Binkie calls as his first witness Robin’s roommate, Shannon Kennsit. It is a good choice. She is a slightly awkward-looking girl with a manner so engaging that you do not even notice she is as chunky as a jar of peanut butter. Shannon captivates the jury with her admitted weakness for the Razorbacks. Describing the time she first met Dade at the party on Happy Hollow Road, she can’t keep a smile off her round face.
“Robin threatened to give me a tranquilizer to calm me down! I can’t re member being more excited except for the night the Hogs beat Duke for the national championship. It was like going to meet somebody you knew you’d see playing in the pro bowl someday.”
Anticipating the direction I’d like to take this case on crossexamination, Binkie asks about Robin’s feelings for Dade. Shannon unselfconsciously tugs at the side of her mauve sweater to adjust her bra. This girl couldn’t be more relaxed than if we were seated in her room at the Chi Omega House.
“She said she liked him. I asked her once if she meant did she like him as a boyfriend, and she said just as a friend. She said he really tried in class, and she admired that. Lots of players don’t care about school, but she said Dade did, and she was glad to help him.”
As the most important witness (besides Robin) Binkie will call. Shannon is utterly believable, and she describes the moment that Robin’s crying woke her up with such genuine feeling that it is impossible not to be moved.
“She was already in bed when I came in about twelve and didn’t say anything, but about four I heard her crying.
She couldn’t stop, and I turned on the light. She looked awful! She was just crying and crying. I kept asking her what was wrong, and finally she said that Dade had raped her. I thought. Oh my God, how terrible! She’s got to go to the police or the hospital or someplace! But when I said this, she just shook her head.”
I close my eyes, realizing I have been affected by what I’ve just heard. There is no doubt in my mind (nor can there be in the jury’s) that Shannon is telling the truth.
Robin’s suffering was profound, at least to this girl. She has finally made her roommate and best friend real to me in a way that Robin herself has not. Why? All this time I’ve been able to think of Robin as an actress. What if she’s not? I glance at Dade. He is hunched over the table with his right hand over his eyes. I nudge him and he lowers the hand to his lap and sits up straighter, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is watching him. From behind the podium, Binkie asks, “Why didn’t you wake up your housemother or call her parents?”
“She wouldn’t let me!” Shannon says, her voice anguished
“I wanted to, but she kept saying that nobody would believe that she had met him off campus just to study together. She said she was afraid that her parents would think she had been dating him. They’re real conservative
I glance quickly at the Perrys, who appear slightly dazed. What if I were Gerald Perry? I’d want to kill Dade.
“What happened then?” Binkie asks, like some second banana prompting a talk-show host.
“I continued to try to convince her that she had to go to the hospital. She kept saying he didn’t hurt her, but I told her it didn’t matter. She had to go tell somebody! Finally, about five-thirty she said okay, and I drove her to the hospital.”
“Did you see her that evening before she went over to the house on Happy Hollow Road?” Binkie asks.
Shannon presses her hands together under her chin as if this were a difficult question.
“I sat next to her at dinner that night and she told me later in the room she was going out to that same little house we went to in the spring so she could help Dade get ready for a speech in communi cations the next day. I wish I had said something or gone with her. Then it wouldn’t have happened.” Tears well up in her eyes. From the right sleeve of her sweater, she pulls out a tissue and dabs at her eyes.
I scan the transcript of the “J” Board hearing and her statement but find nothing inconsistent. Binkie asks her if she knows whether Robin had any alcohol before she left the sorority house.
“Not that I was aware of,” Shannon says, “and we were together from about five until she left around eight that night.”
“She smelled like wine!” Dade whispers fiercely in my ear.
I nod, not sure I believe him, since he has already lied to me on this subject.
Binkie asks if Robin described what Dade had done to her, but Shannon wrinkles her nose in distaste.
“I didn’t ask her. It seemed too personal. If she had wanted to tell me, I would have listened, but she was too upset to make her talk about something like that. I knew she’d have to go over it a million times anyway.”
Binkie keeps her on me stand for another ten minutes going on about the details of the time before she took Robin to the hospital, but according to Shannon she did most of the talking. Abruptly, Binkie announces, “Your witness.”
I take my time getting to the podium, wondering how honest this girl will be under crossexamination. I start off focusing on the party she attended in the spring.
“Did you talk to Dade the entire time?” I ask after a couple of preliminary questions.
“No, I talked to Harris and Tyrone and some to the two girls who were there. Tyrone actually wasn’t very nice,” Shannon sniffs.
So far I haven’t met anyone who is a member of Tyrone’s fan club.
“Do you remember if you were in the same room all the time with Dade?” I ask.
“No, he was in the kitchen part of the time talking to Robin,” Shannon says. This was a big event in her life.
She remembers it all.
I return to the table and pick up the “J” Board transcript.
“Do you recall saying in answer to a question at Dade’s disciplinary hearing in November that Robin was, and I’m quoting here, ‘kind of a private person’?”
“Yes, but we always talked about everything,” Shan non insists.
“She never told you the details of what happened between her and Dade the night she said she was raped by.
him, did she?” I ask.
“Not really,” Shannon says, her voice defensive.
“Just that he raped her.”
Suddenly, it hits me that Shannon probably is the type of person who didn’t want to know the details. She may not have ever really asked Robin, and this was why Binkie never got specific with her in his questioning. I tell the judge I have no more questions and sit down be side Dade.
Binkie confirms my suspicion by having no more questions for Shannon. He introduces Robin’s medical records through Joan Chestnut, the nurse from Memorial who saw Robin. Binkie and I have agreed that since Dr.
Cowling had no time that day to do more than a physical examination, his nurse will read into evidence his brief entries that he observed no trauma and will be allowed to explain that the doctor was called to an emergency in Springdale before he had finished talking to her.
As I have feared, Joan Chestnut bristles with competence. She explains that in her long experience there is no typical rape victim.
“How a woman reacts after having been raped depends on many factors,” she says in a strong, careful voice that needs no amplification.
My only consolation is that today she does not look like a nurse. Apparently unable to resist the possibility she might be photographed or filmed, she has piled her blond hair on top of her head and is wearing a fancy sequined black dress that would be more appropriate for a cocktail party than a court appearance. Binlde must have died when she showed up at the courthouse not wearing her scrubs. She repeats substantially what she told me earlier, yet, here again is an absence of specifics, which Joan Chestnut shrugs off as normal. She tells Binlde that having to repeat me step-by-step actions of tee perpetrator simply forces the victim to relive the honor of he event and is beyond some women’s power to do so soon afterward.
“It’s all some women can do to say something like, “He forced me to have sex with him,”
” she says didactically.
“I might have been suspicious if she had come up with some elaborate story which took her thirty minutes to tell.”
“As a nurse giving care to a patient, you weren’t immediately concerned with investigating whether Robin Perry might have been making up this story, I presume?”
I ask on crossexamination.
Joan Chestnut crosses her long, not unattractive legs and swings her left shoe, which has a four-inch heel, Maybe she has a date after she is through testifying.
“If a person is making up symptoms, for whatever reason, and it happens occasionally,” she says, her tone now droll, “it’s just as important that we be alert to misinformation as opposed to real symptoms. As you are surely aware, these days a hospital’s resources are severely restricted.”
Though she has mentioned a subject most people don’t have much sympathy for, I beat back an urge to spar with her. She has admitted that some people who go to a hospital lie, and I’m satisfied with any little bone thrown my way. People like nurses, even if this one looks like an aspiring Junior Leaguer.
During an hour’s recess for lunch I review the “J” Board transcript. Binkie’s next witness, Mary Purvis, the student volunteer from the Rape Crisis Center, seems even younger than she did at the “J” Board hearing and readily admits her inexperience. Brushing long, unruly strands of brown hair from her eyes as she speaks, the young woman adds little, if anything, to what the nurse has already said. She admits on crossexamination that Robin had little to say to her.
Without further ado, Binkie calls Robin Perry, and the jury, which had been about to doze off, snaps to attention.
As if she were interrupting grownups to come in and say good-night, Robin shyly enters the courtroom. I realize how much window dressing other witnesses are in a case like this. You believe either the victim or the accused.
Binkie starts Robin off slowly, letting her talk about herself to give the jury a sense of who she is. Though she is trying to maintain the poise that has carried her to this moment, today she seems fragile as a glass mirror.
Doubtless Binkie is hoping she will become more comfortable the longer she talks. Gone is the confident ac tress of past performances. This is a girl, not a woman. In a trembling voice she tells the jury that her father had originally served in the Navy and that her family had moved around from base to base until she was ten. I let this go for a moment and then get to my feet.
“Your Honor, this is a rape trial. The jury can decide this case without knowing the name of the family dog. Can’t we at least start with the witness in college?”
A couple of the jurors chuckle, and Judge Franklin responds “Let’s get this going faster, Mr. Cross.”
Unruffled, Binkie asks, “What year are you in at the university, Ms. Perry?” He would have gone on for an hour if I had let him. The one advantage I have is that the jury think they already know Dade. They’ve seen him on TV, read about him. Yet, they thought they knew OJ.
Simpson, too.
Robin answers and, more quickly than Binkie appears to like, begins to talk about Dade. As she tells about the class last spring, I notice that beside me Dade has begun to hold his breath and then release it. What if he is lying and every word she utters about what happened is true?
As she talks, despite my efforts to concentrate, a memory of an event when I was a senior begins to form at the back of my brain. I was dating a Tri-Delt sophomore named Bonnie Edwards, and one Friday night when we were both drunk I took her to my room in the Sigma Nu House. Within minutes we were naked in my bed, but just as I was beginning to enter her, she told me to stop.
Drunk, I didn’t. Did I rape her? Of course I did! Then, like a freight train bearing down on me, another long-ago moment, this one an impression more than a fully remembered event, appears at the edge of my consciousness: late one night after returning from a party where we both had drunk too much, I had insisted on sex with Rosa, who was too helpless to resist, though she made her reluctance known. She had vomited a few hours later, or perhaps it was the next day. I raped my own wife. I have begun to sweat profusely. For the first time since I took this case, I cannot avoid the feeling that whoever is telling the truth, Robin was, at some point that night, completely vulnerable. Yet, whatever he has done, I am no better than the boy sitting beside me.
“Dade tried so hard,” Robin is saying.
“But sometimes in class he’d get real nervous, and it was hard to under stand him. When we’d practice, I’d get him to slow down….”
Robin has a way of making everything she does seem innocent, and the little party on Happy Hollow Road last spring becomes, in her words, purely a favor to Shannon.
There is no mention of an attempted kiss by Dade, and I realize that Binkie does not know about it, for surely he would deal with it now, instead of letting me bring it out when I cross-examine Robin.
“Why did you choose the house on Happy Hollow Road to practice the speech?” Binkie asks, a few minutes later, his voice tightening a bit and betraying the importance of this answer.
It will be the hardest question Robin has to answer.
Why, indeed, with so many other choices?
“Now it seems the stupidest thing I ever did,” Robin says.
“But I trusted Dade. He really cared about his classes. He never horsed around at all when it came to studying. He wanted to make a good grade. I didn’t really want to go over to Darby Hall because of all that’s happened there, and boys aren’t allowed upstairs in our rooms at my sorority house, and the classrooms are usually locked.”
Binkie has to decide whether to ask her to clarify what she means about Darby Hall. It won’t help him, but it can’t do Dade any good either. Binkie uncharacteristically takes his hands from his pockets and grips the side of the podium.
“Why didn’t you get a conference room in the library?”
Robin cocks her head, embarrassed by the question.
“I had forgotten you could. I didn’t even think about it.
Dade just suggested we go to his friend’s house, and I said okay.”
“Did you drive together?” Binkie asks, knowing she still has some explaining to do.
I steal a look at the jury. They are interested. If she is so pure and good, why not meet in public where she can get some Brownie points? Robin sighs audibly.
“No, I told him I’d meet him there. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my father has told me over and over never to let myself get in a situation I can’t get out of. I just figured that if Dade tried to get fresh, I’d leave. It never occurred to me that he would rape me.” Her voice becomes tiny here, though she doesn’t cry.
Despite the welter of emotions building in me, I rock my chair and roll my eyes, communicating to the jury that this explanation is garbage. Fresh? Nobody uses that word. The fact is, Robin could have seduced her professor, fucked him happily on a weekly basis in my motel, and now she’s worried about Dade being “fresh.” The lawyer part of me wants to get up and scream at the jury that Alice is disappearing through the looking-glass, and what remains is a first-class liar. Do I believe this? I don’t know what I believe.
Binkie ignores me and tells Robin to continue.
“What happened next?”
“Well, I got there sometime around eight, and he was already in the house. For the first few minutes he acted okay, but then he came over to the chair where I was sit ting and grabbed me by the arm. I just froze. He said he wanted to take a shower with me. I remember asking him if he were crazy. Then, I smelled beer on his breath and knew he had been drinking. I said, “I have to leave,” but he said, “Don’t make me have to hurt you.” He pulled me up and took me into the bathroom and told me to take off my clothes. I started crying and told him to let me go home. He just shook his head. I could tell he would hurt me if I didn’t do what he said.”
Robin stops and begins to cry, her first tears of the day.
As her roommate has done, she reaches inside the sleeve of her sweater and pulls out a tissue and wipes her eyes.
Sighing heavily, she begins again, this time looking down at her lap but making sure her voice is loud enough for the jury to hear.
“I took off my clothes and did what he said. He did the same and got in with me and made me wash him. Afterward, he took a towel and dried me off and then made me get on the bed in his room. He put his penis inside my vagina and made me have sex with him. I was scared not to. He had this horrible look on his face.”
“Did he ejaculate inside of you?” Binkie asks.
“Yes.”
“Was he wearing a condom?”
“No” “How long did this take?” Binkie asks, his hands twisting inside his suit pockets.
“About thirty minutes from the time he made me take off my clothes and get in the shower with him to the time when he rolled off of me and let me go.”
I watch the faces of the jurors, who are paying close attention Unfortunately, Maria Chastain, the one black juror, seems more engrossed than anyone. I’ve got to give Robin credit: fearful or not, she can captivate an audience
“Did he hurt you?” Binlde asks.
“No,” Robin says, looking up at him.
“I did what he wanted.”
“Did he say anything or did you say anything in those thirty minutes?”
“I was crying,” Robin says, sniffing.
“I think he said some other things but I don’t remember.”
“What did you do after he was finished?” Binkie says, his voice stoical. He doesn’t like rape cases, his manner suggests.
“I put on my clothes. He watched me and said that if I told anybody, nobody would believe me, and he’d spread it all over campus that I was a slut.”
“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 night?” 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 witness 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.
Having chosen to go down this road, Binkie has to stay with it. He strides to the lectern and rubs his hands together.
“So you were in love with Robin Perry,” he says, making the word sound as hokey as it does on daytime soap operas.
In control of himself, Dade answers softly, “I liked Robin a lot.”
“Did you like her-so much you couldn’t stop from raping her?” Binkie yells.
“I didn’t rape her,” Dade says softly.
With as much contempt as he can muster, Binkie shakes his head at Dade and returns to his table and sits down. For once, I don’t feel a need to rehabilitate Dade.
He has done as well as he can do.
“Your Honor,” I say quietly, “I’d like to recall Shannon Kennsit.” I can only hope that Shannon and Robin have obeyed the instruction not to discuss their testimony.
Wideeyed as a small child, Shannon returns to the witness stand. Her eyes narrow into slits as I remind her that she is under oath.
“Robin has told you, has she not,” I ask abruptly, “that at the party you and she went to on Happy Hollow Road last spring Dade had tried to kiss her while they were in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” Shannon admits in a soft voice, but there is no mistaking what she has said.
“But she said she didn’t let him.”
“No more questions,” I say, having rolled the dice and won. Maybe it is small-time craps, but if this case is about telling the truth, it will be something to argue to the jury.
Binkie shrugs as if I had stopped the trial to pick a piece of lint off my jacket.
“No questions. Your Honor.”
At precisely four-thirty Judge Franklin instructs the jury that for them to find Dade guilty of rape, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he engaged in sexual intercourse with Robin and that he did so by forcible compulsion. Putting on a pair of reading glasses for the first time all day. Franklin reads, “Forcible compulsion means physical force, or a threat, express or implied, of death or serious physical injury to, or kidnap ping of, any person….”
When he finishes. Judge Franklin looks down from the bench and says formally, “Mr. Cross, you may give the first part of your closing argument to the jury.”
As Binkie gets up and slowly walks to the jury rail, for the first time since noon I look at Sarah, who is sitting with Lucy. I wonder what kind of bond has been forged between them. So far as I know they have not talked until today. Is it race that they have in common or the fact that they are women? More probably, it is simply the two imperfect men in their lives sitting at the defense table.
Sarah tugs anxiously at her hair and glances up at me with a wan, scared look on her face. Are things that bad?
Probably. I can’t read this jury at all. I look at the sole black juror. Her dark, brooding face is a study in concentration as Binkie, jamming his hands in his pants pockets for the time being, begins.
“Ladies and gentlemen, when we began this morning, I said you’d be tempted to throw up your hands and say it was too hard to decide whom to believe in a case like this,” Binkie says, positioning himself at the middle of the jury rail. He has stopped in front of the oldest retiree and wags his head from side to side.
“But after hearing the testimony, I don’t think it is really all that hard if you use your common sense. Why would Robin Perry, a varsity cheerleader, an outstanding student, a girl who is from a deeply conservative family, tell a story this humiliating and embarrassing to herself if it wasn’t true? For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a minute that she consented to the sexual act. Why claim she was raped, when all she had to do was keep quiet? If Dade started talking about it, she merely had to deny it. Nobody was there to see. It was her word against Dade’s. Common sense tells you that if she denied it vigorously enough, most people would have chalked it up to sexual posturing on a young man’s part, assuming Dade would even have talked about it. After all, by both accounts she left as soon as it was over. There wasn’t much to brag about.
What we tend to forget in our concern with the judicial system and justice and due process for the accused is the victim. It is excruciating to go through this. The fear, and shame, and emotional pain are terrible. Some of you may be thinking that Robin Perry can’t be believed because it appears she didn’t tell the truth to you about an attempted kiss that she resisted by the accused. I ask you to consider what realistic alternative she had if she hoped to convince you she was telling the truth about what happened the second time she went to the house on Happy Hollow Road. If she admitted the man who later raped her had tried to kiss her even months earlier, you would think she couldn’t have possibly driven out to that house alone unless she had changed her mind about him. So, like many of us, she told you a lie when she would have been better served by an embarrassing admission that, in fact, shows she was pathetically naive and trusting. She thought she and Dade were friends. She thought she could trust this boy that she was helping. This kind of faith in human nature is so oldfashioned, Robin herself knew it would make you doubt that a girl can actually be this naive in this day and age. Well, you heard her tell you. Her parents are so conservative they didn’t want her even dating someone who wasn’t from the South. A different race was out of the question. Robin went along with it, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help somebody who needed it. Mr. Page told you that you didn’t have to check your brains at the door, and I couldn’t agree with him more….”
As Binkie talks, my heart sinks. At least two of the damn jurors are nodding, and all are listening as if he is saying the most obvious thing in the world. Sweet, innocent Robin lied to make the truth believable. I helplessly watch faces as Binkie grinds his argument into their gullible brains. Unfortunately, I find myself believing him, too. What could be worth the hassle of saying you were raped unless you were? Binkie tells the jury that all his witnesses’ testimony pointed to rape.
“Not one person who saw her afterward, whether it was her friend and roommate Shannon Kennsit, or three strangers, including an experienced nurse and physician, had any doubt mat Robin had been forced against her will to have sex. We haven’t heard one word from a single witness today that anyone questioned her story except the accused….”
Dade has begun to sink inside his suit coat and I wonder what I can say to counter Binkie. He can think on his feet better than I can.
When Binkie finally is done, I begin my argument standing by Dade.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard the old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Well, the prosecutor desperately needs to explain away Robin Perry’s lie, and he has come up with as good a rationalization of it as you’re going to hear.”
I walk over to the jury rail.
“The trouble with lying is that one leads to another and we all know it, because at one time or another everybody has told a lie about some thing. Granted, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Robin Perry could be lying about one thing and telling the truth about another, but what her lie tells me is how conflicted she was about Dade Cunningham. He was the forbidden fruit, and Robin had been warned away from it. What I think probably happened that night is that Robin told herself another lie, and one that was perfectly understandable. She and Dade were going to work on a speech, but what she was really going out there for that night was to do something she had wanted to do back in the spring and that was to kiss Dade Cunningham.”
I stop and catch the eye of the unemployed waitress, who has begun looking sympathetic.
“What happened next was that these two very attractive young people ended up making love, but when it was over, the guilt Robin Perry felt was intolerable to her. She left immediately, and finally after nine sleepless hours decided that the only way she could handle her feelings was to tell another lie and that was to say she had been raped.”
I stop and walk back to the podium to give them a moment to absorb what I am saying. I’ve got everyone’s attention, but a couple of the retirees on the jury are frowning. Hell, this argument is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t need them all. I’ll take a hung jury at this point. I pick out the professor and start again: “When it comes to sex, none of us, at a given moment, likes to admit what we’re really thinking, even to ourselves, probably because we’ve been told much of our lives our feelings are bad and wrong, and so we lie. It’s human nature. Part of the problem is there’s so much freedom these days, and it’s hard to accept the consequences of it.
We get mad at our kids and say they’re all going to hell in a handbasket when maybe it’s our fault for allowing them to do practically anything they want. The plain fact is, I don’t know for sure what happened that night on Happy Hollow Road and neither does Mr. Cross. The only people who know are telling totally opposite stories when it comes to the most important part whether there was consent or not. Based on the evidence, I can’t swear to you that Dade Cunningham did or didn’t rape Robin Perry and neither can the prosecuting attorney. None of the other witnesses for either the prosecution or the defense can really help us, because there is no physical evidence in the case. All any of them can do is speculate about what happened, whether it was a nurse, counselor, or her roommate Shannon who, by the way, admitted that Robin is kind of a private person. Let’s face it, folks, this girl is close to being a professional actress. If she wanted to lie, she was fully capable of it. Despite what Mr. Cross told you or will tell you when he gets up on rebuttal, I don’t think there is a naive bone in Robin Perry’s body.
She was a Razorback cheerleader; she got up and spoke in front of several hundred people at a women’s rally; she is a communications major and an excellent student, so she is fully capable of pushing whatever buttons she needs to push. It comes down to one thing: there is reasonable doubt in this case….”
By the time I am finished and sit down again by Dade, I feel okay, but, as usual, since the prosecutor has the last word, it doesn’t last. Binkie storms up and down in front of the jury box like a preacher at a tent meeting.
“Folks,” he exhorts them, “you weren’t born yesterday! Mr. Page wants you to ignore what you saw and what you heard Robin Perry say and psychoanalyze her motives like she was some patient in a mental hospital. He doesn’t want you to do the one thing that will put away his client: decide who is telling the truth about whether there was consent or not-Robin Perry or Dade Cunningham. I didn’t believe Dade Cunningham when he said he didn’t threaten her; I didn’t believe him when he said Robin wanted sex. What Mr. Page wants you to forget is that both the accused and the victim testified they were meeting on Happy Hollow Road to work on a speech. If Robin had decided for some reason she was attracted to Dade Cunningham, do you think for a minute she would have needed to pretend in her own mind she was meeting him to study? That’s nonsense. Dade Cunningham would have been telling you a totally different story. He would have been saying they simply agreed to meet at the house on Happy Hollow Road. Folks, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to decide this case. You just have to remember to use your common sense in deciding whom to believe and whom not to believe….”
Finally, Binkie is done, and the court lets the jury file out and goes into recess. As Judge Franklin disappears into his chambers, Dade turns to me and asks hopefully, “What do you think they’ll do?”
I watch his mother whisper something to Sarah as the spectators begin to stand and talk in normal tones.
“It’s hard to say,” I hedge. Again, I am reminded that there is so much that the jury wasn’t allowed to hear.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
“It could go either way.”
Sarah and Lucy pass through the gate that separates the spectators from the trial area. My daughter hugs me.
“You did good. Daddy.”
A warm feeling rushes through me. I will myself not to begin thinking of the mistakes I have made today. There will be time for that soon enough.
“Thanks, babe,” I say into her curly ebony hair. For years she has been too shy to hug me in public. Maybe one of us is finally growing up.
After embracing her son, Lucy extends her hand and says formally, “Thank you, Gideon.”
I let my eyes linger on her face as I shake her hand.
She looks even sadder than usual, which gives me a pre monition that Dade will be convicted. Better to thank me now. She may not feel very thankful in a few hours.
“It went okay, I think,” I say, unwilling to give her hope I don’t feel.
She nods, but it is more of a shrug. She doesn’t expect an acquittal. Spectators, even if they aren’t objective, can sometimes pick up vibes from the jurors that the lawyers can’t. Defense lawyers always hope for miracles. The job would be too depressing if we didn’t. A couple of print reporters stand like vultures, but I wave them off, saying that we will have no comment until after the jury comes back. After I send Sarah off to McDonald’s with a twenty to get us something to eat, I leave Dade and Lucy at the counsel table and go sit down in the back with Barton, whom I didn’t see come in.
“Have you been here all afternoon?” I ask, resentfully noting that Barton’s brown overcoat, which is draped neatly over a chair beside me, looks like it cost twice as much as my new suit. If he had been trying this case, he couldn’t have gotten two words out without throwing up all over his two-hundred-dollar shoes.
“Man, that Binkie can talk,” he says admiringly.
“He looks so damn country that you don’t think he’s got it in him, but he’s hell on wheels once he gets going!”
Thanks for the encouraging words, I think. Yet, Barton, once he quits babbling, will tell it to me straight.
“You think he’ll be acquitted?”
“Well,” Barton hedges, “I didn’t hear all of it.” Noting my expression, he blurts, “Actually, I heard a couple of people saying as they left that they thought Dade was lying through his teeth. One of them did say he thought the jury would be out a long time.”
That’s a wonderful consolation. Hell, I just think I want to know the truth. Sarah returns with our food, but, } too nervous to sample more than a couple of fries, I give mine to Barton, who scarfs down my McDLT so fast that I am reminded of Clan, who has been my sidekick in some of my big cases. No two people could be less alike.
I can’t imagine Barton getting involved with a woman like Gina. I take Barton over to meet Dade and’ Lucy and am amazed that he is reduced to jelly at the prospect.
“He’s already the greatest wide receiver I ever saw, and that includes Lance Alworth!”
People never cease to amaze me. Instead of seeing a kid from the poorest region of the state who any minute may be pronounced a convicted rapist and about to spend the best part of his life in prison. Barton would be delighted to get his autograph.
“This is the man who gave me free office space,” I say by way of introduction. Now I know why he did. He wanted to meet Dade. It turned out that he was always with a client or on the phone when Dade came by and never met him. Barton begins to gush so much about Dade’s career that it is embarrassing, but Dade and even Lucy seem to be relieved to have something to talk about other than what the jury is doing.
Why not? Good of’ denial. Life would be unbearable without it.
At this moment the bailiff rushes in and tells us the jury is returning. I look down at my watch and try not to grimace. They’ve barely been out an hour. How embarrassing.
People begin to stream back into the courtroom, and I catch sight of all three Perrys, who understandably seem elated by this quick decision. I watch the faces of the jurors as they troop back in. I’ve never seen twelve people look so solemn. The lone black juror won’t even look at me. She studies her feet as if she’d never seen them before.
Judge Franklin, who seems equally ready to get home, asks the bailiff to take the verdict form from the foreman, who turns out to be the oldest person on the jury.
Franklin fumbles with the piece of paper and then, frowning, reads in a loud voice, “We, the jury, find Dade Cunningham not guilty of the charge of rape.”
I catch the expression on Lucy’s face as the courtroom erupts in the back when two of the WAR protestors (one of them Paula Crawford) who have smuggled in signs under their coats, begin to shout, “No justice for women!
No justice for women!” For one brief instant Lucy’s eyes gleam with unmistakable joy as Judge Franklin begins banging his gavel and orders the courtroom cleared.
Dade turns to me and offers his hand, and says, smiling, “I thought I was gone.”
“I did, too,” I admit.
“I did, too.”
“Look at her. Dad!” Sarah exclaims.
“She looks so sweet.”
I bend down to the bottom cage and peer in at the greyhound staring back at me. These dogs are bigger than I expected.
“What a weird color,” I say to the attendant standing beside us. Black mixed in with tan. White socks on her feet and a white stripe running down her chest.
“Brindle,” the girl says enthusiastically.
“Want to see her?” She is about Sarah’s age and clearly a greyhound lover. She has been smiling and talking to these strange, skinny, big-faced, little-eared creatures nonstop. I look around the room at the other cages. For the number of dogs in here, there is very little noise. It is as if these retirees from the racetrack sense adoption is their last hope before they are sent to the glue factory or wherever it is doomed greyhounds go to die, and are on their best behavior.
Sarah answers for us, “Yeah!”
The girl, whose name is Barbara, opens the cage and slips a choke collar around the dog.
“Mindy Marie,” she coos, “come on out, girl.”
Mindy Marie heads straight for Sarah and presses her huge muzzle into my daughter’s waiting hands.
“She’s wonderful!” Sarah exclaims.
“She’s so gentle.”
Though it has been only a month since Woogie went to live with Marty, I need a dog in the house. Not a horse.
“Do people ever change their names?” I ask. Mindy Marie is too dainty for this animal.
“Sure,” the girl says.
“Just use her first name with the name you choose for a couple of weeks and then gradually drop her old name. She’ll learn.”
“Feel her face. She’s so silky!” Sarah instructs me, rubbing her face against Mindy Marie’s muzzle.
I squat down on my heels and bring my face close.
“Hi, girl.” She licks my ear.
“She likes you. Dad!” Sarah giggles delightedly “Can we take her outside?”
I suspect Mindy Marie would like Saddam Hussein if he took the trouble to pet her. Barbara, as smooth as a car salesman, hands Sarah the leash.
“When you get out the door, you can take her off this. It’s all fenced in.”
Sarah’s eyes shine with excitement.
“She looks more like a “Jessie’ to me,” she says as we step outside into a cold, gray drizzle.
Mindy Mane scampers away from us to the corner of the enclosure and deposits an impressive pile of shit near the fence. Shades of Woogie. The sight of her squatting on long, powerful haunches is comical.
“Jessie suits her,” I agree.
“She’s too solemn to be a Mindy Marie.”
Mindy Jessie, her business done for now, trots back over to us, and Sarah hugs her.
“She’ll be easy to house break
This is a done deal. I have already applied to be an “adoptive” parent; my references (Clan and Amy) have checked out. I had seen an article in the Democrat Gazette about the greyhound adoption program in West Memphis and got the paperwork done before even telling Sarah.
“I hope so. I’ll be the one cleaning it up.” According to the literature, greyhounds shouldn’t live outside-too delicate.
“So you think I should get her?”
“You know you want her,” Sarah says.
“She’ll be wonderful.”
She will be. She’ll probably tear up the house the first time my back is turned. But that’ll be okay. I can fix the house. It’s the rest of life that is beyond control. While I was making love to Amy this past weekend, I thought of Rainey, whose naked body I never saw. Clan, who scores a perfect ten on the domestic misery index, told me yesterday that he has dreamed of Gina for the past three nights.
“Let’s go inside, Mindy Jessie, and sign your papers,” I pretend to grumble.
In the Blazer going home Sarah chatters about her first-semester exams and turns in her seat to reassure Mindy Jessie, who seems to be wondering what she is getting into. As we cross the line into Blackwell County, she becomes quiet, and I ask her what she is thinking about. She leans back against the window and begins to finger a patch of curls above her right ear.
“I heard some gossip about what really happened between Dade and Robin,” she says.
“You have?” I say, instantly alert, but reluctant to sound too interested lest she decide to clam up. I had not counted on Dade’s being acquitted and consequently had not prepared him for the media, and he shot off his mouth more than he should have to a TV reporter about the university’s lack of support for him, a fact particularly galling to Coach Carter. I read in the Democrat-Gazette only last week that Dade may make himself available for the National Football League draft and not return for his senior year. Since I spilled the beans on myself, I know I have no chance to be his agent.
My daughter shifts uncomfortably in her seat.
“This may not be true, but it’s what I heard. About a week after the trial, Robin supposedly told Shannon that she and Dade both had lied, but that he had raped her.”
The word “rape” hangs in the air between us like a poisonous cloud. It is too ugly a sound to pretend it doesn’t affect me.
“So what did they lie about?” I ask, staring straight down Interstate 40.
“Supposedly, Robin admitted that she had gone out to that house on Happy Hollow Road not really caring whether they worked on Dade’s speech or not. They had started to make love, but she changed her mind and told him she didn’t want to. He made her anyway.”
Poor Robin. My heart feels as if it is about to stop. I cut my eyes over to Sarah. I can’t tell her that I have been guilty of the same behavior. It feels uncomfortably hot in the Blazer, and I crack the window on my side.
“Do you believe that’s what happened?”
Sarah nods.
“Shannon’s her best friend, and she doesn’t have a reputation for making stuff up.”
“Who’d she tell?” I ask.
Sarah presses her lips together, then mutters, “I can’t say.”
I understand. She probably has told me too much, certainly more than she ever wanted to.
“Given Robin’s promiscuity and the fact that she lied,” I ask, “do you think Dade should have been punished?”
Sarah says angrily, “He still raped her. Dad! Of course he should go to jail.”
I check the rearview mirror and stare into the soulful eyes of Mindy Jessie, whose main virtue is that she isn’t interested in this conversation.
“But under the circumstances, which I doubt if Shannon knew, it probably wasn’t all that easy for Dade to restrain himself.”
“Come on. Dad,” Sarah scoffs.
“When a girl says “Stop!” anything else is without her consent.”
To shut her up, I nod, “You’re right.” I don’t have the appetite to argue the point. If her father had been dealt with the way she wishes Dade had been, she wouldn’t have been born. I’m not up to it. I want my daughter to love me, not judge me. Prison. Not a great start for a college kid. If I had gone to Cummins for a year, my life would have been totally different. No Peace Corps, no Rosa, no Sarah, no law degree. It seems like a good argument to me, but one I’ll forgo for the time being.
As the traffic on the interstate begins to build, Sarah asks, “Do you think we’ll see the Cunninghams again?”
“I don’t know,” I say, slowing down behind a truck hauling lawn fertilizer.
“I liked his mother,” Sarah says, “and I liked Dade until I heard this. I had really felt a bond after we went over to Bear Creek.”
Unless Lucy told her at the trial, Sarah doesn’t know that I took Dade’s case because I wanted to be his pro agent.
“One wrong act in a person’s life shouldn’t condemn a person for life, should it?” I ask.
“It depends on what it is,” Sarah says stubbornly.
I go on around the truck.
“Mindy Jessie,” I say, deter mined to change the subject.
“She’s gonna be a fine pet.”