Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion

by Grif Stockley

  “Where was the kid?” I ask, wondering if my client’s child could have been playing in the tub and was burned while Clan was busy with her mother. I feel disgust creeping over me like a dirty fog.

  “Day care, I think,” Clan says, his face red with embarrassment.

  “I only did it once, but I still feel like an asshole about it.”

  I think of the girl: except for her eyes, as uninteresting as a digital clock. I feel sorry for her, but Clan is my friend, and I feel worse for him. Brenda must be giving him hell to drive him to a whore, but he is possibly exposing her to AIDS.

  “Did you use a rubber?”

  “Two,” Clan says, breaming hard.

  “I couldn’t feel a thing.”

  “I’ve heard that’s more dangerous,” I say coldly, “because they break that way.”

  Clan looks miserable.

  “You know, if she reported me to the ethics people, they’d probably jerk my license for this one.”

  I stand up, embarrassed for my friend. It hasn’t been too many months since Clan pleaded guilty in municipal court to shoplifting fifty cents’ worth of food.

  “Lawyers have done a lot worse than snitched a Twinkie or bartered their fee,” I say loyally, putting the best spin I can on Dan’s activities.

  Clan stands and waddles over to the door.

  “That’s what’s pathetic about me. I’m so damn petty.”

  Awkwardly, I clap him on the shoulder as he goes out ahead of me.

  “No,” I say, turning out the light and locking the door, “your problem is you’re so damn human.”

  Walking toward his office with his head down, he mutters, “In my case, I don’t see there’s a difference.”

  I head down the hall for the elevators, thinking that at least Clan has the guts to admit it and the decency to be ashamed. The older we get, the crazier we become. At the front desk, Julia pops a bubble when I tell her I’m going to Gina’s house.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she says, checking her tiny lips in a compact mirror for remains of the explosion.

  Don’t tell me that, I think. Julia is wearing a conservative and even elegant dark green paisley dress, but the top two buttons of her blouse are undone, revealing the top of a black lacy bra underneath.

  “Maybe I’d be safer,” I say, smiling at the outrageous pretense that we are civilized, “if I didn’t do anything you would do.”

  Julia makes a face but doesn’t respond. It is rare that I get the last word. As I stand before the elevators, smugly I glance back at her. She has made a circle with her right thumb and forefinger, and with her left index finger she moves it back and forth through the 0 she has formed, all the while shaking her head. A female client for one of the other attorneys on our floor is seated a few feet away from her desk and is watching Julia with a look of utter amazement. Is this really a law firm?

  A light rain has begun to fall, further darkening my mood. I hope the weather clears before I return to Fayetteville on Wednesday for Dade to give Binkie a statement. The euphoria from the Alabama game has already begun to fade, and the question uppermost in my mind is how long it will take the university administration to re view the “J” Board’s decision. If I could get Binkie to drop the criminal charges against Dade, surely that would influence their decision. Dade is doing his part: the Hogs have jumped to fourth in the UPI Poll and fifth in the AP.

  We play Auburn, ranked third in both polls, Saturday, and a win, if both Florida and Notre Dame lose, should put us on top. Surely the vice-chancellor and the chancellor are feeling some heat to let Dade finish the season when he is so clearly central to our chances. There isn’t a person in the state who didn’t feel the excitement when the Razorbacks won their first NCAA basketball championship.

  With Clinton taking what seems to be a daily pounding by the media, it is about the only thing in the state to feel good about.

  On 1-640 heading east I pass a billboard and see beaming down at me a slutty but expensive-looking model advertising pantyhose and think again of Julia’s parting gesture. No wonder women are cynical. They expect the worst from men and with good reason. We are the ones who commit the rapes, the murders, the never ending garden-variety domestic beatings that seldom get reported.

  So what else is new? If we ever admitted to ourselves how little men have changed since we dropped down out of the trees, we might just give up on the spot.

  I find Gina’s half of a duplex apartment easier than I thought I would. Just five minutes off 1-40 east on the road to Memphis, she is within walking distance of a pancake restaurant, a motel, and a gas station. So much for the zoning laws. On the other hand, given what she does for a living, her place is probably zoned commercial.

  Gina comes to the door of her duplex dressed in a thin white T-shirt and purple short shorts that showcase her long legs. With big shoulders and a high waist, she gives the impression today of having a large frame rather than being overweight, as I remembered her in my office.

  Dumbly, I realize she expects to have sex with me, too.

  Why else would I have come to her place? Lawyers don’t usually make house calls. In my own mind, my motives are pure since I set this visit up before I knew Clan slept with her.

  “Hi,” she says demurely, her round eyes reminding me of two blue buttons.

  “Come on in.”

  As I enter the room, a small black mutt comes up to me. Gina scoops up the dog and speaks baby talk to it. In her own apartment as she coos to the animal, she seems about twelve years old. The only piece of furniture in the darkened living room is a tattered tan couch. It is cold in here. This bleak area won’t qualify for House Beautiful, but since most people don’t use their living rooms either, why bother at all?

  “I’d like to see the tub,” I announce instantly and presumably like her customers, follow her up a flight of stairs to my right. Ascending the steps, I observe that the couch is too short and narrow for a successful business transaction. Off to the left at the top of the stairs, I see what must be her bedroom. I have to check an impulse to enter it. I have never been in a prostitute’s room unless I count my Peace Corps days in Colombia. My main memory is of pictures of JFK and the Pope side by side, a piece of pottery resembling a coffee urn where she squatted in front of me afterward to wash herself, and a health card showing regular visits to the doctor to inspect her for VD. Before AIDS, prostitution seemed a business like any other, the customers wanting to dawdle and the sellers wanting to hurry them along. Since the advent of the HIV virus, the oldest profession must be like working on the bomb squad. All I re member about the Colombian whore I saw occasionally is that the door to her room was off its hinges. She said that while drunk she had broken it. I had no reason to doubt her.

  Gina’s bathroom is cleaner than I expected, cleaner than my own, I’m sure.

  “Tell me again why you left the baby alone,” I say, looking at the fixtures. Instead of a difficult knob a child would have to grasp to turn, there is only a single lever, perhaps the width of the blade of a kitchen knife, for hot and cold. Trying the lever, I find it moves easily and convince myself that a small child could turn it.

  Gina sits down on the closed toilet seat and crosses her legs. We could be a couple debating who left the ring in the tub. She says, “All the towels were dirty. I remembered I had some clean ones in the dryer downstairs and I went down to get them.”

  Logical enough, but would someone financially strapped as this girl have a washer and dryer? I make a mental note to check when I go downstairs.

  “How long were you gone?”

  “Just a minute or two,” she says, hugging herself.

  I turn on the hot water full blast and look down at my watch to time how long it will take to partially fill the tub.

  She has said there was only an inch or two of water. If that is true, it doesn’t make sense that the child would have a burn line right below her nipples if she had been forced to sit down in the water with
her hips flat against the bottom of the tub. I have not seen anything in the re port from Social Services showing the depth of water at the time the child was burned. In four minutes the tub fills to about three inches of water. Perhaps she was gone longer than she is admitting. I turn off the water.

  “Has anyone from Social Services timed how long it takes to fill the tub?” I ask, my face now bathed in sticky steam.

  She hands me a towel to wipe my face.

  “Not while I’ve been here,” she says. If the child were sitting up, I estimate it would take eight inches of water to burn her as the DHS report suggests.

  I plunge my right hand into the water up to the wrist and jerk it out immediately. The flesh is stinging and red.

  The pain must have been excruciating for the child. How could she not have tried to climb out if at all possible? I stand and run cold water over my wrist and look at my self in the bathroom mirror. My forehead feels as if it is covered with thick lard and my hair is plastered against my head. In the heat of the bathroom I don’t look any better than the typical middle-aged men who, drunk, and stinking with their exertions, must come in here to piss after having sweated out an orgasm in her. How do women stand to be prostitutes? Block it all out somehow.

  How does this woman, innocent or guilty, bear to think about her child’s blistered flesh? The same way, I guess.

  We go downstairs, and I ask for a glass of water. I follow her into the kitchen, and notice a utility room off to the right with a rusty washer and dryer. If she is lying, it isn’t about her domestic appliances.

  “How is Glenetta doing?” I finally ask as I sit down in one of the two folding chairs at a card table by the refrigerator.

  Like the bathroom, this small space has a used look and reflects something of the habits of the owner. Pinned against the door with magnets is a calendar whose motif is cats, a birthday card whose cover depicts two Chippendale-like (young with hairless chests) male models in minuscule but bulging briefs, and a picture of Glenetta.

  The photo shows me child digging mischievously at an unseen object in the garbage can here in the kitchen.

  Glenetta, sturdily built, in a red playsuit, has brown curly hair and her mother’s round eyes.

  Following my gaze, Gina hands me tap water in a bright green plastic cup and says, “She’s a lot better. Just like you said, they watch every move I make when I go visit.”

  We talk about the case for a while as I go over the questions she is likely to be asked on crossexamination.

  Her credibility can make or break the case, and I emphasize this point more than once, thinking as I do that it is not unlike Dade’s situation in this respect. All this heavy duty science around, and most cases come down to a matter of whom you believe.

  “You’ve got to convince the judge how much you care about Glenetta and that it was a single isolated act of negligence that could have happened to any parent,” I say.

  “Nobody can do that except you.” The problem is that since the first time I talked with her she has displayed little outward emotion. Perhaps, this is how she is normally (I should ask Clan), but on Friday I want some anguish.

  “That’s all it was,” she says, scanning my face coolly as if she is figuring how much to charge a customer or how long it will take to slop the hogs. Gina, who is wearing no makeup and only a swipe of lipstick, is living proof that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  “I’ve got to go to D.Y.”s in a little bit. You want to go back upstairs?”

  I give her a smile that is more embarrassed than real.

  “I

  don’t know what Mr. Bailey told you about me,” I say, “but I don’t expect to be paid that way.”

  “Oh,” she says, stroking the dog that has come into the room since we have been talking and has curled against her feet.

  “I just figured that’s why you came out here.”

  I realize now that everyone who sees me in court with this woman who knows her past will assume that I slept with her. I can’t do anything about that. I assure her, “I just wanted to get a visual picture of what happened. Do you have a camera?”

  Startled perhaps by an involuntary reflex, the mutt jumps off and runs out of the room. Maybe I’m one of those weirdos who gets off on pictures instead of the real thing.

  “I’ve got one,” she says cautiously, “but it doesn’t have any film.”

  “Before the trial Friday,” I explain, “I want you to take some pictures of the bathtub and be sure to get the lever that regulates hot and cold, okay? I want the judge to see how easy it would have been for Glenetta to have turned on the hot water.”

  Understanding finally that I’m not really a dirty old man, she nods.

  “I can do that.”

  At the door Gina gives me a genuine smile for the first time since I’ve met her.

  “You really seem interested in trying to help me,” she says, smoothing a torn place in the mesh of the front door screen.

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” I promise. I don’t want to be seen as merely going through the motions to get a fee in this case. Besides the fear that somebody will think I’m sleeping with her, I find I am motivated by my new status as a star football player’s attorney. Of course, if Dade is convicted, things will return to normal. You’re only as good as your last case. If these aren’t the most honorable of motives, I figure that since the road to hell is paved with good intentions, any psychological explanation for my accepting this financially unrewarding undertaking is so much window dressing.

  I drive back to my office in a downpour, wondering again if I would have turned Gina down if I hadn’t slept with Amy Saturday night. People don’t steal food if there is enough to eat, but given my own rationalizations for my behavior over the years, I don’t figure I’m all that much different from Clan.

  Dade and I are immediately ushered into Binkie Cross’s office Wednesday morning at eleven. Cross smiles at Dade, who is dressed in coal-black sweats, property of the Razorback Athletic Department, and offers his hand.

  “That was a hell of a catch,” he can’t resist saying.

  “How’d you hold onto the ball?”

  Dade, as I have prepped him, smiles at this man who holds his life in his hands and grasps his outstretched palm as firmly as if he were catching a football. If Binkie wants to dismiss this case for lack of evidence, there is not a soul on earth who can stop him. Though he has probably answered that question fifty times now, Dade says modestly, “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Hell, most receivers wouldn’t have been open,” Binkie says, pointing to a conference table on which rests a tape recorder.

  “There wasn’t any luck to it.”

  Par be it from me to argue the point. As we sit, Mike Cash enters the room and shuts the door behind him. We speak, but I don’t get up. If this kid hadn’t been such an eager beaver, we probably wouldn’t be here. Binkie says, “I’m gonna put him under oath and on tape, okay?”

  This is a calculated risk, but I don’t see that we have much choice. If Dade wants to avoid a trial, he is going to have to cooperate. We begin, and Binkie proves to be a thorough questioner. By this time I have asked myself or heard most of what he gets out of Dade, but there are some things neither I nor the “J” Board learned, the most important of which concerns the clear suggestion that Dade may have had something to drink that night, after all.

  “Are you familiar with Chuck’s Grill on Dickson?”

  Binkie asks casually almost halfway through the inter view.

  Dade immediately becomes uncomfortable and begins to mumble, which he has not been doing.

  “I’ve been there a couple of times.”

  “Did you go there the night this incident allegedly took place?”

  Oh shit, I think, wondering whether to pull the plug on this little chat. Dade says in a barely audible voice, “Yeah.”

  “Did you have anything to drink?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says.

  �
��I might have had a couple of beers.”

  Son of a bitch! I yawn, as if this isn’t any news to me.

  He can be impeached on this point if Binkie can get hold of the tape of the “J” Board hearing, which I suspect he can. Though the hearing was supposed to be confidential, not all those people can keep their mouths shut. Yet, this isn’t fatal, I tell myself. By itself it isn’t a case breaker.

  The problem is, credibility is everything in this case. I can hear in my head already Binkie’s argument: Ladies and gentlemen, if the defendant is lying about one thing, what else is he lying about? Binkie establishes the time (about seven), and asks who was there, though Dade professes not to remember talking to anybody except Chuck.

  Binkie asks Dade several questions about Eddie Stiles, and again Dade evidences some nervousness. Binkie implies that the elusive Eddie, at the least, by letting Dade and other team members use his apartment, is violating NCAA rules by extending benefits to athletes that aren’t being extended to other students. Par worse, Binkie leaves the impression that Eddie may be involved in drugs. He asks Dade directly, “Do you have any knowledge that Eddie Stiles is either directly or indirectly involved in the sale of illegal substances?”

  Dade replies in the negative, but by the time we are through I am wondering how innocent my client really is.

  He wouldn’t be the first or last player to have a drug problem. Yet, it is as if Binkie is merely warning Dade officially that he better stay away from Eddie. He has asked the questions on the record that he had to ask, but Binkie, like everybody else in this state, is a Razorback fan. Surely he doesn’t want the football program penalized I hope that is all there is to it. He tells me he should be getting in touch with me in a few days, and as we are about to leave his office, he shakes Dade’s hand again as if he isn’t too concerned about what he has learned. I nod again at Mike Cash, who apparently has orders not even to open his mouth.

  After waiting not so patiently for Dade to give hair and saliva samples (it seems a waste of time now that he has given a formal statement admitting intercourse), I drive him back to the campus and give him hell for not leveling with me.