Bear Creek! My old hometown in the Arkansas Delta. A good two hours’ drive away. I’ve never tried a case over there, nor have I ever wanted to.

Too many skeletons rattling around in those cotton fields. I lay my briefcase on Julia’s desk, covering up her latest issue of Cosmopolitan, and take off my overcoat. Thanksgiving weekend I had the delightful experience of confirming during a trip to Bear Creek with my twenty-year-old daughter Sarah that my paternal grandfather had impregnated a Negro girl in the 1930s. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time. He had been her mother’s landlord. Still alive, Mrs. Washington, who lives there in a housing project for the elderly, was perhaps too circumspect to characterize the relationship between them as rape. Since my grandfather went to her mother’s shack every month to collect the rent, I’m not so sure.

“Who was the victim?” I ask, wondering if I will recognize the name.

“Willie Ting, an old Chinese man who owned the meat-packing plant,” Mrs. Bledsoe says, “where Class worked.”

I do know the name. Even though nobody else is in our waiting room, this is an inappropriate conversation to be having out here, and I invite Mrs. Bledsoe to follow me back to my office.

Thirty years ago I had regularly played tennis with Willie Ting’s son Tommy when I came home during the summers from Subiaco Academy in western Arkansas. The Tings, like the three other Chinese families in town, had owned a grocery store in the black area of Bear Creek. Tommy, like his younger sister Connie, had been popular and an outstanding student. I wonder what became of him. I should try to find out even if I don’t take this case, which I can’t imagine I can afford to do. A meat-packing job in the state’s poorest county can’t pay for much of a defense.

After Mrs. Bledsoe sits down in my office and declines a cup of coffee, I ask, “What’s the evidence against your husband?” Mrs. Bledsoe says, her voice dropping to a whisper, “They say they found his butcher knife with the old man’s blood on it, and Class doesn’t have an alibi when Mr. Ting was killed. He was home by himself.” She paused to look hard at my face.