The White Road

Charleston International was near empty when we landed, the walkways and stores largely devoid of passengers. To the northwest, at Charleston AFB, gray green military aircraft stood in the afternoon sun, tensed like locusts prepared for flight.

They picked me up at the baggage claim, close by the car rental counters. There were two men, one of them fat and wearing a bright hemp shirt, the other older with slicked back dark hair, dressed in a T-shirt and vest beneath a black linen jacket. They watched me discreetly as I stood at the Hertz counter, then waited at the side door of the terminal building as I walked through the heat of the parking lot to the small marquee beneath which my rented Mustang was waiting. By the time I had the keys in my hand, they were sitting in a big Chevy Tahoe at the intersection with the main exit road and they stayed two cars behind me all the way to the interstate. I could have lost them, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I knew they were there, and that was what mattered.

The Mustang didn’t drive like my Boss 302. When I put my foot to the floor nothing happened for about a second while the engine woke up, stretched and scratched itself before eventually getting around to accelerating. Still, it had a CD player so I was able to listen to the Jayhawks as I drove along the neobrutalist stretch of I-26, “I’d Run Away” blaring as I took the North Meeting Street exit for Charleston.

Meeting Street is one of the main arteries into Charleston, leading straight into the heart of the business and tourist district, but its upper reaches are pretty unsavory. A black man sold watermelons by the side of the road from the back of a pickup, the fruit piled up neatly in rows, a sign advertising the Diamonds Gentleman’s Club rising up above him. The Mustang juddered over railroad tracks, past boarded-up warehouses and abandoned strip malls, drawing glances from kids shooting hoop on overgrown green lots and old men in porch chairs, the paint peeling from the fronts of the houses and weeds bursting through the cracks in the steps in a mockery of fruition. The only building that looked clean and new was the housing authority’s modern glass and redbrick office. It seemed to be inviting those who lived by its gift to storm it and steal all of the furniture and fittings. The Chevy stayed behind me the whole way. I slowed down once or twice, and did a full circle from Meeting, through Calhoun and Hutson and back on to Meeting again, just to bug the two men. They maintained their distance until I reached the courtyard of the Charleston Place hotel, then moved slowly away.

In the hotel lobby, wealthy blacks and whites dressed in their Sunday best stood talking and laughing in their postservice ease. Occasionally, calls were made for parties to head to the dining room, Charleston Place’s Sunday brunch being a tradition for some. I left them to it and headed up the stairs to my room. It had a pair of queen beds and a view of the ATM at the bank across the street. I sat on the bed nearest the window and called Elliot Norton to let him know that I’d arrived. He let out a long sigh of relief.

“The hotel okay for you?”

“Sure,” I said, noncommitally. Charleston Place was certainly luxurious, but the bigger the hotel, the easier it is for strangers to gain access to the rooms. I hadn’t noticed anybody who looked particularly like hotel security, although they were probably present in a very discreet way, and the hallway had been empty apart from a chambermaid pushing a cart loaded with towels and toiletries. She hadn’t even looked at me.

“It’s the best hotel in Charleston,” said Eliot. “It’s got a gym, a pool. You prefer, I can book you in someplace where the roaches will keep you company.”

“I got followed from the airport,” I told him.

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t sound surprised.

“You think they could be listening in on your calls?”

“I guess. I never bothered to have the place swept. Didn’t see the need. But it’s hard to keep a lid on anything in this town. Also, like I told you, my secretary left this week and she made it pretty clear that she didn’t approve none of some of my clients. Her last act was to make your hotel booking. Could be she let something slip.”

I wasn’t too concerned about the tail. People involved in the case were going to know I was here soon enough anyway. I was more worried about the possibility that somebody might find out our plans for Atys Jones and take action against him.

“Okay, just in case: no more calls to or from the hotel, your office, or your home. We’ll need clean cells for routine business. I’ll pick them up this evening. Anything sensitive can wait until we see each other in person.” Cells weren’t an ideal solution, but if we didn’t sign contracts, kept the numbers to ourselves, and used them carefully we would probably get away with it. Elliot gave me directions to his house again, which was about eighty miles northwest of Charleston, and I told him I’d be there later that afternoon. Before he hung up, he added: “I had another reason for checking you into the CP, apart from your comfort.”

I waited.

“The Larousses go there for Sunday brunch most weeks, catch up on gossip and business. You go down there now, you’ll probably see them: Earl, Earl Jr., maybe some cousins, business associates. Thought you might like to get a feel for them discreetly, but if someone tailed you from the airport, then I figure they may be checking you out as much as you’re checking on them. Sorry, bud. I fucked up there.”

I let it go.

Before I headed down to the lobby I checked the Yellow Pages and called a company named Loomis Car Rental. I arranged to have an anonymous Neon delivered to the parking garage within the hour. My guess was that anyone who was keeping tabs on me would be looking out for the Mustang, and I wasn’t about to make life too easy for a potential tail. I spotted the Larousse group as it was coming out of the dining room. Earl Larousse, instantly identifiable from the newspaper photos I’d seen, wore his trademark white suit and a black silk tie, like a mourner at a Chinese funeral. He was about five-eight, bald and heavily built. Beside him stood a younger, slimmer version of himself, although there was a slight effeminacy to the son that was absent from the father. Earl Jr.’s slim frame was concealed beneath a billowing white shirt and a pair of black trousers that were too tight around the ass and thighs, making him look like a flamenco dancer on his day off. He had very fair hair, which rendered his eyebrows almost invisible, and I reckoned he had to shave about once a month. Five other people—three men, two women—were talking with them as they left the room. The party was quickly joined by an eighth person, the man with the slicked-back hair, who walked up to Earl Jr. and whispered discreetly in his ear before moving on. Immediately, Earl Jr. looked over at me. He said something to his father, then detached himself from the group and came over to me. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t to see his hand outstretched and a regretful smile on his face as he reached me.

“Mr. Parker?” he said. “Let me introduce myself: Earl Larousse Jr.”

I took his hand and shook it. “You usually have people followed from the airport?”

The smile wavered then resumed its post, this time the regret more pronounced.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We were curious to see what you looked like.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We know why you’re here, Mr. Parker. We don’t necessarily approve, but we understand. We don’t want there to be problems between us. We understand you have a job to do. Our concern is that whoever is responsible for my sister’s death is punished with the full force of the law. For the moment, we believe that person to be Atys Jones. If that proves not to be the case, then we’ll accept it. We’ve made our statements to the police, and told them all we know. All we ask of you is that you respect our privacy and leave us in peace. We have nothing to add to what has already been said.”

It had the air of a rehearsed speech about it. More than that, I sensed a detachment about Earl Jr. Although he sounded sincere, if mechanical, his eyes were both mocking and slightly fearful. He wore a mask, although I didn’t yet know what lay behind it. Farther back, his father watched us, and in his face I saw hostility. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be directed at his son as much as at me. Earl Jr. turned and walked back to the group, and a shroud fell across his father’s anger as they made their way out of the lobby and into their waiting cars. With nothing else to do I returned to my room, showered, ate a club sandwich, and waited for the car rental guy to arrive. When the call came from the desk I went down, signed the paperwork, and entered the parking garage. I put on my sunglasses and headed out, the sunlight gleaming off the windshield, but there was no sign of the Chevy and nobody seemed interested in me or the car. On the way out of town I stopped at a mall and bought two new cell phones. Elliot Norton lived about two miles outside Grace Falls in a modest white faux Colonial with two pillars at its front door and a big porch running the full length of the first floor. It looked like the kind of place where the mint juleps would still have the julep mix dissolving in the glass. The large sheet of industrial plastic covering the hole in the roof did nothing to add an air of authenticity. I found Elliot around back, talking to a pair of men in coveralls who leaned against a van, smoking. The legend on the side of the van indicated that the two men were roofers from Dave’s Construction and Roofing out of Martinez, Georgia (“Want To Save? Call Dave!”). To their left was a pile of scaffolding, ready to be put in place so that work could commence the following morning. One of the men was idly tossing a piece of burnt, blackened slate from hand to hand. As I approached, he stopped and jutted his chin in my direction. Elliot turned a little too quickly, then left the two workmen and stretched out his hand to me.

“Man, am I glad to see you!” he smiled. Some of his hair had been scorched away on the left side of his head. What remained had been cut back in an effort to disguise the damage. There was gauze over his left ear and burn marks glistened along his cheek, chin, and neck. His left hand, where it was visible beneath a white tube bandage, was blistered.

“Don’t take this wrong, Elliot,” I said, “but you don’t look so good.”

“I know. Fire took out most of my wardrobe. Come on.” He reached behind my back and guided me toward the house. “I’ll buy you an iced tea.”

Inside, the house smelled badly of smoke and damp. Water had penetrated the floors above and damaged the plasterwork in the downstairs rooms, brown clouds now sweeping across the white skies of the ceilings. Some of the wallpaper had already begun to peel and I reckoned there was a good chance that Elliot would be forced to replace most of the timbers in the hallway. In the front room was an unmade sofa bed and clothes hung from the curtain rail or splayed themselves across the backs of chairs.

“You’re still living here?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, as he washed some ash from a pair of glass tumblers.

“You might be safer in a hotel.”

“I might be, but then the folks who did this to my house would probably come back and finish the job.”

“They could come back anyway.”

He shook his head. “Nah, they’re done, for now. Murder isn’t their style. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have done a better job first time round.”

He took a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and filled the tumblers. I stood by the window and stared out at Elliot’s yard and the land beyond. The skies were empty of birds and the woods surrounding Elliot’s property were almost silent. Along the coast, the migrants were already in flight, the wood ducks joining the terns, the hawks and warblers and sparrows soon to follow. Here, farther inland, there was less evidence of their departure, and even the permanent residents were not as obvious as they formerly were, their spring mating songs ended and their bright summer plumage slowly fading to the mourning cloaks of winter. As if to make up for the absence of the birds and their colors, the wildflowers had begun to bloom now that the worst of the summer heat had departed. There were asters and sunflowers and goldenrods, and butterflies flocked to them, attracted by the predominance of yellows and purples. Beneath the leaves, the field spiders would be waiting for them.

“So when do I get to meet Atys Jones?” I asked.

“Be easiest if you talk to him after we get him out of county. We pick him up from the Richland County Detention Center late tomorrow, then switch him to a second car out back of Campbell’s Country Corner to lose anyone with an interest in where we might be taking him. From there, I’ll drive him to the safe house in Charleston.”

“Who’s the second driver?”

“Son of the old guy whose gonna be taking care of him. He’s okay, knows what he’s doing.”

“Why not stash him closer to Columbia?”

“We got a better chance of keeping him safe down in Charleston, believe me. He’ll be over on the east side, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Anybody comes asking questions and we’ll hear about it in plenty of time to move him again if we have to. Anyhow, it’s a purely temporary arrangement. Could be that we’ll have to stash him somewhere more secure, maybe hire private security. We’ll see.”

“So what’s his story?” I asked.

Elliot shook his head and rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. “His story is that he and Marianne Larousse had a thing going.”

“They were lovers?”

“Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. “I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Marianne died they’d been screwing around in the front of his Grand Am. They had a fight, she ran off into the trees. He went after her, thought he’d lost her somewhere in the forest, then found her with her head beaten to a pulp.”

“Weapon?”

“Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom—Trojan—matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case any way they can.”

“You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doubt in a jury?”

“Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but…”

I waited. There’s always a “but.” There wouldn’t be a story without one.

“There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.”

He flicked through the piles of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.

“What you got here,” said Elliot, “is a regular blood feud.”