“She said she had to go.”
“What did you say when she told you she was leaving?”
“Nothing much, I guess ” Dade says.
“How long was she out there from start to finish?”
Binkie asks.
Dade won’t look Binkie in the eye as I had instructed.
Instead, he seems to be staring at his belt buckle.
“About an hour, I guess,” he says, hesitating.
“Well, if this was her idea of a big fling, she had gone to a lot of trouble for just an hour, hadn’t she?” Binkie says, swinging his hands together as if he were about to challenge Dade to a fight.
To Dade’s credit, he answers, “I don’t know what her idea was. I just know what she did.”
“So your testimony is that you were sitting there together in the room working on the speech and she just up and attacked you, got what she wanted and left without a word, huh
Behind me a couple of people snicker. With some dignity Dade says, “She didn’t attack me. I could just tell by the way she came over and sat by me she wanted me to kiss her.”
“Do more than kiss her,” Binkie says, smirking at him.
“She wanted you to ravish her, didn’t she?”
Dade says grimly, “She wanted sex.”
Deadpan, Binkie goads him, “She didn’t tear your clothes off, did she?”
Dade looks over at me as if he is wondering whether he has to answer, and I nod. He sighs and says, “No.”
“Did she leave any passion marks on you?” Binkie asks, now folding his arms in front of him but exposing his big ugly knuckles.
“No.”
Binkie’s plan is obviously to ridicule Dade, and he keeps him on the witness stand a solid hour, asking his questions in the most scathing tone he can muster.
“So she didn’t say anything after you were finished,” he finally concludes, “about what kind of a lover you were?”
Throughout, Dade has looked increasingly hostile, glaring at Binkie between questions as the prosecutor has postured in front of him. My warnings to Dade that Binkie would try to make him angry have been all but forgotten.
“I’ve said five times she didn’t say anything!”
Binkie shrugs and abruptly turns his back as Dade answers.
“Your witness.”
I wish desperately I could call a timeout and confer with Dade, but, of course, I am not permitted to do so.
Dade may be too pissed to answer my questions on redirect honestly, but I will have to risk that he understands that it is in his interest to convey to the jury that Robin was more to him than a football groupie. Suddenly, I realize I have sold him short by not forcing him to admit that he did feel something other than lust for Robin those few minutes that night. The jury badly needs to see an other side of Dade. I wait until the prosecutor sits down and ask Dade in a serious tone, “Had you liked Robin be fore the night she said you raped her?”
For the first time since I’ve known him, Dade looks glad to see me.
“She had really been nice to me, helping me so much,” he says earnestly.
I could hug him. He is smarter than I thought.
“Did you think she was pretty?”
“Uh-huh,” Dade responds. Long gone is the attitude that she was too skinny for his tastes.
“Had you ever before had a romantic or sexual relationship with a white girl?” I ask.
His face becomes stiff.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was told not to.”
Binkie is on his feet objecting.
“We’re getting into hearsay. Your Honor.”
I respond, “He can say what motivated him. Judge.”
“He just did, Mr. Page,” Judge Franklin says.
I’m happy to leave things as they are. Maybe the jury will think the chancellor of the university has a talk with all the incoming black freshmen. I sit down, happy in this instance to let the judge have the last word.
Having chosen to go down this road, Binkie has to stay with it. He strides to the lectern and rubs his hands together.
“So you were in love with Robin Perry,” he says, making the word sound as hokey as it does on daytime soap operas.
In control of himself, Dade answers softly, “I liked Robin a lot.”
“Did you like her-so much you couldn’t stop from raping her?” Binkie yells.
“I didn’t rape her,” Dade says softly.
With as much contempt as he can muster, Binkie shakes his head at Dade and returns to his table and sits down. For once, I don’t feel a need to rehabilitate Dade.
He has done as well as he can do.
“Your Honor,” I say quietly, “I’d like to recall Shannon Kennsit.” I can only hope that Shannon and Robin have obeyed the instruction not to discuss their testimony.
Wideeyed as a small child, Shannon returns to the witness stand. Her eyes narrow into slits as I remind her that she is under oath.
“Robin has told you, has she not,” I ask abruptly, “that at the party you and she went to on Happy Hollow Road last spring Dade had tried to kiss her while they were in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” Shannon admits in a soft voice, but there is no mistaking what she has said.
“But she said she didn’t let him.”
“No more questions,” I say, having rolled the dice and won. Maybe it is small-time craps, but if this case is about telling the truth, it will be something to argue to the jury.
Binkie shrugs as if I had stopped the trial to pick a piece of lint off my jacket.
“No questions. Your Honor.”
At precisely four-thirty Judge Franklin instructs the jury that for them to find Dade guilty of rape, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he engaged in sexual intercourse with Robin and that he did so by forcible compulsion. Putting on a pair of reading glasses for the first time all day. Franklin reads, “Forcible compulsion means physical force, or a threat, express or implied, of death or serious physical injury to, or kidnap ping of, any person….”
When he finishes. Judge Franklin looks down from the bench and says formally, “Mr. Cross, you may give the first part of your closing argument to the jury.”
As Binkie gets up and slowly walks to the jury rail, for the first time since noon I look at Sarah, who is sitting with Lucy. I wonder what kind of bond has been forged between them. So far as I know they have not talked until today. Is it race that they have in common or the fact that they are women? More probably, it is simply the two imperfect men in their lives sitting at the defense table.
Sarah tugs anxiously at her hair and glances up at me with a wan, scared look on her face. Are things that bad?
Probably. I can’t read this jury at all. I look at the sole black juror. Her dark, brooding face is a study in concentration as Binkie, jamming his hands in his pants pockets for the time being, begins.
“Ladies and gentlemen, when we began this morning, I said you’d be tempted to throw up your hands and say it was too hard to decide whom to believe in a case like this,” Binkie says, positioning himself at the middle of the jury rail. He has stopped in front of the oldest retiree and wags his head from side to side.
“But after hearing the testimony, I don’t think it is really all that hard if you use your common sense. Why would Robin Perry, a varsity cheerleader, an outstanding student, a girl who is from a deeply conservative family,
