Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion

by Grif Stockley

  “Did you say anything?”

  Robin dabs at her eyes.

  “I was too afraid.”

  “What happened next?”

  Robin sighs as if she knows she has finished the hard est part and says, “I drove straight back to the sorority house and went up and took a shower and got in bed.”

  “Did anyone see you?” Binkie asks.

  “Did you speak to anyone?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t want to see or talk to any body. I just wanted to be alone.”

  Robin’s voice is tense with anxiety. Beside me, Dade is shaking his head. He whispers urgently in my ear, “She’s lying and she knows it! She wanted to get in the shower. I didn’t tell her no such thing about hurting her or her being a slut or anything!”

  Watching the jury, I nod, realizing he didn’t deny he raped her. Binkie leads Robin through the reasons why she didn’t go to the police or hospital immediately. She says nothing that is not in her statement or in the transcript of the “J” Board hearing.

  “I just couldn’t face going through it then,” she concludes tearfully.

  “If it hadn’t been for Shannon, I might not have gone. I knew it would be horrible, and it has been.”

  Binkie turns to me and says sternly, “Your witness.”

  I take my time getting up. One of the reasons I’m convinced that Robin didn’t tell anybody for nine hours is that she was worried that her escapade the past summer would come out, but if I ask about it the judge will de clare a mistrial and probably would throw me in jail and bury the key. From beside the podium, I ask, “Where is the house you went to that night, Ms. Perry?”

  Robin runs the fingers of her right hand through her hair.

  “About two miles east of campus.”

  “Is it in the city limits?”

  Robin hunches her shoulders.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you recall if it has a well beside it?”

  “I remember seeing a well, but I think it’s boarded up.”

  “Does it have a house across from it?”

  “No” “Immediately on either side?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, the house you went to that night is at the end of the road there. You can’t go any further, can you?”

  “No.”

  “Would you agree that some people might consider the house somewhat isolated?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you majoring in, Ms. Perry?”

  “Communications,” she answers, her hands beginning to twist a bit in her lap.

  “You get almost straight A’s, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she says, undoubtedly schooled by Binkie to make her answers as short as possible.

  “Are you planning a career in the theater?” I ask, as snidely as I can, not caring how she answers.

  Binkie objects, however, and I withdraw the question, knowing I’ve made my point on the jury.

  “Had you ever dated an African-American before Dade?”

  Too sharp for her own good, she answers vehemently, “I didn’t date Dade.”

  I take my time and return to the table and pull out a copy of the local paper and bring it back to the podium.

  “Let me read you a quote attributed to you from the Northwest Arkansas Times from October twenty-third.

  This was at a rally on campus where you addressed several hundred students and others.

  “I want to thank every body for their support. I can’t tell you how many other girls have told me that they have been a victim of date rape since this has occurred. It is a crime that most girls still do not talk about, but it happens much more frequently than we are aware. Thank you for being here.” Do you deny saying those words?”

  “No, but that’s not what I meant,” Robin contends.

  “We never had a date.”

  I fold the paper and take it back to the table and hand it to Dade. When I return to the podium, I ask, “That’s an important distinction to you, isn’t it, Ms. Perry?”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, feigning ignorance or hoping I’m talking about something else.

  “It’s important to you that no one think you dated Dade, isn’t that correct?” I ask.

  “I’ve already explained that my parents are very conservative she says.

  “They asked me not to date anybody who wasn’t white and wasn’t from the South.”

  “So you won’t deny that during your first visit last spring to the house on Happy Hollow Road with your roommate at one point you and Dade were back in the kitchen alone and he tried to kiss you, but you wouldn’t let him.”

  For an instant Robin’s face reflects the unmistakable ambivalence that all witnesses experience when they don’t want to answer a question they suspect might help them. She purses her lips, then bites down on her lower one before finally answering, “Dade didn’t try to kiss me last spring.”

  I let her words hang for a moment.

  “Now you wouldn’t just be answering this question the way you did to please your parents, would you?”

  “No!” she says, her face flushed.

  I am certain she is lying, but the jury has no real reason to believe she is. I move on to other areas of her testimony but don’t come close again to breaking her compo sure. She is no longer crying and is quite believable in her insistence that she was afraid that Dade would hurt her.

  “He didn’t leave a mark on you, did he, Ms. Perry?”

  “He didn’t have to,” Robin says.

  “I was scared to death.”

  “We just have your word on that, don’t we, Ms.

  Perry?” I ask.

  “Yes, you have my word.”

  I return to my seat, knowing the rest is up to Dade.

  Binkie says that the state rests, and after the judge denies my routine motion for a dismissal of the charges, I tell the bailiff that I call Harris Warford to the witness stand.

  Nothing Harris could do would disguise his size (he will be a big black man until the day he dies), but even slightly nervous, he has a slow, patient smile that signals he is, off the football field at least, a gentle, nonaggressive man. He says that he and Dade have been good friends since they went through that terrible freshman season when the team won only three games. Hoping to give him some credibility, I draw from him that he is on track to graduate next spring with a degree in accounting.

  He repeats almost word for word his testimony from the “J” Board hearing: that he had talked to Dade in his room at Darby Hall about an hour after the rape was supposed to have occurred. Dade had seemed normal.

  “He said she wanted sex but that after it was over, she got out of there.

  That’s all he told me about it.”

  I exhale, glad that I have gotten no surprises and that Harris has avoided saying that Dade said he “did” Robin.

  I ask him about the party, and try to anticipate Binkie by asking if Dade had ever said that he liked Robin.

  Harris smooths down a lapel on his midnight blue wool blazer and wrinkles his face.

  “You asked me that at that hearing at the school, and I said then he never said nothing about her except she was helping him. Dade had lots of girls. Me and Tyrone ragged him some after she and her roommate came to the house that day, but, see, you don’t know Dade. If he don’t want to talk, nothing can make him. He talks when he’s ready.”

  Well, I hope he’s ready, I think to myself. He’s got some explaining to do.

  “How did he act the night he said he had sex with Robin?”

  As if I were a slow student he is duty bound to try to help, Harris leans forward, resting his forearms on his colossal thighs.

  “He didn’t act any different than usual.

  He was listening to his stereo when I went by his room. I asked him what he had been doing. That’s when he said what I just told you.”

  “Are you certain Dade didn’t give you any details then or later about what had occurred that ni
ght?” I ask, stealing a look at the jury to see what kind of impression Harris is making on them. I notice in particular the face of the unemployed waitress, who is sitting in the front row of the jury box and is the closest to Harris. She is plainly skeptical. All humans gossip, her expression says. This would have been the normal time for Dade to have bragged about it. Robin was beautiful, a cheerleader, and, not least, a white girl.

  “No,” Harris says finally, rubbing his hands along the tops of his thighs.

  “He didn’t talk.”

  I pass the witness.

  Binkie approaches the podium with the demeanor of someone who doesn’t believe what he is hearing.

  “Mr.

  Warford,” he says, now bringing his gnarled hands out of his pockets and draping them over the lectern as if he wants the jury to inspect them, “weren’t you a little curious about the way Robin Perry had supposedly acted that night?”

  “Yeah,” Harris says, “I was.”

  Binkie drums his thumbs against wood.

  “Did you ask him what Robin had been like?”

  “I asked, but like I told you, when Dade don’t want to talk, nobody’s gonna make him.”

  “What about the time when Robin and her roommate came out to the house on Happy Hollow Road did Dade act as if he was attracted to Robin?”

  “I don’t know,” Harris answers.

  “I was so busy answering questions her roommate was asking, I hardly noticed her.”

  “So if Dade tried to kiss Robin back in the kitchen that afternoon, you didn’t see it?” Binkie asks, his voice be ginning to boom like shots from a cannon.

  “Naw,” Harris says, looking genuinely puzzled.

  “He didn’t tell me he tried to kiss her.”

  Binkie has surely interviewed the others who were there that afternoon and found nothing useful.

  “So as far as you know from all you saw or heard, there was nothing in either the behavior or actual words of either Dade or Robin to suggest they were more than friends who worked together in class?”

  “Not that I could tell,” Harris says calmly.

  “No more questions, Your Honor.”

  I lean over and tell Dade he is next.

  “Just take your time and remember to think about your answers.”

  I stand up and tell the judge, “I call Dade Cunningham.”

  Dade turns to look at Lucy, whose forced smile can’t be fooling him. Everyone in the courtroom seems to have drawn to the edge of their seats. He knows it has all come down to him.

  Harris’s nervousness has infected Dade, and judging from his answers to some easy biographical questions, it will take a while to settle him down. His voice is tight and raspy as I repeatedly have to ask him to speak up. He momentarily forgets whether the family store is in the city limits of Hughes, and I have to correct him.

  Wooden-faced, he sits pinned against the witness chair straining to give the most basic information. Finally, I decide to change my approach and simply ask him, “Dade, did you rape Robin Perry?”

  At this direct question, his face becomes expressive and alive as he yells back at me, “No! I didn’t! She wanted it! I was just there to practice on my speech for class!”

  This emotional outburst has dynamited an internal log jam, and I wish I had made this my first question.

  “Just tell the jury what happened that night.”

  Dade repeats the story that I have heard half a dozen times, but now there is passion in his face, and for the first time since he told me that afternoon in the motel I find he is believable. Robin was the aggressor. It was her idea to get in the shower; she washed him and told him to wash her.

  “I didn’t even bring protection,” he volunteers.

  “We were just friends up until that night.”

  “Why did you think you were just friends, Dade?” I ask, willing him to answer.

  For a moment he looks directly at his mother and then drops his eyes. His voice low, he says, “I had tried to kiss her in the kitchen that time she and her roommate came over to Eddie’s house last spring. She’s lying when she said I didn’t. She stopped me and said she was gonna leave if I tried to do that again. After that, we didn’t say much until all of a sudden she got friendly again in the fall. After about a month she started talking to me, and we began working together again like we had before. But I wouldn’t have touched her if she hadn’t wanted it.”

  Delighted that he has not mumbled his way through an answer, I ask, “Had you been drinking that night?”

  Dade grimaces but answers, “I stopped at a bar and had a couple of beers before I got there.”

  “Had she been drinking?” I ask.

  “I thought I smelled wine,” Dade says, “but I’m not sure.”

  “How many times did you have intercourse with her?”

  “Just once. She got up and left real quick.”

  “Did you threaten her in any way?”

  “No!” Dade says defiantly.

  “Did you hurt her in any way?”

  “She acted like she liked it okay,” Dade says.

  “Naw, I didn’t hurt her.”

  “Then why did she leave so quickly?” I ask, knowing Binkie will hit hard here.

  “She didn’t say,” Dade says, his voice sullen for the first time.

  “What did you do afterward?” I ask.

  In an assertive, almost strident voice he tells the jury that he drove back to Darby Hall and went to his room.

  When Harris came by later, he told him that he’d had sex with Robin but didn’t give him any details and went on to bed that night around midnight after he finished studying.

  I get him to go back and fill in some details, but I got what I wanted with that one impassioned denial. He will have to hold up on crossexamination. There will be little I can do to protect him.

  Binkie goes after him hard. Standing beside the podium with his feet planted apart, Binkie asks, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Now, correct me if I am wrong, but the story you’re asking this jury to believe is that after this voluntary sex act Robin Perry was so eager to have was over, both of you became deaf mutes and didn’t say a word, is that right?”

  Dade’s tone, as I had feared, immediately becomes defensive

  “She said she had to go.”

  “What did you say when she told you she was leaving?”

  “Nothing much, I guess ” Dade says.

  “How long was she out there from start to finish?”

  Binkie asks.

  Dade won’t look Binkie in the eye as I had instructed.

  Instead, he seems to be staring at his belt buckle.

  “About an hour, I guess,” he says, hesitating.

  “Well, if this was her idea of a big fling, she had gone to a lot of trouble for just an hour, hadn’t she?” Binkie says, swinging his hands together as if he were about to challenge Dade to a fight.

  To Dade’s credit, he answers, “I don’t know what her idea was. I just know what she did.”

  “So your testimony is that you were sitting there together in the room working on the speech and she just up and attacked you, got what she wanted and left without a word, huh

  Behind me a couple of people snicker. With some dignity Dade says, “She didn’t attack me. I could just tell by the way she came over and sat by me she wanted me to kiss her.”

  “Do more than kiss her,” Binkie says, smirking at him.

  “She wanted you to ravish her, didn’t she?”

  Dade says grimly, “She wanted sex.”

  Deadpan, Binkie goads him, “She didn’t tear your clothes off, did she?”

  Dade looks over at me as if he is wondering whether he has to answer, and I nod. He sighs and says, “No.”

  “Did she leave any passion marks on you?” Binkie asks, now folding his arms in front of him but exposing his big ugly knuckles.

  “No.”

  Binkie’s plan is obviously to ridicule Dade, and he keeps him on the witne
ss stand a solid hour, asking his questions in the most scathing tone he can muster.

  “So she didn’t say anything after you were finished,” he finally concludes, “about what kind of a lover you were?”

  Throughout, Dade has looked increasingly hostile, glaring at Binkie between questions as the prosecutor has postured in front of him. My warnings to Dade that Binkie would try to make him angry have been all but forgotten.

  “I’ve said five times she didn’t say anything!”

  Binkie shrugs and abruptly turns his back as Dade answers.

  “Your witness.”

  I wish desperately I could call a timeout and confer with Dade, but, of course, I am not permitted to do so.

  Dade may be too pissed to answer my questions on redirect honestly, but I will have to risk that he understands that it is in his interest to convey to the jury that Robin was more to him than a football groupie. Suddenly, I realize I have sold him short by not forcing him to admit that he did feel something other than lust for Robin those few minutes that night. The jury badly needs to see an other side of Dade. I wait until the prosecutor sits down and ask Dade in a serious tone, “Had you liked Robin be fore the night she said you raped her?”

  For the first time since I’ve known him, Dade looks glad to see me.

  “She had really been nice to me, helping me so much,” he says earnestly.

  I could hug him. He is smarter than I thought.

  “Did you think she was pretty?”

  “Uh-huh,” Dade responds. Long gone is the attitude that she was too skinny for his tastes.

  “Had you ever before had a romantic or sexual relationship with a white girl?” I ask.

  His face becomes stiff.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was told not to.”

  Binkie is on his feet objecting.

  “We’re getting into hearsay. Your Honor.”

  I respond, “He can say what motivated him. Judge.”

  “He just did, Mr. Page,” Judge Franklin says.

  I’m happy to leave things as they are. Maybe the jury will think the chancellor of the university has a talk with all the incoming black freshmen. I sit down, happy in this instance to let the judge have the last word.