Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  “What’s the black population in Pine County?” I asked.

  “Enough to cut the grass, clean the houses, and keep the jail full.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Unlike many of the things inmates said to me for shock value, he was expressing genuine sentiment. He was actually serious.

  “My family and I never miss church,” he offered. “I’m a Bible-believing Christian. I do all I can to usher in the kingdom of God.”

  He was smiling now, being both charismatic and charming. He didn’t look like the devil. Listening to him I was reminded of how many seemingly decent people were just as racist, though not as up-front about it. I recalled an incident from childhood and how sick it made me.

  When I was in the third grade, my Cub Scout troop met at the Baptist Church. We had one African-American kid whose mom made him come, though he obviously didn’t enjoy it. I’m not sure any of us really did. At one of our meetings a kid fell into the aluminum covering of a return air duct and bent it. When two of us were sent to the parsonage to tell the preacher what had happened, his son, a kid just a few years older than us, answered the door. His first words were, “Did that nigger do somethin’?” I was so shocked I couldn’t speak.

  I can’t understand racism. It’s hard for me to truly believe people like the Hawkins family exist—and I wouldn’t if I weren’t confronted by them on an almost daily basis.

  “When the kingdom comes,” he continued, “it won’t be filled with a bunch of blacks and Jews.”

  “You just left out nearly everyone in the Hebrew Bible and everyone in the New Testament, including Jesus, the most famous Jew who ever lived.”

  “You oughta be careful how you talk about our lord and savior.”

  I found myself amazed again that two people so different, so diametrically opposed as the two of us, could both consider ourselves in some sense Christian.

  Mike Hawkins and the well-meaning, more subtle racists like him proclaimed in the name of Jesus everything that Jesus was against, and it nauseated me. But I was as likely to change his world view as he was mine, so I decided not to cast any pearls before this swine.

  “If it wasn’t Sergeant Monroe, how do you think the weapon that killed Menge got into your cell?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “You tell me. They moved us outta there as soon as it happened. I’ve been over here ever since. Anyone coulda put it in my stuff. Anyone of the officers, that is. All the PM convicts’ve been over here locked down twenty-four-seven.”

  “Anyone in particular you think it might’ve been?”

  “Well, if not Monroe, then Pitts. He hates my white ass too.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Jealously.”

  I was able to keep from laughing, but I couldn’t suppress the smile on my face.

  He shook his head. “You’re a real disappointment. I expect more from a man who calls himself a minister.”

  “More what? Racism, hatred, ignorance? What exactly?”

  “I’d be careful I was you. My daddy not a man to mess with, and he has a lot of powerful friends in this great state.”

  I was surprised. “You like Florida?”

  “Until about Orlando,” he said.

  “Menge was in here for sexually assaulting a member of your family,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “What?”

  “Got nothin’ to do with me. My fuck-up brother’s kids. I could give a damn. Him, his kids, or his whore dog wife. None of ‘em’re any good. Hell, I think he musta been adopted.”

  “So you didn’t have a score to settle with Menge?”

  “If he’d a killed the little rugrats, he’d’ve been doin’ our family a favor. Whatta I care he felt them up a little?”

  I didn’t respond to his hollow bravado.

  “Let me give you a little piece of advice. Stay out of this. Back off this whole thing. You seem like a pretty good guy. I’ve never heard of you doin’ anybody wrong. So, it’d be best just to get away from those messin’ with me, ‘cause, well, you know what the good book says: eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

  I nodded. “I figured you an ‘eye for an eye’ man.”

  “Can’t argue with the book.”

  “You can read it carefully. If not, you make it say whatever you want it to. What about turning the other cheek?”

  The change in him was as severe as it was surprising. In an instant his charming, nice guy persona was discarded, the snarling rage of the wolf beneath revealing its teeth.

  “That’s not how I read it. Somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. Somebody fucks with my family, my family’s gonna fuck with them.”

  “That’s a convincing argument,” I said.

  He nodded as if it were obvious, his sense of pride and superiority palpable, but he stopped smiling when I added, “For why you’d kill Justin Menge.”

  27

  The new quad the PM inmates were housed in was filled with cigarette smoke. It curled up into the thin shafts of light coming from the narrow second-story windows and hung there like smog. The dank, smoke-filled air made me choke, and I began coughing as soon as I stepped out of Hawkins’s cell.

  The smoke was laced with sweat and urine and the thick pungent smell of unwashed bodies trapped in a confined space with very little air flow.

  “You gonna make it, Chaplain?” Milton White asked as I continued to cough.

  He was seated with two other inmates in plastic chairs, watching a local fishing show. On the opposite end of the quad, four other inmates sat at a table playing cards. Everyone else appeared to be in their cells.

  “I’m not sure,” I said as I continued trying to catch my breath.

  “You ought to have to live here with asthma,” he said.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked after I had quit coughing.

  “Sure,” he said, standing up slowly and hobbling over to me.

  He moved the way most old men with stiff and swollen joints do and winced as if his bones were grinding with each movement.

  “Mind if I sit down?” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  He eased over to the steps and slowly lowered himself down onto the third one. I stood in front of him, my right foot resting opposite his on the first step.

  “Tell me why God allows us to get like this,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Old and feeble.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Good man. I’ve no tolerance for easy answers—or anything that explains everything.”

  I nodded. Milton White was a pleasant surprise.

  “Why’re some of the men locked in their cells and some are out in the quad?” I asked.

  “They’re letting a few out at a time. Rotating. Everyone gets a turn.”

  Milton White, sometime philosopher of the PM unit, had been a gentleman thief in his youth. His specialty was large heists without weapon or accomplice. He had taken over a million before he’d ever gotten caught—and that was back when a million was a lot of money.

  “I’m sure there’s a valuable life-lesson in old age,” he said. “But I doubt I’ll learn it.”

  “Maybe this won’t be your only chance.”

  “I don’t think it will be, but I’m sure you didn’t come down here to talk about the afterlife with me, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You want to know if I killed Justin Menge. I didn’t. I didn’t have any reason to. I liked him. He was a good kid. He and Chris mainly stuck to themselves. Always polite. Quiet. So rare in here.”

  “Any ideas about who might have?” I asked.

  He looked up at the wicker. “He and Potter had a lot of problems. Potter persecuted him ‘cause he was gay. The truth is, I think Potter’s got latent tendencies. It got pretty bad. I mean, Potter knew they were having sex, but he could never catch them. They were much too smart for him—which only made things worse. Finally, Justin wrote him up.”

  �
��And you think Potter retaliated?”

  He gave me an elaborate shrug. “Could of been anyone. Don’t take this for more than it is, because it’s probably nothing, but I think he and Chris had been having trouble. Chris was about to get out. That may have had something to do with it.”

  “Why do you think Chris ran?”

  He gave me another shrug. “The obvious implication is that he’s guilty—why else do it with so little time left?”

  “Did you know he was going to?”

  “Had no idea. I’m not saying I would’ve told if I did, but I honestly didn’t. And I’ll tell you something else. No one else knew either.”

  “Because they’d’ve said something now that he’s gone?” I asked.

  “Exactly. You understand the men down here.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Anybody ever ask you how to do it—get in or out of a cell?”

  He shook his head. “Well, I mean they ask me that stuff all the time—how did I do it, could I do it again, could I show them how. But I didn’t tell anybody anything. Not really. Certainly nothing they couldn’t’ve figured out on their own.”

  “Who’d you tell the most to?”

  “Mike,” he said. “But it was a long time ago and it was about escaping.”

  “Hawkins?”

  He nodded. “But it was about someone escaping from his dad’s jail, not—” He stopped abruptly.

  “But he could use the same secrets to break into Menge’s cell, couldn’t he?”

  His eyes grew wide in recognition as he nodded his head very slowly. “He has such a short sentence. I knew he wasn’t planning to escape.”

  “How was it done?” I asked. “How did the killer get in?”

  “There’s a hundred ways. Short-circuit the lock, pick it—but he’d have to be good and it’d take some time to do it.”

  “But you could do it?”

  “I could do it. In about thirty seconds, maybe less if my arthritis wasn’t acting up. It could’ve been done with an inmate ID badge—or staff ID for that matter, but they probably wouldn’t need to do it that way. It could be done with a fork.”

  “A fork?”

  “I could do it with a fork.” As he talked, he moved his hands about in various demonstrations of what he was saying. At the end of his crooked and swollen fingers, his long yellowing fingernails came to sharp points. “Or a wad of toilet paper stuffed into the locking mechanism. Or a piece of tape. Cover the bolt or the hole in the door jamb. The thing is, just an hour or two before, all the cells were unlocked—he could’ve disabled the lock then. So, when Menge gets back in his cell, the door’s unlocked. On the way to Mass, or on the way back to the cell from library or medical, pop in, pop him, and pop out.”

  I looked over at the cell that was in the same position as Menge’s in the other quad. The stairs were close to it. In fact, they partially hid it from us the night of the murder, but the door was still visible and couldn’t have completely hidden someone trying to disable the locking mechanism.

  “Or he could’ve even gotten Justin to do it,” he continued, shifting his weight from one hip to another, wincing in pain and whistling as he did. “Maybe Justin trusted him. Maybe they were going to meet for something—a transaction, a quickie, a discussion. So Menge disables the lock and lets him in. Then the guy double-crosses him.”

  I nodded as I thought about the implications of what he was saying. That seemed much more plausible than any other scenario we’d come up with so far.

  “But the most likely way was for the guy to disable the lock early in the day, then while Justin was at his visit, sneak into his cell and wait for him. When he comes back, the guy cuts him first thing, then sneaks out to Mass or back to his cell.”

  “If you’re right, all he’d have to do was call out his cell number for Mass—while he was still in Menge’s cell—then instead of coming out, he’d slip into it.”

  28

  When I walked up to Anna, she had a worried look on her face.

  “What is it?”

  “You seen Merrill?”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  We were buzzed out of G-dorm, and, sharing an umbrella, walked up the sidewalk of the empty compound in the rain.

  “Officer Ling said he didn’t show up for work today.”

  When she saw my expression, she said, “What is it?”

  “He was going to do a little poking around in Pine County this past weekend.”

  “Oh,” she said, a look of concern crossing her face. “Well,” she added, forcing a smile, “if he’s still in Pine County he shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “That’s true.”

  The chain-link of the center gate was wet and cold as I pushed it open. The officer in the state-issued clear plastic rain poncho who unlocked it for us was sitting inside the small wooden building in between the two gates in the holding area, his poncho dripping. The tiny building looked more like a bus stop than an officers’ station and he looked about as happy as a kid waiting to go to school on a rainy day.

  “Can you stop in my office for a minute?” Anna asked.

  We had just stepped through the second gate onto the upper compound. On either side of us, the food service and classification buildings were empty, their windows coated with raindrops outside and condensation inside, the weather having driven in the little clusters of inmates who usually congregated around them.

  “Sure. Everything okay?”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, and she waited for it to end before she answered.

  “I’ve got some more information on the suspects.”

  We strolled through the empty halls, past Psychology and into Classification, our wet shoes squeaking loudly on the polished tile floor.

  As we rounded the last corner, her wet heels slipped on the slick tile, and her feet went out from under her. I reached for her at the same time she fell into me, and we both went down. As we did, I was able to turn us so I would be underneath her.

  Suddenly, we found ourselves in an intimate position gazing into each other’s eyes, faces a fraction apart.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. You’re the one who’s gonna have to be hospitalized from having an Amazon woman fall on top of you.”

  I gave her an incredulous little laugh and rolled my eyes. Though not a small woman, Anna was as far from Amazon as Pottersville was from the Rainforest.

  Neither of us made a move to get up.

  “God, I’m so glad no one saw that,” she said.

  “Don’t be so sure. Someone sees everything around here.”

  She looked around, her body rubbing against mine, but still made no attempt to get up.

  “You know we’re supposed to fill out an incident report in case we have to file for workman’s comp later.”

  “Got too much pride.”

  As I felt my body responding to hers, I thought not only of Susan, but of her news that she was pregnant and how nothing would ever be the same again. There was something about being a family instead of a couple that made my desire for Anna seem even more like betrayal.

  “I guess I should get off you,” she said, but didn’t move.

  “What’s your rush?” I asked. “Lay a while.”

  “I would, but you’re a married man.”

  “Well, you were a married woman first,” I said in my most childish voice and smiled.

  “Which is why I have no right to resent your being happily married the way I do,” she said, as she pushed herself off me and stood up.

  There it was. The as yet unspoken truth. I admired her for saying it.

  “You do?” I asked, joining her in an upright position.

  “You know I do,” she said.

  “Now you know how I’ve felt for so long.”

  “Felt?” she asked.

  “Feel.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” she said.

  Without another word, she started toward her office. I followed
after her.

  As we walked down the hallway, I thought about what had just happened. In the past, most everything she said about us had been playful—honest, but partially hidden in humor. Now, without the lubrication of humor, there was a rawness to her honesty that I hadn’t seen before.

  When we reached her office, I used her phone to call Merrill. When he didn’t answer, I called his mom. When she told me she hadn’t seen him since Saturday, I called Dad and told him what was going on. He said he’d find him and let me know.

  After I hung up, we talked for a moment about Merrill and decided that a day was too soon to get worked up over.

  “Dad’ll find him,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”

  She nodded. “No doubt.”

  “So . . . what’d you turn up on the case?”

  “A prison hasn’t been built Milton White can’t escape from. They say he’s only inside now because he’s got no place to go. He says he stays for the health insurance.”

  “I just talked to him.”

  “And?”

  “It was helpful. He had some good ideas of how our guy might have gained access to the cell.”

  “This case,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, you think you’ll be able to make one?”

  I shrugged.

  “What happens if you figure out how and who and can’t prove it to a DA or a jury?”

  “Not my department. Have to ask Daniels.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe that creep is your father-in-law again.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I said, “This is the type of case that’ll be very difficult to make—even harder to prove.”

  “It struck me again this weekend just how much Sobel and Menge looked alike,” she said, pulling two prison photos from her desk and handing them to me.

  I looked at them. “There’s a little resemblance, but they’re not twins.”

  “Those were taken when they first came into the system, but look at these.” She handed me two other pictures. “They were taken just a few months ago.”