As I walked toward her, I realized she wasn’t really looking at the magazines—they just happened to be what were in front of her. She seemed lost and alone, unsure where to go or what to do, so she just stood and stared and saw nothing.
“Mrs. Caldwell,” I said.
When she turned around, she squinted at me for a long moment as if finding it difficult to focus. She only vaguely resembled the overly made-up, seductive young woman I had met the day before.
“Chaplain…” she said, and I could tell she was searching for my name.
“Jordan,” I said. “John.”
She nodded. “Right. What’re you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you,” I said.
Her long, pale face clouded over in incomprehension, then her eyes widened and it contorted into an expression of alarm. “About what?”
“Nicole.”
She tightened her mouth in an unsuccessful attempt to fight off tears. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
I nodded.
“It doesn’t seem real,” she said. “I keep looking for her, keep starting to call her. I even started to buy her that.” I followed her gaze over to an aqua bear draped in a small American flag. “She loves all those Beanie things.”
Beyond the bear, out in the terminal near the rental car counters, I saw a small circle of old ladies huddled around Bobby Earl. Like Bunny, he looked dressed for church—or TV, and he was putting his hands on their heads and praying for them.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, turning back to her.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why did it happen?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Who do you think did it?” I asked.
“Who?” she said softly, and I wondered if the way she was acting was the result of grief, guilt, or medication.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She shook her head.
Maybe it wasn’t grief, guilt or medication, but shock.
She stared at me for a long moment without saying anything, without seeming to even see me. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable, and I felt bad for what I was about to do.
“What could she have done to make somebody do that to her?” I asked, trying not to let my disgust at the question bleed into my voice.
Forgive me, Nicole, I prayed.
If she or her husband had done it, she had to believe I was on their side, that I would understand. She’d need to justify it.
As usual in these situations, I felt indecent and iniquitous. I was attempting to manipulate someone to whom I should have been ministering.
She glanced over at the bald black man reading a magazine behind the counter. He was the only other person in the shop. If he overheard our conversation, he gave no indication. He looked bored, the magazine a barely adequate distraction.
“She didn’t make anybody do anything,” she said. “She didn’t do anything. She didn’t deserve this.”
“No, I didn’t mean…” I said, but of course I did. “I just meant I know how some children can be.”
“Nicole was an angel,” she said. “An angel.” She then turned her head to the side and looked up as if thinking of something for the first time. “Maybe that’s why God took her—to join the other angels.”
“There’s no doubt she’s with God now,” I said. “And the angels, but God didn’t kill her. Who do you think killed her?”
“She was too good,” she continued, in her own world now, no longer talking to me. “She was just too good for this fallen, sinful world.”
Over the intercom, a pleasant-sounding woman with only a slight southern drawl announced the boarding call for their flight, but Bunny didn’t seem to hear her.
“Bunny,” I said sternly. “Who killed Nicole?”
She looked at me, our eyes locking, as if she were really seeing me for the first time. “We did.”
“You and Bobby Earl?”
She nodded. “We—” She broke off, her eyes growing wide, her face filling with alarm, as she spotted something over my shoulder.
I turned to see Bobby Earl quickly approaching us, DeAndré Stone following behind him at a distance.
“Honey, it’s time for our flight,” Bobby Earl said. “Why, Chaplain Jordan, what’re you doing here?”
“I came to see you two,” I said.
“To minister to us or ask us if we killed our daughter?”
“Both,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, shaking his head. “DeAndré, take Bunny to the plane. I’ll join you there in a minute.”
Zombie-like, Bunny stepped forward and DeAndré took her by the arm. When he turned to walk out with her, Merrill was in front of him, blocking the aisle.
“We gonna do this here?” DeAndré asked.
Merrill looked over at me.
I shook my head.
“Guess not,” Merrill said to DeAndré, “but I’d like a rain check on that.”
“Bet on it,” DeAndré said.
Without moving, Merrill relaxed his posture, and DeAndré led Bunny over to another aisle and out of the store.
“I’m sorry again for your loss, Mrs. Caldwell,” I called after her.
“Do you really lack spiritual discernment to such an extent that you suspect me or Bunny of killing our daughter?” Bobby Earl asked.
“When I asked Bunny who killed Nicole, she said, ‘We did.’”
“She meant by taking her into the prison,” he said. “She’s very upset right now, as you can imagine. She feels enormous guilt. It’s unthinkable that you would come and—”
“Whose daughter is she?” I asked. “Is Mrs. Caldwell her biological mother?”
Before he could prevent it, his eyes widened briefly and flickered in confirmation, and he shook his head. “How can you do these things?” he asked. “Talking to another man’s devastated wife when he’s not around, accusing a man of God of murdering the underprivileged little black girl he’s taken in and loved as his own? Sir, I ask you, are you a minister or a… or something else? I have to go now, but I will keep you in my prayers—and the men whose souls you’re meant to shepherd.”
He turned and began walking toward the terminal.
I followed.
“Weren’t you and Bunny the only ones in that locked office with Nicole last night?” I asked.
Without stopping, he said, “Obviously not. She was brutally murdered—and we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Why did you have her in the prison in the first place?” I asked.
He shook his head, but didn’t answer.
He walked quickly, weaving in and out of slower moving passengers. A few of the stragglers from recently landed planes headed in our direction, recognized Bobby Earl, reacting to him the way most people respond to celebrities—with wide-eyed excitement, pointing him out to others or with attempted nonchalant coolness, undermined by surreptitious glances.
“Why have security if you’re not going to use him to protect your daughter in the most dangerous place she’s ever been?” I asked.
We had reached the security checkpoint, beyond which Merrill and I couldn’t go, and I realized that was my last question for the night.
“I gave DeAndré the night off so he could visit with his uncle,” he said, dropping his bag onto the small conveyer belt and stepping through the metal detector. “I was assured y’all would provide security for Nicole. Maybe rather than harassing us, you should be asking yourself why your chapel—your own office wasn’t safe for my little girl and how culpable you and the Florida Department of Corrections are.”
“He actually said ‘culpable’?” Merrill asked.
I nodded.
After continued attempts to engage Bobby Earl across the security checkpoint, and making sure they did, in fact, get on the plane and that it did, in fact, leave the ground, Merrill and I were walking back through the mostly empty airport.
“Sound just like an inmate,” he said. “You can take
the convict out of prison, but…”
I laughed.
The recently deplaned had picked up their luggage and departed, and the airport was much quieter now, though it still had that high-ceiling, tile floor, open-air hum large enclosed spaces like malls get.
“Bobby Earl’s put the fear of God in his old lady,” Merrill said as we walked back toward his truck. “And that ain’t all he’s put in her either.”
“I didn’t smell alcohol on her,” I said. “And if she’d been drinking, I’d’ve known. I can smell booze the way a vampire can smell blood.”
“Man like him can get as much script as he want.”
I nodded.
“‘Course she could be medicating herself,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but for guilt or grief?”
“Maybe both,” he said. “I hear moms make real sensitive murderers. They kill they kid just like anybody else, but then they all ‘oh-shit-what-did-I-do?’ and tore up about it.”
Merrill stopped and looked around the nearly empty building. “Damn, I’s hoping we could pick up some stewardesses to party with—do a little layover.”
“This is a work trip,” I said. “Besides, I’m a married man.”
“It’s not like anybody was gettin’ frequent flyer points from you when you thought you wasn’t.”
I laughed and we started walking again.
“We need to do a real interview with them,” I said. “Even if we have to go to New Orleans to do it.”
“Just let me know when,” he said. “’Cause I wanna conduct a little interview of my own with that nigga’ that works for them. And it’s gonna be real-real painful for his black ass.”
I smiled.
“So which one of them you think did it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe both. Maybe neither.”
“You think it could be one of those other fools hangin’ out in the hallway?”
I nodded. “I think while we’re setting up a real interview with Bobby Earl and Bunny we should try to find out.”
CHAPTER 19
When I reached the control room for work the following morning, I was directed by security, along with the other staff, into the visiting park for a contraband search. A long row of tables was set up on which we deposited the contents of our pockets and anything we were carrying—purses, briefcases, and lunch boxes. We were then escorted into the restrooms—men’s and women’s respectively—and required to remove our shoes and be patted down. These occasional checks for contraband were a good idea in theory—inmate visitors weren’t the only ones bringing it in—but most employees were tipped off about them in the parking lot when they still had time to slip something back into their vehicles, and the thoroughness of the search was often dependent on how well the officer doing the searching knew you. They were our coworkers, after all.
Leaving the VP, I ran into Theo Malcolm, the new GED and literacy teacher at PCI. Malcolm was a thin, wiry black man in his early thirties with small dark eyes, the whites of which looked like unstirred chocolate milk. His eyes had an angry, defiant glare, and his posture was one of rigidity and defensiveness.
“You got a minute?” I asked.
He hesitated, then gave one curt nod of his head. Obviously, he didn’t want to talk to me, but would, as long as I understood that he was doing me a favor. “In my office,” he said and began walking down the compound.
I followed. When I caught up with him, I asked, “Are you enjoying your work here?”
“I’m not here for enjoyment,” he said curtly. “I’m here to do my part to free my brothers from their oppressors.”
“And to enjoy it would lessen its importance somehow, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
He didn’t respond, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.
To my surprise, his office, which was filled with kente cloth and African art, was not only unlocked, but there was an inmate inside it.
The inmate, Luther Albright, one of Malcolm’s orderlies, was in Malcolm’s chair with his feet on the desk.
“Luther, will you please excuse us a moment?” Malcolm asked as if it were Albright’s office.
Taking his time getting to his feet, Albright walked very slowly out of the office, glaring at me and bumping my shoulder with his as he passed by.
When he was gone, I said, “Does he work for you?”
“He’s one of my—”
“Or do you work for him?”
Malcolm said, “I will allot you ten minutes out of professional courtesy.”
“Does that mean you’re going to be courteous?” I asked.
On his desk, open file folders revealed photos of several inmates, including Abdul Muhummin, my chapel library clerk. He quickly closed the files when he reached his desk, and I thought his attempt at nonchalance was jerky and awkward.
He shook his head. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’ve got work to do. My concentrating on doing my job may be the only hope some of them have.”
“I feel the same way,” I said. “We’re here doing the same thing—trying to achieve the same goals.”
The small office and state-issued furniture was all hard, cold surfaces, with no warmth or personality, and was filled with stacks of papers and books and the sloppy clutter that resulted from laziness and disorganization rather than busyness. If it weren’t for the kente cloth and African art, it’d look like every other office in the institution.
“Do you have a Band Aid?” he asked.
“What?”
“I may need it if I get cut—oh, but it’s the color of white peoples’ skin, isn’t it? So, because I live in a white world, I have to bandage the wounds white people inflict with something that resembles your pale weakass skin.”
“Are you for real?” I asked.
“We don’t have the same goals,” he continued. “I’m part of the solution. You’re part of the problem.”
“But some of my best friends are black,” I said with a big smile.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
I shrugged. “I thought it was,” I said. “But the fact is, it’s true.”
“Monroe,” he said. “He’d see he didn’t need your friendship if he wasn’t such a white man’s nigga’. You think you’re doing us a favor by helping us. It only adds to our dependency.”
“Perhaps,” I admitted, “but does that mean I should just forget about Nicole?”
“The white preacher’s colored show piece,” he said. “Well, he finally showed her to the wrong son of a bitch, didn’t he? Ironic thing is, whoever killed her did her a favor. Freed her from slavery.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Wake-up,” he said. “Bobby Earl’s one of the most racist bastards ever to do time in Florida. I’ve told my students, he’s the one they should’ve killed. “
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Whoever did it,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You were there, though, weren’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “You saw me.”
His right eye started twitching, and he looked down and began rearranging the objects on his desk as if it were something that had to be done immediately.
“But I’ve never seen you there before,” I said. “Why choose the night before last to go for the first time? It seems a little—”
“Just checkin’ things out,” he said. “I get a lot of complaints about how racist you and your chapel programs are.”
His comment had its desired effect. Suddenly I felt guilty and defensive, my pulse quickening, my hairline sweating, and I wondered who had accused me of such a thing. I had fought the good fight against the rampant racism of the area nearly my whole life, but with one comment I felt the need to defend myself, spouting my record the way a politician does. The race card was a powerful thing, especially when used on someone afflicted with so much white guilt.
“Really?” I asked, my voice flat, calm. “From whom?”
“I can’t reveal my sources,” he said.
“No, see, that’s only reporters,” I said very slowly. “You’re a teacher in a prison.”
“If you don’t stop patronizing me, you’ll regret it,” he said.
“Luckily,” I said, “I have experience living with regret, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Why are you harassing me?” he asked, his voice taking on a whining, wounded-child quality that matched his squinty expression.
“I would think that’s obvious to you,” I said.
“Because I’m black,” he said.
I smiled and shook my head. The persistence of his perception was maddening, and I realized that for all his racist outrage there was very little that was black or Afro-centric about him.
“Could be,” I said. “Or maybe it’s not harassment at all, but just a few friendly questions.”
“But why’re you asking me?”
“Because you were there,” I said.
“So were a lot of other people,” he said.
“That’s true, and I’m talking to them, too,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, and nodded, seeming to relax a little.
“But, unlike you,” I added, “the murder didn’t happen during their first and only visit to the chapel.”
Leaving Theo Malcolm’s office, I walked down the long hallway of the empty education building toward the door, my dress shoes echoing loudly on the polished tile. Windows starting half way up the walls revealed dark, empty classrooms, many of which were seldom used. We had the inmate labor to build them, but lacked the budget to staff them.
Theo Malcolm has something to hide, I thought. Something so big, in fact, that he aggressively went on the offensive under the banner of racism in an attempt to distract me from it the moment I spoke to him.
The reverberation of my heels striking the tile was so loud in the long, open corridor that I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me—but I felt them. In the split moment before they struck, I knew they were there, but it wasn’t soon enough for me to spin around and defend myself.
Blood of the Lamb (a John Jordan Mystery) Page 9