Michael Lister: Blood of the Lamb

I shook my head. “They’re looking into allegations of abuse, extortion, and homicide.”

“ Homicide? ”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder you don’t want to join my staff,” he said. “But I can assure you there’s some kind of mistake and I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“I’ve noticed that a lot of inmates donate significant amounts of money to your ministry,” I said. “Why-”

“Chaplain,” he said in a voice that sounded scolding. “You know good and well most inmates don’t have much money. It is true that some of them make small contributions, but I can assure you that they don’t even cover our expenses when we conduct a crusade.”

“The really large amounts go to a post office box here in-”

“I don’t have a post office box,” he said. “All our mail is delivered directly to the headquarters.”

“Well, I’m telling you an awful lot of money payable to you is leaving our prison addressed to you at a post office box over here.”

He hesitated a moment, his eyes moving around as he thought about it. “I have a very large organization,” he said. “I guess some of our departments may have post office boxes to keep things separate. I’ll check into it. I will, but right now I’ve got to go.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Please consider coming to Nicole’s service,” I said. “I’m sure the media would like to get a statement from you about it.”

“The media’s gonna be there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, as if I knew, “I think Larry King may even do a follow up show afterwards.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “And you please consider my offer. I can assure you the rumors you’ve heard are not true. You’ll get three times what you’re making now just to attend a few meetings a year and answer the occasional question about prison ministry from time to time. Plus, I’ll give you a signing bonus of say, a hundred K.”

“No,” I said, as he ushered me out the door, “I’m not worth that kind of money.”

“Maybe not, but what you know is,” he said, just before closing the door, and I left wondering if what he thought I knew had anything at all to do with prison ministry.

That evening, with the sun beginning its descent behind St. Louis Cathedral, I bought a bag of beignets and a large coffee at the Café du Monde, crossed Decatur to Jackson Square, and found an empty bench on which to enjoy them.

Slowly, the sounds of jazz bands were dying out, the street artists, mimes, and magicians being replaced by fortunetellers, tarot readers, and guides for vampire, ghost, and graveyard tours.

The breeze blowing off the Mississippi filled the air with a briny pungency and humidity that mixed with the cooking food and confections of the Quarter, riding on its currents the soft, sad sounds of a lone saxophone coming from Pirates Alley.

With the crowds and noises of the day gone, I had hoped to think about the case, integrating what I knew with what I had learned since arriving in New Orleans, but it was not to be.

Both the bag and the beignets were filled with powdered sugar that stuck to my fingers and face, a light dusting of which was accumulating on my clothes. I was trying to wipe it off when Bunny Caldwell walked up.

“I heard you and Bobby Earl talking at the house,” she said.

She was wearing dark shades and a hat that hid much of her face, her nervous moves and paranoid glances highlighting the fact that they were intended as a disguise.

“How?” I asked.

She looked confused.

“That was a crack about its size,” I said. “Have a seat.”

Glancing around furtively, she sat down next to me without trying to avoid the powdered sugar covering the bench.

“Bobby Earl grew up poor,” she said.

“Well, he’s making up for it now.”

She smiled. “Trying.”

“Except you can’t,” I said.

“You can’t make up for anything you didn’t get in childhood, can you?”

“Sounds like maybe you’ve been trying, too,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, more to herself than to me, and I knew some of what I had heard about her was true.

Across the way, a homeless man rose from where he had been sleeping on the grass, walked over to the fountain, and began washing his face and hands.

Figuring there was a reason she had sought me out, I didn’t prod, but instead waited for her to tell me in her own time what she had to say.

“There’s a few things I want you to know about Bobby Earl,” she said.

“Okay.”

“He’s not like me,” she said. “When he gave his life to the Lord, he did it all the way. He really is a new creature in Christ. I’ve never seen someone change so completely. I mean, yeah, he spends too much money and he’s still a kid in many ways, but he really is one of the good guys now.”

The woman sitting next to me was different from the one I had met in the institution just two weeks ago, as if in addition to aging her, grief had stripped her of all illusions. She was now disillusioned in the most positive, if painful, sense of the word.

“He judges people-especially inmates-by what happened to him,” she continued. “If they say they’ve changed, he believes they have.”

“And the ones who work for him…”

“Haven’t,” she said. “For the most part anyway. Not like him. Some, not at all. His transformation and love blinds him. He can’t see what’s going on around him-and that includes the things I do.”

She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t press her.

The three towers of the cathedral and the cross on the center one were now silhouettes backlit by the soft orange gleam behind them, as all around us candles on the tables of palm readers blinked on like the first stars of twilight.

When I caught her looking over her shoulder again, I asked, “Who are you afraid of?”

“No one,” she said. “Why?”

“Who gave you the bruises on your arms?”

“He said if I say anything, he’ll kill Bobby Earl,” she said. “Who?”

“DeAndré.”

“Did he come back into the institution with you the night Nicole was killed?”

She nodded.

“Have you ever worked at Lake Butler?”

“In the chapel,” she said. “It’s where I met Bobby Earl.”

“And Nicole’s father?”

She whipped her head around and stared at me in shock. After a few moments, she nodded. “Yeah.”

“What about Theo Malcolm?”

She squinted, her brow furrowing, then began to shake her head.

“He’s a school teacher.”

“I don’t know him,” she said. “Why?”

In between the intermittent breezy sound of traffic on Decatur behind us, the whinnying and clip-clop of horses could be heard.

“Chaplain Jordan, I didn’t kill my little girl,” she said.

I was inclined to believe her.

“But I’m responsible,” she said. “We should’ve never taken her in there.”

“Why were y’all there?” I asked. “What’s a guy like Bobby Earl gain from preaching in a prison?”

“He has a heart for inmates,” she said. “Though we weren’t scheduled to go back to PCI for quite a while, DeAndré begged him. Bobby Earl saw it as doing a favor for DeAndré and his uncle, but I think DeAndré just wanted an excuse to go in there and deal with Cedric.”

“Nicole’s father?”

She nodded. “I thought he was going to pay him off or something, but maybe he meant to kill him,” she said. “I don’t know. I do know Bobby Earl likes preaching in prison because of what happened to him when he was inside. But we should have never taken Nicole. We just didn’t-”

Breaking off abruptly, she stood up and said, “I’ve done a stupid thing. I should’ve never gotten involved with-he’s always been insanely jealous-even of Nicole. Just seeing us talking together like this-be very careful.”