Both of us will be relieved when the trial is over because we are on opposite sides there. She believes that Paul is innocent while I am convinced he is not, despite the fact that I have no more proof of that than the day I took this case over. I try to convince her that a year from now we won’t even remember the case, but she knows that’s garbage.
If he is found innocent, it will simply be viewed by the whites as another battle in the never-ending racial conflict, but if a jury convicts him, it will be etched in the memory of everyone who ever lived here.
On May 3, I get a call at my office from Darla Tate, who, to her credit, has continued to be helpful by furnishing me updated addresses and telephone numbers of plant employees. In the past week or two I have
fudged the truth a bit by suggesting that I fully expect Class to be acquitted, hoping probably futilely that this news will have the effect of convincing her she should decide to climb aboard his freedom train and testify that it could have been some other employee’s voice she heard that day she was in the bathroom. Today there is an excitement in her voice that I haven’t heard before, but it is hard to take her too seriously.
While everybody has a theory in this case, the only evidence still points at Class. In an earlier conversation, I told her that I haven’t found out much that wasn’t already in the prosecutor’s file.
And she knows that I am still checking out alibis.
She says she has something to show me and asks when I am coming back to Bear Creek. Since I am about to walk over to the prosecutor’s office to try to plead out a cocaine possession case, I check my calendar, tell her the fifth, and head out the door.
As I walk, I realize that I am beginning to distance myself from the outcome of this case, a tendency I have always had to fight against when I get frustrated.
When I arrive at the plant Thursday morning, Darla hands me a cup of coffee and seats me behind Eddie’s desk, explaining that he’s over in Greenville on family business. She makes small talk until Cy, who has been goofing off up front, heads back to the kill floor. When he leaves, Darla reaches into a drawer and pulls out a box of receipts and spreads them out on her desk.
“Eddie said I could tell you about this. I honestly don’t know if it has a bit of significance to your case, but I knew the salesman involved, and I wouldn’t put it past “Muddy’ Jessup to have murdered Willie.”
I notice a bit of lipstick on the lip of the mug and rotate it a half a turn. Neither of the two salesmen truck drivers, to my knowledge, has seriously ever been considered suspects since they were out on the road selling meat the day Willie was killed. I look down at the notes I have made on every employee I’ve talked with, and realize that Jessup is not on my list. On the other hand, I have dutifully talked on the phone to grocery store employees in Memphis, Earle, Marion, West Memphis, and a couple of towns in Arkansas I don’t remember, who have confirmed through their receipts that meat was delivered to them that day by Jessup. I remember now that Darla’s updated list shows that a couple of employees, Jessup one of them and Jorge Arrazola the other, no longer can be found in Bear Creek. Since the sheriff got a statement from him before he left town and his alibi seemed solid, I haven’t worried that the new updated West Memphis address for him hasn’t been checked out.
“What’s the deal on this guy?” I watch as Darla arranges the papers side by side on her desk.
“Let me explain what Eddie and I think he did,” she says, “and then I’ll tell you what I know about him.” She points with her pen to a sheet in front of her.
“The first thing you need to know is that we give every salesman a price list each time they leave here to take with them to call on customers.
Eddie works on the list constantly, because every time we buy a load of
hogs there’s a price change. For the last couple of weeks Eddie and I have gone back through everything, trying to figure out why the plant’s been losing money, and we even went back through stuff from when Willie was still alive to see what he was doing different. Well, in going through all the receipts we developed a suspicion that Muddy was cheating the stores in his territory. Come over here, and I’ll show you.”
With my coffee cup in hand, I get up and walk over behind and look over her shoulder. She puts her finger on a sheet in front of her and says, “This is our price list from June of last year.”
I look down at a sheet that has the name southern pride meats in white against a blue border. Below it are three rows of products ranging from pork tenderloin at $5.15 a pound to fresh pork jowls at sixty-five cents a pound.
“What we think Muddy was doing,” Darla says, “was marking up some of the prices after he left the office. You’d be surprised how few store owners even look at the price lists. The salesmen know which ones do, and we think Muddy would just tell them what the cost was that day and they’d ring it up and pay cash. If you look closely, you can tell on some of the tickets that the figures have been altered.”
Darla points to a smudged spot on a ticket she has marked as the plant copy.
“In other words, when Muddy came back to the plant, he’d turn in a doctored ticket that matched the price list that we’d given him and keep the difference. Actually, he was cheating the customer, but, of course,
it was cheating Southern Pride, too, because it was raising our prices against our competition. Sooner or later, we’d lose their business. But in the short run, unless the customer checked the price list, he wouldn’t know he had been cheated.”
I put on my reading glasses and pick up the ticket. Darla runs her index finger down the middle column of the price list.
“For example, on June fifth, we were supposed to be selling sausage patties for a dollar thirty-five. On the ticket copy the customer retains, we now know Muddy made the three into an eight and was charging a dollar eighty-five for sausage patties. On the plant copy he turned in, you can see he changed it back into a three so it would match our price list.”
I squint at the numbers. True, it is slightly smudged, but it seems inconclusive to me.
“Why did you take so long to find this out?” I ask.
“Carelessness on my part,” Darla admits.
“The price lists change so fast that I didn’t pay any attention. The customer wasn’t complaining, so I didn’t pick it up. But we know now, because last week after we suspected something had been going on, we called some of the stores in his old territory, and were able to verify that he had cheated at least two of them. It wasn’t easy, because most stores had thrown out their receipts, but a couple hadn’t.
They’re letting us give them a discount for a while.”
I peer down at the papers, not sure what to make of this. Just because this guy was a thief doesn’t make him a murderer.
“Did he not get along with Willie or what?” I ask, leaning back against Cy’s desk.
“Muddy’s a son of a bitch,” Darla says, bitterly.
“I’ve known him for years. Maria, his wife, went around town for years with two black eyes.
The thing that you ought to know is that Muddy can use a knife. He was on the kill floor for years before he persuaded Willie to let him try out as a salesman.”
I realize I’ve watched a truck or two being loaded, but I’ve never paid attention to the men who drive them. When I ask what happened to him, Darla explains that Muddy quit a couple of weeks after the murder, saying he was taking a job at a meat-packing plant outside of West Memphis.
“What would be his motive?” I ask, sitting back down behind Eddie’s desk.
Darla stacks the papers on her desk into a neat pile.
“Maybe Willie was suspicious and told him he wanted to talk to him. The salesmen come in and out of the office all the time to turn in their receipts and get the price lists.”
“Wouldn’t Willie have talked to you first?” I ask, not at all impressed with this theory. Willie was killed at his desk with his back turned to his assailant. There was no confrontation, n
o struggle that indicated a fight.
Darla opens a drawer and places the tickets inside.
“At some point he would have. Maybe he was going to, and just hadn’t gotten around to it. I have a theory about what happened. You want to hear it?”
“Sure,” I say. Darla is watching me carefully as if she is afraid I may not be interested in what she is about to tell me.
She leans forward and almost whispers, “Well, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that one of the stores that Muddy sold to is controlled by the Memphis Mafia. It’s a legitimate store but it probably washes a lot of money for them. What I figure is that they found out Muddy was cheating them and made an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
I am getting a sty on my right eye and rub it. I didn’t sleep well last night and must be too slow for this conversation.
“I don’t get it.” “Southern Pride does a cash business,” she says, her voice animated.
“Those guys are constantly looking for places to launder their money and get into legitimate businesses. My guess is they assumed incorrectly that they could pick up the plant cheap if the owner was bumped off. And
now I doubt if it was any coincidence that since Willie died, the Tings have gotten a couple of offers for the plant, one out of Memphis. If I were in your shoes, I’d be looking for Muddy Jessup.”
I stare at Darla, thinking she has been watching too many cop shows set on the east coast.
Organized crime isn’t exactly a stranger in the South, but you don’t hear much about it. Still, I have heard of the “Dixie Mafia.”
“So you now think Paul Taylor didn’t have anything to do with it?” I ask, wondering if she is onto something.
“Maybe he didn’t,” Darla says, arching her back as she stretches against her chair. She is wearing a tight sweater and skirt that is too young for her, but it is hard to fault her for making an effort.
“It’s probably more likely that Muddy could have thought that Willie was going to get him sent to prison when he found out he was stealing.
The salesmen sometimes came back to the plant after it was shut down.
Willie wouldn’t have thought anything about Muddy’s being in the office.”
This seems more plausible to me.
“But what about all the people who said he was selling meat to them that day?”
Darla shrugs.
“He could have delivered early and come back or come here first and gone to his stores late. Hell, he could have bribed a couple.
Somebody could have owed him a favor. He could have been slipping an employee of one of those stores free meat for years.”
I nod at her. It is worth checking out if for no other reason than I’ve about worked my way to the end of the list of plant employees.
“Do you have any idea where Muddy went?”
Darla shakes her head.
“He didn’t leave a forwarding address, and I checked at the plant he was working at in West Memphis. He just didn’t show up one day.
They’re still checking to see if he stole any money.”
I smile at her.
“You should have been a cop.”
She doodles on a pad in front of her.
“Hardly. I was just trying to help you out.”
“Thanks,” I say, pushing up from my chair. It dawns on me that Darla is probably hoping that I might ask her out. We’re about the same age, and
I doubt if there have been too many guys lining up to ask her for a date.
“Have you told the sheriff about the theft?” “I wanted to let you know first,” she says.
“Bonner kind of plays things close to the vest, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I have,” I say. I wonder when Bonner would have gotten around to telling me. If nothing else, I will be able to argue, for what it’s worth, that a thieving salesman and an undocumented alien got the hell out of town after the boss was murdered.
“Are you still friends with Muddy’s wife?” I ask, thinking she might keep up with her ex-husband. Some women never let go, no matter how badly they’ve been abused.
“More or less,” Darla says, reaching for the phone book.
“She lives outside of town.”
I ask her to give Mrs. Jessup a call and see if she has any idea where Muddy is. She says she will, and I leave, relieved that at least one person is actively helping me on this case. I’d be at ground zero if it weren’t for this woman. What is her motivation? If I am honest with myself, it can’t only be that she’s attracted to me. I suspect that, outside of his family, Darla may be the person who misses Willie the most.
Sheriff Bonner sits in his office and looks at me with an expression that says I’m not very bright.
“I would have told you where Mr. Jessup was if you had asked. We found him a couple of weeks ago. He’s living in Nashville working for another plant.”
I feel like an idiot. For the last two weeks I have been wasting my time trying to find him and nailing down his alibi which today is even tighter than it was before I began to try to track him down. Feeling dumber by the minute, I ask Bonner if he has checked out whether Mike’s Super Bargain store in Memphis is Mafia controlled.
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 offer
ed 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.
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