Still, I want to know more.
“Listen,” I say, trying to sound casual, “I’m going to be over here again sometime next week. Is it all right if I call you?”
“Of course,” she says, her face serious as she briefly touches my arm.
“Thanks for breakfast.”
Though her hand is gone in an instant, it is as if I have been given an
electric shock. As I head north for my meeting at the Ting family home on Peach, I recall the pressure of her mouth on mine and wonder if our kiss meant anything at all to her. It did once, but three decades is a long time to try to jump-start a battery. I can’t tell if we are starting a new relationship or resuming an old one. Though there is much that is familiar about Angela, she is not the same, but I can’t put my finger on it. Perhaps, it is simply grief in addition to her uncertainty about the future that gives such an explosive feel to her personality. Though she was not emotional as she was yesterday, there was an edginess that I sensed beneath the surface.
Time has given her a dimension that a younger woman can’t match.
Whatever it is, it’s pulling at me.
As I near Tommy’s old neighborhood, I think of how undeveloped this area of the town was when Willie and Doris Ting first built out here. I would occasionally give Tommy a ride home from the tennis courts and was always struck by how isolated they were. Though their house is literally on the edge of town, it is now in the most impressive residential area of Bear Creek, new houses having been built one by one until the development was full. Each brick home is on two lots and surrounded by magnificent shade trees. I pull into the circular drive wondering how much the home is worth.
Connie opens the door before I can ring the bell.
“Come in, Gideon,” she instructs me without any warmth in her voice.
Not that I expected her to fall all over me, but I was hoping that once
she actually saw me, some of her natural friendliness would resurface.
No such luck.
“Hi, Connie,” I chirp, knowing I sound insincere, “you look great!” In fact, she does not.
Like most of us, she has put on some weight. Her face, once oval, is round as a volleyball, and her waist, so tiny as a girl, has thickened.
She is not obese by any means, but beneath her loose blue trousers and matching tunic, which remind me of those grim documentaries on China before they embraced capitalism, it is clear that her once delightful figure has taken early retirement.
“I would have thought you’d be a professional cheerleader by now, but Tommy tells me you’re just a physicist.” “I knew you’d become a lawyer,” she says, at least interested enough to banter with me. She always had less of an accent than Tommy, who, now that I think about it, seemed more Chinese than she did.
It doesn’t sound as if she is paying me a compliment.
“Did I run my mouth that much when I was a teenager?” I ask, willing to make a fool of myself to draw her out.
“You always had an excuse,” she says succinctly, “when Tommy beat you in tennis.”
So she was paying attention.
“Which was every time we played,” I complain, good-naturedly.
“Tommy didn’t say much about how you’ve been doing. I’ve got a daughter in college. My wife died from breast cancer when Sarah was in junior high,” I babble, hoping to make her talk.
“So I’ve heard.”
So much for catching up on the life of Connie Ting. What is her problem? I liked the high-school version better.
“Mother’s puttering around in the kitchen,” she says.
“Why don’t you follow me back there?”
Amy, bless her art historian’s soul, would love this house: delicate vases, painted fans, teak furniture, jade, calligraphy, and paintings compose a veritable museum. All of it could be antiques, but, given my knowledge of art, for all I know this stuff may have been won at a carnival by turning a hand crank and dredging up junky trinkets. It looks expensive, but I’m easily fooled about these things.
Mrs. Ting (whom I wouldn’t have recognized) is seated at a yellow kitchen table drinking what appears to be a cup of tea. She is wearing a wind suit which is startlingly similar to the one Angela had on yesterday. Her hair is snow-white and pulled into a tight bun behind her head. Gold-rimmed spectacles magnify her eyes as she looks up at me. Connie asks, “Mother, do you remember Gideon Page? He’d like to visit with you for just a few minutes.”
Connie isn’t going to make this easy. Mrs. Ting gives me such a blank stare that I wonder if she is senile.
“Hello, Mrs. Ting,” I say loudly as if she were deaf, although Connie has spoken in a normal tone.
“How are you? I used to play tennis during the summers with Tommy. He always beat me.”
Mrs. Ting studies my face.
“You look like your grandpa,” she says, her thick accent making the years drop away.
“He saved Willie’s life. He made Willie go to Memphis to have his appendix out.
No hospital around here. Willie almost died.”
I blink, uncomfortable with the irony. My grandfather saved her husband’s life, now, I’m trying to save the life of the man who is charged with killing him. But what did Mr. Carpenter say? My grandfather didn’t cure anybody. Still, he knew enough to opine it wasn’t a stomach ache caused by a bad bowl of rice.
“I’m really sorry about Mr. Ting. I know what a shock it must have been to you.”
I look at Connie, who is leaning back against the dishwasher by the
stove. Like an umpire who has heard one too many players complain after taking a called third strike down the middle, she folds her arms tightly against her chest. One false move and I am out of here. Her mother says bluntly, “Willie didn’t trust lawyers.” It sounds as if she has said, “… Trust rawyers.” I’m glad I don’t have to speak Chinese.
Though I assume Tommy has said to her what I’m about to say, I tell her, “I can understand that, but I want you to know that though I represent the man accused of taking Mr. Ting’s life, I’m interested in knowing the truth, and though I can’t prove it yet, I strongly suspect someone else may have murdered your husband and has framed Class.”
Mrs. Ting looks at me blankly, while Connie interjects, “I thought a defense attorney’s job was to defend his client and let the judge and jury worry about the truth.”
I wish Connie would go shopping or something.
“The way the system works,” I say, repeating what I learned in law school, “is the truth emerges if everyone does their job well.”
Connie rolls her eyes at me.
“Gideon, do you actually think my mother believes that? Look at the O.J. trial. He got away with murder. If you get this Class Bledsoe off, it doesn’t mean you know what the truth is. It means you’ve manipulated the system. We’re not idiots.”
“The system didn’t work in the O.J. trial!” I say with more urgency than conviction.
“The police and forensics work in that case was terrible.”
“Well, what do you think happened here?” Connie asks, hugging her arms tightly. She is full of anger, but I don’t know why. As far as I could tell. Tommy wasn’t.
“I don’t know yet, but I think Paul Taylor could have been part of a plot to frame my client,” I say candidly, and repeat what I told Tommy, though I’ve no doubt he has already given her that part of our conversation, too.
“I think that’s crazy,” Connie says, shaking her head when I am finished.
“Paul didn’t know he was being taped, so why should he go to the trouble of setting up somebody who wouldn’t have had a motive? They didn’t make it look like a robbery, no money was taken that I’ve heard.
I haven’t heard that Class Bledsoe hated my father.
By all accounts, he got along with him okay. He obviously killed him for the money that Paul Taylor must have paid him.”
Or for the eventual ownership of Oldham’s Barbecue, I think, but don
’t say.
“I think it’s a mistake to underestimate Paul Taylor,” I say, not having an answer for her.
“He’s more devious than you think.” She has a point. Why would somebody choose to set up Bledsoe? It occurs to me that maybe the person who did kill Willie hated Bledsoe for some reason and wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. If that’s true, it doesn’t eliminate Paul from the picture.
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Ting says quietly, her arms resting on the table, “why anyone would kill my husband if it wasn’t to get the plant.
Everyone respected him.”
i look at this frail, worn-out old woman and blanch at the thought of suggesting to a jury she killed her husband. I was her son’s friend and I can remember the shy but friendly smile she gave me whenever I came into the store. I don’t think I’ll be seeing it again.
“Paul’s lawyer wants me to argue,” I say, watching her face, “that you killed your husband, Mrs. Ting.”
“My God!” Connie gasps as her mother bursts into tears and stumbles out of the kitchen. Connie runs after her, leaving me alone for a moment as I hear her wailing behind a closed door.
I regret having upset her, but don’t feel I have any choice if I am to convince this family to cooperate with me. I am walking a fine line here, but no jury will believe for a moment that this frail, sick woman would have been able to murder her husband without some physical evidence of a struggle.
Connie returns and confronts me across the table.
“Is that what you’re going to do? If I had known this, I wouldn’t have let you set foot in this house. How dare you come here and accuse my mother!”
I say quickly, “I haven’t accused her of anything, Connie. This is Paul’s strategy, not mine.” I don’t have the guts to say that I might have to argue this if I don’t have anything better.
“So why are you here?” she says, her voice high with exasperation.
“Because I need your help,” I say, wondering how I can convince her.
“All I’m really asking for is not to be hindered in any conversations I have with Southern Pride’s workers. I think Tommy understands this.”
“Tommy doesn’t understand anything,” she says shortly.
I don’t know what she means by this and don’t want to anger her any more than I already have.
“All I want is for you and Tommy to think about letting me really try to see if anyone else could have done this. Imagine how horrible you would feel if somebody else gets away with your father’s murder.”
“The sheriff has already conducted an investigation,” she says, but the rage has already left her voice.
“I know,” I say, “but what happens in these situations is that there is a lot of pressure in a high-profile case like this to get a conviction,
especially if you have people who want to advance politically.
Sometimes they make bad mistakes.” Connie is wavering, but finally says, “I’ll talk to Tommy again.”
“That’s all I can ask,” I say truthfully. I leave with a million questions, but this is not the time to ask them.
Despite Connie’s dismissal of the possibility, I am curious about the other Chinese families in Bear Creek. I drive west for about a mile, take a right on Danner, and turn in at Guay’s Grocery.
Ting’s Market was closer to where we lived, and now that I think about it, was not in such an obviously black part of town. I should have at least told Tommy I would visit them, but the truth is, like Connie, I can’t begin to imagine that one of them was responsible. My assumption is that the Chinese, like blacks, stick together, though I personally don’t recall any memory that would validate this feeling. Yet the old lady may know a lot more than she is telling. The trouble with this theory is that I never heard of any of the Chinese in Bear Creek even raising their voices, much less their hands. What is increasingly apparent to me is my lack of curiosity about anybody but the white families when I was growing up in Bear Creek. It was as if over half the town didn’t even exist.
From the outside, Guay’s Grocery is dilapidated and in need of a paint job, and the inside is not much better. Yet, my memory is that these stores were always marginal in appearance, perhaps deliberately, so as not to alert the dominant race that the proprietor was doing better than the consumers. Behind the counter is a Chinese man of indeterminate age
in a brown cardigan sweater and gold-framed eyeglasses. He is taking change from a ten-year-old black kid, who is buying some hard candy. I look around the store to get an idea of the merchandise and marvel at how little stock he has, other than canned goods, some of which appear to be as old as he is. There is an old white man in overalls nursing a can of beer on a stool in the back, an activity that is surely illegal. Beside him is a totally bare meat-case which has, judging by the rust stains on the white panel, been vacant awhile. I look over the top of the panel and see through the door to a room that has furniture in it. It occurs to me that I have probably erroneously assumed that the Chinese families in Bear Creek have homes separate from their stores. It looks lived in, but it is too dim inside to tell. Back up front, across from the counter in a corner, five middle-aged blacks gather in a semicircle around a Sorry TV set watching the Razorback-LSU basketball game on ESPN. I can’t understand a word they are saying. In front of me a black woman lays a sack of potato chips on the counter. Mr. Guay wordlessly changes a five-dollar bill, and I fall in behind her with a sack of plain M amp;M’s I grab from a box. From what I am able to hear of his interaction with the woman ahead of him, he has a pronounced accent. After I pay for the M amp;M’s, I say, extending my hand, “Sir, my name is Gideon Page. I’m a lawyer for the man accused of murdering Mr. Willie Ting. I’d like to come back and visit with you for a few minutes when your store’s closed or you have some help.”
Mr. Guay, or whoever he is, takes my hand, but says, “No business with them. No time to talk. Very busy.”
Up close I can see the lines in the other man’s face. Close to being contemporaries, if not approximately the same age, surely he and Willie had much in common. Business, their wives, children, whites, blacks.
The way each was treated in the South.
“This is about who killed Mr. Ting.”
The old man murmurs again, “Very busy,” and turns his back on me to fuss with his stock of cigarettes, which already seem adequately arranged.
I have no talent for this business of figuring out who-done-it, but I am becoming curious about how these people coped all these years and the lies they had to tell themselves to survive.
I drive back to Blackwell County, wondering which generation of Chinese-Americans has felt the most comfortable in east Arkansas.
Perhaps Willie’s generation. They didn’t have any choices and learned to be content by relying on each other. That couldn’t be enough for Tommy and Connie, nor would it be expected to be enough.
Who did want their father killed? I have no idea. I look out the window at the cold, muddy fields. A new planting season is just around the corner.
“You don’t seem to be enjoying this,” Amy calls from the other side of the net.
“We don’t have to play anymore.”
“I’m fine,” I say, forcing a grimace to become a smile as I stoop to pick up the ball that comes rolling back toward me. I have just hit my
backhand into the same spot on the net for the third time in a row. In tennis, as in other aspects of my life, I have a way of perfecting my mistakes.
“I’m just getting sick of being so consistent.”
We meet at the bench where I sit down and grab my opponent’s water bottle. I can’t use the weather as an excuse: the temperature is a balmy 68 degrees, and the sun has stayed behind a mostly cloudy sky.
Though it is only the first day of March, it looks like an early spring.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were this good?” I complain.
“I could have prepared my ego for this little setback.”
Regardless of how liberated I tell myself I’ve become in the last twenty years, it is no fun being beaten by a woman. Amy, during warmups, casually informed me she is a legitimate 4.5 player under the United States Tennis Association rating system. Though in theory I can hit the ball harder and can cover the court more easily, my genetic head-start has proved to be as useless as a long-range Arkansas weather forecast. Now, in the second set (I won two games in the first) Amy zips around the court and is whacking the ball past me like some wind-up Steffi Grafdoll.
Amy, who has barely worked up a sweat, straightens the strings on her racket.
“You just need to practice. And to bend your knees on your backhand.
You look like you’re trying to putt a golf ball.” She stands and
imitates my swing.
Embarrassed by how ridiculous I must look, I nod and hand her the water bottle, noticing how supple her legs are under her blue tennis skirt. I wonder if she knows how sexy she looks. If she is wearing one of those bras that mash her breasts down, I can’t tell it. Her white top swells out so nicely that it had the local pro in the clubhouse fumbling for her change for thirty seconds.
Unlike almost every other woman I’ve ever played against, Amy can volley at the net. When I saw how well she hit from the baseline, I began hitting short and making her come in. No dice. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Overheads, backhand volleys, even drop shots, her game is as complete as mine is limited. I can get some pace on a forehand if I have time to set up, but Amy won’t let me do it.
When I overplay the left side of the court, she runs me to death. If she controlled the rest of our relationship the way she does on the tennis court, all I’d need is Jessie’s dog collar.
“At my age,” I crack, “they refuse to bend more than a couple of times a day.”
She sips at the water and sternly shakes her head.
“You could get in shape easy. There’re several guys out here a lot older than you who can play all day.”
Older than me? They must be playing in wheelchairs.
Properly motivated, I stand up and head out to the north end of the court. I could get in shape.
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