“But Mrs. Tate you did tell me and Eddie Ting a few weeks ago that you had been going through the books and found out that a meat salesman by the name of Muddy Jessup had been stealing from the plant by altering the price sheets?”
“Yes, I did,” Darla says, her voice high.
“And you suggested I try to find him, but when I did, it involved only a few hundred dollars, isn’t that a fact?”
Darla purses her lips.
“That’s all we could prove. It may have been more.”
“Don’t you find it a little strange that you caught the changes in the price sheets but not the changes in the receipts from Dixie Farms?” “No,” she says, angrily, “it never occurred to me to check them.”
Knowing I will have to accept whatever answer she gives me, I ask, trying to seem as confident as I can, “Mrs. Tate, do you recall telling me that your sons have worked for Paul Taylor during the last two summers?”
For all Darla knows, they are waiting outside the courtroom to testify She blinks rapidly, and says, “Sure.”
“Just one moment, your honor,” I say. Hoping the judge won’t stop me, I walk over to Butterfield’s table and with my back to her, nod as if I am getting an instruction. Melvin looks at me as if I am crazy.
I come back to the podium and rumble with my papers for a moment before asking, “Now, your sons haven’t worked for him since the summertime, is that right?”
Darla has begun ever so slightly to lean back against the witness chair as if she is bracing herself.
“That’s correct.”
My heart pounding, I act as if I am being coy with the next question and mumble it but speak loud enough for her and the jury to hear, “Do you know if they saw Mr. Taylor in January or February of this year?”
Darla cocks her chin slightly, but just for the briefest of instants her eyes track to Paul’s table and then back to me. She is taking too long to answer, or I hope she is.
“I have no idea.”
I smile as if I know the answer and then look back over at Butterfield and nod. He frowns, but I can tell by his eyes that he knows what I am doing. I pause for as long as I dare and then back to Darla and ask, “Mrs. Tate, did Mr. Taylor talk to you about murdering Willie Ting?”
“No!” she answers, shrilly.
“He did not!”
I wheel around and make a show of looking at Dick, who is whispering urgently in Paul’s ear. I turn back to the judge and say that I have no more questions, and before Dick can get up, I point out that it is almost noon and ask the court to break for the noon recess.
Johnson consults his own watch instead of the clock in the courtroom and says the court will be in recess until one. As soon as the bailiff opens the door that leads into his chambers, I walk quickly to the witness
stand before Dick can get to Darla.
“If you know what’s good for you,” I whisper into her left ear, “you’ll follow me right now out this courtroom and to my car out back, so we can talk.”
Darla looks past me at Paul, who I know is watching her.
“He’s gonna get off,” I continue saying, “and you’ll end up in jail.” Darla says nothing, and I head out the door, and go around back to the Blazer, which, like the other thirty or so vehicles sinking into the sweltering asphalt, is now directly in the sun. I climb in and roll down the windows, while the longest minute of my life passes, but I begin to breathe again as Darla comes around the corner. Her face is a mask, but I don’t give her time to bullshit me.
“Bonner and Butterfield will be coming after you, Darla,” I say as soon as she shuts the door.
“They’re not stupid, and you know it.
You’ve got just enough time to make a deal with Butterfield, but you better do it now. Paul can’t be tried again if this case ends today, and you won’t have anything to bargain with.” She says nothing, but looks at me with pure hatred in her eyes.
“It’s Paul who Butterfield wants, not you. He wants to run for office so bad he can taste it, and sending Paul to jail will put him on the map. But you could be the first woman executed in Arkansas if you don’t act immediately.”
Following her gaze, I turn my head, and sure enough there is Paul, brazen as a whore, standing at the corner of the building waiting to talk to her.
“Paul’s spent his life sneering at people like you, and if you let him, he’ll do it again.”
Her temples already beginning to sweat in the heat, she brushes back a lock of wispy gray hair from her forehead. After a moment, she shrugs slightly, and I realize she isn’t going to say anything to me. I look back and see that Paul has disappeared.
“Wait here, and I’ll go tell Butterfield you want to talk to him.”
After a long moment, she raises a hand to wipe a tear out of the corner of her right eye. Until this moment, I wasn’t certain he was in on it.
That is good enough for me. I sprint back into the courthouse to look for Butterfield, whom I find upstairs in his office behind his desk opening a sack lunch, the Arkansas criminal code open before him.
Pushing the sack to one side, he smirks as if he is not at all surprised to see me. I sit down across from him and tell him that Darla is waiting to talk to him in the Blazer.
Melvin looks past me at the closed door behind my chair.
“So this case just comes down to good old-fashioned racism, after all, huh?”
I stare at him. He must mean that Mary Kiley lied to the sheriff.
“Call it what you want,” I say, “but it is obvious she resented the hell out of him and would have tried to protect Adolf Hitler if he had been out there.”
As if he has all the time in the world. Butterfield tilts his chair back and asks, “Assuming you’re right, what was Tate’s motive?”
“Money, probably,” I guess.
“She didn’t say, nor has she admitted anything to me, but she was trying to raise two boys on a secretary’s salary.
Taylor probably got to know how desperate she was through the boys. He somehow learned she was stealing from the plant and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse since Willie was about to find out. The timing for Paul was perfect.”
The prosecutor rocks back and forth in his chair with his hands behind his head and thinks.
“So your idea is, together this Tate woman and Taylor,” he muses, “picked the easiest and the dumbest nigger in the plant to frame?”
I lean forward on my knees. Class is more decent than dumb, but I won’t argue the point.
“And he picked the dumbest lawyer in the state to represent him,” I
admit.
“I’ve had my own agenda so long in this case I’ve been lucky to find the courthouse.”
Butterfield abruptly stops rocking and says, “So I’ve heard.”
For a long moment we sit staring at each other. Then, taking a small Sorry tape recorder from his desk, Butterfield stands up, his lanky frame uncurling as if it were made of rubber.
“Hell,” he complains laconically, “I’m not gonna get any lunch.”
After nervously gulping down a turkey sandwich and a Coke at a convenience store off the square, I wander around the courthouse hoping to spot Butterfield and Darla. They are not in the Blazer.
His office door is shut, but I do not see a light coming from it. I should be sitting with Class, but we have gone over his story so many times that I can’t stay seated. So nervous he can barely speak. Class is going to make a terrible witness.
He will sound guilty, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I walk outside and stand on the front steps.
Paul and Dick are nowhere to be seen either. I have looked for Angela, but she has probably walked home, a mere three blocks away, for lunch.
I have not talked to her for the last week, and now, I wonder how all of
this will affect her.
What does she really know? Has she been lying to me all this time? Is she still in love with Paul? I have tried to put her out of my mind, but now it is impossible. What a mistake it was to become involved with her! Now I am hooked. Gloomily, I realize the case is out of my hands. I walk back inside, knowing that if he wants to, on closing argument, Butterfield can brush away the testimony of Eddie Ting and Mary Kiley in two minutes. Darla has admitted nothing, and unless she does. Class is headed for Cummins, and my anger and stupidity will have helped put him there.