Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (12 page)

“Hello, Gideon,” she says warmly, obviously thinking I am here to help her husband. She gives me a hug, touching me for the first time in our lives. Though once a high-school beauty, now she is almost gaunt, and her once-lovely face is stretched tight against her skull, giving her the look of a middle-aged woman with an incurable disease. Living with Paul has obviously taken a toll.

“Hi, Jill,” I say, and become immediately tongue-tied. I should have insisted on meeting Paul in his office. Though I never knew Jill as well as I would have liked, she was a caring, decent girl from a good background who just happened to be born with beautiful olive skin and the loveliest brown eyes in the entire Delta. I cannot help but wonder what her rival Mae Terry looks like after all these years in a wheelchair. Though she has never met her, Jill asks about Sarah as if I were their next door neighbor who had just returned from a trip with his child to Disneyland.

Sean, their son, is not in evidence, making me wonder if he has been hustled out of town to stay with Jill’s parents until his father’s life calms down a bit. What do you say to your child when you’ve been charged with murder? Sorry for making your life a nightmare, but mine is hell, too, so what about a little sympathy? Not if he’s twelve. I can’t help feeling a little sorry for Jill and Sean, but not sorry enough to resist sticking it to Paul if there is any way I can do it.

As she, chatting all the while, leads me through a formal dining room with a table that could seat twenty, it is apparent she has done her homework about me in the last twenty-four hours. Whatever her husband truly thinks of me, I am to be courted. She opens the door into a den, and I see Dick Dickerson, who stands up as I enter the room. I haven’t seen him in thirty years, but he is recognizable because of his uncanny resemblance to “ole Bullet Head,” Gerald Ford, but unlike the former president with his reputation for ungainliness, Dick can do more than walk and chew gum at the same time. With the grace of a tiger, Dick meets me in the middle of the room and catches my hand before I can spread my fingers.

“Good to see you, Gideon. You’re doing some good legal work these days,” he says, crunching my knuckles.

“Your mother and daddy would be proud.”

“Thank you, Dick,” I say, flattered despite myself.

“Coming from you, that’s a real compliment.

How are you?”

Behind me I hear Paul’s voice, “Jill, can you get Gideon a drink?”

Jill smiles wanly at her husband, who has come in behind us. As Angela has said, he looks in great shape. His blond hair has gone sandy but there is still lots of it, and his stomach is enviably flat under a pair of faded button-up jeans. I wonder what it must be like for her as she visibly ages and he gets more handsome. She asks me, “What would you like?”

I notice that Dick has nothing on the table beside his chair, and say I’ll take some decaf if she has some. Paul protests, but I shake my head.

Something tells me that I am going to want to remember this conversation at least until this trial is over.

Before Paul allows me to sit down he pumps my hand vigorously and looks me in the eye.

“I appreciate you coming by on short notice, Gideon. Dick and I both feel the sooner we start going down the same path the better.”

“No problem,” I say as I sit down on a black leather couch across from Dick and look around the room. On the walls are photographs of the whole family captured in activities that range from duck hunting to posing with Corliss Williamson, the former Razorback great. Jill smiles gamely in all of them as if to say, whose life goes as planned?

Paul, clutching what appears to be scotch and water, takes a seat on the couch by me. I might need a drink too if I were charged with first-degree murder.

“Gideon, Paul says you haven’t had much of a conversation with your client yet,” Dick says, pulling up a yellow legal pad from the briefcase beside his Barcalounger.

“Is he saying anything?”

They seem so eager to know if Bledsoe is going to implicate Paul that it is hard to avoid the feeling that both he and my client are guilty as hell.

“Other than he didn’t do it and that someone is framing him, not much.” “Does he have any ideas,” Dick asks, taking notes, “who that might be?”

Jill returns with a steaming mug that has painted on it Arkansas Razorbacks—National Champs ‘93-‘94. I wait until she leaves, since I’m not sure how much she is supposed to hear. It is difficult for me to gauge their relationship.

Maybe his screwing around with Mae Terry is no threat to her. If your rival is confined to a wheelchair, it probably is easy to believe all you are missing when he goes out the door to her house is some good conversation. I answer, “He doesn’t know. I don’t get the impression that Bledsoe is working on a doctorate in nuclear physics.”

Paul snickers appreciatively, but I detect some nervousness behind it.

If he has a deal with Bledsoe to keep his mouth shut, so far, so good, but there is a long way to go.

“It could have been any of the workers at the plant,” Dick suggests.

“Or possibly someone who didn’t even work there. I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility that Doris could have killed her husband and set up your client.”

I cannot remember the last time I saw Airs.

Ting. It has to be at least thirty years ago and must have been in their store. Her English was not as good as her husband’s, but she seemed to be there every time he was. Connie said her mother has been ill. I can’t imagine she would kill her husband, but as a defense attorney I can’t exclude anyone I can reasonably point a finger at. But I do not want to admit that I am seeing her tomorrow and have already been on the phone with Connie and Tommy.

“Anything’s possible,” I say, knowing that Dick wants to tell me how to do this case.

Dick frowns at this lack of enthusiasm and says, “We know you have a primary duty to your client, but I think if we coordinate our defenses, it’ll be in both our interests to do so.”

The last thing Dick wants me to argue to the jury is that Paul may have hired someone else to kill Willie and is the one setting up Bledsoe Why not pretend to cooperate as long as I can get away with it? It may be the only way I can get Paul. I respond, “I don’t know why we can’t do that.

Bledsoe insists that he is innocent and that he didn’t cook up any conspiracy with Paul.”

After this exchange, Dick visibly relaxes. Paul has obviously professed his innocence, but until now, Dick couldn’t be positive that Class hasn’t confessed to me that he murdered Willie and implicated Paul. For the next hour we talk generally about the case, and I use the opportunity to ask about the connections after the murder between Class and Paul, who, as expected, minimizes them.

“Before he was arrested, I didn’t even know Oldham had hired Class,” he says, “to help him with the restaurant. Talk to Oldham—he’ll tell you. I own the restaurant, but I treat him like an independent contractor, so I won’t have to worry with a bunch of niggers getting drunk out there and shooting each other and then suing the deep pocket.

Oldham can hire anybody he wants. I guess I saw Class out there a couple of times in the last few months but I don’t remember if I even spoke to him or not. I didn’t give a shit.

Class had worked for me years ago, and he had enough sense to deliver appliances and install them, so I figured he could make change and slice barbecue, and I didn’t worry about it. My deal with Oldham was that he pay me five hundred dollars every month, and as long as he did that, I didn’t care what he did.”

Do Dick or I believe this? I doubt it. I try to remember what Butterfield told me: Bledsoe had claimed he didn’t know Paul owned Oldham’s.

Dick explains that in the file there is a statement from Henry Oldham in which he denies being told by Paul to hire Class, but Oldham admits that Paul made several trips to get barbecue during the time around the date of the murder.

Turning to face me on the couch Paul says, “That’s no big deal. Henry makes the best barbecue in the best part of the state, and hell, yeah.

I went out there—to pick up some free barbecue. I sure wasn’t getting rich off of him.”

It occurs to me that in my cursory examination of the file I haven’t seen a statement by Paul and ask him if he gave one.

“I’d be crazy to talk to that sheriff!” he answers, looking at Dick for confirmation.

I ask Dick, bluntly, “Do you plan to call Paul?”

Defendants who refuse to testify usually have a real good reason—they are guilty.

Dick, who has begun to massage the bridge of his nose, shrugs.

“It’s way too early to worry about that.”

Paul snorts.

“Of course I’ll testify at the trial. I haven’t got anything to hide.”

His words hang in the air, though. Of course he does. Every person I know over the age of five has something in his past that can’t stand the light of day.

Dick stands up and makes a show of stretching and says he is ready to call it a night. It has been a long week, he says, and we can get together next week. We both know he wants to shut up his client. He has found out what he needed to know tonight: Class Bledsoe, if he has any beans to spill, hasn’t done so yet. I ask Paul to take two minutes to explain about the tape.

“You don’t ordinarily buy a business from a man by telling him he’s going to die soon,” I say, pushing him just a bit.

Paul’s smooth face becomes wrinkled as he frowns.

“I wasn’t threatening him. That old man wanted a fortune for that place. He was being absurd,” he says scornfully.

“Who was going to take over when he died? Connie’s a physicist in Memphis; Tommy’s a wheeler-dealer in Washington.

All I was doing was pointing out the reality of the situation. Why in the hell would I have him killed just because he was being stubborn? I wasn’t in any hurry.”

Clearly, it pissed him off that old Willie wouldn’t hand him over the keys to the plant. Whether he is acting or not, Paul cannot hide his arrogance.

For a certain breed of Southerner the feeling that the world is his oyster only increases with age; for the rest of us, the certainty that it is not accelerates at a greater pace.

“Since Clinton’s been in the White House,” Paul continues, “some Arkansans have had an inflated notion of the state’s importance. We’re talking Third World prices in the Delta. Southern Pride Meats doesn’t quite abut 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I was probably being generous to offer a hundred thousand for it.”

“You still want it, don’t you?” I ask as Dick begins to jingle the change in his pocket. He doesn’t trust me, I don’t think.

“Not if I have to look like a murderer to do it,” he says angrily.

“You can’t imagine how much this has hurt Jill and Sean and really the whole town. Things were bad enough between blacks and whites before.

Now, it’ll really be terrible.”

I walk toward the door. As long as blacks stayed in their place, race relations were “good.”

Now that they are in control, I won’t hear that cant again. How can Dick not gag when he hears Paul open his mouth? Surely he knows better.

That old saying, I guess from the sixties, comes to mind: “If you want peace, work for justice.” If I get my way, there’ll be some justice, but Paul will get no peace—my clients tell me it is hard to sleep in prison. Dick tells me that he will walk over for the arraignment Monday afternoon, and we can get a trial date afterward. Our conversation is over, and moments later, I am let out the front door, knowing I have given away more than I have gotten.

I drive back to the Bear Creek Inn and sit on the bed while I work my way through the thick file Butterfield has had copied for me. I’m probably not fooling Paul and Dick at all. Yet who knows? To live over here, you have to wear blinders.

Dick, who was raised by a wealthy uncle after his parents were killed in an automobile accident, has always been identified with the white power structure, but somehow seems apart from it. He will serve Paul well if Paul listens to him. In thinking about the evening, I doubt seriously if Paul consulted Dick before he called me this afternoon, but Dick would never let me know it.

He would say something to Paul but not to me. I wonder what he thinks of Bear Creek. His children grown and gone, his wife dead, what keeps him here when all the other whites are beginning to leave in droves?

Perhaps he finds something here that is comfortable. I cannot imagine what it is. He is a mystery to me. Perhaps I overestimate him.

From the nightstand I pick up the yearbook Angela has loaned me and find Tommy’s picture first and then Connie’s. She was cuter than ninety-five percent of the girls in her class. I realize that despite the obvious barriers, I was oblivious to their feelings about race.

Why? I suppose in most ways we considered Tommy and Connie “white.”

During all her sermons to me about racial injustice in those years, I don’t recall Angela ever mentioning the Chinese in Bear Creek. It never occurred to me to ask Tommy how he felt about us. He seemed to like us.

The phone rings. It is Angela.

“How do you like the Bear Creek Inn?” she asks, her voice friendly.

I survey my surroundings. It is a bit unsettling that I am “home” but staying in a motel.

“The owner is cheerful. I’ve already had a meeting with Paul and Dick.”

“You did?” she asks.

“You’re certainly not wasting any time.”

“Paul called me,” I explain.

“I got to see Jill.

She’s changed a little bit since she was a high school beauty.” I flip through the yearbook as I look for Angela’s picture. Suddenly, I realize she didn’t move to town until after the class pictures were taken. When she arrived in Bear Creek, she had a terrible Yankee accent. Now, she sounds like us.

“Poor Jill,” she says, perfunctorily.

“This is terrible for her. Did you find out everything you needed to know?”

I don’t hear a lot of sympathy in Angela’s voice for Jill. Yet, who knows what slights Angela has endured in thirty years? Perhaps Paul’s arrogance has rubbed off on his wife. Though Angela made Paul sound positively wonderful yesterday, maybe she’s not as high on him as she sounded. The Taylors lose interest once you start slipping. Angela’s voice is on automatic pilot. Jealousy? Perhaps.