Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  If she hadn’t needed a cigarette and I didn’t need to get information from her in secrecy, I wouldn’t be out here. I’d be in the chapel, and like many of the inmates cooling off there right now, it would not be for spiritual reasons.

  “He was here while we changed his medication,” she said.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “A couple of days for observation after we changed it,” she said. “Less than a week.”

  So whatever happened to make him do what he did, probably happened here.

  “He seemed despondent,” she said. “Depressed. And angry. He was very upset about something. Maybe I just think that because of what happened, but I don’t really think so.”

  I thought about what she was saying.

  “I should’ve done more for him,” she said. “Tried to find out what was really going on with him. He was one of the best inmates I’ve ever worked with. I hate that this happened.”

  “Any ideas what was bothering him?”

  She frowned, twisting her round face and raising her eyebrows. “I could be wrong,” she said. “I hope I am. I really do. But I’ve worked with a lot of them over the years, and I know the signs. I can usually tell when they walk in the door. Why didn’t I say something, do more?”

  “About what?” I asked.

  She sighed heavily. “I think he had been raped.”

  11

  I lived alone in an antiquated mobile home near the Apalachicola River in The Prairie Palm II—phase two of a failed trailer park community consisting of a single resident.

  When I first moved back to Pottersville from Atlanta, this was all I could find or afford. I had planned to stay here only temporarily, but should have taken one look at The Prairie Palm II and known what happens to plans around here.

  The truth was, I found this Spartan existence liberating, this isolated tin box on the outskirts of a tiny backwoods town appropriate for the marginal life I was living.

  This felt like a choice to me, not something foisted on me.

  Unable to sleep much at night, I occasionally came home from work, laid down on my uncomfortable couch, and attempted to read until I drifted off, telling myself all I needed was about ten good minutes to take the ache out of my head and the burn from behind my eyes. This rarely worked—it wasn’t just at night that I had trouble sleeping—but that didn’t stop me from continuing to try it.

  I was rereading Thomas Moore’s book Dark Nights of the Soul, attempting to feel sleepy, when I heard someone pull up outside.

  I was reading the book again not only because I loved Moore’s insight, honesty, and low soulish spirituality, but because I believed myself to be experiencing an extended dark night of the soul. After years of an intensely intimate, nearly mystical spiritual life, I felt dead inside. All my attempts to regain what I once had falling far short, I felt comforted by Moore’s encouragement to embrace the darkness and emptiness, allowing this depleting experience to have its way with me, trusting that its difficult gifts were necessary for my evolving humanity.

  Of course it was possible that I was just depressed.

  I slipped the tattered envelope I was using for a bookmark between the pages, closed the book, replaced it on my TBR pile on the floor, and pushed myself up off the couch.

  Sliding the thin, wrinkled blind slightly to the side, I squinted in the bright light in an attempt to identify my visitor.

  When I saw the old burgundy Dodge pickup, I knew who it was. The truck belonged to Rudy, the owner of the local diner named after him. But it wasn’t Rudy, it was his teenage daughter Carla who had come calling.

  Carla and I spent a lot of time together at night in Rudy’s Diner where she worked and I didn’t sleep. She had natural blond hair and large green eyes and the permanent sadness of a motherless child.

  As I opened the dented and leaning door, she was out of the truck and approaching the trailer. She had almost reached it when an emaciated hunting dog dove out of the back of the truck, landed face first on the ground, jumped up, and started barking and running around wildly.

  She shook her head and frowned in frustration. “I wanted to talk you into taking him before you saw him.”

  “I can see why.”

  Not only was he loud, wild, and malnourished, but he was missing hair in spots and had red patches on his ears and legs.

  Moving about frantically, he would occasionally dash toward us, always stopping short, yelp loudly, then run back.

  She turned toward him, leaned forward, and began to call him. “Walker. Walker. Here Walker. Come here boy.”

  Like Walker, Carla was much thinner than she should be, and I worried that she might be anorexic. She had a new boyfriend, and lately she had been far more withdrawn, far less confiding, far more self-conscious.

  I ducked back into the trailer and grabbed some sandwich meat from the refrigerator. When I joined Carla in the yard I knelt down on the ground and held out the meat. Walker barked at me but refused to come close enough to take the meat from my outstretched hand. I broke off a little piece of the meat the threw it to him. He jerked back from the meat and ran away a few steps before coming back and inhaling it.

  “He’s been getting into the garbage behind the diner,” she said. “I’m afraid Rudy’s gonna shoot him.”

  “He’d have to have good aim,” I said.

  She laughed.

  I held out the meat again and though he didn’t want to come close to me his hunger got the better of him and he slowly and warily walked over. As he ate the meat from one hand, I slowly raised my other one to pet him. He cowered and crouched down, wetting the ground beneath him as he did.

  “It’s okay,” I said, in that silly voice humans use to talk to animals and babies. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  Walker was mostly white with two large black spots on his back and sides and brown around his face and ears. He had short hair, a long narrow tail, brandy-brown eyes, and was of indeterminate breed.

  “Obviously he was abused before he was abandoned,” she said. “Son of a bitch. Most rednecks are better to their hunting dogs than their kids. Not this bastard.”

  “You got a particular bastard in mind?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Plenty enough around.”

  “He’ll probably come looking for him when hunting season starts,” I said.

  “But he won’t recognize him all filled out and healthy, with his shiny new coat and collar that says ‘Walker Jordan.’”

  I laughed.

  “Besides,” she said, “you get him fixed he won’t want him.”

  “You know I may have a few plans of my own between now and hunting season,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “Reading a bunch of books? Hanging out at the diner at night? Dreaming about Anna? What?”

  “That all you think I do?”

  “I guess occasionally you teach somebody something about God or solve a murder, but those things don’t take up enough of your time. You need a hobby.”

  “So really when you think about it,” I said, “you’re doing me a favor.”

  “It’s what I do,” she said. “Spread sunshine. Give help to the hopeless. Shit like that.”

  Finished with the meat, Walker stuck out his right paw to me and I took it. When I let go, he darted away, circling us and barking.

  As I stood, I could see Merrill pulling up on the other side of Rudy’s truck, his new black BMW shining in the sun the way his skin did when he got out.

  Walker ran toward him barking but stopped long before he reached him and ran back, then repeated the same process several times as Merrill walked over to us.

  “He’s not barking at you because you’re black,” I said.

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “Thought I’s gonna have to cap his ass.”

  When Walker risked coming over to us again, he stood on his back legs and extended his right paw again, exposing his erect penis and the urine it was squirting.

  “Damn,”
Merrill said.

  “He’s had a hard life,” Carla said.

  “So have I,” Merrill said. “But you don’t see me flashing my credentials around and pissin’ on everybody.”

  I laughed. “Everybody deals with trauma in their own way.”

  “Speaking of which,” Carla said, “I better get Dad’s truck back before he realizes it’s gone.”

  She started moving toward the truck slowly, head down, shoulders hunched, as if expecting to be called back.

  “I’m gonna need some help with the mutt,” I said. “Being a single parent and all.”

  She smiled, and it was the happiest I had seen her in quite a while. “I’m sure we can work out a visitation schedule without a judge.”

  “I hope so, Carla, I really do,” I said. “I just want what’s best for Walker.”

  “That’s what we both want, John. We’ll always put him first.”

  She got in the truck and drove away, Merrill, Walker, and I staring after her, though Merrill and I didn’t run around and bark.

  “Convict still in the wind?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He turned and looked toward the river winding around the back of the property. Smiling to himself, he looked back at Walker as the dog darted nervously around wetting himself. “Least now he float down the river and roll up in here on you, you got protection.”

  I smiled.

  “We go get a steak,” he said, “you think he’ll be here when we get back?”

  I looked over at his car. “We could take him.”

  “Out back and drown him in the river,” he said, laughing. “Shee-it.”

  “Don’t listen to Uncle Merrill,” I said to Walker, who barked back, as if on cue.

  He shook his head. “See? Had that mutt two minutes and already sounding like all those other fools.”

  “I was being––”

  Before I could finish, the phone rang. I stepped into the trailer to get it. Walker ran up the wobbly wooden steps behind me, but didn’t come in, just stood there lifting his paw and barking.

  When I answered, Dad said, “Can you get a ride down to the end of the road?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Merrill’s here.”

  “You might not want to bring him,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because,” he said, “there’s been a lynching.”

  12

  In the South lynching has a legacy only second to slavery. It is as charged a way to die as there is, and whoever had used it as a method for murder had to know that.

  I had no way of knowing what the crime scene Merrill and I were racing toward held, but a typical lynching was the hanging of a supposed criminal by outraged citizens taking justice in their own hands.

  Vigilante justice was one thing. Lynching was something else entirely.

  Xenophobia taken to its ultimate end, lynching was the extension of the holocaust of slavery, the terrorizing and brutalizing of a small minority by a mob mad with fear and paranoia.

  Merrill Monroe and I had been friends for what seemed like our whole lives. He was the best friend I had ever had. He was far closer to me than my own family. He knew me better than anyone else on the planet. Perhaps the reverse was just as true, but that didn’t mean I knew him very well. As close as we were, I had never gotten past the last layer that made his detachment and self-containment possible.

  Since I had told him what Dad had said, he had driven in silence, and it seemed as if a world had opened up between us.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I had always respected his need for a certain amount of distance—I understood it, needed it too—and had never attempted to press him very far beyond where he seemed comfortable.

  “We don’t even know what we’re gonna find,” I said.

  “Oh I know what we’a find,” he said. “’Nother nigger strung up.”

  Often playfully using the word nigga, Merrill reserved nigger for the rarest of occasions.

  “Neck stretched, eyes bulging,” he continued. “You know goddamn well what we’ll find. Sheriff wouldn’t’ve said not to bring me if it was something else.”

  He was racing down the twisting road that led across the dam and dead-ended at the river, and as he talked he sped up even more.

  I had seen him joke his way through some of the most difficult and traumatic situations imaginable, often coping with a nearly preternatural coolness. I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen him like this.

  “Anything I can do?” I asked.

  “Nothin’ nobody can do,” he said. “Nothing changes. Nobody—fuck it. It’s just one more dead nigger.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence and when we reached the end of the road he surprised me by not parking but pulling up to drop me off.

  All around us, deputies, game wardens, search and rescue, EMTs, and crime scene techs from FDLE rushed around, strobed by the flashing lights from their vehicles.

  I could sense their urgency, feel the pull of the excitement and energy, but I didn’t move.

  We sat there a long moment, neither of us saying anything. After a while, he nodded. I looked over at him. When he looked back at me, I nodded, then got out.

  Remaining behind at the crime scene, Dad sent Jake to the landing to pick me up. When I stepped into the boat and saw how visibly shaken Jake was, I realized part of the reason Dad sent him was to get him away.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever . . .”

  Since joining search and rescue, Jake had lost some weight and gotten some color, and he more closely resembled the handsome high school quarterback he had been a decade ago. His green deputy’s uniform no longer strained to hold in his gut and his face had regained some of its angularity.

  “Can you tell me about it?” I asked.

  “Be better if you see it. It’s just a few minutes away.”

  Along the banks of the river, campers and permanent residents had come out of their cabins, trailers, and campers and were standing on their docks straining to see what was happening.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked.

  “Close to where we were yesterday. Not far from where the inmate escaped.”

  “It’s not him, is it?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Whatta you mean could be? Did you look at him or not?”

  “The victim?” he asked. “Hell, I thought you meant the perpetrator. He ain’t the victim. The victim’s black.”

  “Got an ID on him yet?”

  “Not when I left. Hard to tell just by looking at him. He’s in bad shape.”

  We were in a different, smaller search and rescue boat that bounced over the wakes of the larger boats in the olive-green waters. The sun was low in the sky, just barely above the tree tops to the west, its light and heat less relentless now, and as we rounded the last bend and I could see the other emergency services boats tied to trees along the bank, I wondered how long we had until it would be too dark to see beneath the thick trees.

  Jake pulled up beside one the game warden’s boats, cut the engine, and I jumped out onto the damp sand with the bow line. The wake from our boat created large ripples that rolled in and receded like waves, slapping at the banks, tree bases, and the hulls of the boats. After securing the boat to the exposed roots of a cypress tree that would be under water if the river was higher, I looked over at Jake.

  “I’m gonna wait here a minute,” he said.

  I nodded. “You okay?”

  “Will be.”

  I hesitated a moment.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Go on. I’m fine.”

  I nodded, then turned, climbed the bank, ducked beneath the crime scene tape strung around the trees, and walked toward the horror waiting for me in the woods beyond.

  It was like so many old photographs I had seen—gray, lif
eless body, elongated, stretched neck, unnaturally up-tilted head.

  A rope had been thrown over a large oak limb, then pulled around the trunk of the tree for leverage. Its noose held a naked black man high above the ground, his feet and hands bound, the ashen skin of his swollen body filled with cuts and gashes.

  It was one of the most horrific things I had ever seen.

  It wasn’t just the death but the degradation. Not only what had been done to the body but the way it was displayed. His nakedness in particular, the indecency of his indignity. The raw, exposed, unflattering way his soft belly and breasts hung, the way his long, hard, yellowish toenails protruded from his wide, flat feet, and most of all the way his flaccid phallus dangled lifelessly for all beneath him to see.

  Disquieting. Unsettling. Disturbing. Truly traumatizing.

  In the near silence the shocking scene elicited, the only sounds beside whispers were those of the stretching rope straining against the tree and the torpid, rhythmic creaking of the branch as a breeze slowly swung the body side to side.

  When Dad saw me he walked over.

  “Can you believe this?”

  I shook my head. “It’s as shocking as it’s meant to be.”

  We were standing alone inside the wide circle of deputies, search and rescue, EMTs, and game wardens.

  “We’re waiting on FDLE to process the scene,” he said. “They’re heading over now from the landing.”

  “Any idea who he is?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No one here recognizes him so far.”

  “You find his clothes?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “No clothes, no shoes, no boat, no nothing.”

  The body was hanging from a large oak tree in the midst of a hardwood hammock, surrounded by a thick canopy of magnolia, pine, oak, and cypress trees, beneath which grew a dense web of weeds, ferns, grass, and bamboo. Scattered all around were fallen trees, limbs, and leaves, very little light penetrating the full August foliage.

  “Who found him?” I asked.

  “COs from the prison looking for the escaped inmate.”

  “You find anything to indicate it might have been a mob or the Klan?”