“That’s fine with me,” I say automatically.
“I’ll do the best job I can.”
“See that you do,” Roy adds, in a menacing tone.
I don’t like to be bullied by anyone, especially a client who isn’t paying me a third of what a case is worth, but Roy, I have the feeling, is out of the loop here. This is between Dade and his mother, I surmise, without any hard evidence to support my intuition. I have the distinct feeling he has chosen to do what he thinks will maintain her image of him. To save his pride, Roy has been given his say, but it is his mother whom Dade wants to please. As I am leaving, ten minutes later, only Lashondra, who is re arranging toilet paper on the shelf next to bar soap, waves good-bye. If she were the client, I’d feel a lot better.
Furious, I gun the Blazer hard westward through the desolate flatness of the Arkansas Delta, already feeling the pressure imposed by Dade’s decision. I know who will be the fall guy in this scenario. Yet, damn it, would he really be risking a trial if he weren’t innocent? Dade and Lucy will drive to Fayetteville Sunday morning so we can work on his testimony. Roy will stay in Hughes to keep the grocery open. Damn. He can’t even take off to see his son’s trial.
I call Binkie from my office and give him the bad news.
“I think, he’s making a mistake, Gideon,” Binkie says, sounding disappointed.
“I do, too,” I confess, as I pull Dade’s file from my briefcase. I had hoped when I walked into my office there would be a phone call from Lucy. There is nothing else to say and I hang up with a sick feeling in my stomach.
Gordon Dyson is waiting for me outside Judge Butler’s chambers with an embarrassed grin on his face. This shouldn’t take long even if “Gucci” shows up. I shake hands with Dyson, who hands me an envelope, presumably my fee.
“How is your son taking this?”
Dyson smiles.
“He’s pissed as hell. He called his mother, but I talked to her and it’s okay. I don’t think he’s even gonna show.”
I take off my overcoat in the poorly ventilated building.
The Blackwell County courthouse is undergoing extensive repairs, and the building the county is using has all the charm of a bus station in a third world country.
We enter the judge’s outside office, and his secretary tells us to go right on back. The judge will take Mr.
Dyson’s testimony in his chambers.
Sonny Butler is an ex-prosecutor and likes cops. He greets my client like an old friend, and I relax, knowing this will be a piece of cake. Across Sonny’s massive desk they chat, each bragging about how well he is doing.
Why the hell not? Cop to businessman, prosecutor to judge. They both have prospered as a result of crime.
Butler is not a bad judge for a man who claimed during his recent campaign that any person who didn’t believe in the death penalty would change his mind if his wife were raped and killed in front of him. His opponent, my old boss at the public defender’s office, Greta Darby, cracked that it was hard to tell whether Sonny was running for judge or executioner. To know Greta is to hate her, and I voted for Sonny, despite his ranting during the campaign.
Sonny kids Gordon about evicting his son and needles him gently about his failure to prosecute him under Arkansas’s criminal eviction statute, the only one left in the country, according to Clan.
“His mother would have killed me,” Gordon says sheepishly, which makes me realize he had considered it At this moment a woman charges into the room, followed by a college-age kid who has to be “Gucci.” My client’s face, now ashen, tells me it is his wife.
“Dora Lou, what are you doing back here?”
“I couldn’t let you throw our son out on the street!” she cries dramatically. It is obvious she has had no sleep for some time. She must have come straight from the airport.
Her bright orange jumpsuit, the color county prisoners wear, is badly wrinkled. Beneath her reddened eyes are plum-colored pouches that emphasize the rest of her under baked pie crust of a face. In contrast, Dyson’s son is wearing an immaculate blue pinstriped three-piece suit.
“Your Honor, can we take a minute?” I ask plaintively.
Judge Butler nods and motions us outside. Lawyers are the first line of defense against unruly litigants.
“What is he going to do?” Mrs. Dyson shrieks once we are outside in the hall. She gestures at “Gucci,” who is staring pitifully at his father.
“Go to work full-time like most other Americans?” the ex-policeman asks, his voice trembling as it rises to a new level.
“You hate him!” his wife rages.
“You hate him because he looks like me!”
This insight is fraught with danger, and I intervene, pulling my client to one side and whispering, “Can’t you bribe him to leave? Give him a new car, a thousand for a couple of months’ rent, and we’ll go back to my office and sign a contract that if he moves home again he agrees to sign over the title to you.”
Gordon Dyson contemplates his family and nods.
“A contract won’t mean anything, but maybe he’ll have a wreck and kill himself.”
Fortunately, “Gucci,” perhaps fearing that he might die unexpectedly in his sleep if he remains home, agrees. An hour later after mother and son have departed my office, I escort Gordon to the elevators and offer to return half my fee.
“We didn’t actually go to court.”
“We were close enough,” Dyson mutters as the door opens.
“Hell, I’d rather give it to you than to him.”
I thank him, and go back inside to work on Dade’s case. What is this world coming to?
Monday morning the Fayetteville media circus begins early. Dade is not even out of the Blazer when a college age kid with three cameras around his neck spots us and begins snapping pictures. Out on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse there is a small contingent of demonstrators carrying signs: stop the violence, justice for women, and of course, women against rape. It must be twenty degrees, but there are five or six girls bundled up in brightly colored ski jackets, knit caps, mittens, and earmuffs and looking miserable. I recognize Paula Crawford and wonder how Sarah will feel when she shows up.
Paula and I never had our lunch. Since the dorms aren’t open, Sarah has spent the night with a friend from Fayetteville and will be arriving later. Two reporters shove microphones in Lucy’s face, but as I have instructed, we smile and keep walking.
“Is it true that Dade turned down a deal?” the beautiful green-eyed reporter from Channel 5 asks. Like a zombie, I give her a frozen grin, not even bothering with “no comment.”
Inside the second-floor courtroom, I shake hands with Binkie, who squints hard at Dade as if to say that he has had his chance at mercy. Without a word, he turns his back and sits down next to his assistant Mike Cash, who, I suspect, will be seen but not heard today. I notice that Binkie is wearing a new suit, too. Though it can’t make him look handsome (his rawboned face precludes anyone but his mother from regarding him that charitably), the nice fit of the light blue herringbone worsted wool, padded in the shoulders, fills him out and gives him less of an angular, hillbilly look. Like myself, someone has taken a look at Binkie’s courtroom apparel and said it was time to dial 911 and ask for an emergency department store run. Judging by his demeanor, I have the feeling that by not forcing my client to take the deal he offered, I have lost some respect in his eyes. Yet, there is nothing I can do about it now.
After I have seated Dade and organized my files around me on the table (I have revised my opening statement five times in the last two days and have it outlined in a yellow legal pad on top of the stack to my right), I watch spectators being admitted into the courtroom and try to rein in what I hope is a temporary panic attack. The glittering, expectant expressions on the faces of some of the doddering old men suggest they are hoping for a blood bath. Yet, these are probably the regulars who have seen every trial for the last twenty years. I smile uneasily at Dade, who seems to be holding his breath. He is looking at his mother. Lucy, to my dismay, has
