Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (23 page)

“What the shit are you doin’ over here?” he asks, offering his right arm, which is covered by a faded red corduroy shirt that stops short of his wrist by a good inch. His jeans look as old as he is. Of course, he wasn’t expecting company either.

Taken aback by this display of friendliness, I nevertheless extend my hand. His palm, as I expected, is rough and hard. Bobby Don must be the only person in Bear Creek not to know already why I’m here.

“I’m a lawyer in Blackwell County, but I’ve got a case here and I’m interviewing some people who might know something about it.”

“Who is it, Donny?” a female voice calls from somewhere in the back.

Whoever, wife or girlfriend, she sounds slightly hung over, too. I hear no children.

“An old friend of mine from when I was a kid,” he calls over his shoulder without a trace of irony.

Friend. He’s got to be kidding! I feel my cheeks begin to burn, but try to say amiably, “I need to find this Ruiz guy. You know where he lives?”

Bobby Don must see something in my face, for his old expression of disdain returns to his own.

“He lives a couple of houses that way,” he grunts, pointing to my left.

“So you’re a lawyer, huh? I should have figured that.”

I know: a gift for gab, though I suspect I know what word Bobby Don would use.

“So, what are you doing these days, Bobby Don?” I say in my snottiest tone.

“Fishing,” he says, giving his answer as much dignity as possible. He gives me a hard stare and shuts the door in my face.

I walk down off his wooden porch and return to the Blazer and back out of his yard. People don’t change, I decide. Yet if Bobby Don knew that my purpose was to get Paul Taylor, I suspect he would approve.

He’s spent his life envying people like Paul.

Alvaro Ruiz’s shack is on higher ground than Bobby Don’s, but I wonder

whether it has ever been flooded. Maybe it only seems that hundred-year floods come every ten years these days. I know I’m glad I haven’t lived on this bank for the last thirty years. In summer the mosquitoes must be like dive-bombers. From the outside the structure looks about a thousand square feet, but unlike Bobby Don’s it has been painted in the last few years. I wonder why he doesn’t live better, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he sends most of his money back to Mexico.

I knock at the door, and wait a full minute before a gray-haired Hispanic with long sideburns and a mustache cautiously sticks his head out. I introduce myself, and at the mention of Eddie’s name, the door opens wide to reveal a short but powerfully built man of about sixty in a red cotton jersey and jeans whose cuffs are folded several times at the bottom, revealing a pair of unpolished Army boots.

“Are you Mr. Ruiz?”

“Yes, I am,” he says, his voice heavily accented.

“You want to come inside?”

“Thanks,” I say and offer my hand to him. His jaws relax into an unforced smile, and he shakes my arm so vigorously I could be a long-lost relative.

I walk past him into a room that shows few signs, if any, of a feminine touch. An ugly green couch, two folding chairs, a scarred unpainted coffee table, and an old 17-inch Motorola TV make up all the furnishings I take in on first glance.

He politely offers me a cup of coffee, and though I already need to piss after two cups at the Cotton Boll, it would seem rude to refuse.

He leaves me alone in the room to take off my jacket and to stare at the blank TV screen and contrast this hospitable beginning with my exchange with Bobby Don. Alvaro may think he has no choice but to appease me. Whatever the differences, I already like this guy more in ten seconds than I ever did Bobby Don. In the moments before he returns I notice on the table a snapshot of a younger woman and four children. His daughter and grandchildren? Wife and kids? Though I spent two years in Colombia, I am basically ignorant about Central America in general and Mexico in particular. I know the African slave trade flourished in South America, but have no idea if it was a part of the Mexican economic system. My host returns with a tea tray, which though not laden with strawberries and cream, contains a carton of milk, a bowl of sugar, a spoon, and a mug of coffee.

Maybe there is a woman in the kitchen after all. This seems oddly elaborate in such spare surroundings, but Alvaro, from outward appearances, appears not at all surprised to be entertaining an uninvited stranger who has shown up at his house unannounced before nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. He seats himself in a folding chair across from me and sips at his own coffee, taken black, while I explain that I just want to ask him a few questions about Jorge Arrazola.

“I’m trying to find out if he did anything while he was here,” I say, “to make you think he might have had something to do with Mr. Ting’s murder.” “No,” Ruiz says, “he is a good boy. A hard worker. He has trouble with the English, but he is learning a little.”

“Are you a citizen of this country, Mr. Ruiz?”

His eyes widen slightly.

“No, but I have papers.

Do you want to see them?”

“Not at all,” I say, hastily.

“What I meant by that question is that you may not realize that you can’t get into trouble if he had told you something that made you suspicious he was involved in Mr. Ting’s death.”

The other man studies the floor.

“So someone tell you I know where he is?” he asks, his fists clenched on his knees.

“I already speak to the sheriff and say I don’t know where Jorge go.

They say it isn’t even his real name.”

“I realize that,” I say, “but my understanding is that you were very helpful to this boy. Maybe he said some things that would help give you an idea of where he went or where he was actually from.

He might have gone back home. His family might know where he is.”

Mr. Ruiz looks past me out the window to the other side of the river.

“I know he say he is born in Juarez, but that isn’t going to help you much. He won’t go there. He breaks the law by having a false ID. But he don’t kill Mr. Ting. I know him. He just need to make some money to help his mother and don’t have no green card. That’s not so bad.”

I can’t help but think this man knows more than he is telling. There is too much emotion in his voice.

“Not at all,” I say, taking another tack.

“The problem is that if he doesn’t come back and clear his name, the Tings might have a problem with hiring any more Hispanics at the plant.

It’s too bad. Eddie said y’all are the best workers they ever had.

Maybe he left behind something that could help find him.”

Ruiz cuts his eyes back at me. Clearly, he feels he is being coerced, however subtle it appears.

“He live with me and sleep on this couch,” he admits.

“But when we find out the next morning Willie is murdered and they think it’s somebody in the plant, he get scared and leave two days later without a word to me. He don’t have nothing here to see.”

I look down at the couch as if I might be looking for an address between the cushions. It’s possible that this kid was Willie’s murderer and Ruiz was in on it. Nobody needs money more than these people. Paul could have

easily made a deal with this man, who was too smart to do it himself.

So Ruiz hired a fellow countryman and showed him how to frame Class.

Why the hell not?

“Did he steal your truck?”

Ruiz shakes his head.

“I give it to Jorge for his birthday last July and he fix it the day after the murder. All it need is a battery and two tires. He take it.”

A murder charge would motivate me to get some transportation, too.

“Mr. Ruiz, how do you know he didn’t kill Mr. Ting?” I ask, making my voice firm.

Ruiz seems more guarded now, but it could just be my imagination. He avoids my eyes and looks out the window again.

“He don’t act no different.

He say he take the boat and go fishing the day Mr. Ting killed. He go fishing a lot.”

“Do you know Paul Taylor?” I ask, sipping my coffee.

Ruiz gives me a quizzical look.

“I see him downtown, but I don’t talk to him.”

I take a sip of my coffee.

“Did Jorge ever mention him or did he ever come out here?” “No,” he says emphatically.

“Mr. Taylor don’t ever come out here to fish.”

Getting nowhere fast, I ask, “Do you think Class Bledsoe killed Mr. Ting?”

Ruiz looks down at his own coffee, which he hasn’t touched.

“I been knowing Class for a long time. I don’t think he kill anybody.”

I look down at the photograph. Despite his defensiveness, I feel a grudging respect for Ruiz.

He has come to a foreign country, learned another language, gotten an honest job, and has helped others.

“Who do you think did?” I ask, certain I won’t get an answer, and I don’t. He shrugs but doesn’t respond, too circumspect to point fingers at anybody.

“My wife was from Colombia,” I tell him.

“The day she became a United States citizen was one of the proudest days of her life. She always said people who are born in this country never

appreciate it enough.” “You have work here,” he says, his voice heartfelt.

“In Mexico, there is never enough. If this plant closes, I can go somewhere else in the state and work in the chicken plants. Here, I send money to my family every month. In Mexico many barely have enough to eat.” He smiles and says in Spanish, “Su esposa es de Colombia, si?”

Embarrassed by my pitifully accented Spanish, I reply in English, “She died seven years ago from cancer, but we had a daughter who looks just like her.” I pull out my wallet and show him Sarah’s picture.

He nods appreciatively.

“Que hermosa!”

I tell him that she is a student at the University of Arkansas and ask about the picture on the table. He picks it up and says in Spanish that his first wife died, too. I make out, or think I do, that three of the children in the picture are by his first wife and the boy is from his second. He is speaking too rapidly for me to follow every word, and I ask him to speak English.

“Comprende bien, no?” he says, but with his typical deference switches back to a language in which he can only express himself in the present tense. He tells me his first wife died in childbirth twenty years ago.

Yet he chose to marry again and begin another family. I can’t imagine having that kind of hope in a country that promises its people so little security. Only one of his adult children has a full-time job and that as

a taxi driver in Mexico City.

As I often did in the Peace Corps, I think about how lucky I was to have been born a white male in this country.

We are interrupted by someone at the door, and when Ruiz opens it, I have a partial view of a man in hunting clothes who is carrying a shotgun in his right hand. It looks like a .20 gauge, which was the size my father and I used to hunt rabbits before my mother, in her growing terror of his paranoia, gave away his guns. I stand up to get a better view and see Ruiz’s caller is a wormy, sallow-faced white guy in his early twenties. I wonder if he is one of Bobby Don’s sons. He says irritably, “Where the hell you been?”

Ruiz mutters an apology to him, but I pick up my coat and go to the door with a card in my hand, and say that I will be back in contact with him. With characteristic politeness, he introduces me to his friend, but I do not catch more than his first name of Mickey. Possibly hung over with his red eyes and vacant stare, Mickey eyes me suspiciously and does not offer to shake hands, which is fine with me.

I drive off, wondering how hard Ruiz was questioned by the sheriff.

The rest of the day is one dry hole after another. Though each of the three men I talk to is more or less willing to discuss the case (they don’t want to lose their jobs, I assume), all, despite being encouraged to talk, are understandably suspicious of me. Obviously, if Bledsoe is not Willie’s killer, one of them might be. Still, I have no choice but to begin the process of visiting each one and satisfying myself that not only are their alibis airtight, they don’t have any information that

could point to other suspects. The most irritating of the three is Cy Scoggins, who, away from the plant, has no doubt who killed Willie.

“For a nigger. Class was okay at his job,” Cy admits as he slides underneath his truck to tinker with something.

“Sooner or later, though, they all revert to type, and will kill you just as soon as look at you. Name me a family where one of them doesn’t have somebody in jail.”

Squatting on my heels to talk to Cy since he isn’t going to interrupt his work, I resist arguing with him. All it will do is piss him off, and that won’t help me. I ask if he remembers Vie Worthy, the man whom Class claimed he heard threaten Willie. This launches him into a diatribe against blacks.

“A perfect example of what I’m talking about. He came to work drunk, got his ass fired, and then had the nerve to file for unemployment compensation. Hell, yeah, he hated me and Willie, but he couldn’t a done it, though, ‘cause Willie wouldn’t let him get near the plant. He would a noticed a nigger like Worthy trying to slip up on him.”

He discounts Darla’s theory that Harrison, the male meat-inspector, could have framed Class and killed Willie. He gestures at me with the wrench.

“Name me a meat inspector anybody likes. They’re assholes, but that’s why they’re meat inspectors. Harrison didn’t give a shit that Willie hated his guts and was trying to fire him. If Willie had liked him, Harrison would have thought he wasn’t doing his job.”

I drive off, thinking how much Cy resents blacks. Maybe he framed Class, and Darla is afraid to say so or is fooled. Yet I doubt it.

Cy’s alibi is rock solid. According to the statements gathered by the sheriff, three junkyard employees are willing to come to court to testify he was at a salvage yard during the time Willie was murdered.

I’m glad he isn’t my client. It can be a pain in the butt to defend someone you instinctively dislike as much as Cy. His implacable racism makes me glad I didn’t come back here. The problem with Bear Creek is its hothouse atmosphere. In Blackwell County you can escape the subject of race occasionally, but here it controls everything.