Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “But if she was—” he began.

  “I think if she were raped or sodomized there wouldn’t be any doubt,” I said, cringing to have to think, let alone say, such things.

  Dad and I were standing on an old twin-trail logging road beneath rows of slash pines not far from the institution. Pete had agreed to let Dad’s department coordinate with the lab to have the evidence processed, and Dad had driven out to collect the evidence. Not wanting to be seen making the exchange, we had opted to meet on the small trail used in years past to harvest the trees growing here previously.

  “If not the little girl,” he said, “what about the woman? The mother?”

  “Could be,” I said. “There’s talk about her having a thing for black men and she obviously has a history with inmates, but...”

  “But what?”

  “They were found in the visitor’s bathroom and if someone saw her leave my office, they’re not saying,” I said.

  Squinting as he gazed into the distance, I could tell that what he was straining to see was behind, not before, his eyes.

  As usual, being caught in the mire of human depravity that accompanies a murder investigation made me feel tainted, my soul soiled, and I longed to be, if not innocent, for surely I would never be that again, at least cleansed.

  “What if she weren’t meeting an inmate, but an officer?” he said. “Of course Coel would say she never left the office if he was the one she left it for.”

  The interest on his face and light in his eyes made Dad look younger, and seeing him so fully engaged made me glad we had involved him.

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “Have you ever considered a career in law-enforcement?”

  He smiled. “Sometimes I think I should,” he said. “Most of the time I feel like a damn politician.”

  The rows of trees all around us were tall and fat, ready to be harvested again, which probably explained why the logging road was so overgrown. It had been many years since it was last used.

  “You thinking these two were used for vaginal intercourse and this one for anal?” he asked, nodding toward the two bags of condoms I had just given him.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But as far as we know, there were only two females in the chapel that night and they were inside a locked office.”

  “Inmates?” he asked.

  “Possibly,” I said, “but a visitor or a staff member had to bring them in.”

  “What about Bobby Earl?” he asked. “Could he have slipped in the back and had sex with one of the inmates while he was supposed to be in your office?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think there was enough time,” I said, “but I guess it’s possible.”

  We both grew quiet a moment.

  The midmorning sun was bright and hot, and the tall slash pines offered little shade, and as we both began to sweat, I noticed that we did so in the same places—our hairlines and the bridges of our noses.

  “Of course, the condom used for anal intercourse wasn’t necessarily used to have sex with a man,” I said, and felt awkward talking about such things with my dad.

  His eyebrows shot up. “The woman?”

  “The presence of a tampon might suggest that Bunny or whoever the hypothetical woman was, was on her period and she and her partner opted for anal intercourse instead.”

  “That makes sense,” he said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “That might just be it.”

  “It’s just one of many possibilities,” I said. “I’m hoping the lab can tell us which one it really was.”

  “Doesn’t look like there’s much of anything in these two,” he said. “Looks like more residue’s on the outside than the inside. Maybe our guy can’t close the deal.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, “but if that’s the case, why two?”

  “Maybe he wore three—left the outer two and took the one with the evidence,” he said. “Bobby Earl’s smart enough to do that. We’ve just got to find out if he, Bunny, or Nicole left your office or if anyone got in.”

  “There’s only one person who can tell us for sure,” I said, beginning to ease back toward my truck.

  “Where’re you goin’?”

  “To ask him.”

  23

  The chow hall of Potter Correctional Institution was a cross between a cafeteria and an enlisted men’s mess hall, combining the very worst elements of both. Inmates were lined up against the wall and spilling out the back door where they entered to be served. At the opposite side, inmates poured out of the exit door after dumping the remainder of their food in a trash can and dropping off their trays.

  In between the line of inmates entering and the line of inmates exiting, the tables were filled with inmates eating. Each stainless steel table was bolted to the floor and had four stools attached to it so that neither table nor chairs could be snatched up and used as weapons.

  A few of the inmates scattered throughout the crowd had their heads down, elbows working, shoveling in their food. However, most of them ate lazily in between conversation, bursts of laughter, and making deals under the table. Prison economy is one of beg, bully, and barter, and every inmate at PCI was well versed in the art of the deal.

  Near the entrance, leaning against the back wall, Roger Coel stood stiffly, keeping an eye on the inmates as they ate.

  “Did you know Stone’s blaming me for what happened?” he asked without preamble.

  I shook my head.

  “He’s written a report that recommends my immediate dismissal,” he said. “I’m under investigation. My attorney says if they put this on me, I could face criminal and civil charges in outside court.”

  Roger Coel had been a soldier before becoming a correctional officer and it still showed in his erect posture, his precision, rigidity, and affinity for uniformity.

  “Tell me again exactly what happened that night,” I said.

  He sighed heavily and shook his head.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw an inmate sneak in on the other side of the line and take a place close to the front. I wondered if I should say something to Coel, who seemed to be concentrating on me.

  “Excuse me a second,” he said, and strode over to the line.

  “Gibbs, I told you if I caught you skipping in line again I’d write you up,” he said. “Come on.”

  “But Officer Coel, I—” Suddenly, the inmate saw something in Coel’s face that said resistance was futile. He followed Coel, slinging his arms and shaking his head in silent protest. Coel led him over to the corner of the chow hall and stood him in it as if he were the class clown.

  “Every inmate gets to eat every time,” Coel said when he reached me again. “Every inmate gets the same amount regardless of when he eats. There’s no logical reason to break the line. None.”

  I could tell that the inmates’ insistence on breaking the rules offended Coel’s military sensibility and bothered him more than it would most.

  “Unless there’s just something in you that has to break the rules,” I said.

  “Criminal mentality,” he said. “We’re surrounded by it. All we do is keep them a while until they get out and rather than skip line, they rob banks. Rather than disrespecting a female officer, they’re gang-raping a woman in their neighborhood.”

  “Some change,” I said.

  “They’re the exception,” Coel said.

  I didn’t say anything. He was right, of course, but if I dwelt on it I wouldn’t be able to do my job.

  In the silence that followed the grim reality we had just discussed, I could hear numerous inmates complaining about their food, the force of their negativity palpable.

  “I don’t have anything to add to what I’ve already said about what happened,” he said.

  “Well, can I just ask a few questions?”

  He shrugged, his eyes leaving mine briefly to scan the noisy chow hall. When he got the attention of a group at a table in the corner, he pointed to his watch signaling their fifteen min
utes were up.

  “Did Bobby Earl, Bunny, or Nicole go anywhere in the chapel beside my office and the sanctuary?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded. “Positive.”

  “They never left my office by the hallway door during the service?”

  “How many different ways can I say the same thing?” he said. “No, they didn’t leave your office. No one went in and none of them came out—except to go the platform.”

  “What if I said we found evidence that suggests they might have gone into the back during the service?”

  “What if you did?” he asked.

  “Listen,” I said. “If you’re gonna change your story, now’s the time to do it. Get in front of this thing and it’ll go a lot easier on you.”

  He turned his attention away from the inmates and fully onto me, his pale, lightly freckled face a mixture of anger and incomprehension.

  “You tryin’ to help Stone set me up?” he asked. Then patting my chest, asked, “You wearin’ a wire?”

  “I’m only trying to find out what happened,” I said.

  “Well, then why won’t you hear what I’m sayin’?” he asked.

  “I just want you to be sure,” I said.

  He laughed coldly. “I think I’m the only one who is,” he said. “And I am. I’m certain that no one went in and no one came out of that office. Strap me to a polygraph right now and take my statement. I tell the truth all the time. I swear to God what I’m saying is true. And I’m willing to back it up by beating the box.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I believe you.”

  “Oh, that’s such a relief,” he said.

  Ignoring his sarcasm, I asked, “Did the Caldwells go into the chapel before you got there?”

  He shook his head. “I unlocked the chapel for them, let them in, searched the place—including your office and bathroom. No one was in there. No one. I did my job. I did my best to protect that little girl and I’ll swear under oath, I’ll take a polygraph on national television that everything I’ve said is the truth, so help me.”

  “So what do you think happened?” I asked.

  “There’s only one or two things that could have happened,” he said. “Either Bobby Earl or Bunny Caldwell killed their daughter or they did it together. No one else could have.”

  24

  Tell me about Bobby Earl and Bunny Caldwell,” I said into the receiver.

  I was seated at the desk in the staff chaplain’s office in the chapel, collar and shoes off, enjoying the cool air and solitude.

  “I heard what happened,” Chaplain Rouse said. “What was that little girl doing in your chapel?”

  Jeremiah Rouse, one of the oldest and most respected chaplains in the state of Florida, was a thick-bodied, balding black man of indeterminate age—one of those people who looked middle-aged their whole lives.

  We had become fast friends when I met him at a statewide chaplaincy meeting in Orlando, which was why I didn’t mind calling him now.

  After answering his question, I said, “You were the chaplain when Bobby Earl was there, weren’t you?”

  As I recalled, he had been the chaplain at Lake Butler for as long as they had a chapel at Lake Butler.

  “Uh huh,” he said, “and Bunny was my secretary.”

  “So they met in the chapel?” I asked.

  “I’d’ve never had them working together if I’d known what was happening, but I didn’t even suspect anything until he was about to EOS,” he said, referring to Bobby Earl’s release date or End Of Sentence.

  “How long did she stay after he was released?”

  “She didn’t leave right away,” he said. “She had to pay the bills until Bobby Earl could get his ministry established.”

  “What kind of inmate was Bobby Earl?”

  “Perfect in every way but one,” he said.

  “Which was?”

  “He tried to run my chapel.”

  “And he had an affair with a staff member,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Every way but two.”

  “So you think his conversion was genuine?”

  “Who am I to judge?” he asked. “But look at the fruit. All he’s done. I’d say it was genuine. You don’t think he killed his...” He trailed off as if unable to say it.

  “Do you think he’s capable?” I asked.

  “I’ve worked inside too long not to know anybody’s capable of anything,” he said. “But I’d have to see evidence to be convinced.”

  “What about Bunny?” I asked. “Could she—”

  “Same answer,” he said. “I’d have a very hard time believing it of either of them.”

  “There’s a rumor going around that Bunny had or has a thing for black men,” I said, “that Nicole was actually her biological daughter.”

  He hesitated before speaking again. As I waited, I could hear the little bits of static and white noise that were undetectable when we were talking.

  “I did see in Bunny an especially strong interest in black men,” he said, “but primarily as forbidden fruit. The interest was in illicitness more than anything else, I think. The way she was raised, black men were off limits.”

  “Did she ever...”

  “Come on to me?” he said. “She did. Which, with our age differences, my position of authority, and me being a married man, confirms what I said about it being stolen bread.”

  “Do you remember another inmate there around that time named Cedric Porter?” I asked.

  “I always suspected they were involved,” he said. “He was a chapel clerk for a while, too. He was one smooth dude. Full of himself like nobody’s business.”

  “Cedric Porter?” I asked, my voice conveying my disbelief.

  I thought about the broken and beaten-down man I knew and wondered if his transformation was the result of lengthy incarceration or a relationship with Bunny Caldwell.

  “Yeah,” he said. “He was very charismatic—and I don’t mean in the spiritual sense. All the cats who knew him from the street said he was a real player.”

  “He’s nothing like that now,” I said. “I know growing up, and especially doing time, can take the starch out of a man, but—”

  “He fell apart when I had him reassigned,” he said, “and until this moment I never could figure out why it changed him so much, but now...”

  “You think it had to do with Bunny?”

  “She’s the one who asked me to reassign him,” he said. “They had been close up until then—a lot closer than I knew at the time, I guess—but then Bobby Earl came to work for me and they began to get close. One day she came to me and said Cedric was making her uncomfortable. Being too familiar and forward with her. I hated to hear it because he was one of my best clerks, but she was staff and I had to let him go.”

  “So she gets involved with Bobby Earl and, to break it off with Cedric, she has him reassigned, which leaves him devastated because he really loved her?” I asked.

  “I’d never thought about it that way until now, but it fits,” he said.

  We both grew quiet a moment, and as I thought about what he had told me, my other line buzzed.

  “Can I put you on hold a moment,” I said. “I don’t have a secretary—and now I’m not sure I want one.”

  He laughed and I took the other call. It was the infirmary. They had an inmate who needed to see me.

  When I punched in Chaplain Rouse’s line again, I said, “If Cedric is Nicole’s biological father and Bobby Earl or Bunny killed her, do you think they’d go after him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “He’s in the infirmary,” I said. “He’s just been attacked.”

  25

  I watched from the nurses’ station through the steel reinforced glass as Cedric Porter was wheeled into the infirmary and helped onto one of the beds. His head was wrapped in a large white bandage quickly turning red from the blood seeping into it.

 
The infirmary was a rectangular room with two rows of beds on each side and an open bathroom area at the end. Windows on all sides prevented any privacy, and bright white tile floors made it seem cold, sterile, and uncomfortable. It was not a pleasant place. Inmates were not encouraged to come here. Cedric was the only inmate in the infirmary. Through the windows on the far side I could see that the suicide cells running along the hallway were empty, and in the hushed quiet of the enclosed space there seemed to be no sound.

  When the nurse had returned to the station, I asked, “What happened to him?”

  “Assault,” she said. “Somebody tried to kill him.”

  Like an unusually high percentage of the nurses at PCI, she was obese, perpetually breathing heavily and moving slowly.

  “How?”

  “An old standard,” she said. “Lock in a sock. Happened in the bathroom of his dorm.”

  “Do they know who attacked him?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “The officer heard something from inside his station—that’s how hard the lick was—everyone else was at chow. Anyway, he ran out of the wicker, interrupting the attack, and the killer ran away. The officer saved Porter’s life.” As I turned to walk back into the infirmary, she added, “He wasn’t too happy about it either.”

  “The officer?”

  “Porter.”

  I understood the feeling well. I often encountered it in the bereaved. But, as much as Cedric may not want it to, the feeling would pass. He would want to live again. We just had to keep him alive until then.

  “How are you?” I asked as I walked up to him.

  He opened his eyes slightly, closed them again, and said, “Not quite bad enough.”

  “Did you see who did it?”

  He started to shake his head, winced in pain, and said, “No, sir. I didn’t.”

  “Well, I’m gonna find out,” I said. “Anything I can do for you in the meantime?”

  “Get him to come back and finish the job,” he said. “I’d rather be with Nicole.”