Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (3 page)

The question takes me by surprise. I have never considered working this side of the street. Why not? It is not a point of honor, or is it? I do not think of myself as a crusader for the proverbial “little guy” (whoever that is), but that is always the side where I end up. I lean forward and rest my arms against her desk.

“I’m going to defend Andrew Chapman.”

Amy nods, now understanding the purpose of my visit.

“Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

This is the opening I wanted. I want to find out whether it is the police or the prosecutor who is driving this case.

“Why?” I scoff, pretending indignation I don’t feel.

“It was obviously an accident.”

Amy’s normally elfin face is expressionless.

“Gideon,” she says carefully, “I’m not in Jill’s inner circle anymore.”

Surprised, I ask, “Why the hell not? I figured you’d be chief deputy, as good as you are.”

Without warning and for the second time today, a woman bursts into tears in front of me.

“Gideon,” she sobs, “I’m three months pregnant.”

I try not to gawk at her. Pregnant? I look more pregnant than she does. I study the photographs on her desk while she grabs a tissue. Stupidly, I ask, “Are you positive?”

Ignoring my idiocy, she bobs her chin.

“Jill is just rigid on the subject of children. She’d like to fire me, but since she can’t, she wants me to take maternity leave and have it.

I’m thinking of an abortion.”

I look at the picture other father, wondering if he knows.

What if Sarah brought me this news?

“This is tough,” I say, hedging. What do I think? I don’t know.

“Have you told your family?” I ask, hoping she isn’t looking for my advice.

“It’d kill them,” she says, honking loudly into a dry tis sue, “unless I decide to have it. But even then Mother and Daddy would never feel the same about me.”

Her parents, if I remember right, are hard-core Baptists.

I stare at the picture of them on their fortieth wedding anniversary and see guilt being uncorked by the gallon as they toast each other with glasses of presumably fake champagne.

“If you need to talk,” I say, hoping to leave the subject, “call me at home. I don’t have an office yet.” I want to help, but I don’t know what to say.

Taking my cue, Amy murmurs,”

“Poor Gideon. You’ve got your own problems.”

I nod, hoping to make her feel better, but I’d take mine any day I stick to my script.

“What is Jill running for?”

Despite her tears, Amy manages a characteristic smirk.

“If you repeat this, I’ll burn your house down, okay?”

I crook my right elbow at ninety degrees on her desk and hold my palm flat and stiff in imitation of a witness who takes his television lawyer shows seriously.

“I swear.”

Amy leans across her desk, and though I have closed the door, whispers, “The gossip I hear is that she is gearing up to run for attorney general in two years. Personally, I think she wants to be the first woman elected governor in the state.”

I lean back, feeling consternation at the never-ending political ambition of lawyers. Why do we feel we are called to positions of leadership merely because some of us become highly skilled at rationalizing decisions and actions of others?

My question was sarcastic, intended to probe for a less obvious motive.

“Isn’t her children’s crusade enough? I mean, my God, how many retarded people vote? Am I missing something?”

“Gideon,” Amy says, her round blue eyes serious, “she’s totally sincere about all of this. Have you heard one of her speeches?” When I shake my head, Amy’s voice rises as she folds her hands in front of her and begins to imitate her boss.

“Every hour of each day thousands of children are being exploited in Arkansas. Not only are children the poorest population group, they are the most physically and emotionally abused segment in society; they’re being provided an ever worsening education; they’re hooked into alcohol and drugs;

their inheritance, the environment and natural resources, are being wasted instead of conserved.” Amy’s voice returns to its natural pitch. “Her audiences eat it up. Children cut across class and race. It’s powerful stuff.”

I try to picture -Till Mary mount in front of the local Kiwanis Club and fail, but then I don’t have much imagination when it comes to politics. Jill is a tall brunette in her mid-thirties, striking rather than pretty, who reminds me of a high school English teacher. She scolds and shames juries more than persuades them, but I can’t argue with her record. Below a certain age, child-abuse cases are almost impossible to link to a specific perpetrator.

“I’ll take your word for it. She sounds like a nag to me.”

Amy, never modest in my presence, reaches inside her white blouse and painstakingly makes an adjustment.

“She’s got her statistics down cold, and she’s so intense, people hang on every word she says.”

I study my lap. Amy isn’t far from whipping off her bra so she can get at it better.

“What’s politics got to do with charging with manslaughter a psychologist who did his best to keep a child from battering herself to death?”

Finally giving up or satisfied (her expression holds no clue), Amy says, “Jill, I’m sure, in her own mind, honestly believes there is no connection. She sees the child who died as simply one more example of the way children are exploited in this country. It wasn’t the child who agreed to try electric skin shock it was her mother. What adult would voluntarily let herself be zapped with a cattle prod to stop self-destructive behavior? One of her arguments is that, for example, smoking kills thousands of adults each year, but they don’t go to psychologists for shock treatments to quit.

Of course, she holds your client responsible, because a mother in that situation is at her wit’s end and is at the mercy of the psychologist, who isn’t a real doctor anyway.”

So Chapman isn’t a psychiatrist but a psychologist. Amy is coming on a little strong: surely Chapman didn’t use a cattle prod. She is telling me more than she probably should, but I do not discourage her. Yet this may be already part of Jill’s after-dinner speech. I murmur, “So this fits right into her children’s-rights theme, huh?”

Amy wags a finger at me.

“Jill doesn’t mention children’s rights in her talks. Remember, they can’t vote. She simply says that these are our children whom we make into victims, sometimes by our neglect and sometimes by our deliberate actions. Who can argue with her?”

“She sounds like she has the makings of a first-class demagogue,” I say, hoping I can egg Amy on to more insights.

Know thy enemy.

“She’s not, really,” Amy says earnestly.

“Her friends say that she’s been saying the same things privately for years.

Now she’s got a public forum and wants to see if she can take the opportunity to make some changes she believes in.”

As Amy talks, I find myself wondering who the father is.

Probably one of the assistant prosecutors. There are some real pretty boys over here now.

“Do you know who’s going to try the case?”

I know her answer before she can say it.

“Jill.”

“Who will assist her?”

Amy spreads her hands.

“Why don’t you ask up front?”

I stand up, taking the hint. It won’t help Amy if anyone thinks she has been talking about the case to me. I reassure her.

“Mum’s the word,” I say, pretending to zip my mouth.

Amy laughs.

“You act so silly to be such a good lawyer.”

I smile, pleased at the compliment. Were I certain of my ability, I would not need to be reassured. I have lost confidence in myself in the last hour, and for good reason. If I am so good, why was I fired?

At the front desk the receptionist calls around for me and finds out that an attorney by the name of Kerr Bowman can see me for a few minutes. She gives me directions, and I head down to the opposite end of the hall from Amy’s office.

I do not know Mr. Bowman, but my first impression is that I have not missed much. Though he is at least fifteen years my junior, Bowman greets me as if I were a long-lost fraternity brother. He is the kind of attorney who is always onstage, no matter how small the audience. The only thing I like about him is his tie, which has alternating navy and green stripes. He is young and cocky, with so much blond hair he probably has to dry it with an industrial-strength fan.

Somewhere along the line a professor must have told this kid he would make a great trial attorney and he believed it. I look behind him and see on his wall a diploma from the University of Texas. That accounts for some of it. Fortunately, today he is on a short leash. He pretends not to have a copy of the arrest warrant, telling me that “Bobba” Stewart, the prosecutor over in municipal court, will be delighted to make me a copy.

“We’ll get one when the case is filed in circuit court after the probable cause hearing,” Kerr says.

I try not to roll my eyes. Kerr probably drafted it. I can’t say much without implicating Amy, so I play dumb, an easy role for me most of the time.

“I assume, since I’m talking to you, that you’ll be handling it once it gets to circuit court.”

Kerr fingers his tie.

“Jill and I will be working together.”

I can’t resist a smile. Once the case hits the papers, he’ll be lucky if she sends him out to have a subpoena served.

“Must be a big case,” I say, feeling a pang on the right side of my mouth. At breakfast I crunched down on what felt like a rock in my cereal and spit it out. A part of a dingy silver-black molar lay on the table surrounded by mush. Second one this year. My mother’s teeth. If my dick begins to crumble the way my teeth are I ‘ll be down to two inches by Christmas.

A good grunt, Kerr doesn’t bite.

“It should be good experience.”

If it goes to trial. Yet Chapman doesn’t strike me as the type to want to cop a plea. I’ll find out soon enough. I head back over to the municipal court, leaving Kerr napping his gums about what a privilege it is to work in front of a jury.

A minute more and I would have gagged. Could Kerr be the father of Amy’s unborn child? Surely she has too much sense for that. The legal woods these days are full of Kerr Bowmans—showoffs with loud voices who are convinced a few jury trials make them bona fide lawyers. I’m not so sure. The most effective attorneys keep their clients out of court and failing that, if at all possible, away from a jury. I hope I don’t have to fight Chapman over a plea. Actually, what I’d love to do is take this case and try it and win. I’m going to need all the publicity I can get.

I sit in the back of the courtroom and wait for Bobba Stewart to finish up. The prosecutor could have filed Chapman’s case directly in circuit court and avoided a “probable cause” hearing—ordinarily no big deal, but under the circumstances, not a sure thing, since Darwin Bell, the municipal judge, is likely to be curious about a fellow African-American with a doctorate accused of recklessly killing a child he was trying to help. At the very least, I am counting on Darwin to set a quick bond hearing and perhaps set Chapman free on his own recognizance. The trial, a simple assault involving onetime friends, no more than a good slap in the face according to Judge Bell, who summarizes the case and then fines the defendant, a bookkeeper for a church, court costs, gives him time served (a day in jail), and then admonishes the complainant and the defendant to stay away from each other.

I come forward while the judge is lecturing the parties.

Since it is now routine, the sight of a black man in central Arkansas shaking his finger at two white males as he warns them to stay clear of each other has lost its wonder (in certain parts of the state a two-headed calf presiding on the bench wouldn’t draw as big a crowd) so that I can perhaps squeeze in a bond hearing before he quits for the day. After he finishes, I grab Bobba, who shrugs noncommittally at my request and accompanies me to the bench to speak to Judge Bell. I explain what I want to the judge, who listens while he is writing in the docket book his female clerk has handed him. When I tell him the name of the defendant. Judge Bell, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Sammy Davis, Jr.” in the period of Sammy’s life when he was photographed joyously embracing Richard Nixon, shakes his head and says, “You’ll have to ask Judge Bruton. I have to recuse. Your client was the best man at my wedding.”

Bobba grins slyly as if to say “Gotcha!” A story is told about Judge Bruton, an old man who generally hears only traffic cases, that he once said at a reception for a colleague that the country had begun an irreversible decline the day Lincoln freed the slaves. This remark must be many years old, because within the so-called “civilized center,” as the Arkansas Gazette once referred to central Arkansas, racist remarks made in public have long been regarded as a breach of etiquette. In private, a different code governs. Five minutes later I am told by Judge Bruton’s clerk that the judge, approaching seventy, has gone home for the day. My bond hearing will be no sooner than tomorrow, and I walk down stairs to tell Andrew Chapman that he will have to spend the night in jail, for no other reason than one judge likes him too much and the other one has gone home to doze in front of the afternoon soaps.

Downstairs I can detect relief by the spring in Chapman’s step as he is led toward me. Damn, I haven’t been on this case an hour, and I already feel guilty. Why? I think it’s because I already like Chapman, even though I’ve just met him. Some people (not many criminal defendants) I like instinctively and he is one of them. There is a dignity about the man that is appealing. I extend my hand formally, knowing at the moment I have nothing better to offer him. He crushes my fingers as if to reprimand me silently for allowing him to be degraded in this way. I explain his dilemma, and he listens intently. Fortunately, I didn’t promise him his re lease this afternoon. Still, guilt, like prickly heat, jabs my conscience while I explain that tomorrow morning he will appear before the judge for a bond hearing. This man should not be in jail even overnight. If he were white, given the nature of the alleged crime, he would most likely be released on his own recognizance. He may spend one night in jail, but I’ll be damned if he is going to spend another one.