“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.
That’s all he told me about it.”
I exhale, glad that I have gotten no surprises and that Harris has avoided saying that Dade said he “did” Robin.
I ask him about the party, and try to anticipate Binkie by asking if Dade had ever said that he liked Robin.
Harris smooths down a lapel on his midnight blue wool blazer and wrinkles his face.
“You asked me that at that hearing at the school, and I said then he never said nothing about her except she was helping him. Dade had lots of girls. Me and Tyrone ragged him some after she and her roommate came to the house that day, but, see, you don’t know Dade. If he don’t want to talk, nothing can make him. He talks when he’s ready.”
Well, I hope he’s ready, I think to myself. He’s got some explaining to do.
“How did he act the night he said he had sex with Robin?”
As if I were a slow student he is duty bound to try to help, Harris leans forward, resting his forearms on his colossal thighs.
“He didn’t act any different than usual.
He was listening to his stereo when I went by his room. I asked him what he had been doing. That’s when he said what I just told you.”
“Are you certain Dade didn’t give you any details then or later about what had occurred that night?” I ask, stealing a look at the jury to see what kind of impression Harris is making on them. I notice in particular the face of the unemployed waitress, who is sitting in the front row of the jury box and is the closest to Harris. She is plainly skeptical. All humans gossip, her expression says. This would have been the normal time for Dade to have bragged about it. Robin was beautiful, a cheerleader, and, not least, a white girl.
“No,” Harris says finally, rubbing his hands along the tops of his thighs.
“He didn’t talk.”
I pass the witness.
Binkie approaches the podium with the demeanor of someone who doesn’t believe what he is hearing.
“Mr.
Warford,” he says, now bringing his gnarled hands out of his pockets and draping them over the lectern as if he wants the jury to inspect them, “weren’t you a little curious about the way Robin Perry had supposedly acted that night?”
“Yeah,” Harris says, “I was.”
Binkie drums his thumbs against wood.
“Did you ask him what Robin had been like?”
“I asked, but like I told you, when Dade don’t want to talk, nobody’s gonna make him.”
“What about the time when Robin and her roommate came out to the house on Happy Hollow Road did Dade act as if he was attracted to Robin?”
“I don’t know,” Harris answers.
“I was so busy answering questions her roommate was asking, I hardly noticed her.”
“So if Dade tried to kiss Robin back in the kitchen that afternoon, you didn’t see it?” Binkie asks, his voice be ginning to boom like shots from a cannon.
“Naw,” Harris says, looking genuinely puzzled.
“He didn’t tell me he tried to kiss her.”
Binkie has surely interviewed the others who were there that afternoon and found nothing useful.
“So as far as you know from all you saw or heard, there was nothing in either the behavior or actual words of either Dade or Robin to suggest they were more than friends who worked together in class?”
“Not that I could tell,” Harris says calmly.
“No more questions, Your Honor.”
I lean over and tell Dade he is next.
“Just take your time and remember to think about your answers.”
I stand up and tell the judge, “I call Dade Cunningham.”