‘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 connection with allegations of ‘improper relationships’ with female prisoners. The only reason the story attracted my attention was that Landron Mobley had hired one Elliot Norton to represent him at both the hearing and what was expected to be a subsequent rape trial. I mentioned the case to Elliot when he arrived fifteen minutes later.
‘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 inner fence was electrified.
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.
The media pounced on Elliot as soon as he stepped from his car, then tried to block his way again when he came out twenty minutes later through the wired tunnel that led into the jail’s reception area, his arm around the shoulders of a young man with light brown skin who kept his head low and his baseball cap pulled down almost to the bridge of his nose. Elliot didn’t even dignify them with a ‘No comment.’ Instead, he thrust the young man into the car and they drove away at speed. The more sensationalist members of the fourth estate raced to their vehicles to follow him.
I was already in place. I waited until Elliot had passed me, then kept close behind him as far as the exit road, at which point I gave the wheel a good spin and managed to block both lanes before stepping from the car. The TV van ground to a halt a few feet from my door and a cameraman in jungle fatigues opened the driver’s door and started screaming at me to get out of his way.
I examined my nails. They were nice and short. I tried to keep them neat. Neatness was a very underrated virtue.
‘You hear me? Get the fuck out of the way,’ yelled Combat Man. His face was turning a bright shade of red. Behind his van I could see more media types congregating as they tried to figure out what all the fuss was about. A small group of young black males in low-slung jeans and Wu Wear shirts emerged from a bondsman’s office and wandered down to enjoy the show.
Combat Man, tired of shouting and achieving no result, stormed toward me. He was overweight and in his late forties. His clothing looked kind of ludicrous on him. The black guys started in on him almost immediately.
‘Yo, GI Joe, where the war at?’
‘Vietnam over, motherfucker. You gotta let it go. You can’t be livin’ in the past.’
Combat Man shot them a look of pure hatred. He stopped about a foot from me and leaned in until our noses were almost touching.
‘The fuck are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Blocking the road.’
‘I can see that. Why?’
‘So you can’t get through.’
‘Don’t get smart with me. You move your car or I’ll drive my van through it.’
Over his shoulder I could see some prison guards emerging from the lockup, probably on their way to see what all the fuss was about. It was time to go. By the time the reporters got on to the main road, it would be too late for them to find Elliot and Atys. Even if they did find the car, their quarry would not be in it.
‘Okay,’ I told Combat Man. ‘You win.’
He seemed a little taken aback.
‘That’s it?’
‘Sure.’
He shook his head in frustration.
‘By the way—’
He looked up at me.
‘Those kids are stealing stuff from the back of your van.’
I let the media convoy get well ahead of me, then drove along Bluff Road, past the Zion Mill Creek Baptist Church and the United Methodist, until I reached Campbell’s Country Corner at the intersection of Bluff and Pineview. The bar had a corrugated roof and barred windows and didn’t look a whole lot different in principle from the county lockup, except that you could order a drink and walk away anytime you wanted. It advertised ‘Cold Beer at Low Prices,’ held a turkey shoot Fridays and Saturdays, and was a popular stopping-off point for those enjoying their first alcoholic taste of freedom. A hand-lettered sign warned patrons against bringing in their own beer.
I turned onto Pineview, past the side of the bar and a yellow lock-up storage garage, and saw a shack standing in the middle of an overgrown yard. Behind the shack a white GMC 4x4 was waiting, into which Elliot and Atys had been transferred before Elliot’s own car, now being driven by another man, had continued on its way. It pulled out of the lot as I appeared, and I stayed a few cars behind it as it headed along Bluff toward 26. The plan was that we would drive Jones straight into Charleston and take him to the safe house. It was kind of a surprise, then, to see Elliot make a left into the lot of Betty’s Diner before he even reached the highway, open the passenger door, and allow Jones to walk ahead of him into the restaurant. I parked the Neon in back then followed them inside, trying to look casual and unconcerned.
Betty’s Diner was a small room with a counter to the left of the door, behind which two black women took orders while two men worked
the grills. It was furnished with plastic garden tables and chairs, and the windows were obscured by both blinds and bars. Two TVs played simultaneously and the air was thick with the smell of fried foods and oil. Elliot and Jones were sitting at a table at the back of the room.
‘Do you want to tell me what you’re doing?’ I asked when I reached them.
Elliot looked embarrassed.
‘He said he needed to eat,’ he stammered. ‘He was cramping. Said he was going to collapse on me if he didn’t eat. He even threatened to jump from the car.’
‘Elliot, step outside and you can still hear the echo of his cell door closing. Any closer and he’d be eating prison food again.’
Atys Jones spoke for the first time. His voice was higher than I expected, as if it had broken only recently instead of over half a decade before.
‘Fuck you, man, I got to eat,’ he said.
He had a thin face, so light in color as to be almost Hispanic, and nervous, darting eyes. His head stayed low when he spoke, and he looked up at me from under his cap. Despite his bluster, his spirit had been broken. Atys Jones was about as tough as a pinãta. Hit him hard enough and candy would come out his ass. Still, it didn’t make his manners any easier to take.
‘You were right,’ I told Elliot. ‘He’s quite the charmer. You couldn’t have picked someone a little less irritating to save?’
‘I tried, but the Little Orphan Annie case was already taken.’
‘The fuck—’
Jones was about to launch into a predictable tirade. I raised a finger at him.
‘Stop right now. You swear at me again and that salt shaker is as close as you’ll get to a meal.’
He backed down.
‘I didn’t eat nothing in jail. I was scared.’
I felt a stab of guilt and shame. He was a frightened young man with a dead girlfriend and the memory of her blood on his hands. His fate was in the hands of two white men and a jury that would most likely redefine the word ‘hostile.’ All things considered, he was doing well just to be sitting upright with dry eyes.
‘Please, man,’ he said. ‘Just let me eat.’
I sighed. From the window where we sat I could see the road, the 4x4, and anybody approaching on foot. Even if somebody had taken it into his mind to hurt Jones, he wasn’t going to do it in Betty’s Diner. Elliot and I were the only white folk in the place, and the handful of people at the other tables were very deliberately ignoring our presence. If we saw any journalists, I could take him out the back way, assuming Betty’s had a back way. Maybe I was overreacting.
‘Whatever,’ I conceded. ‘Just be quick about it.’
It was pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t eaten much during his time in jail. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, and spots and boils had erupted on his face and neck. He devoured a plate of smothered porkchops with rice, green beans, and macaroni and cheese, then followed it with a slice of strawberry cream cake. Elliot nibbled at some fries while I stuck with coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. When we were done, Elliot left Jones with me and went to pay the check.
Jones’s left hand lay flat upon the table, its only adornment a cheap Timex. His right hung on the stainless steel cross around his neck. It was T-shaped, and both its vertical and horizontal shafts appeared hollow. I reached out to touch it, but he drew back and there was something in his eyes that I didn’t like.
‘What you doin’?’
‘I just wanted to take a look at your cross.’
‘It’s mine. I don’t want nobody else touchin’ it.’
‘Atys,’ I said softly. ‘Let me see the cross.’
He held on to it for a moment longer, then uttered a long ‘Shiiiit.’ He lifted the cross from around his neck and let it fall gently into the palm of my hand. I dangled it from my fingers, then gave the shaft an experimental twist. It came loose in my hand. I let it fall to the table, exposing a two-inch length of sharpened steel. I clasped the ‘T’ in the palm of my hand, closed my fist and left the point sticking out between my middle and ring fingers.
‘Where did you get this?’
The sunlight danced on the blade, reflecting in Jones’s eyes and face. He was reluctant to answer.
‘Atys,’ I said, ‘I don’t know you, but you’re already starting to bug me. Answer the question.’
He did some theatrical head shaking before he answered.
‘Preacher gave it to me.’
‘The chaplain?’
Jones shook his head. ‘No, one of the ministers comes to the jail. Tole me he was a prisoner too, once, ’cept the Lord set him free.’
‘Did he say why he was giving this to you?’
‘Tole me he knowed I was in trouble, knowed there was people tryin’ to kill me. Tole me that it would protect me.’
‘He give you his name?’
‘Tereus.’
‘What did he look like?’
Jones met my eyes for the first time since I had taken the cross.
‘He looked like me,’ he replied, simply. ‘He looked like a man seen trouble.’
I replaced the shaft, covered the blade, then after a moment’s hesitation handed it back to him. He looked surprised, then nodded at me once in acknowledgment.
‘If we do this right, then you won’t need it,’ I said. ‘And if we screw up, maybe you’ll be glad of it.’
With that, Elliot returned and we left. Neither of us mentioned the knife to him. This time, there were no more stops, and nobody followed us as we made our way to Charleston and the East Side.
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 price 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 f
rom 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 streetlamps 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.’