I shrugged. “The killer might. Or maybe the card itself and not the cold-case info means something to the killer. Or maybe there’s no killer.”
“Know anything about the Morales case?”
I shook my head. “Will the next time you see me.” She smiled. “Never doubted that, John Jordan.
Never doubted that.”
Chapter Eleven
I stopped by the chapel on my way up to the warden’s office and called Dad.
Chaplain Singer, the staff chaplain forced upon me by the new warden and the one he was working hard to give my job to, was out this week and I had the chapel to myself.
“Driver for Kent Clark says he’s no hero,” Dad said. “Oh yeah?”
“Didn’t try to stop the robbery of the body in the back of his hearse. Didn’t even get much of a description or bother to write down the plate.”
“What happened?”
“Says he was on a long, empty stretch of Highway 22 between Pottersville and Panama City when a nice black car pulls up beside him and a guy in a mask with a gun motions for him to pull over.”
“What kind of mask? What kind of gun?”
“Halloween. Monster mask of some kind. Shotgun as best I can gather from his description. Says the guy told him he wouldn’t hurt him. That he just wanted the girl.
Took his keys and his phone. Tied his hands to the wheel. Took the body. Tried to stuff it in the trunk but it was too stiff. So laid it in the backseat. Tossed the driver’s keys and phone into the woods and took off.”
“He seem credible?” I asked.
“I find his incredibility credible. If he were faking stupidity or ineptitude, I think he’d bring it down several notches.”
“What’s his story?”
“Grandson of Kent or Clark. I forget which. Student at Gulf Coast. Musician. Just your general all around genius.”
“What’re y’all doing now?” I asked.
“Tryin’ to figure out how to put out a BOLO for a nice black car.”
I laughed.
“I have no idea what the hell is goin’ on,” he said, “but the body being stolen this way makes me think it’s someone tryin’ to embarrass me before the election.”
“Could be,” I said. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”
“What’re you dealing with there?” he asked. I told him.
When I finished, we were quiet a moment.
“Oh,” I said, remembering something I wanted to ask him. “Is Jake with you?”
“No. Why?”
“When you see him would you ask him if one of the decks they were using in the poker game last night was a cold-case deck? And who brought it?”
“Sure. Why?” I told him.
“I know you got a lot on you, son, but if you could help me with this thing . . . I’d be grateful.”
“Of course,” I said. “Absolutely. You got it. I was gonna see Mom during my lunch break, but if you need me to do something—”
“No, see her. If something comes up, I’ll call you. Otherwise just check with me after work.”
“I told you to be in my office first thing,” Matson said. “This is the very thing I’m talkin’ about. It’s always somethin’ with you. When I give an order I expect it to be followed to the letter. No exceptions.”
We were in his office with the door closed.
Of course, that didn’t prevent anyone outside his office or in the admin building from hearing what he was saying.
The office, like the man, was stark and severe, minimalist and utilitarian. Everything was institutional and state-issued except for a few framed photographs of inmates working on the farm at Angola, Florida and Louisiana DOC citations, some trite religious and motivational posters, and a little LSU memorabilia.
“I run my prisons a certain way,” he said. “It’s why I’m good at what I do. It’s why I’ve been brought here. I’m going to whip PCI into shape and then it will be the model for the rest of the state. It takes a certain type of person to work at a Bat Matson institution. Not everyone’s cut out for it. In fact, most people aren’t. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t feel as though you are.”
I started to say something but he stopped me. “Just think about that last eighteen hours,” he said.
“I see you having an altercation with a respected attorney. Find you here in the middle of the night pretending to be a deputy sheriff. And when I tell you to be in my office first thing this morning, you show up over an hour late.
Showing up late to work on a day like today of all days—”
“A day like today?”
“When I gave you an order to be in my office first thing.”
“Oh, that kind of day,” I said. “Actually, I wasn’t late. I was early. I was called in to deal with an attempted suicide. I came to your office following that.”
“Oh, well . . . okay then. But you should’ve gotten word to me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I figured you knew.”
I stopped short of saying I thought he knew everything that went on in his institution.
He started to lean back, but stopped and took a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup on the edge of his desk. The sip was loud, accompanied by various swallowing sounds––the kind made by the unselfconscious and uncouth. In big and small ways, Matson was the sort of man who gave no consideration to anyone else in the room. In any room anywhere.
When he did lean back in his chair, he straightened his tie.
I wasn’t sure if the cheap black tie was the only one he owned or if all the ones he owned were identical to it, but he wore it or one like it every day. Black poly/cotton, flat-front work pants. Black Polyurethane lace-up shoes. White cotton shirt with button-down collar. Black too-wide tie. Never a coat. Never any variation. A self-styled uniform as severe as the middle-aged man wearing it.
“Now, on to these other matters,” he said. “What do you know about the young woman killed last night?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“But––”
“I saw her a few minutes before I left Potter Farm,” I said. “She seemed like she might need help. I gave her my card. I never even got her name. Did you see her?”
“Me?”
“At the farm I mean. When you were in the house or out in the pasture before you left?”
“Oh. May have. I’m not sure. So you don’t know anything about her?”
I shook my head, wondering why he was so keen to know. It may have just been because she was found at the prison, but it seemed like more.
“And you got called because her card––I mean your card was in her . . . on her person?”
He seemed flustered, something I’d never seen before.
I nodded.
“Not because you’re going to be investigating her death.”
“I was called because of the card,” I said.
“If you do your job the right way, there won’t be any time left for anything else. And like I’ve said all along . . . if you want to be a detective then be that. You might be good at it––better than chaplain. Just stop trying to be both.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But the most troubling issue I needed to talk to you about is what Chris Taunton said at the gathering last night. I’ve asked around. I didn’t just take his word for it. He was drinking . . . and I wanted to be sure. I’m now satisfied that I know the answer––and it appears to me that it goes far deeper than what he even accused you of. But I’ll ask you directly. Are you living in sin with another man’s wife?”
Phrasing it the way he had, the way so many do, made Anna sound like Chris’s property, like he owned her, like the real question wasn’t what we were doing but did we have his and society’s permission to do it, did I have property rights to her.
One of the aspects of prison chaplaincy I liked most was the privacy it afforded me. Unlike when I pastored a church, as a chaplain I didn’t live in a fishbowl, watched every second by parishioners who felt like the
y owned me and that I owed them. As a chaplain, my personal life was personal.
At least until now.
“I am not living in sin,” I said.
What Anna and I had was sacred. There was nothing sinful about it. Matson was not the kind of man who could understand that.
Anna’s relationship with Chris was over. We planned to marry as soon as her divorce was final, but we were not going to wait until then to be together. We had waited for far, far too long already.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I simply do not believe you.”
Something inside me broke loose a bit and I just couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Believe this,” I said. “I’ve loved Anna Rodden my entire life and will love her for a million more lifetimes long after the sun has burned itself out and the universe has collapsed. Nothing will ever change that. Not Anna’s duplicitous husband, not any laws of man or social conventions, not you or the Department of Corrections. My private, personal life is just that.”
“No chaplain of mine is going to be shackin’ up with another man’s pregnant wife,” he said. “Believe that. I’ve reported this to the chaplain supervisor of the state and the secretary of the department. I’m waiting to hear back from them on exactly how to proceed. Until then, do your job and nothing else. Understand?”
Chapter Twelve
“Sometimes I think about killing myself,” Mom said.
I didn’t say anything. Just listened. “That surprise you?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Actually, my mom was already dying from suicide—the slow suicide of alcoholism, cirrhosis eating away at her body—her pickled brain and nervous system failing, shutting down. She had fought the good fight during her illness, she had regained her faith, her sobriety, and her family. But now she was weary, ready, it would seem, for complete surrender.
“You’d understand?” she asked, eyebrows raising slowly, unfocused eyes searching, entreating. “If I did, I mean.”
I hesitated a moment, but then nodded, and said, “I would.”
The downstairs room Mom had chosen to spend her final days in reminded me of a confinement cell. It had the same hopeless sense of isolation, the same smell of inactivity, of sleep, the same view of the world, of life passing by outside of here, happening everywhere but here. “You’d be okay with it?”
I didn’t want my mama to die. I didn’t want to have to face a world she wasn’t in, though such a world wouldn’t seem to be all that different from the one I inhabited now. She wasn’t a big part of my life––and hadn’t been for a very long time.
My visits to her sickroom, my vigils over her deathbed, that was the extent of our interaction and relationship.
“I would understand.”
It was not the same thing, and she nodded that she caught the distinction.
Before I left the institution earlier, I had made several phone calls and had found no connection between Lance Phillips and Miguel Morales. I had also followed up on a few inquiries relating to the murder victim from the farm. Both cases fascinated me, but I was pushing them back, keeping them at bay as best I could, doing my best not to let them intrude into this moment with Mom.
“You don’t think I should, do you?” she asked.
Mom had been so pretty once. Now, spent, her body older than its years, only occasionally did her eyes sparkle, her face brighten, the young girl she had been peek out of the infirmed old woman she had become.
“I think it’s not for me to say.”
“You think I’d go to hell?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Certain?” I nodded.
“Certain enough not to stop me?”
“Notions of punishment and reward are juvenile.
There is only love.”
I thought about the old notions of suicide being a mortal sin––the kind only committed by those who had despaired of God’s mercy. Of how those who had committed it were refused religious burial, their loved ones left behind refused comfort and reassurance.
Of course, that she could even ask me if I thought she’d go to hell reminded me the notions weren’t just old ones. I couldn’t even think in those terms, and that she could made me feel like a failure.
“How can he sit by and watch me suffer like this?” she asked.
“Who?”
“God.”
“Is that what you feel like is happening?” I asked. She nodded her weak and weary head. “Sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know you are, and I appreciate it, but I’d really like to know what you think.”
“Honestly, I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
I know there are no easy answers, but . . . The best is freedom, but even it falls short. Whatever the reason, I do believe––not just believe, I’ve experienced––God suffers with us. For us. Doesn’t just watch us.”
The pain and conflict I felt incarnated into knots in my stomach. I realized how hollow my words sounded, how inadequate they were. She was hurting so badly she wanted to die, and I had nothing much to offer her.
“I haven’t experienced that,” she said. I nodded.
“Maybe I still will.”
“I really think you will.”
Tears formed in her eyes and she blinked several times. With an unsteady hand, she reached up and pushed her dry, brittle, early gray hair away from her pale face.
“How much pain are you in?” I asked. “We can—” She shook her head, wiped at her tears. “It’s not that.
I’m okay. Physically.”
She looked out the window a moment, but didn’t seem to see anything.
Turning back to me, she said, “Most people don’t see their death coming, but I get to lie here and watch its approach like I’m tied to a railroad track.”
I nodded.
“That’s what I want to end.”
“I . . .”
“What?”
“It’s just . . . if that’s your reason . . . I think you’d miss out on so much.”
“What?” she said, anger accenting the edges of her frail voice. “Pain? Suffering? Depression? Despair?”
“In part, yeah. For what’s in and beyond them.”
“You might feel different if you were in my place,”
she said.
I nodded. “You’re probably right. But the truth is I am. We all are.”
Her lips twisted up into a frown and she seemed to think about it.
“It’s not the same.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. But think about the experience of God suffering with you, for you, you said you had yet to experience. I don’t want you to miss out on that. And cutting your life short just might.”
She nodded ever so slightly, more with her narrowing eyes than her head.
I glanced at the small table on the other side of her bed and saw amid the dirty dishes, TV remote, used tissues, and tiny brown prescription bottles, a copy of Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying by Derek Humphry.
“How much thought have you given this?” I asked, nodding toward the book.
She shrugged. “Some.”
“Will you really think about what we’ve talked about?” I said. “Can we talk about it some more soon? Can we do that? Will you wait? Not do anything until we’ve talked it through some more? It’s your decision, and I won’t . . . I won’t try to stop you once you’ve made it, but I don’t want you making it alone or being alone or with a stranger if you decide to do it.”
Tears began to stream down her cheeks as she nodded. “Promise.”
She smiled, her moist cheeks gleaming in the midday light coming in the window beside her bed.
We had such a complicated relationship. She had never done a lot of parenting. Self-centeredness, vanity, addiction weren’t qualities that lent themselves to motherhood. As an adult, I had been more of a parent to her than she had been to me, but she was the only m
other I would ever have and I didn’t want her to die, didn’t want to lose her one second before I had to. But far more than that, I didn’t want her to miss out on the truly transformative experiences being offered to her. Not now. Not when she had so little time left.
Chapter Thirteen
I ran into Melanie Sagal at the Dollar Store on my way home from work.
Anna had asked me to stop by and pick up a few things and I was glad she did.
A dark-complected girl in her late teens with dark, straight, stringy hair, a trim but curvy body, and extremely straight, extremely white teeth, Melanie—one of the girls at Potter Farm last night—was striking from a few feet away. Up close, a certain hardness, twitchiness, and insecurity undermined her attractiveness.
“I just want you to know I ain’t no hooker,” she said. “I got two kids and not a lot of options, you know? But I ain’t for sale. I’m raising both of ’em on my own without a lick of child support from either of their sorry ass daddies and I do what I have to to take care of ’em. What mom worth anything wouldn’t, right? But God knows my heart and knows I ain’t no hooker.”
I nodded.
She was wearing very short cutoffs that showed off her long, smooth, shapely legs, sandals that showed off sexy but uncared for feet, and a tight white spaghetti strap tank top camisole with no bra beneath that showed off both the curve of her breasts and her dark nipples.
Though it was September she was dressed for full-on July. In her defense, there’s not as much difference between July and September in Florida as other places.
“I know you’re not,” I said. “Really?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not just sayin’ that?”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
From where we stood at the front edge of the building, I could see the steady flow of people entering and exiting. Small-town folk, like me, who didn’t have a lot of shopping options. Poor people, like me, with little or no discretionary income. Here to buy the basics and not much besides.
The Panhandle was largely an impoverished place. Particularly the small towns like Pottersville. There were the working poor like me. People who didn’t subsist in poverty but did live from paycheck to paycheck with debt and virtually no disposable income. Then there were the extreme poor who wouldn’t be able to eat were it not for food stamps, would be unable to survive were it not for assistance, people who had no discretionary anything, only desperation.
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