“My client wants to go to trial. Because he intends to walk.”
“I hope you’ve told him that changing to a plea of not criminally responsible doesn’t mean he won’t do serious time.”
“He understands that. And you know, for all his, uh, issues, he’s actually kind of brilliant. But between his learning disabilities and his claustrophobia—”
“Learning disabilities—please. He got into Bennington, Fred.”
“Which didn’t require standardized tests. And he dropped out freshman year because of depression. But no, he’s not crazy enough, cuckoo Froot Loops crazy. In fact, he’s looked at his case pretty rationally and he believes he has an excellent chance for an acquittal.”
“And what advice do you, as a lawyer, give your client, Fred? I have to think that your legal acumen is better than his, no matter how smart or rational he might be.”
Sitting opposite her former boss, in what was his office less than two months ago—it’s like a perverse job evaluation. Do you think you can beat me, Fred? On this case, with these facts? What would you have done, Fred? He offered murder two because that’s what he would have taken. Fred wouldn’t have gone to the scene. Fred wouldn’t have told the cops to make sure to grab the bedspread because it was mussed.
“I would be willing to tell him that murder two and ten years would be a pretty good deal.”
“No way.”
“Then we’ve got a trial.”
“Yes, we do. Still intent on invoking Hicks?”
“My client wants to get in there as soon as possible. Really, it’s almost inhuman to keep him confined.”
It’s inhuman to beat a woman to death for no crime greater than walking into her own bedroom.
“Let me ask you this, Fred—what makes Drysdale so confident that I can’t win this case?”
“The obvious answer, Lu, is that he didn’t do it, so he believes justice will be done.”
“I guess I’m asking you why your client would think there’s any likelihood that I can’t get a conviction, based on these facts?”
“You know, you’re good, Lu. But you’re not as good as you think you are. Few people are, when it comes down to it. There’s been one great Howard County state’s attorney—and that was your dad.”
It has the whiff of something he has long planned to say, an insult held back for the most perfect, hurtful moment. And it does hurt, but Lu won’t give Fred the satisfaction of seeing that.
“One great Howard County state’s attorney so far. I’ve been in office less than two months. Let’s see where I am in four years. Who knows, Fred? One day, maybe you’ll be arguing a case before the Court of Appeals—and I’ll be sitting above you in one of those crimson robes.”
“Court of Appeals—oh, I’m sure your ambitions go much higher than that, Lu. After all, there are plenty of women who have risen to that position. I assume you’ve set your cap for attorney general, or maybe even governor. Hasn’t been a woman alone in the governor’s mansion since Bootsie Mandel kicked Marvin out for having a mistress.”
“See you in court, Fred. Can’t wait to see how you spin this. Don’t forget to ask Drysdale what he used to take her face off. You know how jurors get obsessed with those little details, let their imaginations take them to the darkest places. Oh, and although you don’t represent them, you might ask which of Rudy’s parents wants to take the stand to testify about the time he attacked his father.”
Fred may have devolved into a timid prosecutor, but he was never a dumb one. “You can’t introduce past crimes unless Rudy takes the stand. Besides, there are no records of any violent behavior on his part.”
“True. But you also can’t claim he has no history of violence. There is a history, Fred, and it’s a very troubling one. But let’s move forward, get everything on the schedule, assuming there’s no chance for a murder one plea.”
“No chance. He’s rolling the dice, all or nothing.”
“Well, then, I’m going to have to assume probability is not one of the things at which Mr. Drysdale is brilliant.”
THE GAME OF LIFE
Even on a Saturday during a long holiday weekend, our father went to the office. We were used to his workaholism. Complaining about it would be like complaining about cold weather in winter, humidity in summer. AJ was still asleep when he left. AJ seldom rose before noon on holidays and weekends, a pattern established early in his teens. I could not believe how much he slept, my brother. My father said I would sleep like that one day, too, that the enormous physical changes of adolescence would exhaust me. He was wrong about that, as it turned out. But I grew very slowly and not very much, maybe only six inches in all from age twelve to age eighteen.
So I was doubly surprised when our father returned home two hours later and expressed annoyance at AJ still being in bed at 11:00. He walked upstairs to AJ’s room, his voice loud, almost yelling. Our father never yelled.
“AJ, get up. I need to talk to you.”
Inaudible mutters, moans.
“Now, AJ. Don’t get dressed. Don’t brush your teeth. Come straight to my room.”
More muttering.
“Then go to the bathroom, for sweet Christ’s sake, but get moving.”
My room shared part of a wall with my father’s. Intensely curious about what AJ had done to be in such trouble, I decided I would clean my room, as I was supposed to do on the weekends, although I usually waited until Sunday evening.
“Where did you go last night?” our father asked AJ. Then, before he could answer: “The truth. You need to tell the truth.”
The whole truth and nothing but the truth, I silently amended.
A long pause. I could almost feel AJ sifting through the consequences of his answer. Clearly, he had not gone bowling. But what could he have done to make our father sound like this? Angry, yet scared, too, a slight tremble in his voice. He didn’t know the answers to the questions he asked. That was rare for our father.
“The girls did go bowling. But Bash and Lynne are in a fight, he didn’t want to go. And Davey was stuck at home. So we went over there.”
“Were his parents there?”
Soft, barely audible. “No, sir. They drove up to Harrisburg to see Davey’s grandmother. They let Davey stay home because he said he wanted to work on a report for AP European History, but they said he couldn’t go out.”
“Who else was there?”
“Only Bash, Noel, and I were invited. It wasn’t a party. We just wanted to hang out, listen to Mr. Robinson’s stereo.”
“AJ, stop trying to skirt the truth by the way you phrase things. Okay, Davey invited you, Noel, and Bash. Was anyone else there, invited or no?”
“A girl named Nita Flood showed up.”
“Who is Nita Flood?”
I almost spoke out loud, excited to know the answer. Nita Flood. She sells sausage at the mall.
“A girl in our class. Not a friend of ours, not really.”
“Just showed up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did she get there?”
“Someone dropped her off. She hitched, I think. She said she had been working and she bummed a ride. But she lives near the high school, not Hobbit’s Glen.”
“Why did she come to Davey’s house?”
“She was mad at him.”
“Why?”
“Because he took a girl from Glenelg to our homecoming dance. She thought he should have taken her.”
“Why?”
My father was in attorney mode. He wanted AJ to tell the story, line by line, fact by fact. He was trying very hard not to put words in AJ’s mouth, I could tell, not to lead him in any way.
“Because—because they’ve been having sex.” The embarrassment in AJ’s voice was palpable. My face burned with mortification and I wasn’t in the room. “Off and on for more than a year, only in secret. Davey never takes her anywhere, doesn’t talk to her in front of other people. He goes over to where she lives, after school, and they
have sex. Nobody knew. Bash, Noel, and I didn’t suspect a thing. She said she was his girlfriend and Davey said she wasn’t, that his parents don’t want him to go steady with anyone. They had a big fight, in the Robinsons’ bedroom. We could hear them all the way down in the rec room. But then they, um, made up.”
“What do you mean?”
An interminable silence.
“AJ? What do you mean by ‘they made up’?”
“They had sex.” I knew AJ was not looking at our father when he said those words. “They had sex and they came downstairs and we played a drinking game. We played Life and you had to take a drink every time you had a kid. She got wasted, really fast, because she drank vodka and the rest of us were having beer. Bash and Noel drove her home. She threw up inside Bash’s car. He came back to Davey’s house and we helped him clean it up. I also helped Davey clean up the house.”
“What do you mean by clean up?”
He was almost whispering now. “We added water to the vodka so his parents wouldn’t know someone drank a bunch. And we bagged up the beer cans, took them to the Dumpster behind Jack in the Box.” A beat. “I was home on time. I’m sorry I let you think I was going bowling. I thought I was going bowling. It was only when I went to Davey’s house that they told me there was a change in plan.”
“Is there any more to the story?”
“No, sir.”
“Think hard. Is that the whole story?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine, because you’re going to tell it to a police detective.”
AJ’s gasp was loud enough that it provided cover for my stifled one.
“Why, sir? I mean, I know I was wrong to drink and that I lied to you about where I was going last night, but are you really going to turn me in to the police? I promise I won’t do it again, I really do. I mean—”
“Juanita Flood was admitted to Howard County General this morning. She has been beaten. And she says that she was raped by Davey Robinson last night.”
“Raped, beaten—no sir!—”
“Don’t speak any further, AJ. A lawyer is going to meet you at headquarters. I have advised Bash’s and Noel’s parents to bring attorneys as well, if possible. But they, at least, can sit in on their sons’ interviews. I have to recuse myself from yours. This is all—this is very complicated. You may go get dressed now.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Just now, when you talked to me—were you speaking as my father or the state’s attorney?”
AJ had hit on the same question I had, even if I hadn’t been able to articulate it. What was our father’s role in this? What was AJ’s role? Would his story help or hurt Davey? I didn’t know because I wasn’t sure what rape was. Something bad, but how bad?
“I am always your father, AJ. Always. If this goes forward—I’m not sure how it will work. My deputy will be there, monitoring all the interviews. Just tell the truth, tell them what you told me. Don’t lie. Don’t try to outthink this. Tell the truth and everyone will be fine.”
AJ left our father’s room. Quicker than I thought possible, my father entered my room through the hallway. He looked at me thoughtfully. I was sitting on my bed, but it had not occurred to me to pick up a book or make myself look busy. I probably looked as suspicious as any nine-year-old ever had, sitting on her freshly made bed, hands folded in her lap.
“I have to go out, Lu. AJ and I—we have to go out.”
“Okay,” I said, then wanted to kick myself. I should have said “Where?” or asked to accompany them. My ready acquiescence was even more suspicious. But my father didn’t seem to notice.
“I really shouldn’t leave you here alone, but—you’re big enough, I think. You’ll be ten in less than two months.” He seemed to be trying to think of the single most important warning he could give me. “Stay inside, don’t open the door to strangers. Don’t touch the stove.”
“I’ve been making my own hot dogs and soup since I was in second grade,” I reminded him.
“Not today,” he said. “There’s still plenty of leftovers. Eat those if you get hungry.”
“Even pie?” I asked. I always liked to spell out all the terms. “With Reddi-wip and ice cream if I want?”
“Sure.”
He called upstairs to AJ: “What’s taking you so long?”
“Ariel and I were supposed to meet to rehearse our duet for madrigals. I just wanted her to know I couldn’t make it.”
“Well, get a move on.”
I assumed they would be gone for maybe an hour at the most. After all, the conversation in my father’s room had taken very little time. But it would be almost 5 P.M. before they returned.
As soon as they left the house, I climbed the stairs to AJ’s room and looked up the word rape in the dictionary on his desk. It was defined as an assault. I looked up assault, which was defined as an attack. Stymied by the circular nature of these definitions, I headed to our father’s room, where he kept a big, old-fashioned dictionary on a stand. This was a marvelous book, with full-color plates that I loved to study—butterflies, flowers, the internal organs of the human body—but I ignored those today. I had only one thing on my mind: rape.
The act of seizing and carrying off by force. That was the first definition.
But Nita Flood had not been seized or carried off. This made no sense. She had been taken home after she drank too much.
It was the second definition that specified: To force a woman to have sexual intercourse.
But how could you force someone to do that? I honestly could not fathom this. I went into the bathroom and examined my own private parts. It seemed impossible to me that they could be accessed without my cooperation. Was that why she had bruises? Because someone had tried to force her body to have sex? My mind reeled. Soap operas, hours of The Big Valley—nothing had prepared me for this. A body would close itself to such an attack. It would have to.
Dinner was a silent meal that night, although not in an unhappy way. If anything, my brother and father seemed relieved, as if they had faced down something difficult and put it behind them. My father even opened a bottle of red wine and offered small glasses to AJ and me. I thought it would taste velvety and rich, like a deeper, sweeter grape juice. But it was vile and I ran to the sink, spitting out my mouthful. AJ didn’t like it much more, I could tell, but he swallowed his sip by sip, as if it were medicine.
“I don’t really care for alcohol that much,” he said.
“Yet you drink, sometimes,” our father said. “Why is that?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Don’t be a sheep, AJ. Don’t do things just because others do them.”
“I’m not. I don’t.”
“Good.”
Davey was at school Monday morning. Nita Flood was not. No charges were filed. There probably would not have been a grand jury hearing if not for my father’s insistence. He wrestled with this decision. Given that he was sure of the outcome, he worried it was unkind to Nita Flood to make her tell her story again—and to be exposed, again, as a liar. But his son’s best friend had been accused, his son was a witness. He wanted to be as transparent as possible, to avoid any accusations of favoritism. He recused himself from the case, asking his deputy to convene the grand jury, which listened to the boys who were there, the ER attendants, Nita Flood herself. Ultimately, they no-billed Davey Robinson on the charge of rape. Because it was a matter for the grand jury, it remained private. Besides, the accuser and accused were minors, deserving of protection even in open court. Not a word about the case appeared in newspapers.
Of course, those records are available to a state’s attorney, so I have read them. The testimony of Davey, AJ, Bash, and Noel is consistent. They were having a party. Nita Flood came by, uninvited. She quarreled with Davey, but they made up, apparently having sex in Davey’s room. She insisted on playing a drinking game with them, a version of Monopoly in which people could choose to pay fines or drink, although the amount of t
he drink was relative to the size of the fine. AJ had told our father it was the game of Life, but I guess he realized later he misspoke, as he and the other boys all agreed it was Monopoly. Nita became woozy, they took her home. No one hit her. They were, according to them, exceedingly gentle with her. Their only failure, as gentlemen, was to leave her on the doorstep, terrified to come face-to-face with the fearsome Mr. Flood.
Nita’s testimony is, of course, different. She says she hitched to Davey’s house, bumming a ride from another mall worker whose name she didn’t know. She said she had not been drinking before she arrived. Yes, she went upstairs with Davey but she had told him she would never have sex with him again if he didn’t treat her like a girlfriend. He held her down—those were the bruises on both her shoulders—and forced her to have sex.
“Did you scream?” she was asked by the assistant state’s attorney, the closest thing she had to an advocate in the court.
No, she was too embarrassed. If she screamed, the other boys might come upstairs and she was naked below the waist. She wouldn’t want anyone to see that. But that’s why she began drinking, during the board game. Because she was embarrassed and she just wanted to forget what had happened. She remembered drinking—then waking up on her own front steps, vomit crusted on her top, in the corners of her mouth.
“What about the bruises on your face?”
“I guess they happened while I was passed out.”
“You think Davey—or the other boys—beat you for fun while you were unconscious?”
“I don’t know.”
The medical record from the ER was entered into evidence.
“There are marks on both shoulders, but the bruises were only on the right side of your face. Does that sound right to you?”
“Yeah.”
The boys were asked if they were right-handed or left-handed. Each one said he was right-handed.
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