Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (29 page)

What keeps the month of April from seeming like a complete waste of time is my steadily growing relationship with Angela. Though I do not spend a night at her house and am wearing out myself and the Blazer commuting, I see her two and sometimes three times a week and have taken to stopping at Bear Creek’s one supermarket, where occasionally I see Alvaro Ruiz in the meat department setting out cuts of beef and pork.

One rainy, unforgettable Saturday we drive to Memphis and spend almost the entire day in a motel. Depending on her mood, she can be aggressive, and I glimpse the passionate girl I knew thirty years ago and

experienced that bizarre afternoon in her brother-in-law’s bed.

Other times she becomes moody and depressed, which I relate to Dwight’s death and her fears about the future. Though she has had no offers on the house, she has begun to work on it, and more than once has come to her door with eggshell-white paint on her face and hands. Having gotten a full-price offer from a middle-class black couple on my house (with no fixing up) after it had been listed for only a week, I am sympathetic to her plight but have no suggestions about how to move it.

Bear Creek is hardly a seller’s market.

I have met her boys, who have been home for a weekend. Although neither is as mature as Sarah, they seem like good kids and both are closer to her than I would have thought. I caught Brad wiping away a tear as he hugged Angela when they were going back to school a couple of Sundays ago. Distressed by their mother’s plans to sell the farm and further disrupt their lives by moving, they have begun to privately pressure her to stay in Bear Creek. Like many Delta-raised children, their manners are so good they can get on your nerves. Accordingly, both boys have been polite and courteous to me but are naturally suspicious since lately I seem to be at their mother’s house every time they call. At first, Angela maintained the fiction that I was “just an old friend” but has begun to admit that we are going out.

Since the Blazer is over here all the time, they could easily discover the truth simply by asking the neighbors how their mother is doing. The Saturday night they were home, Angela instructed me to show them Sarah’s picture, and they were suitably impressed. I guess they figure that if I have a daughter that beautiful I can’t be too bad.

Angela has encouraged them to look for summer jobs in Jonesboro since if she gets an offer she could close on the house within a matter of weeks.

Having so much time to think during the long two-hour drives back and forth, I have begun to admit to myself that I am falling in love with her.

Despite a certain amount of baggage, she seems to be getting used to the idea that I am serious about her. She has let me know that I nearly blew it by kissing her that first day, and I realize now how unsettling it was for her. Would I act differently if I had the chance to do it over again? I tell myself that I would, but hardly from the purest of motives. There is an undeniable sexual attraction between us, something that time hasn’t dimmed.

Both of us will be relieved when the trial is over because we are on opposite sides there. She believes that Paul is innocent while I am convinced he is not, despite the fact that I have no more proof of that than the day I took this case over. I try to convince her that a year from now we won’t even remember the case, but she knows that’s garbage.

If he is found innocent, it will simply be viewed by the whites as another battle in the never-ending racial conflict, but if a jury convicts him, it will be etched in the memory of everyone who ever lived here.

On May 3, I get a call at my office from Darla Tate, who, to her credit, has continued to be helpful by furnishing me updated addresses and telephone numbers of plant employees. In the past week or two I have

fudged the truth a bit by suggesting that I fully expect Class to be acquitted, hoping probably futilely that this news will have the effect of convincing her she should decide to climb aboard his freedom train and testify that it could have been some other employee’s voice she heard that day she was in the bathroom. Today there is an excitement in her voice that I haven’t heard before, but it is hard to take her too seriously.

While everybody has a theory in this case, the only evidence still points at Class. In an earlier conversation, I told her that I haven’t found out much that wasn’t already in the prosecutor’s file.

And she knows that I am still checking out alibis.

She says she has something to show me and asks when I am coming back to Bear Creek. Since I am about to walk over to the prosecutor’s office to try to plead out a cocaine possession case, I check my calendar, tell her the fifth, and head out the door.

As I walk, I realize that I am beginning to distance myself from the outcome of this case, a tendency I have always had to fight against when I get frustrated.

When I arrive at the plant Thursday morning, Darla hands me a cup of coffee and seats me behind Eddie’s desk, explaining that he’s over in Greenville on family business. She makes small talk until Cy, who has been goofing off up front, heads back to the kill floor. When he leaves, Darla reaches into a drawer and pulls out a box of receipts and spreads them out on her desk.

“Eddie said I could tell you about this. I honestly don’t know if it has a bit of significance to your case, but I knew the salesman involved, and I wouldn’t put it past “Muddy’ Jessup to have murdered Willie.”

I notice a bit of lipstick on the lip of the mug and rotate it a half a turn. Neither of the two salesmen truck drivers, to my knowledge, has seriously ever been considered suspects since they were out on the road selling meat the day Willie was killed. I look down at the notes I have made on every employee I’ve talked with, and realize that Jessup is not on my list. On the other hand, I have dutifully talked on the phone to grocery store employees in Memphis, Earle, Marion, West Memphis, and a couple of towns in Arkansas I don’t remember, who have confirmed through their receipts that meat was delivered to them that day by Jessup. I remember now that Darla’s updated list shows that a couple of employees, Jessup one of them and Jorge Arrazola the other, no longer can be found in Bear Creek. Since the sheriff got a statement from him before he left town and his alibi seemed solid, I haven’t worried that the new updated West Memphis address for him hasn’t been checked out.

“What’s the deal on this guy?” I watch as Darla arranges the papers side by side on her desk.

“Let me explain what Eddie and I think he did,” she says, “and then I’ll tell you what I know about him.” She points with her pen to a sheet in front of her.

“The first thing you need to know is that we give every salesman a price list each time they leave here to take with them to call on customers.

Eddie works on the list constantly, because every time we buy a load of

hogs there’s a price change. For the last couple of weeks Eddie and I have gone back through everything, trying to figure out why the plant’s been losing money, and we even went back through stuff from when Willie was still alive to see what he was doing different. Well, in going through all the receipts we developed a suspicion that Muddy was cheating the stores in his territory. Come over here, and I’ll show you.”

With my coffee cup in hand, I get up and walk over behind and look over her shoulder. She puts her finger on a sheet in front of her and says, “This is our price list from June of last year.”

I look down at a sheet that has the name southern pride meats in white against a blue border. Below it are three rows of products ranging from pork tenderloin at $5.15 a pound to fresh pork jowls at sixty-five cents a pound.

“What we think Muddy was doing,” Darla says, “was marking up some of the prices after he left the office. You’d be surprised how few store owners even look at the price lists. The salesmen know which ones do, and we think Muddy would just tell them what the cost was that day and they’d ring it up and pay cash. If you look closely, you can tell on some of the tickets that the figures have been altered.”

Darla points to a smudged spot on a ticket she has marked as the plant copy.

“In other words, when Muddy came back to the plant, he’d turn in a doctored ticket that matched the price list that we’d given him and keep the difference. Actually, he was cheating the customer, but, of course,

it was cheating Southern Pride, too, because it was raising our prices against our competition. Sooner or later, we’d lose their business. But in the short run, unless the customer checked the price list, he wouldn’t know he had been cheated.”

I put on my reading glasses and pick up the ticket. Darla runs her index finger down the middle column of the price list.

“For example, on June fifth, we were supposed to be selling sausage patties for a dollar thirty-five. On the ticket copy the customer retains, we now know Muddy made the three into an eight and was charging a dollar eighty-five for sausage patties. On the plant copy he turned in, you can see he changed it back into a three so it would match our price list.”

I squint at the numbers. True, it is slightly smudged, but it seems inconclusive to me.

“Why did you take so long to find this out?” I ask.

“Carelessness on my part,” Darla admits.

“The price lists change so fast that I didn’t pay any attention. The customer wasn’t complaining, so I didn’t pick it up. But we know now, because last week after we suspected something had been going on, we called some of the stores in his old territory, and were able to verify that he had cheated at least two of them. It wasn’t easy, because most stores had thrown out their receipts, but a couple hadn’t.

They’re letting us give them a discount for a while.”

I peer down at the papers, not sure what to make of this. Just because this guy was a thief doesn’t make him a murderer.

“Did he not get along with Willie or what?” I ask, leaning back against Cy’s desk.

“Muddy’s a son of a bitch,” Darla says, bitterly.

“I’ve known him for years. Maria, his wife, went around town for years with two black eyes.

The thing that you ought to know is that Muddy can use a knife. He was on the kill floor for years before he persuaded Willie to let him try out as a salesman.”

I realize I’ve watched a truck or two being loaded, but I’ve never paid attention to the men who drive them. When I ask what happened to him, Darla explains that Muddy quit a couple of weeks after the murder, saying he was taking a job at a meat-packing plant outside of West Memphis.

“What would be his motive?” I ask, sitting back down behind Eddie’s desk.

Darla stacks the papers on her desk into a neat pile.

“Maybe Willie was suspicious and told him he wanted to talk to him. The salesmen come in and out of the office all the time to turn in their receipts and get the price lists.”

“Wouldn’t Willie have talked to you first?” I ask, not at all impressed with this theory. Willie was killed at his desk with his back turned to his assailant. There was no confrontation, no struggle that indicated a fight.

Darla opens a drawer and places the tickets inside.

“At some point he would have. Maybe he was going to, and just hadn’t gotten around to it. I have a theory about what happened. You want to hear it?”

“Sure,” I say. Darla is watching me carefully as if she is afraid I may not be interested in what she is about to tell me.

She leans forward and almost whispers, “Well, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that one of the stores that Muddy sold to is controlled by the Memphis Mafia. It’s a legitimate store but it probably washes a lot of money for them. What I figure is that they found out Muddy was cheating them and made an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

I am getting a sty on my right eye and rub it. I didn’t sleep well last night and must be too slow for this conversation.

“I don’t get it.” “Southern Pride does a cash business,” she says, her voice animated.

“Those guys are constantly looking for places to launder their money and get into legitimate businesses. My guess is they assumed incorrectly that they could pick up the plant cheap if the owner was bumped off. And

now I doubt if it was any coincidence that since Willie died, the Tings have gotten a couple of offers for the plant, one out of Memphis. If I were in your shoes, I’d be looking for Muddy Jessup.”

I stare at Darla, thinking she has been watching too many cop shows set on the east coast.

Organized crime isn’t exactly a stranger in the South, but you don’t hear much about it. Still, I have heard of the “Dixie Mafia.”

“So you now think Paul Taylor didn’t have anything to do with it?” I ask, wondering if she is onto something.

“Maybe he didn’t,” Darla says, arching her back as she stretches against her chair. She is wearing a tight sweater and skirt that is too young for her, but it is hard to fault her for making an effort.

“It’s probably more likely that Muddy could have thought that Willie was going to get him sent to prison when he found out he was stealing.

The salesmen sometimes came back to the plant after it was shut down.

Willie wouldn’t have thought anything about Muddy’s being in the office.”

This seems more plausible to me.

“But what about all the people who said he was selling meat to them that day?”

Darla shrugs.

“He could have delivered early and come back or come here first and gone to his stores late. Hell, he could have bribed a couple.

Somebody could have owed him a favor. He could have been slipping an employee of one of those stores free meat for years.”

I nod at her. It is worth checking out if for no other reason than I’ve about worked my way to the end of the list of plant employees.

“Do you have any idea where Muddy went?”

Darla shakes her head.

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address, and I checked at the plant he was working at in West Memphis. He just didn’t show up one day.

They’re still checking to see if he stole any money.”

I smile at her.