The Devil’s Punchbowl

‘Isn’t that why you asked me here?’

Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. ‘I’m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That’s what a smart man would do.’

I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I’ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife’s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it’s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It’s the oldest human choice: comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain? I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the Magnolia Queen: ‘Hit or stay, sir?’ If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the Queen to Natchez, I don’t.

‘Let’s hear it, Timmy. I don’t have all night.’

Jessup closes his eyes and crosses himself. ‘Praise God,’ he breathes. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you’d walked away. I’m way out on a limb here, man. And I’m totally alone.’

I give him a forced smile. ‘Let’s hope my added weight doesn’t break it off.’

He takes a long look at me, then shifts his weight to raise one hip and slides something from his back pocket. It looks like a couple of playing cards. He holds them out, palm down, the cards mostly concealed beneath his fingers.

‘Pick a card?’ I ask.

‘They’re not cards. They’re pictures. They’re kind of blurry. Shot with a cell phone.’

With a sigh of resignation I reach out and take them from his hand. I’ve viewed thousands of crime-scene photos in microscopic detail, so I don’t expect to be shocked by whatever Tim Jessup has brought in his back pocket. But when he flicks his lighter into flame and holds it over the first photo, a wasplike buzzing begins in my head, and my stomach does a slow roll.

‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘Keep going. It gets worse.’

2

Linda Church lies beneath the man who pays her wages and tries to hide the fear behind her eyes. As he drives into her, his eyes burning, his forehead dripping sweat, she imagines she’s a stone figure in a cathedral, with opaque eyes that reveal nothing. Linda reads fantasy novels during her off hours, and sometimes she imagines she’s a character in a book, a noblewoman forced by a cruel twist of fate to do things she never thought she would. Things like that happened to heroines all the time. All her life (or since she was four years old and played the princess in her nursery-school play) Linda has searched for a real prince, for a gentle man who could lead her out of the thorny maze that’s been her life ever since the other kind of man had his way with her. When she first met the man using her now, she believed that magical moment had finally come. Only a year shy of thirty (and with her looks still holding despite some rough treatment), Linda had finally been placed by fate in the path of a prince. He looked like a film actor, carried himself like a soldier, and best of all actually talked like a prince in the movies her grandmother used to watch. Like Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier or…somebody.

But not even Cary Grant was Cary Grant. He was named Archie Leach or something, and though he was probably an okay guy, he wasn’t who you thought he was, and that was the truth of life right there. Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be. Everybody wanted something, and men mostly wanted the same thing. If her prince had turned into a frog, she would at least have had the comfort of familiarity. But this story was different; this false prince had morphed into a serpent with needle-sharp fangs and sacs of poison loaded behind them. Linda now knew she was only one of twenty or thirty women he’d slept with on the Magnolia Queen, and was probably still screwing, no matter what he claimed. With good-paying work so hard to find, who could afford to say no to him?

‘What’s your problem tonight?’ he grunted, still going at her without letup. ‘Squeeze your pissflaps, woman, and give the lad something to work with.’

She hates his voice most of all, because the beautiful way he speaks in public is just another cloak he wears to hide what lies beneath his skin, and behind those measuring eyes. He really is like a character in one of her books, but not a hero. He’s a shape-shifter, a demon who knows that the surest way into the souls of normal people is to appear to be exactly what they most want, to make them believe he sees them exactly as they wish to be seen. That was how he’d snared Linda. He’d made her believe her most secret fantasies about herself, just long enough to make her willingly give herself, and then…the mask had come off.

The horror of that night is graven on her soul like scar tissue. In the span of a few minutes, she saw what she’d allowed inside her, and something in her withered away forever. It happened in this very room, a cavernlike hold in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, one of the only two rooms on the casino boat without security cameras. Linda works upstairs in the bar called The Devil’s Punchbowl, but the women on the Queen call this off-limits room the real Devil’s Punchbowl. For it’s here that the demon inside her conducts all business that cannot stand the light of day. Here he brings card counters and other troublemakers, to strap them into the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Here he brings the women who endure what Linda suffered that night after the mask came off….

After he’d gone, while she put herself together as best she could, she’d told herself she would quit the boat. But when it came to it, she hadn’t had the nerve. Partly it was the money, of course, and the insurance benefits. But it was also the mind’s ability to lie to itself. A familiar voice began telling her that she was mistaken, that she’d misinterpreted some of the things he’d done, that she had in fact asked for those things, if not verbally then by her actions. But each new visit brought further confirmation of her warning instincts, and the fear in her had grown. She wanted desperately to stop, to flee the Queen and the city, yet she didn’t. This demon seemed to have–no, he had—some strange power over her, so much that she was afraid to mention her predicament to anyone else. In rational moments, this made her furious. Surely she had an open-and-shut case for sexual harassment. Of course, he might argue that the relationship was consensual. She’s given him enthusiastic sex in several places on the boat, and except for his office and this room, every inch of the casino is covered by surveillance cameras–even the bathrooms, no matter what the law says.

She’s thought about asking some other girls to go to a lawyer with her, but that would be riskier than laying all her money down on one of the table games upstairs. Linda only knows about the other girls because she’s heard a couple of the trashier ones talking about how they did a group thing with him and a big player from Hong Kong. Knowing that the man inside her now has been inside those other women makes her shudder, yet she doesn’t cry out or try to throw him off. Why? A heroine in one of her novels would do just that: find a hatpin or a dagger and stab him in the back during his ‘moment of greatest passion.’ But real life isn’t like that. In real life that moment comes and goes, and when he rolls off of you, you feel like your soul has been ripped out by its bloody roots, leaving only a husk of what you were before.

That was the state she’d been in when her true prince walked into her life. He wasn’t riding a white charger or wearing a doublet or a wizard’s robe; he was wearing a blackjack dealer’s uniform, and watching her with an empathy that cut right through her hardened defenses. His eyes were the opposite of those burning above her now: soft and kind and infinitely understanding. And somehow, she’d known, he had seen her torment before speaking to her. He didn’t know the nature of it; that would have killed him, literally, for he would have tried to stop what was going on, and he is no match for the shape-shifter. He’s too good for the job he has–too good for her, really–but he doesn’t think so. He loves her.

The problem is that he’s married. And to a good woman. Linda despises herself for wanting the husband of another woman. But what can you do if you truly love someone? How can you banish a feeling that is stronger than the darkness that’s eating you from the inside out?

‘You’re making a bloody bags of it,’ the demon growls in contempt. ‘Do ye want me to change at Baker Street?’

Linda shrinks in fear, moves her hips faster. She’s picked up enough slang to feel nausea at the innocuous-sounding euphemism. Her extra effort seems to allay his anger; at least there’s no more coded talk of turning her over.

She shuts her eyes and prays that the demon moving inside her won’t discover her secret prince, or what he’s doing at this very moment to put the world in balance again, like the heroes in her novels–not until it’s one delicious second too late. For if the demon or his henchmen discover that, Timothy will die–horribly. Worse, they will surely make him talk before the end.

That’s one of their specialties.

3

‘Penn?’ Tim says softly, touching my knee. ‘Are you okay?’

I’m bent over three blurry photographs in my lap, trying to absorb what’s printed on the rectangles of cheap typing paper, with only the wavering flame of a cigarette lighter to illuminate them. It takes a while to truly see images like these. As an assistant district attorney, I found that murder victims–no matter how brutally beaten or mutilated–did not affect me quite so deeply as images of those who had survived terrible crimes. The mind has a prewired mechanism for distancing itself from the dead, surely a survival advantage in our species. But we have no effective filter for blocking out the suffering of living humans–none besides turning away, either physically or through denial (not if we’re ‘raised right,’ as Ruby Flowers, one of the women who ‘raised’ me would have said).

The first picture shows the face of a dog that looks as though it was hit by a truck and dragged a hundred yards over broken glass. Yet despite its horrific wounds, the animal is somehow standing under its own power, and staring into the camera with its one remaining eye. Wincing with revulsion, I slide the photo to the bottom of the group and find myself looking at a blond girl–not a woman, but a girl–carrying a tray filled with mugs of beer. It takes a moment to register that the girl, who’s no older than fifteen, wears no top. A vacant smile animates her lips, but her eyes are eerily blank, the look of a psych patient on Thorazine.

When I slide this photo aside, my breath catches in my throat. What might be the same girl (I can’t be sure) lies on a wooden floor while a much older man has intercourse with her. The most disturbing thing about this photo is that it was shot from behind and between a group of men watching the act. They’re only visible from knee to shoulder–three wear slacks and polo shirts, while a fourth wears a business suit–but all have beer mugs in their hands.

‘Did you take these pictures?’ I ask, unable to hide my disgust.

‘No—Damn!’ Tim jerks the hand holding the cigarette lighter, and the guttering light goes out. ‘You seen enough?’

‘Too much. Who took these?’

‘A guy I know. Let’s leave it at that for now.’

‘Does he know you have them?’

‘No. And he’d be in serious shit if anybody knew he’d taken them.’

I lay the pictures beside Tim’s leg, then close my eyes and rub my temples to try to stop an incipient headache. ‘Who’s the girl?’

‘Don’t know. I really don’t. They bring in different ones.’

‘She didn’t look more than fifteen.’

‘If that.’

‘Those pictures were taken around here?’

‘At a hunting camp a few miles away. They run people to the dogfights on their VIP boat. Change the venues each time.’

Now that the lighter is out, my night vision is returning. Tim’s haggard face is wan in the moonlight. I expel a rush of air. ‘God, I wish I hadn’t seen those.’

He doesn’t respond.

‘And the dog?’

‘The loser of a fight. Just before his owner killed him.’

‘Christ. Is that the worst of it?’

Tim sighs like a man stripped of precious illusions. ‘Depends on your sensibilities, I guess.’

‘And you’re saying this is being–what, promoted?–by the Magnolia Queen?’

Tim nods but does not speak.

‘Why?’

‘To pull the whales down south.’

‘Whales?’

‘High rollers. Big-money players. Arab playboys, Asian trust-fund babies. Drug lords, pro athletes, rappers. It’s a circus, man. And what brings ’em from the farthest away is the dogfighting. Blood sport.’ Tim shakes his head. ‘It’s enough to make you puke.’

‘Is it working? To pull them in?’

‘Yeah, it’s working. And not just spectators. It’s the competition. Bring your killer dog and fight against the best. We had a jet fly in from Macao last week. A Chinese billionaire’s son brought his own dog in to fight. A Bully Kutta. Ever hear of those? Bastard weighed more than I do. The dog, I mean.’

I try to imagine a dog that outweighs Tim Jessup. ‘Through the Natchez airport?’

‘Hell, no. There’s other strips around here that can take a private jet.’

‘Not many.’

‘The point is, this is a major operation. They’d kill me without a second’s hesitation for talking to you. I’d be dog bait, and that’s a truly terrible way to die.’

Something in Tim’s voice when he says ‘dog bait’ touches a nerve in me. It’s fear, I realize. He’s watching me closely, trying to read my reaction.

‘Why do I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop?’

Jessup hesitates like a diver just before the plunge. Then he clucks his tongue and says, ‘They’re ripping off the city, Penn.’

This sudden shift in focus disorients me. I settle back against the bricks and watch the wings of an angel twenty yards away. The dew has started to settle; the air around me seems a fine spray that requires wearying effort to pull into my lungs–maybe thick enough for a stone angel to take flight. The low, churning rumble of a push boat on the river far below tells me that sound travels farther than I thought tonight, so I lower my voice when I ask, ‘Who’s ripping off the city?’

Tim hugs himself, rocking slowly back and forth. ‘The people I work for. Golden Parachute Gaming, or whatever you want to call them.’

‘The parent company of the Magnolia Queen is ripping off the city? How could they do that?’

‘By shorting you on the taxes, dude. How else?’

Jessup is referring to the portion of gross receipts that the casino boat pays the city for its concession. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Oh, right. What was I thinking? I just came out here for old times’ sake.’

‘Tim, how could they short us on taxes without the state gaming commission finding out about it?’

‘That’s two separate questions. One, how could they underpay their taxes? Two, does the gaming commission know about it?’

His cold dissection of what would be a nightmare scenario for me and for the town is getting on my nerves. ‘Do you know the answers?’

‘Question one is easy. Computers. Teenagers have hacked into freaking NORAD, man. Do you really think the network of a casino company can’t be manipulated? Especially by the people who own the network?’

‘And question two?’

‘That’s tougher. The gaming commission is a law unto itself, and I don’t know enough about how it operates to know what’s possible. There are three men on it. How many would have to be bent to provide cover for the operation? I don’t know.’

I’m still shaking my head. ‘The auditing system we use was evolved over decades in Las Vegas. No one can beat it.’

Jessup chuckles with raw cynicism. ‘They say you can’t beat a lie detector, either. Tell you what,’ he says gamely, and in his eyes I see the energy of a man who only comes into his own during the middle of the night. ‘Let’s assume for a second that the gaming commission is clean and go back to question one. There’s no way to distort the take from discrete parts of the casino operation, because everything’s so tightly regulated, like you said. The company’s own security system makes it impossible. Every square inch of the boat is videotaped around the clock with PTZ cameras and wired for sound. The cameras are robotically controlled–from Vegas, not Natchez. A buddy let me into the security center one night, and I saw Pete Elliot fingering his brother’s wife in the corner of the restaurant.’

‘I don’t need to know that crap.’

‘I’m just saying—’

‘I get it. What’s your point?’

‘The only way for the company to rip off the city is to understate the gross. You guys see a big enough number, you figure your cut and don’t look any deeper. Right?’

‘To an extent. The gaming commission looks deeper, though. How much money are we talking about?’

Jessup flicks his lighter and examines his burned thumb, then squints at the flame as though pondering an advanced calculus problem. ‘Not that much, in terms of the monthly gross of a casino boat. But that’s like saying a thousand years isn’t much time in geological terms. We’re talking serious bread for an ordinary human being.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I say. ‘There’s a flaw in your premise. A fatal flaw.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no upside for the casino company. However much they rip us off by, their gain is minuscule compared with the risk. They’re practically minting money down there. Why risk killing the golden goose to steal a couple of extra million a year? Or even a month?’

Jessup smiles sagely. ‘ Now you’re thinking, dude. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘Not to me.’

‘Me, neither.’ He lights another cigarette and sucks on it like a submerged man breathing through a reed. ‘Until you realize it’s not the corporate parent doing the ripping, but a single guy.’

‘One guy? That’s impossible. Casino companies never give an individual that kind of power.’

Tim expels a raft of smoke. ‘Who said they gave it to him?’

‘No way, Timmy. The casinos do everything in their power to avoid that situation.’

‘Everything in their power. And they’re good. But they’re not God.’ He grins with secret pleasure, as though he’s smoking pot and not tobacco. ‘The company makes certain assumptions about people and situations, and that makes them vulnerable.’

I run my hand along my jaw. The fine stubble there tells me it’s getting late. ‘Obviously you have a suspect. Who is it?’

Tim’s smugness vanishes. ‘You don’t want to know that yet. Seriously. For tonight he’s “Mr X,” okay? He Who Must Not Be Named. What matters is that he’s been with the company long enough to put something like this together.’

I know a fair amount about the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation. But rather than scare Tim off by speculating over which executive might be the one, I’d rather take what he’s willing to give me. For now. ‘Let me get this straight: Mr X is also behind the dogfighting and the girls?’

‘Hell, yeah. The side action’s what brings the whales down here, which in turn makes the Queen all the more profitable, while making Mr X some serious jack on the side.’

I sigh deeply, sickened by the thought that I, who reluctantly courted Golden Parachute and helped bring the Magnolia Queen to town, may also have helped to infect my town with this virus. But rather than blame myself, I turn my frustration on Tim. ‘You picked a hell of a week to come forward. This is balloon-race weekend. We’ve got eighty-seven hot-air balloons coming to town, and fifteen thousand tourists. I’ve got a CEO expecting the royal treatment, which I’ll have to give him to try to pull his new recycling plant here.’

Tim nods. ‘Read about it in the newspaper. Sorry.’

‘Seriously, Tim. I don’t see how you expect me to help you without knowing Mr X’s identity. I can’t do anything without that.’

Tim goes back to his submerged-man routine with the cigarette. In its intermittent glow, I watch his eyes, and what I see there frightens me. The dominant emotion is fear, but mixed with that is something that looks and feels like hatred.

‘What’s your idea of help?’ he says softly.

‘What do you mean?’

His eyes tick upward and lock onto mine. ‘You worked for a big-city DA. You know what I mean.’

‘I saw the pictures,’ I say gently. ‘I know this is bad. That’s why we have to let the authorities handle it.’

‘Authorities?’ He almost spits the word. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said on the phone? You can’t trust anybody around here with this.’

‘My own police department? Do you really believe that?’

Tim looks astounded by my ignorance. ‘They’re not yours. Those cops were on the job before you got into office, and they’ll be there when you’re gone. Same for the sheriff and his boys. To them, you’re just a political tourist. Passing through.’

His casual damnation of local law enforcement disturbs me. ‘I trust a lot of those men. We grew up with most of them, or their fathers.’

‘I’m not saying the cops are crooks. I’m saying they’re human. They’re looking out for themselves and their families, and they like to have a little fun on the side, same as the next guy. How many guys you know wouldn’t look the other way to get a beer-drinking snapshot with a star NFL running back? I’ve been to a couple of these barn burners, okay? I know who I’ve seen there.’

Like the full import of a cancer diagnosis, the ramifications of what Jessup is telling me are slowly sinking in. ‘You’ve personally witnessed Mr X at these dogfights? You’ve seen him encouraging underage prostitution?’

Jessup snorts in contempt. ‘Are you serious? You want to arrest Mr X for promoting dogfighting? On my word? The bastard could get a dozen upstanding citizens to swear he was on the Queen any day or night we name.’

‘Dogfighting is a felony in Mississippi,’ I say evenly. ‘Just watching one is a felony. The maximum sentence is ten years. And with multiple counts? That’s hard time.’

This seems to get Tim’s attention. But even as I point out the facts, I silently concede that Jessup has a point about his being a problematic witness. ‘Obviously, nailing them for defrauding the city would be the lethal hit. Golden Parachute would lose its gaming license, and that would shut down five casinos in one pop. The IRS would eat them alive. The partners would lose hundreds of millions of dollars.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Tim says bitterly.

‘So how do you propose we handle this? Do you have any documentary evidence, other than the pictures I saw?’

He licks his lips like a nervous poker player. ‘I’m not saying I got nothing, but I need more. I’ve got a plan. I’ve been working on it for a month.’

A sense of foreboding takes hold deep in my chest. Everything he’s told me up to now has been leading to this. ‘Tim, I won’t help you risk your life. I do have experience with this kind of operation, and I’ve seen more than one informer wind up with his throat cut.’

Jessup has the faraway look of a martyr walking into the flames. Without warning he seizes my wrist with a startlingly powerful grip. ‘This is our town, man. That still means something to me. I’m not going to sit still while these carpetbagger motherfuckers ruin everything our ancestors worked to build—’

‘Shhh,’ I hiss, feeling blood coming into my cheeks. ‘I hear you, okay? I understand your anger. But it’s not worth your life. It’s not even worth taking a beating. People in this town were gambling, selling slaves, raping Indian women, and cutting each other’s throats before Paul Revere sold his first silver candlestick.’