Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (8 page)

I look at Dade carefully, knowing he has had almost forty-eight hours to come up with this story. It could have easily been a form of “study rape.”

“When you say she was ‘hot,”

” I ask, neutrally, “try to remember exactly what she did or said.”

He shrugs, “She was all over me. Kissing me, rubbing my dick, hugging me. She even washed me. All the time talking ‘bout how she liked me and what a good body I got.”

I wish I had remembered to bring a tape recorder. Obviously her statement, which I should get tomorrow, is going to be quite a bit different.

“Is she going to be able to testify you hurt her in any way?”

Dade scratches his left armpit. He hasn’t had access to a shower in over forty-eight hours. I’ve had clients who contracted lice in jail.

“She didn’t holler or anything.”

“Did you use a rubber or any kind of birth control de vice?”

Dade admits candidly, “I never even thought about it.

It wudn’t like we stopped to talk about it.”

I write, “no rubber” relieved at least his story seems consistent. I can see developing an argument that Robin was simply curious and decided to scratch an itch and felt overwhelming guilt afterward. Why shouldn’t she be attracted to him? They were friends; he’s a hunk. As routine a part of the culture as casual sex has remained, despite the threat of AIDS, it is not out of the realm of possibility that though Robin felt extremely ambivalent about what she was doing, curiosity and youthful desire got the better of her. Hormones and alcohol have been used to explain the behavior of young males since some body first slipped on a fermenting grape. If women expect to be treated like men, why doesn’t the same rationalization apply to them? A decent argument may be that it now does, but the difference is that they haven’t learned to stop feeling bad about behavior men take for granted. In concrete terms, ladies and gentlemen, my brain preaches, Robin Perry had a few glasses of wine beforehand, and wanted to see what it was like to sleep with an African-American who was a star football player.

He accommodated her, but by the next day she was feeling so terrible about it she claimed it was rape.

I go over his story again and realize I am convinced he didn’t rape her. There is something I find myself responding to in this boy. I might change a few things about him, but I would change a few things about myself as well.

“Assuming Coach Carter is willing to talk to you,” I say, putting down my notebook, “we need to decide if you should talk to him and tell him your story. It’s possible that he may let you stay on the team if you can convince him you’re innocent. Whatever you say can be used against you. The cops will talk to him, and if you contra dict yourself, it’ll be used against you.”

“I want to keep playing!” he says, his voice anguished.

“That’s what I want for you,” I say.

“But there’s a risk involved each time you talk.” I do not say that if he plays out the season and continues to do as well as he has done thus far, he will be worth a lot more money (assuming he is found innocent) to whoever negotiates his pro contract.

“What do you think I should do?” he asks, his brown green eyes searching mine as if I had been representing him all his life instead of just the last couple of hours.

Damn. Lawyers have too much power over other people.

“I think,” I say slowly, hoping I am not acting too much from greed, “that if you get the chance you should talk to your coach and tell him the same things you’ve told me.”

He nods affirmatively. I’ve told him what he wanted to hear, and I know it, too. In a year or two, I hope I can look back on this and not come to the conclusion that I exploited him. Shit, I may be so rich that I won’t even think about it.

“What is Coach Carter like?”

Dade grins.

“He’s pretty damn tough. I’m in shape though. I was dogging it in two-a-days in the beginning, and he chewed my ass out good till I got with the program. I didn’t think I was, but he was right. If you give it a hundred percent, he doesn’t get mad if you screw up.

He just comes over and shows you what you did wrong.

My grandmother died on Monday the week of the South Carolina game. He told me to go home and not worry about it that I’d start and have a good game. I did. If he doesn’t like you though, you might as well quit. He’ll run you off if he thinks you’re bullshitting him.”

Coaches. They are the closest things to dictators the United States has. Nazis, most of them. Probably the worse they are, the better their records. Frustrated drill sergeants and about the same level of intelligence. I hated my track coach at Subiaco. Hell, he wasn’t the one running 880 yards in ninety-degree heat. Still, I was the Class A state champion my senior year, the only thing I ever won in my life, outside a racquetball game at the Y. While we are talking, the phone rings. It is Carter, who tells me to bring Dade to his office at seven tonight.

Hoarse, as if he has been shouting, he asks me not to talk to the media. They will know soon enough. I call Sarah back and leave a message on her answering machine to meet me a five-thirty at the Hilton.

Dade understandably is anxious to get back to his room and take a shower, and I drop him off at Darby Hall, agreeing to meet him outside Carter’s office promptly at seven.

“Don’t talk to anybody about this,” I say, knowing it will be difficult for him to keep his mouth shut.

Sarah, who is not usually punctual, is waiting for me.

Though I saw her two weeks ago (for only a few minutes after the Memphis game, my blood quickens just seeing her face. She has been off at college for over a year, but still I haven’t completely adjusted to her absence from the house. During the few weeks she was home before and after the summer term I saw how much she had matured; with too much time on my hands, probably I have regressed.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says, in a re strained voice that signals her lack of enthusiasm for the object of my visit.

Despite her misgivings, she returns my hug. She needs me more than she thinks.

“You look thin,” I criticize.

“It’s obvious you’re not eating right. I want you to order a steak tonight.”

Actually, she looks great. In her striped tank top and white slacks and with her usual exotic earrings (tonight metal in the shape of musical notes), Sarah will ensure that we get excellent service from the male employees at the Hilton.

“Oh, all right,” she says, in mock protest. When we sit down, she says, “You probably eat worse than I do, judging from what was in the refrigerator when I was home the last time.”

A waiter, obviously a student, comes over to check out Sarah.

“Would you like something to drink?” he says to me, unable to resist staring at my daughter.

With Dade’s interview with his coach looming ahead of me, I resist ordering a beer, though I would love one.

A sign of my less than successful coping skills now is that I drink more. Easy to recognize, but hard to do much about. The house has been too quiet with just me and Woogie. Several nights in the past year I have waked up on the couch in the den in the middle of the night after having an extra shot of bourbon I didn’t need or even want.

“Iced tea,” I say reluctantly.

“No beer?” Sarah asks, surprised. She orders a Coke.

Each of us imagines the other wants alcohol. I explain that I have more work to do, but she steers the conversation away from the case and tells me about the project she’s working on for the professor who gave her a job this summer.

“He’s writing up the results of this massive interdisciplinary study on the Arkansas Delta,” she says.

“It’s a spin-off of the Delta Commission. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”

I fiddle with my silverware, trying to concentrate.

Some kind of economic development scheme to beef up that portion of the southern states the Mississippi runs through. No dice. The country is broke. Congress didn’t want to pay for it, and neither did the states who would supposedly benefit.

“It didn’t really get off the ground, did it?” I ask, watching our waiter nudge another boy who looks our way.

“It’s spawned enormous academic interest in the region,” Sarah says self-importantly, oblivious to the attention she is attracting.

“It’s almost as if the portions of the South where slavery was the most concentrated have been punished. Parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are like Third World countries. They’re desperately poor!”

The boy brings our drinks and practically sits down at the table with us. I’ve never heard Sarah display the slightest intellectual interest in her courses. All she has cared about was the grade, not the subject matter.

“Is the poverty a big surprise?” I comment.

“We kidnapped people from a totally different culture and virtually turned them into farm animals until machines made them obsolete.”

Sarah nods as if I’d said that two plus two equals four.

“But that doesn’t explain why the Delta’s still statistically behind the rest of the country after the invention of tractors and cotton pickers and other laborsaving de vices,” she lectures me.

“Why hasn’t the Delta prospered like the rest of the country? It’s intellectually dishonest to say that the South got behind after the Civil War and was raped during Reconstruction and never caught up. That’s a Southern myth. Besides, when one observes countries such as Germany and Japan after World War Two and Taiwan and South Korea today, it’s a radically different picture. Those countries are booming economically. But the Delta is virtually a wasteland. Why?”

I think I’m supposed to ask. Every time I’ve mentioned Bear Creek in the last couple of years her eyes have glazed over. Small wonder: she’s heard all my boyhood stories a dozen times. Somebody, Professor Birdbath, or whatever his name is, has found a switch I didn’t know existed. I’m not sure I like it. She sounds ridiculous.

“Observe” Germany. Can’t she and Birdbreath simply look at it? I powder my tea with two packets of Equal and say, “I give up. What’s wrong with us?”

Sarah hasn’t even looked at the menu. She says, “The theory, being developed by Professor Beekman and others, and it’s only provisional, is that in places like the Delta, the need to control social relationships is more of a motivating factor than economic self-interest. In other words, in other geographic regions of the country, indi gent blacks are effectively ghettoized and isolated in a social sense, but in the small towns of the South there is no way to do that. You can’t move to the suburbs in Bear Creek.”

Amazed by the transformation of my daughter into a pretentious junior graduate student, I stir my tea until I’ve almost created a whirlpool. If Sarah ever read the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at home, she has kept it a well-guarded secret. Not that I care.

Surely she has more interesting things to do at this stage of her life than worry about the unsolvable problems of humanity, or so I thought. Since she doesn’t want to be pumped about Robin, I wouldn’t mind simply visiting with her, but she seems too serious. Professor Beekman has seen to that.

“I assume you’re talking about political power,” I say lamely, never having given a moment’s thought to the Delta’s economic problems since I left there for good a quarter of a century ago.

“Is this Professor Beekman you work for black or white?”

Sarah cocks her chin at me, a sure sign I have annoyed her.

“What conceivable difference does that make?” she says.

“These people are highly regarded in their fields.

Dr. Beekman is white, but the multi disciplinary team he heads has at least two African-Americans on it.”

“It sounds like awfully soft research.”

“It doesn’t have to be a mathematical formula to be true,” Sarah shoots back.

“I wanted to ask you something about Bear Creek, and I want you to think about this. Did you ever notice how light-skinned the leaders of the African-American community were before the civil rights movement caught on there?”

“Are you ready?” our waiter says, demanding attention from my daughter. This is the kind of place I could walk in naked and nobody would notice me.

I smile at the boy, who is hopelessly smitten.

“We better order,” I say, thinking I’m going to need my strength if I’m to get through this meal. A little more grimly than I would like, Sarah nods and studies the menu while I order fried chicken, the-cheapest meat dish on the menu.

Unaware of my shoestring budget for this case, she takes me at my word and tells the boy to bring her the club steak not the top of the line but no bargain either.

As soon as he is gone, Sarah looks at me expectantly.

“It never occurred to me to pay attention,” I confess, remembering the question.

“What researchers have observed is that the white power structure habitually handpicked the whitest-looking African-Americans they could find for socalled leader ship positions. These blacks were imitation whites. The civil rights movement, of course, changed all that.”

“It sounds like,” I point out, “blacks discriminate on the basis of color, too.”

“As a reaction,” Sarah says stubbornly, “against whites choosing lighter-skinned Negroes to be their leaders.”

Tax dollars are being paid to study the skin color of small-town Negroes? No wonder there’s a deficit. Before I can respond, we are interrupted by a classmate of Sarah’s who visits until our food comes, and fortunately our conversation about her job never regains the level of intensity it had when we first sat down. This version of my daughter will take some getting used to. I bring the conversation around to the condition of her Volkswagen, and whether it will make it home for Thanksgiving. It better. I’ve put nearly a thousand dollars into the damn thing in the last two months.

Finally, as we get up to leave, she asks, “Now that you’ve talked to Dade Cunningham, do you think he’s guilty?”

Poor Sarah. What an uncomfortable position I’ve put her in.

“Well, I haven’t heard the girl’s side,” I say, picking up the check, “but after talking to Dade, I honestly don’t think he raped her.”

She bites her lip. I know she doesn’t want me doing this case, but if it works out, she could benefit in ways neither of us dreamed possible. I wonder what she has heard. She probably knows more than I do at this stage of the case. I decide I’d like to meet this Beekman and tell Sarah I might drop by her office tomorrow. It won’t hurt the man to know Sarah has a father who will be checking up on her. Some of these profs, as far as women go, are probably major-league hitters. Sarah is showing all the signs. I’ve never heard her talk like this before. If Beek man is interested, it is easy to understand why. Half the crew of the Hilton practically follows us to the door.