The White Road

I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection. I was watching a man go insane.

“Go on,” I said. “Finish it.”



“Finish her,” said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Finish her,” repeated Mobley. “Kill her.”

“I can’t do that,” said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.

“You fucked her quick enough,” said Mobley. “You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.” He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.

“Why me?” he whined.

“Why any of us?” asked Mobley.

“I’m not doing it,” said Earl.

Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. “Do it,” said Mobley, “or I’ll kill you instead.”

Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.

Larousse began to cry. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this.”

Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.

“Please,” he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.

“No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now—” He turned his attention back to Larousse. “Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!”

Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.

The girl on the ground was long dead.

“You did good,” said Mobley. The knife was gone. “You’re a regular killer, Earl.” He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. “A regular killer.”



“Mobley took her away,” said Poveda. “People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a gravedigger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.” He swallowed. “At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.”

“And Melia?” I asked.

“She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

“And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?”

He shook his head. “It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

“But somebody found out,” he concluded. “Somebody’s making us pay. Marianne was killed. James took his own life. Grady got his throat cut. Mobley was murdered, then Elliot. Someone is hunting us down, punishing us. I’m next. That’s why I had to get my affairs in order.”

He smiled.

“I’m leaving it all to charity. You think that’s a good thing to do? I think so. I think it’s a good thing.”

“You could go to the police. You could tell them what you did.”

“No, that’s not the way. I have to wait.”

“I could go to the police.”

He shrugged. “You could, but I’ll just say you made it all up. My lawyer will have me out in a matter of hours, if they even bother to take me in at all, then I’ll be back here, waiting.”

I stood.

“Jesus will forgive me,” said Poveda. “He forgives us all. Doesn’t He?”

Something flickered in his eyes, the last dying thrashing of his sanity before it sank beneath the waves.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if there’s that much forgiveness in the universe.”

Then I left him.

The Congaree. The spate of recent deaths. The link between Elliot and Atys Jones. The T-bar in Landron Mobley’s chest, and the smaller version of it that hung from the neck of the man with the damaged eyes.

Tereus. I had to find Tereus.

*

The old man still sat on the worn steps of the rooming house, smoking his pipe and watching the traffic go by. I asked him for the number of Tereus’s room.

“Number 8, but he ain’t there,” he told me.

“You know, I think you may be bad luck for me,” I said. “Whenever I come here, Tereus is gone but you’re taking up porch space.”

“Thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face.”

“Yeah, Tereus’s.”

I walked past him and headed up the stairs. He watched me go.

I knocked on the door to 8, but there was no reply. From the rooms at either side I could hear competing radios playing, and stale cooking smells clung to the carpets and the walls. I tried the handle and it turned easily, the door opening onto a room with a single unmade bed, a punchdrunk couch and a gas stove in one corner. There was barely enough room between the stove and the bed for a thin man to squeeze by and look out of the small, grime-caked window. To my left was a toilet and shower stall, both reasonably clean. In fact, the room might have been threadbare, but it wasn’t dirty. Tereus had done his best to make something of it: new drapes hung from the plastic rail at the window, and a cheap framed print of roses in a vase hung on the wall. There was no TV, no radio, no books. The mattress had been torn from the bed and thrown in a corner, and clothes were scattered around the room, but I guessed that whoever had trashed the place had found nothing. Anything of value Tereus owned he kept elsewhere, in his true home.

I was about to leave when the door opened behind me. I turned to find a big, overweight black man in a bright shirt blocking my way out. He had a cigarette in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Behind him, I could see the old man puffing on his pipe.

“Can I help you with something?” asked the man with the bat.

“You the super?”

“I’m the owner, and you’re trespassing.”

“I was looking for somebody.”

“Well, he ain’t here, and you got no right to be in his place.”

“I’m a private detective. My name is—”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what your name is. You just get out of here now before I have to defend myself against an unprovoked assault.”

The old man with the pipe chuckled. “Unprovoked assault,” he echoed. “Thass good.” He shook his head in merriment and blew out a puff of smoke.

I walked to the door and the big man stood to one side to let me pass. He still filled most of the doorway and I had to breathe in deeply to squeeze by. He smelled of drain cleaner and Old Spice. I paused at the stairs.

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How come his door is unlocked?”

The man’s face creased in puzzlement. “You didn’t open it?’

“No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.”

The owner turned to the man with the pipe. “Anybody else asking after Tereus?”

“No, sir, just this man.”