Chapter 4
Defendants' Motion
The Pruitt County District Attorney's office was on the second floor of the old courthouse, above the tax assessor, and in August the air conditioning gave out every afternoon at about two.
"Sit," said Marcia Lenoir. "Please. I'm sorry about the heat. They tell me the part's on order."
She was forty-four, small and brisk, with cropped black hair and a navy suit that had been bought for exactly this kind of day. She had been an assistant district attorney for seventeen years. She kept a jar of peppermints on her desk and a framed photograph of two boys in Little League uniforms, and she had a way of listening with her whole head tilted, like a bird at a window, that made witnesses talk to her longer than they intended.
Corinne sat. Her mother sat beside her. Detective Beck sat by the door, with his toothpick, and said nothing.
"I'm going to tell you where we are," said Lenoir, "and I'm going to be honest about it, and some of it you won't like. Is that all right?"
"Yes."
"Good." She folded her hands. "The grand jury met on Tuesday. They returned indictments on all five. Grant Pruitt Jr., Owen Maddox, Terrence Boyle, Dale Sutter, and Caleb Moss. Rape, aggravated sexual battery, and conspiracy. Mr. Sutter has also been charged with obstruction." She let that sit. "I want you to understand how unusual that is. In this county. With that name on the first line."
"But they got indicted."
"They did."
"So it's started."
"It's started." Lenoir slid a sheet of paper across the desk. "And this is what comes with it."
It was a motion. It was seven pages long, on heavy cream paper, with a law firm's name embossed in the margin, and it was titled, in plain black capitals, DEFENDANTS' JOINT MOTION FOR PRODUCTION OF THE COMPLAINANT'S MENTAL HEALTH RECORDS.
Corinne read the first paragraph. She read it a second time. She had been trained to read quickly, to scan for the verb, and she scanned for it now, and it sat in the middle of the sentence like a stone in a shoe.
...the complainant, who has a documented history of dissociative episodes requiring inpatient psychiatric treatment, is the sole source of the allegations against the Defendants...
"They can't do this," said Ruth.
It was the first thing she had said all day. Her voice was quiet and perfectly level, and she was looking at the district attorney as she had once looked at an intern who proposed to remove a catheter without checking the chart.
"I'm afraid they can ask," said Lenoir. "It's the judge who decides. And in Georgia, a defendant's right to confront his accuser is very strong, and when the accuser's memory is the heart of the case—"
"Her memory isn't the heart of the case. There's a rape kit."
"There is."
"There are four men who were identified by name on an arm in ink before she'd even been through a door."
"There are."
"Then what is this?"
"This," said Marcia Lenoir, "is Hollis Crane."
Beck made a small sound by the door. It was the kind a man makes when a name he has been dreading has been said aloud in a closed room.
"Who is Hollis Crane?" said Corinne.
He was fifty-eight, and he practised in Atlanta, in a building with a fountain in the lobby. He was the man a family like the Pruitts called when they were not interested in the second-best option. He had defended a senator, two football coaches, and a bishop. He had never lost a jury trial in Fulton County and had lost only one appeal, which he described at dinner parties as a clerical error.
She would meet him on the ninth of September, at the first hearing, in Courtroom B on the second floor, where the air conditioning worked.
He was a tall, narrow, gracious man with silver hair brushed straight back and a voice like warm water. He rose when the judge entered, and rose when she left, and when Corinne's turn came to walk to the witness stand he stood quietly aside to let her pass, with a slight inclination of the head, as if she were a woman at a church door.
"Ms. Bellamy," he said, a few minutes later, pleasantly. "I wonder if you could tell us about Lakeview."
"Objection," said Lenoir.
"Sustained as to form," said the judge. "Mr. Crane, you may rephrase."
"Of course, Your Honor." He turned back, with a faint apologetic smile. "Ms. Bellamy. At the age of seventeen, were you hospitalized?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Forty-one days."
"At a psychiatric facility."
"At Lakeview Behavioral Health, in Atlanta."
"Thank you. I'm sorry. I know this is hard." He said it so kindly that for a moment she almost believed him. "And what was the reason for the hospitalization?"
She looked at him. She looked past him at the court reporter, a woman in her fifties with silver rings on three fingers, whose hands were resting on the machine as lightly as on the shoulders of a child. She had watched a hundred of those hands in a hundred mock trials. She knew exactly what the woman's left hand would do in the next second.
"My father died," said Corinne. "I found him. I stopped speaking for two weeks. And then one afternoon at school I stood up in the middle of a chemistry class and couldn't say what year it was. They called it a dissociative episode. They kept me because the doctor was afraid I'd hurt myself, and I wouldn't have, but I understood why she thought so."
"A dissociative episode."
"Yes."
"Meaning that you lost touch with reality."
"No. Meaning that for about forty minutes I was somewhere else, and nobody could find me."
"Where were you?"
"I don't remember."
A small sound moved through the gallery, not a laugh, only a breath, the sound of a room adjusting to something.
"No further questions," said Hollis Crane, gently, and sat down.
He had asked three of them. It had taken him ninety seconds. Corinne would understand, much later, that it had been the best cross-examination she would ever see, and that it had not been a cross-examination at all. He had not accused her of anything. He had merely allowed a room full of people to hear her say, in her own voice, that there had been a time when she did not know where she was.
The record would read: [No further questions.]
It would not say that the court reporter, a woman named Pat Delacroix, had looked up from her machine for one second, directly at the witness stand, with an expression that was not professional.
But that was in September.
In August, in the district attorney's office with the broken air conditioning, she sat with the motion in her hand and read to the end of it, all seven pages, while her mother watched her face.
There was a paragraph on page five. She read it twice.
The Defendants do not contend that the complainant is untruthful. They contend that she may be honestly mistaken. A person who has experienced documented episodes of dissociation, who by her own account "lost time" on the night in question, who was intoxicated, and who has a history of treatment for a disorder of memory, cannot reliably distinguish between what occurred and what her mind has reconstructed. It is respectfully submitted that the Court must examine whether her account, however sincerely given, is capable of bearing the weight the State has placed upon it.
However sincerely given.
She put the page down very carefully on the desk, squared it with the others, and set her pen on top, as she would have set a paperweight on a transcript.
"They're saying I'm not lying," she said.
"That's right."
"They're saying I'm honest."
"Yes."
"Then they're saying that nothing I tell anyone can be used."
Marcia Lenoir looked at her for a long moment. She did not, Corinne thought, look like a woman who was about to say something comforting.
"I think," said the district attorney, quietly, "that you're better at this than I am."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a yes. It's the cleverest thing I've seen them do." She took a peppermint from the jar, unwrapped it, and put it back, forgetting to eat it. "If they'd called you a liar, I could fight that. A jury doesn't like a defense that attacks a victim. But this—" She turned the page over, face down. "This is respect. This is the most respectful sentence I've ever read. And it will take your case apart."
Ruth Bellamy stood up.
She did it slowly. She put her hand on her daughter's shoulder, and left it there, and said to Marcia Lenoir, in the voice she used on the ward, clear and low and without the least inflection:
"My daughter has never in her life lied to me. If anyone in this building tells me that she has, I'll find out which one."
"Mrs. Bellamy—"
"I'm not threatening you." She smiled, with an effort that Corinne could see in the muscles of her jaw. "I'm only telling you what I know. I have been standing beside this child since the day she was born, and I'd like it to be written down, somewhere, by someone, that I said so."
Detective Beck, by the door, reached up slowly and took the toothpick out of his mouth.
"It's written down, Mrs. Bellamy," he said. "I'll see to that."
He meant it. She could tell that he meant it. She would think about that, later, in a year in which she would think about almost everything: that he had meant it, and that it would not matter.
Outside, on the courthouse steps, the afternoon had gone a flat white. A boy on a bicycle went by with a bag of ice. The Confederate monument at the end of the square, which had been the subject of a petition since April, had been covered with a tarp for repairs, and the tarp had slipped, so that one stone hand was visible, reaching out of the blue plastic as if it had something it wished to say.
Corinne stood with her mother at the top of the steps.
"I need to tell you about Lakeview," she said.
"You don't have to."
"You were there," said Corinne. "You know the dates. But you don't know what I told them. In the group. I said things." She was looking at the stone hand. "I said that sometimes I counted so I wouldn't leave. I said that I thought if I stopped, I'd go somewhere nobody could follow. I said all of that to a room of strangers. And now they're going to read it out loud. Aren't they?"
Her mother did not answer.
"They're going to read it," said Corinne, "in a courtroom. And I wrote it down. Every day. In the little notebook Dr. Okonkwo gave me. I wrote everything. And the judge is going to ask for it."
"Corrie."
"I'm the one who made the record, Mom." She laughed, very softly, a strange, thin, unhappy laugh. "That's what I'm best at. I made the whole record. And now somebody else gets to say what it means."
Her mother put both arms around her, in the middle of the courthouse steps, in front of the tax assessor's and the tarp and a woman with a stroller, and held her for what seemed a very long time.
It was Wednesday, the twenty-first of August.
There were four hundred and eleven days left until the case was dismissed.