At the detention center Class is not at all depressed with the judge’s decision to set the trial the last week in May.
“I jus’ want to get it over with,” he says, emphatically.
“I’m sick of this place.”
As bad as the old jail may have been, I doubt if it had this much security. Here, separated as we are, Bledsoe can’t even shake hands with
me, much less hug his wife. It is hard not to like this guy. As he tells me how much he has begun to miss Lattice, I think of a statistic I’ve read and wonder if it can possibly be true: a million black males locked up all over the United States. It is a mind-boggling number. Is this the only way blacks and whites can live together in this country?
I wonder how many of them are innocent.
Other than Willie’s blood on his knife, there is no physical evidence linking Class to the murder. If he had the money, I would hire a forensic expert to tell the jury why there were no hair, flesh, or clothing fibers found under Willie’s fingernails.
The only bloody footprints leading away from the spot where he died were Doris Ting’s, apparently made when she discovered the body. I’d also like to get an investigator to do a thorough background check on each of the individuals who worked at the plant. One of them could easily have something in his or her past that could be useful to us.
Here, as in too much of life, you get what you pay for and no more.
We talk at length about the events of the day of the murder, which occurred on a Tuesday, September 21, but it is painfully obvious that Class has no memories of that afternoon that can help him. Though I don’t know if it will cut any ice with Butterfield at this point, I urge him to consider taking a polygraph, but he is disturbingly adamant on the subject.
“Like I already said, I don’t trust ‘em,” he says, his voice more stubborn than I’ve ever heard it.
“In a case like yours,” I explain, “the defendant they really want is the one who arranged the murder.”
Class pushes his hands inside his pockets.
“I’m not gonna take no test.”
My heart sinks a little at his intransigence. The last time a defendant of mine refused to take a polygraph test it turned out he was lying. It sounds as if Class has already talked to a lawyer long before he ever contacted me. I ask him if he consulted anyone else, but he claims he has not.
He insists that he never had a conversation with anyone over the telephone from the plant office about having received some money.
“If I’d a killed ole Willie, I’d have to be dumb to call someone from there,” Class argues, staring hard at the concrete floor.
“Not necessarily,” I respond.
“You would have had to think that nobody was around.” Actually, I agree with him. Criminals do amazingly stupid things all the time, and that’s why some of you get caught, I think, my frustration growing.
“Why would the bookkeeper make up a story like that?”
I ask, flipping through the file to find her statement.
“I don’t know,” Class says, his voice getting more stubborn by the moment.
“Maybe she killed Willie, but I doubt it. She’s all right.”
I make the speech I make to all my criminal defendants—that I can’t help them if they lie to me—but it is water rolling off a duck’s back.
I ask him if he has ever stolen from the plant or anyone in the plant.
He denies that he has. Surely in five years he would have had the opportunity to smuggle out a ham for his birthday, but he insists he hasn’t. So much for an explanation for his conversation over the phone in the plant.
I work the discussion around to the other employees in the plant, and finally get Class to think of at least one person who had it in for Willie. He knows someone, he says almost sheepishly, who was fired by Willie about a month before he was killed. Vie Worthy had come in drunk and had nearly cut his little finger off one morning while shaving the hair off pigs’ feet.
Willie had driven him to the hospital but wouldn’t let him come back to work after he got his finger sewed up. ‘“Bout three times a year, he’d drive across the bridge and gamble his paycheck away,” Class says.
“He’d drink all the way home, and then come to work skunked, and I guess Willie finally figured that it shouldn’t be on his time.”
Class sneezes into his hand. He has caught a major cold.
“So he was pissed off because he got canned?”
Class looks up at me, his face a study in disapproval.
“He’d be drinkin’ and talk about how he’d like to kill Willie for firm’ him. See, he wudn’t the only one to ever come to work fucked up.”
It’s about time Class got around to this story, but I’m beginning to learn Class doesn’t do anything in a hurry. I write furiously and ask for as many details as he knows, which aren’t much.
Class had ridden over to Tunica with him to gamble on the riverboats a couple of times, but they had never pulled an allnighter together.
Since Class always took his car when they went together, he could control the time they came home. He had seen him downtown hanging around the square a time or two after Willie had let him go. Usually, Vie was half lit. He was more than half lit the time he’d made the remark about killing Willie. Nobody was with them at the time, and Class had forgotten about it until last night when he had been thinking about the other workers in the plant like I had asked him. I ask if he has seen Vie around town recently, and he says a time or two and tells me where Vie lives.
I tell him I will try to see him later in the week, and walk out to the Blazer, feeling only slightly better about the case. I drive back into Bear Creek and cruise by Angela’s but am disappointed to see that her car isn’t there. I go up to the door and leave a card and write on the back that I’m sorry I missed her. I look back across the street at Mrs.
Sure enough, I see the Venetian blinds move in her front window. I wonder if when I leave she will hobble up the stairs to read what I have written.
At ten, tired by the trip home, I collapse into bed, and fall immediately into a hard sleep but am awakened by Angela at eleven. At first I am so groggy that I don’t realize that it is she, but her voice, warm and confiding, is a shot of adrenaline, and I come instantly awake. How like a teenaged boy she makes me feel! Lust but more than that. How can that be? Was our history together as good as I imagine? It seems to me that it was. Whatever the truth is, I seem programmed to respond to this woman, who surprises me by saying she has been given two tickets to the Razorback game with Memphis Saturday afternoon at the Pyramid. Since the game will be shown on ESPN, I think I would rather watch it from her couch under a blanket in her living room, but I tell her that sounds like fan. We arrange a time for me to come by. It’s still too early to be thinking about making love to this woman, but this will be a real date, which is a starting point. Maybe her off-again on-again attitude is normal. As I lie in the dark, I try to remember what it was like making love to her. I find I can’t actually recall the moment of an orgasm, but my failure of memory does not stop me from imagining what it would be like now.
Later, sinking back into sleep, I think there may be just an awful lot I don’t remember about Angela. Maybe we’d be better off not knowing everything. Is everyone’s life as messy as my own?
I turn onto my stomach, wishing futilely, like most people I know, I could undo some things.
Wednesday afternoon I receive a call at my office from Tommy, who confides to me in a less than confident voice that his family has decided to allow him to instruct his cousin Eddie to encourage his workers in the plant to talk with me.
Buoyed by the miracle of my client’s finally realizing just how stupid it was to allow a third party to make a decision about the future of his children and accepting the agreement we’d hammered out a week ago, I try to think of how to keep Tommy from suddenly changing his mind. I begin by asking if he has been made aware that a former employee named Vie Worthy had
threatened his father less than a month before he died.
When he says he hasn’t, I add, “He probably wasn’t the only person angry at your father, either. There’s never been a person who didn’t overestimate his charms as a boss.”
Perhaps pausing to consider that I could be right. Tommy finally asks, “How does Bledsoe explain the phone call he made from the plant?”
Tommy isn’t going to forget anything and neither will a jury.
“He swears he didn’t do it.
Maybe she misunderstood him,” I say.
“Maybe it wasn’t him she heard. I just want to be able to open up some communication with people like her.” For all I know, she killed Willie and is framing Class ; however, women don’t usually commit premeditated murder with a knife.
“Gideon, promise me you won’t manipulate anyone into saying something they don’t know,” Tommy instructs me, “or honestly believe.”
“I’m an advocate,” I assure him, “but I’m also an officer of the court.
I wouldn’t do that.”
“My father didn’t trust lawyers,” Tommy says, repeating an earlier comment from last week.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if we hadn’t grown up over there together. We were both kind of outsiders.”
Actually, I’ve never thought of us quite like that, but now is not the time to quibble with him.
“I appreciate this. Tommy. I won’t abuse the situation.
You can count on that.”
I can’t ask Tommy to keep our conversations a secret from the prosecutor or Paul’s attorney, and will have to assume he is sophisticated enough not to volunteer them. It is inevitable that sooner or later, Paul and Dick will find out that I am actively working against them, but by then I hope it will be too late. I suggest that he not talk to Eddie about encouraging the workers to talk to me until I have had an official tour of the crime scene, which will probably be made with Paul’s attorney. In order to get this out of the way, I will have to call Butterfield, who could require me to jump through the hoops and file a motion with the
court, but I don’t suspect he will.
Friday morning I follow Tommy’s directions and take Highway 79 to the plant, which is only a mile from the city limits. This visit to the crime scene has turned into a full-scale production. Not only is Dick to meet me out here but the sheriff will be here, too. Since the plant is in operation, there can no longer be any crime scene to tamper with, but Sheriff Bonner, I’m learning, goes by the book. Off the highway a good fifty yards and shielded by a stand of trees, the plant is bigger than I imagined, almost as long as a football field from end to end. I turn into the parking lot, which is full of old junkers and trucks. As depressed as the economy is over here, I suspect most of the workers don’t receive much more than minimum wage. Some of these people are obviously skilled butchers, but I doubt if old Willie had much of a profit-sharing plan.
Inside the plant office I ask a white male, who looks like Willie Nelson with a full white beard, for Eddie Ting. Apparently, neither Dick nor the sheriff has arrived.
“Darla, is Eddie in the can?” he says, scowling at a woman who must be Darla Tate, the woman who claims she overheard Class. A tall, big-framed woman in her late forties toiling behind a computer screen, Darla smiles, making up for her colleague’s lack of candle power. There is something familiar about her, but I can’t place her.
“Either that or he’s vanished into thin air,” she says to me.
“He’ll be out in a minute.”
Her questioner frowns. If this is actually Willie Nelson hiding out in a meat-packing plant in east Arkansas, he doesn’t look very happy about it.
Yet, in my coat and tie, I probably look like I’m from the IRS. I glance around the room. If this is the entire front office of Southern Pride Meats, no one can accuse Eddie of wasting the profits on furnishings. Three scarred desks, beat-up chairs, metal filing cabinets, and a hat tree constitute the furniture. They all look as if they were stolen from a Goodwill warehouse. None of the desks is separated from the other by more than a couple of feet. The five essentials of modern office life-coffee maker, copier, calculator, computer, and fax machine—give the room a busy look. Maybe Eddie has an office somewhere in the back. Then I notice the desk directly across from the woman.
I realize I am looking at the exact place where Willie Ting was murdered.
“Are you the lawyer?” the Willie Nelson lookalike asks.
“Eddie said Bledsoe’s lawyer would be coming by today,” he says to Darla. It is more a question than a statement. Dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a green John Deere cap, Willie doesn’t give me the impression he spends a lot of time getting briefed in corporate meetings.
“Gideon Page,” I say, nodding and holding out my hand.
“Cy Scoggins,” the other man says, reaching across the desk and giving my hand a tentative squeeze which communicates the feeling that lawyers have never scored highly on his personal hit parade.
“I’m Darla Tate,” the female says.
“I’m the secretary and bookkeeper, and Cy runs the back.
Would you like some coffee? The sheriff and Mr. Dickerson should be here any minute,” she says politely.
Before I can answer, a stocky individual with Asian features appears from around the corner wiping his hands on faded khaki pants.
“You must be Mr. Page,” he says, his voice more Southern than my own.
“I’m Eddie Ting. Did you meet Cy and Darla?”
“Sure did,” I say, looking for a family resemblance and finding one in the nose and mouth.
His face is more fleshy than I remember Tommy’s, but he has the same serious expression. We shake hands, and Eddie looks me squarely in the face.
We must be equally curious about each other.
I turn back to Darla and tell her I’ll take a cup of coffee, but when she gets up, the door opens and in walk Woodrow Bonner and Dickerson.
Given Paul’s earlier outburst about blacks taking over the town, I doubt seriously that they rode together. Bonner gives me a suspicious look, and I assure him that I arrived only moments ago and that I was about to
have a cup of coffee.
Bonner, all business, shakes his head and says that if we want to look around the plant we should get started.
“I guess we need hats and coats,” he says to Darla. It is obvious that Bonner has spent some time out here.
“Mr. Ting, can your foreman or you show us around back?”
Though his manner is polite, there is no doubt who is the boss. I don’t know what I expected from a black sheriff, but this guy seems comfortable enough in his job.
“Cy will give you a tour,” Eddie says to Bonner and then nods at the banty rooster across from me.
I wonder how Cy and Darla like taking orders from an Asian twenty years their junior and a black sheriff. Assuming they are from this part of the state, neither they nor I was raised with the expectation that anyone other than white males would ever sign our paychecks or tell us what to do.
Darla has moved with surprising grace from her chair and disappeared around the corner.
With her fingernails painted a bright red and artificial pearls over her lavender sweater, there is something almost touchingly feminine about her in this oppressively male bastion. She probably was never pretty, but she still doesn’t mind trying to raise the flag.
With the crime scene photographs in mind, I point to the desk across from me.
“I take it this is where your uncle was sitting,” I say to Eddie while we wait for Darla.
Eddie looks at Bonner.
“That’s what I was told.”
Dick, obviously coming from his office and dressed in a three-piece suit, crowds in by me. He has been content to sit back and watch this exchange. Like me, he is probably thinking east Arkansas will never be the same again.
Bonner nods, but doesn’t say anything else, and I marvel at the contrast between the sheriff and the
prosecuting attorney. Bonner won’t give anything away and the prosecutor won’t shut his mouth. One is a professional, and the other is a professional politician. I’m not sure which is which, though. We all stare at the desk and chair as if we expect them to start talking to us. Too bad they can’t. Willie didn’t even have an individual cubicle for himself. If he picked his nose, Darla could just not look. I say, “There must have been a lot of blood here. I’m surprised the floor isn’t stained.”
Cy grunts, “We’re used to cleaning up blood around here.”
I imagine so, thinking what must be going on behind us. Squeamish, I’m not looking forward to Cy’s show and tell. Darla returns with three
white coats and caps. As we put them on, Cy volunteers, “They figure he had his back to whoever done it. The person had to know him just to come up behind him and slit his throat. It was bound to be an employee,” he says, putting on the soft white coat that had been lying on his chair.
I tug at my sleeves.
“The coat and hat are for the inspectors,” Eddie explains, ignoring his foreman’s comments.
“I didn’t know this until I came, but you can’t legally operate the plant without them being here. The public has no idea how safe their meat is. They’re here at six and leave when we shut down at two.
You’ll see them back there,” he says, nodding at the wall.
Damn. No wonder this country runs a deficit.
“How many are there?” I ask.
“Two,” answers Darla.
“At the big plants, they probably have their own softball team.”
I look down at Darla’s desk. She has a picture of two teenaged boys within stroking distance in an 8 x 10 frame. I wonder if she took the polygraph.
Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement Page 13
