“What time was that?” I ask, wondering how airtight each of those alibis can be. Surely, one of the workers besides Class was by himself that afternoon.

“Between two when the plant closed and four when his wife discovered his body and called the police. The medical examiner has confirmed the time,” he says, flipping over to an autopsy.

“Is that all the evidence against my client?” I ask, knowing it must not be.

“Not hardly. We’ve documented where he lied about his contacts with Paul Taylor.” I watch as Butterfield flips to the back of the file. He points to a statement by a woman named Darla Tate.

“She’s the secretary at the plant. She heard Bled 5

soe talking to someone on the phone in the plant office a couple of days after the murder. She was in the bathroom and he must have thought he was alone. She’s signed a statement that she heard him saying, and I quote, “I got the money.”

She knew that we had a tape of Taylor threatening Willie about a month before, and so she called the sheriff.”

“You have a tape of Paul actually threatening Willie?” I ask, incredulous. It doesn’t totally surprise me that Bledsoe would make that kind of phone call, but I can’t imagine Paul being dumb enough to let himself be implicated on tape.

Butterfield pulls a tape from his desk drawer and places it in a pocket Olympus tape recorder.

“This is a copy. The sheriff’s got the original in his evidence room,

and you can hear it anytime you want. The relevant part is only a few seconds long.” He pushes a button, and I hear a click and then recognize Paul Taylor’s rich, bass voice saying, “This place won’t be worth a hundred thousand dollars after you die because you’ve got nobody here to run it.”

“It sounds like you’re threatening me,” a soft Asian voice, not unlike Tommy’s, responds.

“Willie, you can interpret it however you want, but one way or the other you’re gonna die soon…” I hear the sound of a telephone ringing, and the tape ends.