Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  Standing, Bobby Earl led me back through the opulent mansion that made me think of a thriving Victorian whorehouse more than anything else.

  “He works for you,” I said. “It’s not as if I made an enormous leap.”

  “He works for my wife,” he said, “but not any longer—if you’re certain he did these things.”

  “I’m certain,” I said. “Did you know that NOPD has an ongoing investigation into you and your organization?”

  “I knew the IRS did,” he said. “They hound every major ministry in the country. Are the police helping them?”

  Either he was truly out of touch with what was going on in his organization or Bobby Earl Caldwell was a tremendous loss to stage and screen.

  I shook my head. “They’re looking into allegations of abuse, extortion, and homicide.”

  “Homicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No wonder you don’t want to join my staff,” he said. “But I can assure you there’s some kind of mistake and I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’ve noticed that a lot of inmates donate significant amounts of money to your ministry,” I said. “Why—”

  “Chaplain,” he said in a voice that sounded scolding. “You know good and well most inmates don’t have much money. It is true that some of them make small contributions, but I can assure you that they don’t even cover our expenses when we conduct a crusade.”

  “The really large amounts go to a post office box here in—”

  “I don’t have a post office box,” he said. “All our mail is delivered directly to the headquarters.”

  “Well, I’m telling you an awful lot of money payable to you is leaving our prison addressed to you at a post office box over here.”

  He hesitated a moment, his eyes moving around as he thought about it. “I have a very large organization,” he said. “I guess some of our departments may have post office boxes to keep things separate. I’ll check into it. I will, but right now I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Please consider coming to Nicole’s service,” I said. “I’m sure the media would like to get a statement from you about it.”

  “The media’s gonna be there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, as if I knew, “I think Larry King may even do a follow up show afterwards.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “And you please consider my offer. I can assure you the rumors you’ve heard are not true. You’ll get three times what you’re making now just to attend a few meetings a year and answer the occasional question about prison ministry from time to time. Plus, I’ll give you a signing bonus of say, a hundred K.”

  “No,” I said, as he ushered me out the door, “I’m not worth that kind of money.”

  “Maybe not, but what you know is,” he said, just before closing the door, and I left wondering if what he thought I knew had anything at all to do with prison ministry.

  46

  That evening, with the sun beginning its descent behind St. Louis Cathedral, I bought a bag of beignets and a large coffee at the Café du Monde, crossed Decatur to Jackson Square, and found an empty bench on which to enjoy them.

  Slowly, the sounds of jazz bands were dying out, the street artists, mimes, and magicians being replaced by fortunetellers, tarot readers, and guides for vampire, ghost, and graveyard tours.

  The breeze blowing off the Mississippi filled the air with a briny pungency and humidity that mixed with the cooking food and confections of the Quarter, riding on its currents the soft, sad sounds of a lone saxophone coming from Pirates Alley.

  With the crowds and noises of the day gone, I had hoped to think about the case, integrating what I knew with what I had learned since arriving in New Orleans, but it was not to be.

  Both the bag and the beignets were filled with powdered sugar that stuck to my fingers and face, a light dusting of which was accumulating on my clothes. I was trying to wipe it off when Bunny Caldwell walked up.

  “I heard you and Bobby Earl talking at the house,” she said.

  She was wearing dark shades and a hat that hid much of her face, her nervous moves and paranoid glances highlighting the fact that they were intended as a disguise.

  “How?” I asked.

  She looked confused.

  “That was a crack about its size,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  Glancing around furtively, she sat down next to me without trying to avoid the powdered sugar covering the bench.

  “Bobby Earl grew up poor,” she said.

  “Well, he’s making up for it now.”

  She smiled. “Trying.”

  “Except you can’t,” I said.

  “You can’t make up for anything you didn’t get in childhood, can you?”

  “Sounds like maybe you’ve been trying, too,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, more to herself than to me, and I knew some of what I had heard about her was true.

  Across the way, a homeless man rose from where he had been sleeping on the grass, walked over to the fountain, and began washing his face and hands.

  Figuring there was a reason she had sought me out, I didn’t prod, but instead waited for her to tell me in her own time what she had to say.

  “There’s a few things I want you to know about Bobby Earl,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “He’s not like me,” she said. “When he gave his life to the Lord, he did it all the way. He really is a new creature in Christ. I’ve never seen someone change so completely. I mean, yeah, he spends too much money and he’s still a kid in many ways, but he really is one of the good guys now.”

  The woman sitting next to me was different from the one I had met in the institution just two weeks ago, as if in addition to aging her, grief had stripped her of all illusions. She was now disillusioned in the most positive, if painful, sense of the word.

  “He judges people—especially inmates—by what happened to him,” she continued. “If they say they’ve changed, he believes they have.”

  “And the ones who work for him...”

  “Haven’t,” she said. “For the most part anyway. Not like him. Some, not at all. His transformation and love blinds him. He can’t see what’s going on around him—and that includes the things I do.”

  She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t press her.

  The three towers of the cathedral and the cross on the center one were now silhouettes backlit by the soft orange gleam behind them, as all around us candles on the tables of palm readers blinked on like the first stars of twilight.

  When I caught her looking over her shoulder again, I asked, “Who are you afraid of?”

  “No one,” she said. “Why?”

  “Who gave you the bruises on your arms?”

  “He said if I say anything, he’ll kill Bobby Earl,” she said. “Who?”

  “DeAndré.”

  “Did he come back into the institution with you the night Nicole was killed?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you ever worked at Lake Butler?”

  “In the chapel,” she said. “It’s where I met Bobby Earl.”

  “And Nicole’s father?”

  She whipped her head around and stared at me in shock. After a few moments, she nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What about Theo Malcolm?”

  She squinted, her brow furrowing, then began to shake her head.

  “He’s a school teacher.”

  “I don’t know him,” she said. “Why?”

  In between the intermittent breezy sound of traffic on Decatur behind us, the whinnying and clip-clop of horses could be heard.

  “Chaplain Jordan, I didn’t kill my little girl,” she said.

  I was inclined to believe her.

  “But I’m responsible,” she said. “We should’ve never taken her in there.”

  “Why were y’all there?” I asked. “What’s a guy like Bobby Earl gain from preaching in a prison?”

&nb
sp; “He has a heart for inmates,” she said. “Though we weren’t scheduled to go back to PCI for quite a while, DeAndré begged him. Bobby Earl saw it as doing a favor for DeAndré and his uncle, but I think DeAndré just wanted an excuse to go in there and deal with Cedric.”

  “Nicole’s father?”

  She nodded. “I thought he was going to pay him off or something, but maybe he meant to kill him,” she said. “I don’t know. I do know Bobby Earl likes preaching in prison because of what happened to him when he was inside. But we should have never taken Nicole. We just didn’t—”

  Breaking off abruptly, she stood up and said, “I’ve done a stupid thing. I should’ve never gotten involved with—he’s always been insanely jealous—even of Nicole. Just seeing us talking together like this—be very careful.”

  As she began to walk away, I looked to see who had spooked her. Across the square, seething beneath a street lamp, was DeAndré Stone, a look of unadorned rage on his face. When I turned to stop her, Bunny was gone, having disappeared in the darkness. Deciding to settle a little business with Stone, I spun around, but found that he had vanished, too.

  47

  “Where the hell you been?” Tom Daniels asked as he stormed into my office.

  I was back in my office because he had removed the crime scene tape and had it cleaned, and he had asked me to meet him there.

  “Miss me?” I asked.

  There was no evidence that an unspeakable act of violence had taken place here, no blood crying out from the ground about the murder of innocence, but I felt uncomfortable, as if a residue of horror hung in the room like a lost spirit hovering aimlessly.

  “You better not have been screwing around in my investigation,” he said.

  “Wasn’t within a hundred miles of it,” I said with a smile.

  “Don’t get cute with me, dammit,” he said. “I’m not your buddy.”

  “We may not be buddies,” I said. “But we are family.”

  He shook his head.

  “Susan and I—”

  “That’s just a technicality,” he said.

  “Actually, Dad, we’re trying to patch things up,” I said.

  He started to say something, but instead shook his head, his contempt seeming to indicate the comment wasn’t worthy of a response.

  “I’m not your enemy,” I said. Then amended, “Well, you’re not mine. Why’d you even notice I was gone?”

  “I’ve got some questions for you,” he said, pulling a pen out of his wrinkled suit coat and opening a file folder. His movements, like his words, were often exaggerated, a compensation for his alcoholinduced unsteadiness. “You’re a witness. This thing happened right here in your office. Hell, you’re a suspect.”

  “A suspect?”

  “You had access to this office. Hell, it’s yours. You were here. What can you tell me?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  He laughed. “Well, who did?” he asked.

  Outside my window, the last of the first shift officers ambled past the last of the second shift arrivals rushing to their post. Both groups carried lunch boxes or small coolers to help them get through their eight-hour shifts in posts they could not leave.

  “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “Let me explain how this works,” he said, holding up his pen. “I ask the questions, you answer them.” When he noticed that his pen was shaking, he pulled his hand down and rested it on the folder. “Now, let’s try that. I ask. You answer. Got it?”

  “Is that one of your questions?” I asked.

  His eyes narrowed into bloodshot slits, his face turning red and strained as if his blood had become mercury and was rising.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve just got a couple of questions. If you answer them, I’ll answer all of yours.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then let it out very slowly. He then sat there in silence for a long time before he opened his eyes again. When he did, they seemed calmer, if not clearer.

  “I’ll cooperate either way,” I said. “But I’d really like to know just two small things.”

  “You got anything really good you could trade me for them?” he asked as if we were on a school yard.

  I nodded.

  “Let’s have it,” he said.

  “Was Nicole sexually assaulted?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Was there any indication that she ever had been?”

  “Inconclusive,” he said. “But we don’t think so.”

  “Was—” I began.

  “That’s two questions,” he said.

  “Actually,” I said. “That was two parts of the same question.”

  “You really are a sneaky SOB,” he said wearily. “What’s your other question?”

  “Was there blood in my office bathroom?” I asked. “Nicole’s blood?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “There was a greeting card and a wad of cash under the desk,” he said. He pointed at the small stack of greeting cards on the corner of my desk. “Tell me about those.”

  “Each month I give the inmates cards to send to their families and significant others,” I said. “Did it match one of the ones on my desk?”

  He nodded. “I think it fell off while they were struggling,” he said. “But what about the money?”

  “I don’t give it out,” I said.

  A metallic clanging drew my attention toward the window. Outside two inmate-powered push mowers were beginning to cut the grass between the chapel and visiting park. The dew on the blades of grass and rose petals glistened in the morning sun, and the wet clippings stuck to the metal mowers.

  “So where’d it come from?” he said.

  “Sounds like a payoff to me,” I said.

  “Yeah, I came to that same conclusion,” he said. “Any idea who?”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe Bobby Earl’s paying off someone to do his business behind bars or to turn their heads while someone else does it.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  He didn’t respond, and we sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “I didn’t look for very long,” I said. “But it looked like her face had been beaten very badly.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “So her killer probably knew her pretty well,” I said.

  “Possibly,” he said, pulling a small plastic bag from his coat pocket. “We found this on the floor near the door.” Handing me the bag, he added, “I think he hit her so hard it flew out of her mouth and across the room. It’s a piece of candy.”

  I held up the plastic bag and examined its contents. It held a round pink piece of hard candy that was circled by red and white streaks.

  I swallowed hard, my heart and stomach in my throat, my forehead breaking out into a cold sweat.

  “Not finding very much about the Caldwells,” he said. “We need to get them back down here, but that’s not gonna happen.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m doing a memorial service for Nicole,” I said.

  His eyebrows shot up along with the corners of his lips and he nodded in appreciation. “That just might work, but I thought you were against her coming in—why memorialize her in front of all the inmates?”

  “To see what happens,” I said. “And not all—just those who were here the night it happened.”

  “I like it,” he said. “Still, we don’t have any real evidence yet.”

  “We will,” I said.

  “We?” he said.

  “You,” I corrected. “You will.”

  “When is the service?”

  “This afternoon,” I said.

  “This afternoon,” he yelled, jumping to his feet and heading toward the door. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Where’re you going?” I asked.

  “To try to get enough evidence to build a case by then.”

  48

  As I began to study for my homi
ly, I noticed again the stack of greeting cards on my desk. I picked them up and rifled through them. To my surprise, all the cards had envelopes. More to the point, all the envelopes had cards. Finding an actual clue, I almost didn’t know what to do. And before I could do anything, Pete Fortner knocked on my door and walked in.

  Sitting down, he looked around my office uneasily. As he stared at the spot where Nicole’s body had lain, I remembered that he had been the second one at the scene, and I knew he still saw her broken little body there just as I did.

  “How can you—” he started, but stopped when his eyes rested on the picture Nicole had colored for me. I had framed it and hung it on the center of the wall behind me. The most prominent place in my office.

  “How can you work in here?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t. I’ve pretty much just been working her case. And she helps me with that. It’s like she’s still present. I don’t know... I feel her guiding me. I like being in here. I think soon the violence will fade and just her precious spirit will remain.”

  He nodded without saying anything. There was nothing in his body language or facial expression to suggest it, but I got the sense that I had made him uncomfortable.

  His mustache had thickened and he rubbed at it absently. When he turned to the side the sunlight outlined his profile, illuminating several nose hairs which had grown so long they blended with his mustache.

  “That was good work with Malcolm and Muhammin the other night,” he said. “But are you sure they didn’t kill Nicole?”

  “As sure as you can be about such things,” I said.

  “You’re probably right. Guess what we found inside a small hole in Paul Register’s mattress?”

  “Nicole’s crayons?” I asked.

  His mouth dropped open. “Just how the hell did you know that?”

  “I didn’t until just now,” I said. “You told me to guess.”

  He shook his head and smiled appreciatively.

  “Who found them?” I asked.

  “Officer Coel,” he said.