Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion

by Grif Stockley

  “She’s practically heard us,” I say, as I put my hand under the top part of her sweats, “she might as well see us” “I can’t imagine a more delightful scene,” Amy says, only halfheartedly pushing my hand away.

  “This is your new mother, Sarah. She’s even cuter without any clothes on, isn’t she? Stop it!”

  The next morning during breakfast I manage only two sips of coffee before asking Sarah, “Well, what did you think of Amy?”

  Sarah chews on a piece of buttered toast, swallows, and then lectures me: “Dad, don’t do anything foolish like getting married right now. You’d just be doing it to spite Rainey. You’re on the rebound. Don’t forget it.”

  I put down the sports pages, unable to continue reading about the massacre last night. My daughter is a piece of work.

  “I wasn’t sending you a wedding invitation. I just asked, what did you think about Amy?”

  “She’s all right,” Sarah says grudgingly.

  More than satisfied, I do not risk a followup question.

  An hour later after she drives off to return to school, I pick up the house and realize that Sarah did not make me try to agree again that I would ask the court to let me withdraw as Dade’s attorney. Maybe she thinks we should be all one big happy family. The court wouldn’t let me withdraw at this late date anyway.

  “your daughter is on the phone,” Julia says, appearing in the doorway to my office.

  “She sounds a little anxious.”

  I have been ignoring the beeping sound in my ear that indicates another call. Julia does not make a practice of being sensitive to anything involving my welfare, so I dare not ignore her. I check the calendar. December 18.

  The last time I talked to Sarah was on Pearl Harbor Day.

  It was a curious conversation. The day before. Dr. Beekman, an unlikely ally if there ever was one, had taken up Dade’s cause and argued that Dade might well be innocent. I had to give her a hard time, since the guy parroted every argument I made to her. God knows what else Beekman knows. He probably can trace my family tree now better than I can.

  “Tell her to hang on,” I say.

  “I’ll be off in two seconds. Thanks.”

  Julia nods. Women have to stick together, her expression says. I am on the phone with Gordon Dyson, who has told me his wife is flying off to New Zealand the day after Christmas. I had completely forgotten about him.

  He is reminding me to send him a power of attorney for his wife to sign before she departs. He says excitedly, “I can’t even get my son to rake the leaves in the front yard!”

  I am amazed that he is actually following through with the eviction. Most of my clients ignore my advice and perhaps for good reason. Now, two months later, my suggestion seems a little extreme.

  “Call me the day after your wife leaves, and I’ll draw up the complaint. Don’t worry; we’ll get him out.”

  “You’ve got to,” he pleads.

  “He’s driving me crazy.”

  “It’ll be a piece of cake.” I feel like a pest exterminator.

  I remind him of my fee and tell him I have to get off. I pick up Sarah’s line, wondering what she wants. She finishes her first-semester exams tomorrow afternoon, and I can’t imagine any call that can’t wait twenty-four hours.

  “What’s up, babe?” I ask.

  “Julia says it sounded important.”

  “Well, it’s probably not, and I don’t feel good about telling you this, because I don’t know how relevant it is, but here goes: there’s a rumor that’s been going around, and it’s only a rumor, that Robin was having an affair with Dr. Hofstra in the history department this summer.

  Depending on the source, it was still going on this fall when Robin filed rape charges against Dade. That may not be true at all though, because the girl who said Robin was still involved with Dr. Hofstra when she said she was raped is a cheerleader and was her big rival.”

  I make notes furiously. Ever since Thanksgiving it’s been as if Dade’s case was on hold. He is still refusing to take the polygraph despite his mother’s encouragement. I have been hoping he would begin to feel some pressure of the upcoming trial date and would cooperate.

  “How long have you known about this?” I ask, marveling at my daughter’s ability to keep a secret, a feat, despite my obligations as a lawyer, that I don’t always manage.

  “I heard it the day before I quit the jay vee cheerleaders,” Sarah admits, “but Paula convinced me not to say anything. She said it was gossip and that a statute called the ‘rape shield law’ made it inadmissible in court. Is that true?”

  I try to contain my exasperation. That was back in October

  “It’s up to the judge. If the court can be convinced that a past sexual relationship has some particular bearing on the case, evidence of it can be admitted, but under most situations, the statute prohibits mention of it,” I ex plain.

  “Why are you telling me now? Have you been talking to Dr. Beekman again?” I ask, hoping she has had a falling out with WAR.

  “Some,” she admits, “but I’ve been thinking about this ever since we got back from Bear Creek, and so I finally called Dade this morning and confronted him. He swears he didn’t rape Robin. I think I believe him. He’s pretty convincing.”

  Family ties. Even as distant as these are, Sarah must feel them. How odd! Yet, is it? She must have a hundred questions about her own racial past. Now, she has a connection however slight, right on campus.

  “I still believe him, too,” I say, encouragingly.

  “I take it you heard this from another cheerleader.” If I can get someone to testify, this case might be back in business.

  “Dad,” Sarah blurts, “I’m sworn to secrecy! I’ve violated a confidence telling you this.”

  “The rest of Dade’s life is at stake,” I press her.

  “This may be crucial evidence in the case. It would be horribly unfair to Dade if the case turned on this point and it never got presented to the jury.”

  “Don’t make me do this!” Sarah says, her voice anguished.

  “You have to, babe,” I scold her. I have no qualms about leaning on my own daughter. She should have told me weeks ago.

  “I need the names of everybody you’ve talked to.”

  Sarah, her voice now choked with tears, says, “I’ve got to talk to them first.”

  Her tears always get to me. I know I’m putting her in a bind. Yet, it is wrong for her to sit on this information.

  “I

  understand,” I say.

  “Just let me know as soon as possible.

  I’ll be in Fayetteville tomorrow afternoon.”

  I make her promise to call me back as soon as she can, and then I go in to Dan’s office to talk this over with him.

  For the last month Clan has been disappearing during the day. I know he is still seeing Gina, but today, it appears, he is actually doing some work for a change. He puts down his Dictaphone as soon as I mention I have some juicy gossip about the case.

  “What would be the possible relevance to Robin’s allegation that she was raped by Dade?” I ask, after going through Sarah’s story.

  As he thinks, Dan’s right forefinger wanders up his face but fortunately misses his nose and comes to rest be-low his eye.

  “Maybe she was trying to make her professor jealous,” he muses, “and she went to the hottest guy she knew.”

  “With a black athlete on a southern campus?” I ask, unable to accept this scenario. I sit down across from him.

  “Maybe this professor knocked her up, and she wanted to get an abortion but needed an excuse, so she claimed Dade raped her.”

  Clan shakes his head.

  “Why wouldn’t she just get one?” he scoffs.

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “It is,” I say, “if you’re raised to think abortion is a sin, and the only thing that justifies it would be rape or saving the mother’s life. Robin’s parents are big Baptists. She wouldn’t be able to admit
to them she got pregnant.

  That’s too big a scandal. But if they knew, they’d make her have the baby. So she lets herself get into a situation with Dade and convinces herself that he has raped her, which justifies an abortion.”

  Clan rocks back and forth in his chair like a child.

  “You’ve got a vivid imagination,” he says, tacitly admitting I may be onto something.

  “Do you have any proof?”

  “Not a shred,” I admit, realizing that up until now Robin has been able to create an image of herself that has been nauseatingly pristine. I still know almost nothing about her. That’s going to change. I need to get back up to Fayetteville and start to work on this case again.

  I go back to my office and call Dade and, for a change, get him in his room.

  “I understand Sarah called you today,” I begin, not at all sure how he will react.

  “I didn’t know she was going to. She’s kind of impulsive sometimes.”

  “She’s all right,” Dade says.

  “At least she told me you went to Bear Creek. Of course, I already knew.”

  “I figured you did” I say awkwardly. In the two conversations I’ve had with him since we came back, I never quite knew how to bring it up.

  “Mama said she had told you, but you didn’t believe her!” he says.

  I should have had this conversation with him long be fore now, but I kept putting it off.

  “All my life I had been told it wasn’t true,” I say weakly.

  “I needed to find out for myself whether it was or not.”

  “Your daughter says it was her idea to go over there.”

  I shift uncomfortably in my chair. They had a longer conversation than Sarah led me to believe.

  “That’s true.”

  “You see why I don’t want to take a lie detector test? I can’t trust white people.”

  Who does he think will be on the jury? We have been over this a dozen times.

  “Then trust the polygraph: it’s a machine; it just records changes in your body as you answer questions.”

  “You’ve said that it’s not what the machine does that’s important; it’s what the man says the answers mean.”

  The Man. How do we get past that? I switch subjects and tell him I am coming up tomorrow.

  “Have you heard anything about Robin in the last few days that you haven’t already told me?” I ask, determined not to put words in his mouth. I will save Sarah’s story until I’ve talked to her again.

  “Anything that could give us a motive as to why she would say you raped her?”

  “Not really,” Dade says, sounding genuinely perplexed

  “I keep asking, but nobody I talked to knows her that good.”

  Dade and his sources are out of the loop. The only black faces in the Chi Omega House are the ones who clean up after the whites. I tell him to call me at the Ozark tomorrow if he hears anything. His last exam is not until Friday. Sometimes, it is hard to forget these kids are really in school.

  My first stop the next afternoon is Jefferson Memorial Hospital. My sophomore year I broke my arm playing touch football one fall and spent a long afternoon in its emergency room. Things are relatively slow this afternoon, and after only a half hour of searching and waiting, I sit down with the nurse who talked with Robin Perry the morning she came in to be examined.

  She had been out of town the day of the administrative hearing conducted by the university, and I am eager to check her out. A tall, gangly, dishwater blonde in her early forties, wearing blue hospital scrubs, Joan Chestnut isn’t particularly eager to talk to me, but does so after I show her the release on the state crime lab report form that Robin had signed. In the corner of a break room shared by two other employees who are watching a daytime soap, I whisper, “Do you remember how Robin Perry seemed to you the morning she came in and reported she had been raped?”

  Ms. Chestnut gives me the patient smile of a woman used to dealing with attorneys.

  “Her reactions were quite consistent for a rape victim,” she says, slowly and deliberately as if she already sees herself being cross examined

  “She was very articulate besides being angry. I remember her in particular because even with all that she had been through she was a beautiful girl.”

  I hand her the section of the nurse’s notes. In it she has noted that the patient was “calm.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be upset?”

  She flips through the entire document and hands it back to me.

  “I’ve done ER over twenty years, and I’ve seen scores of rape victims. I’ve seen women numb, in shock, and then some who were relatively composed even minutes after an attack had occurred. It depends entirely on the individual. If she was raped the night before, she’d had time to work through the initial shock.”

  “So you have no doubt Robin Perry was coerced into having sex?” I ask, over a commercial for breath mints.

  “That’s not something you can ever know with any certainty, but just because she wasn’t hysterical doesn’t mean anything,” Ms. Chestnut responds, remaining un ruffled.

  “The girl said she had been crying the entire night, and I believed her. I could look at her and tell she hadn’t had any sleep.”

  Even though she isn’t saying anything particularly damaging, this woman, unlike the Rape Crisis counselor, is going to be helpful to the prosecution. She radiates such competence that a jury is going to believe anything that comes out of her mouth.

  “Didn’t her roommate come in with her?” I ask, curious about Shannon Kennsit’s reaction. If her roommate was at all suspicious of her story, I might begin to get some hints now.

  Looking at her watch, Joan Chestnut says, “I didn’t re member until now that that girl was her roommate. She was very supportive, I know that. From what I recall, I think she felt in some way responsible. Like if she hadn’t been going out that night, Robin wouldn’t have gone out there by herself, and it wouldn’t have happened.”

  Ms. Chestnut has told me that she is supposed to be checking on a patient, but I say, “One more question. Was Robin worried about being pregnant?”

  “Of course she was!” she says, looking at me as if I were slightly insane.

  I spread my hands in a dismissive gesture.

  “She could have gotten an abortion if that had been the case.”

  Ms. Chestnut puckers her mouth as if she has been forced to swallow something unpleasant.

  “That’s a terrible burden to place on a young woman, Mr. Page. I know lots of people who would only allow abortion if the mother’s life were in danger.”

  Despite what this nurse thinks, I’m not out to make an enemy of her. I need her a lot more than she will ever need me.

  “Thanks for your time, ma’am,” I say politely.

  “I’m glad women have someone like you to support them.”

  She stands up, ready to make her getaway.

  “If you saw what we do,” she says, “you’d react the same way.”

  “I have no doubt,” I say scrambling to my feet.

  “One very last question. I know the lab report says she wasn’t pregnant at the time of the incident. Would she have found that out before she left the hospital?”

  Ms. Chestnut looks puzzled.

  “She would have known she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “But if she thought she had been,” I persist, “she would have known that she wasn’t by the time the hospital got through with her, is that right?”

  As usual, one last question has become two or three.

  “She would have known,” Ms. Chestnut agrees.

  “Do you know how she reacted to the information,” I ask, “that she wasn’t pregnant at the time of the alleged rape?”

  Ms. Chestnut gives me a blank stare.

  “She didn’t react to that news at all,” she says, clearly nonplussed by my question.

  “It was the trauma of being raped she was re acting to.”

  Shit. So muc
h for my theory that she thought she was pregnant by her professor and had concocted a rape story so she could justify getting an abortion.

  “If you think of something you didn’t tell me,” I say sincerely, “I’d appreciate it if you’d call me collect.”

  Now that I am leaving, she smiles and lights up the entire room.

  “I’ll be happy to,” she says, dropping my card into a pocket on her thigh.

  “Am I going to be subpoenaed?”

  I won’t hold my breath waiting for her call.

  “Not by me.” I walk out the automatic double doors of the emergency room realizing I’m not going to be able to do any thing with this woman at the trial except pretend she’s boring the jury to death.

  Like an old drunk who can’t remember anything except where he lives, I check into my room at the Ozark, which seems to be having a heating problem. It must be fifty degrees in here. I’d move, but I’m too damn lazy.

  After complaining to the manager, I call Sarah. Reluctantly she gives me the telephone number of a girl named Lauren Denney at the Tri-Delt House.

  “She’s the one who’s the cheerleader,” Sarah says irritably.

  “She’s too eager. Dad. She wants to talk to you. Her last exam was this morning, but she said she could see you before she leaves town tonight.”

  “What’s she like?” I ask.

  “Two-faced,” Sarah warns me.

  “She’s got more ex friends than anybody I know.”

  “She sounds charming,” I comment. Defense witnesses, like clients, don’t come with a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval stamped on them. When they appear sincere and competent like Joan Chestnut, they are usually on the other side.

  “Actually, she is,” Sarah says, “for the first twenty minutes or so you’re around her. But she can be a bitch!”

  I rarely hear Sarah attack another girl, but I know she isn’t all sugar and spice either. There’s got to be some of me in her somewhere.

  “Any other names?”

  “Jenny Taylor,” Sarah says.

  “I got her as she was just leaving to go home. She lives in Heber Springs, and she said she’d probably talk to you after Christmas if you went up there to see her. She wanted to talk to her parents first. She doesn’t want to be involved and is mad at me for telling you.”