JJ08 - Blood Money

by Michael Lister

  “Does the fact that the killer’s leaving suicide kings let you know who it is?”

  He shook his head. “You think it’s one of the club?”

  “Who else?”

  “But why? That was so long ago. Nothing to gain.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I guarantee the policies have lapsed. And if the others are like me, they’ll think you can’t collect if it’s suicide.”

  “Which might be why he’s leaving the cards—let us know it’s not.”

  “Then he’s risking getting caught.”

  “Probably figures he’s too smart for that.”

  “Against you? He’d be crazy. I still can’t get over how you—”

  “Anybody outside the club know about it? Anybody have anything against the members?”

  He started to shake his head, then stopped. “There was one guy who went through with it back then . . . Ralph Meeks. Think someone could be retaliating for him? Club didn’t kill him, didn’t do anything, but someone might blame us.”

  “Worth looking into.”

  “How long you think I’ll last out here?” he asked. “I can get you put in Protective Management or Confinement.”

  “As vulnerable as I am out here, I think it’s safer than being locked in a cell. I know you’ll figure out who the killer is. Just do it before he kills me and not after, okay?”

  I was walking back to the upper compound with a list of all the members of the Suicide Kings when I ran into Hahn.

  “Any thoughts on why inmates would form a suicide club and put each other in their wills and make each other the beneficiaries of their life insurance policies? You’ve worked closely with these guys. What motivates them to do something like that?”

  “Who in particular?” I told her.

  She shook her head. “Not just one thing. A few of them are—or were—genuinely clinically depressed.

  Don’t care about anything, can be talked into anything. A few of the others are so grandiose, so . . . They truly feel invincible.”

  “Like Brent Allen.” She nodded.

  As usual, Hahn drew the attention of the entire compound. A few of the caged animals made an attempt at subtlety, but most leered and sneered and stared and ogled. There were catcalls and lewd comments, though none quite loud enough for us to make out what was being said or by whom.

  And as usual, I couldn’t help but imagine how it must make her feel. She didn’t react, didn’t respond—at least not in any overt way they could see—but I sensed her tensing, saw the subtle tightness in her body, the slight awkwardness of her gait.

  We walked past the last canteen and dorms and were less than a hundred yards from the center gate. The inmates around us thinned out, and so did the unpleasant and unwanted attention my young, attractive coworker was receiving.

  “They’re so out of touch with reality, they feel like superheroes or something. They don’t think they can die, but if they do they think they’ll transcend death, come back somehow. Others are looking for excitement, a rush, a high, and don’t care how they get it. It’s like playing Russian Roulette. All of them are different, but nearly all of them are self-destructive in some way. It’s no different from risky behavior of any kind.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Jamie Lee’s face lit up when she saw me, and in doing so, lit up the room. And I couldn’t help but smile. She was one of the most pleasant people at the institution and was quickly becoming one of my favorite coworkers.

  “Hello handsome,” she said.

  I turned and looked over my shoulder to make sure she was talking to me.

  “Yeah, you,” she said. “You get better looking every time I see you. If I were straight . . .”

  “You’d still be old enough to be my mother.”

  “What’s your point?” she said with a wicked, bare-lipped smile.

  She was not a lipstick lesbian.

  Jamie Lee looked like what she was—an overweight, middle-aged gay woman. She had short hair shaved in the back, a certain soft androgyny, and the build of a linebacker who’d stopped working out a decade ago.

  Of course, middle-aged gay women, like middle-aged straight women, had an infinite variety of looks, and generalizing was wrong, but Jamie Lee had the look that most people associate with lesbianism, her loose-fitting green nurse uniform adding to the effect.

  “I’m about to take a cancer break,” she said. “Wanna join me?”

  “You bet.”

  We walked through the side door of Medical and out into the bright afternoon sun.

  “You know what they say about second-hand smoke,” she said.

  “The pleasure of your company makes it worth the risk.”

  She carefully withdrew one of the slim cigarettes from the pack, placed it in her mouth, and lit it. After inhaling deeply with obvious pleasure, she withdrew the cigarette from her mouth and held it between her two fingers in a dainty manner.

  Smoking was by far the most feminine thing she did.

  Across from us the inmates assigned to inside grounds were sweeping the sidewalk and street that ran down the center of the compound. The blue uniforms the inmates wore were big and baggy and hung off them the way kids wore their jeans on the street. The plastic bags hanging from their back pockets were filled with the tiny bits of trash they had picked up, and because there were so many workers and so little trash, the bags fluttered in the breeze.

  “Unfortunately, this cigarette won’t last long,” she said. “So . . . let the interrogation begin.”

  “No interrogation. Just a little chat about Danny Jacobs.”

  “You heard I spent a lot of time with him and wondered if I killed him?”

  “I know you killed him. I want to know why.”

  “Danny and I were having an affair,” she said. “I know it’s against the rules and that I shouldn’t have, but God, the rod on that man.”

  As she talked, she moved her hands about, the cigarette making small smoke signals in the air around them.

  “You ever even seen one?”

  “I’m a nurse for fuck sake,” she said. “Besides, I’ve got a couple of special . . . ah . . . objects that look just like ’em. Or so the package said.”

  “I know this is gonna make me sound like one of the homophobes around here, but can I get a straight answer about Jacobs?”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.” I laughed.

  “Okay, I’ve had my fun. The truth is, Dr. Alvarez asked me to watch Danny closely after he got out of the infirmary. But I would’ve anyway because I liked him. He was a good kid. Troubled. Tormented. But good.”

  “You saw him the night he died?”

  “Yeah, I did. I wasn’t supposed to. I mean, I’d just seen him, but he seemed really down. I thought I might cheer him up. In fact, I thought I did, but . . . I feel bad about it. It’s not like we were close or anything. I just liked the kid. Sorry, but that’s it. All I know. Didn’t see anything suspicious, no one lurking around with a noose.”

  “This would be so much easier if you had.”

  She nodded and we were quiet a moment, but when I saw how little of her cigarette was left, I pressed on.

  “What about Lance Phillips?”

  “Same way,” she said. “Got to know him in the infirmary. Cared for him while he recuperated.”

  “Danny was in Lance’s bunk when he died.”

  “That significant?”

  “If Phillips didn’t try to kill himself,” I said. “You don’t think he did?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t.”

  “Well, that may be true, but I was there. I saw what he tried to do. And he was in a locked confinement cell by himself. So how could someone . . . I came up shortly after it started. I saw him swinging from the rope. No one else was around. Seemed like a suicide attempt to me.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but if so, where’d he get the rope?”

  Emile Rollins worked on an outside grounds crew clea
ning and caring for the parks of Potter County. I caught up with him at the south gate as he was being patted down to reenter the institution. Unlike the other inmates around him, he stood perfectly still and kept quiet throughout the procedure. When he did move, it was in smooth, economic motions. He wasted no energy, and there was a certain fluidity to everything he did, a physical grace.

  It was evening, everything lit softly. The setting sun ducking behind the slash pines to the west etched their tops with fire and ignited the horizon beyond, streaking the bottoms of the cirrus clouds with swaths of Spanish orange and salmon.

  But it wasn’t just the quality of light, sound too had a softness I associated with the transition of day into night.

  After the officers had finished with Emile, I motioned him over and he moved toward me without hesitation or expression.

  Standing before me, I could see how deceptive his build was. He was tall and thin, but very muscular. Every inch of him looked cut and ripped, pure muscle pressing out against the skin—not something easily achieved with the long muscles of a tall person.

  His uniform was loose, and at a glance he looked to be anorexic, but it was an illusion. Huge veins popped out of the skin on the undersides of his forearms, and the well-defined muscles beneath them turned and twisted like steel cords as he moved his arms. “Rollins?” I asked. “Yes, sir.”

  His voice was soft and slightly higher than I expected but bore no Southern accent.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me about Lance Phillips, Brent Allen, and Danny Jacobs.”

  “Whatta you wanna know? We all sleep next to each other in the dorm—or did. I knew Danny the best. Still can’t believe he did it.”

  He looked down, but there was no sign of sadness on his face.

  The officers checking in the inmates were tired and ready to go home, but the inmates were not cooperating. They were mouthing off, getting out of line, and moving slowly—seemingly on purpose, and the more the officers showed they didn’t like it, the more the inmates did it.

  “What about Lance? He tried to—”

  “Says he didn’t. I don’t know. You can never tell with Lance, he probably just wanted to get out of Confinement, but I thought Danny was doing good—well, good for him.”

  “Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt either of them?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “You a member of their club?”

  “What club? Gunners?”

  Gunners were inmates who masturbated in front of female officers.

  “Suicide Kings.”

  “Don’t think so. They may’ve made me an honorary member or something ’cause we hang out, but I told ’em I ain’t ever gonna kill myself.”

  I nodded. “What can you tell me about Danny’s death?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just a normal night. We all went to bed. When we woke up he was dead.”

  He said it with no feeling. Just stating the facts.

  Perhaps like so many of the men in here, he was incapable of attachment. Or maybe all associations inside were ones of need and convenience, and didn’t involve anything like empathy.

  “Anybody out of the ordinary in the dorm that night?”

  “It’d be quicker to tell you who wasn’t there. We had more traffic than we’ve ever had before. By a long shot. A nurse came by. And the doctor, but not at the same time.”

  “Baldwin?” I asked.

  “She was there too, at some point, but I was talking about the medical doctor.”

  “Alvarez?”

  He nodded. “And the psych lady.”

  “You already said her.”

  “Not Dr. Baldwin. That other one. What’s her name?”

  “Ling?”

  “Yeah. Small, black-haired Asian chick. They all talked to Danny. Every one of ’em. All at different times. All pretty late. Before lights out, but . . .”

  The officers finished checking the inmates in and they all began to move toward the internal gate of the sally port to be buzzed back in to their dorms.

  We fell in line with the others and walked through the gate after it was buzzed open by the officer in the tower.

  He shook his head. “People thinking I’m a Suicide King mean I’m in danger?”

  The large gate rolled back into place, clanging loudly as it reached the other side. Everyone was locked in again. Another day without an escape.

  It was dark now, the only light coming from a street lamp near the maintenance building on the other side of the fence and a flood light shining down into the sally port from one of the tall poles supporting the south gate.

  “You think of any reason someone would want to kill the Kings?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Well, I’d keep thinking about it, I were you. Might turn out to be valuable information one day.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “You didn’t tell me you were in A-dorm the night Danny died.”

  Across the table from me Hahn stiffened, then sat perfectly still for a moment.

  She had come to my office to go over the list of Suicide Kings and tell me what she knew about each one. “I didn’t?” she asked.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  She shrugged. “It never came up, I guess. I’m not sure.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t mention it.”

  “You don’t suspect me, do you?”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. I just . . . I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner.”

  “Sooner? You didn’t say anything at all. I brought it up, remember? You don’t think that’s a little suspicious?”

  “I think you’ve been around criminals too long. The only suspicious thing is your mind. What’s so odd about me visiting A-dorm?”

  “You don’t do it that often, it was at night so you were off, and it just happened to be the night someone was killed down there.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” she said. “Seriously?”

  “There’s nothing to tell . . . and I have information for you that might actually help you figure out who’s doing it.”

  I shook my head, but she looked down at her notes and pressed on.

  “Of the original Suicide Kings, only three are left inside—Lance Phillips, Brent Allen, and Emile Rollins. One, Myer Goodis, finished his sentence and now lives in Fort Walton Beach. And two are dead—Danny Jacobs and Ralph Meeks. According to everything official, they both committed suicide. Everyone I spoke to says there was nothing suspicious about Meek’s death. It was definitely suicide.”

  “How long ago did—”

  “Nearly two years. Hard to see it having anything to do with what’s going on now.”

  I nodded.

  “What is going on now?” she asked. I shrugged.

  It was evening, just minutes after the end of our work day, and we were at a little convenience store not far from the prison.

  In addition to the normal beer, gas, junk food, and lottery tickets, the small store had a deli that served fried chicken, pizza, and hot wings––all of it as bad as any I had ever tried.

  There were two booth-style tables in the back corner not far from the deli. We were in one of them. No one was in the other.

  White ceramic cups of coffee in saucers sat in front of us on the table but Hahn was the only one actually drinking any.

  The only person on duty, a middle-aged woman with red fro-ish hair was behind the counter, her attention focused on her phone.

  “You think someone’s trying to kill all the remaining Suicide Kings or just Lance and Danny? Or just Lance?

  Did Danny kill himself ?”

  “The ones that are left, what are they in for?”

  “Drugs or drug-related robbery for Jacobs and Rollins. Phillips, conspiracy and fraud. Allen for manslaughter.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “Sister. There’s fa
mily money—both were due to inherit. Now, just him. It was a boating accident. Prosecutor suspected murder, could only get criminal negligence. Allen had been drinking. Says he didn’t mean to kill her.”

  “Whatta you think?”

  “I think he did.”

  I nodded. “What about the staff members in the dorm? Anything come up?”

  “Dr. Alvarez has had some trouble on the street.

  Malpractice stuff. All the cases settled with his insurance, so no convictions, but he doesn’t practice anywhere but here.”

  “They don’t really care who does the doctoring on inmates, do they?”

  She smirked, raised her eyebrows, and tilted her head. “Just a position that has to be filled. Not many successful doctors lining up to work inside.”

  “Is the same true of us? We inside because we failed or ran into trouble on the street?”

  “True of a lot of people who work inside, not all. Some of us just live in a small area without a lot of opportunity. Doctor can make a lot more money outside. Same’s not true for a minister or nurse or counselor.”

  I nodded.

  “Though Alvarez is making money—lots of it. He can’t practice—or doesn’t, but he owns a clinic.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Baldwin’s clean—legal-wise, anyway. She does have constant man trouble. So many neuroses, so much drama. Donnie Foster’s clean. So’s Jamie Lee.”

  “What about you?” She didn’t say anything.

  She wasn’t on the list because I didn’t know she was down there, but—

  I abandoned the thought as a young Hispanic man in a black cowboy getup walked in carrying a gun.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The small bell above the door had not even caused Red to look up, and I hoped she would remain oblivious for whatever happened next.

  He scanned the store slowly until his eyes came to rest on me.