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.”
