Elliot grinned at the incomprehension on my face. ‘Gullah,’ he explained. Gullah was the term commonly used to describe the language and the people of the coastal islands, many of them the descendants of slaves who had been given island land and abandoned rice fields to settle in the aftermath of the Civil War.
‘Ginnie and Albert used to live out on Yonges Island, but then Ginnie got sick and one of their sons, Samuel, the one who’s taking care of my car, insisted they move back to Charleston. They’ve been here ten years now, and I still don’t get some of what they say, but they’re good people. They know what they’re doing. He’s asking you to come in and sit down.’
I accepted the lemonade, thanked them, then took Atys by the shoulder into the small living room. Elliot seemed like he was about to follow me, but I indicated that I wanted a minute or two alone with his client. Elliot didn’t look too happy about it, but he stayed where he was.
Atys sat down on the very edge of the sofa, as if he were preparing to make a break for the door at any moment. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I sat opposite him in an overstuffed armchair.
‘You know why I’m here?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘’Cause you bein’ paid to be here.’
I smiled. ‘There’s that. Mostly, I’m here because Elliot doesn’t believe that you killed Marianne Larousse. A lot of other people do, though, so it’s going to be my job to maybe find evidence to prove them wrong. I can only do that if you help me.’
He licked his lips. There was sweat beading on his forehead. ‘They goan kill me,’ he said.
‘Who’s going to kill you?’
‘Larousses. Don’t matter if they do it theyselves or get the state to do it, they still goan kill me.’
‘Not if we can prove them wrong.’
‘Yeah, and how you goan do that?’
I hadn’t figured that out yet, but talking to this young man was a first step.
‘How did you meet Marianne Larousse?’ I asked.
He sank back heavily into the sofa, resigned now to speaking of what had occurred.
‘She was a student in Columbia.’
‘I don’t see you as the student type, Atys.’
‘Shit, no. I sold weed to them motherfuckers. They like to score.’
‘Did she know who you were?’
‘No, she didn’t know shit about me.’
‘But you knew who she was?’
‘’S right.’
‘You know about your past, about the problems between your family and the Larousses.’
‘That’s old shit.’
‘But you know about it.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘She come on to you, or did you come on to her?’
He blushed and his face broke into a shit-eating grin. ‘Oh man, y’know, she was smokin’ and I was smokin’ and, s’like, shit happened.’
‘When did this start?’
‘January, maybe February.’
‘And you were with her all that time?’
‘I was with her some. She went away in June. I didn’t see her from end of May until week, maybe two weeks before . . .’ His voice trailed off.
‘Did her family know she was seeing you?’
‘Maybe. She didn’t tell them nothin’, but shit gets out.’
‘Why were you with her?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Because she was pretty? Because she was white? Because she was a Larousse?’
There was just a shrug in reply.
‘Maybe all three?’
‘I guess.’
‘Did you like her?’
A muscle trembled in his cheek.
‘Yeah, I liked her.’
I let it rest. ‘What happened on the night she died?’
Atys’s face seemed to fall, all of the confidence and front disappearing from it like a mask yanked away to reveal the true expression beneath. I knew then for certain that he hadn’t killed her, for the pain was too real, and I guessed that what might have started out as a means of getting back at some half-sensed enemy had developed, at least on his side, into affection, and perhaps something more.
‘We was screwing around in my car, out at the Swamp Rat by Congaree. Folks there don’t give a shit what you do, ’long as you got money and you ain’t a cop.’
‘You had sex?’
‘Yeah, we had sex.’
‘Protected?’
‘She was on the pill and, like, I been tested and shit, but yeah, she still like me to use a rubber.’
‘Did that bother you?’
‘What are you, man, stupid? You ever fucked with a rubber? It ain’t the same. It’s like . . .’ He struggled for the comparison.
‘Wearing your shoes in the bathtub.’
For the first time he smiled and a little of the ice broke.
‘Yeah, ’cept I ain’t never had a bath that good.’
‘Go on.’
‘We started arguing.’
‘About what?’
‘About how maybe she was ashamed of me, didn’t want to be seen with me. Y’know, we was always fuckin’ in cars, or in my crib if she got drunk enough not to care. Rest of the time, she drift by me like I don’t exist.’
‘Did this argument turn violent?’
‘No, I never touched her. Ever. But she start screamin’ and shoutin’, and next thing I know, she’s runnin’ away. I was goan just let her go, m’sayin, let her cool off and shit? Then I went after her, callin’ her name.
‘Then I found her.’
He swallowed and placed his hands behind his head. His lips narrowed. He seemed on the verge of tears.
‘What did you see?’
‘Her face, man, it was all busted in. Her nose . . . There was just blood. I tried to lift her, tried to brush away her hair from her face, but she was gone. There was nothin’ I could do for her. She was gone.’
And now he was crying, his right knee pumping up and down like a piston with the grief and rage that he was still suppressing.
‘We’re nearly done,’ I said.
He nodded and wiped away his tears with a sharp, embarrassed jerk of his arm.
‘Did you see anybody, anyone at all, who might have done this to her?’
‘No, man, nobody.’
And for the first time, he lied. I watched his eyes, saw them look up and away from me for an instant before he answered.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
He was about to give me outraged when I reached across and raised a finger in warning before him.
‘What did you see?’
His mouth opened and closed twice without producing any sound, then: ‘I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.’
‘Tell me.’
He nodded, more to himself than to me.
‘I thought I saw a woman. She was all in white, and movin’ away into the trees. But when I looked closer, there was nothin’ there. It could have been the river, I guess, with the light shinin’ on it.’
‘Did you tell the police?’ There had been no mention of a woman in the reports.
‘They said I was lyin’.’
And he was still lying. Even now, he was holding back, but I knew I was going to get nothing more from him for the present. I sat back in the chair, then passed him the police reports. We went through them for a time, but he could find nothing to question beyond their implicit assumption of his guilt.
He stood as I placed the reports back in their file. ‘We done?’
‘For now.’
He moved a couple of steps, then stopped before he reached the door.
‘They took me past the death house,’ he said softly.
‘What?’
‘When they was takin’ me to Richland, they drove me to Broad River and they showed me the death house.’
The state’s capital punishment facility was located at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, close
by the reception and evaluation center. In a move that combined psychological torture with democracy, prisoners convicted of capital crimes prior to 1995 were allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection as their final punishment. All others were executed by injection, as Atys Jones would be if the state succeeded in its efforts to convict him of Marianne’s murder.
‘They tole me I was goan be strapped down and then they was goan inject poisons into me, and that I’d be dying inside but I wouldn’t be able to move or cry out none. They tole me it be like suffocatin’ slow.’
There was nothing I could say.
‘I didn’t kill Marianne,’ he said.
‘I know you didn’t.’
‘But they goan kill me for it anyhow.’
His resignation made me feel cold inside.
‘We can stop that from happening, if you help us.’
But he just shook his head and loped back to the kitchen. Elliot entered the room seconds later.
‘What do you think?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘He’s holding something back,’ I replied. ‘He’ll give it to us, in time.’
‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ snapped Elliot.
As I followed him into the kitchen, I could see the muscles bunched beneath his shirt, and his hands flexing and unflexing by his sides. He turned his attention to Albert.
‘You need anything?’
‘Us hab ’nuff bittle,’ said Albert.
‘I don’t mean just food. You need more money? A gun?’
The woman slammed her glass down on the table and shook her finger at Elliot.
‘Don’ pit mout’ on us,’ she said firmly.
‘They think having a gun in the house will bring them bad luck,’ Elliot said.
‘They may be right. What do they do if there’s trouble?’
‘Samuel lives with them, and I suspect he has less trouble with guns than they have. I’ve given them all our numbers. If anything goes wrong, they’ll call one of us. Just make sure you keep your phone with you.’
I thanked them both for the lemonade, then followed Elliot to the door.
‘You leavin’ me here?’ cried Atys. ‘With these two?’
‘Dat boy ent hab no mannus,’ scolded the old woman. ‘Dat boy gwi’ punish fuh’e wickitty.’ She poked at Atys with his finger. ‘Debblement weh dat chile lib.’
‘Get off me,’ he retorted, but he looked kind of worried.
‘Be good, Atys,’ said Elliot. ‘Watch some TV, get some sleep. Mr. Parker will check on you tomorrow.’
Atys raised his eyes to mine in a last, desperate plea.
‘Shit,’ he said, ‘by tomorrow these two probably have eaten me.’
When we left him, the old woman had just started poking him again. Outside, we passed their son, Samuel, on the way back to the house. He was a tall, handsome man, my age or a little younger, with large brown eyes. Elliot introduced us and we shook hands.
‘Any trouble?’ asked Elliot.
‘None,’ Samuel confirmed. ‘I parked outside your office. Keys are on top of the right rear wheel.’
Elliot thanked him and he headed toward the house.
‘You sure he’ll be okay with them?’ I asked Elliot.
‘They’re smart, like their boy, and the folks round here look out for them. Any strangers come sniffing down this street and half the young bucks will be following them before they have a chance to get their shoes dirty. As long as he’s here, and no one finds out about it, he’ll be safe.’
The same faces watched us leave their streets and I thought that maybe Elliot was right. Maybe they would take account of strangers coming into their neighborhood.
I just wasn’t sure that it would be enough to keep Atys Jones safe from harm.
12
Elliot and I exchanged a few words outside the house, then parted. Before we did, he handed me a newspaper from the backseat of his car.
‘Since you been reading the newspapers so closely, you happen to see this?’
The story was buried in the lifestyles section and headlined ‘In the Midst of Tragedy, Charity.’ The Larousses were hosting a charity lunch in the grounds of an old plantation house on the western shore of Lake Marion later that week, one of two large houses that the family owned. From the list of expected guests, half the grandees in the state were going to be there.
‘While still mourning the death of his beloved daughter Marianne,’ the report read, ‘Earl Larousse, his son Earl Jr. by his side, said that “we have a duty to those less fortunate than ourselves that even the loss of Marianne cannot absolve.” The charity lunch, in aid of cancer research, will be the first public engagement for the Larousse family since the murder of Marianne, 19, last July.’
I handed the paper back to Elliot.
‘You can bet that there’ll be judges and prosecutors there, probably the governor too,’ he said. ‘They should just hold the trial right there on the lawn and get done with it.’
Elliot told me he had business to conclude back at his office, and we agreed to meet again over the next day or two to discuss progress and options. I followed his car as far as Charleston Place, then peeled off and parked. I showered in my room and called Rachel. She was just about to head into South Portland for a reading at Nonesuch Books. She’d mentioned it to me a couple of days earlier, but I’d forgotten about it until now.
‘An interesting thing happened today,’ she said, giving me just enough time to get the word ‘hi’ out of my mouth. ‘I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.’
‘Rachel—’
‘You said it would be discreet. His T-shirt had the words “Klan Killer” written on the front.’
‘I—’
‘And do you know what he said?’
I waited.
‘He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T-shirt. The new one reads “Black Death”. I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?’
I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.
‘Maybe you’d better buy some soya milk.’
She hung up without saying good-bye.
Despite the earlier rain, it was still stiflingly warm when I left the hotel to grab a bite to eat, and I felt as if my clothes were soaked through before I’d walked more than a few blocks. I passed the site of the Confederate Museum, its exterior now surrounded by scaffolding, and headed into the residential district between East Bay and Meeting, admiring the big old houses, the lamps by their doors glowing softly. It was just after ten and the tourists had begun to throng the dive bars on East Bay that sold premixed cocktails in souvenir glasses. Young men and women cruised up and down Broad, rap and nu-metal grinding out insistent, competing beats. Fred Durst, record company vice president, proud father, and multimillionaire, was telling the kids how their parents just didn’t understand his generation. There’s nothing sadder than a thirty-year-old man in short pants rebelling against his mom and dad.
I was looking for somewhere to eat when I saw a familiar face at the window of Magnolia’s. Elliot was sitting across from a woman with jet black hair and tight lips. He was eating, but the pained look on his face told me that he wasn’t enjoying his meal, maybe because the woman was clearly unhappy with him. She was leaning across the table, her palms flat upon the cloth, and her eyes were blazing. Elliot gave up trying to feed himself and spread out his hands in a ‘Be reasonable’ gesture, the one that men use when they’re feeling put upon by a woman. It doesn’t work, mainly because there’s nothing guaranteed to add fuel to the fire of a male-female argument quicker than one party suggesting to the other that she’s being unreasonable. True to form, the woman stood up abruptly and walked determinedly from the restau
rant. Elliot didn’t follow. He sat for a moment looking after her, then shrugged resignedly, picked up his knife and fork, and resumed his meal. The woman, dressed entirely in black, got into an Explorer parked a couple of doors down from the restaurant and drove off into the night. She wasn’t crying but her anger lit up the interior of the SUV like a flare. Out of little more than habit I memorized the tag number. I briefly considered joining Elliot but I didn’t want him to think that I might have seen the argument, and anyway, I wanted some time alone.
I ended up on Queen Street and ate at Poogan’s Porch, a Cajun and low country restaurant that was rumored to be a favorite of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, although the celebrity count was zero that night. Poogan’s had flowered wallpaper and glass on the tables, and I pretty much had to take one of the staff hostage to keep the ice water coming fast enough to cool me down, but the Cajun duck looked good. Despite my hunger, I barely picked at my food when it arrived. It tasted wrong, but it was not the fault of the chef. A memory flashed: Faulkner spitting in my mouth, the taste of him on my tongue. I pushed the plate away.
‘Is there something wrong with your food, sir?’
It was the waiter. I looked up at him but he was blurred, like a Batut photograph in which images of different individuals had been overlaid on one another to create a single composite.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. I’ve just lost my appetite.’
I wanted him to go away. I couldn’t look at his face. It reminded me of slow decay.
The cockroaches were clicking across the sidewalks when I left the restaurant, the remains of those that had not been quick enough to avoid human footfalls lying scattered in small dark piles, troops of ants already feeding hungrily upon them. I found myself walking down deserted streets watching the lights in the windows of the houses, catching shadow plays of the lives continuing behind the drapes. I missed Rachel and wished that she were with me. I wondered how she was getting along with the Klan Killer, now apparently aka Black Death. Trust Louis to send along the only guy who looked more conspicuous than he did, but at least I was no longer worrying as much about Rachel. I still wasn’t even sure how much help I could be to Elliot down here. True, I was curious about the jailhouse preacher who had given Atys Jones the T-bar knife, but it seemed to me that I was somehow adrift from all that was happening, that I had not yet found a way to break the surface and explore the depths beneath, and I still didn’t fully share Elliot’s faith in the ability of the old Gullah couple and their son to handle any situation that might arise. I found a public phone and checked in with the safe house. The old man answered and confirmed that all was well.
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