Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

by Jackie Lynn

  “You’re under arrest for the murder of Jason Holmes in Pierre, South Dakota,” the sheriff continued.

  At first, Rose noticed how surprised Chariot appeared. The words did seem harsh and final. Rose also understood that this was the way the murderer would be able to find Chariot. She understood that this was the easiest method in which he would be able to apprehend her. It made perfect sense.

  Chariot nodded.

  Montgomery walked behind her and Chariot dropped Willie’s hand. She moved toward the patrol car, leaned against it, spreading her arms across it. It seemed to everyone there that she had been through this procedure before. The sheriff did a casual search for weapons and then placed handcuffs on her wrists.

  “Okay,” he said, as a way to let her know it was fine to turn around. He glanced down and saw the swollen ankle.

  “You hurt yourself?” he asked.

  Chariot nodded in response.

  “You running somewhere?” he asked, studying her, waiting for her reply. He was about to guess as much when he had seen the two women in Willie’s truck.

  There was an awkward silence.

  Rhonda and Lucas parked their bikes at the office and walked over to join them.

  “She was coming here,” Old Man Willie suddenly answered for her.

  Rose looked surprised and glanced at the older man. She hadn’t expected him to say anything to the sheriff. “Yeah,” Rose added. She figured she could take it from there. “I was just getting ready to explain that I asked Willie to drive us here,” she lied. “I called him because I thought it would be better for her not to walk. Chariot tripped over a tent peg when she was walking out.”

  Rose stood next to Chariot. Rhonda, Lucas, and Thomas were standing near them. Ms. Lou Ellen was still waiting by the office steps with the deputies. She seemed very deep in conversation with them. While everyone had been waiting for Rose to return with the fugitive, Ms. Lou Ellen had begun a discussion with the two lawmen about their zodiac signs. Even though the sheriff had told them to look out for Chariot, they were paying attention to what Ms. Lou Ellen was telling them. She was doing a kind of impromptu reading.

  “What happened?” the sheriff asked Chariot.

  “It’s like Miss Rose said, she fell,” Willie said, answering for Chariot. He turned to the sheriff. The story was for him more than anybody. “She tripped on a peg. Miss Rose called me on her cell phone.”

  Rose whipped out her phone from her pants pocket to show that she had it with her. She turned to Chariot and then Sheriff Montgomery. “Well, let her sit down, for goodness’ sake.”

  She and Rhonda helped Chariot into the patrol car.

  Willie was standing with them. “It’s her ankle and I suspect she needs some ice on it right away.”

  Everybody studied the old man who lived at the campground. No one had ever seen him this engaged in a conversation. He was usually so quiet, so shy.

  While Sheriff Montgomery, standing next to the group at the car, thought a minute about the situation, Rose quickly retrieved an ice pack from the office freezer. When she returned, Sheriff Montgomery was still considering what needed to be done.

  “We’ll go by the emergency room first,” he announced, having made his decision. “Martin, Davis,” he yelled to his deputies, who were enthralled in their conversation at the steps. “Let’s go, you two.”

  The two men jumped up and headed over to where the others were standing. Ms. Lou Ellen, still in her red and green flowered robe, waved as they left.

  “Brother Leon”—Lucas stepped over, having observed what was happening—“do you think the restraints are necessary?” he asked.

  Chariot was handcuffed and sitting in the backseat of the patrol car. She was leaning forward and appeared very uncomfortable.

  Sheriff Montgomery sighed. He helped pull the young woman from the seat and then reached behind Chariot and unlocked the handcuffs. She leaned back against the seat, rubbing her wrists.

  “Read her her rights, Martin,” the sheriff said to one of the deputies. In all of the excitement, he had forgotten to do so once it became clear that the girl was injured. The two deputies stopped and, suddenly, it became obvious to those watching that the new officer of the law had forgotten the Miranda rights required by law to be read to everyone placed under arrest. His face turned bright red and the other officer laughed.

  “It’s fine, young Virgo,” Ms. Lou Ellen called to Deputy Martin. “Don’t get flustered by authority. No need for anxiety or to feel as if you’ve been thrown into chaos. Just remember that you can do this,” she added. She waved in his direction as she walked down the office steps.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Martin began confidently, smiling at the older woman who had explained why the planets are life forces and are the tools humans live by, and that because the planets were in a particular position in relation to the place of his birth he often felt tense and upset by the happenings in his life.

  “When will she be extradited?” Thomas asked the sheriff.

  Montgomery shook his head. “I guess it’ll be up to South Dakota,” he replied. “They’ll be the ones to come and get her.”

  “Did you tell them that she was here?” Rose asked.

  “Yep,” the sheriff said. “I made a call up there when I got the report from her plates.” He hesitated.

  “So, they’re on their way?” Rose asked.

  Sheriff Montgomery chewed on the inside of his lip. “No, they said to call back when I had her in custody.” He folded his arms around his chest. “Apparently, they like their reports neat and tidy before they act upon them. I’m getting ready to call right now,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.

  “Wait!” Rose shouted.

  Sheriff Montgomery glanced over at her. His look was part surprise and part fatigue.

  “She said it was a policeman who killed her boyfriend,” Rose announced. She thought the information was important. She knew that her explanation sounded far-fetched, was hard to believe, but she also understood the danger the young woman could be in if she was turned over to the man she claimed was the murderer.

  Sheriff Montgomery looked shocked. “What?” he asked.

  “I didn’t get all the details,” she explained. “I wasn’t able to finish my conversation with her because you drove up. But that’s what she said, just before I left her to come see you.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Well, that’s a powerful accusation to make,” he responded.

  “So is an accusation that says she killed her boyfriend,” Rhonda chimed in.

  Sheriff Montgomery scratched his chin and placed his cell phone back in his front shirt pocket. “I can’t do much about matters as they stand now,” he said. “I already made a report,” he explained. “They already know Chariot Stevens has been identified here in West Memphis.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t officially received,” Rose said.

  “The young lady needs the medical attention first,” Thomas noted. He had moved to stand beside Rose.

  “Why not just take her over to Memphis, find out what’s exactly wrong with her foot, let her get the right treatment, and then make the call?” he asked.

  Rose glanced over at Thomas. She was grinning at him. She was amazed at what a good team they were.

  Sheriff Montgomery glanced around at the group gathered near him. He shook his head and blew out a long breath. “What is it with you people at Shady Grove?” He rolled his eyes at what he was deciding to do.

  Rhonda, Lucas, Thomas, Rose, and Willie waited.

  “All right, I’ll take her over to the hospital and get her looked at and then I’ll make the call to Pierre. Rose, since you’re a medically trained professional, I’m going to let you ride with me over to Memphis and see if you can hear the rest of her story. In the meantime, I’ll try to make some calls to see what exactly happened in South Dakota.”

  The group gave a collective sigh.

  “I don’t know why I let you-al
l get to me like this,” he muttered, shaking his head as he strolled of fin the direction of his vehicle.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out,” Rose said to the others and then quickly followed behind him.

  FOURTEEN

  You think that’s the right thing, letting her ride back there with the perp?” Deputy Davis asked the sheriff. He had turned around in his seat and stared long and hard at Rose sitting with the unrestrained Chariot Stevens. He was not very happy about having to go all the way into Tennessee to take a fugitive to get medical care. He was an officer who thought a person wanted for a crime like murder ought not to have any special treatment. And he considered X-rays and pain pills to be special treatment.

  “I said it was fine and that’s the end of it,” the sheriff replied. He knew letting Rose ride in the back with the fugitive was against protocol, but he figured Rose could get more information from her than he could. And in spite of Rose’s tampering in previous cases, Montgomery trusted her. She had, after all, done what she had promised. She had brought the girl to him.

  Deputy Martin, the newest employee in the sheriff’s department, had been sent back to the station. Sheriff Montgomery didn’t need both of the men going over to Memphis to wait with him in the emergency room so he just took Davis with him.

  “Besides, what is she going to do?” Montgomery replied, looking in his rearview mirror to watch the two women behind him. “They’re sitting in the backseat of a moving car,” he added.

  The deputy glanced around behind him, gave a kind of disapproving look at Chariot and Rose, and then turned to face the road ahead. He rolled down his window a bit. “It’s warm tonight,” he commented. And the two men chatted about the weather and about Arkansas football, always a favorite subject among lawmen from that particular state.

  “How are you doing?” Rose asked Chariot, deflecting the animosity coming from the deputy.

  “I’m okay,” she responded.

  Rose took in a deep breath. She knew that they didn’t have a lot of time. She wasn’t sure where to start with her questions, but she knew she had to start asking something.

  “All right, Chariot, we have to find out everything we can if we’re going to get you out of this. Tell me exactly what happened the night Jason woke you up, the night he was …” She paused. “Killed,” she added, hating the way she had started the interview. She sounded more like an interrogating officer, like her father, than she did a friend or someone simply concerned.

  Chariot leaned back hard against the car seat and closed her eyes. It was obvious to Rose that her ankle was hurting.

  “I had fallen asleep,” she began, going through the night as she had over and over again in her mind since leaving Pierre. “Jason woke me up about four thirty. He was already dressed and he just told me that I had to get up and get ready to leave.”

  “Did he say why?” Rose asked.

  Chariot shook her head. “He just said that we had to go, that he was real sorry, that he knew what it meant for me to leave, and that he promised to make it right, but that there was no choice, we had to get out of town.”

  “You mentioned that he had been acting strange or different during the days leading up to the night he was murdered, how so?”

  “Something was wrong,” Chariot replied. “I didn’t know it at the time, but now I remember him doing some different things before that night,” she added.

  “Like what?” Rose asked. “What kind of things?”

  “He just seemed real distracted about something. He acted like he used to act when he had a job he was doing.” Chariot slumped further down in the seat. She winced with pain.

  “Is the ice helping any?” Rose glanced down at the girl’s ankle. She leaned over and readjusted the small ice pack that she had gotten from the office before they left Shady Grove.

  “A little,” Chariot replied.

  Rose sat back in her seat. “Tell me about the night he was murdered.”

  Chariot sighed. She had not talked about the murder to anyone. “I didn’t realize how much danger we were in. I was working the morning shift at the pancake house and when I came home, he wasn’t there. I fell asleep and when I got up, he was just coming in the door.” Chariot recalled the night. “He seemed real happy, different from before, like he had accomplished something important.” She paused. “And there was something more, a couple of days before, he acted like he had gotten more than he hoped for or something.”

  “What makes you think that?” Rose asked.

  “He just seemed happy and he made a lot of calls and he laughed one day when I came home from work and asked me wouldn’t it be nice if my pancake diner days were over. I thought that was especially strange because neither one of us had much money,” Chariot noted.

  “Did you know this policeman that you saw leave your apartment, the one who shot Jason?” Rose kept pushing the girl to think about that night in Pierre. She knew that this was the guy who was framing Chariot and that they had to figure out who he was if they were going to get the charges dropped.

  Chariot shook her head. “But I’ve seen guys like him before,” she said. “When I did time in jail, they all acted like that, you know, real smart and like they ran the show. This guy, even though I just had a glimpse of him, I could tell he was just like those others.”

  “But he wasn’t one of the guys that you figure was with Jason to do this robbery that you think he had to do?”

  Chariot shook her head again. “Those guys were losers. And none of them would have had the guts to kill somebody.”

  Rose glanced up to see if the sheriff and the deputy were listening, but they seemed to be engaged in their own conversation. With the window rolled down on the passenger’s side and with the police scanner on, Rose figured that it was hard to hear their conversation as they drove across the bridge to Memphis.

  “Okay, let’s think about whatever Jason had done with the group of guys,” Rose said, thinking Jason’s actions needed an explanation as well. “Do you have any idea when that happened? Was there ever anything in the news about a robbery or a break-in at a politician’s house?” She remembered that Chariot had mentioned that she thought it was a rich or famous person. She had not asked Chariot why she had thought this and now she wondered about that notion.

  Chariot tried to remember what she had seen in the news the week before she had left Pierre. “No, I don’t recall anything.” She paused. “That is odd, isn’t it?” she noted. “I mean, that there was never anything said about somebody being robbed.” She paused. “In Pierre, there isn’t a lot of news, so it seems like that would have been all over the papers at least.”

  Rose nodded. “What about that name again, ‘the president’? Any other ideas about that?”

  Chariot shook her head.

  “Who would Jason have agreed to rob?” Rose asked. “Maybe a rancher or some politician?”

  Chariot sighed. She leaned her elbow on her knee and placed her chin in her hand. “I don’t know. I just think it was some rich guy.”

  “And you think most of the rich people in Pierre are either the ranchers or those in the legislature?” Rose asked.

  Chariot shrugged. “I never thought about who had money in Pierre.” And then, suddenly, her eyes got big and she turned to Rose. “The drug dealer,” she announced. “That’s who it is,” she said.

  “The president is a drug dealer?” Rose asked.

  Chariot sat up in her seat. “I remember!” She shook her head. “It was this guy outside Pierre that ran a meth lab. He had a lot of money and I think I heard somebody call him something like that, the president or something, I can’t remember. But I bet that’s who it was!”

  “Well, that might make sense as to why there was nothing in the news about a robbery, if it was a drug dealer, I mean.” Rose considered this idea. “He probably wouldn’t report anything stolen to the police, but—”

  “He would definitely kill the guys who did it,” Chariot interrupted Rose with
the logical explanation.

  The two women sat quietly, considering this possibility. It did make sense to Rose that Jason could have been involved in robbing a criminal. There was probably a large amount of money involved and there would be no police inquiry. It would have been extremely risky to rob a drug dealer, but obviously could have been very profitable.

  “What about this thing Jason said they were looking for?” Rose asked, recalling what Chariot had said earlier in the evening about the moments before Jason was killed. “Do you think he was in a good mood after the robbery because he had something he thought could make him more money?”

  Chariot thought about the question. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see him with anything different after the night you think he did the robbery?”

  “It’s like I said, I don’t know what that could be,” she said. “I’ve looked through everything that was in the car,” she added. “And now that I think about it, I can’t believe that Jason would be stupid enough to take something from a drug dealer. He knew those guys. He wasn’t dumb like that,” she said.

  Rose shook her head. “But he did get involved to start with,” she noted. “And maybe he thought he wouldn’t get caught. Maybe he thought it was a perfect crime.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Chariot insisted.

  “No, I guess not,” Rose responded. “But why would he have been involved with these guys in the first place? I thought Jason was clean.”

  “I don’t think he had any choice about the robbery,” Chariot finally acknowledged.

  “What does that mean exactly?” Rose asked.

  Chariot shook her head. “I don’t know anything for sure,” she confessed. “I just think Jason was forced into participating.”

  Rose waited. She could tell that Chariot had more to say.

  “Sometimes, you get in a position where you owe somebody something,” she explained. “You know what I mean?” she asked.

  Rose nodded. She did understand that.

  “And people who use other people, they know that.”

  There was a hesitation.