South of Broad (50 page)

“Then, why do you want me to write a column?”

“I think it’ll flush him out,” Ike says. “And after seeing how he cut Sheba up for bait, I’d like the chance to kill him face-to-face. But don’t write that part.”

“I won’t,” I promise. “But I love you for saying it.”

I stand up on the porch and stagger, but Ike is watching me. He catches me as I lean against one of the columns.

“My God, Ike,” I say. “That was beyond horrible.”

The curious neighbors will receive an immense measure of satisfaction when they get to report to friends and family that they witnessed a newspaper columnist and a police chief weeping helplessly in each other’s arms.

I
n my column, I describe the shock of seeing Sheba’s mutilated body and the dementia-addled mother who had recently grown violent, sitting on her bed standing guard, her knife and clothes covered with her daughter’s blood. If Evangeline Poe had killed Sheba, I wrote, there would be no crime scene because no crime had occurred. I was witness to a great tragedy and nothing more: Alzheimer’s disease had rendered Evangeline Poe incapable of either crime or rational act. I talk about the day Sheba and Trevor moved into the house across the street from the one I grew up in and my welcoming them to the neighborhood with cookies. And about the night the twins and their mother flooded into our home undone by fear of an unseen intruder, the same month I was attacked by a masked and fearsome man in Stoll’s Alley on my paper route. I tell of the mournful smiley face as his emblem and calling card, of his constant predatory stalking of his two terrified children. I write about how in New York City, he was finally caught when he killed a doorman at a Park Avenue address where Sheba was staying. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he faked insanity, then faked his own suicide after his transfer to a mental hospital. I describe his journey to San Francisco, and the dead Indian man in the trunk of a car, and the break-in at the house on Vallejo Street. I call him the man with no name, and I reveal that even his children had no idea about the true identity of their father. He made up a multitude of pseudonyms, changed jobs each year, rented houses deep in the country, insulated his children, raped them at will, brutalized them in every conceivable way.

While she was being raped, Sheba Poe dreamed of being a great actress, starring in tragic roles, speaking lines so powerful she could bring the whole world to its knees. When Trevor Poe’s turn came, he imagined himself on the great orchestra stages of the world, bringing people out of their seats with the indescribable delicacy he brought to the works of the great composers. Out of the unimaginable ruins of their childhood, they both had managed to craft lives of exceptional beauty.

For the first time, I admit that Sheba Poe was the first girl who had ever kissed me. For a homely, bashful teenage boy, it was like kissing a goddess. And a goddess, I wrote, is what Sheba Poe set out to become as she took off for Los Angeles the day after graduation. And that is what she had become: a goddess of film and the limelight, with a body of work that will grant her a portion of screen immortality.

The
News and Courier
produces the photograph taken of her father when he entered Sing Sing to serve his prison sentence. A staff artist also creates a macabre version of that weeping smiley face that has made a guest appearance in all my nightmares.

Because Sheba Poe was famous, my column goes out over the wire services and is printed in newspapers around the world. On the day it comes out, the switchboard at the paper is overwhelmed by a deluge of phone calls. Readers call with leads, tips, hunches, coincidences, sightings of the father, and every other kind of minutia. We write down the name and phone number of each informant, carefully notated and checked for accuracy. Blossom Limestone at the front desk becomes unsettled by the onslaught of men and women who appear with handwritten notes or typewritten letters to me, describing the effect my column had exerted on them. A cop from the bomb squad has to intercept and check these letters before they can be sent up. After Kitty Mahoney vets them, she brings them into my office by the armload.

Ike rides over to see me when he can’t get through the overburdened switchboard and takes the back stairs to my office. He wears an alarmed, impatient expression as he looks through the mounting stack of letters on my desk.

“We think we got something,” Ike says. “An old lady who lives in the Sergeant Jasper Apartments read your article. She lives on one of the top floors. Can’t sleep. Likes looking over the rooftops of Charleston. Saw a middle-aged man running out of a backyard and getting into a car in the parking lot. Says she thinks it was three in the morning, the night Sheba was killed.”

“She give a description?”

“No. Too dark.”

“The car?”

“She wouldn’t know a Pinto from a Maserati,” he says. “We need a bigger break.”

“We’ll get one.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Ego,” I say. “This guy’s going to get off on the publicity.”

The letter comes in the next day, and Kitty lets out a scream loud enough to bring reporters sprinting from their desks. When she hands me the letter, I read it over twice before I put in a call to Ike. I check my watch and it says Friday, September 8. Time rushes by me without leaving footprints or any signs of its passage, and I am lost in the days. I hear Ike’s voice on the phone.

“Something came in,” I say.

“Whatcha got?”

“A letter. No handwriting. The words are all cutouts from magazines and newspapers. There’s a picture of a toad at the top right of the page.”

“A love letter.”

“It says, ‘One down. The cops are idiots. You’re an idiot. I’ve never been a child molester. My kids love me. Next week hunting toads.’”

“That’s it? Did he sign it?”

“Oh, yeah. His best yet, the most elaborate. He took his time with this one. The smiley face, the single tear.”

“Red ink or fingernail polish?”

“Neither,” I say. “I think this one is drawn in blood.”

And indeed, tests are done that very day to prove that Sheba Poe’s blood had provided the paint for her father’s latest work of art.

O
n Monday, September 11, the funeral of Sheba Poe is held in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Broad Street. Monsignor Max is pale and pained by the loss, but can’t quite resist enjoying his finest hour as a man of the cloth. Resist as he might, he clearly revels in the attention he receives from the national news media. He sponsors a dinner held at the bishop’s quarters for the many Hollywood producers and directors and stars who fly in on a fleet of private jets. The
News and Courier
presents a roster of headshots listing the celebrities who are swarming into the city to honor the slain actress. Meryl Streep is tearful in her news interview with Bill Sharpe and Debi Chard on Channel 5. Clint Eastwood is manly, Paul Newman shaken, Jane Fonda emotional, Al Pacino testy, and Francis Ford Coppola affectionate.

Living as I do in the backwaters of South Carolina, I had not fully appreciated the corroding effect of the celebrity obsession that has taken hold in America, leading to a maggoty and fly-spotted culture. But I catch my first glimpse of it at Sheba Poe’s funeral when five thousand people surround the cathedral and violently press in for their right of entry. These are Sheba’s fans, not her friends, and they have come from as far away as Seattle and Mexico City to sign the guest registry: the funeral home goes through seven guest books, and her fans stand in line till two the next morning so that they can record their fulsome, sentimental praise of their “favorite actress.” Outside, the cathedral is a mob scene and Ike’s police force has its hands full controlling this combustible crowd. Trevor has chosen the pallbearers—Ike and Betty, Niles and Fraser, Molly and me—and has asked my mother to push his wheelchair and sit with him at the front of the church. Devastated by his sister’s death and the role his lost mother played in it, he is as frail as a wraith. As the pallbearers bear Sheba’s body up the cathedral steps, I fear the crowd will overwhelm us.

“Let us touch the casket,” a girl screams.

“We have a right to see her!” another cries as the crowd surges forward dangerously, nearly blocking the aisle.

“Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea,” I whisper to Molly wearily.

A fire marshal has cut the crowd to a lucky thousand people, but the place is overflowing as we make our way down the center aisle. The six of us are weeping openly by the time we take our seats in the first row. The search for Trevor in San Francisco has transformed our friendship into something deeper and finer than anything I’ve ever let myself feel before. The covenants between us are now unbreakable, writ in stone, and will be part of our self-definition for the rest of our lives. Sheba came back to us and asked us to accompany her on a quest, and all of us responded with an unhesitating answer of yes. But now, because of dark forces set loose on that journey, we are readying ourselves to bury the woman who bid us to travel west with her. During the funeral, all of us fall apart, and hold on to one another like lifelines.

Monsignor Max conducts a solemn and majestic ceremony, hovering over the Mass of death with an actor’s natural attraction for center stage. His voice is spellbinding and I can tell he is well aware that most of the dignitaries of Hollywood are watching. I can almost hear my mother saying, “Max should’ve been the first American Pope,” and I have to admit that there is something royal about his carriage.

The pallbearers have their first surprise when Wormy Ledbetter rises and walks toward the altar, where the monsignor leads him to a huge, embroidered Bible. Wormy reads the epistle in a Southern accent strong enough to have won him a minor part in the movie
Deliverance
. Trevor told me how Wormy had come undone when he learned the news of Sheba’s death. He moaned that he and his men should have worked all night long to install a security system in her house. Wormy thought they could have saved her life. Trevor assured him that nothing could have saved his sister’s life.

After the epistle, the six pallbearers give Wormy a round of silent applause as he returns to his seat, tears streaming. Chad rises up next and reads from the Gospel according to Luke. In his noble bearing and mellifluous reading, one could understand how breeding and aristocracy have played such a central role in the formation of the city’s gentry. Chad’s voice is silken and polished, and he reads the Gospel as though he’d written it. When he returns to his seat, he nods his head as he too receives a round of silent applause from the pallbearers.

When it comes time to receive Holy Communion, Molly grabs my arm and whispers, “Am I allowed to receive Communion? I’m Anglican.”

I realize that I am the only practicing Roman Catholic among the pallbearers. I look up at Monsignor Max and he motions for all of us to come.

“The monsignor is saying everyone is welcome to the Lord’s feast,” I say. And I lead the pallbearers to the Communion rail, though Ike and Betty are reluctant, as only the best Southern Baptists can be. Letting me lead them through the ceremony, Ike and Betty make their First Communion at Sheba’s funeral. It seems fitting to me that my mother, the purist, hits me with one of her most scabrous stares.

Outside the cathedral, the monsignor has enlisted six other priests of the diocese to serve the Eucharist to the boisterous crowd. With their chalices gleaming and loaded to the brim with hundreds of sanctified wafers, they plunge into the crowd. It mollifies and tames the mob as they are tended to by the priests. For the rest of their lives, they will be able to say: “I received Communion when I attended Sheba Poe’s funeral in Charleston.”

Then the wizardry of Monsignor Max flies into high, imaginative gear. After the Eucharist has returned to its tented lockup in the tabernacle, he lifts his head to give a special signal to the projectionist in the choir loft. At the dinner for the Hollywood guests the evening before, Max met and charmed Sheba’s Hollywood agent, Sidney Taub, who had discovered her at eighteen and had proven faithful and honest to Sheba her entire career. I always thought Sidney was half in love with Sheba, but this caused me no concern; so was I. Sidney dug up all the glamour shots, modeling gigs, and movie stills that he could find. He arranged them as a slide show for the evening before, but the monsignor had an inspired idea. He suggested the slides be shown at the end of Sheba’s funeral.

The first slide, of Sheba Poe in the full flower of her radiant youth, takes the crowd’s breath away. How could a woman be more beautiful, I think, as I look at her green glittering eyes and golden hair, her perfect oval face, her full ripe lips, and a figure formed by the love of God for the shapes of women. In the second slide, Sheba is posing for the camera, petulant, sexy, and brand-new to town. And the third, a lost angel in a big city. Soon, with each slide, a gasp of pleasure bursts from the crowd. A muffled cheer goes up when she makes her first cameo appearance with Clint Eastwood. She is fresh-faced, joyous, Madonna-like, vixen, streetwalker—and the funeral crowd falls into a rapture as we witness the slow, inevitable changes as her face matures. We watch in astonishment as she ages from girl to ingenue to young woman, her beauty deepening, her countenance more knowledgeable, more severe. Until finally, there she is in a Los Angeles restaurant dancing with Al Pacino. Again, she is dazzling, lit up from the inside, still possessing that unnameable something. That flawless look that only a cameraman can discover, a face and a body the whole world wants to make love to—to see and watch and adore again, again, and again. When the last slide is played and the camera snaps off, the crowd waits for the pallbearers to move the casket to the hearse.

As we take our positions, Molly says in an aside to the rest of us: “You boys will never know how hard it was to be in the same high school as Sheba Poe.”

Niles replies, straight-faced, “Molly? We know everything about what it was like to be hard in a high school with Sheba Poe.”

It was the sole bit of conversation we were allowed before starting down the aisle, and I know Sheba would have loved it.