Blind Judgement g-5

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Blind Judgement g-5 Page 13

by Grif Stockley


  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 somet
hing 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.

  She doesn’t seem like the murdering type, though.

  Cy nods.

  “All this stuff here,” he says, pointing to the desk and chair, “is new.” Darla says dryly, “That’s a relative term here.”

  Cy reaches into a cabinet and extracts a wicked-looking knife with a blade about five inches long. He hands me the brown-handled knife, and I press the tip against my thumb. As sharp as it is, it wouldn’t take much work to reach bone.

  “These babies come from Germany,” Cy says.

  “Koch butcher knives. Five inches of the finest cutting steel in the world. If you put this under a microscope, you’d see it has a bunch of teeth. This is what the murderer used. Only fifteen people in this plant had knives like this, and all of their stories were rock solid.

  Class, he claims he was home by his self If he came around here, he’d have his self a little accident, I expect.”

  Cy motions us to follow and pushes through a door in front of me into a hall and then through another door to the left.

  “This is the kill floor,” he says over the squealing of pigs, men’s voices, and machine noise. In front of us about twenty feet away a black guy dressed in knee boots touches what looks like a cattle prod behind the ear of a huge hog and immediately the animal collapses on the concrete floor of an oversized shower stall.

  Beside him another hog watches impassively.

  “Does that kill him?” I ask Cy.

  “Naa, that’s just a little stunner. It’s only got two hundred and forty volts. Knocks him woozy for about a minute,” the manager yells into my ear.

  “No
w watch what happens.”

  From his side the black guy pulls out a knife and bends over the hog, and quickly there is blood spewing onto the floor. The hog beside him sniffs the twitching carcass but otherwise makes no move to flee. I thought pigs were supposed to be smart. This one acts as if his buddy were merely suffering from a major mosquito bite. If I were him, I’d be looking for the back door.

  “If Archie doesn’t get him killed,” Cy yells, above the din, “they’ll get back up.”

  As dumb as these animals are, they probably think they’ve just been out in the sun too long.

  Archie reaches down and hooks the dead animal’s back legs and pushes a button on a machine beside him. I watch as the pig is hoisted up and moved over to a vat of water and then dipped.

  “That water is one hundred and fifty degrees,” Cy says.

  “It helps remove the hair.”

  After more than a minute, the dead animal reappears and is placed on a machine that rolls the body back and forth in a vigorous beating motion. Cy, who has moved ahead of me, motions me over.

  “The hair comes right off,” he says, pointing to the carcass.

  Indeed, the pig is practically nude within a few moments as wisps of hog hair fall away through the metal rods on which it is bouncing.

  Finally, it is pink all over, looking like a cartoon pig-Porky or Petunia, minus their clothes-and again it is hoisted up and sent along its way. Cy directs us to a new station only a few feet from us, and I watch as a skinny white guy who looks to be in his early thirties moves in on the animal and scrapes at the remaining hair. Every few moments he stops to sharpen his knife.

  “He’d wear himself out, and it’d take forever, if he doesn’t keep the blade razor-sharp,” Cy responds when I ask him about this incessant and deliberate process.

  “What is happening if you could see it is the teeth of the knife get lined up again. Still, these guys go through a knife about every month.

  We give ‘em the first one, and they have to buy ‘em after that. Before we did that, they’d go through one every couple of days.”

 

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