distant black relative Mayola Washington presumably still lives. I wonder why I haven’t gone by to see her. However, all we have in common is guilt, and I have enough of that.
A child, perhaps ten, her hair in pigtails, comes to the door and regarding me gravely through the screen, yells, “Mama, there’s a man out here!”
Within seconds Mary Kiley appears and seeing my face, opens the screen.
Though thin as a ballet dancer, she looks okay in a pair of red shorts and a white T-shirt advertising Graceland.
“Go on and watch TV, Maggie!” she says, shooing her daughter away from her.
“May I talk to you a minute, Mrs. Kiley?” I ask, awkwardly, since she isn’t inviting me in.
“It’s about the trial.”
Her lips pucker briefly.
“I didn’t think you were here to ask me for a date Without waiting for my, reaction, she says, “Let me get my cigarettes.”
Presumably, there is no Mr. Kiley. I stand on her stoop and think about Angela. In the last week I have tried hard to block her out of my mind until the trial is over. Was she using me or not? Paul may not be a murderer, but he is a son of a bitch. And yet Angela admitted she was
attracted to him. Betrayed Dwight. Do I believe she slept with him to make sure they got a loan? I don’t know.
Mrs. Kiley pushes open the screen with a kind of nervous energy that makes me glad I don’t have to be around her all the time.
“Let’s go around to the backyard,” she instructs me.
“I’d take you through the house to get there, but it looks terrible, and I don’t want you talking about me.”
“I don’t think the judge would find the condition of your house particularly relevant,” I say, walking fast to keep up with her.
“You’ve got a cute kid.” “Yeah, I know,” she says over her shoulder.
“She’s so innocent it takes your breath away sometimes.”
Away from the school, Mary Kiley seems like a different person, but then most people are when they’re not at work. A month ago she was guarded and didn’t speak unless asked a question.
We sit in two blue and white plastic webbed folding chairs and she lights up an unfiltered Camel with obvious pleasure.
“I love these damn things,” she says, after taking a long drag.
“I hope I die with one in my mouth.”
I laugh, and she asks, “Isn’t this the second day of the trial?”
I say it is and tell her I came by to check a couple of things she told me before about Darlatate.
“Can you really swear that she was not out of your sight the whole time she was at the school that afternoon?”
Mrs. Kiley blows smoke into the air in the direction of a brown picnic table a few feet to our left. I can see ants crawling on it from where I’m sitting.
“So you think she did it, huh?”
“She might have,” I say, and summarize briefly why I am suspicious. I conclude by saying, “I never considered it a real possibility before, because I didn’t think a woman would be coldblooded enough to sneak up behind a man and slit his throat.”
Mary Kiley narrows her eyes at me as if I couldn’t possibly be so naive.
“Have you got the statement I gave to Bonner?” she asks.
I reach into my briefcase and find the page and hand it to her. While she reads, I notice her daughter has come to the back door screen and is staring out at us. She wants to come out but doesn’t want to incur her mother’s wrath. I wave at her and she waves back. She has her mother’s dark eyes and small mouth. I hope she doesn’t smoke. Mrs. Kiley looks up at me and says, “No, I couldn’t swear she was there the whole time.
When that prissy sheriff we got came out the first time and questioned
me, it pissed me off. I didn’t like him coming out to the school.
Hell, that’s why it was built. See, when volunteers are there in the office, it gives me an opportunity to check the halls and the bathrooms and the gym to see if anything is going on. A student who’s got study hall that period stays in the principal’s office and answers the phone when he teaches his two higher math classes. He doesn’t have time to blow his nose most days.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this when I talked to you a month ago?” I ask, trying to keep the irritation I am feeling out of my voice.
Mrs. Kiley flips a cigarette under her picnic table.
“Because I thought it was ridiculous for him to think it was her, and you seemed like you were just kind of going through the motions, anyway.
Besides, everybody said that black man who cut meat in the plant did it. But thinking about it now, I realize that I probably wasn’t around as much as I made it sound. I could have been gone as long as thirty minutes. It was the only break I got.”
Going through the motions, that’s what I’ve been doing. I ask, “Have you seen Darla lately?” “She called me a couple of weeks ago,” Mary Kiley says, lighting up another cigarette, “and said she had been subpoenaed to testify She asked if I had been. I guess that’s what made me a little curious.”
I look toward the screen but don’t see her daughter.
“Would you be willing to testify to what you’ve told me if the judge lets you?”
Mrs. Kiley stretches unselfconsciously, thrusting her small breasts against Elvis’s guitar.
“I guess,” she says, her face deadpan, “this means we’ll be losing a volunteer.”
I race out to Brickeys and give Class a pep talk.
“You can convince that jury you didn’t do this,” I encourage him. He is back in his orange jumpsuit and looks at me through the glass, wanting, I think, to believe me.
“Don’t look down; don’t mumble. When Butterfield questions you, make sure you understand what he is asking. You can say that you don’t understand him…”
I leave in an hour. We’ve gone over his testimony three times. I resist the urge to tell him that I may be able to try to help him for a change. I have no assurance whatsoever that at this late date Johnson will let me call someone who is not on my witness list.
From the Cotton Boll (where I’m almost too late to get anything to eat) Mr. Carpenter lets me call the Ting residence from the counter. Connie answers, and I tell her about my conversation with Mary Kiley.
“She’s willing to testify Connie.
I think she believes Darla might have killed your father. Darla called her to see if she had been subpoenaed.”
“You’re going to get him off, aren’t you?” Connie says, her voice bitter.
“By itself, this won’t be enough,” I say, watching Mckenzie bring out a dinner salad for me, “unless Darla can be shown to have a motive.”
“Well, you should be happy then,” she hisses into my ear.
“Eddie went back to the plant thirty minutes ago.”
This is Tommy’s doing, I realize. Perhaps their mother. Connie is too bitter.
“Please have him call me if he finds something.”
Connie hangs up the phone in my ear without promising me anything. As I eat a chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, Mr. Carpenter sits with me and tells me the gossip about the trial. It looks bad for Class, but Paul never should have been charged. He adds, “Of course, the people who are saying that are the same ones who, if he’s convicted, will say they knew from the beginning he was guilty.”
I spoon some gravy on the chicken. I could get used to a ten-thousand-calorie-a-day diet. I wonder what people are saying about me but don’t dare ask. I don’t need to lose any more confidence than I already have.
“I guess Paul can run for governor if he’s acquitted,” I say, reminded of a comment Angela made the first time I saw her.
“Governor?” the old man laughs.
“He’s too arrogant to be elected dog catcher! It’s Dick who should have run for office. He would have made a difference.”
The old man doesn’t have a clue. A prominent politician hasn’t come out of east Arkansas for decades. It’s been too bogged down in the politics of race. Mckenzie brings out my bilclass="underline" $6.50.1 notice she has written at the bottom good luck!
and drawn a “happy face.” I nod vigorously and wink at her. I will need it.