I stare at Darla, thinking she has been watching too many cop shows set on the east coast.
Organized crime isn’t exactly a stranger in the South, but you don’t hear much about it. Still, I have heard of the “Dixie Mafia.”
“So you now think Paul Taylor didn’t have anything to do with it?” I ask, wondering if she is onto something.
“Maybe he didn’t,” Darla says, arching her back as she stretches against her chair. She is wearing a tight sweater and skirt that is too young for her, but it is hard to fault her for making an effort.
“It’s probably more likely that Muddy could have thought that Willie was going to get him sent to prison when he found out he was stealing.
The salesmen sometimes came back to the plant after it was shut down.
Willie wouldn’t have thought anything about Muddy’s being in the office.”
This seems more plausible to me.
“But what about all the people who said he was selling meat to them that day?”
Darla shrugs.
“He could have delivered early and come back or come here first and gone to his stores late. Hell, he could have bribed a couple.
Somebody could have owed him a favor. He could have been slipping an employee of one of those stores free meat for years.”
I nod at her. It is worth checking out if for no other reason than I’ve about worked my way to the end of the list of plant employees.
“Do you have any idea where Muddy went?”
Darla shakes her head.
“He didn’t leave a forwarding address, and I checked at the plant he was working at in West Memphis. He just didn’t show up one day.
They’re still checking to see if he stole any money.”
I smile at her.
“You should have been a cop.”
She doodles on a pad in front of her.
“Hardly. I was just trying to help you out.”
“Thanks,” I say, pushing up from my chair. It dawns on me that Darla is probably hoping that I might ask her out. We’re about the same age, and
I doubt if there have been too many guys lining up to ask her for a date.
“Have you told the sheriff about the theft?” “I wanted to let you know first,” she says.
“Bonner kind of plays things close to the vest, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I have,” I say. I wonder when Bonner would have gotten around to telling me. If nothing else, I will be able to argue, for what it’s worth, that a thieving salesman and an undocumented alien got the hell out of town after the boss was murdered.
“Are you still friends with Muddy’s wife?” I ask, thinking she might keep up with her ex-husband. Some women never let go, no matter how badly they’ve been abused.
“More or less,” Darla says, reaching for the phone book.
“She lives outside of town.”
I ask her to give Mrs. Jessup a call and see if she has any idea where Muddy is. She says she will, and I leave, relieved that at least one person is actively helping me on this case. I’d be at ground zero if it weren’t for this woman. What is her motivation? If I am honest with myself, it can’t only be that she’s attracted to me. I suspect that, outside of his family, Darla may be the person who misses Willie the most.
Sheriff Bonner sits in his office and looks at me with an expression that says I’m not very bright.
“I would have told you where Mr. Jessup was if you had asked. We found him a couple of weeks ago. He’s living in Nashville working for another plant.”
I feel like an idiot. For the last two weeks I have been wasting my time trying to find him and nailing down his alibi which today is even tighter than it was before I began to try to track him down. Feeling dumber by the minute, I ask Bonner if he has checked out whether Mike’s Super Bargain store in Memphis is Mafia controlled.
He does his best not to smile.
“We’ve checked every lead we’ve been given,” he says.
“If they’re fronting for anybody, we haven’t been able to find it out.”
For some reason I feel a little better. At least he investigated it. I tell myself not to be too hard on Darlatate. Hell, she made as much sense as anybody else.
“Will you bring him back for the trial?”
The sheriff picks off a piece of lint from his uniform, which is as pressed and starched as the day I met him in February. The only difference is that he is wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The third week in May, it is already warm enough for air conditioning, though Bonner hasn’t turned it on in his office.
“Not unless you offer any evidence during your defense that he killed Willie Ting. As you probably know by now if you’ve retraced his route, more people saw him that day than claim they’ve seen Elvis.”
I laugh for the first time in a month. After weeks of going through the records, Darla has told me that they can’t even find enough theft by Muddy to charge him with a felony. This was a complete waste of time. To get in at least one jab against him, I ask, “So, Sheriff, what do you think the odds are that a jury will convict Paul Taylor?”
Bonner’s professional mask descends once again. He says easily, “Go see Mr. Butterfield.
He’s the lawyer, not me.”
That’s as close as Bonner will come to “dissing” his rival. I leave his office, and drive out to Brickeys to see Class, realizing how much I have underestimated Bonner and Butterfield. I thought by this time there would be enough honest-to-God suspects that Bledsoe would be a cinch to walk. Now it looks as if I will have to depend on the blacks on the jury to distrust the system so much that I can get a hung jury.
Unfortunately for Class, instead of a racist detective from the L.A. police department, the star witness against Class will be an African-American sheriff who, thus far, has been as competent and professional as any person I’ve met so far in law enforcement.
Bledsoe, who has lost at least fifteen pounds in the two and a half months he’s been in jail, looks more depressed than ever when I sit down
with him.
“There’s hardly anybody I haven’t talked to,” I say, feeling dejected myself.
“I’ll argue that anybody could have framed you, but damn it, I don’t have any evidence.”
In response, Bledsoe begins to cough and sneeze. Some guys take to jails and prisons as if they were their summer homes. Class is not one of them. He’s been sick almost since the day he got here. Jails are not great places to be sick. Just last week an asthma patient died in the Blackwell County jail.
His congestion finally settling for a moment, Class sputters, “I’m ready to take that deal Butterfield offered me. I did it. You think you can get him to make it again?”
I watch Bledsoe wipe his face with his sleeve.
Has he really been conning me all this time?
“Class, does this mean you’re changing your story? And this time you’re telling me the truth? I can’t be a part of anything that railroads an innocent man.” Sure I can. This is what I’ve wanted to happen ever since I realized Butterfield needed Class to get Paul. Yet if Class tells me he is lying to save himself from execution, I can’t let him do it.
Class covers his mouth and begins to cough again. When the spasm subsides, he says, “It’s like this. Taylor promised me the barbecue
place after Oldham retires next year. Then I’d take it over and in a couple of years Taylor was supposed to give me the deed to the place.
It’d be like I was buying it from him. We figured the Mexican would get scared and take off and then get blamed. I suspected his papers were forged.”
“When did you and Paul plan this?” I ask, watching his face carefully.
His eyes are rheumy, but he looks straight back at me while he talks.
“About two weeks before I did it,” he says stolidly.
“When I’d be out working at Oldham’s, Taylor would come out. That’s when we talked.”
I drop my voice to a whisper.
“How could you kill Willie?” I ask, realizing I’ve always been lulled by his passive demeanor.