The White Road

15


I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.

“Bad day at the office?”

“I got the justice blues. You?”

“Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a Godfearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.

The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime-scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with PRIVATE

PROPERTY signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.

I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The barman didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up. The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Marianne had entered the bar. She recalled the racist abuse directed at Atys and confirmed the times that they had arrived and left. She knew because, well, because the man she was shooting pool with was the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back, you know what I mean, hon, and she was keeping a close eye on the time so that she’d be home before he finished his evening shift. Euna had long red hair, tinted to the color of strawberry jelly, and a small tongue of fat jutted over the lip of her faded jeans. She was saying good-bye to her forties, but in her mind she was only half as old and twice as pretty. Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the a/c but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles. Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.

“Did you see Marianne Larousse in the bar before that night?” I asked her.

“Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.”

“Who was she with?”

“Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.”

She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.

“You got to watch their hands. Those boys, they think their money buys them beer but their tip buys them mining rights, you get my meaning.”

“I take it that it doesn’t.”

Remembered hunger flashed in her eyes, then was softened by the memory of her appetite’s satiation. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

“Not every time.”

“You ever see her with Atys Jones before that night?”

“Once, but not in here. It ain’t that kind of place. It was back at the Swamp Rat. Like I said, I go there some.”

“How did they look to you?”

“They weren’t touching or nothing, but I could tell they was together. I guess other folks could too.”

She let her last words hang.

“There was trouble?”

“Not then. Next night she was back in here and her brother came looking for her.” Again there was a shudder, but this time her feelings were clear.

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t know him.”

“But?”

She looked around casually, then leaned in slightly closer across the bar. The action forced her shirt open a little, exposing the sweep of her breasts and their dusting of freckles.

“The Larousses keep a lot of folks in jobs around here, but that don’t mean we got to like them, Earl Jr. least of all. There’s something about him, like…like he’s a faggot but not a faggot?

Don’t get me wrong, I like all men, even the ones that don’t like me, you know, physically and all, but not Earl Jr. There’s just something about him.”

She took another drag on her cigarette. It was almost gone after three puffs.

“So Earl Jr. came into the bar looking for Marianne?”

“That’s right. Took her by the arm and tried to drag her out. She slapped him, then this other fella came forward and together they managed to get her out.”

“Do you remember when this happened?”

“About a week before she was killed.”

“You think they knew about her relationship with Atys Jones?”

“Like I said, other folks knew about it. If they knew, it would get back to her family in the end.”

The door behind me opened, and a group of men entered, shouting and laughing. It was the start of the evening rush.

“I got to go, hon,” said Euna. She had already declined to sign a written statement.

“Just one more question: Did you recognize the man with Earl Jr. that night?”

She thought for a moment. “Sure. He’s been in here once or twice before. He’s a piece of shit. His name is Landron Mobley.”

I thanked her, and left a twenty on the bar to cover my OJ and her time. She gave me her best smile.

“Don’t take this wrong, hon,” said Euna as I stood to leave, “but that boy you’re trying to help deserves what he got coming.”

“Lot of people seem to think that way.”

She blew a steady stream of smoke from her cigarette into the air, pushing out her lower lip as she did so. It was swollen slightly, like it had been bitten recently. The smoke dissipated. I watched it go.

“He raped and killed that girl,” continued Euna. “I know you got to do what you’re doing, asking questions and all, but I hope you don’t find out nothing to get that boy off.”

“Even if I find out that he’s innocent?”

She lifted her breasts from the bar and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Hon, there ain’t nobody innocent in this world except little babies, and sometimes I ain’t even sure about them.”

I told all of this to Elliot over the phone.

“Maybe you should talk to your client Mobley when you find him, see what he knows.”

“If I can find him.”

“You think he’s skipped?”

There was a pause.

“I hope he’s skipped,” said Elliot, but when I asked him to explain what he meant he laughed it off. “I mean, I think Landron’s facing serious jail time if it goes to trial. In legal terms, Landron’s fucked.”

But that wasn’t what he meant.

That wasn’t what he meant at all.