The Devil's Punchbowl (5 page)

 

“I hear you, okay? But I think you’re a little spooked. The guy is human, right?”

 

Jessup tugs at his mustache like the strung-out junkie he used to be. “You don’t know, man…you don’t
know.
This guy is smooth as silk on the outside, but he’s got
scales
on the inside. When the dogs are tearing each other to pieces, or some girl is screaming in the back of a trailer, his eyes turn from ice to fire right in front of you.”

 

“Tim—” I lean forward and grasp his wrist. “I don’t understand is what you want from me. If you won’t go to the professionals, how do you propose to stop this psycho? What’s your plan?”

 

A strange light comes into Jessup’s eyes. “There’s only one way to take down an operation like this, and you know it.”

 

“How’s that?”

 

“From the inside.”

 

Jesus. Tim has been watching too many cop shows. “Let me get this straight. The guy you just described as Satan incarnate, you want to wear a wire on?”

 

Jessup barks out a derisive laugh. “Fuck no! These guys carry scanners into the john with them. “

 

“Then what?”

 

He shakes his head with childlike stubbornness. “You don’t need to know. But God put me in this position for a reason.”

 

When informants start talking about God, my alarm bells go off. “Tim—”

 

“Hey, I’m not asking you to believe like I do. I’m just asking you to be ready to accept what I bring you and do the right thing.”

 

I feel obligated to try to dissuade him further, but beneath my desire to protect a childhood friend lies a professionally cynical awareness of the truth. In cases like this, often the only way to convict the people at the top is to have a witness on the inside, directly observing the criminal activity. And who else but a martyr would take that job?

 

“What are you planning to bring me?”

 

“Evidence. A stake to drive through Mr. X’s heart, and a knife to cut off the company’s head. Just say you’re with me, Penn. Tell me you won’t quit. Not until we take these bastards down.”

 

Against all my better judgment, I reach out and squeeze Tim’s proffered hand. “Okay. You just watch your back.
And
your front. Informers usually get caught because they make a stupid mistake. You’ve come a long way. Don’t go getting hurt now.”

 

Tim looks me full in the face, his eyes almost serene. “Hey, I have to be careful. I’ve got a son now, remember?” As if suddenly remembering something, he seizes my wrist with his other hand, like a pastor imploring me to accept Jesus as my savior. “If something does happen, though, don’t blame yourself, okay? The way I see it, I’ve got no choice.”

 

Your wife and son wouldn’t see it that way,
I say silently, but I nod acknowledgment.

 

Now we sit silently, awkwardly, like two men who’ve cleared the air on some uncomfortable issue and have nothing left to say. Small talk is pointless, yet how else can we part? Cut our palms and take a blood oath, like Tom and Huck?

 

“You still dating that lady who runs the bookstore?” Tim asks with forced casualness.

 

“Libby?” I guess word hasn’t spread to Jessup’s social circle yet. “We ended it about a week ago. Why?”

 

“I’ve seen her son down on the
Queen
a few times in the past couple of weeks. Looked high as a kite to me. Must have a fake ID.”

 

After all I’ve heard tonight, this news falls on me like the last brick of a backbreaking load. I’ve spent too much time and political
capital getting my ex-girlfriend’s nineteen-year-old son out of trouble with the law. He’s basically a good kid, but if he’s broken his promise to stay clean, the future holds serious unpleasantness for us both.

 

Tim looks worried. “Was I right to tell you?”

 

“Are you sure he was high?”

 

Suddenly Tim hops to his knees, tense as a startled deer, holding up his hand for silence. As he zeros his gaze somewhere past the wall between us and the river, I realize what has disturbed him: the sound of a car coming up Cemetery Road. We listen to the rising pitch of the engine, waiting for it to crest and fall…but it doesn’t. There’s a grinding squeal of brakes, then silence.

 

“Stopped.” Tim hisses. “Right below us.”

 

“Take it easy,” I whisper, surprised by my thumping heart. “It’s probably just a police cruiser checking out my car.”

 

Tim has his feet under him now. Almost faster than I can decipher his movements, he grabs the photos from the ground, shoves them into the corner of the plot, and sets them ablaze with his lighter. “Cover the light with your body,” he says.

 

As I move to obey, he crab-walks over two graves and lifts his eyes above the rim of the far wall. The photographs have already curled into glowing ashes.

 

“Can you see anything?” I ask.

 

“Not yet. We’re too deep in.”

 

“Let me go take a look.”

 

“
No way.
Stay here.”

 

Exasperated by his paranoia, I get to my feet and step over the wall. Before I’ve covered twenty feet I hear the tinny squawk of a police radio. This brings me immediate relief, but Tim is probably close to bolting. With a surprising rush of anxiety, I trot to the bench beneath the flagpole and peer over the edge of Jewish Hill.

 

An idling squad car sits behind my Saab. There’s a cop inside it, talking on his radio. He’s undoubtedly running a 10–28 on my license plate. In seconds he’ll know that the car in front of him belongs to the mayor of the city, if he didn’t already know. As I watch, the uniform gets out of his car and switches on a powerful flashlight. He sweeps the beam along the cemetery wall, then probes the hedge just below Jewish Hill. Our officers carry SureFires, and
this one is powerful enough to transfix the Turning Angel in its ghostly ballet of vigilance over the dead.

 

Given a choice between waiting for the cop to leave and walking down to face him, I choose the latter. For one thing, he might not leave; he might call a tow truck instead. For another, I
am
the mayor, and it’s nobody’s business what I’m doing up here in the middle of the night. I might well be having a dark night of the soul and visiting my wife’s grave.

 

As the white beam leaves the Turning Angel and arcs up toward me, I jog back to the walled plot that sheltered Tim and me. My old friend has vanished as silently as he appeared. The odor of burnt paper still rides the air, and two tiny embers glow orange in the corner of the plot—all that remains of the evidence in a case I have no idea how to begin working. After all, I’m no longer a prosecutor. I’m only the mayor. And no one knows better than I how little power I truly have.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
4

 

 

Julia Jessup watches her seven-month-old son sleep in the crib her sister-in-law sent from San Diego. Julia envies her little boy, that he can sleep so soundly while his father is away. A perfect shining bubble of saliva expands from his cherub’s lips as he exhales, then pops on the inspiration. Julia almost smiles, but she can’t quite manage it. Somewhere between her belly and her heart a great fear is working, like a worm eating at her insides. Tim has promised that everything will be all right, that he will return safely from wherever he went, but her fear did not believe him.

 

Julia has come so far to reach this place, this little haven from the hardness of the world. A hundred years ago, she married her high school boyfriend, the quarterback of St. Stephen’s Prep. The school’s golden boy got her pregnant at nineteen, married her a week later, and gave her herpes two weeks before the baby came. Julia discovered this when the baby contracted the virus during delivery and died in agony eight days later. It was hard to hold on to her romantic illusions after that. But she’d tried.

 

She suffered through the barhopping with his moronic friends and the vacuous sluts they hung out with, his long absences in the woods during deer season, paintball tournaments during the workweek, sweating in a mosquito-clouded bass boat while he fished. But in the end, she’d had to face that she’d bound herself to a boy, not a man,
and that any future with him meant sharing him with every trash monkey who caught his eye, and catching whatever STDs she didn’t have yet.

 

The first years after she divorced him were leaner than she’d known life could be. Julia had come from a good family, but when the oil business crashed in the eighties, her father couldn’t find another way to make a living and ended his erratic job search with a bullet in the head. After her divorce, she was pretty much on her own. She waited tables, worked a cash register, parked cars at parties, and sold makeup to women who paid more for facial creams in a week than Julia paid for a month’s rent. She steered clear of men for the most part, and watched her friends who hadn’t left Natchez screw up in just about every way possible where the opposite sex was concerned. When Julia needed companionship, she chose older men—married ones who had no illusions about where things were headed—and bided her time.

 

Then she’d met Tim Jessup, or remet him. She’d known him in school, of course, but they’d never dated, since he was three years ahead of her. Back then he’d been one of the cocky ones who thought that the good life lay waiting ahead of him like a red carpet spread by fate. But soon after high school, he’d learned different. Julia hadn’t thought of Tim much after that, not until she took a job serving hors d’oeuvres on the casino boat one night. Tim had watched her from his blackjack table, then waited for her to finish her work. They went for breakfast at the Waffle House, talked about the good old days at St. Stephen’s, then, surprisingly, opened up about the not-so-good days that had filled most of their lives since. By the end of that night, Julia had known Tim might be the man she’d been waiting for. There was only one catch. He had a drug problem.

 

She could see it in his eyes, the itchy anxiety that worsened until he made a trip to the bathroom and returned with a look of serenity. But then he’d disarmed her by admitting it, that first night too. They’d seen a lot of each other after that, and within a month Julia had made a deal with herself. If she could get Tim clean—really clean—then she would take a chance on him. And to her surprise, she had succeeded. Nothing in her life had been tougher, but she’d set her whole being on seeing him through to sobriety, and she’d done it.

 

The results were miraculous. Tim quit working the boat his druggie friends patronized, hired on with the new outfit, and began working every shift the
Magnolia Queen
would give him. He’d even talked his father into giving him a loan for a small house, and in his off hours began fixing it up himself, sawing and hammering like a born carpenter, not a privileged surgeon’s son. Julia watched HGTV every chance she got, ripped up the stained carpet of the previous owners, and refinished the hardwood underneath. Installed the bathroom tiles too. Her pregnancy was something they kept to themselves, a treasure they hugged together in the cocoon of their changing house, until they’d gone so far down the road to normalcy that people wouldn’t roll their eyes when she revealed it. By the time she began to show, the change in perception had begun. Even Tim’s father had warmed to her, in his own way. Some days, in the early mornings, or late at night, she would see his silver Mercedes glide past on the lane outside, and she’d know he was checking his son’s progress. When the baby finally came, perfect and round and without flaw because Julia had taken acyclovir for the last month, every pill at the exact moment she was supposed to, the transformation was complete. She could hardly believe this was her life, that by sheer force of will and faith in herself and her husband she could bring goodness out of fear and regret. But she had done it.

 

If only Tim’s evolution had stopped there….

 

As her husband slowly regained the bearings he’d lost during his early twenties, he’d begun to experience a kind of emotional fallout. His memory, which had blocked out so much during his lost years, began to fill in the gaps, and waves of guilt and regret would assail him. Tim rediscovered God, which might have been all right had he not acted like a religious convert, more zealous than those born into the faith. He saw choices starkly, as either right or wrong, and despite his own past he judged those who didn’t measure up to his idea of ethical responsibility. It wasn’t a moral prissiness—he didn’t condemn people for the common human lapses—but he began to obsess about the big things in life. Politics. Organized religion. The diamond brokers in Sierra Leone, the starving children in the Sudan, the good Muslims in Iraq. The uneducated blacks right here in Mississippi.

 

And then it happened. Exactly what, Julia didn’t know. But it was
something at work. Tim had witnessed something terrible, or overheard something, and from that night forward he’d been a man possessed. With each passing week he’d grown more withdrawn, more irritable, to the point that she feared he’d begun using again. But it wasn’t that. Tim had apparently discovered something that so outraged him he felt compelled to right the wrong himself. And that terrified her. Tim wasn’t the kind of man to take on that kind of trouble. He was smart, and he was good-hearted, but he wasn’t hard inside, the way her first husband had been. Tim had illusions about people; he wanted them to be better than they were, and you couldn’t fight evil men if you thought that way. You couldn’t win, anyway. Julia had lived enough life to know that.

 

The only thing that had given her any comfort was Tim telling her that Penn Cage would be helping him. Julia had known Penn in high school too. She’d even kissed him once, beside a car one night at a senior party that she and a friend had sneaked off to. Penn Cage wasn’t like Tim. He wasn’t timid or uncertain; he made decisions and stuck with them, and life had worked out for him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suffered; he’d lost his wife to cancer; but everybody paid for the things they got, some way or other. You had to pay just for being alive.