The Devil’s Punchbowl

‘Could I see his phone?’

‘You know that’s a police matter,’ Shad interjects. ‘You expecting them to find something special?’

The anger I felt beside Tim’s body is reaching critical mass, and the DA is too convenient a target. I need to get away from him as fast as possible.

‘No, but I’m going to inform the widow in a few minutes. I’d like to be able to answer her questions and pass along any personal effects. Knowing the circumstances of his death would help.’

Logan’s alert gaze is on me again, but he says nothing further. He glances at Shad, who gives a slight nod.

‘There were twentysome-odd people up on the balcony at Bowie’s,’ the chief says. ‘Plus a couple over there in the gazebo, making out. There were probably some other people on the bluff too, but we haven’t got them separated from the mob yet. Thank God, the big doors of the bar were closed to enforce their cover charge.’

‘What did the wits see?’

‘Different things, of course. Or different versions of the same thing. After listening to everybody, the best I can figure is this. A tan or light-colored SUV, probably a Lincoln Navigator, came down Broadway from the direction of the Callon building. Nobody was paying much attention at that point. Then about a hundred feet past the gazebo, the SUV skidded to a stop. It squealed loud enough to make people turn. The guy on the gazebo saw Jessup running from Broadway toward the fence. He must have jumped out of the SUV. Then a second guy jumped out of the backseat and started to chase him. The second guy stopped in the grass. Jessup was screaming for help by then. The guy on the bandstand called 911, but we couldn’t get here fast enough to do anything.’

Logan pauses as if expecting me to question his department’s response time, but I motion for him to continue.

‘By this time people on the balcony were looking in that direction, but there are a few trees up there, so they couldn’t see a lot. It looked like the guy chasing Jessup disappeared under the trees. He must have been getting closer because Jessup climbed over the fence and started running along the ledge toward Silver Street. Nobody’s sure whether the second guy ran up to the fence or not. Half the witnesses figured Jessup and the other guy were just drunks horsing around.’

‘But the guy in the gazebo called 911.’

‘His wife made him do it,’ Logan explains. ‘Anyhow, for whatever reason, Jessup stopped on the ledge. He was twisting around like he was fighting an invisible man–that’s what the guy in the gazebo said–and then he went over the edge. That’s it. For now anyway.’

I look up to the ledge forty feet above and try to imagine Tim desperate enough to make that leap voluntarily. If the man chasing him had been torturing him, Tim might have leapt from the ledge in the hope that he could clear the drainage ditch and hit the limbs of the trees beyond it. But the odds of death would still be high. The logical thing would have been to run back toward the tavern, or even down the ledge along Silver Street. Cars travel that hill at all hours, and he might have flagged someone down.

‘Did anybody see the plates on the vehicle?’

Logan shakes his head. ‘The SUV got out of here in a hurry. Nobody’s even sure it had Mississippi plates.’

‘Damn. What do you make of all that?’ I ask, more to observe Logan’s reaction than to learn anything valuable.

‘Could be a lot of things. Jessup was a known drug abuser.’

‘He’s been clean for a year.’

Shad Johnson, quiet up to now, snorts in derision. ‘Jessup rear-ended a friend of mine a couple months back, and my friend swears he was fucked-up at the time.’

Tim was high two months ago? ‘Did the police do a blood test?’

Shad shakes his head. ‘Wasn’t that much damage. And Jessup wasn’t worth suing. He didn’t have anything but debts.’

Logan winces. He doesn’t like being caught between us.

‘This could have resulted from any kind of dispute,’ the DA speculates. ‘Argument over a woman. Jessup’s dealer taking the price of dope out of his ass. I expect we’ll know by Monday or Tuesday.’

‘Have you done a grid search around the body?’ I ask Logan.

‘Best we could. We didn’t find anything within throwing distance, but there’s a lot of damn kudzu and trees down there. If he threw something full force from the top of the bluff, it’ll take daylight to find it.’ Logan stops speaking, but his engineer’s eyes ask me what I think Tim might have been carrying. ‘If he threw something with some weight, he might have thrown it all the way to the river.’

‘Dope doesn’t weigh that much,’ Shad says. ‘Not throwing size, anyway. You’ll find his stash in the morning, if the rats and coons don’t eat it first.’

‘What are you doing at this crime scene?’ I ask pointedly. ‘You usually stay away from the dirty work.’

Shad’s lips broaden into a smile; he enjoys a fight. ‘I was at a party a few blocks away. I’m only answering you as a courtesy, of course. You’re not the DA, Penn Cage. No, sir. This investigation is in my hands, and I’ll decide what gets done and when.’

‘You’re in charge, all right. Just remember that with power comes responsibility. You’ll be held to the highest standard, make no mistake about that.’ I turn to Logan. ‘Let’s put a rush on that autopsy, Chief.’

‘There he goes again,’ says Shad, ‘giving orders like he’s the district attorney.’

Instead of taking the bait, I turn and stride back toward the ladder. As soon as Shad leaves my field of vision, he leaves my mind. My anger remains unquenched, perhaps even unplumbed, but its urgency recedes as I climb back up to Silver Street and make my way through the chattering crowd toward my car. Several acquaintances call out, but I brusquely wave them off. A cold heaviness is seeping outward from my heart. I’d rather clean and embalm Tim’s mutilated body than tell Julia Stanton that the father of her baby is dead. But some duties cannot be shirked. If Julia asks why Tim died, I wonder if I’ll have the courage to tell her the truth? That her husband almost certainly perished because I was late to our meeting.

11 (#ulink_18b83ab5-ac98-5639-8897-59d4853d7ef5)

Tim Jessup’s wife and son live in Montebello subdivision, a cluster of small clapboard homes built in the 1940s to house the employees of the International Paper Company. For most of their history, these structures sheltered generations of working white families, but in the past ten years, quite a few have been taken over by African-American families. Despite the age of the houses and the inexpensive materials with which they were built, most are well kept up, with fresh paint and well-tended lawns. What sticks in your mind when you drive through during the day is the abundance of kids, dogs, bicycles, flowers, lawn ornaments, and glitter-painted bass boats parked on the grass beside the driveways. Tim and Julia bought one of the more run-down houses when she got pregnant, then spent eight months fixing it up for the baby. Montebello is a long way down from the tony subdivision where Jessup grew up, but after he turned thirty, Tim stopped caring about things like that. His father never did. After my return to Natchez, I learned it was better not to mention Tim when I ran into Dr Jessup. Whenever I did, all I saw in the old surgeon’s eyes was shame and bitterness.

I turn off Highway 61 at the Parkway Baptist Church and take the frontage road down into Montebello. A warren of curving, tree-shaded streets divides the neighborhood into asymmetrical sections, and it’s easy to get lost down here if you haven’t visited in a while. After one wrong turn, I find Maplewood and swing around a broad curve through the parked cars and pickups that line both sides of the street.

In less than a minute I will shatter the life of Julia Stanton Jessup, and I’m suddenly aware that my outrage over Tim’s death is an order of magnitude smaller than what she will experience after the initial shock wears off. The explosion might even be immediate. Julia is no shrinking violet. She began life in a coddled existence, but fate soon had its way with her family, and she did not pull through without becoming tough. I still remember kissing her once at a senior party, when she was in the ninth grade. We’ve never spoken of it since, but the image of her as she was then remains with me, a beautiful girl just coming into womanhood, and unlike Tim she retained the glow of her youth through the hard years. I suspect that tonight’s shock may take that from her at last.

The instant Julia’s house comes into sight, I know something’s wrong. The front door stands wide-open, but there’s no car in the driveway and no one in sight. The doorway appears as a rectangle of faint yellow light coming from deep within the house, though deep is not exactly accurate in terms of a house that small. I reach under my seat for the pistol Tim told me to bring to the cemetery meeting. The cold metal is my only comfort as I leave the relative safety of my car and walk through the shallow yard toward the house. I should call Logan for police backup, but Tim’s words from last night keep sounding in my head: You can’t trust anybody. Not even the police.

The neighborhood is relatively quiet. I hear the thrum of a few air-conditioning units, still laboring hard in mid-October. A couple of TV soundtracks drift through the air, coming from the houses that have opened their windows to the damp, cooling night. I press my back to the wall outside Jessup’s door, then crash through in a crouch, the way a Houston police detective taught me. The last thing I thought I’d be doing tonight was clearing a house, but at this juncture, there’s no point in analyzing my instincts.

As I move from room to room, it becomes obvious that the house has been thoroughly searched. Every drawer and cabinet has been opened, the books pulled from the shelves and rifled, and the mattresses slit to pieces. Even the baby’s mattress was yanked from the crib and slit open.

The house has only six rooms, all clustered around a central bathroom. I call out Julia’s name, half-hoping she might be hiding somewhere. But I’ll be happier if she’s not. I hope she’s miles away from this place, safely hidden or running for her life. For the state of this house tells me one thing: Whatever evidence of crime Tim was looking for today, he found it. And that discovery cost him his life. The only questions remaining are what did he find, and where is it now?

I lean out the back door, but all I see in the backyard is a plastic playhouse bought from Wal-Mart, looking forlorn and abandoned. I’m raising my cell phone to call Chief Logan when it buzzes in my hand. I jump as though shocked by a wall socket, and this makes me realize how tense I was while I searched the house. The number has a Natchez prefix, a cellular one.

‘Penn Cage,’ I answer, wondering who might be calling me after 1:00 a.m.

The first sound I hear is something between sobbing and choking, and I know before the first coherent word that Julia Jessup already knows that her husband is dead. She is so hysterically anguished that speech is almost physiologically impossible. Yet still she tries.

‘Ih–ih–ih—’ The vocalization catches repeatedly in her throat, like an engine trying to start in cold weather. And after a couple of gulps and stutters, the full sentence emerges. ‘Is Tim dead?’

‘Julia—’

‘Huh–he-he told me not to kuh-kuh-call you. Unless something hah-happened. But Nancy Barrett called me from Bowie’s. She said…Tim feh-fell. Off the bluff. I don’t understand. Tell me the truth, Penn. Tell me right this minute!’

More than anything I want to ask where Julia is, but there’s no way I’m going to do that over a cell phone. Whoever killed Tim may be searching for his wife at this moment, believing she’s in possession of whatever evidence Tim found.

‘It’s true,’ I say as gently as I can, walking quickly back to my car. ‘I’m sorry, Julia, but Tim died tonight.’

A scream worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama greets this news, then the words pour out in a senseless flood. ‘ OhmiGodohmiGodoh–oh–oh—I knew it! I knew something was going to happen. He knew it too. Goddamn it!’ Another wail. ‘Oh my God. After everything I’ve done to get him clean…. No. No, no, no. It’s not–no, I can’t go there. What am I supposed to do, Penn? Tell me that! How am I supposed to raise this baby?’

‘Are you with somebody, Julia?’

‘ With somebody? I’m at—’