Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (36 page)

“Around what year are we talking about?”

I shift in the uncomfortable wooden chair. If they keep this furniture much longer, they can sell it as antiques. This is one agency that doesn’t get in trouble for spending state money to redecorate bureaucrats’ offices.

“Maybe close to fifteen years ago,” I say, wondering if Olivia had another name back then. For all I know, she could have been married four times since her divorce.

Abruptly, Shelley stands, telling me, “I think I know who you’re talking about. I’ll be back in a minute.”

While she is gone, I look around her office, stilling an urge to go see who has my desk. Shelley has told me only three people remain in the entire office from the time I was there, which was only three years ago. The turnover is enormous.

Insufficient staff, low pay, and unqualified people who shuffle paper until the next tragedy hits the news have long made the place a revolving door. Why did I stay so long?

Much of the time I felt like a voyeur of horror. I know I would have gone crazy if I had accepted a supervisor’s job.

In a system this bad, you have to prove that a case worker lay in bed drunk for six months before you are allowed to fire him. Ordinary incompetence and negligence are part of the job description. On Shelley’s wall is a sign she has lettered herself.

“IP YOU GET YOUR PANTIES IN A WAD BEFORE 10

A.M.” YOUR MEDICINE ISN’T STRONG

ENOUGH.”

Shelley returns, panting a bit as she comes through the door and shuts it behind her. Her blue polyester pants, freak-show size, strain against her hips as she turns the handle on the flimsy door.

“If you reveal where you got this information, I’ll be in bad trouble.”

I watch her ease her huge body into the chair, thinking she could set the governor on fire and no one would touch her.

“You know I’d never do that.” What motivates her to stay?

She’s been here twenty-five years. Low pay and bad working conditions only explain part of it. Actually, I know the answer.

Without making a federal case of it, she is totally convinced there is nothing else on earth she could do with her life that is more important. “Don’t you remember this?” She grins happily, delighted by her superb memory.

“Good, good talker. We were about to file once before and she talked us out of it. This case was not your run-of-the-mill, attractive middle-class single white woman struggling to sell real estate and raise two small children;

and we kept getting calls she was neglecting the one-year-old. The older child, a girl, was retarded. We never exactly understood the problem, but when there was an incident with boiling water that burned the boy, she agreed to a placement with her mother in Ohio and we closed the file.

We never went to court. We’d file on a case like that now instead of having an informal agreement.”

I feel a chill run down the back of my neck. Olivia has never mentioned a word about any of this. Boiling water?

Give me a cattle prod any day. I think of her commercials.

She is a damn good talker all right, but, I suspect, a better actress.

“Can you live with a subpoena?” I ask.

“All of a sudden my memory’s crystal clear.” It isn’t, of course, but I have no qualms about lying to protect her.

My old friend’s smile becomes a smirk.

“You better say that,” she says, squinting at the file in front of her.

“And I didn’t tell you a damn thing.”

After getting a few more details (Olivia would admit only that her infant might have pulled a pan off the stove but had no answer when Shelley pointed out he wasn’t tall enough to reach it), I thank her and leave through the rat’s maze of cubicles, watching the workers at their desks, some gobbling sandwiches and talking at the same time. Almost always it is the poor who get caught up in abuse and neglect proceedings.

Was Olivia that down and out? This child would have had to have been born only a year or so after Pam but before the settlement with the obstetrician came through. Her husband left her, so maybe at one time she wasn’t all that much different from the terrified parents who are sitting across from the desks of my former colleagues. I look into the eyes of a young black man sitting in my old cubicle. Does Andy know about this part of Olivia’s life? I seriously doubt it. Just because she abused one child and let it be sent away doesn’t mean she wanted Pam to die. Yet, if I were a prosecutor, I’d be rubbing my hands with glee and wondering what else I could find out about the past of the star of the River City Realty Commercials.

“My brother’s a little naive,” Morris Chapman says soon after Andy introduces us. He flew in this morning from Atlanta and has accompanied Andy to my office for our final interview before the trial begins tomorrow.”

“You’ve noticed,” I say, unable to resist sarcasm now that I have an ally. Morris Chapman does not have his brother’s flair for clothes. For this visit at least he is dressed in a drab blue business suit that in no way announces its wearer’s presence Taller than Andy, he is also skinnier, but the family resemblance is there around the eyes and mouth. Yet, where Andy’s intelligent face mirrors his emotions even beneath his trim beard and glasses, his brother has a wary, pinched look as if he has an internal computer clicking off prices that he knows aren’t ever coming down. So this is where the money has come from, I think, already wishing this guy had been around for the last couple of months. His long fingers, clenched until this moment like talons around the arms of the chair, finally uncurl but do not relax. He lives in the real world; his brother does not. Uncertain how he will take the information about Olivia, and still wondering how to use it at the trial, I have not yet told Andy about what I learned at the Blackwell County Social Services office.

Andy, who seems to have returned to his more open and accessible personality now that his brother is here, flashes his first smile in days.

“Just a few days in prison will make me like y’all,” he says easily crossing an ankle over a thigh.

The half grin, half smirk on his face suggests to me that some of the weight he has felt in the last two months has been shifted to his brother.

“Not that normal,” Morris replies, shrugging, each digit of his hands now a blunt poker testing the strength of the wooden arms of the chair.

“Any dude dumb enough to get involved with a white bitch in your circumstances needs a lot of work.”

His crudeness crashes over his brother’s face like a tidal wave. I lean back in my chair, content for now to watch the family dynamic work itself out. Andy cocks his head at his brother as if he is amazed that Morris can use such terms, and especially in front of me. Yet his tone, when he finally speaks, is mild.

“White bitch?” he says, laying equal emphasis on both words.

“Mo, you haven’t even laid eyes on her.”

“Damn straight,” Morris says dispassionately as he looks squarely but blandly at me as if I were a poorly painted bowl of fruit in a frame on the wall.

“She’s played you for the starry-eyed, guess-who’scoming-to-dinner nigger aristocrat you’ve always wanted to be. If you had to have some respect able pussy, what’s wrong with Yettie? She’s always gone into heat every time your name comes up. You’ve dragged Yettie down to work with those shit-for-brains fuck-ups and now you won’t even look at her ‘cause you’re too busy sniffing white pussy. Damn, Andy, the only way they’ll let more than one nigger at a time in that bunny hutch where you live is in a maid’s uniform.”

As awful as Morris sounds, I have to resist the urge to hug him. I have thought everything he is saying. But white people can’t talk to blacks that way. Afraid I will end what is be coming an embarrassing but revealing harangue, I stare into the space between the two brothers, wondering how much more of this Andy will take. Yet surely Morris is no surprise to him. Everything comes with a price, and perhaps Morris is merely presenting his bill. After a few polite minutes of chitchat to show him I was real, I had intended to ask Morris to wait outside, but now I wanted him to stay. Despite his crudeness, he is delivering some badly needed reality therapy to his brother, who, amazingly, doesn’t seem angered by it.

As if he were a child learning to pray, Andy brings his hands together and touches them to his lips.

“My brother’s living proof,” he tells me, “of my theory that the most rabid racists and chauvinists are black men.”

Peeling somehow that Morris, Leon Robinson, and I are not all that different, I shake my head.

“I doubt that.”

Brother Morris, clean-shaven and almost burr-headed, so closely clipped is his bristled head, clearly couldn’t care less about our sociological speculations and now gives me a hard stare.

“I should of figured Andy’d get a white lawyer but I hear you don’t mind leaning on people. Can’t he agree to spill some shit on this Olivia Le Master and still cut a deal?”

Perhaps I should feel insulted, but I can live with the word “lean.” Morris understands the game, but surely he doesn’t know how prescient his remark is, and I doubt he knows how deeply involved Andy and Olivia are. Quickly, before Andy can interrupt, I reply, “Sure he could, but he says she hasn’t done anything wrong except trust his judgment.”

“Bullshit!” Morris explodes, slapping the arms of the chair.

“According to you,” he says, turning to his brother, “she was gonna pocket a couple million off her own kid’s death.”

Implicit in Morris’s question to me is the suggestion that Andy conspired with Olivia. More probably, Morris, cynical beyond words, thinks as I do that Andy may have been duped.

Andy returns his brother’s stare. He is younger, but he isn’t about to be bullied by him.

“Olivia’s only mistake in this nightmare,” he says stubbornly, “was to let me shock her daughter.”

I watch Andy’s lips curl into a rare but now familiar pout, signaling he won’t even begin to be budged. If this were still a charge of manslaughter, I’d have another guilty plea on my hands. It is as if it has taken his brother’s presence for him to admit he has some responsibility for Pam’s death, something that can’t be easy to accept when all his energy has been directed toward fighting for his freedom. How ironic that his streetwise, misanthropic brother has had the effect of stimulating his conscience.

“And your mistake,” Morris replies to Andy but nicking a glance at me, “was to pull your pants down when she started wagging her white ass at you.”

Maybe Morris knows more than I think. Andy, who rarely uses profanity in my presence and never refers to women in sexist terms, merely winces as he says to me, “Morris is a real liberal, isn’t he?”

Never having had a brother, and not being particularly close to my only sister (we blow hot and cold), I don’t get it.

What binds these two except blood?

“I think that species,” I reply, “has gone out of business.” “I hope to hell you’re right,” Morris says benignly.”

“They were about to kill us black folks.”

Despite my vow to keep out of this, I laugh out loud.

Morris probably thinks Franklin Roosevelt was part of a Communist plot to overthrow this country, while his brother may well pray to him every night. Still, they must touch something in each other. Maybe it’s just as simple as sleeping in a room together for a number of years and calling the same man and woman your parents. “The composition of the jury could be crucial for us,” I say, having called attention to myself and feeling forced to speak. I would like to be able to discuss my plan to force Leon Robinson to admit his membership in the Trackers, but I am afraid of the reaction I’ll get from Andy. Despite a concerted effort in the last few days on my part to get some information on Leon, I still have no evidence that he deliberately let go of Pam. Yet, surely it was as obvious to Leon as it was to Yettie that Andy and Olivia were romantically involved; and, given his feeling about blacks, Leon wouldn’t miss an opportunity to act upon his pent-up hatred. Too bad I can’t prove it.

“Damn straight,” Morris says emphatically, giving the chair a rest and slapping his knee with the palm of his hand. With his height and aggressiveness, Morris could have been a point guard in basketball had he gone to col lege. Owner of several businesses and some real estate in downtown Atlanta, according to his brother, Morris had better things to do than dribble a basketball and waste his time fantasizing about the pros.

“It only takes one to hang up a jury,” Morris says, looking at me for confirmation.

When I nod, he says, “On the other hand, no nigger I know, man or bitch, is gonna like it when it comes out Andy was messin’ with white pussy.”

I’ve almost gotten used to Morris, but when he says the “N” word, I flinch. For the last two days I’ve worried that there will be no blacks on the jury. Since Blackwell County is about twenty percent black (though its percentage of registered voters from whom the jury panel is selected could be lower), there should be at least a couple. But this is the kind of no-win case that makes prospective jurors, especially blacks, suddenly remember they are about to miss their mother’s funeral in Cleveland.

As if we have touched on something sacred, Andy pointedly changes the subject.

“Tell Morris about our expert,” he says to me.

Morris, like a dog with his favorite bone, shakes his head.

“You’re not gonna pull this shit about race not being an issue,” he says to his brother.

Again, I feel relief that Morris is here.

“It’s the most important thing in this case,” I tell Morris, convinced that only he can bring Andy around on this subject.

“As a psychologist Andy has got to appreciate more than either of us that the jury is going to be influenced by their own racial biases.

We just can’t sit there while the prosecutor takes advantage of that and we don’t,” I plead, hoping Morris will work on him.

For the first time today, Andy’s magnificent eyes begin to smolder behind the gold frames of his glasses.

“You know exactly how I feel about this,” he warns me, his voice a low rumble, “and you gave me your word. You are not going to pander to the racist instincts in the courtroom, and that is final.”