The White Road

I’m sorry that I have to do this thing. People will be hurt by my intervention, and elements of your past may be revealed that you might have wished to remain undisclosed. All I can promise you is that whoever did this will not walk away and will not be allowed to go unpunished because of any action that I may take.

In all of this, I will remember you.

In all of this, you will not be forgotten.

11

I CALLED THE number on the Upper West Side the next morning. Louis picked up.

“You still coming down here?”

“Uh-huh. Be down in a couple of days.”

“How’s Angel?”

“Quiet. How you doin’?”

“Same old same old.”

“That bad?”

I had just spoken to Rachel. Hearing her voice had made me feel alone and had renewed my concern for her now that she was so far away.

“I have a favor to ask,” I said.

“Ask away. Askin’ is free.”

“You know someone who could stay with Rachel for a while, at least until I get back?”

“She ain’t goin’ to like it.”

“Maybe you could send someone who wouldn’t care.”

There was a silence as he considered the problem. When he eventually spoke, I could almost hear him smile.

“You know, I got just the guy.”

I spent the morning making calls, then drove up to Wateree and spoke to one of the Richland county deputies who had been first on the scene the night Maria

I then headed on up to Columbia and spent some time speaking with a special agent named Richard Brewer at the headquarters of SLED. It was SLED special agents that had investigated the murder, as they did all homicides committed in the state of South Carolina, with the occasional exception of those that occurred within the jurisdiction of the Charleston PD.

“They like to think of themselves as independent down there,” said Brewer. “We call it the Republic of Charleston.”

Brewer was about my age, with straw-colored hair and a jock’s build. He wore standard issue SLED gear: green combats, a black T-shirt with “SLED” in green letters on the back, and a Glock 40 on his belt. He was one of the team of agents that had worked the case. He was a little more forthcoming than the deputy but could add little to what I already knew. Atys Jones was virtually alone in the world, he said, with only a few distant relatives left alive. He had a job packing shelves at a Piggly Wiggly and lived in a small one-bed walk-up in Kingville that was now occupied by a family of Ukrainian immigrants.

“That boy,” he said, shaking his head. “He had few people in this world to care about him before this, and he has a whole lot fewer now.”

“You think he did it?”

“Jury will decide that. Off the record, I don’t see no other candidates on the horizon.”

“And it was you that spoke to the Larousses?” Their statements were among the material Elliot had passed on to me.

“Father and son, plus the staff at their house. They all had alibis. We’re pretty professional here, Mr. Parker. We covered all the bases. I don’t think you’ll find too many holes in them there reports.”

I thanked him and he gave me his card in case I had any other questions.

“You got yourself a hard job, Mr. Parker,” he said as I stood to leave. “I reckon you’re going to be about as popular as shit in summertime.”

“It’ll be a new experience for me.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“You know, I find that hard to believe.”

Back at my hotel, I spoke to the people at the Pine Point Co-op about Bear, and they confirmed that he had arrived on time the day before and had worked about as hard as a man could be expected to work. They still sounded a little nervous, so I asked them to put Bear on the line.

“How you doing, Bear?”

“Okay.” He reconsidered. “Good, I’m doing good. I like it here. I get to work on boats.”

“Glad to hear it. Listen, Bear, I have to say this: you screw this up, or cause these people any trouble, and I’ll personally hunt you down and drag you to the cops, you understand.”

“Sure.” He didn’t sound aggrieved or hurt. I figured Bear was used to people warning him not to screw up. It was just a question of whether or not he took it in.

“Okay, then,” I said.

“I won’t screw up,” he confirmed. “I like these people.”

After I hung up on Bear, I spent an hour in the hotel gym followed by as many lengths of the pool as I could manage without cramping and drowning. Afterward, I showered and reread those sections of the case file that Elliot and I had discussed the night before. I kept coming back to two items: the story, photocopied from an out-of-print local history, of the death of the trunk minder Henry; and the disappearance, two decades before, of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt. Their pictures stared out at me from the newspaper clippings, two women forever frozen in their late teens and vanished from a world that had largely forgotten about them, until now.

As evening approached, I left the hotel and had coffee and a muffin in the Pinckney Café. While I waited for Elliot to arrive, I leafed through a copy of the Post and Courier that somebody had abandoned. One story in particular caught my eye: a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a former prison guard named Landron Mobley after he had missed a hearing of the Corrections Committee in co

“Old Landron’s a piece of work,” said Elliot. “He’ll turn up, eventually.”

“Doesn’t seem like a high-class client,” I commented.

Elliot glanced at the story, then pushed it away although he still seemed to feel that some further explanation was necessary.

“I knew him when I was younger, so I guess that’s why he came to me. And, hey, every man is entitled to representation, doesn’t matter how guilty he is.”

He raised his finger to the waitress for the check, but there was something about the movement, something too hurried, that indicated Landron Mobley had just ceased to be a welcome topic of conversation between us.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Least I know where one of my clients is at.”

The Richland County Detention Center stood at the end of John Mark Dial Road, about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, the approach marked by the offices of bondsmen and attorneys. It was a complex of low redbrick buildings surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire. Its windows were long and narrow, overlooking the parking lot and the woods beyond on one side. The i

There wasn’t a great deal that we could do to prevent the knowledge of Atys Jones’s impending release from reaching the media, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to find a camera crew and a handful of journalists and photographers in the parking lot, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I had gone on ahead of Elliot and had been watching them for about fifteen minutes by the time Elliot’s car appeared. Nothing exciting had happened to either them or me in the interim, apart from one brief flurry of domestic theater when an unhappy wife, a small, dainty woman in high heels and a blue dress, arrived to collect her husband after he’d spent some time cooling his heels in a cell. He had blood on his shirt and beer stains on his pants as he emerged blinking into the fading light of the early evening, at which point his wife slapped him once across the head and gave him the benefit of her wide and pretty profane vocabulary. He looked like he wanted to run back to jail and lock himself in his cell, especially when he saw all the cameras and thought, for one brief moment, that they’d come for him.