Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  She nodded, her eyes flattening, her face becoming a impenetrable mask. “I’m fine. But it’s sweet of you to ask.” She glanced down a moment, then back at me. “They look worse than they are. I bruise very easily.”

  “They look like they were made by someone grabbing you,” I said.

  “Even men of God can lose their tempers,” she said. “Besides, I can be nagging and disrespectful.”

  “If—” I began, but she put her fingers over my mouth in a gesture that expressed an intimacy we didn’t share.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Really. Please don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s very sweet of you to care, but they really look worse than they are.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But if it ever gets—”

  “Then I have friends and family I can call,” she said.

  I nodded, embarrassed.

  When I walked into the sanctuary, I found Coel still alone and Bobby Earl giving an impassioned altar call.

  “Where’s Whitfield?” I asked.

  Coel shrugged and shook his head.

  “I’m going to check the bathroom again,” I said.

  “Ten-four,” he said.

  Two steps into the back hallway, I bumped into Theo Malcolm, the institution’s only literacy and GED teacher. Without a word, he shoved past me and rushed out the door.

  I turned and considered him, wondering what he was doing here, and why he was in such a hurry to leave. I called after him, but he didn’t even pause, so I decided to go ahead and check the bathroom. I could always talk to him later.

  In the bathroom, I found Officer Whitfield washing the sweat off his face with water he splashed from his cupped hands.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I said. “Coel needs some help.”

  “I’m heading in there now,” he said.

  Tim Whitfield was tall and lean, but seemed soft. His dark brown hair was thick and wavy and sat high on his head. The front of his hair was damp and small rivulets of water snaked out of it and down his long forehead.

  “Anyone else in here?”

  “Just two convicts,” he said, looking at the dull reflection of the stalls behind him in the sheet-metal mirror bolted above the sink. “You convicts get back in the service.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dexter Freeman said, stepping out of the stall.

  “Just a minute,” the voice of what sounded like a young black guy called from inside the other stall.

  “Just make it fast,” Whitfield said.

  When I walked back into the sanctuary, Bunny was singing “Just As I Am” while Bobby Earl finished his altar call.

  I searched the stage for Nicole, but she wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Nicole?” I asked Coel.

  “Who?” he said.

  “The little girl,” I said.

  “The black one?” he asked.

  Making no attempt to mask my anger, I said, “There’s only one little girl in this entire institution.”

  “She’s still in your office, I guess,” he said. “She didn’t come out with her mother.”

  “Who’s with her?” I asked.

  “No one right now,” he said. “The preacher went in while his wife was singing, and since he came back out for the altar call, I’ve had my eyes on both doors. He hasn’t been out of your office long.”

  Relief washed over me when I saw that the altar call was over and Bunny was slipping back into my office, Bobby Earl remaining behind to say one last prayer.

  Bobby Earl’s prayer was simple, but passionate and persuasive, and I could see why he did well on television. His prayer, which had started off loudly, had now become a whisper and the sanctuary fell into a reverent hush as well.

  “In Jesus’ name,” he whispered. “Through the shed blood of the lamb—”

  He broke off as the scream erupted.

  The entire congregation turned to see Bunny Caldwell stumbling backwards out of my office, her staccato shrieks piercing the silence like stabs. Her screams were not those of fear, but of absolute horror, a horror so dark it seemed to echo from some sudden void in her soul.

  For a moment, perhaps as she took a breath, there was absolute silence, and in that one quiet moment, no one moved. Like children slapped for the first time, everyone was too stunned to do anything. Then, after the initial shock subsided, everyone began to scramble as hesitation gave way to panic.

  As I ran down the side aisle toward her, I somehow knew what I was going to find. Her scream had told me that, and my mind, as if divided into two parts, was simultaneously telling me it was so and absolutely rejecting that it could be.

  Bobby Earl reached Bunny before I did, wrapping her up in his arms while looking into my office. His knees buckled and they both fell as the inmates began gathering around them, all straining to see what the small office held that could elicit such strong reactions.

  “Get back in your seats,” I yelled, but no one moved. They stood there transfixed like the Caldwells had been, and when I reached the doorway, I knew why.

  Beyond the open door of my office was the crumpled, lifeless body of Nicole Caldwell.

  6

  “Go home, Chaplain,” Colonel Patterson said. “The inspector can take your statement in the morning.”

  My nerves were humming like high-voltage lines, my eyes and fingers twitching like an addict in need of a fix. Head aching, heart pounding, adrenaline-rich blood coursing through my veins, home was the last place I wanted or needed to be.

  It had taken a while to quell the overwrought crowd of inmates, most of whom had rushed my office door in an attempt to see Nicole’s body. By the time they were cajoled and, in some cases, beaten into submission and securely locked in their dorms, Colonel Patterson and Inspector Fortner had arrived.

  With the Caldwells being cared for and interviewed by the trauma response team, I had made the mistake of stepping out of the empty chapel to take in some fresh air and collect my thoughts. Now, the colonel was refusing to let me back inside.

  “We’ve got a lot to do tonight, Chaplain,” Patterson said, adding, “We know you’re not goin’ anywhere,” as if I were a suspect. “Pete can take your statement tomorrow.”

  He knew it wasn’t my statement but the investigation I was worried about, and I could tell he was enjoying my frustration almost as much as the tobacco juice that trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  I had to laugh at him trying to be so tough. He just didn’t have the physique to pull it off. He had the body of a bird, his thin, stick-like legs looking incapable of supporting the weight of his enormous belly. The white shirt of his uniform, holding back his belly above his belt, always appeared about to burst open. Like his legs, the strength of his buttons was a mystery. And he wore boots for height, but they only made him look and walk funny.

  All I could think about was Nicole, how I had failed to protect her, how I had let her get killed—in my office. I should’ve never left her. I had to get back in there, had to find out who had done this profane thing.

  I stepped forward and said, “But I—”

  “You’re not going back inside tonight,” he said. “This is a crime scene now. Whatever you’ve left inside you can get tomorrow.” Then, very slowly, he said, “We will see you tomorrow.”

  The previous summer I had been part of an investigation into the death of an inmate that had not only uncovered the illegal activities of some of his officers, but cast him as either inept or corrupt. In fact, my ex-father-in-law, the inspector general of the department, was still investigating him.

  “I didn’t leave anything inside,” I said. “I thought the inspector might need my help.”

  I could feel myself falling apart, but I was powerless to stop it.

  Suddenly, getting inside the chapel became all that mattered, all I could think about. If I could just see her, just be with her, look at the crime scene, examine the evidence, attempt to redeem my negligence by finding her killer.

  “I’ll get him all the help h
e needs,” he said, patronizing me and enjoying it. “You don’t have to worry about it. Just go home and—”

  “But I’m a—”

  “A what?” he asked, as if he had been waiting for this. “You’re a chaplain. A preacher. You’re not an inspector. You’re not an officer. You’re not an investigator. You are a chaplain. If you don’t like being a chaplain and want to be something else, then maybe you should quit, but until you are one of those other things, you are not going into my crime scene.”

  A nearby group of officers perked up when they heard Patterson’s rebuke and a couple of them—his boys, as they were referred to—began to edge toward us.

  “You mean Inspector Fortner’s crime scene?” I said.

  “My institution,” he said. “My crime scene.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked.

  Stepping forward and bowing up his short, fat body, he got very close to me, looked up and said, “I ain’t afraid of you. I tell you that.”

  “You afraid an officer’s involved again? Is that it?” I asked. “What are you trying to cover up?”

  “I’m giving you five seconds to leave this institution on your own,” he said, “and then I’m gonna have you escorted out. And if you resist, I’ll have you locked up.”

  “Just step inside and ask the inspector if he wants my help,” I said.

  “The inspector’s not in charge here,” he said. “I—”

  “He’s in charge of the crime scene,” I said. “He has full—”

  “Boys,” Patterson said.

  The two officers grabbed my arms, and I struggled against them. Breaking free, I pushed Patterson and tried to get in the chapel, but they grabbed me again—this time with both hands and no matter what I did, I could not free myself.

  “Show the chaplain the way out,” Patterson said. “And if he gives you any more trouble, cuff him and put him in the holding cell.”

  They tugged at me, but I didn’t move.

  “Some chaplain we got,” one of them said.

  “He’s as bad as some of the convicts,” the other one replied.

  They dragged me to the front gate and pushed me through it. As soon as I was on the other side, I tried to turn to keep the gate from closing, but my feet got tangled and I fell hard onto the concrete.

  The two officers who had pushed me and the two inside the control room began to laugh.

  “Walk much, Grace?” one of them asked.

  “Maybe he’s had too much communion wine again,” the other one said.

  With the pain and guilt I felt over Nicole’s death, the frustration and powerlessness of not being involved in the investigation, I lay there in my anger and embarrassment after being tossed out like trash. It was just too much. All I could think about was my first drink—the first of many.

  7

  When I arrived at Rudy’s just before three in the morning, I drained the remainder of my bottle and threw it toward the dumpster. Clanging off the side, the bottle hit the powdered oyster shell parking lot and shot up a small puff of white dust.

  I sprayed my mouth with breath freshener and opened the door to the diner quietly, hoping not to wake Carla who was slumped on a barstool, her head resting on her outstretched arm next to open school books on the counter. My coordination wasn’t as trustworthy as it usually was and I was unable to prevent the cowbell above the door from clanging.

  She bolted upright and spun around toward me.

  Her blond hair was mussed and stuck out on the side, her brilliant green eyes soft and vulnerable, their sleepy quality only adding to the sublimity of her beauty. At just seventeen she had the old soul of a motherless daughter trapped in a small town with an alcoholic father.

  “I tried to wait up for you,” she said. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

  “Can I have some coffee?” I asked as I made my way to my booth in the back.

  “Sure,” she said, studying me for a moment before adding, “I’ll bring the pot.”

  I made it to the booth and pitched into it.

  The thick smell of old grease and stale cigarette smoke hung in the air.

  “Anna’s called looking for you,” she said from behind the counter where she was preparing a fresh pot of coffee. “She told me what happened.”

  As usual, Rudy’s was cold. According to Rudy, it caused people to eat more and had tripled his coffee sales. The way I figured it, the increased revenue might almost be enough to pay for his increased electric bill. The condensation covering the plate glass widows in front made them look like sheets of ice and blurred everything seen through them.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “Just that I hadn’t seen you,” she said.

  “If she calls again, tell her the same thing,” I said.

  Carla turned toward me, her brow furrowed, eyes questioning.

  My eyebrows shot up. Challenging.

  She looked back down at the coffee pot. “Sure,” she said softly.

  Since I’d moved back to Pottersville, I had spent many nights here in this booth in the back, reading, studying, making case notes and sermon outlines, and talking to Carla. Most of the time, it was just the two of us, which is why I came. The café sat on the highway and Rudy, Carla’s single father, insisted that it stay open twenty-four hours. And since Rudy was in the back passed out most nights, Carla was the one to keep it open, napping at the bar throughout the night before getting ready and going to school the next morning.

  Like the Pinkertons, I didn’t sleep, not much anyway, so when I was here, Carla could. She often thanked me for keeping an eye on the place, never seeming to realize it was her I had come to watch over.

  She brought over the coffee pot and two cups.

  Wearing faded jeans and an Evanescence T-shirt, inexpensive white tennis shoes, no make-up or jewelry, she moved like she was on the runway—a carriage imbued with such elegance and dignity she made Dollar Store clothes look designer.

  “You can go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  “But—”

  “In fact,” I said, “you can go in the back and lie down. I can make a pot of coffee if someone comes in. And if something has to be cooked, I’ll come get you.”

  Her sad sea-green eyes were full of compassion and I could tell she wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to be around anyone, not even her. All I wanted to do was drink my coffee and not sleep it off.

  “You don’t want to talk?” she asked.

  “I’ll gladly listen to anything you want to tell me,” I said. “But I have nothing to say.”

  She hesitated before speaking and I added, “Do you have anything you need to talk about?”

  She shook her head very slowly. “No,” she said softly, “not really.”

  “Then get some sleep,” I said.

  As she turned and began to walk away, I called after her. She turned quickly, a hopeful, even expectant look on her face. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said with a small smile. She then continued walking away another step or two before turning around and coming back, taking a seat in the booth across from me.

  “I know you’re... well... anyway, I do need to talk—if you can,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  As far as I knew, I was the only adult she really had to talk to.

  Looking at her so closely in the harsh light of the diner, I realized she was not nearly as pretty as I thought she was—not physically anyway. Her eyes were just slightly too close together and her nose was a little on the long side. Perhaps if I were seeing her for the first time—or looking at a photograph of her—I would say she was a little above average at best, but I wasn’t. I was seeing her after knowing her. I was seeing, if not nearly all of her, far more than a first glance or picture could ever reveal. And I still say she was beautiful in a profoundly subtle way.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “I know we’ve talked about a lot of st
uff, but this is hard.”

  I waited. I should have encouraged her to continue, reassured her in some way, but I was in no condition to do either.

  “I’ve got a couple of friends whose boyfriends are pressuring them to...” she began, then hesitated a moment, before dropping her voice and adding, “have sex with them.”

  I nodded. Nothing new there.

  “But they want to be virgins when they get married—or at least when they really fall in love and think the guy’s the one. So they’re considering alternatives—”

  “The girls?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but only because the boys are begging them to,” she said. “Do you know what I mean by alternatives?”

  “Well, unless your generation has come up with some new ones, I only know of three,” I said.

  A small smile twitched on her lips, then she raised her eyebrows and nodded slightly, trying to get me to elaborate.

  “You want me to say them?” I asked.

  I felt myself getting frustrated, but remembered how much I could have used someone to talk to besides my friends when I was her age.

  Wincing slightly, she asked, “Would you?”

  “Well,” I said, finding it more difficult to say than I thought it would be, “there’s manual, oral, and anal.”

  She nodded, a look of relief filling her face. “The third one,” she said. “They already do the first two. They think if they do it—the other thing—their boyfriends will be satisfied and they’ll still be virgins.”

  I shook my head. “They might be virgins—depending on how you define it, I guess—but their boyfriends will never be satisfied. At least not for more than a few minutes at a time. And if the, ah, standard way becomes the thing they can’t do, it will become the thing they most want to.”

  She nodded. “I told them that,” she said. “Well, something kind of like that.”

  “Are we really talking about friends of yours?” I asked.

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’ve thought about it some, too, but I don’t even have a very serious boyfriend.”