The White Road

There were three young black guys standing outside the safe house when I arrived, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. One of them was carrying a knife and he spun toward me as I ran from the car. He saw the gun in my hand and raised his hand in acquiescence.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer, but an older guy behind him did.

“We heard glass breaking. We didn’t do nothin’.”

“Keep it that way. Just stay back.”

“Fuck you, man,” was the reply, but they made no further move toward the house. The front door was locked so I made for the rear of the house. The back door was wide open but undamaged. The kitchen was empty but the ever present lemonade jug now lay shattered on the floor. Flies buzzed around the liquid pooled upon the cheap linoleum. I found the old man in the living room. There was a sucking hole in his chest and he lay like a black angel lost in his own blood, red wings spreading outward from behind. In his left hand he held the phone while the fingers of his right scraped at the wooden boards. He had scraped so hard that he had torn the nails and drawn blood from his fingers. He was reaching for his wife. I could see her foot in the doorway, the slipper pulled back from her heel by the pressure of her bent toes. There was blood on the back of her leg.

I knelt by the old man and clasped his head, looking for something with which to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound. I was shrugging off my jacket when he reached for my shirt, gripping it tightly in his fist.

“Uh ent gap me mout’!” he whispered. His teeth were pink with blood. “Uh ent gap me mout’!”

I didn’t tell.

“I know,” I said, and I felt my voice break. “I know you didn’t. Who did this, Albert?”

“Plateye,” he hissed. “Plateye.”

He eased his grip on my shirt and reached again for his dead wife.

“Ginnie,” he called.

His voice faded.

“Ginnie,” he repeated, and then he was gone.

I let his head rest on the floor, then stood and moved toward the woman. She lay face down with two holes in the back of her dress: one low to the left of her spine, the other higher, close to her heart. There was no pulse.

I heard a noise on the floor behind me and turned to see one of the boys from outside the house standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Stay out!” I said. “Call 911.”

He took one more look at me, his eyes falling to the body of the old man, then disappeared. No noise came from upstairs. The couple’s son Samuel, who had driven Atys to the house earlier in the week, lay naked and dead in the bathtub, the shower curtain clenched in his hand and the water from the shower head still beating down upon his face and body. He had taken two shots in the chest. When I searched the four rooms above I could find no trace of Atys, but the window of his room was broken and tiles had been dislodged from the kitchen roof. It looked like he might have jumped, which meant that Atys might still be alive.

I went back downstairs and was standing in the yard when the police arrived. My gun was back in its holster and I was holding my license and permit. Naturally, the cops took my gun and my phone away and made me sit in a car until the detectives arrived. By now, a crowd had gathered and the uniforms were doing their best to keep them back, the lights on the Crown Vics casting firework glows across the faces and houses. There were a lot of cars because the Charleston PD

assigned only one officer to a car, with the exception of the safe streets unit, two officers from which had arrived on the scene within minutes of the call. The mobile crime scene unit, an old converted bookmobile, had also pulled up by the time a pair of detectives from the violent crimes unit decided that they wanted to talk to me.

I had told them to find Atys Jones and they were already looking for him, although not as a potential victim but as a suspect in two further murders. They were wrong, of course. I knew that they were wrong.



At a gas station in South Portland, the hunched man stood over the Nissan and filled the car with twenty dollars’ worth of gas. There was only one other vehicle at the pumps: an ’86 Chevy C-10

with a busted right wing that had cost its new owner the grand total of eleven hundred dollars, half down with the rest to pay by the end of the year. It was the first car Bear had owned in more than half a decade and he was hugely proud of it. Now, instead of bumming rides to the co-op, he was there waiting each morning when they opened up, music blaring from the Chevy’s tinny stereo.

Bear hardly glanced at the other man close by. He had seen enough strange men in prison to know that the best thing to do in their presence was to mind his own business. He gassed the car with money borrowed from his sister, checked the pressure on every tire, then drove away. Cyrus had paid the bored gas station attendant in advance and was aware that the young man was still watching him, mesmerized by Cyrus’s crooked body. Although used to the revulsion of others, Cyrus still considered it bad manners to be too obvious about it. The boy was lucky that he was safe behind the glass and that Cyrus had other things to occupy him. Still, if he had time he might come back and teach him that it was rude to stare. Cyrus finished fueling, sat in the car, and took his notebook from beneath the seat. He had been keeping careful notes of all that he saw and did, because it was important that he did not forget anything useful. The boy went into the notebook, along with Cyrus’s other observations that evening: the movements of the redheaded woman in her house and the brief, troubling sighting of the large black man who now shared it with her. It made Cyrus unhappy.

Cyrus didn’t like getting the blood of men upon him.





19


T HE HEADQUARTERS OF the Charleston PD occupied a redbrick structure on Lockwood Boulevard, opposite the Joe Riley Stadium and facing out over Brittlebank Park and the Ashley River. The interview room didn’t have much of a view, though, unless you counted the faces of the two irate detectives currently sharing it with me.

To understand the Charleston Police Department, you had to understand Chief Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg had been chief since 1982 and was that contradiction in terms, a popular police chief. In his eighteen years in charge he had introduced a range of innovations that had contributed to containing, and in some cases reducing, the crime rate in Charleston: everything from “Weed and Seed” programs in poorer areas to issuing running shoes to officers to enable them to chase felons more effectively. Homicide rates had consistenly dropped in that time, allowing Charleston to compare favorably with any Southern city of similar size. Unfortunately, the deaths of Albert, Ginnie, and Samuel Singleton meant that any hopes of matching the previous year’s figures were pretty much gone, and anybody even remotely connected with holing the good ship Crime Statistics below the waterline was likely to be very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

I was very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

After an hour spent waiting in a locked patrol car outside the East Side house, I was brought to a room painted in two shades of ugly and furnished by Functional-R-Us. A cup of coffee had since grown cold in front of me. The two detectives who questioned me weren’t noticeably warmer.

“Elliot Norton,” the first repeated. “You say you’re working for Elliot Norton.”

His name was Adams, and there were patches of sweat beneath the arms of his blue shirt. His skin was blue black and his eyes were bloodshot. I’d already told him twice that I was working for Elliot Norton, and we’d gone through Albert’s final words half-a-dozen times, but Adams saw no reason why I shouldn’t do it all again.

“He hired me to do some background work on the Jones case,” I said. “We picked Atys up from the Richland County lockup and took him to the Singleton place. It was supposed to be a temporary safe house.”

“Mistake Number Two,” said Adams’s partner. His last name was Addams, and he was as pale as his partner was dark. Somebody in the Charleston PD had a warped sense of humor. It was only the third time that he had spoken since the interview had begun.

“What was Mistake Number One?” I asked.

“Getting involved with the Jones case in the first place,” he replied. “Or maybe stepping off the plane at Charleston International. See, now you got three mistakes.”

He smiled. I smiled back. It was only polite.

“Doesn’t it get confusing, you being called Addams and him being called Adams?”

Addams scowled. “No, see I’m A dd ams, with two d s. He’s A d ams, with one d. It’s easy.”

He seemed serious about it. The Charleston PD offered an ascending scale of incentive pay based on educational achievement, from 7 percent for an associate’s degree to 22 percent for a Ph.D. I knew this from reading and re-reading the notices on the board behind Addams’s head. I was guessing that the incentive box on Addams’s pay slip was pretty empty, unless they gave him a nickel a month for his high school diploma.

“So,” his partner resumed, “you pick him up, drop him at the safe house, go back to your hotel…?”

“Clean my teeth, go to bed, get up, check on Atys, make some calls—”

“Who’d you call?”

“Elliot, some people back in Maine.”

“What did you say to Norton?”

“Nothing much. We just touched base. He asked me if I was making any progress and I told him that I was just getting started.”

“Then what did you do?”

We had reached the point, once again, where the paths of truth and untruth diverged. I opted for the middle ground, hoping to pick up the path of truth again later.

“I went to a strip joint.”

Adams’s right eyebrow made an ecclesiastical arch of disapproval.

“Why’d you do that?”

“I was bored.”

“Norton pay you to go to strip joints?”

“It was my lunch break. I was on my own time.”

“And after?”

“Went back to the hotel. Had dinner. Bed. This morning: tried calling Elliot, had no luck, checked witness statements, went back to my hotel room. The call came about an hour later.”

Adams rose wearily from the table and exchanged a look with his partner.

“Doesn’t sound to me like Norton was getting his money’s worth,” he said. For the first time, I picked up on his use of the past tense.

“What do you mean, ‘was’?”

The look passed between them again, but neither replied.

“Do you have any papers relating to the Jones case that might prove helpful to the course of this investigation?” asked Addams.

“I asked you a question.”

Addams’s voice rose a notch. “And I asked you a question: do you, or do you not, have material in your possession that might assist this investigation?”