She smiled.
Still later that night, I took her home and kissed her good night.
It was a perfect first kiss. Gentle, slightly lingering, hinting of more, much more.
23
Laura and I were headed to Tallahassee beneath a bank of gray rain clouds.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
We were on Highway 20 in Dad’s new Ford Explorer—borrowed because my old Chevy S-10 was too rough a ride for a day date to Tallahassee.
Laura, who was far less talkative today, looked regal in her long, fitted black dress. Hair down, small gold loop earrings, a single gold chain around her neck. Understated. Devastating.
“When are you going to tell me why we’re dressed like this?” she asked.
I was wearing a black Mark Alexander suit with a gray pinstripe, a black shirt with an Episcopal collar, and black wing tip shoes.
“Did you bring a change of clothes?” I asked.
“Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question.”
So far I had learned that she is working at FedEx while finishing up her master’s degree in counseling at FSU. She and her dad live in Tallahassee, though not together, her mom and sister in Pottersville, where she visits most weekends. Her mom teaches school and is the sister of the wealthy Pottersville Bank president, and her sister Kim plans to attend TCC in the fall.
“You don’t like surprises?” I asked.
“No. Not really.”
I nodded. “We are going out to eat and to listen to jazz in the park and to spend a leisurely afternoon in our state’s beautiful capital after the funeral of an inmate who was killed on Monday.”
“You’re taking me to a funeral on our first date? I hate funerals.”
“Don’t know anybody who loves them.”
The sides of the highway, like every highway in rural Northwest Florida, were lined with rows and rows of slash pines. Occasionally, when the sun peeked out from the gathering rain clouds, it shone just above and behind the rows of trees, causing them to cast shadows across the highway that looked like prison bars.
“I arranged for you to stay with some friends of mine during the funeral if you don’t want to go. Or I could drop you at the mall. It’ll take less than an hour.”
“You go to a lot of inmates’ funerals?” she said.
“This is my first,” I said. “But I’m new.”
“Why this one?” she asked.
“His family asked me to do it.”
“You’re doing the funeral?” she asked, her eyes widening.
I nodded.
“Did you know the family from before?” she asked.
“I’ve never met them, and if I met the inmate, I don’t remember it.”
She was quiet a moment, and I could tell she was processing all this.
“You’ve been giving me such a hard time I thought it’d be funny to surprise you with a funeral, but you don’t have to go.”
The sun peeked out from behind the clouds and reflected off the car in front of us. I put on my shades.
When I pulled out in the other lane to pass, I noticed Laura reached over and grabbed the door handle, her knuckles turning red then white.
After we had safely passed the car and she had time to recuperate, she said, “If we make it to Tallahassee, I’d like to go to the funeral with you.”
The clouds covered the sun again. I pulled my shades off.
“Now will you tell me about yourself?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You seem to see way too much as it is.”
I looked at her with an expression that said I don’t buy it.
The funeral home was actually a small double-wide trailer only slightly larger than mine, but plenty big enough for the small number of people who showed up for Ike Johnson’s funeral.
In addition to Laura and myself, there were four other people there—two elderly black ladies, his grandma and aunt, and two young people, his sister and his friend.
The funeral home was named Jack’s. It didn’t even say Jack’s Funeral Home on the sign—just Jack’s.
An uneven number of wooden pews sat on the thin red carpet that smelled like feet and old socks.
I had wrestled with what to say all week. I felt it must be something about love’s ability to redeem the worst of situations and people, but until I began to speak, I didn’t know exactly what I would say.
“According to one of my favorite passages from the Hebrew Bible, God’s mercies are new every morning. Every single morning, God’s infinite mercies are fresh and unused and waiting for us. They were waiting for Ike this morning no less than for you and me. You may say that Ike didn’t live the way he should have and so surely God’s mercies were not available for him. But I say that it is exactly when we don’t do what we should that we need mercy most, and it is also when mercy is most available to us.
“Grace is not what we deserve, but what we need. Justice gives us what we deserve, but grace gives us what we need. If God doesn’t love Ike as much as he does you and me, then God’s love is conditional. But if love is perfect, if God is love, then we are all loved beyond reason, beyond deserving, beyond understanding.
“Today, like every day, all we have to do is accept the absolute, unconditional, perfect love of God—accept it and let ourselves be changed by it. As for Ike, remember Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son—welcomed home even after he rejected his dad, ran away to a foreign land, wasted all his money on parties and prostitutes. No matter what we do, we are wanted, we are welcome to come home.
“This past Tuesday, Ike closed his eyes in this world and opened them in the next. I trust he opened them to the familiar and loving eyes of a father, who welcomed him home. Johnathan Edwards, the famous Puritan preacher, was wrong. We’re not sinners in the hands of an angry God. We’re sinners in the hands of a merciful and loving God.”
After the funeral, the family thanked me and tried to pay me but I wouldn’t take it.
As Laura and I were preparing to leave, the young man said to be a friend of Ike’s asked if he could talk to me.
“I loved Ike,” he said, looking down at the floor. “I even went to see him a couple of times in prison. But then something happened to him. Drugs, I think, but something else too. He got in over his head. I think they killed him. I wanted you to know.”
“Who do you think killed him?” I asked.
“Whoever he was involved with,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Don Hall.”
“Is there a number I can reach you at if I find something out or need to ask you more questions?”
He shook his head and walked away. After taking about five steps, he stopped, nearly turned around, but then continued walking.
“Do you believe all that?” Laura asked when we were back in the car.
“Believe all what?” I asked.
“All those things you said in your message, which was excellent and perfectly appropriate, by the way.”
“Thank you. Yes, I do.”
“How can you believe such things when the world is the way it is?”
“How can I not?”
“You spoke about mercy and grace, but where is it really? Where do you see any evidence of it? I really want to know.”
“Dancing with you last night. That was a grace. And your peach perfume. A good book. Sunset. Sunrise. A rainy night. The love of a parent. The loyalty of a friend. Grace surrounds us.”
“But you can’t know all of this, all those things have meaning?”
“I get that it’s all wishful thinking, hope and faith, but . . . they have meaning to me.”
24
Under cover of a small oak grove, I parked on an old twin-path logging road in Dad’s Explorer.
I had taken Laura home after our day in Tallahassee, and was parked in a location that gave me a good view of the prison without being observed by Tower One.
If I had been observed, the roving patrol would ha
ve driven out to investigate. If an officer had driven out, I would have been in trouble in more ways than one.
There was, I just discovered while searching for a flashlight, a firearm in the vehicle. Firearms on state prison property were against the law.
In addition to the Smith .38, Dad had an expensive pair of binoculars, which came in handy.
I sat there in the dark watching and thinking, my window rolled down.
Eventually, Captain Skipper appeared near the front of the institution—walking an inmate into the sally port and getting into a van.
In violation of DOC policy, the inmate was neither cuffed nor shackled, and there was no armed officer accompanying them.
The front gate rolled open and the van pulled out of the institution, heading down the two-mile county road to the main highway into town.
I followed.
The night was pleasant, the moon full, the sky clear.
I followed a quarter of a mile back with my lights off.
When the van reached the main highway, it turned toward town.
As I neared the intersection, a car passed by on the main highway. Turning my lights on, I followed it, leaving it between me and the van.
At the next intersection, some two miles from town, the van turned left and the car between us continued straight.
When the van had a sufficient lead again, I turned and followed.
The highway was desolate, with only the occasional house or trailer, most of which sat a good distance off the road under the cover of pine trees.
Pulling over and using the binoculars, I gave the van as much of a lead as possible.
About a mile and a half up on the right, the van turned in to the residence of Russ Maddox, the president of Potter State Bank, the wealthiest man in Potter County and Laura’s uncle.
Russ Maddox was a middle-aged bachelor who had lived alone for as long as I could remember. Slightly effeminate, odd and awkward, he was the subject of much small-town speculation.
By the time I reached the driveway, the van had disappeared into the woods that served as Russ’s front yard.
I pulled the Explorer off the road about a half mile down from the driveway and moved through the woods toward what was known in town as Maddox Mansion.
The light from the moon shone down so brightly the pines cast shadows.
No breeze. No movement.
The undergrowth was thick, moving through it slow, and at one point I tripped over a fallen scrub oak it was camouflaging.
The ground was dew damp and cooler than I expected.
When I reached the end of the woods at the edge of the yard, I could see the front of the house.
The house was dark, the only illumination visible coming from a security light near the closed garage doors. In front of them I could see Maddox’s dusty-rose-colored Lincoln and a gray Toyota Tercel.
Skipper was banging on the imposing solid oak door, the inmate beside him. I couldn’t be positive from this distance but something about the inmate reminded me of Anthony Thomas.
After a few more minutes of banging, Skipper and the inmate turned to leave. When they did, I saw that it was Anthony Thomas. He was walking like he was drunk.
Skipper helped him into the van and then jumped in himself. In another few moments they were gone.
Glancing at my watch, I read 1:46 a.m., I ran toward the Explorer.
It took me three minutes to reach the Explorer—far longer than Skipper needed to reach the end of the driveway.
I paused at the edge of the woods to see which way the van would turn, but it was already gone.
25
On Sunday morning, beneath a clear blue sky and sunny, hot day, I drove out to Dad’s secluded little five-acre farm to return his vehicle.
“Thanks for the use of the Explorer,” I said.
“How’d the date go? Come in for a minute. I need to talk to you.”
He led me down the short hallway to a great room with very little furniture in it. A large stacked-stone fireplace on the back wall had an unvarnished wood hearth that was filled with pictures and marksman trophies. Above the fireplace on the dark paneled wall, the head of a large elk was mounted.
He took a seat in an old gray recliner that was positioned in front of the TV. It creaked when he plopped down in it. The only other place to sit was a dark gray couch in front of the wall opposite the fireplace, but to sit there was to sit behind him, so I stood.
The house smelled as it always smelled—dusty, slightly mildewed, and like a pack of wild dogs lived there. The pack-of-wild-dogs smell came from Wallace, an Irish setter who was currently occupying the couch—another reason I stood.
Before he got to what he needed to talk to me about, I told him about what I had seen at Russ Maddox’s house last night—an account I had already given twice this morning, once to Daniels and once to Stone.
We talked about Ike Johnson’s death and the investigation and what Molly Thomas had told me and what else Skipper might be up to, but it didn’t amount to much more than me just keeping him informed about what was going on in the county where he was the chief law enforcement officer.
“What’d you need to talk to me about?” I said.
“It’s about your mother,” he said.
They divorced when I was fourteen, when her drinking had progressed to the point that it was no longer safe to leave my brother and me with her. He divorced her after almost eighteen years and about a million second chances. It was at this time that my sister Nancy divorced herself from our entire family and moved to Chicago.
“She’s . . . I spoke to her doctor. She has cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure. Doesn’t have long.”
“You sure? She called me the other night drunk.”
“It’s her medication. She’s in the hospital. Makes her sound drunk.”
I thought about how I had spoken to her, guilt spreading through me.
“She needs someone right now,” Dad said, “and that can’t be me. Jake’s not cut out for it, and the only thing Nancy’s going to do is dance when she’s dead. It can only be you. It’s got to be you.”
“I know of no other way to put this,” I said.
“Okay,” Jasper Evans said.
He was huge man—one of the largest inmates on the compound. Well over six and a half feet tall, well over three hundred pounds with skin the color of Tupelo honey and teeth to match.
“I hear you’re one of the main suppliers of drugs on the compound.”
We were seated in my office in the chapel.
It was less than an hour until the worship service and the sounds of the choir rehearsing could be heard from within the chapel sanctuary. They were working on the song for today’s service, “Power in the Blood”—a song I had never cared for.
Since he didn’t respond, I said, “Is it true?”
He shrugged, tilted his head, and made a What can I say? expression.
“How long you been dealing?”
“Don’t deal. Supply.”
“You can no longer be our choir director.”
“Why? It’s two different things. I know doing that shit ain’t right. I don’t do it. I just transport a little of it—and not any of the hard stuff. But I love to sing. ’Specially Gospel music.”
“I know you do. And you’re good at it. But I can’t let you lead the choir.”
“I got to sing,” he said.
I nodded. “But not in the choir and not as the choir director.”
“You our chaplain because you perfect?”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to be perfect. But you can’t be a drug dealer.”
“This because of what happened to Ike. Had nothing to do with that.”
“Who did?”
He shrugged. “He was taken care of. That’s who did him. Wasn’t no inmate. Had to be an officer. He do whatever the hell he want. Get high every day. Stopped getting it from me a long time ago.”
I nodded. “Thanks for the info.
See you at the service in a little while.”
“Not if I ain’t singing you won’t.”
After the service, I went down to Medical.
I knew the body had been hidden in the closet there. I knew that Johnson, Jacobson, and Thomas all spent a great deal of time there and were all involved in whatever was going on.
“Hey, Chaplain,” Nurse Anderson greeted me loudly as I approached the medical building. She was standing outside smoking.
She was a large, attractive woman with bleached blond hair, green eyes the color of lime Jell-O, and bright red lips.
“How’s it going?”
“Just fine. You?”
Smoke came out of her mouth as she talked, and when she wasn’t speaking, she was puffing. In contrast to the dainty Capris that Sandy Strickland smoked, Anderson smoked full-sized Winstons. She held the pack along with a lighter and a paper cup with large red lipstick stains on it in her left hand.
“Anyone in the infirmary today?”
She nodded. “Two lucky winners.”
Behind us a steady stream of inmates, returning from the chapel, library, or dining hall, made their way back to the dorms. A couple of them remarked on my message as they went by. Many of them spoke or waved to Nurse Anderson. She was warm and friendly to all of them.
“Infirmary’s a pretty popular place, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You have no idea,” she said with a wink. “A lot of these men just need some female TLC.”
“ATTENTION ON THE COMPOUND,” a loud voice said over the PA system. The words echoed off the buildings. “RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM. RECALL. INMATES RETURN TO YOUR DORM.” The stream of inmates behind us became a rushing river of blue.
“Aren’t you usually on the night shift?” I asked.
“We’re all working overtime to prepare for the ACA inspection,” she said. “I work midnights mostly.”
I nodded and she took a long drag on her cigarette and a big gulp of her coffee.
“Wasn’t that just awful what happened to poor little Ike Johnson?” she said. “He was here the night before it happened. I talked with him for a pretty good while. We weren’t that busy. I just can’t believe it. Really freaked me out.”
Six John Jordan Mysteries Page 11
