The Old Man in the Club

by Curtis Bunn

  “I solve problems, not create them,” Elliott said.

  “I bet you do,” Tamara said. They chatted for a few more minutes and then hung up. Elliott then called his friend Henry and cancelled lunch. He was tired. Although he was in solid condition, especially considering his age, Elliott at times just felt run down.

  The doctors did not say, but Elliott attributed his occasional fatigue to a difficult bout with cancer. It took three years to overcome prostate surgery, a blood clot that almost killed him and a return of the cancer two years later before finally beating it. He was seven years cancer-free, but underneath his bravado and confidence was an intense fear that it would return.

  He was not sure what was harder to conquer: almost twelve years in prison for a crime he did not commit or three years battling cancer. Few people had been tested with that combination of challenges.

  A few years after his release from prison—DNA evidence showed his specimen was not inside the victim and an investigation found that police officers deliberately withheld information that would have dismissed him as a suspect—Elliott met his ex-wife and mother of his children, Lucy. They attended the same S.W. Atlanta church. Elliott had moved from the D.C. area to start fresh. Being in the area reminded him of a part of his life he wanted to forget.

  The equivalent to what today is called a “Singles Ministry” hosted a meet and greet one night and Lucy complimented Elliott on his black and gold cardigan sweater. Elliott had not noticed Lucy in church, but she enthralled him the moment she said, “That sweater looks good on you.”

  “Oh, thanks,” he said. They smiled at each other. “I’m Elliott Thomas,” he added, extending his hand.

  “Lucy Dancer,” she said.

  That basic introduction was the start of their courtship. Lucy was from a small town called Whitakers, N.C. She moved to Atlanta to escape a troubled past, too. Lucy was a social worker who was inspired to do her job after a personal tragedy. Their first date was lunch at a quaint restaurant in the west end of Atlanta on Ralph D. Abernathy Road. He told her at the table, “We’re going to make some beautiful babies.”

  “You’re way ahead of yourself, don’t you think?” Lucy responded. “I’m not sure I even like you.”

  At that first date, over roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and string beans, Elliott shared with Lucy his traumatic story of prison. He had never told anyone that he did not know intimately, but there was something about Lucy that drew him in and his story out.

  He was almost shocked when she said, “You can trust me, Elliott. Already I see who you are and you’re not what they said you were. Don’t let them win by thinking for a second that you are. You know that God knows who you are.”

  He was shocked because she connected with him enough to know that being accused and convicted of something he did not do made him wary of most people. So many people had to distrust him to believe he would rape and kill a woman, and he found it hard to trust that anyone would see him for who he really was.

  “I appreciate that,” he said. If he had said more, he would have cried. So, he kept it short and ate his food.

  A year later, they were married. Their connection was sorrowfully ironic. She empathized and sympathized with Elliott in a way no one else had when he told her of his wrongful conviction. And he was a strong support system when she told of having been raped and her assailant was arrested but later freed on a technicality.

  She, in fact, had not told any man of her horrific experience. But with Elliott’s transparency came a trust in him that she could open up. It took her seven months to tell Elliott. She waited until she was sure they were in a serious relationship.

  He cried when she told him. Then he hugged her tightly, securely. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  The next day, he proposed. “Why are you doing this now?” she asked.

  “I cried yesterday when you told me what happened to you,” he said. “After prison, I thought I had lost all emotion about anything or anyone other than myself. But immediately my emotions came forward because I love you. My love for you opened up emotions in me that were dead.”

  He was thirty-four and Lucy was twenty-six when they wed. And it turned out that in their marriage they served as quasi-counselors to each other. They talked about how their experiences affected their lives and how they looked at relationships and even their dreams. Each had separate psychologists that they visited. But their therapy extended to home.

  “We have been through something very similar,” Elliott told Lucy the night she accepted his proposal, as they lay in bed after celebratory sex. “I can relate to being violated as you were. When you were…you know—”

  “You can say ‘rape’; I’ve gotten beyond hearing the word,” Lucy said.

  Elliott went on. “Well, I know something was taken away from you that night. I will always remember the violation against me, the shock, the hurt, the emotional trauma. You will never be the same. I know this. You will be all right; you are all right. But, inside, the violation never leaves you. Am I right?”

  “You are,” Lucy said. “I went through some serious counseling and some serious soul-searching. In the beginning, I tried blaming myself. I said I put myself in a position by what I was wearing and where I was at the time. I had on a dress that was kinda short and tight and I stopped in this neighborhood I was unfamiliar with in a town called Enfield, trying to get a pack of cigarettes. Yes, I smoked in those days.

  “It was about midnight, close to it. I had gone to a party and wasn’t feeling it because a guy I used to date was there. So, I left. Figured I could get home, get some rest and go to church in the morning. But I stopped at a store to satisfy that cigarette urge. I saw the guy come out of the store as I was going in. I saw him.

  “When I came out, instead of getting into my car, I started opening the pack of Kools right there by the road. All of a sudden, I could sense someone behind me. Before I could really react, he had me in a headlock and pulled me behind the building. You know how things are like a dream and you truly don’t believe they are happening? That’s how this was.

  “I was breathless. I pushed him and yelled, but he punched me and said, ‘If you scream again, I’m gonna kill your ass.’ The look on his face… I was so scared. I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. He raped me and I was mentally taking notes. I looked into his face. I noticed the cloud and stars in the sky. I heard cars drive by. And before I knew it, he was gone. I laid there almost in shock.

  “My nose was bleeding, and my lip. It was warm outside, but I got really cold. I was shivering. I wanted someone to come find me, to help me. I was too scared to scream; I was scared he might be nearby. Finally, I got up. I pulled myself together and drove to the hospital.

  “I never cried that night. My mind was blown. And I was too angry to cry. Too shocked. It wasn’t until the next day, at home alone, that I realized the violation, as you put it. That animal took something from me that I could never get back, and that hurt.”

  After those initial days following the attack, Lucy had not spoken about that night to anyone outside of the authorities. When the rapist was caught but eventually released because of a so-called improper search of his home, Lucy was devastated. The violation was magnified, and talking about it was even more difficult.

  But Elliott’s openness and their closeness as a couple allowed her to share with him.

  “It wasn’t until I really talked to God—and listened to Him—that I realized it wasn’t my fault,” Lucy said. “I should—we all should—be able to wear whatever we want to wear and go wherever we want to go without being raped. I wasn’t wrong; he was an animal. A sick animal. It’s a simple thing, it would seem, right? Why believe you did something to yourself when something was done to you? When I came to really understand that—that God put me here to live my life and not blame myself for something I did not do—I was able to move on with my life.”

  Elliott related to Lucy like no other
man. They both were twenty when each respective life-changing event happened. And they happened in the same month. He connected with her and understood her emotional swings in a way few people could because he experienced them, too.

  “My violation was different, but still a violation that will never leave me,” Elliott said. “I avoided being physically raped in prison, but I had already been raped by the judicial system. I remember being in court and feeling like, ‘I’ll be glad when this is all over so I can go home and back to school.’ I was naïve, I guess. I believed that the truth would prevail. Innocent people don’t go to prison. That’s what I thought.

  “You did good to not cry; I cried like a baby,” he added. “I was supposed to be entering my senior year of college. Instead I was sentenced to life in prison. Life. They tried to take my life away from me. Actually, they did take it away. It was a miracle that I was able to get it back.”

  DNA testing emerged in the early 1980s, as Elliott was going into his twelfth year at notorious Lorton Reformatory, about twenty miles south of D.C. It was a place of mayhem that broke Elliott’s spirit.

  He had dreamed of owning a business. His work at the car dealership made him feel like it was an area he would like to pursue. But all that evaporated. His ambition became staying alive and not being raped, which he managed by staying away from prison politics, drugs and being a stellar basketball player that many inmates admired.

  But he spent almost every waking moment afraid or paranoid at best. He lived among criminals, some of them real rapists and murderers. When he spoke of his conviction in prison, which was rare, he spoke of the murder charge. To speak of being convicted of rape would enhance his chances of being brutalized.

  A family friend read about DNA testing in The Washington Post and how each human has a genetic makeup that was unique from anyone else. Those distinguishing chromosomes would be a part of evidence in a rape case. The family located a lawyer at the Innocence Project in New York, which found a DNA expert who had the evidence tested to determine that it was not Elliott who committed the crime.

  At thirty-one, and with little fanfare—certainly far less than the media horde that covered his trial—Elliot was released from prison. “May 22nd, 1983—that’s my ‘rebirth day,’ ” he told Lucy. “That’s when I got out. I celebrate that day more than I celebrate the day I was born.”

  After meeting Danette, who placed him in a job, Elliott slowly but painfully reimmersed himself back into society. His “friends” had long since eased away before he was released. He walked Hains Point on the Potomac River and Rock Creek Park as a way of expressing his freedom. He could go anywhere he wanted. But he was angry and bitter that the years he should have been partying and traveling and being carefree and finding himself were spent in the most vile place on earth among mostly crazy men. So he moved to Atlanta to separate himself from it all. Didn’t know anyone there, but heard enough about the Southern way of life, the abundance of professional women and reasonable cost of living to pick up and give it a try. And he loved it.

  But just when he found his footing, the doctor told him he had cancer.

  “Couldn’t catch a break,” he told Lucy a month into knowing her.

  “Are you serious? Oh, my God,” she said. “You’ve got to be the strongest man I’ve ever met.”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “I felt like I was the unluckiest man in the world—but meeting you seems to have changed that.”

  “I feel the same way,” Lucy said. “I feel like I have finally met someone who really connects with me and understands that I’m going to have my moments and can relate to them.”

  They could not afford an elaborate wedding or an exotic honeymoon. They went to the justice of the peace and drove to Myrtle Beach for three days for their honeymoon. And they were as happy as any couple around.

  “If money is going to determine our happiness,” Lucy said, “then where does our love come in?”

  That’s how Lucy liked to talk. She’d pose a question and leave it up to Elliott to figure it out. When he asked her why she did that, she said, “Because questions make you think.”

  All he could do was smile.

  Two years after their wedding, Lucy got pregnant. Elliott wept when she shared the news. “Why are you crying, baby?” she asked her husband.

  “Not that long ago I was in prison, and I could not see this for myself,” he said. “I was done. My life was over. And now here I am, a few years later, with you and now you’re telling me we have a child on the way. This might be normal stuff to the next man. But to me, it’s amazing.”

  When the doctor told them a few months before delivery that they were having twins, he thought he was dreaming. Danielle came out first. Lucy was happy it was a girl. Daniel came six minutes later. Elliott was proud to have a son to raise into a man.

  They agreed on Daniel’s name because in The Bible he was a young man of strong convictions, someone who understood the ways of God and who studied the law. Elliott found those attributes important. “And even when he was held captive into Babylon,” he told Lucy, “he remained pure and unfazed by all the drama. And God ended up entrusting him with the ability to understand and interpret dreams and visions.

  “I want that for my son,” Elliott added. “Not literally interpreting dreams or visions, but being able to see the life he wants and to do what’s necessary to live it.”

  Lucy was charged with the girl’s name and she chose Danielle because it meant “God is my judge.”

  “If we have a girl and she lives her life understanding that, then she will be inclined to do the right thing,” Lucy said. “And that’s all I ask of her—to do the right thing understanding God is watching.”

  They were not prepared for two children, but they adapted quickly. Elliott was unaware of how to handle an infant, much less raise one, but he was a fast and eager learner. He treated his kids like the treasures they were. Danielle owned his heart, while he saw toughness in Daniel as early as one year old.

  “He’s the youngest, but he will protect his sister,” Elliott said. “He has that spirit already.”

  They represented a happy family, navigating their way through minor crises, enduring financial concerns and growing together. When Elliott was awarded $2.4 million in a settlement in his wrongful conviction, their lives were made. Then it all came crashing down when the kids came home while in the eleventh grade to find their parents in the midst of a fight.

  There had been arguments before that the kids heard, but the tone in this one was more volatile. They could only hear fragments, but it was perfectly clear when Lucy screamed, “Just leave, Elliott!”

  Then there was silence. Daniel and Danielle looked at each other. “It’s gonna be okay,” Daniel reassured his sister.

  Daniel was wrong. A few minutes later, Elliott stormed out of the house, a suitcase on wheels carrying some of his belongings.

  Fear ran through the children. Some of their friends had divorced parents. They felt sorry for them. That evening they could see that would be their fate, too.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kids Will Be Kids

  Elliott could afford to live in the residential section of the W Hotel because he had money from the civil suit.

  He hardly told anyone about his triumph. He took care of his family and the few who stuck with him while he was in prison. He invested in two small auto dealerships that flourished. He also purchased a few properties that he managed. Much of his money was in interest-bearing accounts.

  Financial concerns were not a part of his life. But that fight with his wife started a dissent that led to divorce. And his kids blamed him.

  When they asked their mother what happened, Lucy said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Ask your father.”

  When they asked Elliott, he said, “I love you guys. You know I do. But this is between your mother and me. It has nothing to do with you and I don’t think it’s a conversation we should have.”

&nb
sp; “It has everything to do with us,” Daniel said. “Aren’t we a part of this family?”

  “I’m saying that the problems your mom and I have do not have anything to do with you,” Elliott said.

  “I know what that means,” Daniel said.

  “You do? What does that mean?” Elliott asked his son.

  “That you cheated on Mom,” he said. “We have money. So why else would she ask you to leave the house? If it wasn’t true, you’d say so. But you’re giving us this bullshit about it’s between you and Mom.”

  “Hey, listen, boy, don’t you ever curse at me again,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re seventeen. I’ll kick your ass.”

  Daniel started to talk back, but Danielle jumped in. “Daddy, this is messed up,” she said. “Please tell me, did you cheat on Mom?”

  “Honey, don’t ask me that,” he said.

  The look on her face pained Elliott. It told of her disappointment in her father, the man she admired the most.

  She got up from the couch, crying as she went into her room. Daniel and Elliott sat there. Finally, Daniel said, “You broke up this family. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Danny,” he said. “I understand you’re hurt.”

  “If you didn’t do something, why would she tell you to leave?” Daniel asked. “There’s only one reason she would do that.”

  Elliott wanted to talk, but he could not bring himself to do so. Instead, he rose from his seat and put his hand on the shoulder of his son, whose head was hung. “One day you’ll understand,” he said as he walked out of the house.

  “No, I won’t,” Daniel said.

  “Daddy,” Danielle said. She had come back into the living room.

  Elliott turned to his daughter, his pride and joy. They looked at each other for a moment before she walked over to him. They hugged.

  Daniel came over and pulled his sister from their father’s arms. “Come on, Danielle,” he said. “Let him go. Let him get out of here. Let’s go check on Mom.”