The Thursday morning after April Fools’ Day, I get a call from Melvin Butterfield that may be Doss’s only chance. In the last few weeks I have interviewed several more workers from Southern Pride and checked their alibis. If someone is framing Bledsoe, I can’t find out who it is.
“I think it’s time for us to have a chat about some things,” he says, his voice booming in my ear as if he were in the room with me.
Though I am busy in the office this week and had not planned to drive over until Saturday to meet with Class and have dinner with Angela, if Butterfield’s ready to offer Class a deal, I don’t want to give him time to change his mind.
Though I have a new client coming in this afternoon, Julia can try to reschedule it for tomorrow.
I’ve had the feeling all along that Bledsoe won’t implicate Paul until he gets a concrete offer of a reduced sentence.
“Actually, I was planning to come over this afternoon if I could get away,” I lie glibly.
He asks if I can be there at four. I say that I can and hang up feeling a little hope for the first time since I took the case. Granted there are many more witnesses to interview, but the law of diminishing returns has already begun to kick in:
the more people I talk with, the less I get out of them.
Moments later Dan charges into my office, muttering loudly, “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.”
“What’s happened?” I say, looking up at my friend, whose face is even glummer than usual.
Over a beer last week after losing a case in Municipal Court to a near-deaf nursing home resident who represented herself from a
wheelchair, Dan waxed philosophical, describing the life of the bad lawyer as one long humiliation, with death the final but not inappropriate indignity.
First you lose, and then you die.
“One of the women I went out with complained to the Attorney General’s office that the dating service had misrepresented me,” he says, collapsing opposite me into one of my chairs, which trembles from the impact.
“This assistant A.G. from the Consumer Protection Division just barged her way into my office and called me part of the biggest fraud in Arkansas consumer history,” he huffs, his double chin beginning to jiggle.
“I couldn’t believe it. This little miniskirted girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-five flashed her badge at me like she was Eliot Ness about to close up half of Chicago and said if I wouldn’t agree to testify she could practically guarantee my picture on the feature page of the Democrat-Gazette as part of her investigation. The nerve some people have. If she hadn’t been such a babe, I would have thrown her out of my office!”
Glad to take a break, I push the papers in front of me aside and put my feet up on my desk.
“I thought you were the victim in this dating service business,” I say, remembering his last complaint about the woman who couldn’t keep her eyes open past nine o’clock.
Dan pats his beefy cheeks with a folded handkerchief, which this humid morning looks like a sponge. Did this woman make him cry?
“I’m a victim,” he whines, “but this A.G. says that each of the four women I’ve been out with has complained that I lied about too many details. Hell, everybody puffs their ‘pif’ a little.
“Personal information form,” he adds when I raise my eyebrows.
“A little!” I exclaim.
“You put down that you’re single.”
“It’s the weight thing that bothers most of them,” Dan says, fluttering the fingers on his right hand as if he were a famous music conductor dismissing a critic’s carping about a few bad notes.
“They believe you when you say your divorce is just a matter of time.
It’s when you show up at their door at two-fifty instead of one-fifty that pisses ‘em off.”
I whistle. That’s quite a stretch.
“I bet you haven’t weighed one fifty since you were in junior high,” I guess, amazed at his gall.
“Sixth grade,” Dan corrects me.
“Trixie-that’s this girl’s name-says her office wants these matchmaking companies held to some kind of minimum truth-in-packaging standard so that singles can get their money back if they’ve been ripped off. She wants me and the women totes 9
tify at a legislative subcommittee meeting that’s coming up next month.”
He’s got to be kidding. Matchmakers Who Lie Too Much. Surely, it’s already been done, but we could have our own redneck version of Oprah:
That of’ boy lied like a dog on his “pif.” Ah’d a dated him if he’d jus’ been a little bald, but he didn’t have a hair on his haid! Fearing the worst, I ask, “Do you really want that kind of publicity?”
“No,” Dan admits.
“But it’d be a good way to get to know Trixie better,” he says.
“She’s cute as a button, and she wasn’t wearing a ring.”
The species’ capacity for self-delusion knows no bounds. Dan would fall in love with a boa constrictor if it were wearing a skirt.
“Don’t you think she’s getting to know you a little too well?
You won’t exactly be coming off as Washingtonian in this story.”
Dan looks hurt.
“She could do a lot worse,” he points out.
“At least I haven’t served any time yet. Besides, there’re some women who don’t mind fat men.”
Or men who are married, broke, desperate, or liars.
“Go for it,” I advise.
“This may be the love of your life. She sounds like a female Geraldo.
You could be on daytime TV together.”
A gleam comes into Dan’s eyes.
“If her skirts get any shorter,” he predicts, “she’ll have to be on the Playboy Channel. She uncrossed her legs once and I swear I thought I was looking at Sharon Stone.”
So much for Janet Reno being the next role model for our female attorneys.
“You haven’t been sued by one of these women?” I ask suspiciously.
Every few months Dan requires some kind of major rescue job. I had thought a failed marriage would slow him down, but it seems only to have speeded up his self-destruct button.
“Hell, no,” Dan assures me.
“They know I’m just a pawn. This last woman told me kind of wistfully
that if I had a tummy tuck, she’d consider going out with me again.”
I eye Dan’s stomach over the desk. It’s going to take more than a tuck. To get rid of that much blubber, the surgeon would have to go in there with a backhoe.
“Are you sure this Trixie character is for real? She sounds a little eager to me.”
Dan nods solemnly.
“Consumer protection is big business. It’s how state attorney generals go on to being governors. It’s not just old folks who go to the polls.
Half the country is divorced and miserable, and the other half is thinking about joining them. Singles like myself are a vulnerable part of the population and tend to vote if given a decent reason.”
I think of one of the comic strips that Dan substitutes for artwork in his office and laugh out loud. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
At 4:15 I walk into Melvin Butterfield’s office on the second floor of the courthouse in Bear Creek, deliberately a few minutes late, but if he is annoyed, I can’t tell it. He smiles and shakes my hand and invites me to have coffee, which I decline. As chatty as last time, he gossips about the Razorbacks as if we had been teammates ourselves, telling me that the reason the Hogs will lose in the NCAA tournament this year is that this team has too many Juco players who won’t stay focused enough to play defense for an entire game. His hands parked behind his head.
Butterfield proclaims, “Corliss Williamson was ready for every game. These guys play only when they feel like it.”