‘Mr. Parker?’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself: Earl Larousse Jr.’
I took his hand and shook it. ‘You usually have people followed from the airport?’
The smile wavered then resumed its post, this time the regret more pronounced.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We were curious to see what you looked like.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We know why you’re here, Mr. Parker. We don’t necessarily approve, but we understand. We don’t want there to be problems between us. We understand you have a job to do. Our concern is that whoever is responsible for my sister’s death is punished with the full force of the law. For the moment, we believe that person to be Atys Jones. If that proves not to be the case, then we’ll accept it. We’ve made our statements to the police, and told them all we know. All we ask of you is that you respect our privacy and leave us in peace. We have nothing to add to what has already been said.’
It had the air of a rehearsed speech about it. More than that, I sensed a detachment about Earl Jr. Although he sounded sincere, if mechanical, his eyes were both mocking and slightly fearful. He wore a mask, although I didn’t yet know what lay behind it. Farther back, his father watched us, and in his face I saw hostility. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be directed at his son as much as at me. Earl Jr. turned and walked back to the group, and a shroud fell across his father’s anger as they made their way out of the lobby and into their waiting cars.
With nothing else to do I returned to my room, showered, ate a club sandwich, and waited for the car rental guy to arrive. When the call came from the desk I went down, signed the paperwork, and entered the parking garage. I put on my sunglasses and headed out, the sunlight gleaming off the windshield, but there was no sign of the Chevy and nobody seemed interested in me or the car. On the way out of town I stopped at a big mall and bought two new cell phones.
Elliot Norton lived about two miles outside Grace Falls in a modest white faux-Colonial with two pillars at its front door and a big porch running the full length of the first floor. It looked like the kind of place where the mint juleps would still have the julep mix dissolving in the glass. The large sheet of industrial plastic covering the hole in the roof did nothing to add an air of authenticity. I found Elliot round back, talking to a pair of men in coveralls who leaned against a van, smoking. The legend on the side of the van indicated that the two men were roofers from Dave’s Construction and Roofing out of Martinez, Georgia (‘Want To Save? Call Dave!’). To their left was a pile of scaffolding, ready to be put in place so that work could commence the following morning. One of the men was idly tossing a piece of burnt, blackened slate from hand to hand. As I approached, he stopped and jutted his chin in my direction. Elliot turned a little too quickly, then left the two workmen and stretched out his hand to me.
‘Man, am I glad to see you!’ He smiled. Some of his hair had been scorched away on the left side of his head. What remained had been cut back in an effort to disguise the damage. There was gauze over his left ear and burn marks glistened along his cheek, chin, and neck. His left hand, where it was visible beneath a white tube bandage, was blistered.
‘Don’t take this wrong, Elliot,’ I said, ‘but you don’t look so good.’
‘I know. Fire took out most of my wardrobe. Come on.’ He reached behind my back and guided me toward the house. ‘I’ll buy you an iced tea.’
Inside, the house smelled badly of smoke and damp. Water had penetrated the floors above and damaged the plasterwork in the downstairs rooms, brown clouds now sweeping across the white skies of the ceilings. Some of the wallpaper had already begun to peel and I reckoned there was a good chance that Elliot would be forced to replace most of the timbers in the hallway. In the living room was an unmade sofa bed, and clothes hung from the curtain rod or splayed themselves across the backs of chairs.
‘You’re still living here?’ I asked.
‘Yup,’ he replied, as he washed some ash from a pair of glass tumblers.
‘You might be safer in a hotel.’
‘I might be, but then the folks who did this to my house would probably come back and finish the job.’
‘They could come back anyway.’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, they’re done, for now. Murder isn’t their style. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have done a better job first time round.’
He took a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and filled the tumblers. I stood by the window and stared out at Elliot’s yard and the land beyond. The skies were empty of birds and the woods surrounding Elliot’s property were almost silent. Along the coast, the migrants were already in flight, the wood ducks joining the terns, the hawks and warblers and sparrows soon to follow. Here, farther inland, there was less evidence of their departure, and even the permanent residents were not as obvious as they formerly were, their spring mating songs ended and their bright summer plumage slowly fading to the mourning cloaks of winter. As if to make up for the absence of the birds and their colors, the wildflowers had begun to bloom now that the worst of the summer heat had departed. There were asters and sunflowers and goldenrods, and butterflies flocked to them, attracted by the predominance of yellows and purples. Beneath the leaves, the field spiders would be waiting for them.
‘So when do I get to meet Atys Jones?’ I asked.
‘Be easiest if you talk to him after we get him out of county. We pick him up from the Richland County Detention Center late tomorrow, then switch him to a second car out back of Campbell’s Country Corner to lose anyone with an interest in where we might be taking him. From there, I’ll drive him to the safe house in Charleston.’
‘Who’s the second driver?’
‘Son of the old guy who’s gonna be taking care of him. He’s okay, knows what he’s doing.’
‘Why not stash him closer to Columbia?’
‘We got a better chance of keeping him safe down in Charleston, believe me. He’ll be over on the east side, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Anybody comes asking questions and we’ll hear about it in plenty of time to move him again if we have to. Anyhow, it’s a purely temporary arrangement. Could be that we’ll have to stash him somewhere more secure, maybe hire private security. We’ll see.’
‘So what’s his story?’ I asked.
Elliot shook his head and rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. ‘His story is that he and Marianne Larousse had a thing going.’
‘They were lovers?’
‘Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.’ He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. ‘I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Marianne died they’d been screwing around in the front of his Grand Am. They had a fight, she ran off into the trees. He went after her, thought he’d lost her somewhere in the forest, then found her with her head beaten to a pulp.’
‘Weapon?’
‘Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom – Trojan – matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case anyway they can.’
‘You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doub
t in a jury?’
‘Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but . . .’
I waited. There’s always a ‘but’. There wouldn’t be a story without one.
‘There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.’
He flicked through the pile of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.
‘What you got here,’ said Elliot, ‘is a regular blood feud.’
9
The first files were blue and contained witness statements and other material assembled by the police in the aftermath of Marianne Larousse’s death. The historical file was green. Beside it was a slim white file. I opened it, saw more clearly the photographs that lay within, then closed it carefully. I was not yet ready to deal with the reports on Marianne Larousse’s body.
I had taken on a little defense work in Maine in the past, so I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead of me. Atys Jones would be the most important element, of course, at least to begin with. Defendants will often tell an investigator things that they haven’t even told their attorney, sometimes out of sheer forgetfulness or the stress surrounding their arrest, other times because they trust the investigator more than their lawyer, especially if their lawyer is a hard-pressed public defender already overwhelmed by his or her caseload. The rule of thumb is that any additional information is passed on to the attorney, whether favorable or prejudicial to the case. Elliot had already received some statements and testimonials from those who knew Jones, including schoolteachers and former employers, in an effort to form a favorable profile of his client that could be presented to the jury, so that was a little less donkey work for me to do.
I’d have to go over the police reports with Jones as these would provide the basis for the charges against him, but also because he might pick up on mistakes made or witnesses that had not been contacted. The police reports would also be useful to me in checking statements, since they usually contained the addresses and phone numbers of those to whom the police had spoken. After that, the real legwork would begin: all of those witnesses would have to be reinterviewed because the early police reports were rarely in-depth, the cops preferring to leave the detailed interviewing for the prosecutor’s investigators or the primary detective. Signed statements would have to be obtained, and while most witnesses would be willing to talk, fewer would be willing to sign their names to a summary of their comments without a struggle. In addition, it was likely that the prosecutor’s investigators had spoken to them already, and they often had a way of intimating to witnesses that they should not talk to the defendant’s investigator, placing another barrier in the way. All things considered, I had a busy time ahead of me, and I might be able to do little more than scratch the surface of the case before I had to return to Maine.
I pulled the green file toward me and flipped it open. Some of the material inside dated back to the seventeenth century and the earliest origins of Charleston. The most recent cutting came from 1981.
‘Somewhere in here may be part of the reason why Marianne Larousse died, and why Atys Jones is going to be tried for her murder,’ said Elliot. ‘This is the weight that they carried with them, whether they knew it or not. This is what destroyed their lives.’
He had been rummaging in his kitchen cabinets as he spoke, and he now returned to the table with his right fist tightly closed.
‘But in a way,’ said Elliot softly, ‘this is really why we’re here today.’
And he opened his fist to let a stream of yellow rice cascade onto the tabletop.
Amy Jones
Age 98 when interviewed by Henry Calder in Red
Bank, S.C. From The Age of Slavery: Interviews with Former
North and South Carolina Slaves, ed. Judy and
Nancy Buckingham (New Era, 1989).
I was born a slave in Colleton County. My pappy name Andrew and my mammy name Violet. They belong to the Larousse family. Marster Adgar was a good marster to his slaves. Him had about sixty families of slaves before the Yankees come and made a mess out of their lives.
Old Missus tell all the colored people to run. She come to us with a bagful of silver all sew up in a blanket, ’cause the Yankees apt to take all they valuables. She tell us that she couldn’t protect us no longer. They broke in the rice barn and share the rice out, but they not enough rice there to feed all the colored people. Worst nigger men and women follow the army, but us stay and watch the other chillun die.
Us wasn’t ready for what come. Us had no education, no land, no cow, no chicken. Yankees come and take all us had away, left us with freedom. They give us to understand us as free as our marster was. Couldn’t write, so us just had to touch the pen and tell what name us wanted to go in. After the war, Marster Adgar give us one-third of what us make, now that us free. Pappy dead just before my mammy. They stay right to plantation and dead there after they free.
But they tole me. They tole me about Old Marster, Marster Adgar’s pappy. They tole me what he done . . .
To understand the crop is to understand the history, for the history is Carolina Gold.
Rice cultivation began here in the 1680s, when the rice seed reached Carolina from Madagascar. They called it Carolina Gold because of its quality and the color of its hull, and it made the families associated with it wealthy for generations. There were the Englishmen – the Heywards, the Draytons, the Middletons, and the Alstons – and the Huguenots, among them the Ravenels, the Manigaults, and the Larousses.
The Larousses were scions of Charleston aristocracy, one of a handful of families that controlled virtually all aspects of life in the city, from membership in the St. Cecilia Society to the organization of the social season, which lasted from November to May. They valued their name and reputation above all else, and safeguarded both with money and the influence that it bought. They could not have suspected that their great wealth and security would be undermined by the actions of a single slave.
The slaves would work from first light until last, six days each week, but did not work on Sundays. A conch shell was used to call in the laborers, its tones sweeping across the fields of rice now afire in the dying rays of the setting sun, the black shapes against them like scarecrows amid the conflagration. Their backs would straighten, their heads rise and, slowly, they would begin the long walk back to the rice barn and the shacks. They would feed on molasses, peas, corn bread, sometimes home-raised meat. They would sit in their homemade clothes of copper straw and white cloth at the end of the long day, and eat and talk. When a new delivery of wooden-soled shoes came, the women would soak the rawhide leather in warm water and grease them with tallow or meat skin so the shoes would slip onto their feet, and the smell would cling to their fingers when they made love to their men, the stench of dead animals mingling with the sweat of their lovemaking.
The men did not learn how to read or write. Old Marster was strict on that. They were whipped for stealing, or for telling lies, or for looking at books. There was a dirt house out by the swamp where they used to carry those who had smallpox. Most of the slaves carried out there never returned. They kept the Pony in the rice barn, and when the time came for more serious punishments to be meted out, the man or woman would be spread-eagled upon it, strapped down, and whipped. When the Yankees burned down the rice barn, there was blood on the floor where the Pony had stood, as if the very ground itself had begun to rust.
Some of t
he East African slaves brought with them an understanding of rice cultivation that enabled the plantation owners to overcome the problems faced by the original English colonists, who had found its cultivation troublesome. A task system was introduced on many plantations that allowed skilled slaves to work somewhat independently, enabling them to create free time to hunt, garden, or improve the situation of their families. The produce or products created could then be bartered by the slaves to the owner, and removed some of the pressure of providing for his slaves from him.
The task system created a hierarchy among the slaves. The most important bondsman was the slave driver, who acted as the mediator between the planter and the labor force. Beneath him were the trained artisans, the blacksmiths and carpenters and bricklayers. It was these skilled workers that were the natural leaders in the slave community, and consequently they had to be watched more closely for fear that they might foment unrest or choose to run away.
But the most crucial task of all fell to the trunk minder, for the fate of the rice crop lay in his hands. The rice fields were flooded when necessary with freshwater collected in reservoirs above the fields on higher ground. Salt water flowed inland with the tide, forcing the freshwater to the surface of the coastal rivers. It was only then that the low, wide floodgates could be opened to permit the freshwater to flow into the fields, a system of subsidiary gates allowing the water to run into the adjoining fields, a drainage technique whose correct application was a direct result of the involvement of African slaves. Any breach or break in the gates would permit salt water to enter the fields, killing the rice crop, so the trunk minder, in addition to opening and closing the main gates, was required to keep the trunks, the drainage ditches, and the canals in working order.
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