The White Road

“With one d.”

“Two d s.”

I nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”

When I got back to my hotel I barely had enough energy to undress before I fell into my bed and slept soundly until after ten. I didn’t dream. It was as if the deaths of the night before had never happened.

But Charleston had not yielded up the last of its bodies. While the cockroaches skittered across the cracked sidewalks to hide from the daylight and the last of the night owls made for their beds, a man named Cecil Exley was walking to the site of the small bakery and coffee shop that he owned over on East Bay. There was work to be done, fresh bread and croissants to be baked, and although the clock had not yet struck six, Cecil was already running late. At the corner of Franklin and Magazine, he began to slow down slightly. The bulk of the old Charleston jail loomed over him, a testament to misery and grief. A low white wall surrounded a yard thick with long grass, at the center of which stood the jail itself. The red bricks that had formed its sidewalks were missing in places, stolen, presumably, by those who felt their need was greater than the demands of history. Twin four-story towers topped with battlements and weeds stood at either side of the locked main gate, its bars and the bars of the windows around and above it stained red with oxidized rust. The concrete had crumbled and fallen from around the frames, exposing the brickwork beneath, as the old building succumbed to slow decay. Denmark Vesey and his coconspirators in the ill-fated slave revolt of 1822 had been chained up in the whipping house for blacks at the back of the jail before their execution, most of them led to the gallows still proclaiming their innocence and one of them, Bacchus Hammett, even laughing as they placed the noose around his neck. Many others had passed through its gates before and since. There was nowhere else in Charleston, Cecil Exley believed, where the past and the present were so closely linked, where it was possible to stand quietly on an early morning and feel the aftershocks of past violence still shuddering through new days. It was Cecil’s habit to pause occasionally at the gates of the old jail and say a short, silent prayer for those who had languished there at a time when men with skin the color of Cecil’s could not even arrive in Charleston as part of a ship’s crew without being consigned to a cell for the duration of their visit.

To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest but, as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.

“Hey,” said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. “Hey,” he repeated.

“You okay in there?”

The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.

“Hey,” said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.

Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood—too much blood to have merely soaked down—on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck. The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.





20


I T WAS ADAMS who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.”

I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.

“Do you have a time of death?” I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.

“Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV light. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.”

I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.

“You going to talk to the Larousses?”

Adams finished off his toast. “My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.”

“Or maybe even sooner.”

Adams waved a finger at me in warning. “That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.” He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. “But, since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?”

I stayed silent.

“I mean,” he continued, “the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?”

I almost spit in contempt.

“Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.”

There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who hunted him down were almost certain that he had killed Marianne Larousse, but almost certain wasn’t good enough. They wanted it from his own lips because if he wasn’t responsible then the consequences were even more serious, and not simply because the real culprit might evade detection. No, the actions that had been taken in the last twenty-four hours indicated that some people were very concerned indeed about the possibility that someone might have targeted Marianne Larousse for very particular reasons. It seemed to me that it was about time to ask some hard questions of Earl Larousse Jr. but I wasn’t about to do that alone. The Larousses were hosting their party the following day, and I was expecting some company to join me in Charleston. The Larousses would have two unwelcome guests crashing their big occasion.

That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.

I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen. Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the State Courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in courtroom number three at the arraignment of a woman named Johanna Bell who had been accused of stabbing her husband in the course of a domestic argument. Apparently, she and her husband had been separated for about three months when he had returned to the family home and a quarrel had broken out over the ownership of the couple’s VCR. The quarrel had ended abruptly when she stabbed him with a carving knife. Her husband sat two rows behind her, looking sorry for himself.

Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to OR

release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assualt by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.

I intercepted Rhine on the courtroom steps.

“Mr. Rhine?”

He paused, and something like worry flashed across his face. As a public defender, he encountered some of the lowest forms of life and was sometimes forced to try to defend the indefensible. I didn’t doubt that, on occasion, his clients’ victims took things personally.

“Yes?” Up close he looked even younger. He hadn’t started to gray yet and his blue eyes were shielded by long, soft lashes. I flashed him my license. He glanced at it and gave a nod.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Parker? You mind if we talk while we walk? I promised my wife I’d take her out to dinner tonight.”

I fell into step alongside him.

“I’m working with Elliot Norton on the Atys Jones case, Mr. Rhine.”

His steps faltered for a moment, as though he had briefly lost his bearings, then resumed at a slightly faster speed. I accelerated to keep up.

“I’m no longer involved in that case, Mr. Parker.”

“Since Atys is dead, there isn’t much of a case, period.”

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure. I have some questions for you.”

“I’m not sure that I can answer any questions. Maybe you should ask Mr. Norton.”

“You know, I would, except Elliot isn’t around, and my questions are kind of delicate.”

He stopped at the corner of Broad as the light changed to red. He gave the offending signal a look that suggested he was taking its interference in the course of his life kind of personally.

“Like I said, I don’t know that I can help you.”

“I’d like to know why you gave up the case.”

“I have a lot of cases.”

“Not like this one.”