The Devil's Punchbowl (14 page)

 

“Did he have his wallet on him?” I ask, moving closer to the scene. “Is that how you knew who he was?”

 

“No sign of his wallet. A patrolmen recognized him. I doubted it at first, the face was so messed up by the fall, but my man seemed sure. Says he played blackjack at Jessup’s table some.”

 

I’m close enough now to see the dark blood pooled under Tim’s upper body. Turning away from the carnage, I look Logan in the eyes. “What made you call me?”

 

The chief stares straight back at me. “Jessup had a cell phone in his back pocket. He landed on his face and hands, so the phone was still working. I took a look at the call log, and the last call he placed before he died was to your cell phone.”

 

This revelation leaves me speechless. I haven’t spoken to Tim in the past twenty-four hours. But if he called my cell phone, it should have rung. I was standing on one of the highest points in the city.

 

“I didn’t get any call from Jessup tonight.”

 

Logan chews on this for a few seconds. “He actually called you four times. Or tried to, anyway. Three times about twelve minutes before he died, and then once in the seconds right before he went over the fence. That’s the best I can figure anyway. Did you have your cell phone on?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Logan doesn’t ask to see my phone. He doesn’t have to. He can easily check my records, and I’m sure he will. To save him the trouble, I call up the log on my Razr. It shows no incoming calls from Jessup. I move to Logan’s side so he can see this information.

 

“Were you in a dead spot or something?” he asks.

 

“No.”

 

“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.

 

“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.”