our chances to knock this case down to carnal abuse and a six-year sentence, but the prosecutor made this offer because he said Robin’s parents have finally been convinced not to put their child through a trial if they can get this deal.”

These sentiments have come straight from my gut, and I am out of breath when I finish. Lucy makes a small fist with her right hand but shows no other emotion.

“I

thought you’d be different.”

“Well, I’m not,” I say hoarsely.

“I can’t change history.

By the way, I’m sorry about your grandmother. My daughter thinks that under the circumstances she was raped. I guess she was. I can’t do anything about that, just as I can’t really do anything about the kind of person who will serve on Dade’s jury. All I can do is tell you what’s likely to happen to Dade if he goes to trial.”

She unclenches her hand.

“You’re putting your racism on that jury,” she says fiercely.

“That’s what’s making you afraid.”

Is that what I’m doing?

“I know what people are like,” I say, breaking it down as simply as I can.

“And so do you.”

Her jaw flexing in anger and her dark eyes flashing, she leans across the table to shake a long black finger in my face.

“I don’t want my son in prison, you hear me!”

Pushing up from the table with both hands, she walks past me and through the door. I am already tired, and it is not even nine o’clock. I close my eyes, wishing I had kept my mouth shut about what has motivated me in this case. In the other room, I hear all three talking at once, Lucy’s voice the loudest. I strain to hear but can’t distinguish more than a few words. I hear Lucy saying, “If you didn’t do it …” and then her voice is drowned out by Roy and Dade.

Just moments later, all three are back, surrounding the table. Dade glares at me as if I were a prisoner who had been charged with some heinous crime.

“I want to go to trial,” he announces.

“I’m innocent.”

I judge by the expression on Lucy’s face that she is fully supportive of this decision.

“That’s fine with me,” I say automatically.

“I’ll do the best job I can.”

“See that you do,” Roy adds, in a menacing tone.

I don’t like to be bullied by anyone, especially a client who isn’t paying me a third of what a case is worth, but Roy, I have the feeling, is out of the loop here. This is between Dade and his mother, I surmise, without any hard evidence to support my intuition. I have the distinct feeling he has chosen to do what he thinks will maintain her image of him. To save his pride, Roy has been given his say, but it is his mother whom Dade wants to please. As I am leaving, ten minutes later, only Lashondra, who is re arranging toilet paper on the shelf next to bar soap, waves good-bye. If she were the client, I’d feel a lot better.

Furious, I gun the Blazer hard westward through the desolate flatness of the Arkansas Delta, already feeling the pressure imposed by Dade’s decision. I know who will be the fall guy in this scenario. Yet, damn it, would he really be risking a trial if he weren’t innocent? Dade and Lucy will drive to Fayetteville Sunday morning so we can work on his testimony. Roy will stay in Hughes to keep the grocery open. Damn. He can’t even take off to see his son’s trial.

I call Binkie from my office and give him the bad news.

“I think, he’s making a mistake, Gideon,” Binkie says, sounding disappointed.

“I do, too,” I confess, as I pull Dade’s file from my briefcase. I had hoped when I walked into my office there would be a phone call from Lucy. There is nothing else to say and I hang up with a sick feeling in my stomach.

Gordon Dyson is waiting for me outside Judge Butler’s chambers with an embarrassed grin on his face. This shouldn’t take long even if “Gucci” shows up. I shake hands with Dyson, who hands me an envelope, presumably my fee.

“How is your son taking this?”

Dyson smiles.

“He’s pissed as hell. He called his mother, but I talked to her and it’s okay. I don’t think he’s even gonna show.”

I take off my overcoat in the poorly ventilated building.

The Blackwell County courthouse is undergoing extensive repairs, and the building the county is using has all the charm of a bus station in a third world country.

We enter the judge’s outside office, and his secretary tells us to go right on back. The judge will take Mr.

Dyson’s testimony in his chambers.

Sonny Butler is an ex-prosecutor and likes cops. He greets my client like an old friend, and I relax, knowing this will be a piece of cake. Across Sonny’s massive desk they chat, each bragging about how well he is doing.

Why the hell not? Cop to businessman, prosecutor to judge. They both have prospered as a result of crime.

Butler is not a bad judge for a man who claimed during his recent campaign that any person who didn’t believe in the death penalty would change his mind if his wife were raped and killed in front of him. His opponent, my old boss at the public defender’s office, Greta Darby, cracked that it was hard to tell whether Sonny was running for judge or executioner. To know Greta is to hate her, and I voted for Sonny, despite his ranting during the campaign.

Sonny kids Gordon about evicting his son and needles him gently about his failure to prosecute him under Arkansas’s criminal eviction statute, the only one left in the country, according to Clan.

“His mother would have killed me,” Gordon says sheepishly, which makes me realize he had considered it At this moment a woman charges into the room, followed by a college-age kid who has to be “Gucci.” My client’s face, now ashen, tells me it is his wife.

“Dora Lou, what are you doing back here?”

“I couldn’t let you throw our son out on the street!” she cries dramatically. It is obvious she has had no sleep for some time. She must have come straight from the airport.

Her bright orange jumpsuit, the color county prisoners wear, is badly wrinkled. Beneath her reddened eyes are plum-colored pouches that emphasize the rest of her under baked pie crust of a face. In contrast, Dyson’s son is wearing an immaculate blue pinstriped three-piece suit.

“Your Honor, can we take a minute?” I ask plaintively.

Judge Butler nods and motions us outside. Lawyers are the first line of defense against unruly litigants.

“What is he going to do?” Mrs. Dyson shrieks once we are outside in the hall. She gestures at “Gucci,” who is staring pitifully at his father.

“Go to work full-time like most other Americans?” the ex-policeman asks, his voice trembling as it rises to a new level.

“You hate him!” his wife rages.

“You hate him because he looks like me!”

This insight is fraught with danger, and I intervene, pulling my client to one side and whispering, “Can’t you bribe him to leave? Give him a new car, a thousand for a couple of months’ rent, and we’ll go back to my office and sign a contract that if he moves home again he agrees to sign over the title to you.”

Gordon Dyson contemplates his family and nods.

“A

contract won’t mean anything, but maybe he’ll have a wreck and kill himself.”

Fortunately, “Gucci,” perhaps fearing that he might die unexpectedly in his sleep if he remains home, agrees. An hour later after mother and son have departed my office, I escort Gordon to the elevators and offer to return half my fee.

“We didn’t actually go to court.”

“We were close enough,” Dyson mutters as the door opens.

“Hell, I’d rather give it to you than to him.”

I thank him, and go back inside to work on Dade’s case. What is this world coming to?

Monday morning the Fayetteville media circus begins early. Dade is not even out of the Blazer when a college age kid with three cameras around his neck spots us and begins snapping pictures. Out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse there is a small contingent of demonstrators carrying signs: stop the violence, justice for women, and of course, women against rape. It must be twenty degrees, but there are five or six girls bundled up in brightly colored ski jackets, knit caps, mittens, and earmuffs and looking miserable. I recognize Paula Crawford and wonder how Sarah will feel when she shows up.

Paula and I never had our lunch. Since the dorms aren’t open, Sarah has spent the night with a friend from Fayetteville and will be arriving later. Two reporters shove microphones in Lucy’s face, but as I have instructed, we smile and keep walking.

“Is it true that Dade turned down a deal?” the beautiful green-eyed reporter from Channel 5 asks. Like a zombie, I give her a frozen grin, not even bothering with “no comment.”

Inside the second-floor courtroom, I shake hands with Binkie, who squints hard at Dade as if to say that he has had his chance at mercy. Without a word, he turns his back and sits down next to his assistant Mike Cash, who, I suspect, will be seen but not heard today. I notice that Binkie is wearing a new suit, too. Though it can’t make him look handsome (his rawboned face precludes anyone but his mother from regarding him that charitably), the nice fit of the light blue herringbone worsted wool, padded in the shoulders, fills him out and gives him less of an angular, hillbilly look. Like myself, someone has taken a look at Binkie’s courtroom apparel and said it was time to dial 911 and ask for an emergency department store run. Judging by his demeanor, I have the feeling that by not forcing my client to take the deal he offered, I have lost some respect in his eyes. Yet, there is nothing I can do about it now.

After I have seated Dade and organized my files around me on the table (I have revised my opening statement five times in the last two days and have it outlined in a yellow legal pad on top of the stack to my right), I watch spectators being admitted into the courtroom and try to rein in what I hope is a temporary panic attack. The glittering, expectant expressions on the faces of some of the doddering old men suggest they are hoping for a blood bath. Yet, these are probably the regulars who have seen every trial for the last twenty years. I smile uneasily at Dade, who seems to be holding his breath. He is looking at his mother. Lucy, to my dismay, has dressed in black as if she were attending Dade’s funeral. Her dress, plain and unadorned by jewelry, emphasizes her light skin. Is she thinking about what it will be like to visit her son in the hellhole that is Cummins prison? Last night at the restaurant at the Holiday Inn (Dade’s choice), she was unusually quiet, as if she had already resigned her self to a bad outcome. Prom the defense viewpoint, a criminal trial is like surgery on a high-risk patient. Denial becomes difficult when the patient has been propped and the cutting is about to begin.

At the door I see the Perrys, who are clutching hands like three children lost in the woods. Despite Blanche Perry’s bravura performance at their home in Texarkana, they don’t want to be in a Fayetteville courtroom any more than we do. This morning Blanche Perry is nothing but a frightened parent, just as I would be if the situation were reversed. Her eyes flutter rapidly as her husband whispers in her ear. In the name of justice, her daughter is about to undergo one of the most wrenching experiences humanity has devised. If the jury finds Dade innocent, Robin faces a lifetime of humiliation. I marvel at my willingness to add to it. I was itching to call Joe Hofstra at this trial. Not for the first time in my career, I realize the job of defense attorney is too much of a game for me.

I’ll walk away from this courtroom thinking I’ve won or lost. The Perrys may leave here feeling their daughter has been stripped of all her dignity. No wonder they were willing to capitulate and settle for something far less than they think justice demands. Maybe they know something I don’t. I wonder if even now it is not too late to accept Binkie’s offer. If their expressions are any guide, the Per rys would go for it. Robin, who will be leaving the court room after the witnesses are sworn in, has an ethereal Alice-in-Wonderland quality about her. Her breasts have been made to disappear under a simple white wool dress that extends from her throat to the floor, and her blond hair is in bangs. The word “virginal” doesn’t do her jusdee. This girl, I must remember, takes communication seriously, and she will be telling the jury she couldn’t act sexually aggressive if she were given lessons every day for a year. Not one word will be spoken about this past summer’s torrid affair. Ladies and gentlemen, this young woman is not what she seems. Just ask her professor. If only I could. Yet, even as I think of it, the sleaziness of such a tactic finally hits me. Sarah could have been seduced by Beekman. If she were, would that automatically make her less credible if she got raped later by another man? Obviously not. Though it makes my job more difficult, I finally admit to myself that it was only justice that I lost the motion to introduce into evidence Robin’s past sexual conduct.