Grif Stockley: Blind Judgement

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.