Perfect killer

CHAPTER 13

I had died, gone to hell, and was doomed to spend an eternity attending funerals in the freezing cold.

This time I stood far from center stage, out toward the edge of a crowd that jammed Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church's ragged little cemetery north of Greenwood. A brilliant sun had chased away the winter frost and loosened the buttons on overcoats and jackets. Among the hundreds of people there to say good-bye to Vanessa Thompson, some wore $5,000 suits and arrived on private jets. Others mourned in their Wal-Mart Sunday best worn so often the elbows shone when the sun hit them just right. I watched expensively citified celebrities with their surgically enhanced beauty literally rubbing elbows with entire families of tough, enduring people whose hard-won wisdom was sculpted in the deeply lined geography of timeworn faces. Despite the multitude, people spoke so quietly I could clearly hear the distant sounds of an old "Popping Johnny" John Deere tractor and the slamming of a screen door in some distant house.

I turned toward the sun and squinted as I held up my face to its light, trying to let it into the winter darkness that clouded my heart and chilled my soul. It failed miserably.

Here I stood as a footnote in the crowd, a grain of salt amid the pepper, relegated to the fringe less for my pale complexion than for my lack of familial, personal, political, or professional standing.

I had been to this cemetery once before, to visit the grave of blues legend Robert Johnson, who, myth has it, met the devil on a Delta crossroads somewhere nearby and sold his soul in exchange for his unholy excellence on the guitar.

As the final hymn drifted over the heads of Vanessa's mourners, I heard the low murmur of a single-engine prop biplane that resurrected a distant memory of riding in the back of Al Thompson's pickup down some dusty road at Mossy Plantation when the crop dusters would fly right over our heads and leave us lightly frosted with DDT powder.

Faces in the crowd turned expectantly upward as one, toward a vintage, fabriccovered Stearman PT-17 Kaydet biplane painted bright red. The old military trainers from the mid-1920s had been all over the Delta when I was a child. From a lengthy New York Times article, we all knew the Stearman was owned and piloted by Vanessa's daughter; Jasmine, who had almost become a commercial airline pilot before being pulled into her mother's irresistible orbit of law and power.

The Times article noted that even as a child, Jasmine had been something of an aviation prodigy, winning competitions and the respect of adults many decades her senior by designing and building advanced radio-controlled model aircraft that enabled her to obtain three patents by the time she was thirteen. But by then, she had moved on to earning a license to fly real aircraft.

Because her mother's offer of financial assistance with college came with law school strings attached, Jasmine-having inherited her mother's headstrong temperament-refused the money and had put herself through school by flying a news helicopter for a series of Los Angeles television stringers and freelancers before finally landing a slot with one of the network affiliates.

All of this came back clearly and easily as the biplane emerged over the treetops so low and slow I was certain it would simply fall out of the sky. Instead it made a lazy, tight circle as only a biplane can do in the hands of an expert pilot, then loosed a dense shower of rose petals, filling the sky with color and the air with fragrance. The Stearman dipped its wings, then vanished as the brilliant petals drifted to earth.

No one moved until long after the sound of the Stearman's engine had faded, such was the shock, the depth of loss, and the reluctance to leave a wonderful woman behind. Then we all began to drift reluctantly away.

I thought I had said good-bye to Vanessa and the past. I was wrong.