The Devil’s Punchbowl

As feared, I find no one waiting at the top. No one was waiting for me last night either, but tonight feels different somehow. There’s a different silence among the stones. The air doesn’t seem quite still, as though it’s recently been stirred, and the insects are silent. That could be the result of someone approaching, but my instinct says no. I feel a dreadful certainty that Tim has already been here and gone. Turning my back to the river and the moon, I walk deeper into the marble necropolis, scanning the darkness for signs of movement.

Out of the pulse beat of my blood comes a deep, subsurface rumble, almost too low for my ears to detect. It seems to vibrate up from the very ground. Thirty seconds later, I realize I’m hearing the engine of a push boat driving a great string of barges upriver, its massive cylinders propelling an unimaginable weight against the current. Turning, I see the red and green lights on the bow of the foremost barge, a third of a mile forward of the push boat’s stern. The pitch of the engine changes as the boat moves northward, then out of its steady drone a higher hum rises. A blue halogen wash fills the near sky, dimming the bow light on the barge, and I realize a vehicle is passing below me on Cemetery Road. It’s coming from out in the county, from the direction of the Devil’s Punchbowl, heading toward town.

I’m too deep inside the cemetery to see the vehicle. On impulse, I run back along the top of Jewish Hill, but too late. All I see are vertical taillights winking through the leaves of the ancient oaks in the low-lying part of the cemetery where Sarah is buried. The taillights look as if they belong to a truck or an SUV, not Tim’s Sentra.

My watch reads 12:37. The pistol feels awkward in my waistband but not completely unfamiliar. As a prosecutor of major felony cases in Houston, I was sometimes forced to carry a weapon for extended periods. Even after retiring from that position and taking up writing, certain circumstances have required me to carry a gun for protection, and on several occasions I’ve been forced to use it, sometimes with fatal results.

I feel an almost unbearable compulsion to call Tim’s cell phone, but I resist it. Tim might simply be later than I am. Certainly, more things could have delayed him, or so I’d guess. After jogging in place for half a minute to relieve my anxiety, I sit on a low grave wall that commands a good view of Cemetery Road. With my mother watching Annie, I can afford to give Tim an hour of my time. I only wish I had a cup of coffee to keep me warm and alert. I’d like to lay my cell phone on the wall beside me, but I’m afraid its light will betray my position if anyone is watching.

My body has just begun to gear down when the Razr in my pocket vibrates, bringing me to my feet. I dig the phone from my pocket and cup it to my chest like a man trying to light a cigarette in a strong wind. I didn’t expect to recognize the number, and I don’t, but it has a Mississippi area code and a Natchez prefix.

‘Hello?’ I say in a stilted tone.

‘Is this Penn Cage?’ asks a voice both familiar and unfamiliar.

My heart rises into my throat, and for some reason I glance at my watch. Nine minutes have passed since I saw the taillights on Cemetery Road. ‘Who is this?’

‘Don Logan, chief of police. Is this the mayor?’

A dozen reasons the chief might be calling me after midnight come to mind, none of them good. The most likely is something to do with Soren Jensen–the last thing I want to talk about right now.

‘Yeah, Don, this is Penn. Don’t tell me the kid’s done something else.’

There’s a brief silence, then Logan speaks with the gravity I heard too often from homicide cops in Houston. ‘No, it’s not that. I’m down by Silver Street on the bluff–well, underneath it really–forty feet underneath it. I’m in that drainage ditch that runs along the foot of the retaining wall.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I reply, my throat tightening.

‘We’ve got a situation down here, Penn. Bad.’

‘Okay.’ I look desperately around the cemetery for a sight of Tim.

‘We got what looks to me like a homicide. Or a suicide, I’m not sure which yet. Guy went over the fence and hit the cement’–Logan says ‘ see-ment’–‘and I was wondering if you might come down here and look at the scene.’

This request is unusual, but I have a lot of experience with homicide cases. Maybe the chief wants my opinion on some evidence. ‘What do you think I can do for you, Don?’

‘Couple of things, I figure. I don’t really want to say on a cell phone. But you knew the victim.’

As the chief finishes speaking, the last threads of Tim’s destiny are pulled into place. ‘Who is it?’

This time the silence lasts awhile. I suspect the chief wants to ask me if I already know. ‘Initials are T.J. That ring any bells for you?’

Logan probably mistakes the silent seconds I require to endure this blow as my trying to figure out whose initials those are. Only now do the squawks of police radios cut through the staticky silence of Logan waiting. ‘I’m too tired for guessing games, Don. Let me just get down there and see for myself.’

‘How long will it take you? We’ve got quite a crowd gathering here.’

‘Have you got Silver Street blocked off?’

‘Hell, I can’t block Silver Street. The casino would go crazy. I’ve got the runoff gutter where the victim landed blocked. But all the rubberneckers have to do is lean over the fence for front-row seats. Bowie’s Tavern was busting at the seams with tourists when this happened.’

‘Get a goddamn tent over the body!’

‘I’m working on it, but we’ve lent all our stuff out to the Katrina shelters.’

‘Well, grab something from the carnival up at Rosalie. Just take it.’

‘Good idea. I’d disperse this crowd, but some of them are witnesses. I have the people who were on the balcony at Bowie’s—’

‘Detain anybody who might have seen any part of what happened, whether it seems important to your men or not. And don’t let anyone contaminate that crime scene.’

‘You sound awful sure it’s a murder all of a sudden.’

‘Suicide’s a crime too. Common law, anyway. Is Jewel Washington there?’ Jewel is the county coroner.

‘She just got here.’

‘Good.’ The potential for collateral damage suddenly strikes me. ‘Has anybody told–Have you informed the next of kin?’

‘Not yet. I was kind of thinking you might want to do that.’ When I don’t reply, Logan says, ‘You figured out those initials yet?’

‘I’ve got a bad feeling that I might have. If I’m right, then I agree with you. I’d better do the telling.’

‘Works for me.’

‘Don’t let your men mention his name on the radio.’

‘It may be too late for that. Plus, we got sheriff’s deputies wandering around, and I’ve got no authority over them.’

For the thousandth time I curse the territorial problems caused by overlapping jurisdictions. ‘It’s your crime scene, Don. Don’t let anybody tell you different. And get that tent up over his body. Everybody on that bluff has a cell phone, and somebody’s going to recognize him.’

‘I doubt it. He’s facedown right now, and he’s busted up pretty bad.’

Jesus. ‘I’ll be there in three minutes, and I won’t be driving the speed limit. Let your cruisers know.’

‘Hell, all my guys are down here. Floor it, brother.’

10

The scene atop the bluff where Silver Street joins Broadway looks like Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. More than two hundred people are milling over the broad expanse of grass and pavement between the fence where Caitlin and I walked a few hours ago and the tavern across Broadway. The buzz of recent tragedy is in the air, and as I shoulder through the crowd, I see that about a third of the people are carrying styrofoam go-cups or beer bottles.

I spent most of the ride from the cemetery trying to decide whether to phone Julia Jessup with news of her husband’s death. No one should get that kind of blow by telephone, but it will be worse if someone else calls her first, someone reveling in the thrill of passing on the ultimate gossip. With so many people near the crime scene, there’s a real danger this could happen before I can get to Julia’s home, but still I wait. I need to see Tim’s body before I talk to his wife. I know what kind of questions survivors ask, and the one at the top of the list is always ‘Did he suffer?’

Silver Street sweeps down at a precipitous arc from Broadway on the bluff to historic Natchez Under-the-Hill and the Mississippi River. I can’t imagine how the horses handled it in the 1840s, when they had to haul freight up from the landing and the slave market. When I was a boy, we used to ride skateboards down this street, taking our lives in our hands every time we descended the half-mile-long hill. Then, as now, there was no stopping place on the narrow road. But tonight, about thirty yards down the hill, the police have placed an aluminum extension ladder against the guardrail to provide restricted access to the concrete drainage ditch that follows the base of the colossal retaining wall built to stabilize the bluffs. This wall runs more than a mile from end to end and is held in place by steel anchors that reach a hundred feet back into the bluff. At some places the wall towers a hundred feet from top to bottom, but here it averages about forty, as Chief Logan estimated on the phone.

Two uniformed cops stand at the head of the ladder. They’re obviously expecting me, because one trots forward and escorts me to the ladder while the other marches up the hill to ward off an inquisitive drunk who has followed me. Mounting the ladder, I climb carefully down into a well of darkness, but at the bottom I see a hazy glow coming from beyond a bend in the wall. The air is thick with the scent of kudzu and backwater, but even with more light I could not see the river. A wall of treetops stands between me and the water, reminding me that I’m walking on an earthen ledge, a shallow step-down only halfway to the bottom of the bluff.

When I round the bend in the wall, two more uniforms confront me, but after shining a SureFire in my face, they wave me through. Thirty yards beyond them, a bubble of artificial light whites out the night. Men in uniforms and street clothes move deliberately through that light, and even from this distance I see the rumpled mess they are orbiting. I feel a rush of vertigo that could have been caused by the ladder climb, but I know better. A man I knew from the age of four is dead, and I am about to look into his empty eyes. I pause to gather myself, then walk forward.

As I get closer, Chief Logan notices me and breaks away from the others. Logan is thin and fit and looks more like an engineer than a cop. Tonight he’s wearing street clothes and carrying a small flashlight, which he aims just in front of his feet. A wise man. I’d hate to know how many venomous snakes are within a hundred feet of me right now.

‘That was quick.’ Logan gives my hand a quick but firm shake. ‘I didn’t want to say any more on the phone, but you’d better steel yourself. It’s bad.’

‘I’ve seen a lot of homicide victims,’ I say with more bravado than I feel. The truth is, I’ve seen a lot more crime-scene photos of victims than victims themselves, though I have seen my share of violent death. But when it’s someone you know, it’s different. Once the insulating barrier of professional detachment is breached, there’s no telling what emotions will come pouring out.

‘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.’