On New Year’s Day of 1985, Turnip Coogan, facing twenty to life for capital murder, decided he’d have to be dumb as a post not to break out of jail, and his mama didn’t raise no post. That morning, as usual, the cells were unlocked to give the hundred inmates time to exercise, and due to a current heat wave, one of the trustees had opened a window by the mess hall. Turnip saw his chance. In poor testament to his mother’s child-rearing abilities, he didn’t bother getting dressed before climbing out the window, and in poorer testament to the intelligence of posts, he forgot the jail was located on the roof of the Lauderdale County Courthouse.

Turnip had nowhere to run, and even if he did, he’d be running there in a tank top, boxer shorts, and one sock.

Before and below him lay downtown Meridian, Mississippi, a railroad hub that billed itself the state’s “Queen City” but that had, over recent decades, become more of a countess or baronet. Strip malls in the northern hills, via two fangs, Poplar Springs Drive and Highway 39, had sucked the life out of the city’s downtown. What remained included a triptych of hospitals, donut shops to help fill them, churches praying to empty them, and lawyers’ offices trying to profit off them. Turnip blamed all those god- damn shit-brained lawyers for his present situation.

One in particular. William motherfucking Pickett. On the roof of the courthouse, as the alarm started to whine inside the jail and onlookers in the street below raised hands to brows, Turnip let his half-socked toes hang over the edge, thinking of all he would like to do to that asshole Will Pickett, the district attorney prosecuting his case.

“Take a step on this roof and I jump!” Turnip yelled at the armed guard whose short-brimmed hat bobbed like a fishing float at the top lip of the fixed metal cage ladder twenty yards away.

“You got nowhere to run, Coogan! This ladder’s the only way down, be- sides that window you climbed out of, and there’s ten, twelve guards waiting inside it. Come back yonder ways, we forget all about it. All right now?”

“One step, okay? One step and I jump!”

How long had Turnip been on the roof? He couldn’t say for sure. The day was turning into a real blue-moon scorcher, even for January in Mississippi, the roof’s black tar going glassy, the sun a giant interrogation lamp blasting down on Turnip. In the street three stories below, the crowd had grown. A police blockade cut off traffic. Patrolmen in short sleeves and aviators tried without success to disperse the people on cigarette breaks from the few offices that remained downtown.

Everyone, Turnip figured, was getting pushed around by this godforsaken city. Those folks down there knew a comrade in arms when they saw one. Their hands held to their temples were a salute, not makeshift visors what better to see the fun. Turnip was a hero, a symbol of oppression! If only his mama could see him now.

Soon the crowd even started to chant for him. Turnip’s bare shoulders slumped, however, when he realized what exactly they were chanting.

“Jump, Turnip, jump!” yelled the crowd, singsong. “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

With a grunt, Turnip sat on the edge of the roof, letting his legs dangle humpty-dumpty-style. He tried to ignore the chants by plotting his revenge. The prosecution, led by that son-of-a-bitch district attorney, claimed Turnip and an accomplice had killed Randall Hubbard, the rich- ass real estate developer responsible, if Turnip was being honest, for the death of downtown Meridian. Hubbard had built the strip malls draining the life out of this city. Hubbard made millions leasing space to greasy pizza joints, bargain shoe stores, nail and hair salons, liquor stores, dollar stores, record stores, and hippie-dippie head shops.

And what did he do with those millions? Build a house on a hilltop, marry a woman young enough to be his daughter, get fat, go bald, and take out a stupidly sizable amount of life insurance on himself. Of course his beautiful young wife had started to get notions.

“I been framed!” Turnip yelled to the crowd below. “That bitch set me up!”

The bitch in question was Odette Hubbard. Turnip never should have trusted her. Last year, she’d hired him as her bodyguard at the rate of $1,000 per week, which was a sight more than what he made driving commercial rigs. Turnip figured she hired him because she knew he was connected to the DM, a deduction he made when, a week after hiring him, she said, “I hear you’re connected to the DM.”

So, sure, Turnip thought, watching TV crews set up equipment on the street below, he’d made some calls to his people in the Dixie Mafia. Due to his cockfighting side hustle—he’d earned some of the high-ups in the DM piles of money with his secret method of sticking a cocaine-laced Q-tip up his bird’s asshole before the fight—Turnip had used code. “Got a hen offering thirty-large for somebody to take out her rooster.”

Soon as he got off this roof, Turnip would prove the murder had been Odette’s plan all along. He was a patsy. The news crews down there would hold up their mics to his face and he’d spill, goddamn it. Everybody would know the truth—about Odette and the DM, about the Meridian PD and city hall, about the whole goddamn rigged system of this whole goddamn town!

An updraft cooled Turnip’s feet and calves. He rubbed the lacerations on his wrists. Last night, he’d tried to get moved to the infirmary by way of a suicide attempt, but when the doctor saw the cuts Turnip had made with a plastic knife, he’d laughed in Turnip’s face and said, “Son, you’re supposed to cut on the underside of the wrist.”

In the street, all the cars, whether parked or driving by, seemed to be tuned to Q101. Turnip could hear the radio from their open windows. “Shit,” he whispered after noticing what song was playing. When Van Halen’s “Jump” ended, the DJ said, “This goes out to you, Turnip. Give those folks downtown a show!” and the song started up again.

Had he only wanted to go to the infirmary? Turnip asked himself, rubbing his wrists, fingering the scabs. No. He’d wanted to go somewhere else, and he couldn’t even get that right.

Firemen set up a jumping sheet on the curb, locking the hinges of its circular metal frame and, each spaced a few feet apart, holding it above the hard concrete. They looked to Turnip like kids gathered around a trampoline. He appreciated the white sheet had a red bull’s-eye in its center. That way he’d know where not to aim if he took his last step.

Leaning forward, hands clamped to the ledge, Turnip let a glob of spit form against his parched lips. He watched it fall three stories to the sidewalk. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Miss— Two and a half seconds for three stories. Was that too long a stretch of terror? Turnip would rather die than live out his whole life in prison. Might as well ask for the death penalty, he figured, because he might as well be dead.

He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Somebody stand up and say I killed Randy Hubbard! I want somebody to give me a motherfucking lie detector to prove I ain’t killed nobody. I may know who killed the worthless bastard, but I’m not going to rat on nobody!”

From behind Turnip came the voice he wanted most and least to hear at that moment. “I’m coming up, Coogan,” yelled Will Pickett. The district attorney climbed over the top rim of the cage ladder. Hands raised, he said, “The man behind me? That’s my investigator, Jake. He’s armed. I told Jake shoot you dead, you make a move.”

“You ugly son of a bitch. I’m sure you’d like that. Get rid of me, easy-peez.”

Turnip stood. He looked over the ledge. News cameras scattered through the crowd peered back at him, sound operators beside them, raising boom poles above their heads. He guessed that at a distance of three stories they must be close enough to pick up everything he and Pickett said.

“Did I mention fat?” Turnip asked the district attorney, raising his voice so it would carry. “You are one fat, ugly son of a bitch.”

Pickett, in pin-striped shirtsleeves, maroon suspenders, and an affected bow tie, said, “Let’s go on back inside, all right, Coogan?” His round glasses with cable temples reflected a pair of suns. Sweat drenched his chevron moustache.

“You lied about my plea deal,” Turnip said, the tone in the second-to-last word sounding, to his embarrassment, like what it was: a plea. Months earlier, after his offer to turn state’s evidence if the capital murder charges were dropped, Turnip had sent a letter to the local paper, declaring his innocence and his unfair treatment by the district attorney. Unfortunately, how Turnip concluded the letter, stating he could not have done more to get the court’s attention unless he’d threatened to kill Ronald Reagan, occasioned an entire week of questioning by unamused FBI agents.

“Lewis,” Pickett said, using Turnip’s given name. He inched closer, hands still raised, the old man behind him still gripping a revolver. “You and I both know we never had a plea deal.”

“I ain’t killed nobody. You took everything I had when you put me in jail.”

Not until he saw a line of wet drops on the roof’s tar did Turnip realize he was crying. He wiped his face with the hem of his tank top and, as his boxer shorts ballooned from his thighs and his one sock gripped the ledge, did a chicken dance, flapping his bent arms like two wings and making gobble-gobble sounds. The dance used to bring him luck before cockfights. Now he hoped it would keep the people down in the street from seeing his tears.

“What are you doing, Lewis?” Pickett was now close enough to reach out and touch Turnip. “Think about your lovely wife. Think about that baby you got on the way.”

“Baby?”

“She hasn’t told you. Shit.”

Turnip’s wife, Molly, hadn’t visited him since he’d been detained at the county’s pleasure. He understood. In fact, he was happy she stayed away. At the initial hearing, when Turnip had been ordered to be held without bond, Molly had been shaking as she gave her testimony that she had met Turnip’s alleged accomplice in the murder, a DM hit man named Jacob Cassidy. Turnip’s heart had crumbled like old corn bread to see his girl so afraid of what Cassidy and the Dixie Mafia might do to her in retaliation for the testimony.

It was for the best, her staying away from the jail, but she could have at least called Turnip and told him he was going to be a daddy. Molly could have at least done that.

“You took everything I have,” Turnip mumbled to Will Pickett. “My home, my truck. My family.” His voice swelled out of anger with himself and with this piece of shit who’d made him cry in front of the whole world. “How’d you like it if I took away your family, Mr. Pickett? What if someone killed your wife, your son, that baby in your wife’s belly?”

Down below, the group of uniformed police officers began to froth, talking into their radios and making hand signals to other officers. Behind Pickett, the old man with a gun stepped forward. “Easy, Jake,” Pickett said. “Lewis was just puffing his chest. Isn’t that right, Lewis?”

Turnip, sensing he’d gone too far, started to pace, his motion back and forth on the ledge keeping a lockstep with the motion back and forth in his mind. He was such an idiot. What kind of man couldn’t properly send himself to hell? Turnip got dizzy thinking about it. Even his stomach turned on him. A belch filled his mouth, tasting of bitter eggs and toast and coffee. “How can anyone win in this damn town?” After he stopped pacing, Turnip continued swaying side to side, favoring one heel and then the other. He couldn’t help himself. The motion was still going in his head. The bitter taste was still in his mouth. “Game’s been rigged my whole entire life.”

“Let’s go back inside.” Pickett stepped forward. He was inches from Turnip’s back. He couldn’t see his face. “We can sit down and have a little talk about a plea deal. How’s that sound?”

“They took everything I have, and I ain’t got nothing to lose.” “Lewis!”

To the people in the street below, Turnip, shadowed by the noontime sun and given fluffy white wings by the backdrop of two clouds, didn’t jump or fall so much as topple from the roof, arms at his sides and back straight, like a toy soldier nudged forward by a child’s finger. Collectively they gasped when his body hit the sidewalk. Parents held hands over their children’s eyes. Paralegals, secretaries, and nurse practitioners forgot to agonize, if only for a moment, about their overdue mortgage payments, about the tests that came back positive, about the liens on their Ford Escorts or Oldsmobile Cutlasses or Chevy Chevettes.

The rest of Meridian, Mississippi, did not notice. At Bill Gordon’s barbershop, young men thinking of joining up asked for flattops, demonstrating by holding one hand like a mortarboard to their heads, trying to tamp the quiver in their voices. At Merrehope, one of six homes left standing after General Sherman’s raid during the Civil War, a group of volunteers from the Junior Auxiliary dusted, polished, mopped, and swept in preparation for the two-o’clock tour. At Weidmann’s Restaurant, customers smeared peanut butter on saltines while looking over the menu. At the Threefoot Building, insurance salesmen read the paper while getting their brogans shined. At the Temple Theatre, students from Lamar School, a segregation academy named for the Confederate statesman L. Q. C. Lamar, took advantage of the New Year’s Day holiday by waiting in line to see Disney’s rerelease of Song of the South. A few of them sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as an ambulance passed, headed to the courthouse to collect the body.

And later that evening, after Will Pickett’s pregnant wife and two-year- old son had been startled by a black-and-white police cruiser pulling up to their house—“Only here as a precaution, ma’am,” the officers had said—Clementine Baldwin, proprietor of the Queen City Detective Agency, sat in her office to look over a stack of unpaid invoices. She was pouring her third whiskey neat when the phone rang.

“Queen City,” she said into the shouldered receiver. “Baldwin here.”

“Hello,” came a woman’s voice, frail but bold, with a hill-country twang. “My name is Lenora Coogan. My son is Lewis Coogan. I’d like to hire you to find the sons of bitches who killed him.”

Excerpted from The Queen City Detective Agency: A Novel (William Morrow, 2024) by Snowden Wright. © 2024 by Snowden Wright, used with permission from the publisher.

Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop (2019) and Play Pretty Blues (2013). He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.