She’s clad in a modest green jumper with a white blouse underneath, Julia’s outfits, by comparison, look like the getups of a low-rent call girl. I realize how low my expectations are in the Delta. If you believe everything you read, you’d expect to find a girl this age at the welfare office with two children hanging on to her as she signs up for food stamps and AFDC.
“I’m Gideon Page,” I say, holding out my hand for my coffee. She takes my hand and pumps it as if she were a politician seeking votes.
“I’m Yolanda Ford, Sheriff Bonner’s secretary,” she replies.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
The door opens, and there is no mistaking the sheriff. Bonner is a
compact black man in his early forties, in an olive and tan uniform. He measures no more than 5‘9”, and that may be stretching it because of the boots he is wearing.
He sports a firm black mustache, and as he grins at Yolanda, I notice he has the whitest teeth of any black I’ve seen this side of Hollywood.
The color of dark chocolate, Bonner is undeniably an attractive man. He smiles easily at me, but instead of introducing himself, he turns back to Yolanda and asks, “Who do we have here?”
By allowing her to make our introduction, I see he is training her, and I watch closely as Yolanda replies, “Sheriff Bonner, this is Mr. Gideon Page. He hasn’t been here long enough to let us know what we can do for him.”
Revealing his gun at his side as he takes off his leather jacket, Bonner offers his hand.
“I’m Woodrow Bonner. How’re you, Mr. Page?”
Such friendliness seems genuine enough, and with his firm handshake I begin to perceive why Bonner is surely the first black sheriff in Bear Creek since Reconstruction. He radiates a politician’s affability. I tell him I am fine and that I am Class Bledsoe’s attorney.
“Yolanda, hold my calls,” he says without changing his expression and leads me back through a door to his office behind her desk.
His office, though small, is very much like an up-and-coming
politician’s-on the walls is a picture of him with Bill Clinton and another with the once Surgeon General of the United States, Joycelyn Elders, who I recall as director of the Arkansas Department of Health helped start a controversial school-based clinic over here which made available birth control information. Directly behind his chair is a picture of him shaking hands with Jesse Jackson and Maynard Jackson, the former black mayor of Atlanta. This area of the state is heavily Democratic, and no serious candidate can afford to overlook it, despite the declining population. Beside the celebrities are framed certificates showing his participation in various law enforcement and community activities. On his desk is a picture of presumably his wife and his two children, both teenaged girls who look just like him.
“I’m originally from Bear Creek,” I say as I sit down, determined to make an ally of this man even though he surely must be convinced of my client’s guilt.
“But we didn’t have many big names stopping by here thirty years ago. I remember Orval Faubus campaigning once at the square, but I doubt you would have had his picture up here.”
Sheriff Bonner smiles politely, presumably blanching inwardly at the thought of the state’s most famous segregationist schmoozing for votes in his office.
“If the ugliest girl in town had the only car,” he points out, “there comes a time when it’s convenient to forget who used to ride around with her.”
“I guess you’re right,” I say, not about to rub this man’s face in
whatever compromises he’s needed to make to get where he is today.
Rubbing his chin, he asks, “Did your daddy own a pharmacy here a long time ago?”
I’ll take whatever mileage I can get out of Page’s Drugs.
“On the square. You’ve got a good memory.” My mind plays back summer Saturday evenings at closing time, when, locking the front door, my father, invariably dressed in muted slacks and short-sleeved shirts, would stare balefully across the square and shake his head in distaste at the gaudily dressed black males strutting like peacocks as they dipped in and out of the Busy Bee, a black cafe. I recall a liquor store and black movie theater adjacent to the restaurant.
“I used to go in there when I was a kid, and he’d shoo me out,” Bonner says.
“I’m pretty sure he thought I was stealing comic books.”
“He thought everybody was,” I say hastily.
Though I don’t remember my father as a rude man, I doubt if he was overly polite to the black kids who waited restlessly for their parents to decide what store-bought nostrums would ease their aches and pains.
I try to picture Bonner as a ten-year-old and imagine him already picking up cues on how the world worked-slowly in our part of the state. I add, “You might not remember he became seriously mentally ill.”
Bonner, to his credit, doesn’t pretend sympathy he can’t feel.
“I had forgotten that,” he says.
“Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Page?”
I explain that I am merely trying to get oriented and haven’t even seen the charges filed against my client.
“Did your office handle the investigation,” I ask politely, “or did the state police get involved?” Usually, small-town sheriffs need all the help they can get.
Bonner spins a small globe on his desk.
“Do you know how many investigators there are on the state police force that are minorities? I’ll give you a hint. Not many. As you probably know, Bear Creek is now seventy percent black. To maintain the credibility of law enforcement over here, I do all my own investigations.”
And it keeps you in the public eye, I think to myself. In ten years I can see this man being the first black Congressman from the 1 st District. He has that much charisma.
“I can understand that,” I say.
“Though I’m just getting started, it seems to me that my client could easily have been set up. Weren’t there other suspects besides him?”
Bonner puts his hand behind his head.
“My policy is that once I’ve turned over a file to the prosecutor, I don’t say anything about it until trial.”
“So you don’t have any doubts,” I ask, “that my client was hired by Paul Taylor to murder Willie Ting Instead of responding right away, Bonner rocks gently in his chair.
Finally, he says, politely, “I think I just answered that question.” He stands up, dismissing me.
“Our prosecutor is upstairs.
I’m sure he’ll answer any questions for you.”
I scramble to my feet.
“If you received some information that Paul Taylor had hired someone else to kill Willie Ting I say, “you’d investigate it before this case goes to trial?”
The sheriff shrugs.
“Of course.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” I say as if I already have something in mind.
I don’t. But it is never too early to begin the job of softening up the prosecutor.
If law enforcement begins to have doubts about a case, you can be sure they will be passed along to the prosecutor. My advantage in this case is that I know Paul’s track record.
I ask if he can arrange for me not to have to call ahead to the prison for an appointment each time I want to see Bledsoe. He says he can do that, but to call ahead if I can.
I smile and shake hands again with Bonner and head upstairs, not knowing how to ask if the prosecutor is also black. I should have asked Class or his wife these questions. All I know is that the judge, Rufus Johnson, is a black man.
The whites still left over here must be going nuts over this case. If Paul Taylor can be charged with murder, they have to feel nobody is safe.
I find the prosecuting attorney’s office across from the top of the stairs. There is no secretary, but I can hear a black man’s voice in an inner office. I go stand in the doorway and motion that I’ll be sitting in the waiting room. On the telephone, he nods at me. In contrast to the s
heriff’s Hershey’s Kisses color, the prosecutor is polished copper, and his eyes look yellowish from the distance of about ten feet. The sleeves of his white shirt are folded back at the cuffs, and his pink silk tie is flung back over his shoulder as if it has been getting in his way. He sounds agitated, but I can’t make out what he is saying. He motions to me that he will be off the phone in a moment, and I go have a seat across from the secretary’s desk.
Unlike the sheriff’s office, the walls in the prosecutor’s office, as out here, are bare, and it occurs to me that his home base is probably either Forrest City to the north or Helena to the south. Both towns have been more prosperous than Bear Creek, but I remind myself prosperity is a relative term in the Delta these days. As I unsuccessfully try to eavesdrop, it occurs to me that I have deliberately avoided making inquiries about the case through the white community first. Why?
The answer is obvious, now that I permit myself to think about it. I would have been pressured to turn down Bledsoe’s case, and I might have done so. For the first time, I allow myself to guess who Paul has employed to represent him, but I know already that he must have hired Dick Dickerson, who is considered one of the best trial attorneys in the state. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Dick could have gone anywhere. For reasons I’ve never understood, he chose to come back to practice law in a place where ninety-nine percent of his clients couldn’t have cared less where he went to school. He must be at least sixty. I wonder if he has any regrets. I may find out before this case is over.
Moments later, the prosecutor comes out and introduces himself.
“Melvin Butterfield,” he says, apologetically, extending his hand as if I have an appointment and he has forced me to wait.
“Gideon Page,” I say, as we shake hands.
“I’m representing Class Bledsoe.”
The prosecutor’s mouth doesn’t exactly drop open, but he is clearly surprised as he stares at me for a long moment. Perhaps he thought Class
would hire a black attorney.
“How do you do?” he says.
“Sorry, I was on the phone. Want to come on back?”
“Sure,” I say and follow him back into the office. Butterfield is tall, perhaps 6‘4”, and can’t weigh more than one sixty.
“I know you,” he says emphatically as he takes a seat behind his desk.
“You’re that guy who got off Dade Cunningham in that rape case up in Fayetteville. Damn. First, Taylor gets Dick Dickerson, whom I can’t even beat on a parking ticket, and now Class hires a hot-shot from Blackwell County.” He grins, splitting his face from ear to ear.
“Maybe we can plead this out to simple assault tomorrow, and I can go back to trying DWIS against the public defender.”
I laugh out loud. Prosecuting attorneys invariably take themselves as seriously as God. This guy has a twinkle in his yellowish eyes.
Compared to him, the sheriff was positively pompous.
“That would be fine with me,” I reply.
“Man, you’re famous around here. How’d you get an acquittal in that case? There was only two blacks on that jury.”
Flattered that he knows so much about me, I say modestly, “It probably
helped that he had caught the pass that beat Alabama.” “Isn’t that the truth?” he says breezily.
“As long as they win, the Razorbacks can do no wrong.”
Is this guy really the prosecutor? He seems pretty loosey-goosey.
“Have you got a minute to talk? I just saw my client in the jail. I assume Paul Taylor is already out.”
“You bet,” Butterfield says.
“Despite five-hundred-thousand-dollar bail Dick had him out before they could give Mr. Taylor a wiener for supper.”
I smile, thinking how much I’d have liked to have seen Paul seated on his bunk eating a hot dog.
“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.
Blind Judgement g-5 Page 3