Mississippi Mud by Edward Humes

Author:Edward Humes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

Chapter 24

Two weeks after Pete Halat succeeded a wearied Gerald Blessey as mayor of Biloxi, two Harrison County investigators made the long drive from the Coast back to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. County Attorney Payne wanted a second go at Bobby Joe Fabian. With him was Randy Cook, a sheriff’s captain assigned by Joe Price to take control of the Sherry murder probe. Cook would become a principal investigator in the case, the first in nearly two years to make actual progress.

Tall and lanky, with a long face and fine, sandy hair, Cook had that laconic, set-back-in-your-chair way of talking that suggested he’d be more comfortable in chaps than in the uniform pants with the single blue stripe he favored. Cook had worked briefly with the ill-fated first Sherry task force early in the case, seeing firsthand how disorganized the Biloxi-run investigation had been. Later, he had left the sheriff’s department for a brief and unsatisfying stint as chief of security for a cruise ship line. He returned to the sheriff’s department on June 1, 1989. A cop most of his adult life, Cook had missed the squad room badly, his misery on the job mounting daily, until his wife and young son finally begged him to go back to the sheriff’s department. The day after his return, Joe Price handed him a transcript of Fabian’s first interview, with a file containing John Ransom’s photo and criminal history, shipped from Georgia authorities.

“Have fun,” Price told Cook, who hadn’t even had time to unbox his files. “You got your work cut out for you.”

Cook and Payne arranged for a visiting room at Angola to be cleared, still trying to keep Fabian’s cooperation secret. They wanted to fill in the holes he had left in his first statement. But extracting details from Fabian proved a frustrating and mostly unproductive task—a bad omen, Cook knew. Fabian preferred to speak of his glory days with the Dixie Mafia rather than the subject at hand, deftly avoiding specific details when talking about the murders.

But Cook repeatedly pressed Fabian to replay the exact discussion during the supposed meeting at Angola to plan the murder of Vincent Sherry—the heart of his story. Finally, Fabian sat back in his chair, flicked the ashes from his ever-present cigarette, and said with that back-of-the-throat, jailhouse voice of his, “Halat said something has to be done. Nix says, yes, I’ll take care of it. He will bite the dust. That’s the terminology they used, you know. Halat said, all right, get with me on it.”

Once the deal to hire John Ransom was in place, Fabian said, “Ransom is supposed to have got in touch with Peter, you know. To get the layout and stuff, the judge’s house and all that. Give him, you know, the inside on what he needs to know to go in there, the best time . . . and so forth.”

Here, Cook noticed something troubling: The story had changed. In Fabian’s first statement, he had Halat merely shifting blame for the missing money onto his best friend.

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