Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  He nodded.

  We walked along in silence for a while, both of us seeming oblivious to the prison and prisoners around us, though neither of us were. But as alert as I was, Merrill was more so.

  “You need me to do anything while you’re gone?”

  “You could take a little closer look at Hawkins,” I said, “Find out what’s going on in Pine County.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Habla Ingles?” Merrill said to Matos, when we walked into the infirmary.

  Carlos Matos was lying face down, his shirt off, on the first bunk of the otherwise empty infirmary. His skin, the color of tobacco stains, ripped and torn, was covered with a clear salve. He looked up in surprise and fear at Merrill.

  “What?” he asked.

  Speaking slowly in a loud voice, Merrill said: “Do you speak fuckin’ English?”

  Merrill had slipped into his bad ass CO persona. He would be brutal, uncaring and unrelenting. He pulled it off as well as anybody at the prison. The difference between him and the others who also did it was that for Merrill it was a persona, a role—one he could slip back out of again just as quickly and effortlessly as he had slipped into it. For many of the others, they soon became the persona.

  “English?” he asked.

  “Si,” Merrill said.

  “Yes,” Matos said. “Si.”

  Carlos Matos was about five and a half feet tall, thick and meaty, but not quite muscular. His dark hair matched his eyes, and his nose spread over much of his round face. His teeth were small and very white with space between them.

  “So you understand me when I ask who cut you the fuck up?”

  He nodded. “I fell in my cell. Scraped my back on the wall and my bunk.”

  “How you say bullshit in Spanish?” Merrill asked. “I thought you said you understood my question?”

  “I did, señor,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Did I say fuck with me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh,” Merrill said, as if he suddenly got it. “You just did that on your own. You improvisin’ and shit?”

  “It is the truth.”

  “The truth. You don’t tell me the truth, they gonna have to call the doctor back in here.”

  All but the outside wall of the infirmary was steel-reinforced glass, and though the nurse doing paperwork in the nurses’ station could see everything, she kept her head down, conspicuously paying no attention to us.

  Carlos looked at me, fear in his eyes.

  I shrugged and gave him an expression like what can I do? This was Merrill’s interview. I was just along for the ride. We had different roles, different approaches, but we’d probably get the same results either way—lies, misdirection, and misinformation.

  “I look like I could stop him?” I asked. “I mean, without a gun?”

  Merrill slapped Carlos on the back with his open hand. Carlos jumped and screamed in pain.

  I winced, but neither of them saw me. Matos seemed so vulnerable, so helpless, it was easy to forget what he was capable of. A hardened gang member with assault and battery charges, among others, his current condition was deceptive. Merrill’s approach was probably the best one to take with him. It was truly amazing how many of the men in here didn’t respond to anything else, and I understood how having a strong, even menacing, warden and security presence ultimately made for a safer compound—which protected inmates as well as staff. I was just glad he was here to do it because I didn’t think I could.

  “Did that hurt?”

  He looked at Merrill in obvious pain, sweat pouring from beneath his coarse and shiny black hair.

  “Did that hurt?” Merrill asked again.

  “Si, señor, Very much.”

  His black eyes looked glazed and watery.

  “Then you got what we call a low threshold of pain,” Merrill said, wiping his hand on Matos’s shirt and tossing it on the floor. “Now, what I’m gonna do to you next—well, let’s just say it’s made some tough motherfuckers cry, so I’m pretty sure it’s gonna kill your sensitive ass.” While Merrill continued to chat with Matos, I stepped into the nurses’ office and called Daniels.

  “They find anything under Menge’s fingernails?”

  “No,” he said. “Evidently, he didn’t put up much of a fight.”

  “What about blood? Anybody else’s in his cell?”

  “Looks like just Menge’s. Just about all of Menge’s, though. What’s this about?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  “Okay. Okay,” Matos was saying when I walked back into the infirmary. “I tell you. I got into a fight.”

  “No shit,” Merrill said. “Was it with Menge before you killed him?”

  “No. No. I swear.”

  An extremely overweight nurse from the meds desk lumbered down the hallway toward the break room and the candy bars and chips it held. Gasping for breath from the effort required to walk, she alternated between glaring at Merrill and giving Matos a look of maternal pity.

  “Then who?”

  “I cannot say. Maybe he kill me.”

  “Maybe I kill you,” Merrill said. “And I’m here.”

  “He got to Menge,” he said. “You don’t think he could get to me?”

  “Who?”

  “Juan,” he said.

  “Martinez?”

  “Si. I refuse to kill Menge for him, so he had me cut. Teach me a lesson. I disobey him again, I die.”

  “You two part of the same gang?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Juan is the leader.”

  “And he killed Justin Menge?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I do not know.”

  “But he wanted you to?”

  “He wanted him dead before he could testify. He was tryin’ to set up Juan on some bullshit charge for the chief inspector. He’s really got a hard-on for Juan for some reason.”

  “If you’ve been lying to me, you’re dead,” Merrill said as we began to leave.

  “Since I told you the truth I am dead. Either way I die.”

  Merrill smiled broadly and said, “Then next time somebody ask, say ‘No Habla Ingles.’”

  19

  “You two’ve been up to no good,” Anna said when we walked into her office.

  I nodded, as we both sank down into the chairs across from her desk.

  “So tell.”

  “We had a little chat with Carlos Matos,” Merrill said, still squirming around trying to fit his large frame into the average-size chair.

  “Did he do it?” she asked.

  From behind Anna’s desk, on the shelf with all the ceramic angels, a small CD player emitted the smooth sounds of jazz. It was mood music. And it created a soulful, pleasant atmosphere that, like Anna, was out of place here. No wonder inmates lined up to get into her office, though I suspected they, like me, had other, more carnal, reasons as well.

  “Don’t ask me,” Merrill said with a wry smile. “I just available for fisticuffs when needed.”

  “Fisticuffs?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Just tryin’ it out.”

  Anna smiled and looked at me for a real answer.

  I shrugged. “I don’t think so, but . . . .”

  “I figured you’d have this thing solved by now.”

  “I keep telling you,” I said. “I’m not nearly as smart as you think I am.”

  We all grew silent a moment and I considered again how much the angels in her office reminded me of her. Like Anna, they were fiery and sensual, with a look of intelligence and simple unadorned beauty.

  She cleared her throat. “Need me to do anything on the case while you’re gone?”

  “Mind doing a little background on the suspects.”

  “Sure. Who are they? Chris Sobel . . .” she said, reaching for a pad and writing his name on it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Though you’ve probably already told me most everything on him. Mike Hawkins, Jacqueel Jefferson, Car
los Matos, Juan Martinez, and Milton White. They’re the only inmates who went anywhere close to Justin’s cell.”

  “You figured out how it was done yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Daniels has a couple of working theories, but we’re not quite there yet.”

  “Well, I might just have it. And if I haven’t, I know who can.”

  “Who?”

  “Milton White.”

  “Milton White?”

  “Oldest convict we’ve got. His DC number is in the sixties. And he’s escaped from six different maximum security prisons, including FSP.”

  I was shocked. Inmates rarely escaped from within a prison, especially not Florida State Prison, the Florida prison most like an old fashioned penitentiary. Most escapes were done by inmates who were already outside the prison—on a work squad, chain gang, furlough, or while being transported.

  She said, “Who better to commit or plan the perfect locked-cell murder than an escape artist?”

  Before I could respond, her phone rang.

  “It’s for you,” she said, handing me the receiver.

  I took the call while they continued to talk quietly about Milton White.

  “Come on,” I said after I hung up.

  “Where?” Anna asked.

  “That was Shebrica Pitts,” I said. “Michael’s wife. She wants to meet with me.”

  “So why’re we going?”

  “To put her at ease,” I said.

  “How exactly will we do that?” she asked, looking at Merrill.

  “Just being ourselves,” Merrill said. “You a woman and I a brother.”

  We met Shebrica Pitts in front of the Dollar Store in Pottersville where she worked part-time as a cashier. She was a thick woman with dark skin and long straight hair in a heap atop her head, its thick strands coated with a wet substance that made it glisten in the sunlight. Her breasts were enormous, seeming to stretch her bra to the point of tearing, but for all their heft, her backside was even bigger.

  “Damn,” Merrill exclaimed when we pulled into the small parking lot. “Just follow the booty.”

  “Have you ever known him to do anything else?” Anna said.

  “You think when she back that thing up you can hear those little warning beeps?” he asked.

  “I thought brothers liked a sister with some backside,” Anna asked.

  “Some,” he said. “Sheeit. They is such a thing as too much.”

  Merrill was in a particularly good humor, which was often the case when Anna joined us.

  Shebrica Pitts was standing at the corner of the building lighting a cigarette when we walked up. Her forehead furrowed and eyes narrowed as she looked at Merrill, then Anna, then me.

  “They’re here to put you at ease,” I said.

  She looked confused.

  “This is Merrill Monroe,” I said.

  “I’m black,” he added.

  “And Anna Rodden.”

  “I’m a woman,” Anna said.

  “We work together,” I explained. “If they hear what you have to say now it saves me the time of having to tell them later.”

  She nodded as if that were reasonable.

  Though her cigarette had been lit for a while now, she still hadn’t taken a drag.

  “We got to breathe that shit,” Merrill said, “you might as well be enjoying it.”

  She looked at the cigarette in her hand as if surprised to see it. “I don’t smoke . . . just like the breaks.”

  Beneath the overhang, the front porch of the Dollar Store was filled with several outdoor products including a barrel filled with rakes, hoes, and shovels, a stack of park-style benches, and plastic tables with matching chairs and optional umbrellas—all for what seemed to me a fraction of the cost of the materials it took to make them. The plate glass windows behind them were filled with sale signs and Halloween decorations.

  “I don’t have long,” she said. “Better get to it. Michael in trouble?”

  I shrugged. “Could be. Right now he’s a witness and a suspect in a murder investigation—but one of many.”

  I decided not to mention the possible assault charges should the video resurface.

  “He really a suspect?” she asked in surprise.

  I nodded. “So am I. Everyone who was there at the time is right now.”

  “He’s been so different lately,” she said, shaking her head. “It only started when he got on at the prison. And it’s gettin’ worse and worse.”

  “What is?” Anna asked gently.

  “He’s got no patience with me or the kids. Ten years of marriage, he never put a hand on me and only spanked the kids when he wasn’t mad.”

  From the pocket of her Dollar Store smock, she withdrew a long narrow sausage stick, peeled back its red and yellow wrapper, and began chewing on it. I thought about how trim and muscular her husband was, how different they seemed—and not just physically.

  “And now?” Anna asked.

  She swallowed. “He hits me . . . beats my kids.”

  Merrill’s reaction—the change in his posture, the flexing of his muscles—was palpable, but he didn’t say anything.

  Across Main Street, the bell of the drive-thru liquor store dinged and the clerk slid open the window. Next to it, a man was coming out of the florist shop carrying a single rose in a bud vase with a balloon tied to it.

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “Been building for about a year now, but it’s gotten real bad the past few months.”

  “Do you think he’s involved in Justin Menge’s murder?” I asked.

  She took the last bite of the sausage, wadded up the wrapper, and stuck it in the pocket of her smock. “Who’s that?”

  “The inmate who died in the PM unit.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. No, there’s no way.” Her eyes narrowed in concentration and she thought about it some more. “I ain’t sure, but I don’t think so.”

  “But you never thought he’d hit you either, did you?” Anna said.

  “That’s different.”

  “It ain’t that different,” Merrill said. “Man who a hit a woman . . .”

  “It’s not like that,” she said to him, then turning to me added, “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I want you to help him.”

  “If he wants me to,” I said. “But he’s got to—”

  “It’s that damn job,” she said.

  Paula’s question reverberated through my mind: How much does prison change a man?

  I had heard this so many times before—from spouses, children, parents, friends, even the officers themselves. The hostile, negative environment, the continuous assault on their sensibilities, the constant lack of civility, humility, even humanity, resulting in the captors acting like the captives they loathed.

  This was nothing new. What was, and what concerned me more, was the way I was feeling, the change I was experiencing. How could I, as their spiritual leader, offer them an alternative if I were no different? How could I help them deal their demons when I was continually being defeated by the same ones?

  There were so few opportunities in rural areas like this one, which, of course, was why the state built prisons in them. And now, with a soft paper market, there were less and less logging jobs. One paper mill had closed and the other was struggling. With such rampant poverty, many people took any position the prison offered—as much for the insurance as the money.

  “That’s all it is,” she continued. “That damn prison. I wish he’d go back to roofin’.”

  School was out. I could tell by the new clientele. Now, teachers—nicely dressed women, their walk intentional, their pace certain, who normally shopped in Panama City or Tallahassee—dashed into the Dollar Store, and unlike their mid-day counterparts, didn’t browse or do their week’s shopping, just picked up an odd item or two and left.

  “He won’t?” Anna asked.

  “Say he won’t.”

  Evidently the Dollar Stor
e didn’t have an intercom system. From inside the open door, a woman with a low, heavily accented voice shouted, “Shebrica open up register two, please. Shebrica.”

  “Listen,” she said, extinguishing her cigarette, “I don’t think he killed nobody, but if you find out he did, I need to know.”

  “What will you do?” Anna asked.

  She shrugged. “Don’t know, but I’ve gotta look out for my kids. Will you talk to him, try to help him?”

  I nodded.

  “You think he did it?”

  “I think he could be dangerous,” I said. “I have no idea whether or not he was involved in the murder.”

  “I can’t afford to leave him right now even if I had to,” she said. “But in a few months . . .”

  “What changes then?” Anna asked.

  “I finish my correctional officer training,” she said, without the slightest hint of irony in her voice, “and I can get on out at the prison myself.”

  20

  “I’ve got a big surprise for you,” Susan said. “And you’re gonna love it.”

  It was late Saturday afternoon. We were riding in her black BMW on 285, the under-produced, cheaply recorded sound of indie alt rock playing softly through her speakers in the back. The sun was setting, the dusk air cool and crisp, the weekend traffic light.

  It had only been three days since Justin had been murdered. As usual, things were moving quickly—they almost always did at the prison—and I didn’t want to leave, but Susan and I had been planning this for a long time, it was important to her, and I was sure the break would do me good. It was for that reason that I was determined not to talk about—and if possible not to even think about—the case this weekend.

  I had felt so dry lately, so numb inside, as if I were in a spiritual wasteland, and was hoping time away from the prison would help.

  I said, “I couldn’t love it any more than last night’s surprise.”

  When I had arrived last night, she had met me at the door wearing only her earrings.

  She smiled, and though it was spectacular, it wasn’t quite the same with her clothes on. “You’ll love this surprise, too. Just in a different way.”