The White Road

“You are, sir.”

“And does the Bible not tell us to think well on our fellow man, to give him every chance that he deserves?”

“I couldn’t say for sure, sir.”

“Neither could I, but I feel certain that there is such an injunction. And, if there is not such an injunction in the Bible, then it was an oversight, and the man responsible, if he could go back and correct his mistake, would most certainly return and include said injunction, would he not?”

“He most certainly would, sir.”

“Amen. So we are agreed, Detective, that you have given Mr. Parker every chance to answer the questions put to him; that you, as a God-fearing man, have heeded the Bible’s probable injunction to take all that Mr. Parker has said as the word of an honest man; and yet you still doubt his basic sincerity?”

“I guess so, sir.”

“Well that certainly is a most unfortunate turn of events.”

He gave me his full attention for the first time.

“Statistics, Mr. Parker. Let’s talk about statistics. Do you know how many people were murdered in the fine city of Charleston in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety-nine?”

I shook my head.

“I will tell you: three. It was the lowest murder rate in more than forty years. Now, what does that tell you about the police force in the fine city of Charleston?”

I didn’t reply. He cupped his left hand around his left ear and leaned toward me.

“I can’t hear you, son.”

I opened my mouth, which gave him his cue to continue before I could say anything.

“I will tell you what it says about this police force. It says that this fine body of men and women does not tolerate murder; that it actively discourages said form of antisocial activity; and that it will come down upon those who commit murder like two tons of shit from a trainload of elephants. But your arrival in our city appears to have coincided with a shocking increase in acts of homicide. That will affect our statistics. It will cause a blip on the screen, and Chief Greenberg, a fine, fine man, will have to go to the mayor and explain this unfortunate turn of events. And the mayor will ask him why this should be, and Chief Greenberg will then ask me, and I will say that it is because of you, Mr. Parker. And the chief will ask me where you are, and I will lead him to the deepest, darkest hole that the city of Charleston can provide for those of whom it most seriously disapproves. And under that hole will be another hole, and in that hole will be you, Mr. Parker, because I will have put you there. You will be so far below the ground that you will no longer officially be in the jurisdiction of the city of Charleston. You will not even officially be within the jurisdiction of the United States of America. You will be in the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, and you would be advised to hire yourself a Chinese lawyer in order to cut down on traveling expenses incurred by your legal representative. Do you think I am shitting you, Mr. Parker? Because I am not shitting you. I do not shit people like you, Mr. Parker, I shit on people like you, and I have been saving some of my nastiest shit for just such an occasion as this. Now, do you have anything further that you wish to share with us?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you any more.”

He stood. “Then our business here is concluded. Detective, do we have a holding pen available for Mr. Parker?”

“I’m sure we do, sir.”

“And will he be sharing this holding pen with the dregs of this fine city, with drunks and whoremongers and men of low moral character?”

“That can be arranged, sir.”

“Then arrange it.”

I made a vain attempt to assert my rights.

“Don’t I get to call a lawyer?

“Mr. Parker, you do not need a lawyer. You need a travel agent to get you the hell out of this city. You need a priest to pray that you do not irritate me any more than you already have. And finally, you need to go back in time to get hold of your mother before your father impregnates her with his sorry seed and ask her not to let you be born because, if you continue to obstruct this investigation, you are going to regret the day she thrust you mewling and screaming into this world. Detectives, get this man out of my sight.”

They put me in the drunk tank until 6 A.M., then when they felt I had stewed for long enough and the decision to charge me with something or set me free became imminent, Addams came down and had me released. As we headed for the main door, his partner stood in the hallway and watched us pass.

“I find out anything on Norton, I’ll let you know,” he said. I thanked him, and he nodded.

“I found out what ‘plateye’ means too. Had to ask Mr. Alphonso Brown himself, man who guides folks round the old Gullah places. He said it was a kind of ghost: a changeling, one that could shift its form. Could be he was trying to say that your client turned on them.”

“Could be, except that Atys didn’t have a gun.”

He didn’t reply, and his partner hustled me on.

My possessions were handed back to me, minus my gun. I was given a slip and told that the gun was not being returned to me for the time being. Through the doors I could see prisoners in jail blues arriving to work on the lawns and clear garbage from the flower beds. I wondered how much trouble I’d have getting a cab.

“You pla

“No. Not after this.”

“Well, you make a move and you let us know, y’hear?”

I made for the door but found Addams’s hand resting against my chest. “You remember this, Mr. Parker: I got a bad feeling about you. I made some calls while you was in here and I didn’t like one thing that I heard. I don’t want you starting one of your crusades in Chief Greenberg’s city, you understand me? So just to guard against that, and to make sure that you call on us again when you’re leaving, we’ll be holding on to that Smith 10 of yours until your plane starts heading down the runway. Then maybe we’ll give you your ca

The hand dropped, and Addams opened the door for me.

“Be seeing you,” he said.

I stopped, frowned, and clicked my fingers.

“Which one were you again?”

“Addams.”

“With one d.”

“Two d s.”

I nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”

When I got back to my hotel I barely had enough energy to undress before I fell into my bed and slept soundly until after ten. I didn’t dream. It was as if the deaths of the night before had never happened.

But Charleston had not yielded up the last of its bodies. While the cockroaches skittered across the cracked sidewalks to hide from the daylight and the last of the night owls made for their beds, a man named Cecil Exley was walking to the site of the small bakery and coffee shop that he owned over on East Bay. There was work to be done, fresh bread and croissants to be baked, and although the clock had not yet struck six, Cecil was already ru

At the corner of Franklin and Magazine, he began to slow down slightly. The bulk of the old Charleston jail loomed over him, a testament to misery and grief. A low white wall surrounded a yard thick with long grass, at the center of which stood the jail itself. The red bricks that had formed its sidewalks were missing in places, stolen, presumably, by those who felt their need was greater than the demands of history. Twin four-story towers topped with battlements and weeds stood at either side of the locked main gate, its bars and the bars of the windows around and above it stained red with oxidized rust. The concrete had crumbled and fallen from around the frames, exposing the brickwork beneath, as the old building succumbed to slow decay.

Denmark Vesey and his coconspirators in the ill-fated slave revolt of 1822 had been chained up in the whipping house for blacks at the back of the jail before their execution, most of them led to the gallows still proclaiming their i