Clarence lowered his head, saying nothing.
“Okay, we need to talk strategy,” Grant Bowles said. “Nick checked into your arrest. There were some procedures we can challenge. We can say the officer was out of his league, should have turned it over to the detectives and the sex abuse experts. It’s a judgment call, but we’ll argue it was a bad one. Also, he failed to give you a drug test and didn’t get the girl to the med school for the semen examination. Has to be done within forty-eight hours. We’re lucky he blew that one.”
“Why?” Clarence asked. “If he’d done it, it would’ve cleared me.” He looked uncomfortably at Geneva, sitting quietly beside him, her arm in his. “There would have been no drugs, and no semen, or it would’ve been someone else’s, not mine. Right?”
“Sure. Whatever.” Clarence looked at his attorney long and hard. For the first time it occurred to him that he didn’t believe him.
“Look, Grant, I didn’t do this. No way. If you don’t believe that, I want another lawyer.”
“Clarence, it’s my job to defend you, and that’s what I’m going to do. But if you’re sure you’re innocent, you can take the polygraph test and that will help us.”
“If I’m sure? Of course I’m sure. I didn’t do it!”
“Okay. Then we’ll submit to a polygraph test. It’s not admissible, but it makes a strong statement to the prosecutor. The DA’s looked over the officer’s interview notes, and he’s taking it to a grand jury so they can determine whether there’s probable cause.”
“So I’ll be able to tell them my side of the story?” Clarence asked.
“No, you won’t. It doesn’t work that way. They just hear your accuser. They aren’t giving a final verdict, just determining if there’s probable cause to take it further.”
“And if there is probable cause?”
“The DA puts out a warrant for your arrest. Then you go through booking. But you’ve already done that. So you’d just show up at the arraignment.”
“When’s that?”
“Tuesday, 2:00 P.M., Room 3 back at the Justice Center. There’s just one arraignment hearing a week. Lots of other people will be there.”
Clarence remembered that the Trib had a reporter assigned to the weekly arraignment. As a respectable citizen with no record, and as a fellow reporter, surely Dan Ferrent wouldn’t put his name in the paper. Especially not with a minor involved. Would he?
His heart sank. He kept thinking of his children, especially Jonah. And what people would be thinking and saying.
“Manny talked with the officer who arrested you,” Ollie told Clarence as they sat in his living room. “They’re buddies.”
“That figures,” Clarence said.
“What figures?”
“That they’re buddies.”
“Why? Because they’re both Hispanic?” Clarence didn’t respond. “Well, I’ve got a lot of white friends,” Ollie said. “You got a lot of black friends?”
“Yeah.”
“Then don’t make something of it because Hispanics have Hispanic friends, okay? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Anyway, Manny asked him why he chose to follow through on the case rather than hand it over to the sex abuse detectives or the CAT.”
“Cat?”
“Child Abuse Team. He said he likes to follow a case through. That’s okay, it’s his call. Manny asked him why he cuffed you, given your history as an upstanding citizen and all. I’m sure he checked and saw you didn’t have a record. He said the reason he did it was you were so hostile with him. Of course, I didn’t realize you would be so incredibly stupid as to actually lay a hand on him.”
“It was just a finger.”
“Finger’s on your hand, right?”
Clarence looked down at his hand. “Yeah.”
“The officer felt you were a risk since you were agitated and you’re so big.”
“Or since I’m so black?”
“You know, Clarence, you’re not a fun guy to try to help. Anybody ever tell you that? Manny and I, we’re both concerned for you so we try to get some info that might be helpful, while you just make it worse for yourself by justifying your stupidity.”
“I didn’t do it!”
“Didn’t do what? Mess with the girl? Do the drugs? I believe you. But did you yell at the police officer? Poke him in the chest? So what do you expect? He told Manny at first he was going to cut you some slack. Till he saw how you acted and he found the stuff on you.”
“He arrested me.”
“He was doing his job If you’d cooperated, there would’ve been no handcuffs and you could’ve just walked out the door with him. But that was too easy, huh? Well, let me welcome you to the slow cogs of American justice,” Ollie said, getting up to leave. “I hope they move faster for you than they did for me.”
“Ollie, wait,” Clarence said. “I’m sorry. I really appreciate your help. Look, sit down, would you? Talk to me. Is there anything more on Dani’s case? Like with the license plate?”
“Lucky for us, Motor Vehicles is way behind and hasn’t sent the permanent plates yet.” Ollie took out his notepad and flipped a few pages. “They’ll be delivered to a Mr. Rafer Thomas in L.A. One of my cop buddies down there went and checked him out. He was real cool. Said there must be a mistake. Doesn’t know anything about a Mercedes. The guy has a Crip history, and you can bet he’s a friend or relative of one of our guys. I sent down a PI to check out his family. Ray Eagle.”
“You sent Ray?”
“Yeah. He does a good job, ex-cop you know. But he’s the one that called me. He’s doing it for free.”
“For free?”
“We can’t afford to hire PIs. But since Ray volunteered to help you, I said sure. He flew down this morning. Motor Vehicles is going to send the plates through to Rafer Thomas tomorrow. Ray’s going to be on surveillance, watching the mailbox. When the plates come, wherever Thomas goes, Ray goes.”
An official-looking, brisk-walking woman escorted Clarence into a plain, colorless room. It was quiet, deathly quiet, conspicuously lacking life’s background noises. Only one door came into the room. There was no other way to get out. On one wall was a mirror. Clarence supposed it was a two-way mirror. He wondered what invisible eyes were watching him.
Nick Sirianni, Grant Bowles’s young partner, sat in a chair off to the side. Nick seemed nervous, his eyes darting around the room. Clarence wondered if this was the right move after all.
“Please be seated, Mr. Abernathy,” a middle-aged, accountant-like man said. Clarence sat uncomfortably in the chair. It seemed fashioned for a five-foot four-inch, 120-pound woman. The man started to strap a tube around his chest.
“What’s that?” Clarence asked.
“A pneumograph tube.”
“What does it do?”
“Just relax, Mr. Abenathy. It monitors your breathing.”
A female assistant put a blood-pressure cuff around his right arm. She pumped it, and he felt it close in around him.
“Turn your hand up, please.” She put electrodes on his fingers and the surface of his hand. He felt like a serial killer about to be electrocuted.
They set up a microphone in front of him. He wanted to ask if this was going to be taped, but he didn’t want to sound defensive.
Why is it so hot in here?
He wiped his face with a handkerchief, self-consciously, feeling as if he was being studied like a lab rat. At an overly neat desk sat a white man with the calm measured voice of a scientist studying a specimen. “What is your name?” he asked him.
“Clarence Abernathy.” He paused just before he said it, afraid that by saying it wrong he would appear to be a liar. It was irrational, he knew. But it was as if he were on trial for every black man who’d ever lived. If they thought O. J. got away with something, they’d make sure he didn’t.
The man asked him question after question. “Do you know Gracie Miller?”
“Yes.” Why did he feel guilty? Of course he k
new her. He met her on assignment.
“Did you give illegal drugs to Gracie Miller?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Have you taken drugs in the last week?”
“No,” he said, but then he realized the man hadn’t said “illegal” this time. He thought about his insulin. Was that considered a drug? Should he qualify his answer? Too late. His interrogator had moved on to another question.
Several other questions followed and then, there it was. “Did you have sexual relations with Gracie Miller?”
“No!” He said it louder than he meant to. He felt agitated at this whole process. He wanted to be done with this nonsense and get out of this cage. Without showing any expression the man at the neat desk studied the physiological changes as they were transmitted through a small panel unit and into the synchronized readings on the moving graph paper. Later he would take these parallel graphs and correlate and interpret them to determine whether Clarence was lying. But already he was drawing his conclusions, Clarence felt sure.
The interrogator repeated several earlier questions, including whether Clarence took drugs and had sex with Gracie Miller. Half an hour later, they unhooked him from the devices.
“You’re free to go now, Mr. Abernathy.”
Clarence walked out with his lawyer. “That was so weird,” Clarence said to him. “I just told the truth, but I feel like I blew it.”
“You did fine,” Nick said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“They sit in judgment over truth,” Torel said, “but Elyon alone knows everything, sees every heart, records every action. He is the rewarder of those who embrace truth and the punisher of those who embrace falsehood. Truth brings its own rewards, sometimes in the Shadowlands, but always in heaven.”
“I realize now,” Dani said, “sometimes I put more value on the rewards in that world than those reserved for this one.”
“Earth’s treasures are easily destroyed,” Torel said. “If a person’s treasures are on earth, death is the ultimate tragedy, for it separates him from his treasures. Every day brings him closer to death, and therefore every day moves him farther from what he treasures. Jesus said to lay up your treasures in heaven, so that every day on earth, as you get closer to leaving that world, you are headed toward your treasures instead of away from them. He who is headed away from his treasures has reason to despair. He who is headed toward his treasures has reason to rejoice.”
Dani nodded. “No wonder so many there live lives of despair instead of joy.”
“Do you recall the story Jesus told,” Torel asked, “about using your resources on earth to gain friends in heaven so that when your life there was done you would be welcomed into eternal dwellings? What you did during your life on earth made special friends for all eternity, friends eager to open their homes to you in heaven. People you helped and discipled and shared your faith with, they will invite you to their dwellings in the heavenly city. You will share meals together, make music and celebrate, and tell great stories of old.”
“I can hardly wait for that, Torel.”
“There will be others too you still haven’t met. Those you influenced without even knowing it by your godly example, by your letters, your phone calls. Those you reached through your art, the lives you touched in your church and Bible studies, and the lives in turn that they touched, lives you don’t even know yet. Those to whom you brought the truth—like when you gave a book to one person who passed it on to another, and she to another. There are people you talked to on a bus, waitresses, a woman who cut your hair. The child of the woman who cut your hair. The friend of that child. There is an effect like dominos falling, one touching the next, which touches the next, and so on. When you gave your time and money to the poor and to reach people with the gospel, these were investments that will bear eternal returns. Here you will always be thankful for every minute of worship, every hour of prayer, every dollar you gave to further the cause of Christ. People will come to your home and say ‘thank you,’ and they will open their homes to you, and you will hear their stories. Perhaps you may go back over time and space and relive their adventures with them.”
“If only I’d understood this on earth. It would have been a great motivator. It would have changed the way I lived.”
Clarence arrived at Bowles & Sirianni at ten the next morning. He sat down in the office of Grant Bowles.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Clarence.”
“What?” Clarence caught his breath.
“You failed the polygraph,” Grant said. Clarence sat motionless, staring at nothing. “The examiner says your responses indicate you weren’t telling the truth. At least not on the key subjects of doing drugs and having sex with Miss Miller.”
“But I was telling the truth. I’m innocent!”
“Clarence, listen, I’m your attorney. It’s my job to defend you, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get you off. Anything you say to me is entirely confidential under attorney/client privilege. I cannot, I will not divulge it to anyone.”
“Why are you saying all this?”
“Because I have to ask you. Are you sure you never did heroin or had sexual relations with Gracie Miller?”
Clarence stared vacantly into his attorney’s eyes. He got up, walked out of the room, and headed for the elevator, ignoring the voice behind him. “Clarence, we’re not done. We have to talk.”
Clarence drove straight to the Justice Center. As he went up the elevator, for the first time he knew exactly what was going on in all those floors where the elevator wouldn’t stop. He sat down with Ollie and told him about failing the polygraph.
“I wish you’d told me this before,” Ollie said. “I never recommend taking a polygraph.”
“Why? I wasn’t lying.”
“I know that. But the lie detector has a basic flaw—it doesn’t detect lies. It detects stress. It records blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration. That’s not the same as recording truth and lies. I rarely use polygraphs anymore. I’ve seen people I know for a fact are guilty pass them. I’ve seen people I know are innocent fail them. They’re right the great majority of the time, of course, but that’s no consolation when they’re wrong.”
“But…I don’t understand,” Clarence said. “I thought they were reliable. Obviously, my lawyer thought so.”
“He’s probably only had good experiences up till now. He’ll think twice next time.”
“He said if I’m innocent I should take it, if I’m guilty I shouldn’t. If I didn’t take it, I’d have looked guilty.” He wondered if his voice sounded as pathetic to Ollie as it did to him. “Your reputation is all you’ve got, Ollie. I felt like I had to take that test to save my reputation.”
Ollie looked at him. Neither of them had to say it. If Clarence’s reputation was all he had, then now he had nothing.
Clarence put the girls to bed. He tried to explain to Jonah what had happened, embarrassed both by what he’d been accused of and that he’d failed the polygraph test. After an awkward conversation, he left Jonah’s room and went out to join his daddy and Geneva, who sat in the living room in front of the fire, Obadiah on a rocker and Geneva on the couch.
“I was just talkin’ to Geneva about your mama, Son. Some days I miss her so bad it hurts. You should have seen her when I first did. Um, um. She was so pretty, uncommon pretty. Like my daughter-in-law here. She could cook up gumbo by the bucket like nobody you ever seen. When we was courtin’, we used to sit on that ol’ Mississippi porch countin’ cricket chirps. And later when we was married, we’d put you kids to bed and we’d lay out a blanket and get on our backs and count the stars. We got up to a thousand one night. Well, yo’ mama’s on the other side of those stars, lookin’ down. Not that long I’ll be lookin’ down here too. And when I do, I want to see my son tellin’ his chillens about the God who created those stars.”
“I’ve lost everything,” Clarence said. “You work so hard, and then someone takes it all away with a lie.?
??
“You hasn’t lost everything, Son,” Obadiah said. “The things most important are the things only God can see. Ain’t nobody can take those away. Only God knows what’s truth and what’s lies. He separates the grain from the chaff. Don’t matter what men think. Only matters what God thinks. If the world thought you was innocent and God knowed you was guilty, you should be shakin’ in your boots. If the world thinks you’re guilty and God knows you’re innocent, then what the world thinks don’t matter a hill of beans, now does it, boy?”
“Do you know what they’re sayin’ about me, Daddy? I could go to jail for this. Lose my job. A man’s reputation is all he’s got.”
“No, a man’s character is all he’s got. And his God’s all he’s got.”
“And his family,” Geneva added.
Obadiah nodded so hard his old neck creaked. “We’re still here for you, Son. Your family loves you. You got the best woman who ever walked God’s green earth, save your mama and your sister.” He smiled and nodded at Geneva. “We know they’s lyin’ about you. I been lied about myself. I knows what it’s like. But see, character, that’s what a man is in the dark, where only God sees him. You’re in a trial right now, Son. You gots to make sure you’re lettin’ the good Lord build his character in you. You gots to entrust yourself to the God who judges justly. That’s what you gots to do.”
“I don’t understand why he’d do this to me.”
“Clarence, you remember that time in Mississippi, just before we moved north, when I told you to haul in the hay before the rain come? ’Member what you said to me?”
“Yeah. I said, ‘I don’t feel like it.’”
“And what did I do?”
“You took off your belt and told me, ‘Son, I can change the way you feel.’”
“That’s what you needed. We all need it, Son, even when we don’t realize it. You ask me why your Father’s doin’ what he’s doin’. I don’t know the answer for sure. Maybe it’s discipline, maybe it’s to change your priorities, maybe to make you more like him. Maybe he’s just tryin’ to get your attention. Maybe he’s decided to change the way you feel.”