“What kind of bond will you recommend for Class?” I ask, knowing it doesn’t matter.
“Same as Paul,” the prosecutor says, “five hundred thousand.”
“Can we get the hearing done this afternoon?”
I ask, noting that Butterfield has only the slightest trace of a Delta accent. Maybe he went to school up north and they shamed it out of him.
“Can’t do it,” Butterfield says, turning around to check a large calendar on the wall behind him.
“The judge is in Memphis for a funeral and won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon. What about three o’clock? I’ll call down and put it on the docket.”
I have a hot-check case in municipal court tomorrow morning, but no more court appearances.
“Sure, I can be back over here.”
Butterfield pulls out a file from his desk drawer and pushes it over to me. As if we were on the same side of the case instead of opposing attorneys, he confides, “It’d be hard to believe these guys would try to get away with something like this until you see the evidence against them.”
Normally, a prosecutor won’t even talk to you until after the bond hearing and the arraignment, but Butterfield seems down-right eager to discuss the case. I scan the formal charges, which don’t tell me more than I already know. He points out the test results from the FBI concluding that it was Willie’s blood on Bledsoe’s knife and shows me a thick sheaf of statements taken from the other workers in the plant.
“Everybody else we’ve talked to has an alibi during the time the old man was killed.”
“What time was that?” I ask, wondering how airtight each of those alibis can be. Surely, one of the workers besides Class was by himself that afternoon.
“Between two when the plant closed and four when his wife discovered his body and called the police. The medical examiner has confirmed the time,” he says, flipping over to an autopsy.
“Is that all the evidence against my client?” I ask, knowing it must not be.
“Not hardly. We’ve documented where he lied about his contacts with Paul Taylor.” I watch as Butterfield flips to the back of the file. He points to a statement by a woman named Darla Tate.
“She’s the secretary at the plant. She heard Bled 5
soe talking to someone on the phone in the plant office a couple of days after the murder. She was in the bathroom and he must have thought he was alone. She’s signed a statement that she heard him saying, and I quote, “I got the money.”
She knew that we had a tape of Taylor threatening Willie about a month before, and so she called the sheriff.”
“You have a tape of Paul actually threatening Willie?” I ask, incredulous. It doesn’t totally surprise me that Bledsoe would make that kind of phone call, but I can’t imagine Paul being dumb enough to let himself be implicated on tape.
Butterfield pulls a tape from his desk drawer and places it in a pocket Olympus tape recorder.
“This is a copy. The sheriff’s got the original in his evidence room,
and you can hear it anytime you want. The relevant part is only a few seconds long.” He pushes a button, and I hear a click and then recognize Paul Taylor’s rich, bass voice saying, “This place won’t be worth a hundred thousand dollars after you die because you’ve got nobody here to run it.”
“It sounds like you’re threatening me,” a soft Asian voice, not unlike Tommy’s, responds.
“Willie, you can interpret it however you want, but one way or the other you’re gonna die soon…” I hear the sound of a telephone ringing, and the tape ends. Though I’m certainly not going to admit it to Butterfield, my reaction is one of deep satisfaction. There is no way in hell Paul can deny the tape. Though I’ve never done any research on this precise legal point, I’m certain the tape of this conversation could be admit y led into evidence. I ask, “What was the deal? Was Paul trying to buy it and Willie wouldn’t sell?”
“Exactly,” Butterfield answers.
“This was made about a month before he died. He gave this tape to his wife and told her that if anything happened to him to tell his son in Washington about it. He had told the secretary about it, too.”
“Why didn’t Willie take the tape to the sheriff the next day?” I ask.
“He might still be alive.”
Butterfield shrugs.
“Who knows? Those folks have always been a mystery to me. All I know is that they’re still sucking what little money there is right out of the black community with those dinky little stores they operate and never crack so much as a smile.”
There is no mistaking the bitterness in the prosecutor’s voice. It occurs to me that there is probably no love lost between the blacks and Asians in Bear Creek any more than there is in places like Los Angeles.
“How many stores do they have left?”
“Three,” the prosecutor says.
“They’re still hanging on, though there’s not much left to get.”
I file away his response. It may come in handy later. I wonder how he feels personally about Paul Taylor. Now is not the time to ask, but I would like to know.
“Did Paul make an offer for the plant after Willie died?”
Butterfield presses down a creased place on one of the statements.
“He waited about two months. Of course, we were working with the son in DCI but Taylor didn’t say anything more that incriminated himself.
He offered a hundred thousand for the plant, but after a couple of meetings with the son, he withdrew the offer. The plant’s being run by his cousin from Greenville.
Obviously, you’ll want to go out there.”
The reason for all this chumminess and willingness to let me see the file before I’ve officially entered my appearance in court as Doss’s attorney dawns on me as I realize there is no smoking gun linking Paul Taylor to Bledsoe. Butterfield has the one overheard conversation at the plant, but the secretary can’t say whom he was talking to. I’d be willing to bet my fee in this case that at some point, perhaps very soon. Class is going to be offered a deal he may not be able to refuse in order to get his testimony against Paul. If that’s what this case comes down to, it will be fine with me.
Before I leave his office, I ask about the sheriff.
“I see him running for a bigger office someday.
The pictures on his walls are pretty impressive.”
Butterfield gives me his only frown of the day.
“Bonner’s been running for something since the day he was born. He’s a good sheriff,” he adds quickly.
I resist asking the prosecutor what he will be running for next. I should have realized he and Bonner see themselves as natural competitors in this area of the state. With all the whites leaving, they have political opportunities they never dreamed possible when they were growing up.
The phone rings, and when Butterfield gets off, he promises to get me a
copy of the file tomorrow after the arraignment, and I leave his office understanding that Butterfield wants to convict Paul in the worst way.
What better springboard to office than the murder conviction of the biggest planter in the county? He probably doesn’t care about Bledsoe at all. Behind the courthouse I start up the Blazer. It is time to begin finding out about Paul Taylor.
Before it gets too dark, I drive around Bear Creek’s residential areas.
Though I was here three months ago, I am struck this visit by my hometown’s desolation on the eve of spring. The houses and businesses show the effects of years of neglect, a dismaying shabbiness I had not noticed earlier. In the summer the abundant honeysuckle vines, tiger lilies, and chinaberry trees framed by giant magnolia, pecan, and even persimmon trees hide the decay. As a child my favorite tree was the weeping willow. My friends and I stuffed the droopy branches down the backs of our britches and pretended we were horses.
On Sharp Street I drive slowly past our original family home. A wood two-story structure, it needs a paint job. Scott Nightingale, the town dentist whose work always required aspirin for days afterward, bought the house after Mother died, but he, too, is dead. Though there is a middle class and even some wealthy people still left in Bear Creek, many of the homes and yards seem shrunken. This area north of Hazelnut was my childhood universe. It occurs to me, for the first time in years, how much I loved it here.