The White Road

“Did that bother you?”

“What are you, man, stupid? You ever fucked with a rubber? It ain’t the same. It’s like…“He struggled for the comparison.

“Wearing your shoes in the bathtub.”

For the first time he smiled and a little of the ice broke.

“Yeah, ’cept I ain’t never had a bath that good.”

“Go on.”

“We started arguing.”

“About what?”

“About how maybe she was ashamed of me, didn’t want to be seen with me. Y’know, we was always fuckin’ in cars, or in my crib if she got drunk enough not to care. Rest of the time, she drift by me like I don’t exist.”

“Did this argument turn violent?”

“No, I never touched her. Ever. But she start screamin’ and shoutin’ and, next thing I know, she’s runnin’ away. I was goan just let her go, m’sayin, let her cool off and shit? Then I went after her, callin’ her name.

“Then I found her.”

He swallowed and placed his hands behind his head. His lips narrowed. He seemed on the verge of tears.

“What did you see?”

“Her face, man, it was all busted in. Her nose…there was just blood. I tried to lift her, tried to brush away her hair from her face, but she was gone. There was nothin’ I could do for her. She was gone.”

And now he was crying, his right knee pumping up and down like a piston with the grief and rage that he was still suppressing.

“We’re nearly done,” I said.

He nodded and wiped away his tears with a sharp, embarrassed jerk of his arm.

“Did you see anybody, anyone at all, who might have done this to her?”

“No, man, nobody.”

And for the first time, he lied. I watched his eyes, saw them look up and away from me for an instant before he answered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He was about to give me outraged when I reached across and raised a finger in warning before him.

“What did you see?”

His mouth opened and closed twice without producing any sound, then: “I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.”

“Tell me.”

He nodded, more to himself than to me.

“I thought I saw a woman. She was all in white, and movin’ away into the trees. But when I looked closer, there was nothin’ there. It could have been the river, I guess, with the light shinin’

on it.”

“Did you tell the police?” There had been no mention of a woman in the reports.

“They said I was lyin’.”

And he was still lying. Even now, he was holding back, but I knew I was going to get nothing more from him for the present. I sat back in the chair, then passed him the police reports. We went through them for a time, but he could find nothing to question beyond their implicit assumption of his guilt.

He stood as I placed the reports back in their file. “We done?”

“For now.”

He moved a couple of steps, then stopped before he reached the door.

“They took me past the death house,” he said softly.

“What?”

“When they was takin’ me to Richland, they drove me to Broad River and they showed me the death house.”

The state’s capital punishment facility was located at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, close by the reception and evaluation center. In a move that combined psychological torture with democracy, prisoners convicted of capital crimes prior to 1995 were allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection as their final punishment. All others were executed by injection, as Atys Jones would be if the state succeeded in its efforts to convict him of Marianne’s murder.

“They tole me I was goan be strapped down and then they was goan inject poisons into me, and that I’d be dying inside but I wouldn’t be able to move or cry out none. They tole me it be like suffocatin’ slow.”

There was nothing I could say.

“I didn’t kill Marianne,” he said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“But they goan kill me for it anyhow.”

His resignation made me feel cold inside.

“We can stop that from happening, if you help us.”

But he just shook his head and loped back to the kitchen. Elliot entered the room seconds later.

“What do you think?” he asked in a whisper.

“He’s holding something back,” I replied. “He’ll give it to us, in time.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” snapped Elliot.

As I followed him into the kitchen, I could see the muscles bunched beneath his shirt, and his hands flexing and unflexing by his sides. He turned his attention to Albert.

“You need anything?”

“Us hab ’nuff bittle,” said Albert.

“I don’t mean just food. You need more money? A gun?”

The woman slammed her glass down on the table and shook her finger at Elliot.

“Don’ pit mout’ on us,” she said firmly.

“They think having a gun in the house will bring them bad luck,” Elliot said.

“They may be right. What do they do if there’s trouble?”

“Samuel lives with them, and I suspect he has less trouble with guns than they have. I’ve given them all our numbers. If anything goes wrong, they’ll call one of us. Just make sure you keep your phone with you.”

I thanked them both for the lemonade, then followed Elliot to the door.

“You leavin’ me here?” cried Atys. “With these two?”

“Dat boy ent hab no mannus,” scolded the old woman. “Dat boy gwi’ punish fuh ’e wickitty.”

She poked at Atys with her finger.

“Debblement weh dat chile lib.”

“Get off me,” he retorted, but he looked kind of worried.

“Be good, Atys,” said Elliot. “Watch some TV, get some sleep. Mr. Parker will check on you tomorrow.”

Atys raised his eyes to mine in a last, desperate plea.

“Shit,” he said, “by tomorrow these two probably have eaten me.”

When we left him, the old woman had just started poking him again. Outside, we passed their son, Samuel, on the way back to the house. He was a tall, handsome man, my age or a little younger, with large brown eyes. Elliot introduced us and we shook hands.

“Any trouble?” asked Elliot.

“None,” Samuel confirmed. “I parked outside your office. Keys are on top of the right rear wheel.”

Elliot thanked him and he headed toward the house.

“You sure he’ll be okay with them?” I asked Elliot.

“They’re smart, like their boy, and the folks round here look out for them. Any strangers come sniffing down this street and half the young bucks will be following them before they have a chance to get their shoes dirty. As long as he’s here, and no-one finds out about it, he’ll be safe.”

The same faces watched us leave their streets and I thought that maybe Elliot was right. Maybe they would take account of strangers coming into their neighborhood. I just wasn’t sure that it would be enough to keep Atys Jones safe from harm. 12

E LLIOT AND I exchanged a few words outside the house, then parted. Before we did, he handed me a newspaper from the backseat of his car.

“Since you been reading the newspapers so closely, you happen to see this?”

The story was buried in the lifestyles section and headlined IN THE MIDST OF TRAGEDY, CHARITY. The Larousses were hosting a charity lunch in the grounds of an old plantation house on the western shore of Lake Marion later that week, one of two large houses that the family owned. From the list of expected guests, half the grandees in the state were going to be there.

“While still mourning the death of his beloved daughter Marianne,” the report read, “Earl Larousse, his son Earl Jr. by his side, said that ‘we have a duty to those less fortunate than ourselves that even the loss of Marianne cannot absolve.’ The charity lunch, in aid of cancer research, will be the first public engagement for the Larousse family since the murder of Marianne, 19, last July.”

I handed the paper back to Elliot.

“You can bet that there’ll be judges and prosecutors there, probably the governor too,” he said.

“They should just hold the trial right there on the lawn and get done with it.”

Elliot told me he had business to conclude back at his office, and we agreed to meet again over the next day or two to discuss progress and options. I followed his car as far as Charleston Place, then peeled off and parked. I showered in my room and called Rachel. She was just about to head into South Portland for a reading at Nonesuch Books. She’d mentioned it to me a couple of days earlier, but I’d forgotten about it until now.

“An interesting thing happened today,” she said, giving me just enough time to get the word “hi”

out of my mouth. “I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.”

“Rachel—”

“You said it would be discreet. His T-shirt had the words ‘Klan Killer’ written on the front.”

“I—”

“And do you know what he said?”

I waited.