Back to Lazarus (Sydney Brennan)

by Judy K. Walker

  “This is a beautiful place you have here, Mrs. Harrison.”

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  Her voice was hard, without a bit of the quaver common to the elderly. Her unblinking eyes were equally hard. I began to wonder if Ginny’s offer of hospitality was all that altruistic, or if she had just wanted to escape her mother’s formidable glare.

  “It’s a shame to bring ugliness into such a beautiful place, don’t you think?” she demanded.

  Definitely not altruistic. “Yes, ma’am, it is.”

  She turned her head slightly, as if measuring me for my coffin. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Your granddaughter hired me for reasons of her own, Mrs. Harrison. If she can’t explain them to you, then I certainly can’t.”

  “Oh, I know why she’s doing it. Or why she thinks she’s doing it. I asked why you are. What makes a person want to meddle around in another person’s business for money?”

  Some inexplicable puckish urge almost brought a smile to my face, but I repressed it. “It’s what I do.”

  “And is that something you’re proud of?”

  When I didn’t respond, she tried another tact. “Just how much is she paying you?”

  I took the time to breathe before answering.

  “Mrs. Harrison, I didn’t come here to pick a fight. I just came here to meet you, to let you know what I’m doing and see if you have any questions I can answer. Noel is going forward with this. I don’t know your granddaughter very well, but I have a feeling that when she puts her mind to something it gets done.” I paused. “I also have a feeling she takes after you.”

  For a moment her eyes softened, and I thought she would smile, but it was just a moment. Still, I knew it was the closest thing I’d ever have to an opening. “What can you tell me about the relationship between your daughter and her husband?”

  “I assume you mean my dead daughter. My dead, murdered daughter.” She watched to see if I’d flinch; I didn’t. “Her name was Vanda.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He killed her. That was the extent of their relationship. What more is there to know?”

  “They had a daughter.”

  “I thank the Lord for that every day.”

  “They were married for several years.”

  “Until he beat and choked her to death. Blissful years they were not. Young lady, let me tell you that you have never seen a woman more beautiful than my Vanda. She could have had any man, any man she wanted, and what she ever saw in him, I shall wonder until the day I die. That’s all I have to say.”

  I wasn’t sure I had the strength to respond. I could feel myself shriveling like a worm on the hot sidewalk under her gaze. She went on.

  “You think you got some kind of magic in that little finger of yours, you can wave and make me say my Vanda was a bad person, you go right ahead and try. You… who do you think you are? What gives you the right to come in here and say I don’t know my own daughter?”

  Not understanding her defensiveness, I opened my mouth to respond, but she barreled on.

  “You don’t have to say it. I can see it in your eyes. And let’s just say I got a little magic of my own. I know one day you’re gonna come in here and try to break my heart with your lies. Go ahead and try; you can’t touch me. But if you hurt my Noel…”

  “Mrs. Harrison, think what you want about me, but the simple fact is that if I don’t do this, she’ll just get someone else. You can’t scare everyone away.”

  I wasn’t really so sure of that last part; her glare made my chest hurt. “Or she might just do it herself.”

  For the first time, I saw a crack in her composure, and she became what she always was but refused to let anyone see—an old woman. When she spoke this time, her voice trembled with anger.

  “Get out. Get out now, and don’t come back.”

  I rose and left the way I’d come in. When the door shut behind me, I paused on the porch long enough for a few deep breaths of hot humid air. I never did get my iced tea.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tanya was true to her word. When I stopped by WFC on my way back to Tallahassee, she was at lunch, but the records were waiting for me at the front desk in a banker’s box with an invoice. I tried not to outwardly cringe at the figure and wrote the check out slowly to give myself time to consider whether it would bounce. Probably not. The man behind the desk watched me lazily from his straining reclined chair. I couldn’t decide if the poor chair or his uniform buttons were in more agony, stretched against his massive bulk. He hadn’t even bothered to speak when I arrived, just nodded toward the box. Perhaps he was contemplating my account balance as well, dreaming idle correctional officer dreams of thinner days when he could have apprehended me in the parking lot before I made my felonious check-writing escape. No, I realized, as I tore the check from my book. He’d been staring down my blouse as I leaned over the desk. Asshole.

  The box wasn’t quite full and I’d managed to snag a spot near the admin building, so it gave me great pleasure to refuse his half-hearted offer of assistance to a “little lady.” Even better, I was able to lug the box balanced against my hip in one hand so I looked like a bad ass. (You can bet he hadn’t moved it, so he didn’t know how heavy it was, or wasn’t.) My desire to throw the box at him to see how fast he could move was a strong itch in need of scratching.

  A life lived in the South taught me long ago to take offensive chauvinistic offers and diminutive titles as well-intentioned but misguided remnants of a chivalrous code that wasn’t all bad. I often used those fossils to my advantage, and sometimes they even gave me a touch of the warm and fuzzies. I can’t say my irritation with the man was out of character for me, but it was disproportionate to the quick peek he’d had. I suspected my bad temper was a result of Grandma Harrison’s animosity.

  What was with the paranoia? Her accusations that I was lying about her daughter before I’d even started my investigation made me wonder what I’d find. What could be so bad about a child that her mother could refuse to accept it as truth, nearly 25 years after her death? No point speculating; it just made me dwell on the woman’s ill will. A little music therapy (singing along with my favorite road trip CD’s at the top of my lungs) flushed the prickles out of my system. I managed to not think about Mrs. Harrison or anyone related to her by blood or marriage for the remaining hour drive back to Tallahassee. No doubt about it—the woman was a distraction I wasn’t being paid enough to deal with. For that matter, I wasn’t being paid to deal with her at all, as I’d remind Noel at the next opportunity.

  When I got home, I set the box of records on my desk in the living room. In my gallivanting around the Panhandle I’d forgotten to eat lunch, or even my dried-up peanuts, and my tummy was gurgling. Tallahassee is a town that eats depressingly early—try finding a restaurant that’s open after 9 pm and you’ll end up at a 24-hour diner—but at 4:00 it was early for dinner even by Tallahassee standards. Since Ben wouldn’t be coming over this evening (he had some kind of sports things at school) I embraced the flexibility and eccentricity of the self-employed. Grabbing a couple of slices of leftover pizza, I added a Mexican beer with a slightly shriveled lime to round out the meal and took it all to my desk.

  Three hours later, I had stale pizza crust, a stiff neck, and a few pages of notes to show for my efforts. The box representing the last years of Isaac Thomas’s life had gained some color too. A tagging system for reviewing records is essential—I use yellow for useful information I may need in the future, green for items of interest that require more investigation, and red for knock your socks off revelations. The color scheme was skewed toward yellow and green, as is usual, but there were a couple of items in red as well. Generally what red lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality.

  Although only a few pages in length, the Pre-Sentence Investigation Report (PSI) was the most colorful section of the box. A PSI can be requested by the sentencing judge or one of the parties, and it’s always prepared by
the Department of Corrections. It often includes a statement from the investigating officer that headed the investigation, and may also include a statement from the defendant. There was nothing from Isaac Thomas in this one, but there was a brief statement from the investigating officer, Rudy Nagroski. His words weren’t nearly as personal or as vengeful as some I’ve read. It sounded like standard language, and only requested generally that punishment be commensurate with the crime. Mr. Nagroski definitely went in the green column.

  The statement of the facts of the case must have been from one of the case reports or from an informal discussion with one of the investigating officers. The source wasn’t identified, and the summary was brief with little detail. Vanda Thomas was discovered in the evening hours of October 6, 1980, by a neighbor. She was lying fully clothed on the bed. There were some signs of struggle in the bedroom. Isaac had struck her several times in the face, then manually choked her to death. Although it technically couldn’t be used in his “score” (to lengthen his sentence) because there had been no conviction, another section of the PSI noted that there was a previous complaint of domestic violence against him. The complaint number was provided—big green tab. The complaint had been less than a year before Vanda’s murder.

  Also in the green column was Isaac’s public defender, Sam Norton. I wasn’t familiar with the name, but I knew Ralph would be. Sam Norton had pled Isaac out before they could go to trial. Isaac got 25 years to life for first degree murder. Didn’t sound like much of a deal to me, but what do I know? In the 80s, parole might have sounded like a real possibility. In fact, with prison overcrowding in the mid 90s, some guys were getting five and 10 times or more of their time served as gain time, only serving a fraction of their original sentence. It wasn’t until building prisons overtook building schools as a priority that the legislature was able to really “get tough” on crime. Now with a myriad of sentence enhancements and minimum mandatories, sentences were longer to begin with, and inmates had to serve 85% of their sentence before they’re eligible for parole. And good luck getting it then.

  The rest of the information in the box was mostly yellow, for example, all those magic dates and numbers that would hopefully enable me to access every bit of information about Isaac Thomas. Still, a picture of the man began to appear in his incarceration records. He had only two DR’s (disciplinary reports) in his 20 years of incarceration. One of these had nothing to do with Isaac’s conduct. There’d been a minor incident of vandalism in his wing, and when the officer was unable (or unwilling) to determine the identity of the perpetrator, he wrote up everyone. The other was for a fight on the yard. There were statements from 7 inmates swearing that Isaac had intervened to stop the fight, and he wasn’t seriously disciplined.

  Isaac’s inmate request forms were always respectful (as were the responses from the officers in charge), and they were rarely for purely personal benefit. Many of the prisons in Florida aren’t air conditioned in summer and are poorly heated in winter, so sometimes he asked for extra fans or blankets, depending on the season. Other times it was something as trivial as permission for the wing to stay up an extra half hour to watch the NBA play-offs. He’d been issued an extra T-shirt—could he give it to so-and-so next door who was short one? Would it be possible to get their legal mail delivered earlier so they had more time to respond before the next pick-up? All the minutiae that make up day-to-day life in a prison.

  It wasn’t until I got near the back of the box, or closer in time to the present, that red flags appeared. There were only two, and one of these was an optimistic categorization—it didn’t exactly knock my socks off, but my gut said it could with a little more digging.

  All prisons have their own medical facilities, but treatment of illness obviously isn’t the focus of our prison system (I’m not even sure it’s the focus of our health care system) so these facilities are limited. Often an inmate requiring specialized tests or suffering from a serious illness is sent to a separate prison medical facility. A couple of weeks before Isaac committed suicide, he received a medical transfer. He was returned to WFC the next day, so it was probably just for testing. Still, there could be a connection to his death. Southern prisons aren’t exactly known for their oncology wings. Isaac wouldn’t be the first person to choose the time of his demise rather than suffer the pain and humiliation of a protracted illness.

  The other one was a true red flag. Isaac’s PSI reflected that he had no living family. This information didn’t come from Isaac, so it probably came from his trial attorney, and it was consistent with what Noel had told me. However, a few months before he committed suicide, Isaac added someone to his visitor’s list for approval, a woman named Ida Pickett. Well, to say he added her name is misleading. Hers was the only name he had ever submitted as a potential visitor during his 20 lonely years of incarceration. There was no other mention of Ms. Pickett, and no indication that she had ever actually visited him, but she was listed there, along with her address. Interesting enough, but her singular status wasn’t what knocked my socks off. Isaac’s identification of her was. Under the heading of “relationship to inmate,” Isaac had written in impeccable block letters “SISTER.”

  Noel had just gained another aunt.

  CHAPTER SIX

  My head spun from hours of looking at photocopies of small type and barely decipherable handwriting, not to mention the latest revelation about Noel’s family. Noel was either mistaken or lied about when her father died and how old she was when her mother was killed, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. It’s possible she didn’t know about her aunt. It looked as if her father and his sister hadn’t been in touch for years, and Vanda’s family was unlikely to bring up the subject. That didn’t change my conviction that Noel wasn’t being straight with me about everything else, but I needed more information before I started attributing devious motives to her omissions. All I knew right now was that Noel and her entire family made my Sydney Sense tingle like crazy.

  So I did what I always do when my head is spinning. I made Ralph’s favorite cookies.

  I’d already been an investigator for a few years by the time I met Ralph Abraham, but I still feel like he showed me the ropes. He knew how things worked at the local level, who’s important and how to get the community on your side. His connections (and convictions) go back to his days as an idealistic young black man in the civil rights movement. He’s in semi-retirement now, doing consulting work once in a while on projects and issues that still ignite those young fires, but his health isn’t what is used to be.

  Ralph was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago. Although she tries to hide it, I swear his wife Diane cringes every time I walk through their door. I try to tell myself it’s because I still bring him forbidden chocolate peanut butter oatmeal cookies. The truth is, I only ever bring them when I need Ralph’s help, so I can’t really blame Diane’s anxiety on sugar alone.

  It was 9 p.m. when I arrived on their doorstep, but Diane managed to swallow her emotions quickly as she welcomed me inside. I held up my little baggie in an effort at full disclosure. “See, I only brought four—two for each of you.”

  She smiled. We both knew she’d be lucky to get her hands on just one. I paused for a moment before heading toward the den. “How is he?”

  Diane started to speak, then made a face that caused her head to tilt and one eyebrow to rise. I recognized it as a variation on the “men are such dumbasses” expression and mirrored it with the ease of much practice. Diane let out a surprisingly girlish giggle for a woman of her mature years.

  I tossed the bag of cookies on Ralph’s lap as I crossed the room to my favorite armchair. “Hey, old man. I brought your stash.”

  It took Ralph a moment to tear his eyes from the TV. A big-haired woman was leaning against a police cruiser, wailing about her man in a twangy voice while mascara streaked down her face. It wasn’t a country music video, so it must be Cops. “Ever see anybody you know on there?”
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  “If I’m such an old man, how do you expect me to remember? What do you want, Syd?”

  “Just to bask in your sunny disposition. Have a cookie, codger. If you’ve got your teeth in.”

  He tried to scowl at me, but his natural good humor won out. Ralph could never maintain a bad mood for long. “So who’s got your world in a whirl this time, kid?”

  I told him all about Noel and her shrinking and expanding family. “You check the body?” he asked. Little chunks of chocolate covered some of the gray in his mustache and settled on the pooch of his slightly bulging belly.

  I simply blinked. “Her dad’s body. Check with DOC and see what they did with it. If the lady’s really his sister, maybe they released the body to her. Not to mention your client might want to know where her dad’s buried.”

  I nodded. “The sister—if she is his sister—lives in Lazarus.”

  “Lazarus!” Ralph lurched forward and I was afraid his tatty black recliner would flip before settling into its full upright position. By his tone of voice, you’d think I’d said Baghdad. In the off season.

  “Yeah, Lazarus. What about it?”

  “You never heard of Lazarus?” He shook his head in disgust. “Let me tell you a little story about a shitheap called Lazarus. A bunch of industries moved to Lazarus in the 1940s to help with the war effort. Close to the coast and to the interstate so you got cheap transport, close to the air force base, and lots of unemployed poor people, so you got cheap labor. Well, Lazarus was so friendly, those companies told a few friends, and on and on. Before you knew it, business was booming and Lazarus had just about the lowest unemployment rate in the south.”

  “And then the other shoe dropped?”

  Ralph mock-glared at me. “Who’s telling this story?”