Angela at eighteen would have been indignant at this article and charged a conspiracy between the media and the business community, but today she says that she is grateful no one is trying to exploit the already tense race relations in town. If Angela has changed, so have I. If anyone had told me I would make love to Angela in her brother-in-law’s bed thirty years after I left Bear Creek, I would have doubted his sanity. She promises to call me when she returns and hangs up. I go to bed and dream that we are making love in her house in Bear Creek. Someone was watching, but when I wake up, I can’t remember who it was.
Darla Tate’s house is the first one on the right on Kentucky Avenue, less than a mile from Jefferson Academy, where she sends her sons. It is
in a development that was relatively new when I was growing up, but like everything else here, it seems much smaller. The homes are modest A-frames with tiny yards. Darla’s house has siding, however, and is distinguished by a large pecan tree in front. Driving over, I have realized this woman can be a gold mine of information if I don’t make her defensive. Outside of his family, probably nobody spent more time with Willie. What I’m afraid I’ll find out, though, is that Willie, being Chinese, rarely confided in anyone except his wife.
Darlatate comes to the door in a pair of baggy brown slacks. Now that I get a good look at her, I realize she is almost as tall as I am. Her oval face is partially obscured by long, straight hair of a hue that seems to have gone through several changes and is now the color of winter wheat. As I follow into her living room, she offers me a beer, which I regretfully decline. I don’t want this to turn into a party.
“My boys are still at basketball practice,” she says.
“They both play, but they can’t jump more than two inches between them.”
I laugh, remembering that I would have liked to have played basketball at Subiaco, but I, too, had a vertical leap of an inch. What furniture she has is old, and a little worn. A couch, coffee table, TV and VCR, and recliner more than fill the room. Pictures of her boys in their football uniforms are on the walls. I sit on the couch while she plops down in the recliner and picks up a can of Bud Light by her feet.
“They’re good-looking kids,” I say sincerely, wondering what the future holds for white adolescents. I think of Angela’s comments about her two sons. These two boys could easily end up at the plant like their mother.
“They’re a handful,” she says, “especially without a father around.”
Without any prompting, Darla explains that she waited until she was almost twenty-five to get married, and then her carefully chosen husband took off after just three years, leaving her to struggle through one marginal job after another until Southern Pride Meats came into existence five years ago.
“That old man,” she volunteers fervently, referring to Willie, “was the most decent human being I’ve ever known. Even when he’d cut down on the number of hogs, he still kept our workers on the clock so they’d get a full paycheck. Two years ago, I was sick a whole winter, and he kept my check coming. That’s just how he was. There aren’t many white men who’d do that around here as far as I’m concerned.”
I ask her if she minds if I take some notes, and begin to scribble furiously on my legal pad. Perhaps I can make her seem so blindly loyal to Willie that she would do anything to incriminate his killer.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem like someone who would tell a lie when the truth is less convenient. Instead, she simply comes across as what she portrays herself to be: a profoundly grateful woman who needed a decent job to support her children.
“He must have trusted you a lot,” I say, “or he wouldn’t have told you about the tape between him and Paul Taylor.”
Darla winces as if I have struck her.
“If I had known what was on the tape, he might still be alive today, but there was always a line I wasn’t permitted to cross. He just said to make sure Doris played a tape he had given her if anything mysterious happened to him. When I asked about it, he just gave me this look, and so I shut up.”
Darla is a talker and requires no urging to gossip about the personnel in the plant, thus relieving me of the fear that she was so wedded to the idea that Class was the killer that she wouldn’t be willing to discuss anyone but him.
“Harrison, one of the meat inspectors, hated Willie,” she says in response to a question about who, other than Bledsoe, could have killed her employer.
“And, frankly, Willie hated him. Willie wrote to his boss and tried to get him fired. He was nitpicking us to death.”
I ask about the other inspector, Frieda, who seemed that day in the plant almost apologetic about having to write up somebody. It was Harrison who noticed that Bledsoe’s knife was slightly out of place the day before.
“Surely you’ve had this conversation with the sheriff or an investigator,” I say, delighted with this information.
“It’s not in my statement, but I mentioned it the same morning the sheriff went through the plant with Harrison,” Darla says, gulping at her beer, “but the problem is that he’s got a pretty good alibi. See, he and Frieda commute all the way from Memphis every day. He couldn’t have
made it back after the plant closed before Doris found Willie’s body.”
I tap my pen against my pad. Some alibis are only as good as the amount of time it takes to understand what they’re built on.
“Maybe Harrison has some kind of hold on Frieda. You think they could have been sleeping together?”
Darla laughs out loud.
“That little bitty peck 7
erwood? Frieda’s no prize, but I sincerely doubt if she’s that desperate. She knows on a daily basis what an asshole Harrison is. I’m not gonna say it’d be impossible, but a woman’s got to draw the line somewhere.”
In an ideal world maybe-but from what I’ve seen of Frieda, it’s not hard for me to make that leap. While I write, Darla gets up to get another beer.
“Are you sure you won’t have one?”
I nod, having decided one won’t wipe me out, and a moment later take the Budweiser she hands me. If beer helps her keep talking, I’m not going to discourage her.
“You ought to try to check out that illegal alien who ran off after the murder,” she says, snapping the top off her second can of Miller Lite in less than twenty minutes.
“Now, if Class didn’t do it, that boy could have. But I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut he’s in Mexico, and nobody will ever find him.
They haven’t got a clue.”
I reach down into my briefcase and flip through to the back of the file where I find a copy of his work permit. Jorge Arrazola. I study his picture. In his early twenties, he is a nice enough looking kid but basically indistinguishable from a million of his countrymen. Dark, lots of hair, and a mustache. Darla gets up from her chair, stands by the arm of the couch, and looks over my shoulder.
“This is an obvious fake, if you study it. Who knows what his name really is? But it doesn’t pay employers to study their identification papers too closely. Willie liked Mexicans and hired them whenever he had the chance. Typically, they’re the best workers in the plant.
Jorge hardly spoke a work of English, and so we relied on Alvaro Ruiz to tell him what to do.”
That name rings a bell, and I rummage through the file to find his statement. As I do, I ask, “Who is he?”
“He’s worked for Willie ever since the plant opened and is like a godfather to the Mexicans who come through here. A real steady and sweet old guy. Jorge lived with him before he took off.
I’d go talk to Alvaro if I were you.”
I’ve scanned his statement once before and do so again. Darla adds, “Alvaro had another part-time job he went to after he got off at the plant.
He worked as a butcher for Bear Creek’s one supermarket, so he was never a suspect.”