The White Road

by John Connolly

  “Because you mark my words: it is not just one man who is facing a false trial. It is a way of life. It is our way of life, our beliefs, our faith, our futures that will be on trial in that courtroom. The Reverend Aaron Faulkner represents us all, and if he falls, then we fall with him. God is with us. God will give us strength. Hail Victory! Hail Victory!”

  The chant was taken up by the crowd as men moved among them with buckets, collecting donations. I saw the odd ten or five slipped in, but most gave twenties, even fifties or hundreds. At a conservative estimate, I reckoned Bowen’s work this afternoon had probably made three thousand dollars. According to that day’s paper, which had carried some advance coverage of the rally, Bowen’s people had been working flat out since shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, encouraging everything from yard sales and bakeoffs to a draw for a new Dodge truck donated by a sympathetic auto dealer, with thousands of tickets already sold at twenty dollars a pop. Bowen had even succeeded in galvanizing into action those who would not usually have been drawn to his cause, the vast constituency of the faithful who saw in Faulkner a man of God being persecuted for beliefs that were similar, if not identical, to their own. Bowen had taken Faulkner’s arrest and approaching trial and made it a matter of faith and goodness, a battle between those who feared and loved the Lord and those who had turned their backs on him. When the subject of violence was raised Bowen usually skirted the issue, arguing that Faulkner’s message was pure and that he could not be held accountable for the actions of others, even if those actions were justified in many cases. Racist insults would be kept for the old guard and for those occasions where TV cameras and microphones were absent or forbidden. Today, he was preaching to the new converts and those who had yet to be converted.

  Bowen stepped from the stage and people moved forward to shake his hand. Just inside the gate, two trestle tables had been set up so that the women behind them could display the items they had brought for sale: Johnny Reb flags, Nazi battle flags decorated with eagles and swastikas, bumper stickers announcing that the driver was WHITE BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY GRACE. There were also cassettes and CDs of country and western music, although I figured that they weren’t the kind Louis would have wanted in his collection. Pretty soon, the two women were doing steady business.

  A man appeared at my side. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt, with a baseball cap perched incongruously on his head. His skin was reddish purple, and peeling badly. Clumps of fair hair hung on grimly to his skull like sparse vegetation on a hostile landscape. Shades concealed his eyes. I could see an earpiece in his left ear, connected to a unit at his belt. Immediately, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was the strangeness of his appearance, but there was a sense of unreality about him. There was also a smell emanating from him, like the odor left after an oil fire has been extinguished.

  He smelled of slow burning.

  “Mr. Bowen would like to talk to you,” he said.

  “It was the Ramones,” I said. “On the CD player. I’ll make him a copy if he’d like it.”

  He didn’t blink.

  “Like I said, Mr. Bowen wants to talk to you.”

  I shrugged and followed him through the crowd. Bowen had almost finished glad-handing the troops, and as I watched, he stepped behind the truck to a small area enclosed by a white tarp that stretched from the bed of the truck. Beneath it were chairs, a portable a/c unit, and a table with a cooler on top. I was shown through to Bowen, who sat in one of the chairs sipping from a can of Pepsi. The cap-wearing man stayed but the other people bustling outside moved away to give us some privacy. Bowen offered me a drink. I declined.

  “We didn’t expect to see you down here today, Mr. Parker,” he said. “You considering joining our cause?”

  “I don’t see much of one,” I said, “unless you call hustling rednecks for dimes a cause.”

  Bowen exchanged a look of mock disappointment with the other man. There was blood in Bowen’s eyes. Although he was ostensibly in charge, he appeared to defer to the man in the suit. Even his posture suggested that he was somehow afraid of him, his body turned slightly away from the other man, his head lowered. He looked like a cowering dog.

  “I should have introduced you,” he said. “Mr. Parker, this is Mr. Kittim. Sooner or later, Mr. Kittim is going to teach you a harsh lesson.”

  Kittim removed his sunglasses. The eyes revealed were empty and green, like raw, flawed emeralds.

  “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands,” I said to him. “You look like bits of you might start to drop off.”

  Kittim didn’t react, but the smell of oil grew stronger. Even Bowen’s nose wrinkled slightly.

  Bowen finished his cola and tossed it in the garbage bag.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Parker? If I was to get up on that stage and announce to the crowd who you are, I think your chances of getting back to Charleston unscathed would be very slim.”

  Maybe I should have been surprised that Bowen knew that I was staying in Charleston, but I wasn’t.

  “Keeping track of my movements, Bowen? I’m flattered. By the way, it’s not a stage. It’s a truck. Don’t get above yourself. You want to tell the morons who I am, go right ahead. The TV cameras will eat it up. As for why I’m here, I wanted to take a look at you, see if you’re really as dumb as you seem to be.”

  “Why am I dumb?”

  “Because you’re aligning yourself with Faulkner, and if you were smart you’d see that he’s crazy, even crazier than your friend here.”

  Bowen’s eyes flicked toward the other man. “I don’t think Mr. Kittim is crazy,” he said. The words left a sour taste in his mouth. I could see it in the curl of his lips.

  I followed his glance. There were flakes of dried skin caught in Kittim’s remaining hair and his face almost throbbed with the pain of his condition. He seemed to be slowly disintegrating. His was a Catch-22 situation: looking and feeling the way he did, he’d have to be crazy not to be crazy.

  “The Reverend Faulkner is a man unjustly persecuted,” resumed Bowen. “All I want to see is justice done, and justice will result in his vindication and release.”

  “Justice is blind, not stupid, Bowen.”

  “Sometimes it’s both.” He stood up. We were almost the same height but he was broader than I was. “The Reverend Faulkner is about to become a figurehead for a new movement, a unifying force. We’re bringing more people into our fold day by day. With people come money and power and influence. This isn’t complex, Mr. Parker. It’s very simple. Faulkner is the means. I am the end. Now, I’d advise you to go and take in some of the sights of South Carolina while you still can. I have a feeling it may be the last chance that you have. Mr. Kittim will escort you back to your car.”

  With Kittim at my side, I walked through the crowd. The TV crews had packed up and left. Children had joined the celebrations, running in between the legs of their parents. Music was playing from the trestle tables, country music that spoke of war and vengeance. Barbecues had been set up, and the smell of burning meat filled the air. Close by one of them, a man with slicked-back hair bit greedily into a hot dog. I looked away before he could see me staring at him. I recognized him as the man who had followed me from the airport to Charleston Place and who had then pointed me out to Earl Larousse Jr. Both Atys Jones and Willie Wyman had confirmed to me that the late Landron Mobley, in addition to being a client of Elliot’s, had been one of Bowen’s attack dogs. Mobley, it seemed, had also been helping the Larousses hunt down Atys before Marianne’s death. Now another link between the Larousses and Bowen had been revealed.

  At my car I turned to Kittim. He had replaced his sunglasses, obscuring his eyes. An object lay on the ground between us. He pointed his finger at it.

  “You dropped something,” said Kittim.

  It was a black skullcap, ringed with a red and gold band. Blood had soaked into it. It hadn’t been there when I’d parked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I suggest you take it with you. I
’m sure you know some old kikes who’d be glad to receive it. It might answer some questions that they have.”

  He backed away from me, made a pistol from the finger and thumb of his right hand, then fired it at me as a farewell.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

  I picked up the skullcap from the ground and wiped the dirt from it. There was no name inside it, but I knew that it could only have come from one source. I drove as far as the nearest strip mall and made a call to New York.

  When the end of the working day came with no contact from Elliot, I decided to go looking for him. I drove out to his house, but the workmen hadn’t seen him since the day before, and as far as they could tell, he hadn’t slept in the house the previous night. I headed back to Charleston and decided to check the tag number of Elliot’s dining companion from earlier in the week. I took out my laptop, and ignoring the E-mail notifications, went straight to the Web. I entered the license plate on three databases, including the huge NCI and CDB Infotek services as well as SubTrace, which flirted with illegality and was more expensive than regular searches but was faster too. I red-flagged the SubTrace request and got a response less than an hour later. Elliot had been arguing with one Adele Foster of 1200 Bees Tree Drive, Charleston. I found Bees Tree on my DeLorme street atlas and headed out.

  Number 1200 was an impressive classical revival tabby manse that must have been more than a century old, its facade constructed from a mixture of oyster shell and lime mortar and dominated by a two-tiered entry porch supported by slender white columns. The SUV was parked to the right of the house. I walked slowly up the central staircase, stood in the shade of the porch, and rang the doorbell. The sound of it echoed in the hallway beyond, eventually losing itself in the sound of firm footsteps on the boards before the door opened. I half-expected Hattie McDaniel to be standing before me in a pinafore, but instead it was the woman I had seen arguing with Elliot Norton on my first night in town. Behind her, dark wood extended through the empty white hallway like muddy water through snow.

  “Yes?”

  And suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I had come here, except that I couldn’t find Elliot and something told me that the argument I had witnessed went beyond any professional issue, that there was more between them than a typical client-lawyer relationship. Also, seeing her up close for the first time, I was confirmed in another suspicion that I had: she was wearing widow’s weeds. All she needed was a hat and a veil and the look would have been complete.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

  I was about to reach into my pocket for id but a movement on her face stopped me. Her expression didn’t soften, exactly, but something flashed across it, like a tree moving in the wind that briefly allows moonlight to flash through its branches and illuminate the bare ground beneath.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” she said softly. “You’re the one that he hired.”

  “If you mean Elliot Norton, then yes, I’m the one.”

  “Did he send you here?” There was no hostility in the question. Instead, I thought there was something almost plaintive in it.

  “No, I saw you…talking to him in a restaurant two nights ago.”

  Briefly, she smiled. “I’m not sure that ‘talking’ was what we were doing. Did he tell you who I was?”

  “To be honest, I didn’t tell him that I’d seen you together, but I made a note of your license plate.”

  She pursed her lips. “How very farsighted of you. Is that how you usually behave: making notes on women you’ve never met?”

  If she was expecting me to act embarrassed, she was disappointed.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I’m trying to give it up, but the flesh is weak.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I was wondering if you might have seen Elliot.”

  Instantly, there was worry on her face.

  “Not since that night. Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Can I come in, Ms. Foster?”

  She blinked. “How do you know my name? No, let me guess, the same way you found out where I lived, right? Jesus, nothing’s private anymore.”

  I waited, anticipating the closing of the door in my face. Instead, she stepped to one side and gestured for me to enter. I followed her into the hallway and the door closed softly behind me.

  There was no furniture in the hall, not even a hat stand. Before me, a staircase swept up to the second floor and the bedrooms. To my right was a dining room, a bare table surrounded by ten chairs at its center. To my left was a living room. I followed her into it. She took a seat at one end of a pale gold couch, and I eased myself into an armchair close by. Somewhere, a clock ticked, but otherwise the house was silent.

  “Elliot’s missing?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.”

  She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.

  “And you thought that I might know where he is?”

  “You met him for dinner. I figured that you might be friends.”

  “What kind of friends?”

  “The kind that have dinner together. What do you want me to say, Ms. Foster?”

  “I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.”

  I started to apologize but she waved it away. “It’s not important,” she said. “I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?”

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.

  “Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.” She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “We all are.”

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. “He killed himself.” She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.”

  She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.

  “Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.”

  I waited.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “But if Elliot’s gone…”

  The way that she said the word “gone” made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.

  “Elliot was my lover,” she said at last.

  “Was?”

  “It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”

  “When did it begin?”

  “Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”

  “Did your husband know?”

  She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”

  “To Elliot?”

  “He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”

  “How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”

  “That James knew. It was Elliot who d
ecided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”

  “So why were you arguing with him at dinner?”

  She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

  “Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”

  The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

  “What do you mean by ‘them all’?”

  “Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”

  “Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

  Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.”

  “What happened to Grady Truett?”

  “Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”

  “And you think the two deaths are connected?”

  “Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.”