“I did what he wanted.”
“Did he say anything or did you say anything in those thirty minutes?”
“I was crying,” Robin says, sniffing.
“I think he said some other things but I don’t remember.”
“What did you do after he was finished?” Binkie says, his voice stoical. He doesn’t like rape cases, his manner suggests.
“I put on my clothes. He watched me and said that if I told anybody, nobody would believe me, and he’d spread it all over campus that I was a slut.”
“Did you say anything?”
Robin dabs at her eyes.
“I was too afraid.”
“What happened next?”
Robin sighs as if she knows she has finished the hard est part and says, “I drove straight back to the sorority house and went up and took a shower and got in bed.”
“Did anyone see you?” Binkie asks.
“Did you speak to anyone?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t want to see or talk to any body. I just wanted to be alone.”
Robin’s voice is tense with anxiety. Beside me, Dade is shaking his head. He whispers urgently in my ear, “She’s lying and she knows it! She wanted to get in the shower. I didn’t tell her no such thing about hurting her or her being a slut or anything!”
Watching the jury, I nod, realizing he didn’t deny he raped her. Binkie leads Robin through the reasons why she didn’t go to the police or hospital immediately. She says nothing that is not in her statement or in the transcript of the “J” Board hearing.
“I just couldn’t face going through it then,” she concludes tearfully.
“If it hadn’t been for Shannon, I might not have gone. I knew it would be horrible, and it has been.”
Binkie turns to me and says sternly, “Your witness.”
I take my time getting up. One of the reasons I’m convinced that Robin didn’t tell anybody for nine hours is that she was worried that her escapade the past summer would come out, but if I ask about it the judge will de clare a mistrial and probably would throw me in jail and bury the key. From beside the podium, I ask, “Where is the house you went to that night, Ms. Perry?”
Robin runs the fingers of her right hand through her hair.
“About two miles east of campus.”
“Is it in the city limits?”
Robin hunches her shoulders.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you recall if it has a well beside it?”
“I remember seeing a well, but I think it’s boarded up.”
“Does it have a house across from it?”
“No” “Immediately on either side?”
“No.”
“In fact, the house you went to that night is at the end of the road there. You can’t go any further, can you?”
“No.”
“Would you agree that some people might consider the house somewhat isolated?”
“Yes.”
“What are you majoring in, Ms. Perry?”
“Communications,” she answers, her hands beginning to twist a bit in her lap.
“You get almost straight A’s, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she says, undoubtedly schooled by Binkie to make her answers as short as possible.
“Are you planning a career in the theater?” I ask, as snidely as I can, not caring how she answers.
Binkie objects, however, and I withdraw the question, knowing I’ve made my point on the jury.
“Had you ever dated an African-American before Dade?”
Too sharp for her own good, she answers vehemently, “I didn’t date Dade.”
I take my time and return to the table and pull out a copy of the local paper and bring it back to the podium.
“Let me read you a quote attributed to you from the Northwest Arkansas Times from October twenty- third.
This was at a rally on campus where you addressed several hundred students and others.
“I want to thank every body for their support. I can’t tell you how many other girls have told me that they have been a victim of date rape since this has occurred. It is a crime that most girls still do not talk about, but it happens much more frequently than we are aware. Thank you for being here.” Do you deny saying those words?”
“No, but that’s not what I meant,” Robin contends.
“We never had a date.”
I fold the paper and take it back to the table and hand it to Dade. When I return to the podium, I ask, “That’s an important distinction to you, isn’t it, Ms. Perry?”
“I don’t understand,” she says, feigning ignorance or hoping I’m talking about something else.
“It’s important to you that no one think you dated Dade, isn’t that correct?” I ask.
“I’ve already explained that my parents are very conservative she says.
“They asked me not to date anybody who wasn’t white and wasn’t from the South.”
“So you won’t deny that during your first visit last spring to the house on Happy Hollow Road with your roommate at one point you and Dade were back in the kitchen alone and he tried to kiss you, but you wouldn’t let him.”
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.
