Blind Judgement g-5 Read online

  Blind Judgement

  ( Gideon - 5 )

  Grif Stockley

  Grif Stockley

  Blind Judgement

  PROLOGUE

  “The typical white guy who is moving to our town from the Delta does it… to get away from the Delta. Race enters into it about 100 percent of the time. But there are other things going on.

  That area is becoming too depressing for people.

  No one wants to be from one of those towns with all those problems.” (Quote from an Arkansas businessman speaking on condition of anonymity to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter in a December 31, 1995, article on white flight from the Arkansas Delta.) It appears only a matter of time before complete political control passes to the African American racial majority in small Southern towns nourished by the Mississippi on its way to the sea. At the time of the Civil War, Arkansas, a diverse state geographically, with mountains to the north and west and rich bottom land to the east, was the second fastest-growing slave state in the Union (next to Texas). That legacy continues to haunt and obsess those of us who have been part of the landscape. This book is dedicated to those Arkansans, black and white, who remain and struggle in the Delta.

  “Are you Gideon Page?”

  I turn to my right and see an attractive-looking black woman in her thirties seated in our waiting room. She is wearing jeans and a red cotton jersey sweater and tennis shoes. On the chair beside her is a faded cloth coat that can’t be much protection in the raw February wind that is blowing fiercely outside the Layman Building.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, and look for Julia, our receptionist, who is

  probably already taking a break though it is only a quarter after nine.

  This woman isn’t a scheduled client. I don’t have an appointment until ten.

  “I’m Lattice Bledsoe. I drove over from Bear Creek,” she says, standing up.

  “My husband was charged with murder yesterday and needs a lawyer.”

  Bear Creek! My old hometown in the Arkansas Delta. A good two hours’ drive away. I’ve never tried a case over there, nor have I ever wanted to.

  Too many skeletons rattling around in those cotton fields. I lay my briefcase on Julia’s desk, covering up her latest issue of Cosmopolitan, and take off my overcoat. Thanksgiving weekend I had the delightful experience of confirming during a trip to Bear Creek with my twenty-year-old daughter Sarah that my paternal grandfather had impregnated a Negro girl in the 1930s. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time. He had been her mother’s landlord. Still alive, Mrs. Washington, who lives there in a housing project for the elderly, was perhaps too circumspect to characterize the relationship between them as rape. Since my grandfather went to her mother’s shack every month to collect the rent, I’m not so sure.

  “Who was the victim?” I ask, wondering if I will recognize the name.

  “Willie Ting, an old Chinese man who owned the meat-packing plant,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, “where Class worked.”

  I do know the name. Even though nobody else is in our waiting room, this is an inappropriate conversation to be having out here, and I invite Mrs. Bledsoe to follow me back to my office.

  Thirty years ago I had regularly played tennis with Willie Ting’s son Tommy when I came home during the summers from Subiaco Academy in western Arkansas. The Tings, like the three other Chinese families in town, had owned a grocery store in the black area of Bear Creek. Tommy, like his younger sister Connie, had been popular and an outstanding student. I wonder what became of him. I should try to find out even if I don’t take this case, which I can’t imagine I can afford to do. A meat-packing job in the state’s poorest county can’t pay for much of a defense.

  After Mrs. Bledsoe sits down in my office and declines a cup of coffee, I ask, “What’s the evidence against your husband?” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice dropping to a whisper, “They say they found his butcher knife with the old man’s blood on it, and Class doesn’t have an alibi when Mr. Ting was killed. He was home by himself.” She paused to look hard at my face.

  “I know my husband, Mr. Page. He isn’t a killer.”

  I begin to doodle on my note pad. Too bad she can’t be on his jury. I glance at my watch. I’ve got some time to kill before my ten o’clock appointment.

  “What do the authorities think his motive was?” I ask, interested because of Tommy. God, he was a human backboard. The Arkansas Michael

  Chang. I could never beat him. His father I barely knew. I never saw him outside his crowded little convenience store. Mr. Ting’s English was only fair, and he had a heavy accent.

  Sent by my mother to pick up a bar of soap or a box of salt, sometimes I’d see the whole family.

  Tommy would seem a little embarrassed, but maybe it was my imagination.

  “Supposedly, he was hired,” Mrs. Bledsoe says solemnly, “by Paul Taylor to kill him so he could buy the plant cheap.”

  “Paul Taylor?” I exclaim, my voice jumping high enough to shatter crystal.

  “A white man whose family owned half the county?” It can’t be.

  Paul was an asshole, but he was too rich to have to commit murder.

  “The very same,” Mrs. Bledsoe confirms.

  “My husband hardly even knew him.”

  My stomach begins to knot up. I hated the Taylors. Oscar, Paul’s father, had cheated my mother after my father died, and then years later as an adult, Paul had picked up eighty acres of her land at a tax sale. Because of them. Mother died in a shabby three-room apartment on the outskirts of town. Come to think of it, I still hate the Taylors.

  “Now, tell me again why would he hire your husband?” I ask. In junior

  high, Paul and I had been best friends. Before my father’s death, my parents would drive out to parties with other couples to Riverdale, the Taylor plantation on the banks of the Mississippi about fifteen miles from town. Many nights in those years, Paul would spend the night in town at our house. Six feet tall in the ninth grade, Paul had girls eating out of his hand while the rest of us were still borrowing our daddies’ razors. After my father hanged himself in the state hospital, Paul never darkened our door again, and my mother never returned to Riverdale.

  “He didn’t!” Lattice Bledsoe says urgently.

  “Class is being framed!”

  “Who does he think is framing him?” I ask, paying more attention by the second. The memory of my mother’s face when she learned that Oscar Taylor was foreclosing on the building my father had been buying registers in my brain like it was yesterday. Mother was trying to find a buyer for the pharmacy, but Oscar snatched the building away before she could sell it. It was the only time I ever heard her curse.

  “He doesn’t know; maybe one of the other workers,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice weary.

  “Maybe it was Paul Taylor,” I suggest, but unable to believe it. I can’t imagine why he would do it. Not with all their money.

  “Couldn’t he have planned with someone else to set up your husband?”

  I would love to prove that in a court of law.

  Mrs. Bledsoe shrugs. She obviously hasn’t made that leap yet.

  “We wanted to know,” she says, her voice shy as she approaches the topic at hand, “how much you charge.”

  It has barely been two months since I regularly commuted to the northwest part of the state for a rape trial. Though the publicity was worth it, I lost money on that case with all the traveling and being away from the office. Though I think I know, I ask, “How did you find out about me?”

  “You were the lawyer for Dade Cunningham, and you used to live in Bear Creek. Lucy Cunningham recommended you.”

  I nod, though I am a little surprised. Though Dade was acquitted, his mother wasn’t al
l that happy with me by the end of the trial. Dade Cunningham was a wide receiver for the University of Arkansas who was accused of raping a white cheerleader. His mother, who lives in Hughes, a few miles east of Bear Creek, retained me to represent him, and I took his case hoping that if I got him acquitted I could negotiate his pro contract.

  It was hardly an accident she turned out to be the granddaughter of Mrs. pretend to write some figures on my legal pad.

  “How much can you pay?” I ask, knowing I’d take the case for gas money. It surprises me to know how much I’d love to see Paul Taylor go to prison.

  “We’ve got seven thousand dollars in sawings Mrs. Bledsoe says, consulting a piece of paper she has taken from her purse.

  “We were going to use it to buy a house.”

  Mrs. Bledsoe somehow reminds me of the singer Keely Smith, a singer from at least a generation ago whose somber expression never seemed to change during a performance. I look past her out the window. Seven thousand for a capital murder trial is a joke. I flip through my calendar and note how full it is the next few months.

  Finally, after I’ve struggled as a solo practitioner the last few years, my mostly criminal defense practice has begun to build. I will be busy as hell, but I think I can squeeze it in. Though it will mean endless driving again, I vow that I will spend as much time in the office as I possibly can. Pushing fifty, I’ve only been a lawyer for five years, and so far I haven’t managed to make up for lost time.

  “That will do it,” I say.

  “But I’ll need all of it before I begin.”

  “Will you take a check?” Lattice Bledsoe asks calmly as if we were discussing a parking ticket. I wonder if her husband has been in trouble before.

  “I’ve got a thousand in cash.”

  Though I have been burned more than once taking checks from clients, I say that I will, and watch her count out ten one hundred bills and then

  also write on a green piece of paper that obligates the Farmer’s State Bank of Bear Creek to give me her life savings. I make her a receipt, and we exchange paper. I will have her husband sign a retainer agreement. It occurs to me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that she is lying, and I, like my client, am now on Paul Taylor payroll. For that to happen, though, Paul would have to be suffering from a major case of amnesia, but the thought makes me nervous as does the knowledge of how much time this case will take. I have recently abandoned my neighborhood of over twenty-five years and am moving into a new house. Add the new mortgage to Sarah’s tuition and my other expenses and you have the equation for tight money.

  In the next thirty minutes I cover as much ground as I can but don’t find out anything that makes it seem less likely that Class Bledsoe is guilty of slitting his employer’s throat. According to his wife, the plant was in operation from six to two, and it was her husband’s habit to come home after work, fix himself some lunch, drink a beer, and take a nap. The time of death she thinks is claimed to be between two and four in the afternoon, the time when Willie’s wife discovered his body.

  Bledsoe has no alibi, just his word.

  In her haste to get over here this morning, she has forgotten to bring a copy of his charges and her information is sketchy at best. She has heard through a clerk in the courthouse that the prosecutor had been waiting for the DNA results from the FBI lab in Washington, D.C.” before arresting Class and Paul yesterday. Having exhausted her knowledge of the charges, I learn that Lattice now works the night shift in a 7-Eleven, but at the time of the murder back in September, she was working days. She and Class, in their early thirties, and lifelong

  residents of Bear Creek, married four years ago. They have no children yet. Class had been working at the plant for five years. He had liked Willie, although he didn’t pay much. She adds dryly that eastern Arkansas was hardly union territory.

  I think I’m going to like Lattice. She has convinced herself that her husband is innocent, and that alone is refreshing. My last client charged with murder had a wife who was itching to testify that she had no doubt her husband was guilty. We pleaded the case out to manslaughter. I look down at my calendar and tell her I can get over there this afternoon. If I leave after lunch, I can be at the jail by a little after three. Not that I’m going to be able to get Bledsoe out of jail. Unless he has a very rich uncle his wife hasn’t told me about, he isn’t going to be able to make bond even if I could persuade the judge to grant it. But at least I can visit with him and see if I want to change my mind about handling his case.

  I get Lattice’s address and phone number. She remembers to tell me that Class is incarcerated at the new state-run detention facility near Brickeys, about thirteen miles outside of Bear Creek, and that I will need to call ahead in order to see him. My ten o’clock appointment, a rare probate case, is waiting for me, and I walk Lattice to the elevators, realizing I may be spending a lot of time in my old home town. I’m not at all sure how I feel about that.

  At 11:30 I get the number from information and call the jail to set up my meeting and then leave a message for my girlfriend, Amy, not to wait for dinner, when my friend Dan walks stiffly into my office holding his side. I haven’t seen him since he won and took an all-expense-paid ski trip to Crested Butte, Colorado.

  “How was it?” I ask, glad to see him. Dan has been my best friend since I got an office here. He is a mess, but he makes me laugh, and that one quality covers up a multitude of sins.

  “Well, I’m alive,” he says, easing himself into the chair across from my desk.

  “You look like somebody tried to hang some Sheetrock down your spine.

  Is anything broken?”

  Dan takes a deep breath and winces.

  “Only my eighth and ninth ribs. My instructor said I looked like I was trying to ski on the damn things.”

  Poor Dan. I try not to smile. As fat as he is, breaking a rib would be like trying to pop a balloon inside a bale of cotton. He must have fallen hard.

  Dan’s having a rough time. He got involved with a prostitute he once had represented; his wife kicked him out; and now he’s hurt himself.

  Dan fingers his rib cage.

  “The first two days I thought I was going to have a heart attack. When I’d fall, which was every five minutes, I couldn’t get up. I’d flail around on the snow hyperventilating.

  It scared the hell out of the rest of the class.

  My instructor said that if I fell one more time, she’d leave me out in the snow to die. I’ve never worked so hard in my life just to stay upright!”

  I don’t want to laugh, but it’s impossible not to.

  “Did you meet any women?” I ask, knowing they were the principal inducement. Years of beer commercials convinced him to take the trip despite his fears he was too old and fat. Maybe he would meet, if not snow bunnies, a bored housewife chaperoning a church group.

  “Hell, no,” he wheezes, “I was too ac hey and tired at the end of the day. The one night I made it to a bar I nodded off during the one conversation I had with a woman.”

  I cackle, knowing that I’d have been just as bad or worse.

  “When did you break your ribs?” I ask, realizing his injuries could be more serious than they sound. Guys our age can break a bone, develop pneumonia, and be dead within a week.

  “Probably the second day, but everything else was hurting so bad by then, I thought the pain was normal. My thighs felt like somebody was coming in while I was asleep and hammering on them. My shoulders were almost as bad because of trying to get around using those damn poles.

  By the end of the week I was practically using them as crutches. Then some fancy clinic charges me four hundred dollars to take enough X rays

  to sterilize a thousand-pound gorilla and then tells me to breathe deeply and cough a lot. I didn’t even get a Band-Aid out of it.”

  I wince, knowing Dan doesn’t have insurance.

  He was almost broke before he left and wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been a free trip.

>   Feeling sorry for him and guilty at the same time, I say, “I’ll buy you lunch. I’ve got a case to run by you.”

  As I knew he would, Dan perks up at the mention of food. Gripping the armrests of the chair, he pushes himself up like an old man and looks around my office.

  “Where did you get those prints?” he asks respectfully.

  “They don’t look too bad.”

  “Amy thought,” I say, standing up, too, “my office needed sprucing up.

  I gave up on the plants since they insist on being watered.” “You gonna marry Gilchrist?” Dan asks as he follows me out.

  “You could do a lot worse.”

  “I have done a lot worse,” I remind him, but not responding to his question. Amy, Dan, and I were classmates and friends together in night law school, and he knows about some of the women I dated after my wife Rosa’s death. Actually, Amy and I are considering living together if I

  ever get heat in my shiny new house from hell.

  At the front desk, Julia grins at Dan.

  “You couldn’t look any stiffer if you were mounted on the wall.”

  It has taken me years to get used to Julia, a niece of the owner, and I have needed every one of them. She has lifetime security in a job she despises. If that isn’t a prescription for hell on earth, I don’t know what is. As usual, Dan regresses in her presence.

  “Actually, my body is one long, stiff, hot poker,” he says, leering at her.

  Julia lets the skirt that Dan calls imitation cracked leather when she’s not around ride up to within an inch of her panties.

  “If I had a dollar for every guy who believed that,” she says, stretching her breast implants against today’s tight wool sweater, “I could buy this dump from my Uncle Roy and turn it officially into the nursing home it’s becoming. When are you guys gonna get some clients in here? It’s like living in a morgue, it’s so quiet.”

  “It’s the cold,” I say, knowing she is talking about Dan and some other lawyers on our floor.

  Dan is floundering, but then it seems he always is.

  “If it was the summer,” Julia challenges me, “you’d be saying it was the heat. Face it, you solo practitioners are dinosaurs. You don’t know how