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.