The Devil's Punchbowl

  My cell phone is ringing in my pocket. I’m already wishing I hadn’t switched it back on. This time it’s not Caitlin or Labry.

  “Penn, it’s Chief Logan. I heard you had some trouble.”

  “A little bit.”

  “Nobody hurt too bad, I understand. Lucky break.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was wondering if you could swing by headquarters for a minute.”

  “What for? Is it about the shooting?”

  “No. I’ve had your girlfriend here threatening me with lawsuits till Judgment Day if I don’t let her kid out of jail.”

  “Chief, I can’t deal with Libby Jensen’s problems right now.”

  Logan voice changes suddenly; all the official tone goes out of it. “We need to talk, Penn. And not on a cell phone. I’m at headquarters for another half hour. Find a way.”

  I sigh in resignation. “Okay. I’m on my way.”

  I’m only six feet from the roof door, but I feel it’s a mile away. The thought of making my way to the ground floor of the hospital seems beyond me. I don’t know if it’s sleep deprivation or the crash. I am gathering my last reserves of energy to stand when I look to my left.

  Facing me like a giant blue dragonfly is the Athens Point helicopter, its rotors turning as though they could go on for eternity. Danny McDavitt sits at the controls like a waiting chauffeur, his eyes on me.

  There is my ride.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Police headquarters is on the north side of town, far from the most recent residential and commercial development, closer to the predominantly black part of town. The low-slung, one-story structure looks like a cross between a 1970s office suite and a federal prison minus the barbed wire. Wedged between a Pizza Hut and the Entergy building, it’s surrounded by car dealerships, auto parts shops, cheap motels, and a cash-for-your-car-title place. Across the street, amid this haphazard sprawl, stands Devereaux, one of the most beautiful Greek Revival mansions in the South, now dwarfed by the massive Baptist church that has become its neighbor, the only new construction on this side of town.

  Inside the glass-walled entry area of the station, I announce myself to the officer behind her bulletproof glass window. After a show of finishing some paperwork, she buzzes me through the door and points to the chief’s door.

  Don Logan and I have been through more than one scrape together. A year and a half ago, we were both shot at by gang members in the lobby of the city’s finest hotel. As I told Tim the night before he died, I find it almost impossible to believe that Logan could be on the pad, no matter what the temptation. On the other hand, the chief might have guilty knowledge about one or more cops under his command. Situations like that have put honorable men in difficult positions before, so I must tread carefully with Logan, honest though he may be.

  The chief is waiting behind a desk that’s the picture of order, a compulsive engineer’s desk. He wears a starched blue uniform and a silver badge, but in his wire-rimmed glasses he still looks like a high school science teacher.

  “What’s going on, Don?” I ask, hoping to get past titles immediately. “You sounded pretty upset on the phone.”

  “I’m not sure where to start.”

  “What’s the status on Soren Jensen?” This question gives me time to read the chief’s mood. What I’m picking up is serious tension.

  “Jensen’s being charged with possession with intent to distribute.”

  Seeing the shock on my face, Logan hurries on, “It’s not my call, Penn. The DA’s filing those charges. Shad even came down here this morning to make sure I understood his position. I don’t know what you did to step on his toes, but he’s out for this kid’s blood.”

  “I hear you. What about the MVA?”

  “The kid’s being charged with DWI as well. He was drunk on the Breathalyzer, but I think he was full of meth too. His mother told him not to take a blood test, but Shad’s going to get a court order.”

  I absorb this in silence. Libby is probably close to a nervous breakdown by now.

  “I know he’s basically a good kid,” Logan says. “But he hit a cop. You know he wouldn’t have done that unless he was high.”

  “Probably not. He needs help, though, not time in the pen.”

  “So do all the poor black kids who come through here, and a lot of them don’t get it. So it’s easy for Shad to throw the book at Jensen and look like he’s being impartial. But let’s move on. We’ve got more serious problems to deal with.”

  “Like?”

  “Tim Jessup.”

  Here we go. “Are you treating his death as a homicide?”

  Logan lifts a stainless steel pen from a holder and glances away, temporizing. “The autopsy results aren’t back. Let’s move to some specifics before we start drawing conclusions.”

  “I saw the story in this morning’s paper. Who found the dope in Jessup’s house?”

  “The two patrolmen who saw you leaving there called in a K9 unit. Dog found it behind some Sheetrock in the closet. Typical hidey-hole.”

  “Don, somebody tore the place apart before I got there. They would have found the drugs and taken them.”

  Logan shrugs as if he can do nothing about the facts.

  “How did Caitlin Masters find out about the meth so fast?”

  “Come on,” he says. “You know that woman better than anybody. She’s got sources all over town, from the courthouse to Lawyers’ Row to this department.”

  I concede this with a nod. “What concerns me is that to the best of my knowledge, Tim Jessup has been clean for a year.”

  “There’s no way to know that.”

  “Julia Stanton turned that boy around. I tend to be cynical where drugs are concerned, but I don’t think Julia would have stayed with him if he was using again.”

  Logan taps the pen on his desk, looks toward his partially open window blinds. Then he reaches into his drawer and pulls out a manila envelope. From it he takes four photographs and lays them out for me to examine. They’re printed on ink-jet photo paper, and all four show a nude or partly nude woman with a stunning body posed in various erotic positions. Unlike the teenage girl in the cell phone shots Tim showed me, this woman is in her midthirties and looks confident of her sexuality.

  “What am I supposed to get from these?”

  “We found these in Jessup’s house. Something tells me Julia didn’t know about this either.”

  I am at a loss for words.

  “Nobody leaked these to Ms. Masters, by the way,” he adds.

  Thank God for small favors. “Were these stashed with the dope?”

  “No.” Logan can’t suppress a small smirk. “Folded inside The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

  “Have you ID’d the woman? She looks vaguely familiar.”

  “Linda Church. Hostess at the Devil’s Punchbowl, one of the bars on the Magnolia Queen. Born right here in Natchez.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Who ID’d her?”

  “One of the patrolmen recognized her. I did too, when I saw the pictures. She grew up out in Morgantown, like me. She wasn’t that far behind me in school. I’m eight years younger than you, remember, even if I’m losing my hair faster.”

  I smile and nod.

  “You never saw Linda on the boat?” he asks.

  “I don’t gamble.”

  “Me either. But I go down there and eat with the wife sometimes. Food’s good, and not too expensive.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “She stripped in Vegas. A lot of people don’t know that. She went to a juco in Oklahoma, married a guy there. That lasted about ten years. No kids. He left her. She got short of money, started stripping in Oklahoma City, then moved on to Vegas. Not sure why she left, but she came back here and started working the boats. I do remember her from school, though. They called her Butterface.”

  “Butterface?”

  “You know, everything about her was hot but her face.”

  I lean forward and examine the pictures more closely. Aside from her high, full breasts and tight bottom, Linda Church has large eyes and good bone structure
. “She looks pretty enough in these pictures.”

  “Yeah. It was acne. She had it bad in high school. She’s scarred more than these pictures show. But Linda’s like a lot of country girls, a ten-plus when you see them from behind, a five from the front.”

  “So based on these pictures, you think Tim was having an affair with her.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “Jessup’s not in any of the pictures.”

  “Would you be, if you were going to keep these around your house?”

  “I wouldn’t keep them around my house. And neither would Tim. Julia would castrate him if she found them.”

  “No offense, but Jessup has a history of self-destructive behavior.”

  “Have you questioned this woman yet?”

  Logan sighs heavily. “We can’t find her.”

  The moment he says this, I suspect that Linda Church may never be found alive. “Was she supposed to report for work today?”

  “Not for another hour yet. We already questioned her coworkers, though. One said she’s positive Jessup and Linda were hooking up on the sly. They kept it secret because of workplace rules.”

  If Tim was having an affair with her—or if she was helping him with his plan to steal evidence—why didn’t he tell me about her? As soon as I ask myself, I know the answer: Tim didn’t want me to judge him for cheating on Julia, if in fact he was doing so.

  “Jessup never told you about this girl?” Logan asks.

  “Me? We weren’t that close, Don. Not since we were nine years old.”

  “Right. But you’re positive he wasn’t doing drugs.”

  Frustrated by the need to conceal my relationship with Tim, I say, “I’m just telling you what I think.”

  “Well, here’s what I think. To an objective investigator, it looks like an old dopehead slid back to his old ways. He was banging a waitress at work and selling meth to keep up his two women.”

  “That’s what it’s supposed to look like. Did you find any meth precursors in Jessup’s house? Any cooking equipment?”

  Logan shakes his head.

  “It’s bullshit, Don. Staged. Every bit of it.”

  Logan leans back in his chair and cradles his hands behind his head, his eyes regarding me coolly. “Were you and Jessup working on something together?”

  I thought I was ready for this kind of question, but the directness of it takes me by surprise. “I’m the mayor. He was a blackjack dealer. What could we be working on?”

  Logan’s eyes remain steady. “You’re also a novelist. And a lawyer. A former prosecutor.”

  “And?”

  “And a couple of nights ago, one of my patrolmen saw your car out at the cemetery. After midnight. That’s not far from where Jessup worked. And his shift ended at twelve a.m. this week.”

  I shrug as casually as I can. “I was feeling down, Don. I went out to visit my wife’s grave. I do that sometimes.”

  Logan looks as if he’s trying to give me the benefit of the doubt—and failing. “That’s what my man said you said. I can respect that. But if anything else happened while you were out there, I’d sure like to know about it.”

  I shake my head slowly. “Nothing. Me and the ghosts, that’s it.”

  Logan watches me awhile longer, then says, “There’s a couple of other things you should know. One, Jessup’s wife is missing.”

  “Meaning what? Someone filed a missing persons’ report? Or you just can’t find her?”

  “We can’t find her or her son.”

  I shrug again. “I don’t know where she is, if that’s what you’re asking. Do you have Tim’s car?”

  “That’s the other thing. It’s missing too. Thing is, I’ve got Linda Church’s cell phone records, and she received a pretty disturbing text message last night shortly before midnight.”

  “What did it say?”

  Logan reaches back into the manila envelope, takes out a small piece of paper, and slides it across his desk. Written on it in pencil are the letters: Thiefwww kllmmommy. Sqrttoo.

  “What do you make of this?” Logan asks.

  “Tim sent this?”

  “It was sent from the cell phone of a man whose phone was stolen while he was on the Magnolia Queen last night. I think Jessup’s been doing a lot of that lately.”

  Logan’s inquisitive eyes probe mine, but I say nothing. At length he says, “In my experience, strippers have been exposed to pretty much everything. Getting mixed up in a murder for hire wouldn’t be that big a step for some of them. An objective investigator might look at that text message and see an order to kill Jessup’s wife and child.”

  I can’t believe the chief is serious. “Tim was planning to murder his wife? The woman who saved his life? That’s ridiculous. You know it is.”

  “Brother, two years ago I’d have said it was ridiculous if you told me Dr. Drew Elliot was porking a high school girl. If this job has taught me anything, it’s that you have no idea what people are capable of, not even the people you think you know best.”

  “Fair enough. But I’m telling you, Julia Stanton was Tim Jessup’s salvation.”

  Logan taps one of the photos on his desk, his finger coming to rest on Linda Church’s shapely derriere. “Maybe Tim thought this was his salvation.”

  “That’s sure what somebody wants you to think. You and everybody else in town.”

  “You really believe he’s being framed? After his death? Who has a motive to frame Tim Jessup?”

  “Cui bono, my friend.”

  “What?”

  “Who benefits?”

  “From his death?”

  “Yes. And from smearing what remained of his good name. It’s pretty clear that someone wants Tim’s death to look like a run-of-the-mill drug murder. Guaranteed to go in the ‘unsolved’ file.”

  Logan looks uncomfortable.

  “Which is exactly how Shad Johnson seemed to be reading it last night at the crime scene,” I remind him. “Before any such evidence had been discovered. By the way, when Shad was here to make sure you threw the book at Soren Jensen, did he give you any sense of urgency about solving Jessup’s murder?”

  The chief can’t meet my eyes now. “Not exactly.”

  “Uh-huh. I’d say the situation’s pretty self-explanatory, Don.”

  Logan gets up from his desk and walks to the window, toys with the blinds. “Let me ask you a question. You know a lot about this town. You were raised here, you’ve written about it.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He turns and looks me squarely in the eyes. “Who actually runs this place?”

  This is a question I’ve asked myself since I was a boy.

  “You’re the mayor. Do you run it?”

  “Far from it. In fact, our kind of city government is literally defined as the ‘weak mayor’ form of government.”

  Logan gives me a guarded look. “You’ve got the power to fire me.”

  “I’d happily trade that for the power to fire the district attorney.”

  The chief grunts as if he agrees. “My folks always told me Natchez was run by the garden clubs. Maybe that was true once, but that idea’s a laugh and a half now.”

  “They never really did, Don. This town was always run by a few big men behind the scenes. Men like Leo Marston. Judges, bankers, lawyers, oilmen. But things have changed. The big money’s mostly gone or spread among the heirs. There’s not that much power here anymore. It’s a free-for-all. White or black, everybody’s chasing whatever money they can find. We’re just like the rest of the country that way.”

  Logan nods dejectedly, but something else seems to be eating at him. “I tell you, I’m starting to feel like the marshal in a company town. Mining town, lumber town, whatever.”

  “Gambling town?” I suggest quietly.

  A quick, worried glance. “You said that, not me. Look, gambling is gambling, and everybody knows what comes with it. But it’s legal now, and given that, I have to say the casinos have been good partners.”

  “You sound like a lot of people when they talk about casinos.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Careful.”

  “Well. It’s
like being police chief in a town by an army base. If you’re not pro-army, you’re in the wrong job. The way I see it, my job is to collect evidence and make arrests. I can only go by the evidence I find.”

  “Chief, your job is to uncover the truth.”

  Logan looks at me with a dogged defiance in his eyes. “No, sir. That’s a jury’s job. And a judge’s. Lawyer’s, maybe. And it don’t make a bit of difference how much detective work I do if the DA doesn’t want to prosecute something.”

  Now I stand. “If you find solid evidence, Shad will have no choice.”

  “You really believe that? You were an assistant DA yourself. You know how political that stuff gets.”

  “Murder is murder, Don.”

  The chief makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Well, I’ll sure be interested to see the results of Jessup’s autopsy.”

  “When will you get those? Next week?”

  “Actually, Jewel Washington put a rush on it. She’s pretty tight with the people at the crime lab in Jackson. I think the pathologist may be cutting Jessup late today.”

  A fillip of excitement shoots through me. “Does Shad know that?”

  Logan shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want to be Jewel when he finds out either.”

  “If he tries to retaliate against Jewel for doing her job the way it ought be done, Shad’ll find out just how much power I have.”

  “Penn, look—”

  “No, this is bullshit. You tell me one thing. If the autopsy comes in conclusively as homicide, are you going to press the investigation or not?”

  Logan straightens up with impressive dignity. “If it comes back homicide, I’ll be investigating a homicide. I’ll do it by the book, and I won’t miss a lick. But, brother, in the end, being chief of police is a lot like being mayor. Unless you’re backed up by the people above and below you, it’s just a nice-sounding title.”

  As Logan grimaces under the burdens of his office, something disturbing strikes me. “Don, we’ve been talking quite a while, and you haven’t asked me anything about my balloon getting shot down.”

  He takes a deep breath, then answers with carefully chosen words. “First off, I can see you weren’t hurt bad. Second, it happened over Louisiana. Not my jurisdiction. Mine ends at the river.”