Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (3 page)

It is only in the last few months that I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that my image of myself as an ex-sixties liberal no longer fits the facts. It was Rosa who had bonded with our neighbors, a mixture of mostly middle-class blacks and elderly whites who, for one reason or another, had decided they couldn’t afford to sell when blacks had begun to be steered into the neighborhood.

The sixties (despite the excesses) had been such a hopeful time for me.

I was helping to implement the legacy of Kennedy’s Camelot and Johnson’s “Great Society.” Driven by the legislation of the period (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaid, Medicate, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Housing Act of 1968, etc.), America would wipe out its twin evils of racial discrimination and poverty, and I was doing my part.

After my two-year stint in the Peace Corps, I worked briefly for a Blackwell County War on Poverty project until it finally dawned on me that it was a bureaucratic make-work project for blacks that rivaled any northern city’s reputation for patronage, waste, and political intrigue. Damn, was I naive! After about a year of pushing paper I drifted into a social worker’s job for the county, investigating child abuse, and stayed there until Rosa finally prodded me into night law school.

And all the while, instead of becoming a model of peace, prosperity, and racial harmony, parts of Blackwell County, like much of the rest of the country, were becoming a battle zone for the gangs, drug dealers, and the underclass that seems to be growing daily.

As I angle south off 1-40 before reaching Forrest City, I wonder why it took so long for me to realize I was no longer a soldier in a war that couldn’t be won, not in my lifetime anyway. I didn’t really need to solve the world’s problems.

It has been more than I can do to raise Sarah and keep myself out of trouble. Sarah. The thought of her makes me smile. Such a wonderful kid but a moralist as only the young can be. At various times in the past three years she’s been a fundamentalist Christian, a dancer on the Razorbacks porn porn squad, a feminist. Now she’s a caregiver to AIDS victims.

Always searching. I hope I haven’t made her too insecure ever to be content with herself. Her mother’s death from breast cancer when she was in junior high didn’t help. How much did my father’s schizophrenia and subsequent suicide when I was thirteen affect me? It is something I will always wonder about. Sarah has coped much better than I did.

I stop at a convenience store in Moro to use the bathroom. Middle age.

If this is a precursor to what’s ahead, I can’t get too excited about it. Is it my imagination or do I really have to piss fifteen times a day? How do guys who work in factories cope with one fifteen-minute break in the morning? As I read the copy on the white condom boxes above the urinal, I realize I would need a catheter and a bottle the size of a water cooler strapped to my leg to hold a job in a plant.

On the road again with a cup of coffee, I can tell I am back home in the Delta by the increasing number of beat-up old cars with blacks behind the wheel, many of them as ancient looking as their cars.

Despite having been away, I can’t escape the feeling that I know this area, and I know its people, better than I’ll ever know anyplace else.

There is something vaguely comforting about the past even if it was difficult. I think of the way I acted at thirteen after my father hanged himself on the state hospital grounds in Benton.

As far as shitty adolescent behavior goes, I can’t quite say I wrote the book. Walking out of class, talking back to teachers, sneaking beer out of neighbors’ refrigerators, was small potatoes compared to the problems kids have today, but it was enough to make my mother think that she wasn’t going to be able to handle me. She couldn’t afford to send me to Subiaco, but, as Marty, my sister, has pointed out, at the time she couldn’t afford not to. Fortunately, for me, society didn’t have psychiatric institutions for kids who mainly needed a good kick in the butt every day.

At Subiaco I cried like the baby I was that first semester, but Mother had the sense not to let me come home. I resented it at the time, but she was right. Was she perhaps right also to discourage Rosa and me from returning to Bear Creek? Why did I want to go back, anyway?

Rosa’s presence would have been a constant reminder to the town that perhaps the rumors about my paternal grandfather’s out-of-wedlock child were true, something that my mother had consistently denied.

“It’s in the Page blood,” they would have said.

“They’re all nigger lovers.”

Coming into the outskirts of Bear Creek on 79 I continue east toward Memphis, and I arrive at the state prison and county jail facility fifteen minutes later. I sign in at the reception desk and then have to get back in my car and drive around to a separate building to see my client, a hassle I’d like to avoid in the future.

Short, round, and balding in his bright orange jumpsuit, Bledsoe does not look like a killer. We sit across from each other in a visitation room in green plastic chairs separated from each other by a clear glass window and steel mesh, and I scribble notes while he talks.

“I liked ole Willie,” he says mildly.

“I felt pretty bad when they told me someone cut him up. He was a hell of a good man. Hardly anybody would be workin’ in Bear Creek at all if it wudn’t for people like him.”

“When did they first start acting like you were a suspect?” I ask, noting how easygoing Class appears. I was afraid he was going to be some hulking monster who looked at home with a butcher knife. Instead, his hands are smaller than mine, and his receding hairline and a squint give him a mild, innocent expression that a jury can’t help but notice.

“The best I figure now, the very next morning,” Class drawls, wiping his nose with his sleeve.

“The plant’s got these two meat inspectors, and one of them said he saw my knife wasn’t put up exactly right, and they said there was some blood on it. I heard it turned out ‘0’ positive—same as ole Willie’s.

Of course, I didn’t know all this was going on. They began questioning everybody on the kill floor that day and up front, too. Even though I’d been home that afternoon by myself, I never figured I had to worry.”

“How’d they say Willie was killed?” I ask, realizing how much I have forgotten to ask his wife.

“Was there a struggle?”

Class shakes his head.

“Naw, they said he didn’t even put up a fight. That’s why they knew right away it was somebody who worked in the plant.

Whoever done it jus’ walked right up behind him at his desk and cut his throat and then stepped back and watched him die. It wouldn’t take long

if you get that artery.” Class draws an imaginary line across his throat.

I feel a chill, and it isn’t just from the cold.

What a horrible moment it must have been for that old man when he realized what was happening to him.

“So you were the only suspect?” I ask, thinking how tempting it would be to try to frame someone like him.

Class shrugs.

“They acted like we was all suspects for a while till that blood got checked. Then the sheriff wanted me to take a lie detector test, and I wouldn’t. Hell, I don’t trust that shit. Then they fired me, but nothing happened after that until yesterday when all hell broke loose.”

Somehow he is able to grin, though weakly, at the spectacle of himself being taken into custody.

“Your wife said she heard that the DNA analysis,” I say, realizing he may not know, “showed conclusively that the blood on your knife was Willie’s.”

“I don’t know about that,” Class demurs, scratching a sore on his ring finger.

“Anybody could have got hold of my knife. We just kept ‘em laid out in the back. Ever’body had his own spot.”

I try to visualize the floor of a meat packing plant and conjure up a scene of bloody, controlled carnage. I will have to get the judge to allow me a tour of the plant. The inside of my mouth begins to moisten at just the thought. This will be fun: I can’t even see a dead weasel on the road without becoming a little queasy.

“How do they tell them apart?”

“Most scratch a little mark on the handle,” Class explains.

“I got my initials on mine.”

It occurs to me that Class misses his work.

“What have you been doing since you got fired?”

I ask, wondering how I’d handle months of idleness.

I’d probably turn into an alcoholic after the first month.

“I’ve been helpin’ out at my uncle’s barbecue place in town for a while,” Class responds.

“It’s actually owned by Paul Taylor. I didn’t even know that.”

For the first time since I’ve been talking to him, I pick up a false note here. I haven’t asked about his association with the Taylors.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, watching his face carefully.

If he is conning me, I’d like to find out earlier than later.

“They’re sayin’ he hired me,” Class says.

“I hardly even know him.”

I question him at length about Paul, and he admits that before he started at the plant he was a delivery man for an appliance store in town that Paul owned. Paul rarely came in the store, but when he did, he would make a point to speak to the help.

“He was real friendly,” Class says.

“We always got a ham at Christmas from him.”

That sounds like Paul, the great benefactor of the underclass. He wouldn’t pay minimum wage if there was any way he could avoid it, but he liked to play Santa Claus.

“Have you seen him since you worked there?” I ask, afraid I see where this is heading.

“On the street every now and then,” Class says.

“And then at Oldham’s Barbecue some. See, like I say, it turned out he owned it, and my uncle just managed it for him.”

Paul, it appears, has had Class on the payroll for years.

“So how long have you been working one way or another for Paul Taylor?”

“About eight years, I guess,” Class says, using his fingers to count.

It is easy to guess what has happened. While the prosecuting attorney was waiting for the results of the DNA analysis, he just sat back and watched Class. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Oldham was about to retire and Class was going to join the entrepreneurial class, courtesy of Paul.

On the other hand, it is not out of the realm of the possible it was a coincidence. Employers are few and far between in the Delta.

“How much were you making?” I ask.

“More than I was making cutting meat,” Class admits. He sighs, knowing things don’t look good for him.

I ask him directly, “Did Paul Taylor hire you to kill Willie “Naw, sir!” Class says, raising his voice for the first time.

“I swear to God he didn’t. I didn’t murder ole Willie for nobody.”

For some reason I think I believe him. Maybe I just want to do this case. We talk for a while longer and then I get a guard to let him come around to sign my retainer agreement. I don’t make a practice of trying to milk the cow dry in one setting. I will have ample opportunity to find out Doss’s story. I tell him that I will try to have his arraignment set as quickly as possible so we can get a trial date. I explain that since he has no money for a bond, he will have to remain in jail until the trial, which he accepts more stoically than I would.

Paul, he tells me, has already made bond, which is hardly surprising.

I drive to the courthouse in Bear Creek and find the sheriff’s office on the first floor. I want to pay a courtesy call on him before I go see the prosecuting attorney. If I do my job right on this case, the sheriff’s job in this case is just beginning. As I walk into the building, I realize I haven’t been here since I was a teenager and signed up for the draft. With the Vietnam War on, a heart murmur, which has never given me a moment’s problem, probably saved my life. As I push open the door, I wonder why this case didn’t make this morning’s edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I can understand that the arrest of a black plant-worker in the rural Delta for the murder of a Chinese businessman would spark no great interest by the media, but Paul’s arrest should be big news. At least it would have been twenty years ago. Maybe he isn’t as rich as I thought.

I open the door and am greeted by a young black secretary behind a desk and a typewriter.

“You lookin’ for Sheriff Bonner? He just called and said he’s on the way.”

She has an old-fashioned bushy ‘fro that I haven’t seen in twenty years. Maybe eighteen at the most, she has an infectious smile that draws a smile from me. The last time I was in this building the only black face was behind a broom.

“May I have a seat and wait for him?” I ask.

“You sure can,” she says brightly.

“Would you care for some coffee?”

I take off my overcoat and sit down across from her. I’ve drunk enough coffee today to float a battleship, but one more cup won’t hurt.

“With just a little milk or whitener in it,” I say, pleased by the courtesy shown me. Could the sheriff be a black man? I realize I’ve got to find out what the hell has been going on for the last thirty years over here before I go too much further on this case.

“You must be a lawyer, but not from around here,” my hostess says, pouring my coffee into a mug that has a replica of the design of the Pyramid office building and sports arena in Memphis.

She’s clad in a modest green jumper with a white blouse underneath, Julia’s outfits, by comparison, look like the getups of a low-rent call girl. I realize how low my expectations are in the Delta. If you believe everything you read, you’d expect to find a girl this age at the welfare office with two children hanging on to her as she signs up for food stamps and AFDC.

“I’m Gideon Page,” I say, holding out my hand for my coffee. She takes my hand and pumps it as if she were a politician seeking votes.

“I’m Yolanda Ford, Sheriff Bonner’s secretary,” she replies.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

The door opens, and there is no mistaking the sheriff. Bonner is a

compact black man in his early forties, in an olive and tan uniform. He measures no more than 5‘9”, and that may be stretching it because of the boots he is wearing.