“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.
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