Read Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement for Free Online Page B

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.
    From morning to night Elmer Burton, Joe Hood, Hannah Carlton and I played “Army” in these yards, shooting each other and dying and rising
    to fight another day. The owners all knew us and our families intimately and watched out for us.
    Two houses down from us lived the Carltons, my parents’ closest friends. For years it seemed that I spent every rainy day playing with Hannah in their attic. She was a year younger but truly, in those prepuberty years, my best pal. A smiling, happy tomboy wise beyond her years, Hannah never cried or got mad no matter how many games of go fish, blackjack, or checkers she lost.
    To her, competition was merely an excuse for companionship. Winning was never the point, friendship was. To satisfy my curiosity one stormy Saturday morning we went in the bathroom, shut the door, and she pulled down her pants and showed me that bizarre, defenseless little crack between her legs. I reciprocated by exposing my equally exotic nub and its microscopic attachments.
    That done, we went back to our games.
    As I cruise by the tennis courts at the old high school where Tommy and I competed against each other more than three decades ago, I marvel at our innocence in those days. It was a life so safe and secure it seems almost laughable now.
    No houses or cars were locked at night, much less during the day.
    On Orchard Lane, I stop the Blazer in front of my old girlfriend’s house, knowing she could be a major source of information if she feels like talking.
     
    Despite my status as a hometown boy, there are few, if any, people I feel I know well enough after all this time to trust completely or for them to feel like talking to me. Angela Marr is one of these few.
    As I get out of the Blazer, I am reminded of the note she sent me last month after a case of mine was in the Democrat-Gazette. When I saw the return address, egotistical beyond all reason, I had assumed she was writing to congratulate me, when, in fact, she was letting me know that Dwight had died in December after a long battle with cancer. I had missed her husband’s obituary in the paper.
    The letter unleashed a flood of warm memories.
    Angela and I had started dating the summer after our senior year in high school. Both of us were