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  “She’s a cheerleader, so I’d see her at pep rallies, and I was in this course called public speaking with her. She didn’t get friendly like she was last semester until a couple of weeks ago, and then we started working together like we did before.”

  “So it was her idea,” I conclude, watching his face carefully. This kid seems incapable of guile, but I remind myself I’ve had plenty of clients who had no difficulty believing their own lies.

  “Now it seems that way,” he says thoughtfully.

  “She’d talk at the first of the semester, but it was like she was too busy.”

  “Had you asked her to work together, and she hadn’t wanted to, or what?” So far it seems that Robin called the shots.

  “Not really,” Dade replies casually.

  “You can jus’ tell.”

  This kid is more sensitive than a lot of guys his age.

  His light color may have something to do with that. Thus far, he seems about as far from a rapist as I can imagine.

  “So you just started working together again?”

  “Yeah,” he says blankly.

  “We had a big speech coming up, and we agreed to get together and work on it a little bit the night before.”

  “Whose idea was that?” I ask.

  “Well, this fall we didn’t have a chance to practice be fore class. She had something before ten. I guess I did.”

  “So did you suggest a place or she?” Robin could have easily manipulated this conversation. Dade seems as naive as most boys about girls. Yet, even if he is not, he gives the appearance of having been reluctant to push too hard.

  “I remember talking about our rooms,” Dade says, “but you can’t study there with all the shit that goes on. I guess I suggested Eddie’s house if he wasn’t going to be there.”

  Robin could have easily made this idea inevitable without saying a word about it. If this case goes to trial, one mother on the jury with a son the right age could hang up the case. Mothers know what idiots their male children can be.

  “Who’s this Eddie again? What’s his last name and where’s his apartment?”

  “House,” Dade answers.

  “It’s a rented house on Happy Hollow Road. I don’t even know if it’s in the city limits.

  Eddie Stiles. He’s just a student that kind of hangs around the players a lot. He’s okay. He lets guys use it pretty much whenever they want.”

  “Is he rich?” I guess, wondering how common this arrangement is. With all the wannabes and hangers-on surrounding the Razorbacks, it can’t be terribly unusual.

  I wonder if any NCAA rules are being violated.

  “I heard his family owns a big funeral home in Tulsa,” Dade admits.

  “He drives a new Cutlass.”

  I wonder if he is black, but at this stage it seems rude to ask. I don’t want to turn Dade off. A lot of white kids have too much money; why shouldn’t one or two blacks?

  “I take it that he wasn’t around that night?”

  “I didn’t see him the whole day,” Dade says.

  I assume the cops have talked to Eddie. He could help or hurt. Either way, I need to talk to him.

  “Did you drive over together?”

  “She said she’d meet me there,” Dade says.

  I wonder about Robin’s motive. It sounds as if she wanted to be able to leave if Dade got out of hand. I am writing with my legal pad on my knees, and the bed creaks every time I shift my weight. Too bad the Ozark’s decorating budget didn’t allow for a table.

  “Why don’t you just tell me from the moment she showed up what happened?”

  Dade grabs the sides of his chair.

  “It wasn’t ten minutes before she had forgot about the speech. You can tell when a girl wants to be fucked, jus’ the way she looks and acts.”

  I interrupt, “How was she dressed?” I need to see a picture of Robin, so I can get an image in my mind of what happened.

  “Skirt and sweater,” he says.

  “She always dressed up, even for class.”

  I remember seeing Robin, but it was from Row 42 in War Memorial Stadium at Little Rock during the Memphis game two weeks ago. As bad as my eyes are getting, I could have been standing next to her and not have recognized her.

  “Did you have anything to drink,” I ask, “or could you tell if she had been drinking?” A good answer would be helpful here. If she had been juicing herself up beforehand, it would at least be arguable she had more than studying on her mind.

  “I smelled wine on her breath, but we didn’t have any thing at Eddie’s. It happened pretty fast.”

  “Did Eddie just leave his place unlocked?” I ask, glad I didn’t have a friend like Eddie in college. I got in enough trouble.

  “He gave me a key,” Dade says.

  “A couple of guys had them.”

  I think I’m getting the picture.

  “So it wasn’t uncommon to take girls over there.” Robin shouldn’t have been there. No woman asks for rape, a logical impossibility if there ever was one, but perhaps someone on the jury will want to punish her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they had really wanted to find a place on campus to study, it would have been easy enough.

  “Not really,” Dade says.

  “You got to get off campus sometimes.”

  “So you’ve slept with girls over there before?” I say bluntly.

  Dade makes an angry face for the first time.

  “I didn’t rape nobody though. If you’re an athlete on this campus, you can get girls. That’s no shit.”

  “Were you attracted to her?” I ask again, knowing this is a sore point with him, given the lectures he must have received from his parents.

  I hear Dade’s stomach growl. Jail is a great place to be gin a diet. Patting his stomach through his wrinkled shirt, he says, “She wasn’t my type. A little thin, you know what I mean? No titties, no butt. I like girls with meat on ‘em.”

  I scribble as fast as I can.

  “So what did she do?” I ask, knowing there are a hundred details to fill in. But Dade seems in no mood at this first meeting to write a book on the subject.

  He looks at a spot on the ceiling and says emphatically, “She wanted it. She came over to the sofa and took this paper out of my hand and sat down by me. She started writing on it, and talking, kind of bumping against me on the sofa. Hell, I knew what she wanted and I kissed her.

  And before I knew it we were in the shower and damn she was hot! Shit! What else could I do? I only fucked her once, and then she got out of bed and took off like a bat out of hell. It was like she got what she came for, and that was all she wanted. While we were doin’ it, she didn’t complain or tell me to stop or nothin’.”

  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 after
ward. 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?”