Craig Smith - Cold Rain

‘You can send Davey out if you want, Milt. You’re the manager. You can do anything you want. You do it, though, and I’ll be selling Buicks before the sun goes down.’

Milt kicked the empty air. ‘This close never works, Tubs! Let me go in and buy the deal for sixty-nine.

I’ll pay a commission for seventy-four. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t care if I sell that car or not. I put my word on it, and that’s that.’

Milt cussed blue smoke in a murderous rage, but he left the office. There was no dealing with Tubs when he got to the issue of his sacred word. I heard Milt on the loudspeaker a few minutes later. He started calling out the specials of the day. He read an interminable list, and then he came to the Mustang. His voice rasped in an awful car salesman’s seduction, cylinders, litres, and miles per gallon, ‘…seventy-four hundred dollars. A steal at that price, folks.’ He named a couple more cars and shut up. He paced on the makeshift tower and smoked. He smoked two cigarettes at once.

Mr Dietrich sat for thirty minutes at my desk, absolutely alone. Nobody approached him. Nobody got within fifty feet of that desk. Finally, Mr Dietrich came to Tubs’s office. He leaned through the doorway, actually. He wasn’t coming all the way in. It was a gesture that announced clearly he was about to make a last offer. ‘I’ll go sixty-nine, against my better judgement.’

Tubs didn’t even contemplate it. ‘Mr Dietrich,’ he said, ‘You need a gun in my face and another five hundred dollars.’

Dietrich was a horse trader from way back, but he laughed. He laughed hard. It was over. He didn’t have a gun, he said, but he thought he could find another five hundred dollars for a car that nice. ‘Assuming, that is, you all pick up my sales tax.’ Tubs smiled and said he could do that, he surely could.

Later, Mr Dietrich told me, ‘You got a ways to go, David, before you’re as good as your old man.’ He thought about it fondly for a minute. ‘Gun in my face and another five hundred dollars!’ Mr Dietrich shook his head and laughed again. ‘I never heard that one before!’

I wrote three different confessions for Gail to pass on to the committee. I tore each up in turn.

Finally, I found the defence I could live with and scribbled it out: ‘I am innocent of all wrongdoing.’

The next day I took it into Gail Etheridge’s office.

‘You want to type this out or just hand it over like this?’

Gail’s face showed no reaction. She simply stared at me. ‘I take it we are prepared for the consequences?’

‘I have a verbal statement as well.’

‘Great! Let’s see it.’

‘It’s a verbal statement, Gail. I don’t have anything written down.’

Gail looked at my one sentence defence sceptically.

‘Can you give me a rough idea of what you intend to say?’

I played the English professor. ‘I can,’ I said, ‘but I think I’ll wait until the defence and let you hear it then.’

‘I don’t like this, David.’

‘I like it, and that’s what counts.’

She urged me toward ‘a more comprehensive statement’ but I told her it didn’t get any more comprehensive than innocent of all wrongdoing.

We met the VP’s committee a couple of days later.

Gail made one last pitch as we went in. She thought it might be best if I didn’t say anything at all. She would speak to the issue of a complete lack of proof, the lawyer’s preferred method of pleading innocent.

By then I had steeled my resolve and shook my head like Tubs. ‘It’s my execution,’ I said. ‘I want to tell them I didn’t do this.’

The meeting did not feel like a trial. In fact, the vice president for academic affairs, Lou Morgan, assured me repeatedly, while not quite looking at me, that I was not on trial, nor were we in a court of law. The committee had examined the evidence, he said, and they had gathered here today to discuss it. I was free to call witnesses on my behalf, but this was not a forum for cross-examination. Furthermore, he said, the administration rejected our request to interview the two women who had originally filed the complaints against me. Their statements had been investigated and verified. There was no point in involving them in what was essentially now a disciplinary action.

As things developed the meeting involved a good deal of back and forth between the vice president and various members of the committee. One prof, who I remember had consumed a great deal of caviar at my party, wondered if it was appropriate that Leslie Blackwell was on the committee. She had collected the evidence. Shouldn’t it be for others to judge it? The vice president made it clear that Dr Blackwell was sitting on the committee as a non-voting member. Gail Etheridge asked for clarification. Was Dr Blackwell to provide guidance? Certainly. Guidance and clarification of law? Of course. Clarification of the evidence as well? That seemed only logical. Gail wrote this down for a future complaint, muttering to me as she did, ‘Imagine a trial in which the prosecutor sat with the jury during deliberations.’ I nodded thoughtfully.

We had already discussed due process. Any break in procedure causing fundamental unfairness in the process would be open season when and if we brought suit against the university.

Curiously, there were no witnesses for the university. This meant the evidence Dr Blackwell presented was the complete case. None of it could be contra-dicted by oral statements made directly to the committee, nor refuted by cross-examination.

Blackwell’s notes about her interview with me had me confessing to calling the breasts of Johnna Masterson bodacious ta-tas. When Gail Etheridge complained that I had said no such thing the vice president informed Gail that Dr Blackwell was not on trial. Gail swallowed her exasperation and tried to explain that the evidence itself was incorrect. Her client, she said, admitted to using the term without explaining the context of that usage. Dr Blackwell had either wilfully or unconsciously manipulated an honest response into an admission. A committee member asked in what context bodacious ta-tas would be acceptable.

Gail was ready for that one, ‘In the context you just used it,’ she said and scored nicely for our side. Another committee member asked if Gail meant to say Dr Albo had been discussing the expression and not a certain feature of the female anatomy. Gail explained that Dr Blackwell had failed to investigate that issue. Without the ability to cross-examine, she said, every piece of evidence put forward was subject to the investigator’s whim, and this was a perfect illustration of whimsy.

A second committee member pushed the issue. Was Dr Albo asserting that he used the phrase ‘in a technical sense?’

Gail finished the discussion with perfect deadpan:

‘I wasn’t aware that bodacious ta-tas had a technical sense, professor.’

Before the affronted professor could respond, the vice president suggested we move on. The committee could discuss that possibility in private.

It was a grim procedure for the very reason that it lacked judicial procedure. Material was not presented, then challenged. The case lay before the committee as a finished product, rather like a dead fish on the verge of rot. Hearsay and gossip passed for facts because the rules of evidence did not apply. Perish the thought that professors pretend at being lawyers. The committee members could speak whenever they chose to, thus directed the course of the hearing. As a result, there was a great deal of concern about the issue of faculty members performing sexual intercourse in their offices.

Rather to their astonishment they discovered the handbook did not address this issue. Instead of discussing the implications of that in my case, one of the committee members concluded, and they all nodded solemnly, the handbook should be rewritten. At about this point, Gail breathed pure rage, whispering to me,