Dick asks, “How well did you know Class?”
“Well, we didn’t socialize, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Harrison says and laughs.
“Class had a mouth on him, I’ll guarantee you. He was good for one thing-cutting meat and throats. I’ll give him that.”
We move on and Cy points out the men who are doing various cuts of meat: hams, bacon, ribs, chops. Their knives flashing, they work quickly and steadily. This part of the job doesn’t seem as gross as what I’ve just been witnessing. The hog, alive a few minutes ago, now looks more like what I see in the store. Of course, humans can get used to anything.
He leads us through a door, and in the hall we see large containers of presumably inedible hog parts.
“These are hauled off to the rendering plant near Memphis,” Cy says, his voice conversational now that he doesn’t have to shout.
“They boil this down and make dog food and stuff out of it.” He bends down and picks up a bottle.
“Before it’s taken off, it has to be denatured, so nobody’ll be tempted to try to sell it for human food.” He unscrews the cap and pours a green liquid over the offal. I feel my gorge rise.
“I guess some people,” he says, chuckling, “ain’t got out of the habit of eating this shit.”
I burp into my hands. If it were warm in here, I’d be throwing up.
Fortunately, Cy opens a door and leads us into a cooler. The frigid air feels good despite the fact that I was not at all warm.
“It’s ten below in here. One of the many things we don’t have a handle on since Willie died is maintenance. Costs are beginning to eat this plant alive. Willie had it figured out, but we sure as hell don’t.
There’re not a lot of people who know the refrigeration business around here, and I think we’re getting ripped off. According to Darla, we’re paying a lot more for things now that Willie’s dead.”
I look around the room and see giant slabs of pork that look like frozen monoliths. Though there is plenty of space, I feel claustrophobic.
Perhaps, it is the knowledge that it wouldn’t take long to die in here.
“Do you think Eddie is running things okay?” I ask, curious to see Dick’s reaction.
Cy folds his arms against his chest.
“I guess so,” he mumbles. Cy may be a redneck, but he, too, knows that it is the messenger who gets shot.
He wants to keep his job. Since he is part of management, criticizing it won’t help him.
We go out and into another room, and see our first female employees in
the actual operation of the plant. Not unexpectedly, they look a little rough, but one woman, about my age, catches my eye and grins.
“Fresh meat,” she says, nudging her coworker, a woman at least ten years younger.
Cy ignores her and explains, “We vacuum pack our sausage. The profit’s back here. You can’t hardly find butchers in supermarkets these days.
More and more all the grocery stores do is stick it out on the meat racks. This business is changing all the time.”
Clearly, it is beyond him. The kill floor he can manage, but Cy probably isn’t much help to Eddie on the business end. We follow Cy around the rest of the plant and soon I am hopelessly lost as he shows us more cookers, smokers, a spice room, a kitchen, and the break room.
Willie’s killer could have tried to hide his body in a dozen places.
But obviously, it would have been found immediately, so why bother?
Standing on the lip of the loading dock he points out the trucks and then spits harshly on the concrete. I ask, “Couldn’t his killer have been someone who had never seen the plant? All he needed to know was that Willie often worked there by himself after closing time.”
Though he should be used to it, Cy hugs himself in the damp February air.
“It had to be somebody who knew the plant,” he says, shaking his head.
“I’ve been looking for you!”
We turn and see a woman standing at the door with a clipboard waving at Cy. She, too, is in a white coat and is wearing a cap. Cy takes a long drag on his cigarette and turns his back on her before saying under his breath, “Frieda-she’s the other one. She’s not so bad, anymore.”
Government inspector, he must mean. Since Cy isn’t budging, she walks toward us, impervious to Cy’s studied indifference. A tall, awkward woman with bad teeth, she is probably used to men being rude to her and affects a professional cheerfulness.
“You can run, but you can’t hide.”
When Cy deigns to turn and glare at her, she hands him her clipboard.
Barely glancing at the paper he is signing, he says, “These are some lawyers, and I guess you know the sheriff by now.”
Dick nods, and I introduce myself, wondering if Cy remembers my name.
He is not what I would call a people person.
“Frieda Blakey,” she says, smiling again.
“I’ve got an uncle who’s a lawyer. He’s in prison.”
There is no malice in her tone. Perhaps this is how she bonds with other humans.
“Great place to find clients,” I say, deciding to humor her.
Given her reception by Cy, she must have a lonely job.
“I’ve been telling Kip to keep ‘em spaced,” she says apologetically to Cy.
“He just blows it off.” “I know,” Cy says, handing her the clipboard back.
“I’ll talk to him.”
Frieda stands a little closer than absolutely necessary and says, “You know the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead skunk in the road?”
“No, what?” I respond, thinking I had heard every lawyer joke told in the last ten years.
“There are skid marks in front of the skunk!”
she cackles.
Dick and I laugh politely. Frieda wants desperately to be liked, and I’ll do my best when I contact her later on.
Our tour is at an end, and since neither of us is going to interview witnesses with the sheriff breathing down our necks, we return to the office to say goodbye to Eddie. I ask to use the bathroom, and sure
enough, I can hear the talk in the office through the thin plywood door as plain as day. The secretary could have easily overheard Class on the phone. Dick thanks Eddie for the use of Cy’s time, and we head for the parking lot.
Dick tells me that he will buy me a cup of coffee at the Delta Star restaurant two doors down by his office, and I follow his Mercedes back into town, wondering what I have learned. Probably nothing other than that if I lose my law license, I don’t want to work in a meat packing plant. I could stand around for an hour at the crime scene and not pick up a damn thing.
At the Delta Star restaurant next to his office downtown Dick makes me feel better by confessing, “The only thing I learned was that Willie must have felt very comfortable with the person who killed him. What you need to find out is how often someone like Class came up to the front office. Did they come up to use the telephone? If somebody was in the bathroom in the back, could they come up and use the one in the office?
What I don’t understand is, if the plant closed at two, how is Butterfield going to explain to the jury what Class was doing hanging around after hours? If he had come up front after the plant was shut down instead of going home, wouldn’t that have made Willie suspicious?
You need to talk to that Darla Tate if you can get anything out of her.
She’s probably wedded to her story, though.”
The Delta Star is nicer than the Cotton Boll but not by much. The downtown area is thin, indeed. There are few retail establishments and
even fewer people on the streets. Though it is half past eleven, there are only two other customers in this cafe. I ask, “Are you going to interview all the workers?”
Dick tastes his coffee and winces at its bitter flavor.
“Not if you’re going to. I have such a heavy trial schedule between now and June I don’t see how I can. You’ll share it with me if you learn anything that can help Paul, won’t you?”