JJ08 - Blood Money (16 page)

“Who dealt duplicitously with me in nearly every
way,”
she added.

“I’m so
sorry,”
I said. “I
didn’t
even think about––”

“
It’s
so nice to be with someone I can trust,” she said. “Such a great fuckin’ feelin’. I know you
John,
know your soul, know the force of your
character.
You
didn’t
think about it because
you’re
not a
cheater.
You
were out there doing good––either as a minister or an investigator.
It’s
what you
do.
It’s
all you
do.”

“Still,” I said, “it was inconsiderate. Thoughtless. I’m
sorry.”

She reached up and touched my face.

“I will never cheat on
you,”
I said. “Not
ever.
You
can count on that.”

“I
do.”

“And
I’ll
try
not to make another rookie mistake like that again.”

“Come
on,”
she said, and I could hear a smile in her
voice,
“neither of us are
rookies.”

“Why
it’s
all the more inexcusable.”

I
t felt like I had just fallen
asleep,
and maybe I had.

My phone began ringing. I fumbled to find it on the nightstand, Anna rolling
over
and groaning beside me.
“You
ain’t
gonna believe this shit,” Merrill said. “That
you’re
callin’ me at this
hour,”
I said.
“No,
not that shit.”

“Then what?”

“Oh,”
he said, as if just remembering something, “Sergeant Helms say tell you she found cards in the other inmates’
property.
Say they were regular
kings.”

“Thanks.”

“But that
ain’t
the shit you
ain’t
gonna
believe.”

“
Well,
go
ahead and get to that shit,” I said.

“Know how everybody say Brent Allen was hanging out with Phillips and
Jacobs,
how he sleep close to them?”

“Yeah?”
I said, trying to talk
softly.
“Guess what the
bitch’s
nickname is?” I
didn’t
say anything, just waited.

“Go on and do it.
Guess.”

“
Too
early.”

“His ass is known as the Suicide
King.”

“
What?”

“Told
you it some shit.”

I laughed.

“Say the little fucker know everything they is to know about suicide. Say he tried a few dozen times
too.
I
say,
he
ain’t
trying hard enough.”

T
he laundry department at
Potter
Correctional Institution washed, dried, ironed, and folded the uniforms,
towels,
and sheets for some thirty-four hundred inmates every day of the
work
week. It was twice as big as any
dry
cleaners or Laundromat I had ever seen on the street.

Outside, the laundry building looked like all the other structures of the institution—nondescript gray cinder block with pale blue trim.

Inside, it was a large open space filled with huge commercial washers and dryers with a network of metal pipes and wires snaking along the steel structure supporting the unfinished ceiling. The building was also filled with noise. The hum of motors, the rush of fan-blown wind, the stamp of the
press,
the whistle of the steam, and the continual metallic slaps and clanks obscured every other sound made by the officers and inmates working among them.

“I knew
you’d
get around to me
eventually,”
Brent Allen yelled
above
the noise when Merrill and I walked
up.

He stretched a shirt between the
two
steaming halves of the press and pulled the lever releasing the top onto the bottom one and the wrinkled cotton fabric between them.

“Oh yeah?”

He shook his head. “Shame about poor
Danny.”

Brent Allen was a short, thick guy with a certain softness about him. His closely cropped brown hair stood on end and his copper eyes were dim, rimmed by puffy dark half-circles beneath them.

“What made you think
I’d
come see you?” I asked.

He smiled. “Come on, Chaplain.
Don’t
treat me like the rest of the tards
’round
here. I deserve better than that. Everybody knows I’m the go-to guy for all things suicide.”

“You
the damn Suicide King,” Merrill said. “One of ’em.”

“
One
?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“There are others?” I asked.

“How can you
have
more than one king?” Merrill
asked.

“It’s
a
club,”
he said. “Or used to
be.”

“A
club
?” Merrill said. “What? Y’all play chess and shit?”

“A
suicide
club,”
Allen said. “Long time
ago.
We
haven’t
even talked about it in—”

“Start from the beginning,” I said.

“A
group of us formed a
club.
Called ourselves the Suicide
Kings.”

This is it, I thought, feeling the buzz begin again.

We’re
getting somewhere
now.

“Who?” I asked.
“Was
Danny
Jacobs
in it?”

“It was a long time
ago.
Some of the guys
have
transferred. A
few’re
already out. I’m tellin’ you . . . we
don’t
even . . . it
wasn’t
even serious back then. Not
really.
And
that’s
been . . . I
don’t
know . . .
years.”

“
Was
Danny in it?”

He nodded. “But I’m telling you—it
didn’t
mean anything back then. Means even less
now.
It has nothing to do with him or his . . . ”

“Who else? Phillips?”

“Yeah.
Lance. Emile Rollins . . . ah . . . I
can’t
even remember who
else.”

“Tell
me about the
club.”

“We
all felt suicidal . . . I
don’t
know.
We
were like, fuck it. If we ever decide to
go
through with it, we could count on the others to help us out. Look after our shit.
We
made wills. Left each other our earthly possessions—even took out life insurance, but the policies had a suicide clause,
wouldn’t
pay if the insured committed suicide.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I told you. A
while.”

“Be more specific.”

“Why?”

“The suicide clause on most policies is
two
years. If it happens after
two
years, they usually
pay.”

His eyes widened as his eyebrows arched and his forehead wrinkled.

“How
long’s
it been?”

“About
two
years—but I’m sure they’ve all lapsed by
now.
We
haven’t
been paying them.”

“You
didn’t
think you should tell someone about all this after the attempt on Lance or
Danny’s
death?”

“Danny killing himself or Lance trying has nothing to do with a defunct club from a few years
ago.”

“And
if they
didn’t
do it to themselves?”

He stopped
suddenly,
holding the blue inmate shirt dangerously close to the
press,
the steam enveloping his hand. Squinting in concentration, he looked off into the open space of the laundry
building.

“You
think someone killed Danny?”

He had stopped squinting
now,
and his eyes twitched and blinked as he talked.

“Do
you
?” Merrill said.

“I
hadn’t,”
he said, closing his eyes completely for a moment. “But if someone was trying to kill Lance . . . then they killed Danny
by
mistake. What does Lance say?”

“That he
didn’t
try
to kill
himself,”
I said.

To
our left, a group of about seven inmates stood around tables folding
towels,
while behind us inmates were loading and unloading towels and uniforms into the giant washers and dryers, all under the careful supervision of the laundry sergeant.

“Oh,
that’s
a
beauty,”
he said, shaking his head. “Kill someone
who’s
attempted suicide before and make it look like suicide again.
That’s
fuckin’ genius. Who
would
suspect? I mean, think about it, if they
hadn’t
failed to off him the first time and left him to say that he
didn’t
do it, then no one would even question it. Especially in here.

Hell, I bet no one believes him as it
is.”

His response to what I was saying was one of interest but not concern. If he cared for Lance or
Danny,
his fellow Suicide Kings, he
didn’t
show it, and the longer we talked, the more he twitched and blinked. He looked like someone with shell shock or a nervous disorder.

Across the building, I saw the colonel duck beneath the half-opened rolling bay door and enter the laundry. The sergeant cleared his throat and the inmates sitting on the gigantic blue sheet press stood up and acted like they were
working.
The inmates sitting behind the sewing machines
couldn’t
pretend to be busy because there was nothing on their tables to be sewn.

“Can you think of any reason anyone would want to kill Lance?” I asked.

“Sure,”
he said with a half shrug. “Lots of reasons to kill people. People’ve killed
over
some pretty petty shit before—’specially in
here.”

“Anyone
in particular come to mind?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Any
reason why anyone would want to kill Danny?”

Brent
Allen’s
inmate uniform looked
new.
Unlike the other uniforms on the compound, it
wasn’t
worn and faded from wear and
washing.
It was also military crisp without a single wrinkle,
pucker,
or gather.

“Not as many as with
Lance,”
he said. “Danny
was
quieter. Stayed to himself
mostly. Actually,
he’s
the kind
I’d
suspect of a legitimate suicide.”

“Really?”

“You
know much about suicide?” he asked.

He started pressing the shirts and pants of the blue inmate uniforms again, laying each garment down between the
two
small ironing board–shaped halves of the
press,
pushing the button, and waiting for the hydraulic press to
drop, press,
and rise again.

“Not enough to be called a Suicide
King.”

He smiled.
“Suicide’s
sorta my
hobby.
It was a fad for the other members of the
club,
but for me . . . I probably know more about it than anyone.
Want
a quick class on it?”

I nodded.

“Well,
first of all
it’s
all bullshit.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said. “Everything people think they know about it. Everything I’m about to tell you. First thing to know is we
don’t
know shit about it. Oh, the professionals say they do but they
don’t.
They
don’t
know why more people kill themselves than kill
others.
They
don’t
know why more
women
attempt it, but more men complete it. They
don’t
know why so few
leave notes.
They sure as hell
don’t
know what was going through the poor
bastard’s
mind at the end. Hell, I’ve tried it
over
a dozen times and I
couldn’t
tell you what was going through mine. And they
can’t
tell you why people choose to do it the
way
they
do.”

As we continued to talk,
Allen’s
twitch moved out of his eyes, down his face, and into his
body.
Now he
was
shrugging his shoulders, slinging his arms, and jerking his head about.

Over the tops of laundry carts, some piled high with folded stacks of clean clothes and others with mounds of unfolded dirty
ones,
I could see Donnie
Foster,
the sergeant on duty in A-dorm the night
Jacobs
was killed, enter the building, look at
us,
and then walk out
quickly,
bumping into the inmates waiting to push the laundry carts back to the dorms as he did.

“Suicide’s
not bullshit,” he said. “Everything else
is.
Suicide’s
the only sane response to this painful, meaningless disaster
we’re
clinging
to.
For
fuck sake, can you imagine a worse world? All we do is suffer and watch those we care about suffer.
We
lose everything—e
very single
thing
—
including
ourselves.
How can any thinking person look at this cluster fuck of a world and conclude anything but that
it’s
the cruelest joke ever played on anyone.
Ever.”