Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (17 page)

You can count on that.”

I can’t ask Tommy to keep our conversations a secret from the prosecutor or Paul’s attorney, and will have to assume he is sophisticated enough not to volunteer them. It is inevitable that sooner or later, Paul and Dick will find out that I am actively working against them, but by then I hope it will be too late. I suggest that he not talk to Eddie about encouraging the workers to talk to me until I have had an official tour of the crime scene, which will probably be made with Paul’s attorney. In order to get this out of the way, I will have to call Butterfield, who could require me to jump through the hoops and file a motion with the

court, but I don’t suspect he will.

Friday morning I follow Tommy’s directions and take Highway 79 to the plant, which is only a mile from the city limits. This visit to the crime scene has turned into a full-scale production. Not only is Dick to meet me out here but the sheriff will be here, too. Since the plant is in operation, there can no longer be any crime scene to tamper with, but Sheriff Bonner, I’m learning, goes by the book. Off the highway a good fifty yards and shielded by a stand of trees, the plant is bigger than I imagined, almost as long as a football field from end to end. I turn into the parking lot, which is full of old junkers and trucks. As depressed as the economy is over here, I suspect most of the workers don’t receive much more than minimum wage. Some of these people are obviously skilled butchers, but I doubt if old Willie had much of a profit-sharing plan.

Inside the plant office I ask a white male, who looks like Willie Nelson with a full white beard, for Eddie Ting. Apparently, neither Dick nor the sheriff has arrived.

“Darla, is Eddie in the can?” he says, scowling at a woman who must be Darla Tate, the woman who claims she overheard Class. A tall, big-framed woman in her late forties toiling behind a computer screen, Darla smiles, making up for her colleague’s lack of candle power. There is something familiar about her, but I can’t place her.

“Either that or he’s vanished into thin air,” she says to me.

“He’ll be out in a minute.”

Her questioner frowns. If this is actually Willie Nelson hiding out in a meat-packing plant in east Arkansas, he doesn’t look very happy about it.

Yet, in my coat and tie, I probably look like I’m from the IRS. I glance around the room. If this is the entire front office of Southern Pride Meats, no one can accuse Eddie of wasting the profits on furnishings. Three scarred desks, beat-up chairs, metal filing cabinets, and a hat tree constitute the furniture. They all look as if they were stolen from a Goodwill warehouse. None of the desks is separated from the other by more than a couple of feet. The five essentials of modern office life-coffee maker, copier, calculator, computer, and fax machine—give the room a busy look. Maybe Eddie has an office somewhere in the back. Then I notice the desk directly across from the woman.

I realize I am looking at the exact place where Willie Ting was murdered.

“Are you the lawyer?” the Willie Nelson lookalike asks.

“Eddie said Bledsoe’s lawyer would be coming by today,” he says to Darla. It is more a question than a statement. Dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a green John Deere cap, Willie doesn’t give me the impression he spends a lot of time getting briefed in corporate meetings.

“Gideon Page,” I say, nodding and holding out my hand.

“Cy Scoggins,” the other man says, reaching across the desk and giving my hand a tentative squeeze which communicates the feeling that lawyers have never scored highly on his personal hit parade.

“I’m Darla Tate,” the female says.

“I’m the secretary and bookkeeper, and Cy runs the back.

Would you like some coffee? The sheriff and Mr. Dickerson should be here any minute,” she says politely.

Before I can answer, a stocky individual with Asian features appears from around the corner wiping his hands on faded khaki pants.

“You must be Mr. Page,” he says, his voice more Southern than my own.

“I’m Eddie Ting. Did you meet Cy and Darla?”

“Sure did,” I say, looking for a family resemblance and finding one in the nose and mouth.

His face is more fleshy than I remember Tommy’s, but he has the same serious expression. We shake hands, and Eddie looks me squarely in the face.

We must be equally curious about each other.

I turn back to Darla and tell her I’ll take a cup of coffee, but when she gets up, the door opens and in walk Woodrow Bonner and Dickerson.

Given Paul’s earlier outburst about blacks taking over the town, I doubt seriously that they rode together. Bonner gives me a suspicious look, and I assure him that I arrived only moments ago and that I was about to

have a cup of coffee.

Bonner, all business, shakes his head and says that if we want to look around the plant we should get started.

“I guess we need hats and coats,” he says to Darla. It is obvious that Bonner has spent some time out here.

“Mr. Ting, can your foreman or you show us around back?”

Though his manner is polite, there is no doubt who is the boss. I don’t know what I expected from a black sheriff, but this guy seems comfortable enough in his job.

“Cy will give you a tour,” Eddie says to Bonner and then nods at the banty rooster across from me.

I wonder how Cy and Darla like taking orders from an Asian twenty years their junior and a black sheriff. Assuming they are from this part of the state, neither they nor I was raised with the expectation that anyone other than white males would ever sign our paychecks or tell us what to do.

Darla has moved with surprising grace from her chair and disappeared around the corner.

With her fingernails painted a bright red and artificial pearls over her lavender sweater, there is something almost touchingly feminine about her in this oppressively male bastion. She probably was never pretty, but she still doesn’t mind trying to raise the flag.

With the crime scene photographs in mind, I point to the desk across from me.

“I take it this is where your uncle was sitting,” I say to Eddie while we wait for Darla.

Eddie looks at Bonner.

“That’s what I was told.”

Dick, obviously coming from his office and dressed in a three-piece suit, crowds in by me. He has been content to sit back and watch this exchange. Like me, he is probably thinking east Arkansas will never be the same again.

Bonner nods, but doesn’t say anything else, and I marvel at the contrast between the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney. Bonner won’t give anything away and the prosecutor won’t shut his mouth. One is a professional, and the other is a professional politician. I’m not sure which is which, though. We all stare at the desk and chair as if we expect them to start talking to us. Too bad they can’t. Willie didn’t even have an individual cubicle for himself. If he picked his nose, Darla could just not look. I say, “There must have been a lot of blood here. I’m surprised the floor isn’t stained.”

Cy grunts, “We’re used to cleaning up blood around here.”

I imagine so, thinking what must be going on behind us. Squeamish, I’m not looking forward to Cy’s show and tell. Darla returns with three

white coats and caps. As we put them on, Cy volunteers, “They figure he had his back to whoever done it. The person had to know him just to come up behind him and slit his throat. It was bound to be an employee,” he says, putting on the soft white coat that had been lying on his chair.

I tug at my sleeves.

“The coat and hat are for the inspectors,” Eddie explains, ignoring his foreman’s comments.

“I didn’t know this until I came, but you can’t legally operate the plant without them being here. The public has no idea how safe their meat is. They’re here at six and leave when we shut down at two.

You’ll see them back there,” he says, nodding at the wall.

Damn. No wonder this country runs a deficit.

“How many are there?” I ask.

“Two,” answers Darla.

“At the big plants, they probably have their own softball team.”

I look down at Darla’s desk. She has a picture of two teenaged boys within stroking distance in an 8 x 10 frame. I wonder if she took the polygraph.

She doesn’t seem like the murdering type, though.

Cy nods.

“All this stuff here,” he says, pointing to the desk and chair, “is new.” Darla says dryly, “That’s a relative term here.”

Cy reaches into a cabinet and extracts a wicked-looking knife with a blade about five inches long. He hands me the brown-handled knife, and I press the tip against my thumb. As sharp as it is, it wouldn’t take much work to reach bone.

“These babies come from Germany,” Cy says.

“Koch butcher knives. Five inches of the finest cutting steel in the world. If you put this under a microscope, you’d see it has a bunch of teeth. This is what the murderer used. Only fifteen people in this plant had knives like this, and all of their stories were rock solid.

Class, he claims he was home by his self If he came around here, he’d have his self a little accident, I expect.”

Cy motions us to follow and pushes through a door in front of me into a hall and then through another door to the left.

“This is the kill floor,” he says over the squealing of pigs, men’s voices, and machine noise. In front of us about twenty feet away a black guy dressed in knee boots touches what looks like a cattle prod behind the ear of a huge hog and immediately the animal collapses on the concrete floor of an oversized shower stall.

Beside him another hog watches impassively.

“Does that kill him?” I ask Cy.

“Naa, that’s just a little stunner. It’s only got two hundred and forty volts. Knocks him woozy for about a minute,” the manager yells into my ear.

“Now watch what happens.”

From his side the black guy pulls out a knife and bends over the hog, and quickly there is blood spewing onto the floor. The hog beside him sniffs the twitching carcass but otherwise makes no move to flee. I thought pigs were supposed to be smart. This one acts as if his buddy were merely suffering from a major mosquito bite. If I were him, I’d be looking for the back door.

“If Archie doesn’t get him killed,” Cy yells, above the din, “they’ll get back up.”

As dumb as these animals are, they probably think they’ve just been out in the sun too long.

Archie reaches down and hooks the dead animal’s back legs and pushes a button on a machine beside him. I watch as the pig is hoisted up and moved over to a vat of water and then dipped.

“That water is one hundred and fifty degrees,” Cy says.

“It helps remove the hair.”

After more than a minute, the dead animal reappears and is placed on a machine that rolls the body back and forth in a vigorous beating motion. Cy, who has moved ahead of me, motions me over.

“The hair comes right off,” he says, pointing to the carcass.

Indeed, the pig is practically nude within a few moments as wisps of hog hair fall away through the metal rods on which it is bouncing.

Finally, it is pink all over, looking like a cartoon pig—Porky or Petunia, minus their clothes—and again it is hoisted up and sent along its way. Cy directs us to a new station only a few feet from us, and I watch as a skinny white guy who looks to be in his early thirties moves in on the animal and scrapes at the remaining hair. Every few moments he stops to sharpen his knife.

“He’d wear himself out, and it’d take forever, if he doesn’t keep the blade razor-sharp,” Cy responds when I ask him about this incessant and deliberate process.

“What is happening if you could see it is the teeth of the knife get lined up again. Still, these guys go through a knife about every month.

We give ‘em the first one, and they have to buy ‘em after that. Before we did that, they’d go through one every couple of days.”

Damn. A plant where the workers have to pay for their own tools! At the next station the toenails and more hair on the feet area are removed, and then the actual cutting begins.

“Watch Tony rip,” Cy says, with obvious pride in his voice.

“I taught him myself ten years ago, I’ve never seen anybody work with less wasted motion.” Tony is a middle-aged black man with sloping shoulders and arms as long as Scottie Pippen’s, also an Arkansas product. First, he splits the hog, still hanging from the grappling hook, lengthwise.

As Tony works, Cy explains that at Southern Pride (unlike many other plants), they do not save the lungs, ears, or intestines, because Willie demonstrated to his own satisfaction long ago it wasn’t economical. Tony tosses these items into a bag that makes me nauseated to look at. Then, as the head comes off, I find myself listening more than watching.

“Some people come direct to the plant and buy hogs’ heads for five and a half bucks, and we sell ‘em to stores. They cook up what we call souse out of it. We make it up ourselves, and you can buy it over the counter. Spreads good on crackers. I’ll give y’all some before you leave.”

For the first time Dick, standing beside me, grins. It is a promise neither of us would be brokenhearted to see go unfulfilled. Almost directly in front of me is a guy squinting hard at various pig parts.

He looks as if he dropped a contact lens into them.

“Who’s that guy?” I ask, noting that the sheriff has grown even more tightlipped than usual though he is watching everything like a hawk. I realize that “some people” means blacks.

“Harrison—one of the federal inspectors,” Cy says.

“He’s still kind of an asshole, but it was him that noticed that Doss’s knife was out of place the next morning. If it wasn’t for him, it might not have been checked.” Dick asks, “What’s he doing?” Dressed like everybody else in a white coat and cap, Harrison looks as if he is about to lose his cookies, too.

Cy points at the pig hanging above us and then to a metal table to our left where four men are busy cutting meat.

“Before the hog makes it to the table, the inspector checks each one’s parts for abscesses, tumors, signs of disease in general.