The White Road

“Mr. Poveda!” I shouted. “Talk to me.”

There was no reply, but I sensed him there, waiting, at the other side of the metal, trapped in a darkness of his own devising. I took a card from my wallet, inserted it partly into the gap between the door and the ground, then left him there with his sins.

When I looked back, the card was gone.

Tereus wasn’t at LapLand when I called by, and Handy Andy, his courage now boosted by the presence of a bartender and a couple of doormen in black jackets, wasn’t in any mood to be helpful. I also failed to get a reply from Tereus’s apartment: according to the old guy with the permanent residency on the front steps, he had left for work that morning and hadn’t returned since. I seemed to be having a lot of trouble finding the people with whom I needed to talk.

I walked across King and entered Janet’s Southern Kitchen. Janet’s was a relic of times past, where folks took a tray and lined up to receive fried chicken, rice, and porkchops over the counter. I was the only white person eating, but nobody paid me much attention. I picked at my chicken and rice, but my appetite had still not returned. Instead, I drank glass after glass of lemonade in an effort to cool myself down, but it did me no good. I was still parched, and my temperature was still way above normal. Louis would be here soon, I told myself. Things would become clearer then. I pushed my plate to one side and headed back to the hotel.

Once again, as darkness fell, my desk was covered in depictions of a woman. The folder containing the Larousse crime scene photographs and reports lay closed by my left hand. All other available space was taken up by James Foster’s drawings. In one picture, the woman had been captured in the act of looking over her shoulder, the place where her face should have been shaded in tones of gray and black, the bones in her fingers visible beneath the thin material that enveloped her body and what seemed like the tracery of raised veins or scales shrouding her skin. There was also, I thought, something almost sexual about her depiction, a combination of loathing and desire expressed in artistic form. The shape of her buttocks and legs was carefully etched, as if sunlight were shining between her legs, and her nipples were erect. She was like the lamia of myth, a beautiful woman from the waist up but a serpent from the waist down, beguiling travelers with the sound of her voice only to devour them when they came within reach. Except, in this case, the scales of the serpent appeared to have spread across her entire body; the myth’s origins in a male fear of aggressive female sexuality had clearly found fertile ground in Foster’s imagination.

And then there was the second subject of his endeavors, the pit surrounded by stone and rugged, barren ground, the shapes of thin trees in the background like mourners around a grave. In the first drawing, the pit was simply a dark hole, seemingly deliberately reminiscent of the woman’s hooded face, the shelving of the ground at its lip like the folds of cloth around her head. But in the second drawing, the column of fire roared up from deep within, as if a cha

The final item that his widow had allowed me to remove from his office was a photograph, a picture of six young men standing together before a bar, a neon Miller sign visible behind the figure at the far left of the group. Elliot Norton was smiling, a bottle of Bud raised in his right hand, his left arm curled around the waist of Earl Larousse Jr. Beside him was Phil Poveda, taller than the rest, leaning back against a car, his legs crossed at the ankles, his white shirt open to his chest, his arms folded before him, a beer bottle poking out close to his left breast. Next in line was the smallest member of the company, a dough-faced, curly-haired boy-man with a starter-kit beard and legs that seemed too short for his body. He had been caught in a dancer’s pose, his left leg and left arm outstretched before him, his right raised high behind him, tequila glistening in the flash of the bulb as the last of it spilled from the bottle in his hand: the late Grady Truett. Beside him, a boyish face peered bashfully into the camera, chin lowered to chest. This was James Foster.

The last young man was not smiling as widely as the rest. His grin seemed forced, his clothes somehow cheaper. He wore jeans and a check shirt, and he stood awkward and straight upon the gravel and dirt of the parking lot, like one who was not used to having his picture taken. Landron Mobley, the poorest of the six, the only one who did not go on to college, who did not progress to greater things, the only one never to leave the state of South Carolina to advance himself. But Landron had his own uses: Landron could score drugs; Landron could find cheap, slutty women who would go down for the price of a beer; Landron’s big fists could pummel anyone who decided to take issue with a bunch of wealthy young men intruding on territory that was not their own, taking women that were not theirs to take, drinking in bars that held no welcome for them. Landron was the point of entry for a world that these five men wanted to use and abuse, but of which they wanted no lasting part. Landron was the gatekeeper. Landron knew things.

Now Landron was dead.

According to Adele Foster, the allegations of improper relationships made against Mobley had come as no surprise to her. She knew what Landron Mobley was like, knew what he liked to do to girls even while he was systematically flunking high school. And though her husband claimed to have cut off all ties with him, she had seen him talking to Landron a couple of weeks before his death, had seen Landron pat him on the arm as he leaned into the car, and had watched as James had passed him a small wad of bills from his wallet. She had confronted him that evening, only to be told that Landron was down on his luck since he’d lost his job, and he had only given him the money so that he would go away and leave James alone. She hadn’t believed him, though, and his patronage of LapLand had only confirmed her suspicions. By that time the distance between husband and wife was growing ever greater, and she had told me that it was to Elliot Norton, not James, that she had confessed her fears about Landron Mobley as she lay beside him in the small room above his office, the room in which he sometimes slept when working on a particularly demanding case but which now, increasingly, he used to satisfy other, more pressing, demands.

“Has he approached you for money?” she asked Elliot.

Elliot looked away. “Landron always needs money.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’ve known Landron for a long time, and yes, I’ve helped him out from time to time.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’”

“I don’t understand, that’s all. He wasn’t like the rest of you. I can see why he might have been useful to you when you were young and wild-”

He reached for her then-“I’m still wild”-but she forced him gently away.

“But now,” she continued, “what part can somebody like Landron Mobley have to play in your lives? You should have left him in your past.”

Eliot pushed back the sheets to stand naked in the moonlight, his back to her, and it seemed that his shoulders dropped briefly, the way a man’s shoulders will slump when exhaustion threatens to overcome him and he briefly accedes to it.