The White Road

“But your friend Parker is tormented by empathy, by his capacity to feel. He is all that Faulkner is not. He is destructive, and angry, but it is a righteous anger, not merely wrath, which is sinful and works against the Divine. I look to your friend and I see a greater purpose in action. If evil and good are both creations of the Almighty, then the evil visited on Parker, the loss of his wife and child, was an instrument of the greater good, just like Yossi’s death. Look at the men that he has hunted down as a result, the peace that he has brought to others, living and dead, the balance that he has restored, all born of the sorrow that he has endured, that he continues to endure. In his response to all that he has suffered, I, for one, see the work of the Divine.”

Angel shook his head in disbelief.

“So this is some kind of test for him, for all of us?”

“No, not a test: an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of salvation, to create that salvation for ourselves, maybe even to become salvation itself.”

“I’m more concerned with this world than the next.”

“There is no difference. They are not separate, but linked. Heaven and hell begin here.”

“Well, one of them sure does.”

“You are a wrathful man, are you not?”

“I’m getting there. I hear another sermon and I’ll arrive.”

Epstein raised his hands in surrender.

“So you are here because you want our help? Our help with what?”

“Roger Bowen.”

Epstein’s smile widened.

“That,” he said, “will be a pleasure.”





18


I LEFT ADELE FOSTER and headed back into Charleston. Her husband had begun visiting LapLand prior to his death, and LapLand was where Tereus worked. Tereus had hinted to me that Elliot knew more than he was telling me about the disappearances of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt, and from what Adele Foster had told me Elliot and a group of his former boyhood friends were now under active threat from some outside force. That group included Earl Larousse Jr. and three men now deceased: Landron Mobley, Grady Truett, and James Foster. I tried Elliot’s phones again, with no result, then swung by his office close by the intersection of Broad and Meeting, what the locals called the Corners of Four Laws since St. Michael’s Church, the federal court, the state courthouse, and city hall each occupied a corner of the intersection. Elliot occupied a building with two other law firms, all three sharing a single, street-level entrance. I headed straight for the third floor but there was no sign of life behind the frosted glass door. I took off my jacket, placed it against the door, then used the butt of my gun to break through the glass. I reached in through the hole and opened the door. A small reception area with a secretary’s desk and shelves of files led into Elliot’s office. The door was unlocked. Inside, filing cabinet drawers were open and files lay scattered across the desk and chairs. Whoever had gone through the files knew what he or she was looking for. There was no Rolodex or address book that I could find, and when I tried to access the computer I found that it was password-locked. I spent a few minutes going through the alphabetically ordered files, but could find nothing on Landron Mobley and nothing on Atys Jones that I did not already have in my possession. I turned out the lights, stepped over the broken glass at the door, and closed it softly behind me.

Adele had given me an address in Hampton for Phil Poveda, one of the by now rapidly dwindling group of friends. I drove out there in time to find a tall man with long gray-black hair and a flecked beard closing his garage door from the inside. As I approached him he paused. He looked nervous and skittish.

“Mr. Poveda?”

He didn’t reply.

I reached for my id. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I wondered if I could have a few minutes of your time.”

He still didn’t reply, but at least the garage door remained open. I took it as a positive sign. I was wrong. Phil Poveda, who looked like a hippie computer geek, pulled a gun on me. It was a.38, and it shook in his hand like unset Jell-O, but it was still a gun.

“Get out of here,” he said. His hand was still shaking, but compared to his voice it was steady as a rock. Poveda was falling apart. I could see it in his eyes, in the lines around his mouth, in the sores that had opened on his face and neck. On my way to his house, I had wondered if he might be responsible in some way for what was occurring. Now, faced with the reality of his disintegration and the fear he exuded, I knew that he was a potential victim, not a possible killer.

“Mr. Poveda, I can help you. I know something is happening. People are dying, people to whom you were once close: Grady Truett, James Foster, Landron Mobley. I think Marianne Larousse’s death may also be linked. Now Elliot Norton is missing.”

He blinked. “Elliot?” he said. Another little shard of hope seemed to fall away from him and shatter on the ground.

“You have to talk to somebody. I think that sometime in the past, you and your friends did something, and now the consequences of that act have come back to haunt you. A snub-nosed .38 in a shaky hand isn’t going to save you from what’s coming.”

I took a step forward, and the garage door slammed down in front of me before I could get to it. I hammered hard on it.

“Mr. Poveda!” I shouted. “Talk to me.”

There was no reply, but I sensed him there, waiting, at the other side of the metal, trapped in a darkness of his own devising. I took a card from my wallet, inserted it partly into the gap between the door and the ground, then left him there with his sins. When I looked back, the card was gone.

Tereus wasn’t at LapLand when I called by, and Handy Andy, his courage now boosted by the presence of a bartender and a couple of doormen in black jackets, wasn’t in any mood to be helpful. I also failed to get a reply from Tereus’s apartment: according to the old guy with the permanent residency on the front steps, he had left for work that morning and hadn’t returned since. I seemed to be having a lot of trouble finding the people with whom I needed to talk. I walked across King and entered Janet’s Southern Kitchen. Janet’s was a relic of times past, where folks took a tray and lined up to receive fried chicken, rice, and porkchops over the counter. I was the only white person eating, but nobody paid me much attention. I picked at my chicken and rice, but my appetite had still not returned. Instead, I drank glass after glass of lemonade in an effort to cool myself down, but it did me no good. I was still parched, and my temperature was still way above normal. Louis would be here soon, I told myself. Things would become clearer then. I pushed my plate to one side and headed back to the hotel.

*

Once again, as darkness fell, my desk was covered in depictions of a woman. The folder containing the Larousse crime scene photographs and reports lay closed by my left hand. All other available space was taken up by James Foster’s drawings. In one picture, the woman had been captured in the act of looking over her shoulder, the place where her face should have been shaded in tones of gray and black, the bones in her fingers visible beneath the thin material that enveloped her body and what seemed like the tracery of raised veins or scales shrouding her skin. There was also, I thought, something almost sexual about her depiction, a combination of loathing and desire expressed in artistic form. The shape of her buttocks and legs was carefully etched, as if sunlight were shining between her legs, and her nipples were erect. She was like the lamia of myth, a beautiful woman from the waist up but a serpent from the waist down, beguiling travelers with the sound of her voice only to devour them when they came within reach. Except, in this case, the scales of the serpent appeared to have spread across her entire body; the myth’s origins in a male fear of aggressive female sexuality had clearly found fertile ground in Foster’s imagination.

And then there was the second subject of his endeavors, the pit surrounded by stone and rugged, barren ground, the shapes of thin trees in the background like mourners around a grave. In the first drawing, the pit was simply a dark hole, seemingly deliberately reminiscent of the woman’s hooded face, the shelving of the ground at its lip like the folds of cloth around her head. But in the second drawing, the column of fire roared up from deep within, as if a channel had been opened straight to the earth’s core or to hell itself. The woman at its heart was consumed by flames, her body wreathed in fingers of orange and red, her legs wide, her head thrown back in pain or ecstasy. It might have been dime-store psychological analysis, but my guess was that Foster had been a very disturbed man. That’ll be one hundred dollars. You can pay my secretary on the way out.

The final item that his widow had allowed me to remove from his office was a photograph, a picture of six young men standing together before a bar, a neon Miller sign visible behind the figure at the far left of the group. Elliot Norton was smiling, a bottle of Bud raised in his right hand, his left arm curled around the waist of Earl Larousse Jr. Beside him was Phil Poveda, taller than the rest, leaning back against a car, his legs crossed at the ankles, his white shirt open to his chest, his arms folded before him, a beer bottle poking out close to his left breast. Next in line was the smallest member of the company, a dough-faced, curly-haired boy-man with a starter-kit beard and legs that seemed too short for his body. He had been caught in a dancer’s pose, his left leg and left arm outstretched before him, his right raised high behind him, tequila glistening in the flash of the bulb as the last of it spilled from the bottle in his hand: the late Grady Truett. Beside him, a boyish face peered bashfully into the camera, chin lowered to chest. This was James Foster.

The last young man was not smiling as widely as the rest. His grin seemed forced, his clothes somehow cheaper. He wore jeans and a check shirt, and he stood awkward and straight upon the gravel and dirt of the parking lot, like one who was not used to having his picture taken. Landron Mobley, the poorest of the six, the only one who did not go on to college, who did not progress to greater things, the only one never to leave the state of South Carolina to advance himself. But Landron had his own uses: Landron could score drugs; Landron could find cheap, slutty women who would go down for the price of a beer; Landron’s big fists could pummel anyone who decided to take issue with a bunch of wealthy young men intruding on territory that was not their own, taking women that were not theirs to take, drinking in bars that held no welcome for them. Landron was the point of entry for a world that these five men wanted to use and abuse, but of which they wanted no lasting part. Landron was the gatekeeper. Landron knew things. Now Landron was dead.

According to Adele Foster, the allegations of improper relationships made against Mobley had come as no surprise to her. She knew what Landron Mobley was like, knew what he liked to do to girls even while he was systematically flunking high school. And though her husband claimed to have cut off all ties with him, she had seen him talking to Landron a couple of weeks before his death, had seen Landron pat him on the arm as he leaned into the car, and had watched as James had passed him a small wad of bills from his wallet. She had confronted him that evening, only to be told that Landron was down on his luck since he’d lost his job, and he had only given him the money so that he would go away and leave James alone. She hadn’t believed him, though, and his patronage of LapLand had only confirmed her suspicions. By that time the distance between husband and wife was growing ever greater, and she had told me that it was to Elliot Norton, not James, that she had confessed her fears about Landron Mobley as she lay beside him in the small room above his office, the room in which he sometimes slept when working on a particularly demanding case but which now, increasingly, he used to satisfy other, more pressing, demands.

“Has he approached you for money?” she asked Elliot.

Elliot looked away. “Landron always needs money.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’ve known Landron for a long time, and yes, I’ve helped him out from time to time.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’”

“I don’t understand, that’s all. He wasn’t like the rest of you. I can see why he might have been useful to you when you were young and wild—”

He reached for her then—“I’m still wild”—but she forced him gently away.

“But now,” she continued, “what part can somebody like Landron Mobley have to play in your lives? You should have left him in your past.”

Eliot pushed back the sheets to stand naked in the moonlight, his back to her, and it seemed that his shoulders dropped briefly, the way a man’s shoulders will slump when exhaustion threatens to overcome him and he briefly accedes to it.

And then he said something strange.

“Some things you can’t leave in the past,” he said. “Some things follow you all through your life.”

That was all he said. Seconds later, she heard the sound of the shower from the bathroom, and knew that it was time to leave.

It was the last time that she and Elliot had made love.

But Elliot’s loyalty to Landron Mobley had gone beyond simply helping him out when he needed a few bucks. Elliot was representing his old friend in what could have turned out to be a very nasty rape case, a case now rendered null and void by Mobley’s death. In addition, Elliot appeared willing to destroy a long-standing friendship with Earl Larousse Jr. in order to defend a young black man with whom Elliot had no apparent connection. I pulled out the notes I had made so far and went through them once again, hoping to find something that I might have missed. It was only when I laid the sheets of paper side by side that I noticed one curious correspondence: Davis Smoot had been killed in Alabama only a few days before the disappearance of the Jones sisters in South Carolina. I went back to the notes I had jotted down while talking to Randy Burris about the events surrounding Smoot’s death and the hunt for, and subsequent arrest of, Tereus for the killing. According to what Tereus himself had told me, he had gone down to Alabama to seek the help of Smoot, who had fled South Carolina in February 1980, days after the alleged rape of Addy Jones, and had remained in hiding until at least July 1981, when he was confronted and killed by Tereus. He had denied to prosecutors that his confrontation with Smoot was in any way connected with rumors that Smoot had raped Addy. Addy Jones had subsequently given birth to her son Atys early in August 1980. There had to be some mistake.

The sound of the cell phone pulled me away. I recognized the number on display immediately. The call was coming from the safe house. I picked it up on the second ring. There was no speech, just a tapping, as if somebody was banging the phone gently on the ground. Tap-tap-tap.

“Hello?”

Tap-tap-tap.

I picked up my jacket and ran for the parking garage. The gaps between the taps were growing longer now and I knew for certain that the person at the other end was in trouble, that somebody’s strength was fading, and this was the only way that he or she could communicate.

“I’m on my way,” I said. “Hold on. Just hold on.”