Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  As the truck was being unloaded and each box being carefully searched for contraband, Chuck, the warehouse manager, read what was printed below Bobby Earl’s logo on each of the boxes. “Man incarcerates. God liberates.”

  “As Bobby Earl’s ego inflates,” I said, and we both laughed.

  4

  After working through lunch, I had caught up enough to take a break and finish my conversation with Anna. Walking down toward the classification department, the heat of the afternoon sun bearing down on my back, I spotted Warden Stone, his nephew, and the Caldwells near the center gate. I was shocked to see that Nicole was with them.

  The center gate separated the upper compound of service buildings—the library, chow hall, medical, the chapel, and classification—from the lower compound of inmate dorms and the rec yard. The majority of inmates were on the lower compound, but there were enough on the upper to be a serious threat to Nicole.

  What was wrong with Stone? Had he been behind a desk outside the institution too long? Was he that out of touch? Or was it just that, unlike me, he had never heard the detailed confessions of the predators we held captive, never looked into the abyss of their dark hearts?

  “Chaplain,” the warden said by way of greeting as I walked up. “We got back earlier than we expected and I was just giving the Caldwells a tour of the institution. They’re very impressed. Would you like to join us? It’d give you and Bobby Earl a chance to talk,” meaning a chance for Bobby Earl to talk and me to listen.

  “What is Nicole doing on the compound? Shouldn’t she be—”

  “If anyone even looks at Nicole the wrong way,” Stone said, “my nephew will put him in the hospital.”

  I glanced around the compound at all the inmates who were gawking in our direction and knew that, even as appealing as many of them would find Bunny, they weren’t all looking at her.

  When Paul Register, a sex offender I had been counseling, saw me, he quickly looked away.

  “She’s safe, Chaplain Jordan,” Bunny said. “Mr. Stone wouldn’t let anything happen to her in his institution.”

  “That’s right,” Stone said.

  “You worry too much, John,” Bobby Earl said with the smarmy smile of a door-to-door Bible salesman. “You’ve got to learn to trust God more.”

  “It isn’t God I don’t trust,” I said. “Why don’t I take Nicole up to the admin conference room and let her color while you finish the tour?”

  “Chaplain, you’re being silly,” Stone said. “I assure you she’s—”

  “Mama, I’m hot,” Nicole said. “I want to go with Chaplain JJ inside to color.”

  I smiled. Not very many people called me JJ anymore, and I wondered who she had heard refer to me by my initials. Adding chaplain to them was purely her own invention. No one had ever called me Chaplain JJ before, but coming from her it sounded cute, and hinted at what I suspected was a delightful personality.

  Bunny looked at me. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Have her quote Scripture for you,” Bobby Earl said. “I guarantee she knows it better than you. I’ll put hard-earned money on it.”

  Not pointing out that quoting and knowing aren’t the same things or the fact that, though he had plenty of money, none of it was hard-earned—not by him anyway—I took Nicole’s hand and we walked as quickly as we could off the compound, through the front gate, and into the admin building.

  “You’re a preacher like my daddy?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Not exactly like him.”

  “Are you on TV?” she asked.

  “That would be one of the ways I’m not like him.”

  The cool air and shelter from the sun felt refreshing, but couldn’t compare to the relief I felt at having Nicole on this side of the chainlink and razor wire. I still couldn’t believe they had taken her down on the compound. Perhaps the Caldwells were just naive. Not everyone was as sensitized as I was to the danger the concrete and steel held, but it was unimaginable they could put her on display like that, parading her around for all the molesters to see, and Edward Stone should have known better.

  “Are you saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost?” she asked.

  “Not so much,” I said.

  She looked puzzled, but let out a small laugh. “You’re silly.”

  Once we had retrieved her coloring book and crayons from Stone’s office, she settled in the head chair at the conference table with them and got right to work.

  For a long moment, I just sat and watched her, finding her intensity and concentration fascinating. As she worked, she narrowed her eyes, furrowed her brow, and talked very softly to herself about what she was doing.

  “Would you like a Coke or a candy bar?” I asked.

  Without looking up, she said, “Mom says caffeine and chocolate make me hyper.”

  I was struck again by the way she spoke. Like her straightened hair and preppy dress, the only thing about her that was black was her skin—and it was very light. Was it just the inevitable byproduct of being adopted by Caucasian parents, or were Bobby Earl and Bunny consciously raising her to be white?

  “CHAPLAIN,” one of the ladies from the business office yelled from down the hall. “THERE’S A CALL FOR YOU. ARE YOU UP HERE?”

  “TRANSFER IT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM, PLEASE,” I called. “THANKS.”

  I picked up the phone almost the moment it rang.

  “I thought you were gonna come see me this afternoon,” Anna said.

  “I got a better offer,” I said.

  Watching Nicole color so intently, I realized again just how stunning she was and how wrong it was for her to be here.

  “Rumor has it you’re with another woman,” she said.

  “Why don’t you come see for yourself?”

  Though she never looked up, Nicole leaned toward me slightly, turning her ear in my direction, and began to color with less enthusiasm, and I could tell she was listening to our conversation.

  “I think I will,” Anna said, and hung up.

  When she arrived a few minutes later, I made the proper introductions.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Nicole said to Anna, then turning to me, asked, “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “Only in my dreams,” I said.

  “You’re silly,” she said again.

  “May we color with you?” Anna asked.

  “Sure,” Nicole said. “I have a whole book of pictures.”

  She let each of us tear a page from her book and told us to help ourselves to her crayons.

  “Thanks for being so generous,” Anna said.

  “It’s more blessed to give than receive,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard,” Anna said, smiling at me.

  “Sprite doesn’t have caffeine,” Nicole said.

  Unaware of my previous offer and Nicole’s response, Anna smiled at what she thought was the typical non sequitur of a small child. “No, it doesn’t,” she said.

  “A Sprite it is then,” I said. “Anna?”

  “No, thank you,” Anna said, continuing to color, “I’m starving for my art.”

  As I was walking from the room, Nicole said, “Chips don’t have chocolate.”

  When I returned with the Sprite and chips from the vending machine, seeing Anna and Nicole together, I wondered what it would be like to have children with such a woman. Though aware of and attentive to Nicole like I had yet to see Bunny be, she had thrown herself into coloring her masterpiece with the same childlike abandon Nicole had.

  “Thank you, Chaplain JJ,” Nicole said, as I popped the top and opened the bag for her.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  After a few chips and sips, she looked up at Anna and said, “You should marry him. I’m gonna marry a preacher.”

  “If she were my wife,” I said, “I might just get my own TV show.”

  “My mom’s pretty,” she said.

  “She
sure is,” Anna said.

  Before I could say anything, the phone rang again and I picked it up.

  “Chaplain Jordan, this is Kate at the switchboard. An inmate in A-dorm just tried to commit suicide and they need you down there right away.”

  I stood as I placed the receiver back in the cradle.

  “I’ve gotta go to A-dorm,” I said. “Can you stay with Nicole until her parents get back?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Attempted suicide.”

  She nodded.

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  Without looking up from her work, Nicole said, “We’ll pray for you, Chaplain JJ.”

  They were the last words she ever said to me, and their simplicity and sincerity would haunt me long after she was dead.

  5

  That night when I reached the chapel, Bunny and Nicole were singing “Consider the Lilies.” Bobby Earl looked on with pride from his seat on the platform, and it was disconcerting to see him sitting in the chair I had come to think of as mine.

  Crisis counseling wasn’t something that could be rushed, and I was much later getting to the chapel than I would’ve liked.

  I slipped into the sanctuary past Officer Roger Coel, who gave me a strained nod, and walked to the center aisle to get a better idea of the attendance. The chapel was packed, inmates filling the pews and spilling over into chairs beyond the drawn divider into the overflow room.

  “Good turnout,” I whispered when I had eased back over to Coel.

  He was a tall, lean, ex-military man with thin blond hair that had a tendency to stand up.

  “Someone circulated a picture of Bunny Caldwell around the compound this afternoon,” he said.

  “You sayin’ their reasons for being here are more carnal than spiritual?” I asked with mock surprise.

  “It’s why I’m here. I volunteered for this assignment.”

  The nondescript chapel, meant to accommodate all religions, bore the symbols of none. It was large, with pews on either side of a wide center aisle and had a platform with a wooden pulpit centered at the front. The pews and the pulpit had been built by inmates who lacked the precision their construction required. The tops of the pews were different heights and the pulpit leaned to the left a little.

  “Are you the only officer here?” I asked, unable to keep the surprise and anger out of my voice.

  He nodded. “Whitfield was here—he loves this shit, but he got pulled to escort the GED class back down to the dorms. Almost made him lose his religion,” he added with an appreciative smile. “He should be back soon.”

  Bunny and Nicole finished their song and received a standing ovation. Bunny took several bows, but looked over at Bobby Earl uneasily. Nicole just smiled. Then, as the men were being seated and Bobby Earl was taking the pulpit, Bunny and Nicole slipped into my office through the door near the platform.

  “Do you need any help?” I asked Coel.

  “You can check the bathrooms,” he said. “I can’t be here and there at the same time, and it’s probably full of these randy bastards beatin’ off to Bunny.”

  I nodded, and started to walk out when Coel grabbed my arm.

  “Why didn’t you put out a memo for security about this service?” he whispered, his voice harsh, his face pinched. “Control didn’t have anything on it. Were they cleared through the proper channels?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with this program,” I said. “Stone set it up. He said he took care of everything.”

  “Yeah, with a phone call at the time they arrived. No advance warning. No chance for us to prepare. Nothing.”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said.

  My pulse started pounding when I found several inmates, one of whom was a child molester, lurking around the hallway near the water fountain and my office, and I realized again just how vulnerable Nicole really was.

  “You need to get back in the sanctuary now,” I said.

  Paul Register seemed to shrink in on himself, his short, boyish form becoming even smaller. His eyes blinked sheepishly at me like a small puppy expecting another whack with a newspaper.

  “Yes, sir,” he said softly. “My knee’s hurting. I was trying to stretch it out some.”

  “You can stand in the back if you need to,” I said. “But you need to be in the sanctuary.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m going.” He glanced through the glass pane in my office door, then limped back into the sanctuary under the hard glare of Officer Coel.

  Once Register was out of the front hallway, I walked over and made sure the door to my office was locked. It was. Then I headed to the inmate bathroom next to the kitchen and multi-purpose room in the back.

  Obviously designed by someone who had never worked in a prison, the chapel’s inmate and visitor bathrooms were down a short L-shaped hallway that led to the kitchen and meeting room in the back. It was a blind spot, difficult to supervise, and, if not watched closely, the place where the more criminal of our criminal element congregated. For an event like this, there should be a minimum of three officers on duty.

  Inside the bathroom, to my shock, I discovered Abdul Muhammin, one of the clerks assigned to the chapel. I had never seen him or any other Muslim at a Christian worship service.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Using the bathroom,” he said. He posture and tone were defiant and challenging, his muscular body flexing as he began to bow up.

  “No,” I said. “In the chapel?”

  “Hearin’ Bobby Earl,” he said. “Dog’s doin’ good for hisself.”

  Suddenly, he was different, his demeanor relaxed and playful, as if he and I were friends just hanging out, talking about old times and people we knew.

  “You’re a fan?” I asked.

  “Shit,” he said, “I shared a cell with ‘im at Lake Butler. I came to make sure he don’t forget a nigga’.”

  “You and Bobby Earl—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bobby Earl’s my boy. He like the Jimmy Swaggart of jailhouse religion.”

  “Well, you need to get back in there,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to miss him.”

  He nodded slowly, rubbing his chin as if contemplating something profound. “All right, Chap. I’m on my way.”

  “Is anybody else in here?” I asked.

  “I am,” a disembodied voice rose from within the stall.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Inmate Cedric Porter, sir,” he said.

  “It’s time to get back to the chapel,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  When I left the bathroom, I checked on Bunny and Nicole through the window of my office door. Nicole appeared bored, Bunny sad and restless, and I wondered how much of their lives were spent waiting on Bobby Earl’s seemingly eternal sermons to end.

  I stepped out of the air-conditioned chapel into the humidity and heat of the dark night, and walked up to the control room where I asked to see the memo giving Bobby Earl and his family authorization to enter the institution and conduct the special program.

  There wasn’t one. Never had been. No one knew anything about it until Mr. Stone called and told them to let Bobby Earl and his family through the gate and to escort them to the chapel.

  I borrowed the phone and called Anna at home.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” I said, thinking but you do me all the time.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice full of concern. I never call her at home.

  “Did you run a FCIC/NCIC check on Bobby Earl and Bunny Caldwell?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “When’re they supposed to be coming in?”

  “Tonight,” I said.

  “Not gonna happen,” she said. “I haven’t—”

  “It already has.”

  “What?” she asked in shock. “I haven’t seen anything on it.”

  “You still the only one who runs the checks?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.
“Which means they shouldn’t be there tonight. So how the hell’d they get in?”

  “Stone,” I said.

  “Well, he can do that.”

  “Even without a background check?”

  “Not supposed to,” she said. “But he can. He has the authority.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Check?” she asked. “Maybe because he knows Bobby Earl so well. Knows he’s not related to any of our inmates. Knows he’s not a convicted felon.”

  “Or knows he is.”

  “What?”

  I told her. As I did, I stared absently into the control room.

  The dark night made the light in the control room seem even brighter, putting the two officers inside on display like fish in an aquarium, the condensation on the glass reinforcing the illusion.

  “And an inmate in the chapel says he was Bobby Earl’s cell mate at Lake Butler.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “John, you better keep a close eye on him.”

  “I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Once in the chapel again, I looked into my office. Bunny Caldwell, who was sitting in my chair, waved to me. She smiled, too, which was something to see, and for just a moment the sadness left her eyes. I waved back. She smiled even bigger and I motioned her over to the door, which was still locked.

  “You okay?” I asked after she had unlocked the door and I stepped inside.

  She nodded, but looked away. When she looked back, she said, “I’m just a little tired. I don’t have Bobby Earl’s stamina.”

  “Where’s Nicole?”

  “In the bathroom,” she said, nodding toward the narrow door in the corner.

  “I’m sorry to do this,” I said, “but I may never see you again.”

  As though she knew where I was going with this, tears began to fill her eyes. Blinking them back, she said, “What?”

  “I couldn’t help but notice the bruises on your wrists.”

  Instantly, she jerked her arms back, and began to shake and move, as if no longer in full control of her body.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I had to ask. Are you okay?”