Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (21 page)

“I don’t think she knows what she’s doing,” I say, thinking how odd Saturday was. Angela made up her brother-in-law’s bed, but she didn’t bother to wash the sheets.

“But she looked so damn good I couldn’t have resisted her if I had wanted to.”

“You should get her over here,” Dan advises.

“It sounds like she prefers somebody else’s bed to her own.”

I take out a rubber band from my drawer and pop it against the desk.

“She’s gonna have to do something. For some reason she feels obligated to sell out to his brother, but she doubts if he can pay her. I can’t help but feel bad for her.”

Dan snorts and wags a finger at me.

“Who you ought to feel bad about is Amy. If she put out a contract on you, I wouldn’t come to your funeral.”

Amy, Dan, and I were all friends in night law school. He is rightfully protective of her.

“I wouldn’t blame you,” I say, contritely.

“I called her the other day to see how Jessie is doing. She sounded okay.”

“Don’t you fuck her over anymore!” Dan orders, and pushes himself up out of the chair.

“If you’re through with her, leave her alone! Damn it, she’s crazy about you and this is killing her!

The stupid little fool.”

“I won’t,” I say quickly. Dan’s face is flushed, and he’s actually panting. With a look of disgust on his face, he huffs out of my office and slams the door. I give him five minutes to get over it.

One of Dan’s problems is that he can’t stay mad at anybody any more than he can lose five pounds.

Dan’s right. I shouldn’t have called her. It’s just that this is an unsettling time in my life. Taking this case in Bear Creek probably wasn’t a good idea. There is too much unhappiness over there, and I feel as though I am becoming sucked in by it. Still, things could work out for me and Angela. All she needs is time. My problem is that slowing down is not something I do well. Apparently, neither does Angela.

At four o’clock I get a rare business client, a young man who told me on the phone last week he wanted to come in to see me about a zoning problem. Len Chumley, a kid who can’t be much out of college, follows me back to my office, telling me that he knew Sarah his last year at the University.

“She was just a freshman,” he says respectfully as he sits down across from me, “but you could tell she was going to be special.”

“She’s doing fine.” Special in what way, I wonder, as I try to size up Chumley. This guy looks a little slick, but I have no handle on males his age.

Only a couple years out of college, he probably doesn’t have a lot of money, but he doesn’t mind putting it into the clothes on his back. He has on a black-and-white herringbone sports coat that looks to be silk and a dandy purple handkerchief poking out of the pocket.

“What kind of problem do you have?” I ask, deciding not to inquire about my daughter. He probably wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway.

“I’m primarily in the condom delivery business,” he says, not batting an eye. He whips out a business card and slides it across my desk. I put on my reading glasses. In old English script it gives Chumley’s telephone number and an address that I recognize as only a couple of blocks from an exclusive area of town. In the center it says:

CHUMLEY’S CONDOMS DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR.

Then below it: we come before you do.

“A business for the nineties,” I concede, thinking this kid will probably be a millionaire someday.

Chumley is short, maybe no more than 5‘6”, and already a bit thin on top, but he has the sales man’s way of using what assets he has to his advantage.

“They have a condom store in Fayetteville,” Chumley reminds me, “but for every person who isn’t embarrassed buying their rubbers in front of their neighbors, there are fifty in Arkansas who would prefer to have a conservatively dressed salesperson come to their house and show them a variety of products including condoms, sex toys, and videos.”

Maybe their neighbors will mistake them for Mormons.

“Sex videos, huh?” I ask.

“So it’s not just condoms?”

“Related products. In my marketing course at the University, I was always fascinated by surveys which show how difficult it is for the customer to say what it is he or she would really like to buy.

Even though the interactive video is revolutionizing the art of merchandising, there will always be a place for the Fuller Brush man and the Avon lady.”

I would hardly place French ticklers, dildos, vibrators, and porno movies such as Sore Throat and Full Speed Ahead in the same category as cosmetics, but maybe I’m out of touch. I can picture Sarah’s reaction when my picture shows up on the front page of the Democrat-Gazette defending the First Amendment rights of this little hustler. I ask, “Specifically, what is your problem?”

“They want me to take my “We Come Before You Do’ sign out of my front yard,” he says, his voice registering high with indignation.

“I work out of the house my parents left me.” He hands me a letter from the city warning me that he is in violation of city ordinance #1437. “All I’m doing is advertising a legitimate business.”

“Where do you live?” I ask, wondering who on the floor has a set of municipal ordinances. We have more laws in this country than ants.

It’s hard to believe that we need every single one of them.

“On the corner of Riverview and Dayton,” he says.

“Even though it’s zoned residential, there’s a lot of traffic by there in the day. You’d be surprised how many people see it.”

I don’t doubt that. I suspect that it hadn’t been up fifteen minutes before someone called city hall. This case is a loser, and I tell him so.

“There’re all kinds of eloquent arguments that can be made on behalf of free speech and the free enterprise system, but I suspect it would be so much pissing in the wind. You could wind up spending a fortune trying to get a variance and falling flat on your face.”

The kid gives me a sly smile.

“I was thinking maybe you’d barter your fees.”

I groan inwardly, thinking this is what my law practice has come to.

“Follow me,” I say, standing up and heading for the door. Dan, I think,

have I got a client for you!

At home Tuesday night Angela calls to tell me that she has been invited to Atlanta to spend a week with an old college roommate. She is driving down Thursday morning. I wonder if she is trying to avoid me, but she sounds friendly enough. I want to talk about Saturday, but I manage to restrain myself. The quickest way to make her back off is to crowd her, especially when she has asked me not to do so. I tell her what is going on in the case and that I will be back in Bear Creek Thursday. She is keenly interested in the details and reads to me an article in the Bear Creek Times about the case. For the only source of news in Bear Creek, it is amazingly succinct and reports only the barest outline of the case. My recollection of the news media in Bear Creek is that its primary business was advertising revenue, and distinctly not investigative journalism or crusades of any kind. Since most of the stores that must advertise in the Times are probably in some way associated with Paul, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Angela at eighteen would have been indignant at this article and charged a conspiracy between the media and the business community, but today she says that she is grateful no one is trying to exploit the already tense race relations in town. If Angela has changed, so have I. If anyone had told me I would make love to Angela in her brother-in-law’s bed thirty years after I left Bear Creek, I would have doubted his sanity. She promises to call me when she returns and hangs up. I go to bed and dream that we are making love in her house in Bear Creek. Someone was watching, but when I wake up, I can’t remember who it was.

Darla Tate’s house is the first one on the right on Kentucky Avenue, less than a mile from Jefferson Academy, where she sends her sons. It is

in a development that was relatively new when I was growing up, but like everything else here, it seems much smaller. The homes are modest A-frames with tiny yards. Darla’s house has siding, however, and is distinguished by a large pecan tree in front. Driving over, I have realized this woman can be a gold mine of information if I don’t make her defensive. Outside of his family, probably nobody spent more time with Willie. What I’m afraid I’ll find out, though, is that Willie, being Chinese, rarely confided in anyone except his wife.

Darlatate comes to the door in a pair of baggy brown slacks. Now that I get a good look at her, I realize she is almost as tall as I am. Her oval face is partially obscured by long, straight hair of a hue that seems to have gone through several changes and is now the color of winter wheat. As I follow into her living room, she offers me a beer, which I regretfully decline. I don’t want this to turn into a party.

“My boys are still at basketball practice,” she says.

“They both play, but they can’t jump more than two inches between them.”

I laugh, remembering that I would have liked to have played basketball at Subiaco, but I, too, had a vertical leap of an inch. What furniture she has is old, and a little worn. A couch, coffee table, TV and VCR, and recliner more than fill the room. Pictures of her boys in their football uniforms are on the walls. I sit on the couch while she plops down in the recliner and picks up a can of Bud Light by her feet.

“They’re good-looking kids,” I say sincerely, wondering what the future holds for white adolescents. I think of Angela’s comments about her two sons. These two boys could easily end up at the plant like their mother.

“They’re a handful,” she says, “especially without a father around.”

Without any prompting, Darla explains that she waited until she was almost twenty-five to get married, and then her carefully chosen husband took off after just three years, leaving her to struggle through one marginal job after another until Southern Pride Meats came into existence five years ago.

“That old man,” she volunteers fervently, referring to Willie, “was the most decent human being I’ve ever known. Even when he’d cut down on the number of hogs, he still kept our workers on the clock so they’d get a full paycheck. Two years ago, I was sick a whole winter, and he kept my check coming. That’s just how he was. There aren’t many white men who’d do that around here as far as I’m concerned.”

I ask her if she minds if I take some notes, and begin to scribble furiously on my legal pad. Perhaps I can make her seem so blindly loyal to Willie that she would do anything to incriminate his killer.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem like someone who would tell a lie when the truth is less convenient. Instead, she simply comes across as what she portrays herself to be: a profoundly grateful woman who needed a decent job to support her children.

“He must have trusted you a lot,” I say, “or he wouldn’t have told you about the tape between him and Paul Taylor.”

Darla winces as if I have struck her.

“If I had known what was on the tape, he might still be alive today, but there was always a line I wasn’t permitted to cross. He just said to make sure Doris played a tape he had given her if anything mysterious happened to him. When I asked about it, he just gave me this look, and so I shut up.”

Darla is a talker and requires no urging to gossip about the personnel in the plant, thus relieving me of the fear that she was so wedded to the idea that Class was the killer that she wouldn’t be willing to discuss anyone but him.

“Harrison, one of the meat inspectors, hated Willie,” she says in response to a question about who, other than Bledsoe, could have killed her employer.

“And, frankly, Willie hated him. Willie wrote to his boss and tried to get him fired. He was nitpicking us to death.”

I ask about the other inspector, Frieda, who seemed that day in the plant almost apologetic about having to write up somebody. It was Harrison who noticed that Bledsoe’s knife was slightly out of place the day before.

“Surely you’ve had this conversation with the sheriff or an investigator,” I say, delighted with this information.

“It’s not in my statement, but I mentioned it the same morning the sheriff went through the plant with Harrison,” Darla says, gulping at her beer, “but the problem is that he’s got a pretty good alibi. See, he and Frieda commute all the way from Memphis every day. He couldn’t have

made it back after the plant closed before Doris found Willie’s body.”

I tap my pen against my pad. Some alibis are only as good as the amount of time it takes to understand what they’re built on.

“Maybe Harrison has some kind of hold on Frieda. You think they could have been sleeping together?”

Darla laughs out loud.

“That little bitty peck 7

erwood? Frieda’s no prize, but I sincerely doubt if she’s that desperate. She knows on a daily basis what an asshole Harrison is. I’m not gonna say it’d be impossible, but a woman’s got to draw the line somewhere.”

In an ideal world maybe—but from what I’ve seen of Frieda, it’s not hard for me to make that leap. While I write, Darla gets up to get another beer.

“Are you sure you won’t have one?”

I nod, having decided one won’t wipe me out, and a moment later take the Budweiser she hands me. If beer helps her keep talking, I’m not going to discourage her.

“You ought to try to check out that illegal alien who ran off after the murder,” she says, snapping the top off her second can of Miller Lite in less than twenty minutes.

“Now, if Class didn’t do it, that boy could have. But I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut he’s in Mexico, and nobody will ever find him.

They haven’t got a clue.”

I reach down into my briefcase and flip through to the back of the file where I find a copy of his work permit. Jorge Arrazola. I study his picture. In his early twenties, he is a nice enough looking kid but basically indistinguishable from a million of his countrymen. Dark, lots of hair, and a mustache. Darla gets up from her chair, stands by the arm of the couch, and looks over my shoulder.

“This is an obvious fake, if you study it. Who knows what his name really is? But it doesn’t pay employers to study their identification papers too closely. Willie liked Mexicans and hired them whenever he had the chance. Typically, they’re the best workers in the plant.