“Who?”
I told her.
“I just got out of a marriage with a man who cheated on me,” she said.
Oh shit. How stupid could I be? I didn’t even think about that. I wasn’t usually this thoughtless and unaware.
“Who dealt duplicitously with me in nearly every way,” she added.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t even think about––”
“It’s so nice to be with someone I can trust,” she said. “Such a great fuckin’ feelin’. I know you John, know your soul, know the force of your character. You didn’t think about it because you’re not a cheater. You were out there doing good––either as a minister or an investigator. It’s what you do. It’s all you do.”
“Still,” I said, “it was inconsiderate. Thoughtless. I’m sorry.”
She reached up and touched my face.
“I will never cheat on you,” I said. “Not ever. You can count on that.”
“I do.”
“And I’ll try not to make another rookie mistake like that again.”
“Come on,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice, “neither of us are rookies.”
“Why it’s all the more inexcusable.”
It felt like I had just fallen asleep, and maybe I had.
My phone began ringing. I fumbled to find it on the nightstand, Anna rolling over and groaning beside me. “You ain’t gonna believe this shit,” Merrill said. “That you’re callin’ me at this hour,” I said. “No, not that shit.”
“Then what?”
“Oh,” he said, as if just remembering something, “Sergeant Helms say tell you she found cards in the other inmates’ property. Say they were regular kings.”
“Thanks.”
“But that ain’t the shit you ain’t gonna believe.”
“Well, go ahead and get to that shit,” I said.
“Know how everybody say Brent Allen was hanging out with Phillips and Jacobs, how he sleep close to them?”
“Yeah?” I said, trying to talk softly. “Guess what the bitch’s nickname is?” I didn’t say anything, just waited.
“Go on and do it. Guess.”
“Too early.”
“His ass is known as the Suicide King.”
“What?”
“Told you it some shit.”
I laughed.
“Say the little fucker know everything they is to know about suicide. Say he tried a few dozen times too. I say, he ain’t trying hard enough.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The laundry department at Potter Correctional Institution washed, dried, ironed, and folded the uniforms, towels, and sheets for some thirty-four hundred inmates every day of the work week. It was twice as big as any dry cleaners or Laundromat I had ever seen on the street.
Outside, the laundry building looked like all the other structures of the institution—nondescript gray cinder block with pale blue trim.
Inside, it was a large open space filled with huge commercial washers and dryers with a network of metal pipes and wires snaking along the steel structure supporting the unfinished ceiling. The building was also filled with noise. The hum of motors, the rush of fan-blown wind, the stamp of the press, the whistle of the steam, and the continual metallic slaps and clanks obscured every other sound made by the officers and inmates working among them.
“I knew you’d get around to me eventually,” Brent Allen yelled above the noise when Merrill and I walked up.
He stretched a shirt between the two steaming halves of the press and pulled the lever releasing the top onto the bottom one and the wrinkled cotton fabric between them.
“Oh yeah?”
He shook his head. “Shame about poor Danny.”
Brent Allen was a short, thick guy with a certain softness about him. His closely cropped brown hair stood on end and his copper eyes were dim, rimmed by puffy dark half-circles beneath them.
“What made you think I’d come see you?” I asked.
He smiled. “Come on, Chaplain. Don’t treat me like the rest of the tards ’round here. I deserve better than that. Everybody knows I’m the go-to guy for all things suicide.”
“You the damn Suicide King,” Merrill said. “One of ’em.”
“One?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“There are others?” I asked.
“How can you have more than one king?” Merrill asked.
“It’s a club,” he said. “Or used to be.”
“A club?” Merrill said. “What? Y’all play chess and shit?”
“A suicide club,” Allen said. “Long time ago. We haven’t even talked about it in—”
“Start from the beginning,” I said.
“A group of us formed a club. Called ourselves the Suicide Kings.”
This is it, I thought, feeling the buzz begin again.
We’re getting somewhere now.
“Who?” I asked. “Was Danny Jacobs in it?”
“It was a long time ago. Some of the guys have transferred. A few’re already out. I’m tellin’ you . . . we don’t even . . . it wasn’t even serious back then. Not really. And that’s been . . . I don’t know . . . years.”
“Was Danny in it?”
He nodded. “But I’m telling you—it didn’t mean anything back then. Means even less now. It has nothing to do with him or his . . . ”
“Who else? Phillips?”
“Yeah. Lance. Emile Rollins . . . ah . . . I can’t even remember who else.”
“Tell me about the club.”
“We all felt suicidal . . . I don’t know. We were like, fuck it. If we ever decide to go through with it, we could count on the others to help us out. Look after our shit. We made wills. Left each other our earthly possessions—even took out life insurance, but the policies had a suicide clause, wouldn’t pay if the insured committed suicide.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I told you. A while.”
“Be more specific.”
“Why?”
“The suicide clause on most policies is two years. If it happens after two years, they usually pay.”
His eyes widened as his eyebrows arched and his forehead wrinkled.
“How long’s it been?”
“About two years—but I’m sure they’ve all lapsed by now. We haven’t been paying them.”
“You didn’t think you should tell someone about all this after the attempt on Lance or Danny’s death?”
“Danny killing himself or Lance trying has nothing to do with a defunct club from a few years ago.”
“And if they didn’t do it to themselves?”
He stopped suddenly, holding the blue inmate shirt dangerously close to the press, the steam enveloping his hand. Squinting in concentration, he looked off into the open space of the laundry building.
“You think someone killed Danny?”
He had stopped squinting now, and his eyes twitched and blinked as he talked.
“Do you?” Merrill said.
“I hadn’t,” he said, closing his eyes completely for a moment. “But if someone was trying to kill Lance . . . then they killed Danny by mistake. What does Lance say?”
“That he didn’t try to kill himself,” I said.
To our left, a group of about seven inmates stood around tables folding towels, while behind us inmates were loading and unloading towels and uniforms into the giant washers and dryers, all under the careful supervision of the laundry sergeant.
“Oh, that’s a beauty,” he said, shaking his head. “Kill someone who’s attempted suicide before and make it look like suicide again. That’s fuckin’ genius. Who would suspect? I mean, think about it, if they hadn’t failed to off him the first time and left him to say that he didn’t do it, then no one would even question it. Especially in here.
Hell, I bet no one believes him as it is.”
His response to what I was saying was one of interest but not concern. If he cared for Lance or Danny,
his fellow Suicide Kings, he didn’t show it, and the longer we talked, the more he twitched and blinked. He looked like someone with shell shock or a nervous disorder.
Across the building, I saw the colonel duck beneath the half-opened rolling bay door and enter the laundry. The sergeant cleared his throat and the inmates sitting on the gigantic blue sheet press stood up and acted like they were working. The inmates sitting behind the sewing machines couldn’t pretend to be busy because there was nothing on their tables to be sewn.
“Can you think of any reason anyone would want to kill Lance?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said with a half shrug. “Lots of reasons to kill people. People’ve killed over some pretty petty shit before—’specially in here.”
“Anyone in particular come to mind?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Any reason why anyone would want to kill Danny?”
Brent Allen’s inmate uniform looked new. Unlike the other uniforms on the compound, it wasn’t worn and faded from wear and washing. It was also military crisp without a single wrinkle, pucker, or gather.
“Not as many as with Lance,” he said. “Danny was quieter. Stayed to himself mostly. Actually, he’s the kind I’d suspect of a legitimate suicide.”
“Really?”
“You know much about suicide?” he asked.
He started pressing the shirts and pants of the blue inmate uniforms again, laying each garment down between the two small ironing board–shaped halves of the press, pushing the button, and waiting for the hydraulic press to drop, press, and rise again.
“Not enough to be called a Suicide King.”
He smiled. “Suicide’s sorta my hobby. It was a fad for the other members of the club, but for me . . . I probably know more about it than anyone. Want a quick class on it?”
I nodded.
“Well, first of all it’s all bullshit.”
“What is?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said. “Everything people think they know about it. Everything I’m about to tell you. First thing to know is we don’t know shit about it. Oh, the professionals say they do but they don’t. They don’t know why more people kill themselves than kill others. They don’t know why more women attempt it, but more men complete it. They don’t know why so few leave notes. They sure as hell don’t know what was going through the poor bastard’s mind at the end. Hell, I’ve tried it over a dozen times and I couldn’t tell you what was going through mine. And they can’t tell you why people choose to do it the way they do.”
As we continued to talk, Allen’s twitch moved out of his eyes, down his face, and into his body. Now he was shrugging his shoulders, slinging his arms, and jerking his head about.
Over the tops of laundry carts, some piled high with folded stacks of clean clothes and others with mounds of unfolded dirty ones, I could see Donnie Foster, the sergeant on duty in A-dorm the night Jacobs was killed, enter the building, look at us, and then walk out quickly, bumping into the inmates waiting to push the laundry carts back to the dorms as he did.
“Suicide’s not bullshit,” he said. “Everything else is. Suicide’s the only sane response to this painful, meaningless disaster we’re clinging to. For fuck sake, can you imagine a worse world? All we do is suffer and watch those we care about suffer. We lose everything—every single thing—including ourselves. How can any thinking person look at this cluster fuck of a world and conclude anything but that it’s the cruelest joke ever played on anyone. Ever.”
“How’d you do it?” I asked. “Huh?”
“How’d you try to do the sane thing?”
“Every way in the book,” he said. “And yes, there are books about it. Lots of ’em. We can’t have them in here, but I have ’em all at home.”
He unbuttoned the perfectly pressed left sleeve of his shirt with an unsteady hand and rolled it up. Long, uneven mounds of scar tissue like small worms beneath his skin ran along the bottom side of his twitching wrists. “Razor,” he said. He continued rolling his sleeve up to reveal the track marks on his arms. “Overdose.” He then reached up and tugged on his collar. Around his neck were rings of scars and bruises—old scars and new rope burns. “Hanging.” Carefully unbuttoning his neat, clean, crisp shirt, he exposed a thin white scar on his side. “Knife.”
“If you were trying to qualify yourself as an expert on the subject,” I said, “you’ve succeeded.”
“I’ve also tried pills, poison, carbon monoxide, plastic bag, cyanide, self-starvation, and gunshot,” he said, pushing his hair back to reveal an old gunshot scar over his ear. “And it’s all still a mystery to me. Like death or life or God. It’s a mystery. People think if they could just know what the guy was thinking . . . But all they have to do is ask us and we could tell them. We don’t know. We can’t tell you. Those who’ve done it couldn’t tell you if they were here.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“The number of suicides each year is probably five times greater than what we think,” he said. “Most anybody is capable of it under the right circumstances. And the decision to do it is usually a cumulative one. So when someone takes his life, it’s because of a buildup of several factors, none of which by themselves would cause him to do it. You’ve heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back, well, that’s how it happens. You have all this shit and it just keeps piling up on you and then maybe it levels out. Maybe for a long time. But then this one tiny little thing comes along, and maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it doesn’t amount to a tiny piece of straw, but it’s the final straw and it’s just too much to handle, so you go for it.”
“And you don’t see evidence of that in Lance’s or Danny’s lives?”
He shook his head. “But all sorts of people commit suicide. There’s no profile. Think about the difference between Hitler and Hemingway or Judas and Juliet and yet they all did it.”
“You know so much,” Merrill said, “why you so unsuccessful at it?”
“What I do is about luck, not skill. Everything to do with chance. The universe is such a random place, I . . . my attempts contain the possibility for intervention. I let fate decide.”
“Sheeit,” Merrill said. “You really think fate wants your sorry ass around?”
Chapter Twenty-four
“The killer’s calling card didn’t make you think you should tell me about your little club?”
I’d found Lance Phillips in line at the barbershop and called him over away from the other inmates waiting for a bad buzz cut.
“Huh?” Lance said.
He looked around constantly, scanning the compound. He was obviously nervous, distracted, scared.
It was a brilliant, beautiful September day, and the compound was abuzz, inmates swarming about like bees at the height of tupelo season.
“I felt it in my pocket,” he said. “Tried to look at it, but couldn’t make it out. I was nearly unconscious.”
“It was a playing card.”
“Oh.”
“From the cold-case deck. Had a missing person on it.”
All around us, inmates were moving—in and out of dorms, in and out of canteen lines, in and out of the barbershop. A steady stream of them flowed toward the center gate and a steady stream flowed back. Cigarettes were being rolled, trash was being talked, deals were being made, and everywhere seen and unseen, intentional and not, threats, slights, disses were being both issued and noted.
“Miguel what’s-his-name you mentioned?”
“Morales. Yeah. What’s your connection with him?”
“None. I mean, that I know of. I’ve never—”
“Card was a king of hearts. That mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. “Should it? You know who tried to kill me?”
“Forget about the cold-case deck for a minute,” I said. “In a regular deck the king of hearts is also known as—”
“Oh fuck me,” he said, his eyes growing wide and even more fearful. “You think this has somethin
g to do with the Suicide Kings?”
“Whatta you think?”
“But why not put a suicide king in my pocket? Why the one with Miguel Morales?”
“Maybe that’s all he had at the time,” I said. “He put a regular suicide king in Danny’s pocket.”
He looked down and frowned, his eyes busy blinking back tears, but only for a moment, then he was back to scanning the passing inmates, looking over his shoulder.
“They tell you I found him?”
I shook my head. Not telling me much of anything. “I got out of Medical very late. He was already in my bunk asleep. He got in it a lot. I’ve got a thicker roll, more comfortable—guys always trying to sleep in my rack, but Danny just always felt safer up there. I didn’t mind. I left him in it—just got in his. Did that get him killed? That would be . . . I don’t know, ironic. Man that’s . . . I didn’t sleep well. Got up first and found him. Still can’t believe it.”
I nodded. “He was a Suicide King too?”
He nodded. “Poor Danny. The Kings are active now? I haven’t even thought about it in . . . a long time.”
“Why’d you guys do it in the first place?” I said.
He shrugged.
“Why give other inmates a motive to kill you?” I asked. “Why—”
“We’re not those kind of inmates,” he said. “We were all nerds, not thugs. The only person any of us ever thought about hurting was ourselves. It was just something to do. We were bored. Brent said it’d be cool.”
“You don’t think nerds kill for money?”
“Not us, I’m telling you, but that was part of the fun. It was exciting—for a while, then it became boring like everything else around here and we let the whole thing drop—including the policies. Now there’s no motivation.”
I didn’t say anything, just thought about what he had said. If the policies were no longer in effect there would be no money motive.
“I can’t believe you figured out the killer’s message about suicide kings from the Miguel Morales cold-case card,” he said.
“If I’m right.”
“I’m impressed, Chaplain. And I’m not easily impressed. Wow. You live up to the hype.”
As we talked, nearly every inmate who passed us strained to hear what we were saying or asked me for something. It happened everywhere I went—Chaplain, when you gonna hook me up with a phone call? Chaplain, I need to come see you? Chaplain, help a brother out with some extra greeting cards? Chaplain, I need some extra time in the library? Chaplain, I need to come practice my music. Chaplain, Chaplain, Chaplain.
JJ08 - Blood Money Page 10
