The Devil’s Punchbowl

‘Huh. I can’t figure it, then. When was the last time you talked to him before today?’

‘I don’t remember,’ I say in an offhand voice. ‘You know how it is. I’ve seen him to say hello in the street, but no real conversation.’

Logan nods, but his eyes are watchful.

‘I’d like to look at his body now, Chief. Do you mind?’ I ask permission because I must. Logan’s allowing this would be purely a courtesy. To help him decide, I add, ‘I want to get to his house and tell his wife as quickly as possible.’

‘Don’t you want to know how it happened?’ Logan asks. ‘How he went over, I mean?’

I can’t believe I haven’t asked this yet, but then the reason comes to me: I’m a lot more concerned about what Tim might have been carrying when he went over the fence than the circumstances that caused him to do so. ‘I’d prefer to see his body first. Could you clear those people out of there, Chief?’

‘Everybody but the coroner. She doesn’t answer to me.’

The truth is, the coroner is one of the few people whose presence I can tolerate in this situation. Jewel Washington is a nurse who ran for office after being laid off from one of the two hospitals in the city. An MD isn’t a requirement to be a coroner in Mississippi, but Jewel is a knowledgeable and conscientious nurse, and she does a better job with the dead than was sometimes done in the past.

As I step into the pool of light, I see that Chief Logan didn’t exaggerate. Tim’s body sustained massive trauma as a result of the fall. The impact broke both his forearms and split his skull above the eyebrows. The one eye I can see is wide and cloudy, the eye of a dead fish on a pier. In my mind I hear my father’s voice telling me about René Le Fort, the French army physician who created the system for classifying facial fractures by throwing cadavers off the roof of an army hospital. Though Tim is almost unrecognizable, it’s not his shattered face that holds my attention. It’s his chest and arms. His shirt is shredded and covered with blood, and his broken forearms look almost as though they were mauled by a wild animal. His chest and neck also show puncture wounds and tears. Unless he fell forty feet into a pile of nails and broken glass, I don’t see how he could have got those injuries.

‘I turned him over,’ Jewel Washington says from the darkness behind me. ‘Soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. You ever seen anything like that?’

The coroner’s voice seems to come from far away, as though we are hikers separated in a twisted canyon. I’ve seen worse than this, I reply silently, but not on someone I knew well. ‘You mean his arms?’

‘Yeah, his arms. He didn’t get those wounds in no fall.’

I bend over Tim, squinting down at the torn flesh. ‘Could animals have gotten to him before anyone else did?’

‘I guess it’s possible. Histamine tests will tell us that. But you ask me, that stuff happened antemortem.’

‘Christ,’ I whisper.

‘Christ, indeed. This world done gone crazy, I believe.’

Jewel speaks with the weary resignation of a middle-aged black woman who has sacrificed a lot to send her two sons to junior college. Because she has worked closely with my father in the past, I know I can rely on her to give me all the help in her power.

I stand and give her a hug from the side. ‘Did the fall kill him?’

‘Can’t say. Not yet, anyway. He’s got some kind of wounds on his leg that smell like cooked pork to me. Got to be burns, but I don’t know how he’d get those.’ Jewel’s bloodshot eyes hold mine. ‘Do you?’

I shake my head, trying to repress images of Tim being tortured for information, yet wondering what his torturers did to tear him up so badly.

‘We won’t know about this one until they do the autopsy up in Jackson,’ Jewel observes.

‘Well, let’s make sure they do it in a hurry.’ I turn back to the coroner and give her a small glimpse of my outrage. ‘Don’t miss a lick on this one, Jewel. Push for every test you can get. Toxicology, everything.’

‘I plan to.’ She grunts noncommittally. ‘Let’s just hope the DA is on board for it.’

I expel a lungful of air at the thought of Shad Johnson being in charge of Tim’s case. ‘I’m going to inform the victim’s wife.’

‘Lord,’ Jewel says softly. ‘That’s one visit I’m glad I don’t have to make.’

‘If anybody asks you tonight, he died instantly. Okay?’

She nods slowly. ‘I can live with that until tomorrow. I hope it’s the truth too.’

I lean closer and look into her dark eyes, holding her gaze. ‘Has anybody searched the body?’

‘Not since I been here. But you know they did before I got here.’ Shouts reverberate along the wall from atop the bluff, and I see drunken spectators peering down at Tim and us.

‘We ought to charge admission,’ Jewel says bitterly. Seeing my quivering chin, she squeezes my arm above the elbow and says, ‘Tent’s on the way.’

Her small gesture of compassion cracks the armor plating I buckled over my emotions back at the foot of the ladder. Deep within me, a caustic soup of guilt and rage boils upward, searching for an outlet. Jewel squeezes my arm harder.

‘Easy now.’

‘We grew up together,’ I whisper by way of explanation.

Jewel nods in sympathy. ‘I imagine this boy had a tough time growing up. I used to work with his daddy some. Never liked Dr Jessup. Cold as an old-time scalpel.’

Jewel has cut right to the heart of Tim’s family. The corpse lying on the ground was alive for forty-five years, but the soul that occupied it until tonight never managed to escape boyhood.

‘Stay in touch?’ I ask.

Jewel gives me a sad smile of encouragement. ‘You know I will.’

I turn and walk back to the dim perimeter of the light, where Chief Logan stands talking to a man in the shadows. As I near the pair, I realize that the newcomer is Shadrach Johnson, Natchez’s district attorney, the man I defeated for mayor two years ago. The scars from our campaigns still sting, but our troubled history predates that election by five years.

‘Well, look who we’ve got here,’ Shad says with mocking reverence. ‘You’re out mighty late considering all the mayoral duties you’ve got this weekend.’

Shad was born in Natchez but moved to Chicago while he was still a boy. He attended college there on scholarship and worked as a big-firm lawyer until he was forty, when he returned to Natchez to run for mayor. His Southern accent waxes and wanes with his moods and motives. As usual, he’s dressed to the nines, wearing an expensive suit and tie on a weekend when most people are dressed like fans at a Jimmy Buffett concert.

‘Why don’t we skip the bullshit tonight?’ I ask. ‘Tim Jessup was a friend.’

‘My condolences,’ Shad says without empathy. ‘Seems like an odd friendship to me, the mayor of the city and a no-count blackjack dealer.’

I take a deep breath and focus on Logan. ‘Could I speak to you alone, Chief?’

Logan starts to step away, but Shad catches hold of his arm. ‘Not so fast, Chief. You need to finish my briefing here, and that might take a while.’

‘I just need a minute,’ I add with as much civility as I can muster.

‘Well, Mr Mayor,’ Shad says with relish, ‘you’re just going to have to wait. I know you’re not accustomed to waiting, but I am the chief law enforcement officer of Adams County.’

I pointedly ignore Shad, keeping my eyes on Logan. ‘Did you find anything else on Jessup besides his cell phone?’

The chief shakes his head.

‘If somebody stole his wallet, it seems like they’d take his phone too.’

‘Seems like,’ Logan agrees.