Blind Judgement g-5

by Grif Stockley

  With all his problems, he’s still a neat guy. I think he thought you were okay.”

  “I liked him,” I admit.

  “I don’t see how he’s sane, but he seems as normal as I do.” I have noticed that since she has been home, Sarah has been less obsessed with her own personal problems, and as a consequence, she has been in my face less. I had expected an entire lecture from her and was ready to give as good as I got. Yet the old confrontational Sarah has disappeared, or at least didn’t make the trip. Maybe she is growing up.

  “How is Amy?” she asks when we sit down in the living room.

  “You haven’t mentioned her since you told me Jessie was going to stay with her while you worked on the case in Bear Creek.”

  I lean back in the chair and listen as my stomach tries in vain to digest my dinner. I shouldn’t have tried to fit in the bread pudding.

  I realize I haven’t mentioned Amy because I feel guilty about her, and so I haven’t said anything about Angela either. Sarah has always accused me of using the women I have been involved with to help me on my cases.

  “You’ll be happy to know it looks as if Amy and I are probably history,” I say, thinking of the best spin I can put on this.

  “You always complained she was too young for me, anyway.”

  Sarah tucks her legs up beneath her on the couch.

  “I liked her because I know how much she cared about you. That made up for the age difference.”

  I don’t want to think about Amy.

  “Well, I’m dating a woman exactly my own age, and one I’ve known for over thirty years.”

  “Dad!” Sarah exclaims.

  “Who is she?”

  I feel a mild explosion in my stomach. I need to quit eating so much at night. I had enough chips and cheese dip before they brought out the food to feed an army.

  “My first girlfriend,” I say, and tell her the story of how I met Angela at the library in Bear Creek.

  She is entranced and quizzes me for the better part of thirty minutes.

  I omit a few things, including how we first made love in my mother’s Fairlane and recently in her brother-in-law’s bed.

  Nor do I tell her how much desire I feel when I am around Angela. I

  suspect that one of the reasons my daughter does not want me to date younger women is that she, understandably, does not want to be confronted with my sexuality, nor do I have any desire to be confronted by hers. I’m all for Sarah’s getting to know me as adult to adult, but there is a limit to how far I want us to be pals. Maybe when I’m old and less of a sexual being we’ll sit around in our bathrobes and tell war stories, but not quite yet.

  “She’s been through a lot,” I tell Sarah, wondering whether they’ll like each other, “but at one time she had more influence on me than anyone I’ve ever met.” “She sounds neat. Dad,” Sarah says.

  “I hope it works out if that’s what you want.”

  Do I? I pick up a dog hair from the arm of the chair, a legacy of Jessie’s that seems perpetual, and drop it into the trash can beside me.

  “We’ve really gone out only a couple of times,” I demur.

  “She’s still got a lot of grieving to do.” As I say this, I wonder.

  Angela, I’m coming to realize, is more of a mystery than I like to admit.

  The phone rings. Naturally, it is for Sarah, who tells me moments later her old friend Donna Redding is coming by to pick her up at ten and she needs to change clothes. They are going “out.” I am strangely comforted by this act of normalcy. I know better than to ask where but do anyway.

  “I don’t know,” she says, standing up.

  “Dad, have you been by to see Dade’s grandmother?”

  I find another hair and realize it is one of Woogie not Jessie’s. Damn.

  I miss Woogie, exiled to my sister’s over a year ago after an alleged kitten-eating episode. Have we ever cleaned anything in this house? I knew this question was coming. It was at Sarah’s insistence that we drove over to Bear Creek to try to confirm the story that my grandfather had fathered a child by a black woman.

  “Dad, she might appreciate it if you went by.”

  “Well, I might,” I say, “I just haven’t had time.”

  Sarah leans back against the wall. For once she doesn’t argue with me.

  “I’m proud of you for representing a black man over there,” Sarah says.

  “I bet you’re getting some criticism for doing it.”

  I realize that Sarah has no idea, despite our visit, what my old hometown is like.

  “It’s not as if I’m suing the town on a race discrimination suit.

  White attorneys have always represented blacks in Bear Creek.”

  Sarah nods absently, perhaps thinking about her coming evening, and leaves the room. I lean back in the chair and allow myself to remember

  how delicious my lovemaking with Angela was the last time we were together. How could I tell Sarah what that feeling is like for me?

  That is the last thing either of us wants to discuss. We don’t always want the truth, just a level of comfort. Is that so bad? About ninety percent of the time truth is an overrated virtue.

  Wednesday night Angela calls to tell me that she has made it back, and I am pleased to hear a warmth in her voice that wasn’t there when she left.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she says after we tell each other about our past week, “and I think I’m ready to have a relationship if you’re interested. But I’d like to go slow.”

  Taking her call in the living room, I hear Sarah in the kitchen, and I whisper into the phone that this is good news indeed, and that I completely understand her feelings. She asks when I will be coming back and I tell her Saturday. Shyly, she invites me to dinner Saturday night, and I waste no time in accepting. After I hang up I stare out the window. It is amazing how some things come together after so long a time. Sarah comes in and tells me that I am smiling. I am.

  The Thursday morning after April Fools’ Day, I get a call from Melvin Butterfield that may be Doss’s only chance. In the last few weeks I have interviewed several more workers from Southern Pride and checked their alibis. If someone is framing Bledsoe, I can’t find out who it is.

  “I think it’s time for us to have a chat about some things,” he says, his voice booming in my ear as if he were in the room with me.

  Though I am busy in the office this week and had not planned to drive over until Saturday to meet with Class and have dinner with Angela, if Butterfield’s ready to offer Class a deal, I don’t want to give him time to change his mind.

  Though I have a new client coming in this afternoon, Julia can try to reschedule it for tomorrow.

  I’ve had the feeling all along that Bledsoe won’t implicate Paul until he gets a concrete offer of a reduced sentence.

  “Actually, I was planning to come over this afternoon if I could get away,” I lie glibly.

  He asks if I can be there at four. I say that I can and hang up feeling a little hope for the first time since I took the case. Granted there are many more witnesses to interview, but the law of diminishing returns has already begun to kick in:

  the more people I talk with, the less I get out of them.

  Moments later Dan charges into my office, muttering loudly, “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.”

  “What’s happened?” I say, looking up at my friend, whose face is even glummer than usual.

  Over a beer last week after losing a case in Municipal Court to a near-deaf nursing home resident who represented herself from a

  wheelchair, Dan waxed philosophical, describing the life of the bad lawyer as one long humiliation, with death the final but not inappropriate indignity.

  First you lose, and then you die.

  “One of the women I went out with complained to the Attorney General’s office that the dating service had misrepresented me,” he says, collapsing opposite me into one of my chairs, which trembles from the impact
.

  “This assistant A.G. from the Consumer Protection Division just barged her way into my office and called me part of the biggest fraud in Arkansas consumer history,” he huffs, his double chin beginning to jiggle.

  “I couldn’t believe it. This little miniskirted girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-five flashed her badge at me like she was Eliot Ness about to close up half of Chicago and said if I wouldn’t agree to testify she could practically guarantee my picture on the feature page of the Democrat-Gazette as part of her investigation. The nerve some people have. If she hadn’t been such a babe, I would have thrown her out of my office!”

  Glad to take a break, I push the papers in front of me aside and put my feet up on my desk.

  “I thought you were the victim in this dating service business,” I say, remembering his last complaint about the woman who couldn’t keep her eyes open past nine o’clock.

  Dan pats his beefy cheeks with a folded handkerchief, which this humid morning looks like a sponge. Did this woman make him cry?

  “I’m a victim,” he whines, “but this A.G. says that each of the four women I’ve been out with has complained that I lied about too many details. Hell, everybody puffs their ‘pif’ a little.

  “Personal information form,” he adds when I raise my eyebrows.

  “A little!” I exclaim.

  “You put down that you’re single.”

  “It’s the weight thing that bothers most of them,” Dan says, fluttering the fingers on his right hand as if he were a famous music conductor dismissing a critic’s carping about a few bad notes.

  “They believe you when you say your divorce is just a matter of time.

  It’s when you show up at their door at two-fifty instead of one-fifty that pisses ‘em off.”

  I whistle. That’s quite a stretch.

  “I bet you haven’t weighed one fifty since you were in junior high,” I guess, amazed at his gall.

  “Sixth grade,” Dan corrects me.

  “Trixie-that’s this girl’s name-says her office wants these matchmaking companies held to some kind of minimum truth-in-packaging standard so that singles can get their money back if they’ve been ripped off. She wants me and the women totes 9

  tify at a legislative subcommittee meeting that’s coming up next month.”

  He’s got to be kidding. Matchmakers Who Lie Too Much. Surely, it’s already been done, but we could have our own redneck version of Oprah:

  That of’ boy lied like a dog on his “pif.” Ah’d a dated him if he’d jus’ been a little bald, but he didn’t have a hair on his haid! Fearing the worst, I ask, “Do you really want that kind of publicity?”

  “No,” Dan admits.

  “But it’d be a good way to get to know Trixie better,” he says.

  “She’s cute as a button, and she wasn’t wearing a ring.”

  The species’ capacity for self-delusion knows no bounds. Dan would fall in love with a boa constrictor if it were wearing a skirt.

  “Don’t you think she’s getting to know you a little too well?

  You won’t exactly be coming off as Washingtonian in this story.”

  Dan looks hurt.

  “She could do a lot worse,” he points out.

  “At least I haven’t served any time yet. Besides, there’re some women who don’t mind fat men.”

  Or men who are married, broke, desperate, or liars.

  “Go for it,” I advise.

  “This may be the love of your life. She sounds like a female Geraldo.

  You could be on daytime TV together.”

  A gleam comes into Dan’s eyes.

  “If her skirts get any shorter,” he predicts, “she’ll have to be on the Playboy Channel. She uncrossed her legs once and I swear I thought I was looking at Sharon Stone.”

  So much for Janet Reno being the next role model for our female attorneys.

  “You haven’t been sued by one of these women?” I ask suspiciously.

  Every few months Dan requires some kind of major rescue job. I had thought a failed marriage would slow him down, but it seems only to have speeded up his self-destruct button.

  “Hell, no,” Dan assures me.

  “They know I’m just a pawn. This last woman told me kind of wistfully

  that if I had a tummy tuck, she’d consider going out with me again.”

  I eye Dan’s stomach over the desk. It’s going to take more than a tuck. To get rid of that much blubber, the surgeon would have to go in there with a backhoe.

  “Are you sure this Trixie character is for real? She sounds a little eager to me.”

  Dan nods solemnly.

  “Consumer protection is big business. It’s how state attorney generals go on to being governors. It’s not just old folks who go to the polls.

  Half the country is divorced and miserable, and the other half is thinking about joining them. Singles like myself are a vulnerable part of the population and tend to vote if given a decent reason.”

  I think of one of the comic strips that Dan substitutes for artwork in his office and laugh out loud. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

  At 4:15 I walk into Melvin Butterfield’s office on the second floor of the courthouse in Bear Creek, deliberately a few minutes late, but if he is annoyed, I can’t tell it. He smiles and shakes my hand and invites me to have coffee, which I decline. As chatty as last time, he gossips about the Razorbacks as if we had been teammates ourselves, telling me that the reason the Hogs will lose in the NCAA tournament this year is that this team has too many Juco players who won’t stay focused enough to play defense for an entire game. His hands parked behind his head.

  Butterfield proclaims, “Corliss Williamson was ready for every game. These guys play only when they feel like it.”

  I ask him how come he doesn’t have a framed, autographed picture of Nolan Richardson on the wall like the sheriff, and Butterfield laughs and puts his feet up on his desk, saying one is in his filing cabinet.

  “Woodrow has threatened to arrest me if I try to put mine up.”

  I nod, appreciating his willingness to acknowledge the rivalry between him and the sheriff.

  From what I’ve seen of Bonner, he doesn’t have enough of a sense of humor to joke about it. Without missing a beat, Butterfield says casually, “If your client is willing to testify at the trial that Paul Taylor hired him to murder Willie Ting, I’ll knock his charge down to second-degree murder.”

  Butterfield hasn’t changed expression. This is no time for me to be cute. Though the maximum sentence is twenty years for second-degree murder, Class could be eligible for parole in five years. I reply bluntly, “I’ll talk to him. When do you need an answer?”

  Butterfield, who seems the type to dress for the occasion, whatever it is, fingers the vest of his three-piece gray pinstriped suit.

  “No later than this time next week,” he says, his voice going flat and betraying an intensity I haven’t seen before.

  Suddenly I realize that behind his almost folksy, deferential manner,

  Butterfield knows exactly what he is doing. This friendliness is just his way of dealing with white folks. Wanting to know if he has his own reasons for prosecuting Paul, I ask, “Did you know the Taylors once were the richest planters in this part of the state?”

  Butterfield again retreats behind a smile and makes a show of stretching his long frame as if he is tired.

  “I know lots of things about east Arkansas. Some good, some bad.”

  I wonder what he knows about my history over here.

  “It’s easy to make a case that the bad ole days were pretty bad,” I say, hoping to encourage him to talk.

  Instead, he says, his voice bland, “That’s all in the past. Better to get along. Y’all didn’t like the bad ole days much either. They were hard on everybody.”

  I think to myself this guy must be a pretty smooth campaigner among whites. What good does it do to throw the past up to somebody if you want h
is vote? If Butterfield is one of the blacks who wants to take over completely, he isn’t admitting it.

  “Getting along isn’t so easy,” I say.

  “Bear Creek is living proof of that.”

  Butterfield holds up his right hand and wiggles his fingers.

  “But we’re stuck with each other. I tell my campaign audiences to try to move their index fingers while keeping the ones on each side still.

  You can’t do it. That’s how we are in east Arkansas.”

  I smile politely. One of the flies in Butterfield’s metaphorical ointment is the rate at which whites are leaving places like Bear Creek. This guy isn’t going to give away shit. If he weren’t running for office, he might tell me what he really thinks about the Arkansas Delta, but all I will get now are platitudes.

  I get to my feet and tell him that I’ll be in touch as soon as I can but no later than Thursday.

  He says he’ll be in Helena and gives me his office number there. I leave the courthouse, pleased with this conversation. Second-degree murder is quite a leap from capital murder. Bledsoe may say he is innocent, but a few years in Cummins Prison compared to death row will cause him to reconsider. For whatever reason, Butterfield wants Paul in the worst way. If I have anything to do with it, he will get him.

  I speed the thirteen miles to Brickeys. Bledsoe is healthy again and surprised but glad to see me.

  I waste no time in telling him about my conversation with Butterfield.

  “He needs your testimony to convict Paul Taylor,” I explain, after I tell him the offer.

  “That’s why he is willing to give you a reduced sentence.”

  Bledsoe, who has begun to lose some weight, shakes his head.

  “I can’t say nothin’ that will help,” he mutters, ” ‘cause he didn’t hire me, and I didn’t do it.”

  I squint at him as if the truth might become clearer if I could bring him into focus better.

  What does he have to gain by lying? Maybe much more than I know. I say, hastily, “I don’t want you to tell me right now what you want to do. You think about this offer. If I could guarantee you an acquittal, I would have told Butterfield where he could go with his offer. I can’t do that. There’re innocent men who have been murdered by the state. If you insist on a trial, I can’t sit here and promise you that won’t happen to you.”