Illegal Motion g-4 Read online

  Illegal Motion

  ( Gideon - 4 )

  Grif Stockley

  Grif Stockley

  Illegal Motion

  1

  “Page!”

  I look up at a black man who has appeared from behind his house which is halfway between mine and Pinewood Elementary on the corner. He shakes his head as if he has had about all of me he can tolerate. I think I know why.

  “Woogie! Come on, damn it!” I yell. Like a marble statue, my dog is frozen in the classic posture of an animal doing his business in a neighbor’s yard. Emerging at the east end of this castrated mixture of beagle and melting pot is a soft quarter pounder that would make a St.

  Bernard bark with pride.

  “We were trying to make the schoolyard,” I explain. As persistent violators of the leash law at all times, Woogie and I escape detection at this time of day only in the dead of winter. On this gloriously mild mid-October afternoon at six o’clock in the evening there is still plenty of light.

  “Over the years your dog has dumped enough fertilizer in my yard,” my neighbor says mildly, “to start a nursery.

  Actually, I was about to call you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I lie, racking my brain for his name. If my memory is like this at forty-eight, I can’t wait for fifty.

  Connery? No, Cunningham. Rosa, my late wife, would have known. A native of South America and dark herself, she knew everybody, black or white, on our street. The longer I live in this neighborhood, the fewer “pleasantries there are to exchange. Crime, drugs, racial tensions in the schools, etc.” were supposed to have been solved by now; instead, the problems are worse. Twenty years later, Blackwell County, located in the center of the state, hosts the “Crips” and the “Bloods” and other gangs, almost all black. On our street, mostly a mixture of white retirees and middle-class blacks, it seems as if all we can safely talk about is the latest addition to our medical records, which, as the years pass, are becoming the size of the Dallas phone book.

  “I just had anal fissure repair surgery,” Payne Littlefield, my next-door neighbor, recently confided to me.

  “I’ve never experienced such pain in my life! …” After a few minutes of this, I’d just as soon watch in silence as Woogie hoses down his rosebush. I was more outgoing and neighborly when my wife was alive, but I realize I’ve become pessimistic about the possibility of lions and lambs even co-existing on the same planet, much less taking a snooze together. When Rosa and I moved to Blackwell County a quarter of a century ago I never dreamed I’d become so wary, but now fear is an emotion I carry around in my back pocket like a wallet.

  “It won’t happen again,” I say hastily to Cunningham.

  My neighbor, a tall man in his forties who has the gut of an ex-jock, hooks his thumbs in his jeans. He works, I think, at the post office downtown.

  “I wanted to find out if you’d be interested in talking about the case of the Razorback football player charged with rape in Fayetteville yesterday. Dade Cunningham is my nephew. His father is inside.”

  Dade Cunningham. Now that’s a name I know! Three years ago he was the most sought-after prospect from Arkansas since Keith Jackson signed with Oklahoma back in the early eighties. Lou Holtz had come within an inch of luring Cunningham to Notre Dame, but the pres sure on the kid to stay in-state was tremendous. It would be like Rush Limbaugh announcing he was about to defect to China. Until yesterday, Cunningham, a junior wide receiver with 4.4 speed in the forty-yard dash, was a cinch to be a top draft choice whenever he decided to turn pro. He was on several preseason first team all-American lists and has already had a season most players only dream about. With that kind of future I can’t help feeling a little sorry for him. This morning’s front-page article in the Democrat-Gazette about Cunningham’s re ported rape of a University of Arkansas coed (her name was not given) has to be worth four or five points on the betting line out of Las Vegas for the Hogs’ Southeastern Conference game against Georgia this week. On Satur day, Cunningham caught eight passes for over two him dred yards and two touchdowns against South Carolina in the Razorbacks’ 24 to 17 win.

  “Sure, I’ll talk to him,” I say.

  “Let me get my dog home and put on some pants and a shirt.” I have just been home from work long enough to get out of my suit, and I am wearing a pair of ragged shorts, a wrinkled yellow T-shirt that advertises “Lobotomy Beer” ( a gag gift from my daughter on my birthday) and Adidas running shoes, which are badly in need of washing. Not exactly a business recruiting outfit.

  “Don’t take the time to change clothes,” my neighbor says.

  “Just come on back. My brother’s got to drive back to eastern Arkansas as soon as he can. He’s got a sick child at home, and his wife needs him.”

  I nod and clap my hands at Woogie, who now that he has relieved himself, is markedly more frisky.

  “Let’s go home, boy!” Usually, we walk around at the school while he sniffs the empty candy wrappers and waters the playground equipment. As I walk south to the house, followed by my reluctant dog, I try to remember the article in the Democrat-Gazette.

  With the paper withholding the alleged victim’s name and the university claiming privacy under a federal law, the story was mostly about Dade Cunningham’s stats. All I remember off the top of my head is that the victim was a twenty-year-old white cheerleader and the rape was supposed to have taken place off campus. According to the paper, Cunningham claimed the girl consented. Of course, there’s probably never been a rapist who hasn’t argued the act was voluntary. Alleged rapist, I remind myself. There’s a double standard at work here. The media withholds the alleged victim’s name but not the alleged perpetrator’s. What’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, my criminal defense lawyer’s mind tells me. But it doesn’t work that way, and with Cunningham being black, if this case goes to trial he’s got an uphill battle. Unless there’s been a racial migration I don’t know about, Washington County, in the northwest corner of the state, is overwhelmingly white, and I don’t know of a single case in Arkansas where a black male was acquitted of raping a white woman.

  Maybe there are some, but they didn’t teach them in law school.

  “Sorry, boy,” I say inside the house to my dog, who looks at me with the tragic eyes of one who is perpetually wronged.

  “We’ll go later.” Sure we will. He slinks into the kitchen to point out to me his empty food dish. A terribly neglectful master. He misses my daughter. So do I. But if I get this case, it will be a chance to see Sarah more often this year. Actually that still may be hard to do, as busy as she is. Sarah, a sophomore who has aspirations to be a varsity Razorback cheerleader, is cheerleading for the junior varsity (a necessary step, she tells me), and is working part-time for a professor in the sociology department What a great kid. She has every reason to be roy ally screwed up, with her mother dying from breast cancer when she was thirteen and me half nuts during that time. Instead, she’s got her head on a lot straighter than most kids her age I know. They would be crazy not to make her a cheerleader. Part Hispanic, Indian, and black as a result of her Colombian mother’s ancestry, Sarah would not only help solve some cultural diversity problems but she is also a knockout. Voted a campus beauty her freshman year, she is the picture of her mother, who, even at the end of an eight-hour shift at St.

  Thomas Hospital, where she worked as a nurse, could look stunningly lovely. My only real complaint is that occasionally Sarah does get on a soapbox. Her senior year in high school she was on a fundamentalist religious kick. Now she seems normal again. If I handle her the right way, she might be able to help get me some in formation providing this conversation with the father works out. She surely knows the girl. Like Woogie looking for a cornco
b, I rummage through the garbage, but the Democrat-Gazette article is drenched with stains from last night’s pizza and is unreadable. I grab a legal pad and head out the door.

  As my neighbor lets me in his house, a rangy black man in his early forties stands up in front of a couch and waits for me to come over to him.

  “This is the lawyer,” my neighbor says to him, “I was telling you about. He represented Andrew Chapman.”

  “Gideon Page,” I introduce myself, and offer my hand, thinking most people forget that Andy Chapman, a black psychologist accused of murdering a retarded child, actu ally was found guilty of negligent homicide. Still, he only got probation and didn’t go to jail, so I’ll take the credit.

  “Roy Cunningham,” the man says, and engulfs my palm in his. No wonder his son is a wide receiver. His hand is practically the width of my notebook. Cunningham studies me with an intense expression. I doubt if there is going to be a lot of small talk.

  I retreat to a chair opposite the couch. My neighbor’s living room is small and decorated with family pictures.

  A snapshot of the Cunningham brothers sits on the table beside my chair. In the picture, which seems recent, they are smiling. Today they are not.

  “Have you talked to any other attorneys?” I ask, checking to see if I have any competition. If he has already retained someone, in theory

  I’m not even supposed to be talking to him. Rules governing professional conduct among lawyers have somewhat unrealistic expectations if you are trying to earn a living in solo practice.

  Roy parks himself beside his brother, who is an older, softer version of himself.

  “A couple,” he says brusquely, “but I don’t know nothing about criminal lawyers. My wife and I own a grocery store near Hughes in St. Francis County. We’ve got four other kids to feed.”

  I guess he is telling me he couldn’t afford them. Yet, it occurs to me that there are plenty of lawyers who would be willing to take this case for nothing on the hope that if Dade is acquitted, the attorney would soon have a great shot at the opportunity to negotiate his pro contract. With the kind of money these top players at the skill positions are getting, ten percent would be in the millions. Damn, I wish I had taken two seconds and changed clothes. I look like a beach bum. I cluck sympathetically, “These athletes are sitting ducks for women. Your son probably can’t walk down the street without being harassed by them.”

  Cunningham sighs and looks at his knees.

  “My wife and I told him a million times to stay away from white girls. They’re guaranteed trouble. I saw him in the jail for a little while yesterday afternoon. He said this girl practically attacked him.”

  “Had he been friends with her before this took place?”

  I ask. With grainy pouches underneath his eyes blacker than the rest of his visible skin, Cunningham looks as if he hasn’t gotten much sleep in the last twenty-four hours. He probably hasn’t. St. Francis County, only thirty miles west of Memphis, is over a five-hour drive from Fayetteville, which is close to the Oklahoma border in the northwest corner of the state.

  “He knew her a little just because she was a cheerleader,” he says, smoothing out a wrinkle in his khaki pants, “but he’d had a speech class with her the previous spring, and he said they had worked together some. But that was all until this semester. They have another class together this fall, but he hadn’t talked to her much until the last couple of weeks.”

  “Are you sure he hadn’t had sex with her before this incident?” I ask bluntly, guessing their relationship may have more of a history than the father knows. It sounds like date rape to me. If Dade had been warned to stay away from white girls, he might have a hard time admitting he ignored his father’s advice.

  Roy Cunningham stifles a yawn.

  “I as’t him. He says he didn’t. He says they were studying together at a friend’s house off campus. He said she was all over him from the time she got over there.”

  I jot down what he says, knowing there is a lot more to this situation than I’m hearing. If I want this case, I’ve got to give the Cunningham brothers a reason to hire me.

  “Has his bond been set?” I ask, wondering what James Cunningham thinks of me. We’ve lived on the same street for years and have barely nodded since Rosa’s death.

  When she was alive, we went to a few parties in the neighborhood, but I never felt comfortable around the black males. Too much history and not enough future. I always had the feeling I was on their turf and never felt quite welcome. Still, one on one he seems like a nice guy, and Rosa liked his wife.

  James answers, “It’s fifty thousand. I’ve told Roy I’d help him take care of the bond once we got a lawyer for Dade.”

  I wonder if James is calling the shots on this job. I wish I had been more friendly over the years.

  “Good,” I say.

  “The sooner he’s out of jail, the better.” I ask Roy, “Do you know anything about the girl?”

  Anger comes into Roy’s voice.

  “All Dade had time to tell me was that her name is Robin Perry and she’s from Texarkana. She didn’t even go to the cops until the next morning.”

  “It sounds like a classic case of a woman changing her mind after the fact,” I suggest, knowing that this is what the father wants to believe; in this instance it is plausible.

  The girl may have decided to scratch an itch and later realized Dade wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. Not the end of the world in most cases, but this particular guy is black, which her parents would probably object to and would give credence to the questionable things that hap pen in the Razorback athletic program. In ‘91 there was a major incident in the athletic dorm involving a white woman and four black Razorback scholarship basketball players that is still talked about. No charges were filed because the woman was admittedly drunk and couldn’t get her details straight, but it sent shock waves through the entire state. Who knows? Perhaps Robin Perry had mixed emotions at the time and convinced herself that she had tried to resist. Maybe we can put some pressure on the girl to drop the charge or at least reduce it. What if it had been Sarah? Would she pull a stunt like that? I can’t imagine it.

  “That’s what it sounds like to me,” Roy says, as his brother nods in agreement.

  “Do you know if alcohol was involved?” I ask Roy. It is obvious that he thinks of his son as a victim.

  “Dade said he hadn’t had nothing to drink,” he says defensively

  “I was thinking the girl might have possibly been drinking before she got there,” I respond quickly, noting this is a touchy area with the father. His problem or his son’s? Alcohol and women don’t make for the greatest combination in the world. I’ve had a few problems in that area myself.

  “She could have,” James Cunningham says, his voice sounding like his brother’s. Eastern Arkansas is like Mississippi The Delta clings to your speech like rich soil.

  “Even if he did,” Roy says, his voice low and sullen, “my boy never raped nobody. I didn’t raise my son to be a fool! He knows he doesn’t need to force a woman. Just like you said, he’s always had ‘em runnin’ after him.”

  I glance at my neighbor, who appears slightly uncomfortable at these remarks. Less sophisticated, or perhaps just more honest, Roy Cunningham isn’t worried about how he is coming across to me. His son doesn’t rape, be cause women line up to go to bed with him. Yet, in truth, he may be right. If women stopped wanting sex, we’d take it anyway. On the Discovery channel last week there was a program on apes in Saudi Arabia. The females seemed so loving and protective, so human. The dominant males were insanely jealous, forming harems of up to twelve females and demanding and getting sex at will.

  “You know this is different,” James says to his brother.

  “If the girl had been black, it would have been next to the funnies.”

  I look up to see a black woman standing in the door way.

  “Hello, Gideon,” she greets me warmly.

  “How’re you
doin’?” James’s wife smiles as if I were their best friend.

  Glad for the interruption, I stand up and speak, relieved I can call her name.

  “Gloria, how are you?” My neighbor’s wife is an attractive woman. Her almond colored eyes are always smiling, and ever since I’ve lived in the neighborhood she has maintained a willowy, svelte figure. She is a conscientious gardener, and her long, magnificent legs have piqued my interest every spring while she tends the roses, azaleas, pansies, and violets that bloom in the front yard. Today, her legs are hidden by baggy blue slacks. Rosa had always commented on her flowers and if she knew Woogie had shit on them, she’d be livid at me. She only allowed him to defecate in our backyard and handled his turds as casually as if they were leftover breakfast sausages. I gag if they are the least bit soft, but as a registered nurse, she dealt with far worse on a daily basis.

  “I’m doing fine,” Gloria says, putting her hands in her pockets.

  “How’s Sarah? She’s a sophomore, isn’t she?”

  I marvel at how much she knows. I can’t even come close to remembering the names of their children. I used to try harder at this sort of thing. We had deliberately chosen to live in a mixed neighborhood that the block busters hadn’t finished off. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia back in Arkansas with a wife of mixed blood, I was going to make the old sixties dream of racial harmony come true in Blackwell County, the socalled “civilized center” of Arkansas. Had I been mat naive? Obviously so.

  “She’s staying busy. In addition to cheerleading for the jayvees, she lucked into a good job at the university this summer working for a sociology professor who’s got a big grant, and she’s still working part-time for him some this fall.” I wonder at this arrangement. Sarah is gorgeous and friendly and utterly unqualified to do more than run a copy machine. Dr.

  Birdseed, or whatever his name is, probably hasn’t employed a male in years.

  James clears his throat. His wife has interrupted for long enough.

  “How much longer are you going to be?”