The White Road-CP-4 (23 page)

The East Side neighborhood was one of the original developments outside the old walled city, and had always been unsegregated. Blacks and whites shared the warren of streets bordered by Meeting and East Bay to the west and east, and the Crosstown Expressway and Mary Street to the north and south, although even in the mid-nineteenth century the black population was higher than the white. Working-class blacks, whites, and immigrants continued to live together on the East Side until after World War II, when the whites moved to the suburbs west of the Ashley. From then on, the East Side became a place into which you didn’t want to stray if you were white. Poverty took root, bringing with it the seeds of violence and drug abuse. But the East Side was changing once again. Areas south of Calhoun Street and Judith Street that had once been exclusively black were now nearly all white, and wealthily so, and the wave of urban renewal and gentrification was also breaking on the southern verges of the East Side. Six years before, the average price of a house in the area was about $18,000. Now there were houses on Mary Street making $250,000, and even homes on Columbus and Amherst, close to the small park where the drug dealers congregated and within sight of the brownstone projects and yellow and orange public housing, were selling for two or three times what they were worth only half a decade before. But this was still, for the present, a black neighborhood, the houses painted in faded pastels, relics of the days without air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store at Columbia and Meeting, the yellow Money Man pawn shop across from it, the cut-rate liquor store nearby all spoke of lives far removed from those of the wealthy whites returning to the old streets.

The faces of the young men at the corners and the old people on their porches regarded us warily as we drove: a black man and a white man in one car, being tailed by a white man in a second car. We might not have been Five-O, but whatever we were we were still bad news. At the corner of American and Reid, on the side of a two-room house erected as some kind of art exhibit, someone had written the following lines:

THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN

RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN

INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN

ACADEMIC.

I didn’t know the source of the quotation, and neither did Elliot when I asked him about it later. Atys had apparently just looked blankly at the words on the wall. I guess he probably already knew all that it said from experience. Around us, hydrangeas were in bloom, and heavenly bamboo grew by the front steps of a neat two-story house on Drake Street, midway between a ruined building at the junction of Drake and Amherst and the Fraser Elementary at the corner of Columbus. It was painted white with yellow trim, and there were shutters drawn on both the upper and lower floors, slatted on the top floor to let the air in. A bay window faced out onto the street from beneath the porch, with the front doorway to the right, a mass-produced carved wood pattern above it for decoration. A flight of five stone steps led up to the door. When he was certain the street was quiet, Elliot backed the GMC into the yard to the right of the doorway. I heard the sound of the doors opening, then footsteps as Atys and Elliot entered the house from the rear. Drake seemed largely empty apart from two small kids playing ball by the railings of the school. They remained there until it began to rain, the raindrops glittering in the glow of the street lamps that had just begun to shine, then ran for shelter. I waited ten minutes, the rain falling hard on the car, until I was certain that we hadn’t been followed, before I too headed into the house.

Atys—I was forcing myself to think of him by his first name in an effort to establish some kind of connection with him—sat uncomfortably at a cheap pine kitchen table, Elliot beside him. By the sink, an elderly black woman with silver hair was pouring five glasses of lemonade. Her husband, who was a lot taller than she was, held the glasses as she poured, then passed them, one by one, to their guests. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but the strength of his deltoid and trapezius muscles was still apparent from their definition beneath his white shirt. He was well over sixty years old, but I guessed that he could have taken Atys easily in a straight fight. He could probably have taken me.

“Devil and wife fighting,” he said, as I shook the rain from my jacket. I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself then pointed out the window at the rain and sunlight mingling.

“De wedduh,” he said. “Een yah cuh, seh-down.”

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.”