Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (16 page)

“You have to promise me that as soon as you realize this isn’t working out, you’ll bring her back.”

Amy clips Jessie’s leash to her collar.

“I promise,” she says, “but you’ll need to remember I’m pretty slow at figuring things out.”

I am, too. And what I need is time. Part of me wants to take Amy into my arms and swear everything will be fine, but I can’t do that.

“Let me get her dog food,” I say, and go out to the garage to get it.

But when I return my dog and girlfriend are gone. Sick at heart, I open a beer and wash the dishes, wishing I had lied. Amy has been the best thing in my life for a long time. Still, I feel a distant odd sense of relief.

At precisely three o’clock Monday, with me standing by his side and his wife and twenty onlookers in the spectator section. Class Bledsoe enters his formal plea of not guilty. After he sits down, Dick Dickerson comes forward (Paul had his arraignment last week), and Judge Johnson, over both our objections, sets the trial for the week of May 26. I complain that I won’t have enough time to prepare my client’s defense in a case like this, but Judge Johnson looks at me with a bemused air. Since he was just elected last year, he has no discernible track record. In private practice in Helena until he was elected, according to Dick, Johnson was by himself and like most small town practitioners, took everything that walked in the door. When I protest, he gives me a withering look.

“You don’t have the burden of proving your case, Mr. Page, do you, sir?” he says, with excessive courtesy.

“Doesn’t the prosecutor have the burden of proving his case, and you merely have to show reasonable doubt?”

I ignore his sarcasm and argue, “Of course, your honor, but the prosecution has worked on this case for six months. I’d like to have at least that long.”

Beside me, Dick tells Johnson he has a heavy trial schedule in the next two months, and adds, “Judge, in order to do an adequate job of investigating this case, we’ll have to track down everyone who was in the plant that day. It is my understanding not every one of the workers is still there.”

Johnson, a small, gray-haired man in his fifties who seems entirely

comfortable being the first black judge in the Delta, shrugs.

“I would imagine Mr. Butterfield has whatever information there is available on the whereabouts of each worker in his file, which he is obligated to turn over to you. Since I have been judge in this district, I have observed that it is his practice to make his file available to the defense without a motion having to be filed. Do you anticipate problems in this regard?”

“Well, I don’t know, your honor …” Dick begins, but the judge cuts him off.

“If you have problems locating witnesses, then you may file a motion closer to trial, but I warn you that I will not grant a continuance unless counsel has shown appropriate diligence and has shown he has complied with the criminal rules of procedure.” He consults his calendar, sets what is known as an omnibus hearing for April 4 to hear any motions that may be pending at that time, and abruptly calls the next case.

As Dick and I walk out of the courtroom, which has all the charm of a bus station with its lime green seats, it is hard not to wonder if we were being picked on because we are white.

There is no reason to schedule a trial with so many witnesses this quickly. I whisper to Dick, “Did you know he was going to be like this?”

Dick doesn’t reply until we are out of the courthouse.

When we are coming down the steps, he mutters, “He and Butterfield are

old friends from Helena. Whatever he can do for him, he will. In civil cases he’s reasonable most of the time. But if Butterfield ever makes it big in politics, which could easily happen now with all the whites pulling out, Johnson’s chances of making it to the federal judiciary go way up. This area of the state has always been neglected when it comes to receiving our fair share of judgeships.”

I realize that Dick is talking about himself.

Despite his reputation, he has never had much political pull. He invites me over to his office across the street, but I tell him that I will have to call him later in the week. I have to drive back tonight to Blackwell County to get ready for a two-day child custody trial that I thought was going to be settled but has blown up over the weekend, and before I head back I promised Bledsoe I would come see him. With his practice primarily civil litigation, Dick understands settlements coming apart at the last moment, and says for me to call him when I get that behind me. As he crosses the square to go back to his office, I realize that he is still convinced that we are allies in this case, which is fine with me. After today’s hearing, I suppose in some ways we are.

At the detention center Class is not at all depressed with the judge’s decision to set the trial the last week in May.

“I jus’ want to get it over with,” he says, emphatically.

“I’m sick of this place.”

As bad as the old jail may have been, I doubt if it had this much security. Here, separated as we are, Bledsoe can’t even shake hands with

me, much less hug his wife. It is hard not to like this guy. As he tells me how much he has begun to miss Lattice, I think of a statistic I’ve read and wonder if it can possibly be true: a million black males locked up all over the United States. It is a mind-boggling number. Is this the only way blacks and whites can live together in this country?

I wonder how many of them are innocent.

Other than Willie’s blood on his knife, there is no physical evidence linking Class to the murder. If he had the money, I would hire a forensic expert to tell the jury why there were no hair, flesh, or clothing fibers found under Willie’s fingernails.

The only bloody footprints leading away from the spot where he died were Doris Ting’s, apparently made when she discovered the body. I’d also like to get an investigator to do a thorough background check on each of the individuals who worked at the plant. One of them could easily have something in his or her past that could be useful to us.

Here, as in too much of life, you get what you pay for and no more.

We talk at length about the events of the day of the murder, which occurred on a Tuesday, September 21, but it is painfully obvious that Class has no memories of that afternoon that can help him. Though I don’t know if it will cut any ice with Butterfield at this point, I urge him to consider taking a polygraph, but he is disturbingly adamant on the subject.

“Like I already said, I don’t trust ‘em,” he says, his voice more stubborn than I’ve ever heard it.

“In a case like yours,” I explain, “the defendant they really want is the one who arranged the murder.”

Class pushes his hands inside his pockets.

“I’m not gonna take no test.”

My heart sinks a little at his intransigence. The last time a defendant of mine refused to take a polygraph test it turned out he was lying. It sounds as if Class has already talked to a lawyer long before he ever contacted me. I ask him if he consulted anyone else, but he claims he has not.

He insists that he never had a conversation with anyone over the telephone from the plant office about having received some money.

“If I’d a killed ole Willie, I’d have to be dumb to call someone from there,” Class argues, staring hard at the concrete floor.

“Not necessarily,” I respond.

“You would have had to think that nobody was around.” Actually, I agree with him. Criminals do amazingly stupid things all the time, and that’s why some of you get caught, I think, my frustration growing.

“Why would the bookkeeper make up a story like that?”

I ask, flipping through the file to find her statement.

“I don’t know,” Class says, his voice getting more stubborn by the moment.

“Maybe she killed Willie, but I doubt it. She’s all right.”

I make the speech I make to all my criminal defendants—that I can’t help them if they lie to me—but it is water rolling off a duck’s back.

I ask him if he has ever stolen from the plant or anyone in the plant.

He denies that he has. Surely in five years he would have had the opportunity to smuggle out a ham for his birthday, but he insists he hasn’t. So much for an explanation for his conversation over the phone in the plant.

I work the discussion around to the other employees in the plant, and finally get Class to think of at least one person who had it in for Willie. He knows someone, he says almost sheepishly, who was fired by Willie about a month before he was killed. Vie Worthy had come in drunk and had nearly cut his little finger off one morning while shaving the hair off pigs’ feet.

Willie had driven him to the hospital but wouldn’t let him come back to work after he got his finger sewed up. ‘“Bout three times a year, he’d drive across the bridge and gamble his paycheck away,” Class says.

“He’d drink all the way home, and then come to work skunked, and I guess Willie finally figured that it shouldn’t be on his time.”

Class sneezes into his hand. He has caught a major cold.

“So he was pissed off because he got canned?”

Class looks up at me, his face a study in disapproval.

“He’d be drinkin’ and talk about how he’d like to kill Willie for firm’ him. See, he wudn’t the only one to ever come to work fucked up.”

It’s about time Class got around to this story, but I’m beginning to learn Class doesn’t do anything in a hurry. I write furiously and ask for as many details as he knows, which aren’t much.

Class had ridden over to Tunica with him to gamble on the riverboats a couple of times, but they had never pulled an allnighter together.

Since Class always took his car when they went together, he could control the time they came home. He had seen him downtown hanging around the square a time or two after Willie had let him go. Usually, Vie was half lit. He was more than half lit the time he’d made the remark about killing Willie. Nobody was with them at the time, and Class had forgotten about it until last night when he had been thinking about the other workers in the plant like I had asked him. I ask if he has seen Vie around town recently, and he says a time or two and tells me where Vie lives.

I tell him I will try to see him later in the week, and walk out to the Blazer, feeling only slightly better about the case. I drive back into Bear Creek and cruise by Angela’s but am disappointed to see that her car isn’t there. I go up to the door and leave a card and write on the back that I’m sorry I missed her. I look back across the street at Mrs.

Sure enough, I see the Venetian blinds move in her front window. I wonder if when I leave she will hobble up the stairs to read what I have written.

At ten, tired by the trip home, I collapse into bed, and fall immediately into a hard sleep but am awakened by Angela at eleven. At first I am so groggy that I don’t realize that it is she, but her voice, warm and confiding, is a shot of adrenaline, and I come instantly awake. How like a teenaged boy she makes me feel! Lust but more than that. How can that be? Was our history together as good as I imagine? It seems to me that it was. Whatever the truth is, I seem programmed to respond to this woman, who surprises me by saying she has been given two tickets to the Razorback game with Memphis Saturday afternoon at the Pyramid. Since the game will be shown on ESPN, I think I would rather watch it from her couch under a blanket in her living room, but I tell her that sounds like fan. We arrange a time for me to come by. It’s still too early to be thinking about making love to this woman, but this will be a real date, which is a starting point. Maybe her off-again on-again attitude is normal. As I lie in the dark, I try to remember what it was like making love to her. I find I can’t actually recall the moment of an orgasm, but my failure of memory does not stop me from imagining what it would be like now.

Later, sinking back into sleep, I think there may be just an awful lot I don’t remember about Angela. Maybe we’d be better off not knowing everything. Is everyone’s life as messy as my own?

I turn onto my stomach, wishing futilely, like most people I know, I could undo some things.

Wednesday afternoon I receive a call at my office from Tommy, who confides to me in a less than confident voice that his family has decided to allow him to instruct his cousin Eddie to encourage his workers in the plant to talk with me.

Buoyed by the miracle of my client’s finally realizing just how stupid it was to allow a third party to make a decision about the future of his children and accepting the agreement we’d hammered out a week ago, I try to think of how to keep Tommy from suddenly changing his mind. I begin by asking if he has been made aware that a former employee named Vie Worthy had threatened his father less than a month before he died.

When he says he hasn’t, I add, “He probably wasn’t the only person angry at your father, either. There’s never been a person who didn’t overestimate his charms as a boss.”

Perhaps pausing to consider that I could be right. Tommy finally asks, “How does Bledsoe explain the phone call he made from the plant?”

Tommy isn’t going to forget anything and neither will a jury.

“He swears he didn’t do it.

Maybe she misunderstood him,” I say.

“Maybe it wasn’t him she heard. I just want to be able to open up some communication with people like her.” For all I know, she killed Willie and is framing Class ; however, women don’t usually commit premeditated murder with a knife.

“Gideon, promise me you won’t manipulate anyone into saying something they don’t know,” Tommy instructs me, “or honestly believe.”

“I’m an advocate,” I assure him, “but I’m also an officer of the court.

I wouldn’t do that.”

“My father didn’t trust lawyers,” Tommy says, repeating an earlier comment from last week.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if we hadn’t grown up over there together. We were both kind of outsiders.”

Actually, I’ve never thought of us quite like that, but now is not the time to quibble with him.

“I appreciate this. Tommy. I won’t abuse the situation.