Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “This is important,” Daniels said, ignoring Potter. “Who did you buzz in?”

  “It was Menge,” Potter said. “You buzzed Sobel out a little while later for church and then you saw him again when he went back to his cell because I had to make him go put his shoes on.”

  Daniels looked at me. “Shoes?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s right,” Pitts said. “It was Menge. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was there when Stanley brought him back and I walked straight up and buzzed him in.”

  “What about the shoes?” Potter asked.

  “We got two bloody footprints in Menge’s cell,” Daniels said.

  “So?”

  “So maybe Sobel didn’t wear his shoes to the service because they had blood on them,” he said, then looking back at Pitts, “What happened next?”

  “While I was updating my logs,” he continued, “Sergeant Potter called the cell numbers of the inmates attending the Mass and I unlocked those cells and then a few inmates from medical came back and I buzzed them into their cells and then it was pretty quiet until . . .”

  “Until Menge was served up as communion,” Potter said with a sophomoric smile.

  Menge’s cell had now been cleared of all the agents except for the thin man dusting for prints. I watched as he methodically pointed his small flashlight in several directions at varying angles until he found what he was looking for. He then held the light with his mouth as he twirled the brush between his palms, dipped it into the powder, and then brushed the dust very lightly onto the surface that held the prints.

  “Didn’t Menge always go to Mass?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Potter said. “He used to argue with the old priest during his sermons. Take up the whole damn hour sometimes.”

  “Okay,” Daniels said. “I’m not here to bust anybody’s balls. You were understaffed and that’s not your fault. You were having to do too many things at one time. I understand. But I’ve got to figure out how this was done. Okay? So, tell me the truth and I’ll handle the heat.”

  Pitts nodded.

  “Could you’ve hit Menge’s cell button when you were letting the others out?”

  Pitts thought about it.

  “He always goes,” Daniels said. “You do it automatically. Same inmates every time. And you just hit the button. Coulda happen to anyone.”

  Pitts looked up, squinted, and thought about it, then glanced over at Menge’s cell.

  Having found and dusted another clean print, the FDLE agent was now pressing tape down onto it. Next, he lifted the tape in one quick motion that sounded like a Band-Aid being ripped off and pressed it down on the lift card. He then labeled the card and went off in search of others.

  Pitts shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “I’m not here all the time. I’m in D-dorm some too. So I wouldn’t’ve expected him to go—or anyone else for that matter. And I’m real careful over the cell door buttons. Real careful. Especially after Inspector Fortner told us about the threat.”

  “And the truth is,” Potter said, “the cell doors are usually left open until lights out. This is a self-contained quad. It’s not confinement. The inmates come out and watch TV or play cards or go to church service. Only reason we were on lock-down tonight was because we were told to. So no one would’ve been used to opening any cells for church anyway.”

  Daniels nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I believe you. Is there any way the inmates could’ve opened it—either from inside or out?”

  “Once that door is locked, they can’t get it open.”

  “So you’ve never had one open before without you doing it?” I asked.

  “Well, sure we have,” Pitts said. “Almost every time we have a thunderstorm, some of them open. The lightning shorts the locks out or something. I’m not sure.”

  “But there wasn’t any lightning tonight,” I said.

  “We’ve had a couple of inmates keep their cell doors from locking before,” Potter said.

  “How?” Daniels asked.

  “By putting a plastic spoon between the lock and the latch,” he said.

  Daniels raised his eyebrows.

  “But we haven’t used spoons down here in over a year,” Pitts said. “No one down here would have one.”

  “Yeah,” Potter said. “I’m sure of that. Anyway, I checked all the doors when I went by for count.”

  “When was that?” Daniels asked.

  Potter shrugged. “Right after the priest got here and just before you and the chaplain came down.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pitts said, his face suddenly lighting up. “You said Sobel went back to his cell to get his shoes.”

  Potter nodded. “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t buzz him back into the cell,” Pitts said.

  “You sure?” Daniels asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Then just how the hell did he get back in?”

  6

  It was the morning following the murder, and though I had yet to sleep, the adrenaline in my blood, the questions in my brain, and the shower I had just taken made me feel awake and alert.

  I was walking down the compound with Anna Rodden to interview Chris Sobel. She was his classification officer.

  If happiness is not wanting to be any place other than where you are, then I was truly happy. Happy to be in prison. Happy to be alive. Happy to be in the presence of Anna. I have that same thought every time I’m near her. It’s as certain as the dread I feel as our time together approaches its end.

  The early morning air was chilly and damp, the unseen sun illuminating the vibrant colors of the tender young flowers all around us, their delicate petals drooping beneath the weight of the thick dew. Inmates in pale blue uniforms assigned to inside grounds were already busy working on the only source of beauty—besides Anna—and their greatest source of pride in this desolate place. The care they lavished on the small, vulnerable plants showed in their abundance and lushness.

  As usual, the inmates on the compound stopped what they were doing to watch Anna. They did the same thing every time an attractive woman was on the compound, but more so with her. The inmates gawked like teens who didn’t know any better, but in fairness, most men and many women stopped to watch Anna—we just weren’t as obvious about it.

  “Does it bother you?” I asked.

  “Whatta you think?”

  I knew it bothered her. What I really meant was how much, but I didn’t pursue it.

  There was far more to Anna than what the inmates were seeing, her true attractiveness having more to do with qualities that couldn’t be seen. Or, if they could, it was only intangibly, through their effects—the way she held herself, the way she moved, the way intelligence and compassion blazed through her bright eyes.

  Had I been sober I would have married her back when we were both single. As it happened, I moved off to Atlanta after high school and the next time I saw her she was married.

  When I moved back to Pottersville a little over a year and a half ago, thinking I was divorced, being around Anna was excruciating, and now, finding myself still married didn’t make it any easier. Being so close to her was torture—cruel and unusual punishment. And there was nowhere I’d rather be. By definition I was a happy man.

  A pang of guilt, unbidden but not unfamiliar, rumbled inside me like distant thunder, and I wondered how I could be happy so soon after Justin Menge had been so violently murdered. How could I be so glad just to be in the presence of a woman not my wife?

  “How are things with you and Susan?” she asked, as if reading my mind.

  “Good,” I said. Very good actually. “We’re different—and so’s our relationship.”

  She nodded and smiled as if she knew something I didn’t. “You think this is it?”

  Unless you tell me it’s not. “It could be. Who would’ve ever thought?”

  “Not me.”

  The silence that followed accompanied a change in her posture and presence. Withou
t breaking stride, she stiffened slightly and withdrew from me somehow.

  After a year of thinking I was single, it was nice to find myself back on a more emotionally level battlefield with this woman who in love was both enemy and ally. In some stunted sophomoric place inside, I felt a tiny bit triumphant at being able to make her feel some semblance of what I had felt in the recent past, and it disturbed me to be confronted with how shallow and immature I could still be.

  After a while, she said, “Will you be moving back to Atlanta?”

  I hesitated. “I’m not sure. I came running back here as a failure, not knowing where else to go. I’ve got a broken down mobile home and a downwardly mobile job, but . . . I love it. Love the space and solitude. Love the stripped-down way I live. Love being here with you. I’ve never been happier.”

  I was wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a thin pin stripe and a black clerical shirt with full collar. Anna was wearing a black sheath dress. We looked like a couple, or given our matching chestnut-colored hair and dark brown eyes, like brother and sister. Either way, we looked like we belonged together.

  So why weren’t we? I wish I knew. It was complicated and had a lot to do with timing.

  Growing up, Anna had been my older sister Nancy’s best friend. In high school, when our attraction began to blossom, the two years that separated us seemed insurmountable. After graduation when Nancy fled our family, Anna left for college. Four years passed before I saw her again and, by that time, she was married. I was devastated.

  Several years later, following the breakup of my life and what I thought was the breakup of my marriage to Susan, I came home, began rebuilding, and not coincidentally became the chaplain at the same prison where Anna was a classification officer.

  “I love having you here,” she said. “Actually look forward to coming in here every day because most days I get to see you—be with you. But I can’t see Susan living in Pottersville.”

  “I know.”

  Susan was a city girl, unsuited for my rural, Spartan existence.

  “Certainly not the way you’re living.”

  “And she shouldn’t have to,” I said.

  She turned her head and looked up at me with raised eyebrows. “I guess Sarah shouldn’t’ve had to follow Abraham into the wilderness either.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  She held up her arms and gestured to the prison around us. “You saying this ain’t the Promised Land?”

  Many of the inmates marching in orderly lines all around us were able to convey their contempt for life just in the way they moved, their careful avoidance of Anna as conspicuous as those ogling her.

  “Seriously,” she added, “you do believe God called you here, don’t you?”

  Lured is more like it, I thought, and guess who she used for bait?

  “You’re the one who told me you gotta go through the wilderness to get to the Promised Land?”

  I nodded. “No other way to get there. Thanks for the reminder. You give good argument.”

  She smiled, something flickering in her eyes.

  “That come from being married to a lawyer?”

  “No,” she said with a mischievous smile, “from having Sarah envy.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  We were seated in the interview room of G-dorm, waiting for an officer to escort Sobel to us.

  As Sobel’s classification officer, Anna was responsible for classifying and managing him as well as writing his progress reports, determining his custody level and work assignment.

  “He’s got good adjustment,” she said, using the vernacular of her position. “Hasn’t given me one minute’s trouble. Quiet. Sticks to himself—except for Menge. He’s in on a drug charge and he’s really worked hard on recovery. He’s in AA and NA as well as the drug treatment program.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s very religious,” she said. “Catholic. But I’m sure you know that.”

  “I was surprised when he showed up for Mass late.”

  “You think it’s because he was busy killing Justin?”

  “It’s crossed my mind.”

  The interview room was roughly the size of a cell, most of which was used as a storage closet. A rickety folding table sat at its center, two rusted folding chairs on each side. Laundry lockers ran along one wall, shelves lined with bottles of cleaning chemicals on another, and a damp, musty smell emanated from the mops and buckets in the back corner.

  “He’s short, too,” she said, which was prison speak for an inmate with very little time remaining on his sentence. “He’s only got about sixty days left.”

  “Unless he killed Menge.”

  “Do you really think it’s possible?”

  “Do you?”

  “You mean is he capable? Who can ever say? But my intuition says no.”

  “Well, that says a lot,” I said. “Did you know they were lovers?”

  “Well, not know know, but yeah, I’d heard they were. That’s not something either of them would ever tell me. In here love’s a crime.”

  She was right. But I had never thought of it in quite that way.

  “But I could be wrong,” she added. “I’m not saying he didn’t do it. And if he’s using again, then I’d say it’s quite possible he did. What have you got on him?”

  “Their relationship for one,” I said. “This kind of crime is usually committed by someone close to the victim.”

  “We hurt those we love,” she said, playfully, but then quickly grew quiet.

  We were silent an awkward moment.

  “Do we hurt each other?” she asked.

  “Faithfully.”

  We fell silent again, each of us retreating into our own interior worlds.

  Eventually, she said, “What else?”

  “He didn’t come to the service until after it had started. He wasn’t wearing shoes—and somebody’s shoes have blood on them. Since he had to go back to get them, he passed Menge’s cell several times. And Pitts never popped his cell door—or so he says. Pitts also said it was Sobel and not Menge he let into the cell the first time. Only changed his story later after Potter persuaded him to.”

  “Pitts could be setting Sobel up,” she said.

  “Sure. Or Potter. And there were other guys who passed by his cell, but we’ve got to start somewhere.”

  The door opened and Chris Sobel shuffled in, cuffed and shackled, and sat down in the chair across the table from us.

  “Chaplain, Ms. Rodden. I’m so glad to see you both. I’m really scared. I mean really. I haven’t even been able to be upset about Justin because I’m so frightened.”

  “Of what?” Anna asked.

  “That whoever killed Justin is either going to kill me or set me up for killing him.”

  “You think you’re being set up?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s more a feelin’ than anything. But I’m perfect for it. Everyone knew we were in love. My cell’s close to his. I overslept Mass. I’ve never done that before. I think maybe someone drugged my food. ‘Course, I don’t even know how it happened. Maybe I’m way off base here.”

  It was amazing how much Chris Sobel looked like Justin Menge. They weren’t twins, but like Anna and me, they probably could’ve passed for siblings. He was thin, with little muscle and no fat, and his inmate blues hung loosely on him. His eyes were light brown with a faint metallic quality like rust in water set beneath full, coarse hair of the same color.

  Anna leaned over and whispered, “Are you sure he’s Chris Sobel and not Justin Menge?”

  7

  “You’re not?” I whispered back to her, looking at him again.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I never realized how much they looked alike before they started wearing their hair the same way. Could Menge have killed Sobel and taken his place because he’s about to get out?”

  “Prints say no. It possible their records were swapped?” />
  “It’s next to impossible.”

  It occurred to me again just how many of the inmates look alike. Like the girl “band” in Robert Palmer’s iconic video of “Addicted to Love,” very disparate looking people can look nearly identical when dressed and made-up alike. With inmates, it’s even more extreme. Not only do they have the exact same uniforms, but they all have the same bad haircuts, pale skin, and the thickness that comes from too much starch and too little exercise. But for all the similarities of inmates in general, the particular likeness of Chris and Justin was staggering.

  Like all couples, the time Chris and Justin had spent together enhanced their similarities. Not only did they look alike, but their mannerisms, voice, speech, gestures, expressions had all become eerily identical.

  It was like talking to a dead man.

  “You know you don’t have to talk to us,” I said to Chris.

  “No, I want to. I really do.”

  “Okay. Start with why you really missed the first part of Mass.”

  “I told you. I was asleep. I’ve never missed Mass before—”

  “Exactly. On the one night you miss most of the service a murder is committed.”

  “I know how it looks, but I swear. That’s why I think someone’s setting me up.”

  “I can’t help you if you lie to me.”

  “I’m not. Please.”

  “And what was that shit about holy ground? You’ve never attended the service without shoes before. Now all of a sudden you decide the ground is holy and you can’t wear shoes to Mass.”

  “Ah, I’m, I’d been reading about Moses. I know it sounds crazy, but I really did have a sense that God was meeting with us in that quad and that I needed to hallow the fact.”

  I shook my head. “Even if I believed that, which I don’t. I’d expect you to wear your shoes to the service, then take them off when it started.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You sayin’ the whole quad’s holy ground?”

  “I don’t know. I’s just trying to honor God.”

  “Think about the timing. You did this on the night that Justin was murdered. Never before. It means you passed by Justin’s cell at least three times. That’s more than anyone else.”