Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (41 page)

As I think about where to begin, it occurs to me that Jill has made the same erroneous assumption I had that Olivia and Andy are no longer sexually involved and has failed to follow up. But perhaps she hasn’t asked this question for a reason: she would be delighted to leave the jury with the impression that the affair is over. Olivia, I decide as I sit down, can’t be allowed to have it both ways. Either she must be shown to have manipulated Andy into helping her through an act of seduction or she still loves him, and as repugnant as that may be to a Southern jury, it will be consistent with Andy’s feelings when he testifies.

“Your witness, Mr. Page,” Judge Tarnower clucks impatiently from the bench. I get up again and begin the arduous chore of trying to rehabilitate Olivia’s answers, but, as I have feared, there is little I can ask Olivia that hasn’t already been compromised by her admissions. No matter what spin I give my questions, Andy still seems to be either a conspirator with her or a grossly incompetent professional. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels about him, but I will point out to the jury that maybe after all this time she should. If Andy won’t turn on her, I sure as hell can when it comes to my closing argument.

“Mrs. Le Master, did I hear you say that you are uncertain,” I ask, feigning a genuine air of puzzlement, “about your present feelings for Dr. Chapman?”

If she has a clue where I am going, Olivia doesn’t act like it. Calmly, she recrosses her legs as if I had asked her what she had for breakfast.

“Although I know Pam’s death was an accident,” Olivia says calmly, “I can’t help but feel very confused about the way it happened. As I have said, I no longer think Dr. Chapman should have used shock.”

I lean my arms against the lectern as if I am suddenly wearied by her testimony. Dr. Chapman? She is talking about Andy as if she only met him a couple of times.

“Isn’t it a a fact you told me that it was you who seduced Dr. Chapman and not the other way around?”

Taken off guard, Olivia draws back in the chair as if I have tried to strike her.

“I don’t recall saying that,” she says, frowning. Her face colors slightly, and if I can see it, so can the jury. I am glad I can’t see Andy without turning my head, because I know if I do, I will see him going through the roof.

“Isn’t it a fact, Mrs. Le Master,” I say slowly, now clearer in my own mind about the effect Olivia wants to create,” ‘that you’ve had sex with my client as recently as last week?”

There are titillated gasps behind me. Olivia, visibly angry, can’t resist a look at Andy before saying, “That’s not true!”

To heighten the effect, I, too, turn and look at Andy, who seems as stricken as a father who has caught his teenaged daughter in her first act of deception. I turn back to Olivia and keep up the pressure.

“Is it your testimony that you haven’t had sexual intercourse with my client on five different occasions since he was originally charged in this case?”

Olivia knows she can’t retreat, and tears again well in her eyes as she cries in a choked, almost guttural, voice, “Of course not! I’ve talked to him on the telephone several times, but that’s all!”

I pause, wishing her steadily reddening face would burst into flames.

“Now isn’t it a fact that approximately fifteen years ago the Department of Human Services substantiated child abuse involving your son, whom you no longer have custody of?”

Prepared for this question, Olivia, as if on cue, bursts into tears again and recites the story she gave me yesterday. The jury seems more shocked than moved, a reaction I’ll take anytime. I sit down, and while Jill confers furiously with Kerr Bowman, Andy whispers furiously, “Why did you ask her all of that?”

When Jill tells Judge Tamower finally that she has no more questions, every eye in the courtroom watches Olivia leave the stand. I hedge my answer.

“You don’t think the jury should hear the truth?”

“You humiliated her!” he rages.

I try to keep from reacting in front of the jury. Only a man in love could worry about such a thing.

“Why should she be humiliated,” I ask, disingenuously, “if she’s telling the truth?”

Unwilling to respond, now that Yettie Lindsey is about to begin her testimony, Andy pulls back and sits rigidly in his chair. He knows what is coming. Even if he could talk me out of asking him what he has admitted as recently as last night, Jill Marymount will have to bring it up, and Andy is one criminal defendant I will not give the benefit of the doubt if he tries to lie on the witness stand. I will not let him lie to protect Olivia. If I were on the jury, I’d be mulling over at least two possibilities. If Andy testifies under oath the affair is still going on, I’d be asking myself whether she is still screwing him because she still loves him, or she is manipulating him so he won’t turn on her. At least now, if I judge this correctly, the case will turn on Andy’s credibility and not Olivia’s.

Bristling with the dignity that only rejection can give a person, Yettie makes the kind of witness lawyers drool over in their sleep. She is wearing a beige knit suit that seems enameled upon her chocolate frame, and her strange, speckled yellow eyes seem to burn with the pleasure of the knowledge that at long last some chickens are coming home to roost. The men on the jury have to be wondering what in hell would possess a black man to kiss off this voluptuous and obviously passionate young woman for a milky bread stick like Olivia—unless, it was, of course, a fortune and a chance to get into a white woman’s pants. Tearfully, she acknowledges she was in love with Andy, and you can see the female jurors loving her for admitting it and loving her for eavesdropping outside his office. That son of a bitch, we’ll punish him if for nothing else than breaking this girl’s heart. Sure, she spied on him, but we wouldn’t have cared if she’d set up a hidden camera and microphone under their beds.

Yet despite the visual impact Yettie has on the jury-indeed on all of us except perhaps Andy her testimony re ally adds nothing, since Olivia has admitted at least part of it just minutes before. And she doesn’t say the one additional thing that could hurt Olivia (and by extension Andy), and that is her comment to me in her office that Olivia said on more than one occasion that she thought Pam would be better off dead. If she went to Jill with what she had overheard, why didn’t she volunteer this as well? Why didn’t Jill ask her what else she had heard Olivia say? Perhaps Yettie believes that those comments could have been made by anyone with a self-abusive child, and that it wouldn’t, after all is said and done, be fair to mention. I don’t know the answer, but now is not the time to find out. Unwilling to give Jill a second bite at this juicy plum, I say, “I have no questions of this witness. Your Honor.”

Jill has sandwiched Leon Robinson between Yettie and her other witnesses. As he struts to the witness stand, I feel my heart kick into overdrive. My tongue goes to my false tooth, on which I will be paying for the next six months. My body was sore for three days. If Leon has told Jill that his friends and I got acquainted that night in the parking lot, I haven’t heard it.

Judging by the way Leon is sashaying to the front of the courtroom, someone must have told him he is the star witness in this case. In his red cowboy shirt with its requisite whorls, buttoned-down pockets, and fancy stitching and new, starched Lee jeans that slide down over brown cowboy boots that gleam with a military spit shine, Leon, his pompadour waved even higher on his head than at the probably cause hearing, looks cocky instead of nervous. Surely, like Olivia, he must be pretending confidence he can’t be feeling. Unless Leon has had a vastly different life from most Arkansans, he hasn’t appeared before this many people since the night he graduated from high school.

Jill has him well rehearsed, however, and he testifies in an arresting country voice that for the first time has a little twang in it, like George Jones singing, “I stopped lovin’ her today.”

After reviewing his length of employment (three years, not a record, but unusual given the turnover at the Blackwell County HDC) and training, Jill asks him to describe what happened when Pam was electrocuted.

I follow his testimony in the transcript from the probable cause hearing. He repeats it almost verbatim.

“If Dr. Chapman had of jus’ told me how bad it was really gonna hurt, I’d of known to holt her a lot tighter,” he says earnestly.

“I

didn’t want to hurt her by squeezin’ too hard. I liked Pam a lot.”

He gets through his testimony this time without tears, though, as last time, his voice becomes hoarse with emotion.

Jill has left me as little as possible. As I stand up to crossexamine him, Leon shoots me a look of pure hatred, which I interpret as fear. We are on my turf now.

“How much do you weigh, Leon?” I ask as if we are old friends comparing diets.

“About one-seventy,” he says, his voice sullen.

“How old are you?”

Not understanding where I’m going, he volunteers, “I’ll be twenty-five in October.”

“Would you say you’re in pretty good shape?”

Too macho to admit he doesn’t lift more than a pool stick and a can of beer when he finishes his shift, he says in his George Jones voice, “I’m all right.”

“Despite being a hundred-and-seventy-pound, twenty-four year old in good condition, you couldn’t hold on to Pam’s hands when she pulled away?”

Leon’s lower lip puffs out as if a bee had stung it.

“I said every way I know how,” he huffs, “I would have kept aholt of her if I had been told she was gonna kick like a mule.”

Leon’s whining cuts through the room like a power saw being revved up. I ask, “How long have you known Dr.

Chapman?”

He is wary now, but he has no choice about answering my questions.

“It hadn’t been a year, I guess.”

“Would you say you and he were friends?” I ask, turning as I finish to look back over my shoulder. In the courtroom I have noticed a couple of men whose knuckles look familiar.

Unable to restrain a dry chuckle, Leon looks into the audience.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“But you don’t have anything against him?”

No genius, Leon has started going on smell. He sniffs, “He don’ give me no trouble, an’ I don’t give him any.”

I am in no hurry.

“So you know of no reason why you wouldn’t try to do exactly what he said when it came to holding on to Pam.”

I can’t resist looking at Jill. She is on the edge of her seat and she knows something is coming.

“Have you ever heard of a group that has the reputation of hating African-Americans and goes by the name of the Trackers?”

Jill shoots out of her chair like a Roman candle. “I object, Your Honor. This isn’t relevant.”

Judge Tamower looks at Jill and then at me. I’d rather not have to telegraph it all to Leon, though right now the question is like a neon sign blinking on and off. “Of course it is. Your Honor,” I say.

“Every one of the jury answered this question This isn’t precisely true, but it’s close.

The judge, bless her liberal heart, helps me out.

“I’ll allow it. Answer the question, Mr. Robinson.”

Thinking he’s about to be trapped, Leon says nonchalantly, “Sure, I heard of it.”

I have been waiting to ask this question for weeks, and I don’t waste any time.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Trackers, Leon?”

On her feet again, Jill says, “I object again. Your Honor!”

her voice anxious for the first time all day.

“I have no idea how Mr. Robinson is going to answer, but all Mr. Page is trying to accomplish is to prejudice this jury.”

“On the contrary. Your Honor,” I say, “if Mr. Robinson let go of Pam when she was shocked because he hates black people and he thought in a moment of anger she would attack Dr. Chapman, the jury, in deciding what my client’s own state of mind was, should be allowed to take this into ac count. ” Shaking her head angrily, Jill says, “That’s guilt by association, Your Honor. Just because Mr. Robinson may have been in some kind of club doesn’t prove he did anything.”

“The Trackers is not just some kind of club, Your Honor.

It’s…”

Cutting me off. Judge Tamower says, “Sit down, Mr.

Page. You’re not testifying. Answer the question, Mr. Robinson

I plop down, trying not to look too relieved, thinking this entire case (unless Andy is lying) is about guilt by association.

Leon, righteously indignant, yelps, “I’ve never joined them or nothin’ like them.”

After a few more questions, I sit down, thinking that with a little luck, we’ll know about that tomorrow.

As I return to my seat, Andy, without even a glance at me, rises suddenly and says in a loud voice to the judge, “Your Honor, I want to fire Mr. Page and represent myself!”

Staring at Andy as if he has suddenly gone crazy. Judge Tamower stands up, too, and says, “I want the lawyers and Dr. Chapman back in my chambers immediately. The court will be in recess for fifteen minutes.” With that, she flees the bench through a side door.

I turn to Andy and snarl in a low whisper, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

In front of the jury, Andy grabs my arm and says, “You broke your word! I warned you not to do this!”

“Come on!” I say, furious.

“She’s not going to let you.”

Shaking with rage, I look into the stunned faces of Jill and her young assistant as they hurry past our table.

In chambers, the judge has taken off her robe as if she is through for the day. Underneath it, she is wearing a red dress almost identical to Olivia Le Master’s.

“What is your client’s problem, Mr. Page?” she yelps at me. Whatever sympathy she may have had for our case seems a distant memory.

Judges do not like surprises, nor do they like defendants to represent themselves.

For an instant I consider trying to explain what I believe is in Andy’s mind. The truth that Andy thinks I have wrongly injected the issue of race into this case, when, in fact, that is what it is primarily about as far as I’m concerned is too bizarre, too threatening. Instead, I say, “We are having a disagreement over trial tactics. Your Honor.”