“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tallahassee’s loss is our gain.”
“Thanks. Anyway, I didn’t mean to get into all that, but you are so easy to talk to. And so nonjudgmental. I’ve heard you went through a divorce and some pretty rough times yourself. I’m sure that gives you a lot of empathy for others.”
“I hope so,” I said as I walked over to the door and opened it. “Thanks again.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to talk again sometime, perhaps over coffee.”
“Sounds great.” I walked out, leaving the door open.
Chapter 8
Compared to other investigations I had conducted, I was finding out information quickly. Prison is such a closed society and so self-contained that rather than having a lack of information about the case, it seemed as though I’d soon be faced with having too much. Having such easy access to everyone at all times, with the exception of the first- and third-shift officers, made this more like Murder on the Orient Express than a modern-day investigation.
I was trying to track down an inmate named Jacobson, which on the street would have taken days, if not weeks. In a matter of minutes, I discovered that he was in lockup.
There are four types of lockup in the state prison system. Protective management lockup is for those who are at risk in the general prison population—rapists, child-molesters, ex–law enforcement officers. Close management dorms are for those who, because of their custody, crimes, and behavior on the inside, do their entire sentence inside a cell. Then there is confinement, which has two classifications—administrative and disciplinary. An inmate is placed in administrative confinement when the administration determines that it is best to do so—usually when he is under investigation for a crime. Disciplinary confinement is for those inmates who were accused of a crime and were found guilty. Jacobson was in the latter.
Whereas most inmates in the Florida DOC are housed in open-bay, military barracks–style dormitories, those in lock-up are housed in single six-by-nine cells. Some of the lockup cells house two inmates, some one. All have a sink, toilet, bunk, and a very small window covered with steel mesh. The inmates in lockup are fed through a slot in the metal door about the size of a food tray. Jacobson’s was open, and I was talking to him through it.
Squatting down to talk through the tray slot in the door always made my knees ache and my feet fall asleep. I usually chose to talk to an inmate through the tray slot because of the security hassle involved in arranging to meet him in his cell or the conference room. For me to enter an inmate’s cell, he must be frisked and cuffed, and an officer must be present at all times. The same is involved if I meet with him in the conference room. Many times what the inmate has to say to me is so short that being frisked and cuffed takes longer than our meeting. Other times the inmates have a lot to say, but are unable or unwilling to because of the security officer standing within hearing distance. I was hoping that without an officer present, Jacobson would sing me a song. He did. Unfortunately, it was one I had heard before.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” he said in response to my first question, which was “How are you doing?”
From the last cell of the corridor to my right, I could hear Inmate Starn yelling, “CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN, COME HERE. COME HERE, CHAPLAIN.”
He did that every time I came to confinement. It was Wednesday, and I had already seen him twice that week.
It didn’t look like Jacobson was going to cooperate. Perhaps I had spoken too soon about the overabundance of information I was going to uncover during this investigation.
Crouching down on the bare cement floor of the confinement hall, I smelled the same smell I always did down there—sleep. The stale air was thick with smells of drool, perspiration, and halitosis. The cell was one of twenty along a long corridor. There was an officer seated at the end of the hall, a round black man with virtually no hair. Another officer, a tall slender man with strawberry blond hair and pink cheeks, was crouched down by a food slot about five cells down from me.
“Is there nothing I can help you with?” I asked. “Nothing you would like to talk about?” Behind me, the gray block wall was lined with empty milk cartons, wads of crumpled napkins, and various other items of trash the inmates had tossed out of their cells.
“Fuck you, motherfucker.”
“From what I hear, you would, but I’m not interested,” I said, deciding to change my approach. A few cells down, an inmate yelled, “DON’T TALK TO THE CHAPLAIN LIKE THAT, YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!”
If Jacobson heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it. “I ain’t no punk,” he said, his eyes seeming to take on a demonic glow in the dark cell.
He may or may not have been a punk, but he certainly did not look like one. His shaved head, pale white skin, sparse beard, and puke-green tattoos made him look like a neo-Nazi serial killer.
“What are you then?” I asked. Somewhere in another corridor a steel door slammed. The noise bounced off the concrete walls and floors and reverberated through confinement. It was, perhaps, the most depressing sound I had ever heard. Another inmate, from a cell to my left this time, said, “We’re locked in now, boys.” Someone else said, “Yeah, and so is the chaplain.”
“I’m Satan, man,” Jacobson hissed.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said.
“Don’t be so hard on Satan,” the inmate to my left said and started laughing.
“Did you come to cast me out, Holy Man?” Jacobson asked in such a way as to doubt my ability to do so.
“Actually, I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you and maybe ask you a few questions.”
“There’s nothing you could do for me. I’m well taken care of. What you really mean is, there’s something I can do for you. You need something I have.”
“CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN,” Starn continued to call.
“Which is what?”
“Secrets.”
The officers’ radios sounded at the same time, and because of their distance apart and the cement surroundings, every word was doubled. It sounded like the digital delay that many recording artists overused during the late eighties.
“What makes you think I want to know your secrets?” I asked.
“Believe me, you do. I see evil. I hear evil. I see and hear that which is done in darkness,” he said. His eyes were wide and wild, and he hissed his words, placing about fifteen s’s on the end of darkness. He was a bad actor doing Manson.
I felt something moist on the back of my hand. It was a small dot of water. I looked up. Above me, hanging from the ceiling, there were two bare galvanized pipes running the length of the hallway. I saw condensation around the joint of one of them directly above me. For a moment, I lost my train of thought, forgetting what he had said. Then I remembered—he knew things that were done in the dark.
“What sort of things?” I asked.
“I see evil. I hear evil. But I speak no evil. I’ve crossed my heart, hoped to die. Watch it, or I’ll stick a needle in your eye. I’ll cast you out, Holy Man.”
“I see,” I said. “And hear.”
“Don’t play games with me. I can have you stuck, just like Johnson. Was it in his eye? Corrections officers are so sloppy, you know. I heard it was very messy. Did all his blood drain out? There’s power in the blood, you know. Life and death. Atonement’s in the blood. But, I guess you know that. You think he atoned for his sin?”
“CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN. CHAPLAIN, I NEED YOU,” Starn yelled.
“So you had Johnson stuck? What was his sin?” I asked, trying to keep up.
The officer seated at the end of the hall propped his feet on the corner of the desk and leaned back in his chair. The shortness of his legs caused his feet to fall off the desk when he leaned back in his chair.
“I can have anybody I want to stuck,” he continued. As he talked, he widened and narrowed his eyes. I had seen Charles Manson do the same thing on a TV interview. “But I like sticking pigs best.”
&n
bsp; The officer at the desk stood, pulled the chair closer to the desk, and then repeated his earlier attempt. This time he was successful. However, his new position made him look extremely uncomfortable.
“Was Johnson your punk?” I asked.
“Hickory, dickory, dock—Johnson didn’t have a cock, but he got one . . . every night, and now he’s taken flight.”
“CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN.” Starn’s voice sounded sad and whiny.
“Did you have Johnson stuck?”
“The pig had him stuck because he was tired of getting stuck in the butt.”
He jumped up suddenly from his crouched position at the slot and began dancing around the cell, crashing into the sink, bed, and walls as he did. All the while he was singing the old hymn, “There’s Power in the Blood.” There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb.
“Jacobson,” I yelled at him, “Jacobson, come here, now.”
Power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb.
Evidently the officer at the other cell heard me yelling because he rushed over and looked through the narrow glass window of the cell door. He yelled for the other officer, who was still seated at the end of the hall, to come quickly and began to fumble for his keys.
“CHAPLAIN, CHAPLAIN.”
“Step back, Father, please,” he said, his voice an octave higher from the excitement. His strawberry blond hair was very fine and it moved a great deal whenever he did. His face, previously pink, was now a deep red.
I complied. He pulled the handcuffs from the back of his belt and opened them. As soon as the rotund black officer joined him, Strawberry unlocked the door and stepped in, Rotund following closely behind him. As Rotund entered the cell, I could have sworn I saw him smile.
Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.
Strawberry told Jacobson to assume the position, to which he responded with many colorful obscenities, some of which I had never heard before. The next thing I knew, Jacobson was on the floor. It happened so quickly that it took my mind a few seconds to replay it, at a slower pace, so that I could comprehend what had happened. The tall white officer in front told Jacobson to turn around and spread them, and it looked as if he was actually about to when the short black officer stepped up and punched him hard at the base of the neck.
By the time my mind had finished the first scenario, the second one was already over. Jacobson was cuffed, face down on the rough concrete floor. They got him to his feet and spun him around. There was a mild abrasion on his forehead. He looked as calm as anyone I had ever seen. In fact, he appeared to be in a trance. He seemed to move in slow motion, but his movements lacked both direction and sturdiness.
“Let’s get him to medical,” Rotund said. “See about these cuts.” Then he added to Jacobson, “Next time I’m using the gas.”
“You better ask your captain first,” Jacobson whispered.
“Nobody touch this blood,” Rotund said as if he hadn’t heard Jacobson. “It’s bad blood in more ways that one.”
“Let me call the OIC first,” Strawberry said, beginning to walk back toward his desk. “Chaplain, can I talk with you for minute?”
“Sure,” I said looking back at Jacobson, who stared blankly at the wall in front of him.
As we walked down to the officer’s desk at the end of the corridor, I learned that Strawberry’s name was Rogers. When we passed by Starn’s cell, I stopped and looked in.
“Chaplain,” Starn asked, “do you believe that a demon can possess a man?”
“We already talked about this, Starn,” I said.
“I’m scared,” he said in the small voice of a scared child.
“Nothing spiritual good or bad can happen to you that you don’t allow or even invite,” I said. “You keep reading your Bible and praying. I’ll check in on you later, okay?”
“Okay,” he said in an upbeat voice again, easily soothed like a child.
Rogers propped his feet up on the desk without the problems Rotund had had. “What happened to make him go off like that?” he asked. I was seated across the desk from him.
“I really couldn’t say. He was okay, and then all of a sudden he exploded. Does he do that often?”
“He does pretty much whatever he wants to around here,” he said, and I could tell he wanted me to ask him for more.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just that certain inmates are looked out for by certain officers, and if the officer happens to be a captain, well, then they do pretty much what they want to. At least on that captain’s shift anyway. And, if the captain is popular or powerful enough, the inmate does pretty much whatever he wants anytime.”
“Who gives that kind of preferential treatment to an inmate as unstable as he is?”
“He’s not unstable. He’s a damn thespian.”
“You’re saying that was a show for my benefit?” I asked.
“I’m saying that everything he does is for show. It has an angle. He is always on the make. Did you say anything about Johnson to him?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. Why?”
“Well, his death really seemed to shake him up. Like maybe he wasn’t acting. I don’t know, but I think he’s scared for real about that.”
“Do you think he had anything to do with it?”
“He had everything to do with Johnson. They were both down here constantly. So either he had something to do with it or it scared him shitless, excuse my language, because he had nothing to do with it.”
“Like it may have been a message to him?” I asked.
“Yeah, something like that,” he said as if that caused a light to come on in his head. “Yeah, that could be it.”
Rotund yelled from down the hall, “Come on. What’s taking so long?”
“Just a minute,” Rogers yelled back.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost time for my meeting with Tom Daniels and Edward Stone.
“I’d better be going now. I’ve got a meeting up front. What will happen with Jacobson?”
“He’ll be taken to medical, checked out, and probably taken to the isolation cell and sedated and watched for twenty-four hours. That is, unless Captain Skipper cuts him out.”
“Then what will happen to him?” I asked.
“He’ll be sent back down here, I guess,” he said with a shrug that said, I just work here.
“What’s the difference in being confined in one cell as opposed to another?”
“Not much during the day, but I’ve heard at night all sorts of weird stuff happens in here.”
“Thanks for the info,” I said.
“Anytime, Father,” he said respectfully.
Before leaving, I glanced down the hallway at Jacobson. If he had moved even an inch, I couldn’t tell it. He appeared to be catatonic. I walked out of confinement with these words whirling around in my head: There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb. There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb.
Chapter 9
They looked like men sitting around a barber shop on Saturday morning or senior citizens on a park bench or mall-wanderers: they had time to kill. Inmates don’t have much, but what they have they possess a lot of—time. They sat around the chapel library under the watchful eye of the officer temporarily assigned to watch them until my new assistant, a Jewish chaplain, was hired next month. Mr. Smith and three other inmates were reading Decision magazine, the monthly magazine that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association faithfully sent us free of charge. Mr. Smith and one of the other inmates were wearing headphones—listening to gospel music no doubt. On my way to meet with Mr. Stone and Tom Daniels, I decided to stop by the chapel to check in and pick up something to take notes on, sure our meeting would prove to be noteworthy.
When Mr. Smith saw me, he jumped up and walked out into the hallway where I was unlocking my office door. “They�
�s two who want to see you, Brother Chaplain,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, “but it will have to be when I get back. I’ve got a meeting with the superintendent in about ten minutes.”
“Yesuh. I tell them to wait. It so hot out there, they won’t mind waitin’ in here where it nice ’n cool. ’Sides they got nothin’ else to do.”
“Thank you,” I said and walked into my office. As I closed the door, the phone began to ring.
“Chaplain Jordan,” I said into the receiver.
“Is this the chaplain?” a distressed female voice asked.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “How can I help you?”
“This is Veronica Simpson. My husband Charles Simpson is an inmate there.”
“Uh huh,” I said encouragingly.
“I need to talk to him,” she said, her voice breaking slightly. “I haven’t heard from him in four months, and I need to talk to him right now. I’m not playing with you, and I’m not crazy, but I’ve got a gun to my head, and I’m going to kill myself and his two-year-old son if I can’t talk to him right now.”
My heart started racing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Whatever it took, I was not going to let another person die. So help me God, I was not. I had no way of knowing whether or not she would do it, but that really wasn’t the point.
“Okay,” I said, “now listen to me. I will let you talk to your husband, so just put the gun down and relax.”
“I’m not crazy. I swear,” she added quickly, her voice seeming to gain strength. “If I can just talk to him, I will not kill myself.”
“The thing is, he is not here right now,” I said talking very slowly. “It will take a few minutes, but I will have him called up right away. So, why don’t we talk until he gets here. Would that be okay?”
“That would be okay,” she said softly. She was beginning to sound calmer.
“I have to ask you to hold on just a minute while I call down to his dorm and have him sent up here, okay?”
“Okay. I’m not going anywhere. I’m all right, Preacher. I just want to talk to my husband. I won’t do anything foolish,” she said as if we had switched rolls and now she was trying to reassure me.
MICHAEL LISTER'S FIRST THREE SERIES NOVELS: POWER IN THE BLOOD, THE BIG GOODBYE, THUNDER BEACH Page 7
