Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement

by Grif Stockley

  He does his best not to smile.

  “We’ve checked every lead we’ve been given,” he says.

  “If they’re fronting for anybody, we haven’t been able to find it out.”

  For some reason I feel a little better. At least he investigated it. I tell myself not to be too hard on Darlatate. Hell, she made as much sense as anybody else.

  “Will you bring him back for the trial?”

  The sheriff picks off a piece of lint from his uniform, which is as pressed and starched as the day I met him in February. The only difference is that he is wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The third week in May, it is already warm enough for air conditioning, though Bonner hasn’t turned it on in his office.

  “Not unless you offer any evidence during your defense that he killed Willie Ting. As you probably know by now if you’ve retraced his route, more people saw him that day than claim they’ve seen Elvis.”

  I laugh for the first time in a month. After weeks of going through the records, Darla has told me that they can’t even find enough theft by Muddy to charge him with a felony. This was a complete waste of time. To get in at least one jab against him, I ask, “So, Sheriff, what do you think the odds are that a jury will convict Paul Taylor?”

  Bonner’s professional mask descends once again. He says easily, “Go see Mr. Butterfield.

  He’s the lawyer, not me.”

  That’s as close as Bonner will come to “dissing” his rival. I leave his office, and drive out to Brickeys to see Class, realizing how much I have underestimated Bonner and Butterfield. I thought by this time there would be enough honest-to-God suspects that Bledsoe would be a cinch to walk. Now it looks as if I will have to depend on the blacks on the jury to distrust the system so much that I can get a hung jury.

  Unfortunately for Class, instead of a racist detective from the L.A. police department, the star witness against Class will be an African-American sheriff who, thus far, has been as competent and professional as any person I’ve met so far in law enforcement.

  Bledsoe, who has lost at least fifteen pounds in the two and a half months he’s been in jail, looks more depressed than ever when I sit down

  with him.

  “There’s hardly anybody I haven’t talked to,” I say, feeling dejected myself.

  “I’ll argue that anybody could have framed you, but damn it, I don’t have any evidence.”

  In response, Bledsoe begins to cough and sneeze. Some guys take to jails and prisons as if they were their summer homes. Class is not one of them. He’s been sick almost since the day he got here. Jails are not great places to be sick. Just last week an asthma patient died in the Blackwell County jail.

  His congestion finally settling for a moment, Class sputters, “I’m ready to take that deal Butterfield offered me. I did it. You think you can get him to make it again?”

  I watch Bledsoe wipe his face with his sleeve.

  Has he really been conning me all this time?

  “Class, does this mean you’re changing your story? And this time you’re telling me the truth? I can’t be a part of anything that railroads an innocent man.” Sure I can. This is what I’ve wanted to happen ever since I realized Butterfield needed Class to get Paul. Yet if Class tells me he is lying to save himself from execution, I can’t let him do it.

  Class covers his mouth and begins to cough again. When the spasm subsides, he says, “It’s like this. Taylor promised me the barbecue

  place after Oldham retires next year. Then I’d take it over and in a couple of years Taylor was supposed to give me the deed to the place.

  It’d be like I was buying it from him. We figured the Mexican would get scared and take off and then get blamed. I suspected his papers were forged.”

  “When did you and Paul plan this?” I ask, watching his face carefully.

  His eyes are rheumy, but he looks straight back at me while he talks.

  “About two weeks before I did it,” he says stolidly.

  “When I’d be out working at Oldham’s, Taylor would come out. That’s when we talked.”

  I drop my voice to a whisper.

  “How could you kill Willie?” I ask, realizing I’ve always been lulled by his passive demeanor.

  “Everybody said he liked you and that you liked him. You even said you did.”

  Bledsoe gives me a cold look.

  “What makes you think we gonna tell you the truth unless we have to?”

  I put my face close to the window to try to get his attention.

  “You don’t act like any murderer that I’ve ever represented. Class.

  Not somebody who’d kill in cold blood.”

  “It was a lot easier than kinin’ a pig,” he says, his voice cold and hard.

  “I jus’ slipped behind that old dude when I was walking by him to git some pills I said I left in the bathroom. He gave a little grunt—didn’t even holler.”

  A change has come over Bledsoe, but whether he is acting I can’t tell.

  There definitely is another side to him. For the first time I can see he can get mean in a hurry when he wants to.

  “How’d you slip up on him?” I ask, not as skeptical as I was.

  “That place clears out right at two, ‘cause he didn’t pay a dime after that, and I circled the block and came back. I picked a day when the secretary was gone and then came back and went in the front door and told Willie I had to come back and get some medicine I had left in the bathroom.

  He wudn’t paying no attention, and when I come out, I jus’ slipped up and cut him and stepped back and watched him die. It didn’t take but a minute or two.”

  In the time it has taken him to tell me this, I have deep-sixed any thought that Class couldn’t have killed Willie. Gone is the affable,

  almost teddy bear-like man I first met, and in his place is a cold son of a bitch I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

  “What’d you do then?” I ask, transfixed by his story.

  “I had me a rag and a paper bag in my pocket and I wiped off my knife with it and took it back and laid it where I always did, but I guess all the blood didn’t come off. I didn’t know my nerves would get to me like they did. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I stopped and burned the bag on the way home.”

  “Why didn’t you go somewhere so you’d have an alibi?”

  “Me and Taylor talked about that,” he says, nodding, “but he said it would look suspicious if I did something different than I usually did.

  He figured someone would notice my car and think I got home when I always did. See, I got home just fifteen minutes later than usual. It only took five minutes to kill him and put my knife up. But it turns out nobody noticed nothin’.”

  I nod, knowing I have been to every residence in his neighborhood and along the route he took from the plant to his house in a futile effort to find someone who might confirm that he went home the day of the murder at his usual time.

  The sheriff’s office already covered much the same territory six months earlier and found nothing, and neither did I. In his haste or nervousness, he acted too fast. Assuming he is telling the truth. I ask, “So, Darlatate did hear you that day in the bathroom?” “I reckon,” he

  says and shrugs.

  “Taylor had left a couple hundred in cash in my truck for me the next night, and I called him that week to let him know I got it. I didn’t see nobody around and figured the secretary had gone home.”

  Nobody has claimed Class was a genius, and clearly, that was the dumbest call he ever made.

  We talk for a few minutes longer, and he asks if I think that Butterfield would go for a shorter sentence than twenty years.

  “See if I can do less time,” he instructs me, his voice bereft of emotion now that he has gotten through his story.

  I am not ready to do anything yet, and I stall for time by telling him that the best time to approach Butterfield will be two or three days before the trial begins. Today is the nineteenth, and the trial b
egins on the twenty-sixth.

  “If you’re lying, I can’t be a part of it.”

  “I ain’t lying,” he says stubbornly, “but I ain’t gonna take the fall for Taylor. See, we knew he was a suspect less than a day after I killed Willie.

  Somebody couldn’t keep their mouth shut about that tape, and Taylor was real cautious after that and didn’t do nothing where they would link him up with me. He’s knowed all along they was after him.”

  I lean back in my chair now, understanding why no evidence has turned up against Paul. No wonder he didn’t give a statement. Though I pump him for more details. Class, still hacking and wheezing, doesn’t have much more to say.

  He had seen Paul at Oldham’s a few times, where Paul had slipped him small amounts of cash, never more than a couple of hundred. Any large sums of money he would have had to have withdrawn from a bank and could have been traced and used as evidence against him. No wonder Dickerson was so relieved when I told him that Class hadn’t implicated Paul.

  “Does Paul’s lawyer know you and Paul planned this?”

  Nonplussed, Class mumbles, “I don’t know.”

  He looks at me as if the question hasn’t ever occurred to him. Clients, he obviously believes, don’t confess to their lawyers unless they think it will help them. What he won’t accept is that it is always in a client’s interest to tell his lawyer the truth.

  Shaken, and wondering what the truth is, I drive away from the jail, having promised to return no later than forty-eight hours. Despite what he has told me, clearly he wants to believe that I will discover a crack in the case against him. The only moment he lost his composure was right before I left when I asked him if Lattice knew he had killed Willie. Distressed, he said that she didn’t. For the first time, a look of agony replaced the hardness on his face. He can do the time; he isn’t sure that Lattice can.

  I drive back into town, my head spinning with the conversation I’ve just

  had with Class. I had told Angela I would come by for a glass of iced tea before heading for home to get ready for a DWI jury trial tomorrow. I have to win this one because it’s my client’s fourth trip down this road. If I lose he automatically goes to prison. The noise from her Lawn Boy tells me Angela is in her backyard cutting the grass.

  I walk around to the back, where she gives me a wave and continues mowing a small rectangle in the center. Through with the jobs she can perform herself on her house, she spends more and more time with her garden. She still has had no offers on the house and has only shown it twice. Though cutting the grass is a chore her boys would normally do, they, as she hoped, have gotten jobs in Jonesboro this summer. Curt working as a desk clerk for a motel, and Brad making sandwiches for Subway.

  As I watch her, I wish I could tell her about the conversation I had with Class, but disclosing what he has just told me would be the ultimate violation of client confidentiality. Still, if it would help to talk to anyone about what Class has just told me, it would be Angela. She would serve as the perfect devil’s advocate, since she has never believed that Paul was involved in the murder.

  On the other hand, if she thought Class were telling the truth, it would go a long way in convincing me, too. Dressed in short shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that advertises the King Biscuit October blues festival in Helena, she makes me wish this case were safely behind us.

  Though it has not been an easy time for her, she seems to trust me more each time I am with her. I go through the back door of her house into the kitchen and find a pitcher of iced tea already made up in the

  refrigerator. I’d rather have a beer for the trip home, but if I had one, I’d want two, and would wind up wanting to do something else. When I come back out with two glasses full of tea, she is done, and we sit on the patio under the shade of her pecan tree.

  “What’s wrong?” she says immediately.

  “Something’s happened.”

  “Nothing,” I say, realizing I should have called her from a service station and told her I had to get back.

  “Did you come by to dump me,” she asks lightly, “just as I was starting to feel comfortable with you?” She is smiling, but her voice is tense.

  “No!” I exclaim.

  “It’s the case. I really can’t tell you. I should have just driven on back home.”

  She wipes sweat from her upper lip, reminding me of Class wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Class has confessed to you, hasn’t he?”

  she guesses. She knew I was going to see him.

  I know I have been talking too much to her.

  Angela has pumped me for details on a regular basis.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I say, unable to look at her. She has always been able to read me like a book.

  Angela reaches over and grips my arm.

  “He’s not trying to say that Paul is involved, is he?”

  I stand up abruptly and pour my tea out on the ground. This was a terrible idea.

  “I can’t talk about it. I need to get home.” “Paul didn’t do it,” she says.

  “I know he didn’t!”

  Angela is practically shouting at me. I look around to see who is listening.

  “How could you possibly know for sure?”

  She shakes her head, and begins to cry.

  “Let’s go inside. I can’t talk out here.”

  She runs into the house, and I follow, now prepared for her to tell me she doesn’t want to see me anymore. She sits down at the kitchen table and motions for me to do the same. When I do, she wipes her eyes with a tissue and says, “Gideon, I’m absolutely certain that Paul didn’t kill Willie I haven’t told you this, but Paul said to me the day after Willie

  died, and this is an exact quote: “If somebody hadn’t killed the old son of a bitch, I might have done it myself.””

  “Are you serious?” I say, leaning across the table toward her. I am dumbfounded that she hasn’t told me this before now.

  Angela nods.

  “But don’t you see? He was joking!

  I know it makes him look bad, but it proves he didn’t kill him. When I told him how horrible he sounded, he said he wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before now?” I demand.

  “That doesn’t prove he didn’t have Willie murdered. He was giving himself a cover in case something backfired down the line.

  Something must have scared him, and he started constructing an escape hatch.”

  Angela shakes her head furiously.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard you say! That’s not what he meant at all!”

  “Listen to me,” I say, excitedly.

  “I’ve got to call you as a witness. A jury has to hear this. Where were

  you? Had he taken you out to lunch?” “No,” she says, her voice now frigid.

  “We were in bed at the Peabody Hotel. Paul and I had been lovers for over a year.”

  I collapse against the back of my chair, my face tingling as if she has just slapped me. Damn it, why didn’t I figure this out? She has talked about him nonstop for three months.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I gasp. I’m suddenly lightheaded, as if the blood in my brain has thinned into water.

  She puts both hands to her face and begins to cry.

  “I didn’t want to lose you! But Gideon, I know Paul. He would never have somebody killed. You’ve got to believe that.”

  I clench my fists, which have become the color of mayonnaise.

  “You couldn’t wait,” I cry, “until your husband died to crawl into bed with him?”

  At the time Willie was murdered, Dwight had just two months to live.

  Angela begins to sob, but I don’t give a damn.

  I fight back a wave of nausea before yelling, “Why did you do it? Is Paul that great in the sack?”

  Angela stares at a spot to the right of my head and forces out the words, “I got involved with him orig
inally so we’d get our loan. But it became more than that.”

  More than that. I look at this woman. Thirty years ago she was the most idealistic person I’d ever known. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

  “Was Dwight in on this little plan?” I ask sarcastically, opening my hands and watching blood rushing into my fingers. I feel my face go beet-red as the shock of what she has told me transforms into rage.

  Angela puts her head down on her arms as her body is racked by spasms.

  I am tempted to grab her by the hair and shake her. Why has she done this to me?

  “Though he would have, Dwight didn’t actually die from the cancer,” she says in a tiny voice.

  “Cecil suspected I was involved with Paul and told him. After Dwight confronted me, and I admitted Paul and I were lovers, he took an overdose of pills that night and never woke up.”

  “Oh, shit!” I gasp, feeling my breath coming in short bursts. The guilt she must feel! Despite my own rapidly growing feeling that Angela is like an old-fashioned grifter and I am the gullible dupe in some ancient con game, I can’t help but have some sympathy for her. I force myself to take a calming breath and wonder if this is for real or part of an act that involves Paul. If she would betray her husband of thirty years, surely she would betray me.

  When she can speak again, she says, “Cecil knows how Dwight died, but I begged him not to tell the boys. They’d never forgive me.”

  I feel a numbness creeping up my chest, my body unable to keep up with all I am hearing.

  “Cecil’s blackmailing you, isn’t he? He’s forcing you to sell him the land.”

  Angela clears her throat and sighs heavily.

  “Yes.”

  Now I comprehend why we rode out to Cecil’s and screwed in his bed.

  “You hate him, don’t you?”

  She nods but doesn’t speak. If I make her testify, everything will come out, including my own conduct. My mind races as I review my options.

  Damn it! I feel like some wild animal caught in a trap that can’t escape unless it gnaws off a leg. It is too late to try to withdraw.