Grif Stockley - Illegal Motion

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?”