by Jeff Crook
By this time, the Fayette County sheriff’s department had also arrived. Nobody seemed to know what to do first. The firemen wanted to save somebody but there was nobody to save. The deputies wanted to arrest somebody. I was the only one available for either service, so while one fireman strapped an oxygen mask to my face, checked my pulse and gazed deeply into my eyes, a deputy asked me what I had seen.
I had recovered enough from the shock of events to realize I couldn’t tell them I’d seen a man who’d been dead for several hours waving at me barely twenty minutes ago. But that left me in a hell of a spot. Anything I said from this point forward was going to make it look like I was hiding something.
So I played sick. I fell into the fireman’s arms, babbling nonsense and shivering. They strapped me on a stretcher and took me to the ambulance, grateful, I think, for something to do. They stuck needles in my arms and hung bags of fluids over my head. It was a wonder they could find a vein. I lay in the warm, antiseptic ambience of the quietly humming ambulance and listened to the beeping of my heart signal, trying to think of some way to explain what I had seen without coming off crazy or guilty or both. Eventually the shaking stopped. Eventually. Officer Lorio climbed into the back of the ambulance and I knew they weren’t taking me to the hospital.
He didn’t have his cuffs in his hand, so they weren’t ready to arrest me just yet. After checking with the medics, he asked me to follow him to the MCC. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Mobile Command Center.”
The fire trucks were still there, idling alongside the idling firemen, but now a half-dozen black Suburbans lined the other side of the street. One was a K-9 unit—I could barely see the German shepherd inside, panting against the tinted windows. A seventh Suburban was parked on the levee, a county coroner emblem decorating its driver’s door and its rear door open to accept its charge of flesh. Ten or twelve deputies loitered around it, keeping the curious onlookers at bay. A chopper circled overhead—at first, I thought it was a news chopper, until I noticed the black-and-gold colors of the Fayette County sheriff’s department.
The Mobile Command Center was a luxury motor home about eight blocks long. Officer Lorio led me across the street to it, where a granite-faced footman in paramilitary black uncoiled the tattooed pythons of his arms and opened the armored door. Seventy-degree air poured out, smelling of new carpets, expensive electronics, and English Leather. The uniformed rack of meat sitting behind the mahogany desk was Sheriff Roy Stegall.
Roy Stegall had been elected despite his lack of law-enforcement experience, but in his own estimation that didn’t make him any less of a Law Man. Born in McNairy County, he fancied himself a modern-day Buford Pusser.
“Close the door,” he said without looking up from his laptop. A flat-screen television on his desk played some cable news program with the sound muted. The bank of monitors on the wall behind him showed front, rear, and side views from the top of the MCC, as well as a live feed from the helicopter camera. A cell-phone earpiece hung like an apostrophe from the cauliflower pasted to the side of his enormous head.
I sat in a leather chair while he finished pecking at his computer. Lorio stood at ease in the corner, fingers laced behind his back, his eyes nowhere. Finally, Stegall closed his laptop and pushed it to the side. “Sorry about that,” he said to Lorio. “Mickelson’s due in town this evening. You know how it is.” Senator Mickelson was Tennessee’s senior United States senator, but it wasn’t election season.
“Now, about this witness,” Sheriff Stegall said. He picked a notepad from the jumble of papers on his desk. Lorio came to life like somebody had flipped his switch. He removed a pen and notepad from his pocket and waited. “What’s her name?”
“Jackie Lyons,” I said.
Stegall looked at me as though he didn’t care for what he saw. “Address?”
“Deertick Motel. Room 102.”
“Deertick? Where’s that?”
“Highway 70,” I said.
“I think she means the Detrick Motel,” Lorio suggested.
“That’s the one,” I said.
“No permanent address then?”
“Times are hard,” I said.
“Are you on food stamps, Mrs. Lyons?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“I was just wondering if my tax dollars were buying all your expensive toys.”
“Toys?”
He flipped through a folder on his desk. I guess it was my dossier, because he read out of it. “Camera, laptop. Says here you had a cell phone but you lost it in the lake. You also have a car. Times don’t sound too hard if you have a car.” He closed the folder. “This country is getting sick of supporting moochers like you. One of these days the tit will run dry.”
I shrugged against the cables of nervous tension tightening across my back. “I work out of my car. I sell my car and I can’t work, then I really will be on welfare.”
“What about your cell phone?”
“I don’t work if people can’t call me.”
“And were you working today?”
I told him how I was supposed to meet a preacher about a job. “Strange place to meet a preacher,” he chuckled. “Maybe it was a blow job. You’re not a hooker, are you, Mrs. Lyons?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Don’t worry, I won’t bust you.”
“Especially if I give comps, huh? I bet you got a nice bed in the back of this thing—tinted windows, soundproof walls, the whole shebang.”
Instead of getting mad, he smiled and folded his hands on the desk. He was going to humor me now, feed me enough rope to hoist myself by my own petard. “So you’re here to meet a preacher about a job. What kind of job are we talking about?”
“Photography.”
“Professional photographer, huh? I just paid a fortune for my daughter’s wedding pictures. Her photographer drives a bigger car than I do, but here you can hardly afford a decent place to live. Maybe you should think about another line of work.”
“Are you hiring? I know how to shoot radar and write tickets.”
“That’s funny as hell. You almost made me laugh.”
“It’s what I live for, Sheriff,” I said.
“So, you work out of your car and you’re a photographer.” He said it almost like he didn’t believe me. “Where’s your camera? Did you lose that in the lake, too?”
“I gave it to that girl, the one that looks like an Elle model.”
Lorio flipped back several pages in his notes. “Mercedes LaGrance.”
“What made you give her your camera and run off like that?” Stegall asked me.
My only choice now was to brass it out and hope for the best. “I thought I saw somebody fall in the lake.”
“People fall in the lake every day. Nobody calls 911.”
“The guy looked like he was having some kind of fit. I thought he might drown. Of course, I could have been mistaken.”
Stegall nodded and leaned back in his chair. “We all make mistakes. But that’s the problem. You didn’t make a mistake. Somebody really had fallen in the lake and drowned. Only not when you say he did. How do you explain that?”
“Maybe he had a stroke.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“All I can tell you is what I saw,” I said. “I can’t explain how I saw it.”
Stegall closed his notebook and put his shoes up on the desk. They were cheap, black leather, so shiny they looked like plastic, remnants of an old wad of gum stuck to one heel. “The coroner believes the deceased had been in the water for several hours. Officer Lorio said you mentioned this fact, yourself, when he arrived on the scene. You claim you saw the deceased fall in the water, yet this girl…”
“Mercedes LaGrance,” Lorio filled in the blank.
“… says she didn’t see anybody on the levee at the time.”
All I could do was shrug.
“That can only mean you had prior knowledge…”
&
nbsp; “Just one problem, Sheriff. I wasn’t there when he drowned. If you want to know what time I arrived, ask the old man at the gate.”
“I intend to do that,” he said.
“Good.” I crossed my arms and waited.
“Meanwhile, I’ll hold you as a material witness until we can get this straightened out.” Stegall nodded to Lorio, who removed the handcuffs from his belt and asked me to stand.
While he cuffed me, Stegall came out from behind his desk. “I hope you understand, this is just procedure. Senator Mickelson has a house at Stirling Estates. Until we can be absolutely sure what happened, we’re forced to treat this as a possible threat to national security. No doubt it will all be straightened out in the morning and you can go on your way.”
“Yeah, it’s just one night in jail.” I twisted my wrists in the cuffs—Lorio hadn’t put them on too tight. “No biggie.”
“I’m glad you understand our situation,” Stegall said. His smile said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if I understood or not. “Of course, you’ll be staying with us in the county lockup. Our jail is much nicer than the one in town. Probably a whole lot nicer than that roach motel you live in.”
“I can hardly wait to get there.”
Lorio led me to the door and opened it. “Just one last thing, Mrs. Lyons.” Stegall stuck his thumbs in his belt and leaned back against his desk. “The EMT said he had a lot of trouble finding a good vein due to all the tracks in your arm.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve ordered a search of your vehicle. Just thought you’d like to know.”
As he held my elbow to help me down the first step, Lorio whispered, “Sorry.” Then he handed me over to one of Stegall’s goons.
4
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when they finished booking me. I used my one phone call to leave a message with Preston Park’s answering service and went to bed in a cell with three cots, a sink, a toilet and half a roll of John Wayne. About two in the morning, they brought in a pair of women. One was a meth addict who spent the first hour throwing up in the toilet and the rest of the night organizing the lines on her pillow. The second was a hooker who stared at me like I was a work of art. Finally, she asked, “Didn’t you arrest me once?”
“Probably.” I turned my face to the gray concrete wall. Back in the day, I’d been a vice cop in the Memphis Police Department. I wondered for about ten seconds if she would shiv me, then I fell asleep. Me and the bedbugs had a lovely four-hour gonk.
When the officer of the day banged on the door, my cellmates were already awake. “Let me just get my things,” I said when he called my name.
“Hey,” the hooker said from her bunk. I looked up while the officer handcuffed me. “You Jackie Lyons?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“You had a visitor last night, asked for you by name.”
“Did I?”
“Some old lady. Stood right there, said not to wake you.”
“That was nice of her.”
“Come on.” The officer pulled me into the hall. “Don’t listen to that tweaker,” he said as we walked away. “We don’t let people back here, especially after visiting hours.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I don’t know any old ladies.”
* * *
He delivered me unto the offices of Sheriff Stegall. Preston Park stood up from the leather chair in front of Stegall’s desk. “Jesus, she’s still in cuffs.” Preston was an old friend of mine as well as my occasional employer. He paid me to photograph the auto accidents and nursing home patients that made up the bulk of his law practice, but he would sometimes go slumming in criminal law and take on hopeless cases like me.
At a nod from the sheriff, the jailer unlocked me and bowed out. Preston led me to his chair. “Are you OK?” I nodded that I was.
Stegall’s office desk was even bigger than the one in his motor home. Green felt and pockets at the corners and you’d have a decent pool table. Windows to either side framed an antique bookcase that climbed to the ceiling, left wall checkerboarded with photographs of sheriffs past, with little brass plaques telling their terms of office and noting which ones died in the line of duty. One had heroically eaten a German shell in World War II.
A half-dozen biographies and books on military history bookended a library of photographs of Sheriff Stegall shaking hands with nearly every politician within three hundred miles, plus a couple of dead presidents. The top shelf was reserved for his model collection. I spotted an A-6 Intruder and an A-7 Corsair, along with an aerial photo of an aircraft carrier and some kind of shadow box containing a gaudy jumble of ribbons and medals.
“Sheriff Stegall, was it really necessary to parade my client through the entire building in prison clothes and cuffs?” Preston asked. He was polite, but there was a professional edge to his voice that sometimes intimidated even me. “I was told that she had been released.”
Stegall wasn’t the least bit impressed. “She’s still being processed out.” He ran a hand over the smooth white knob of his head, then set his fists on the desk in front of him, fingers laced together. A new wedding band had barely begun to leave an impression in his ring finger, but on the other hand he wore a heavy ring of old, worn-looking gold with a black stone in the center. “May I ask your client a question before she goes?”
Preston looked at me and I shrugged. “Go on.”
“Refresh my memory. How did you happen to find the body?”
I sighed. I would never be able to explain to him or anyone else that I had seen the last moments of this man’s life played out like a movie, or how, for as long as I could remember, I’d been seeing things like this, ghosts, spirits of the dead. Not all the time and not everywhere. Sometimes I’d go months without seeing them. It had been over a year since I tried to hide my friends behind a snow-white curtain of heroin. Whenever I started seeing ghosts again, it was usually a sign that my life was about to fall apart.
And here I’d just got it back together.
“I thought I saw somebody fall in the lake.” I shrugged and flexed my hands. I could still feel the band of cold where the cuffs had bit into my wrists. “Obviously, I didn’t see anything. It must have been a coincidence.”
“That would be an incredible coincidence.”
“You know my client had nothing to do with this man’s death,” Preston interrupted.
“Her story about meeting a preacher for a photography job checks out. The pastor called yesterday to vouch for her. And as it so happens, due to circumstances I’m not at liberty to reveal, the coroner has ruled the drowning a suicide.” He unlaced his fingers and tapped his ring on the desk.
I tried not to laugh out loud. What I had seen yesterday afternoon on the levee was no suicide. The man was in some kind of distress, but he hadn’t walked into the water and drowned himself. The coroner’s ruling was a joke.
Stegall continued, “We’ve also verified with the guard when Mrs. Lyons arrived on the property.”
“Miss,” I corrected.
“However, I still have questions about her involvement in this.”
“What kind of questions?” Preston asked.
Stegall tapped his ring several times on the desk, giving himself time to think. It was obvious he didn’t like questions that didn’t have easy answers. He much preferred his answers lined up in neat little rows that he could tick off before clocking out at five every day. He shuffled some of the papers on his desk to see if he could find his answers there.
“Why exactly did you jump in the water?”
“I was trying to save him.”
“He’d been in the water for hours. You said so yourself.”
“I didn’t know that until I was in the water with him.”
“Sam—that is, the deceased, Samuel Loftin, was a big man. You’re not exactly built for dragging grown men out of lakes.”
That was true enough. I was five-three and still had the body of a heroin junkie. Always being hungry will do that to you. �
�I’ve had some training,” I said.
“YMCA swim lessons?”
“Coast Guard. Rescue diver school.”
“So you were a spar in the knee-deep navy,” Stegall sneered. “I’m an Annapolis grad, twenty years flying off carriers.”
“I never took you for a Navy man,” I said to the anchor-faced ring-knocker. I pointed to his toys and the box of fluff on the shelf. “I thought maybe you picked those up at a garage sale.”
“Jackie.” Preston warned, then inserted himself between us. Stegall had gone scarlet to the point of his head. “If you have no intention of charging my client, may we go?”
I’ll give Sheriff Stegall this much. He could screw it down tight. He didn’t answer. He just shooed us away, like flies trying to land on his pie.
5
IT TOOK A MERE two and half hours for them to locate my camera in the property cage. Someone had filed it in their office without bagging it as evidence first. When they finally returned it to me, the photo I had taken of the three girls skipping rope had been erased.
Preston drove me to the impound lot to retrieve my car. We found it sitting under some pine trees in a pasture of junked and seized cars. Its rear seat was lying on the ground beside the door panels, the dashboard dismantled, front seats slashed to ribbons with the springs showing through. “At least they didn’t cut up the tires,” Preston said.
While he helped me stuff the seat into the back, I had a few choice words about Sheriff Stegall and his methods. Preston said, “A little town like Malvern, they do whatever they want. I could sue for damages to your vehicle, but most likely he’ll be fishing buddies with the judge.” He closed the door and stood back to examine my POS. “I doubt you could get more than a couple hundred, even if we won.”
We shoved the dashboard in the trunk, but it stuck out the back too far to close. The front seats were hopeless and I didn’t have the money to get them reupholstered. “What you need is a new car.”
