Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(17)

“Right. Okay, let’s talk about the other night,” I said. “And Kevin, I’m just going to be honest with you. I don’t want to take this case. Someone close to me was raped when she was very young, and I know how devastating something like that can be. Usually, when criminal defense lawyers talk to clients, especially for the first time, they kind of dance around the facts of the case. The lawyer isn’t necessarily looking to find out if his client is innocent, because more than ninety percent of the time the client is guilty. So the lawyer looks for ways to attack the prosecution’s case by trying to find things the police may have done incorrectly. We look for constitutional violations, anything that can get our client out of the charge, or at the very least, put us in a better plea-bargaining position. But with you, I’m not going to do that. You’re going to have to convince me you’re innocent or I’m not going to take this case. I’m not going to represent a rapist, plain and simple. If you can’t convince me during this meeting that you didn’t commit this rape, you’ll have to find somebody else.”

“There was no rape,” Kevin said. “Nothing happened. You’re not going to kick me in the testicles, are you?”

“What? Why would you say that?”

“Because that’s what the cop did. I wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear so he kicked me in the testicles. I nearly passed out.”

That pissed me off immediately. I hated police brutality almost as much as I hated rapists.

“Who was the cop?”

“Skinhead named Riddle.”

Bo Riddle. I knew him well, or at least I’d known him professionally for a long time. I’d always suspected him of being a racist and had heard stories of him beating on suspects, but I’d never been able to pin anything on him. I made a mental note to make sure that changed in the near future.

“Okay, if I take this, I’ll deal with Riddle,” I said. “I promise you I’ll deal with him for assaulting you. But before we go there, what did you tell him?”

“I told him we hired a stripper, which we did. One of my buddies called the escort service. A couple of my friends got the money together from the players and put the party together. The girl showed up, she chatted some of the guys up, including me, for a few minutes, and then she said she was going into the bathroom to change and would start her show. When she came back out, she was too messed up to do anything. She could barely walk.”

“Know her name?” I said.

“No. The paper isn’t printing it and the cops didn’t tell me. I called the escort service and asked them, but they hung up on me.”

“Why in the hell did you hire a stripper to come to a party in the first place? I mean, even if this hadn’t happened, didn’t you think word would have gotten out?”

“Nothing happened,” Kevin said. “And as far as why we did it, I really can’t tell you. It wasn’t my idea, but I didn’t say no, either, when it came up. We’d been working our butts off, and we just felt like we needed to do something to loosen everybody up and have some fun before the season started.”

“So objectifying and sexually exploiting women is your idea of fun?” I said.

He was silent for several seconds. Then he looked at me and said, “You don’t like me much, do you?”

His parents were shifting in their seats. I don’t think the meeting was going quite the way they expected it to go.

“I don’t know you,” I said. “But I have to tell you I don’t tend to like people who objectify and exploit women. I have some wonderful women in my life that I love and respect, and I already told you about the rape incident, so when someone walks in here and says, ‘We hired a stripper to dance at a football party,’ it sticks in my craw a little.”

“Before we continue,” Gerome said, “may I ask you a personal question?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Sure.”

“Are you a racist?”

I figured the question might be coming, but I still found it a little disconcerting. Because I was vigorously questioning his son, I was a racist? What he didn’t know was that over the years, while practicing criminal defense, I’d asked myself that question many times. The answer, to me, was far more complicated than a simple yes or no.

“I don’t think so,” I said to Gerome. “I don’t think I’m a racist any more than you or anyone else. I think the better question, Mr. Davidson, is when I see a black man or a brown man or anyone of a different race, do I automatically hate that person? The answer to that question is an unqualified no. Do I judge them differently than I do white people? I don’t think so. I certainly don’t do it consciously. My mother was an uneducated Southern woman. She hated a lot of things, including the government as an institution, many individuals in government—especially those that had to do with our involvement in the Vietnam War—and she despised organized religion. But she didn’t hate people based on their skin color, so I didn’t have that ingrained into me from a parent or family member like so many racists do. I’ve represented black men and women and Latino men and women who have done some pretty horrible things, just like I’ve represented white men and women who have done horrible things. I look at them as flawed human beings, not as flawed black people or Latinos or white people. So I guess the simple answer to your question is no, I’m not a racist.