I ask, flipping through the file to find her statement.

“I don’t know,” Class says, his voice getting more stubborn by the moment.

“Maybe she killed Willie, but I doubt it. She’s all right.”

I make the speech I make to all my criminal defendants-that I can’t help them if they lie to me-but it is water rolling off a duck’s back.

I ask him if he has ever stolen from the plant or anyone in the plant.

He denies that he has. Surely in five years he would have had the opportunity to smuggle out a ham for his birthday, but he insists he hasn’t. So much for an explanation for his conversation over the phone in the plant.

I work the discussion around to the other employees in the plant, and finally get Class to think of at least one person who had it in for Willie. He knows someone, he says almost sheepishly, who was fired by Willie about a month before he was killed. Vie Worthy had come in drunk and had nearly cut his little finger off one morning while shaving the hair off pigs’ feet.

Willie had driven him to the hospital but wouldn’t let him come back to work after he got his finger sewed up. ‘“Bout three times a year, he’d drive across the bridge and gamble his paycheck away,” Class says.

“He’d drink all the way home, and then come to work skunked, and I guess Willie finally figured that it shouldn’t be on his time.”

Class sneezes into his hand. He has caught a major cold.

“So he was pissed off because he got canned?”

Class looks up at me, his face a study in disapproval.

“He’d be drinkin’ and talk about how he’d like to kill Willie for firm’ him. See, he wudn’t the only one to ever come to work fucked up.”

It’s about time Class got around to this story, but I’m beginning to learn Class doesn’t do anything in a hurry. I write furiously and ask for as many details as he knows, which aren’t much.