Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (2 page)

“We’ve got seven thousand dollars in sawings Mrs. Bledsoe says, consulting a piece of paper she has taken from her purse.

“We were going to use it to buy a house.”

Mrs. Bledsoe somehow reminds me of the singer Keely Smith, a singer from at least a generation ago whose somber expression never seemed to change during a performance. I look past her out the window. Seven thousand for a capital murder trial is a joke. I flip through my calendar and note how full it is the next few months.

Finally, after I’ve struggled as a solo practitioner the last few years, my mostly criminal defense practice has begun to build. I will be busy as hell, but I think I can squeeze it in. Though it will mean endless driving again, I vow that I will spend as much time in the office as I possibly can. Pushing fifty, I’ve only been a lawyer for five years, and so far I haven’t managed to make up for lost time.

“That will do it,” I say.

“But I’ll need all of it before I begin.”

“Will you take a check?” Lattice Bledsoe asks calmly as if we were discussing a parking ticket. I wonder if her husband has been in trouble before.

“I’ve got a thousand in cash.”

Though I have been burned more than once taking checks from clients, I say that I will, and watch her count out ten one hundred bills and then

also write on a green piece of paper that obligates the Farmer’s State Bank of Bear Creek to give me her life savings. I make her a receipt, and we exchange paper. I will have her husband sign a retainer agreement. It occurs to me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that she is lying, and I, like my client, am now on Paul Taylor payroll. For that to happen, though, Paul would have to be suffering from a major case of amnesia, but the thought makes me nervous as does the knowledge of how much time this case will take. I have recently abandoned my neighborhood of over twenty-five years and am moving into a new house. Add the new mortgage to Sarah’s tuition and my other expenses and you have the equation for tight money.

In the next thirty minutes I cover as much ground as I can but don’t find out anything that makes it seem less likely that Class Bledsoe is guilty of slitting his employer’s throat. According to his wife, the plant was in operation from six to two, and it was her husband’s habit to come home after work, fix himself some lunch, drink a beer, and take a nap. The time of death she thinks is claimed to be between two and four in the afternoon, the time when Willie’s wife discovered his body.

Bledsoe has no alibi, just his word.

In her haste to get over here this morning, she has forgotten to bring a copy of his charges and her information is sketchy at best. She has heard through a clerk in the courthouse that the prosecutor had been waiting for the DNA results from the FBI lab in Washington, D.C.” before arresting Class and Paul yesterday. Having exhausted her knowledge of the charges, I learn that Lattice now works the night shift in a 7-Eleven, but at the time of the murder back in September, she was working days. She and Class, in their early thirties, and lifelong

residents of Bear Creek, married four years ago. They have no children yet. Class had been working at the plant for five years. He had liked Willie, although he didn’t pay much. She adds dryly that eastern Arkansas was hardly union territory.

I think I’m going to like Lattice. She has convinced herself that her husband is innocent, and that alone is refreshing. My last client charged with murder had a wife who was itching to testify that she had no doubt her husband was guilty. We pleaded the case out to manslaughter. I look down at my calendar and tell her I can get over there this afternoon. If I leave after lunch, I can be at the jail by a little after three. Not that I’m going to be able to get Bledsoe out of jail. Unless he has a very rich uncle his wife hasn’t told me about, he isn’t going to be able to make bond even if I could persuade the judge to grant it. But at least I can visit with him and see if I want to change my mind about handling his case.

I get Lattice’s address and phone number. She remembers to tell me that Class is incarcerated at the new state-run detention facility near Brickeys, about thirteen miles outside of Bear Creek, and that I will need to call ahead in order to see him. My ten o’clock appointment, a rare probate case, is waiting for me, and I walk Lattice to the elevators, realizing I may be spending a lot of time in my old home town. I’m not at all sure how I feel about that.

At 11:30 I get the number from information and call the jail to set up my meeting and then leave a message for my girlfriend, Amy, not to wait for dinner, when my friend Dan walks stiffly into my office holding his side. I haven’t seen him since he won and took an all-expense-paid ski trip to Crested Butte, Colorado.

“How was it?” I ask, glad to see him. Dan has been my best friend since I got an office here. He is a mess, but he makes me laugh, and that one quality covers up a multitude of sins.

“Well, I’m alive,” he says, easing himself into the chair across from my desk.

“You look like somebody tried to hang some Sheetrock down your spine.

Is anything broken?”

Dan takes a deep breath and winces.

“Only my eighth and ninth ribs. My instructor said I looked like I was trying to ski on the damn things.”

Poor Dan. I try not to smile. As fat as he is, breaking a rib would be like trying to pop a balloon inside a bale of cotton. He must have fallen hard.

Dan’s having a rough time. He got involved with a prostitute he once had represented; his wife kicked him out; and now he’s hurt himself.

Dan fingers his rib cage.

“The first two days I thought I was going to have a heart attack. When I’d fall, which was every five minutes, I couldn’t get up. I’d flail around on the snow hyperventilating.

It scared the hell out of the rest of the class.

My instructor said that if I fell one more time, she’d leave me out in the snow to die. I’ve never worked so hard in my life just to stay upright!”

I don’t want to laugh, but it’s impossible not to.

“Did you meet any women?” I ask, knowing they were the principal inducement. Years of beer commercials convinced him to take the trip despite his fears he was too old and fat. Maybe he would meet, if not snow bunnies, a bored housewife chaperoning a church group.

“Hell, no,” he wheezes, “I was too ac hey and tired at the end of the day. The one night I made it to a bar I nodded off during the one conversation I had with a woman.”

I cackle, knowing that I’d have been just as bad or worse.

“When did you break your ribs?” I ask, realizing his injuries could be more serious than they sound. Guys our age can break a bone, develop pneumonia, and be dead within a week.

“Probably the second day, but everything else was hurting so bad by then, I thought the pain was normal. My thighs felt like somebody was coming in while I was asleep and hammering on them. My shoulders were almost as bad because of trying to get around using those damn poles.

By the end of the week I was practically using them as crutches. Then some fancy clinic charges me four hundred dollars to take enough X rays

to sterilize a thousand-pound gorilla and then tells me to breathe deeply and cough a lot. I didn’t even get a Band-Aid out of it.”

I wince, knowing Dan doesn’t have insurance.

He was almost broke before he left and wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been a free trip.

Feeling sorry for him and guilty at the same time, I say, “I’ll buy you lunch. I’ve got a case to run by you.”

As I knew he would, Dan perks up at the mention of food. Gripping the armrests of the chair, he pushes himself up like an old man and looks around my office.

“Where did you get those prints?” he asks respectfully.

“They don’t look too bad.”

“Amy thought,” I say, standing up, too, “my office needed sprucing up.

I gave up on the plants since they insist on being watered.” “You gonna marry Gilchrist?” Dan asks as he follows me out.

“You could do a lot worse.”

“I have done a lot worse,” I remind him, but not responding to his question. Amy, Dan, and I were classmates and friends together in night law school, and he knows about some of the women I dated after my wife Rosa’s death. Actually, Amy and I are considering living together if I

ever get heat in my shiny new house from hell.

At the front desk, Julia grins at Dan.

“You couldn’t look any stiffer if you were mounted on the wall.”

It has taken me years to get used to Julia, a niece of the owner, and I have needed every one of them. She has lifetime security in a job she despises. If that isn’t a prescription for hell on earth, I don’t know what is. As usual, Dan regresses in her presence.

“Actually, my body is one long, stiff, hot poker,” he says, leering at her.

Julia lets the skirt that Dan calls imitation cracked leather when she’s not around ride up to within an inch of her panties.

“If I had a dollar for every guy who believed that,” she says, stretching her breast implants against today’s tight wool sweater, “I could buy this dump from my Uncle Roy and turn it officially into the nursing home it’s becoming. When are you guys gonna get some clients in here? It’s like living in a morgue, it’s so quiet.”

“It’s the cold,” I say, knowing she is talking about Dan and some other lawyers on our floor.

Dan is floundering, but then it seems he always is.

“If it was the summer,” Julia challenges me, “you’d be saying it was the heat. Face it, you solo practitioners are dinosaurs. You don’t know how

to market yourselves. You charge too little or too much, and then don’t collect half of what you bill. Half you guys on this floor are dead and don’t even know it.”

Dan grins.

“Thanks for the pep talk, sweetie,” he says, staring admiringly at Julia’s chest.

“You want me to bring you some pie from downstairs?”

“It wouldn’t make it to the elevator.” She smirks, staring back at Dan’s stomach. Though she would sooner die than admit it, Julia has become quite protective of Dan. While he was going through his recent craziness, she worried about him like a mother hen. While Julia likes to pick on Dan, she becomes enraged when other people follow suit. Or putting Dan’s own spin on it, to be such a competitive society, there is nothing we hate worse than competition.

Downstairs in the cafeteria, Dan blows through a plate of spaghetti in five minutes flat.

“Have you ever noticed that the real pleasures in life,” he says, wiping his mouth with a napkin at our table in the non-smoking section, “last no more than a few minutes tops—fucking, eating, shitting, the few seconds right before you know you’re finally going to sleep? All this civilized behavior just fills out the day. We’re just animals, ole buddy. I’d just as soon drop over on all fours right now and quit kidding myself.”

Poor Dan. He’s never had a kid. Childish and silly, he would make a great father. The children of his divorce clients hang all over him.

He plays with them as if he is their long-lost brother.

“What’s stopping you?” I egg him on.

“Just get neck id and plop on down there. The country’s looking for some honest-to-God leadership. If poor Bill tried to do it, half the country would say it was just a way to try to get a woman to go to bed with him.”

Dan loosens his tie as he gazes out over the crowded tables of mostly office workers from inside the Layman Building, who, like us, are beginning to show symptoms of cabin fever after a long cold snap. How do people stand the north in the winter? Three weeks in a row of frigid air is all it takes for us to start talking crazy. Dan sips greasy coffee and then nags at me, “Have you thought any more about joining One-on-One?

They’ve got a list of boys a mile long.”

I roll my eyes and pretend to sigh. Dan has been bugging me to get involved in a buddy program for ghetto kids for the last month.

“I know,” I say, thinking of the fact sheet he left in my chair last week.

“Let’s make a deal. If you can keep quiet about it until after this case is over, I’ll sign up, okay?” Despite Dan’s cynicism, he has a bowl of

mush where his heart ought to be. Actually, I’ve been feeling guilty for deciding to desert my old neighborhood. Rosa and I lived in a mixed area for years. Since her death I’ve felt increasingly detached from my black neighbors. At Dan’s urging, I have thought of taking on a kid from one of the projects as a way of keeping a pledge to Rosa that I wouldn’t try to become a Yuppie after her death. Fat chance with my income, but my new neighborhood will be lily-white, and maybe joining One-on-One will keep the guilt at a manageable level.

Rosa would have been angry with me for leaving our neighborhood without a good reason.

Dan pretends to zip his mouth.

“So go ahead and brag about your new case. I don’t mind. I think I took a vow of poverty somewhere along the way and nobody told me about it.”

I smile at the thought of Dan as St. Francis of Assisi. A monk he is not, even if he might be happier if he accepted his new solo status as permanent.

Over a piece of pecan pie and a cup of coffee I don’t need, I run through Lattice Bledsoe’s visit and admit, “I had forgotten how much anger I’ve carried all those years at the Taylors. I thought I had gotten over it.”

Dan burps into the fist of his right hand.

“We never get over anything,” he gasps, ever the philosopher.

I wonder if that is true. If I take this case because I think I can get back at the Taylors somehow, I will screw it up. Surely, I’ve got more sense than to pull a stunt like that. Though I have made more mistakes in the last five years than I care to remember, I have never betrayed a client or sacrificed his interest. Now is not the time to start. I look down at my watch. It’s time to get on the road.

I begin the dreary trek east on 1-40 toward Bear Creek thinking how monotonous it would be to make this drive every day. The cold gray winter afternoon and unrelieved flatness of the Delta soil give me plenty of time to think. I know I am having a severe case of buyer’s remorse, but it is hard not to second-guess my abrupt decision to move from a neighborhood I’ve lived in for the past twenty-five years. Yet, maybe I should have sold the house after Rosa’s death seven years ago.