IT WAS ALMOST SUNRISE.
Cyrus Nairn crouched naked in the dark womb of the hollow. Soon, he would have to leave this place. They would come looking for him, suspecting immediately some form of vendetta against the guard Anson and turning their attention toward those who had most recently been released from Thomaston. Cyrus would be sorry to go. He had spent so long dreaming of being back here, surrounded by the smell of damp earth, root ends caressing his bare back and shoulders. Still, there would be other rewards. He had been promised so much. In return, sacrifices were to be expected.
From outside there came the calling of the first birds, the gentle lapping of the water upon the banks, the buzzing of the last night insects as they fled the approaching light, but Cyrus was deaf to the sounds of life beyond the hole. Instead he remained motionless, conscious only of the noises coming from the loose earth under his feet, both watching and feeling the slight shifting as Aileen Anson struggled beneath the dirt and, finally, grew still.
• • •
I was woken up by the telephone ringing in my room. It was 8:15 A.M.
“Charlie Parker?” said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.
“Yeah. Who is this?”
“You got a breakfast appointment in ten minutes. You don’t want to keep Mr. Wyman waiting.” He hung up.
Mr. Wyman.
Willie Wyman.
The boss of the Dixie Mafia’s Charleston branch wanted to have breakfast with me.
This was not a good way to start the day.
The Dixie Mafia had existed, in one form or another, since Prohibition, a conglomeration of loosely associated criminals with bases in most of the big Southern cities but particularly Atlanta, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi. They recruited one another for out-of-state jobs: an arson attack in Mississippi might be the work of a firefly from Georgia, or a hit in South Carolina could be farmed out to a contract killer from Maryland. The Dixies were pretty unsophisticated, dealing in drugs, gambling, murder, extortion, robbery, arson. The closest they ever got to white-collar crime was robbing a laundry, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a force to be reckoned with. In September 1987, the Dixie Mafia had murdered a judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret, at their home in Biloxi. It was never made clear why Sherry and his wife had been shot—there were allegations that Vincent Sherry had been involved in criminal operations through the law offices of Halat and Sherry, and Sherry’s law partner, Peter Halat, was later convicted on charges of racketeering and murder connected to the deaths of the Sherrys—but the reasons behind the murders were largely inconsequential. Men who kill judges are dangerous because they will act before they think. They don’t weigh up the consequence of their actions until after the fact.
In 1983 Paul Mazzell, the then boss of the Charleston branch, was convicted with Eddie Merriman of the murder of Ricky Lee Seagreaves, who had robbed one of Mazzell’s drug deals. Since then, Willie Wyman had been the king in Charleston. He was five-four in height and weighed about one hundred pounds in wet clothes, but he was mean and cunning and capable of doing just about anything to maintain his position. At 8:30 A.M., he was sitting at a table by the wall in Charleston Place’s main dining room, eating bacon and eggs. There was one other empty chair at the table. Nearby, four men sat in two pairs at separate tables, keeping watch over Willie, the door, and me.
Willie had short, very dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and was wearing a bright blue shirt and blue chinos. The shirt was decorated with small white clouds. He looked up at me as I approached the table and waved his fork to indicate that I should join him. One of his men seemed about to frisk me but Willie, conscious of operating in a public place, waved him away.
“We don’t need to frisk you, do we?”
“I’m not armed.”
“Good. I don’t think the people at Charleston Place would appreciate their breakfast tables being all shot up. You want to order? It’s on you.” He grinned humorlessly.
I ordered coffee, juice, and toast from the waitress. Willie finished devouring his food and wiped his mouth on a napkin.
“Now,” he said, “to business. I hear you kicked Andy Dalitz’s nuts so far up his tubes that he can scratch them by sticking his fingers in his mouth.”
He waited for a reply. Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to oblige.
“LapLand’s your place?” I said.
“One of them. Look, I know Andy Dalitz is a moron. Hell, I’ve wanted to kick him in the nuts for as long as I’ve known him, but the guys got three fucking Adam’s apples now because of you. Maybe he had it coming, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if you want to visit one of our clubs, then you should ask, and ask nice. Kicking the manager so hard that he can taste his balls in his mouth is not asking nice.
“And I got to tell you: if you’d done that in public, in front of customers or the girls, then we’d be having a very different conversation now. Because if you make Andy look bad then you make me look bad, and the next thing you know I have guys thinking maybe my time has come and I should make way for somebody new. Then I have two choices: I either convince them that they’re wrong, and then I got to find somewhere to put them and we waste a day driving around with them stinking up the trunk until we find a place, or else I’m the one stinking up the trunk and, between you and me, that’s not gonna happen. We clear?”
My coffee, OJ, and toast arrived. I poured the coffee and offered Willie the option of a fresh refill. He accepted, and thanked me. He was nothing if not polite.
“We’re clear,” I assured him.
“I know all about you,” he said. “You could screw up Paradise. The only reason you’re still alive is that even God doesn’t want you near Him. I hear you’re working with Elliot Norton on the Jones case. Is there something I need to know here, because that case stinks like my kid’s diapers? Andy told me you wanted to speak to the half-breed, Tereus.”
“Is that what he is?”
“The fuck am I, his cousin?” He relented a little. “His people came from Kentucky way back, is all I know. Who knows who they were fucking out there? There are people in those mountains who are maybe half fucking goat because their daddies got an itch at a bad time. Even the blacks don’t want nothing to do with Tereus or his kind. Lesson over. Give me something.”
I didn’t have any choice but to tell him a little of what I knew.
“Tereus visited Atys Jones in jail. I wanted to know why.”
“I think Tereus knew the family. Plus he’s found Jesus.”
Willie looked unhappy, although not terminally so.
“That’s what he told Andy. I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him. I know you’re not telling me everything, but I’m not going to make an issue of it, not this time. I’d prefer it if you didn’t go back to the club, but if you do have to go, keep it discreet and don’t kick Andy Dalitz in the balls again. In return, I expect you to let me know if there’s anything that I should be worried about, you understand?”
“I understand.”
He nodded, seemingly content, then sipped his coffee.
“You tracked down that preacher, right? Faulkner?”
“That’s right.”
He watched me carefully. He seemed amused.
“I hear Roger Bowen is trying to get him out.”
I hadn’t called Elliot since Atys Jones had told me of Mobley’s connection to Bowen. I wasn’t sure how it fitted into what I already knew. Now, as Willie Wyman mentioned Bowen’s name, I tried to block out the noise from the adjoining tables and listen only to him.
“You curious about why that might be?” Willie continued.
“Very.”
He leaned back and stretched, exposing a sprinkling of sweat under his arms.
“Roger and me go way back, and not in a good way. He’s a fanatic and he has no respect. I’ve thought about maybe sending him away on a cruise: a long cruise, strictly one-way to the bottom, but then the crazies would come knocking on my door and it would be cruises for everyone. I don’t know what Bowen wants with the preacher: a figurehead, maybe, or could be the old man has something stashed away that Bowen wants to get hold of. Like I said, I don’t know, but you want to ask him, I can tell you where he’ll be later today.”
I waited.
“There’s a rally in Antioch. Rumor is that Bowen is going to talk at it. There’ll be press there, maybe some TV. Bowen didn’t use to make public appearances too often, but this Faulkner thing has brought him out from under his rock. You go along, you might get to say hi.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He stood, and the other four men rose at the same time.
“I figure why should it just be me who has his day fucked up by you, you know? If you’ve got shit on your shoe, you spread it around. And Bowen’s already having a bad day. I like the idea of you making it worse.”
“What’s so bad about today for Bowen?”
“You should watch the news. They found his pitbull Mobley up at Magnolia Cemetery last night. He was castrated. I gotta go tell Andy Dalitz, maybe make him see how lucky he was just to get his nuts bruised instead of cut off completely. Thanks for breakfast.”
He left me, his blue shirt billowing, his four goons in tow like big children following a little piece of fallen sky.
Elliot did not turn up for our scheduled meeting that morning. The answering machine was picking up calls at his office and at his home. His cell phones—both his own and the clean one we were using for day-to-day contact—were off. Meanwhile, the papers were full of the discovery of Landron Mobley’s body at the Magnolia Cemetery, but hard details were scarce. According to the reports, Elliot Norton had been uncontactable for comment on his client’s death.
I spent the morning confirming the details of more witness statements, knocking on trailer doors, and fighting off dogs in overgrown yards. By midday I was worried. I checked on Atys by phone, and the old man told me he was doing okay, although he was becoming a little stir-crazy. I spoke to Atys for a couple of minutes, but his replies were surly at best.
“When can I leave here, man?” he asked me.
“Soon,” I replied. It was only a half truth. If Elliot’s fears about his safety were real, my guess was that we’d be moving him soon enough, but only to another safe house. Until his trial, Atys was going to have to get used to staring at TVs in unfamiliar rooms. Pretty soon, though, he wouldn’t be my concern. I was getting nowhere fast with the witnesses.
“You know Mobley’s dead?”
“Yeah, I heard. I’m all cut up.”
“Not as cut up as he is. You got any idea who might have done a thing like that to him?”
“No I ain’t, but you find out you let me know. I want to shake the man’s hand, m’sayin?”
He hung up. I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve. It would take me more than an hour to get to Antioch. I tossed a mental coin and decided to go.
• • •
The Carolina Klans, in common with klaverns across the country, had been in decline for the best part of twenty years. In the case of the Carolinas the decline could be dated back to November 1979, when five Communist Workers died in a shootout with Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina. The anti-Klan movements assumed a new momentum in the aftermath while Klan membership continued to drop, and on those occasions when Klansmen took to the streets they were vastly outnumbered by protesters. Most of the recent Klan rallies in South Carolina had been the work of the Indiana-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, since the local Carolina Knights had demonstrated a reluctance to become involved.
But against their decline had to be set the fact that over thirty black churches had been burned in South Carolina since 1991 and Klansmen had been linked to at least two of those burnings, in Williamsburg and Clarendon counties. In other words, the Klan may have been dying on its feet, but the hatred that it represented was still alive and well. Now Bowen was trying to give that hatred a new momentum, and a new focus. If the news reports were to be believed, he was succeeding.
Antioch didn’t look like it had too much to recommend it at the best of times. It resembled the suburb of a town that didn’t exist: there were houses, and streets that somebody had taken the trouble to name, but none of the larger malls or town centers that might have been expected to grow up alongside them. Instead, the section of 119 that passed through Antioch had sprouted small strip malls like clumps of mushrooms, boasting between them little more than a couple of gas stations, a video store, a pair of convenience stores, a bar, and a laundromat.
It looked like I had missed the parade, but midway along the strip was a green square surrounded by a wire fence and untended trees. Cars were parked nearby, maybe sixty in all, and a makeshift stage had been created on the back of a flatbed truck from which a man was addressing the crowd. A group of about eighty or ninety, consisting mostly of men but with some women scattered throughout, stood before the stage listening to the speaker. A handful wore white robes but most of them were dressed in their usual T-shirts and jeans. The men in the robes were sweating visibly beneath the cheap polyester. A crowd of fifty or sixty protesters stood some distance away, kept back from Bowen’s people by a line of police. Some were chanting and catcalling, but the man speaking from the stage never broke his stride.
Roger Bowen had a thick brown mustache and wavy brown hair, and he looked like he kept himself in good condition. He wore a red shirt and blue jeans, but despite the heat his shirt appeared to be unsullied by sweat. He was flanked by two men who led the occasional bursts of applause when he said something particularly important, which seemed to be about every three minutes, judging by his aides. Each time they applauded, Bowen looked to his feet and shook his head, as if embarrassed by their enthusiasm yet unwilling to curb it. I spotted the cameraman from the Richland County lockup close by the stage with a pretty blond reporter close by. He was still wearing his fatigues, but this time nobody was giving him a hard time over them.
I had a CD playing in the car at top volume as I cruised in. I’d chosen it especially for the occasion. My timing was pretty good. Joey Ramone’s girl had gone to LA and never come back, and Joey was blaming the KKK for taking his baby away just as I swung into the parking lot.
Bowen paused in his speech and stared over in my direction. A considerable portion of the crowd followed his gaze. A guy with a shaven head and wearing a black “Blitzkrieg” T-shirt approached the car and asked politely but firmly if I would turn the music down. I killed the engine, cutting the music off, then stepped from the car. Bowen kept looking in my direction for about another ten seconds, then continued his speech.
Perhaps he was conscious of the media presence, but Bowen appeared to be keeping the invective to a minimum. True, he tossed in references to Jews and “coloreds,” talked of how non-Christians had seized control of the government at the expense of white people, and spoke of AIDS as a visitation from God, but he steered away from the worst racial slurs. It was only as his speech reached its close that he got to his main point.
“There is a man, my friends, a good man, a Christian man, a man of God, who is being persecuted for daring to say that homosexuality and abortion and the mixing of races is against the will of the Lord. A show trial is being organized in the state of Maine to bring this man down and we have evidence, my friends, hard evidence, that his capture was funded by Jews.” Bowen waved some papers that looked vaguely legal in form. “His name, and I hope you know it already, is Aaron Faulkner. Now they’ve said some things about him. They’ve called him a murderer and a sadist. They have tried to smear his name, to drag him down before his trial has even begun. They are doing this because they have no proof against him and are trying to poison the minds of the weak so that he will be found guilty before he even has the chance to defend himself. The Reverend Faulkner’s message is one that we should all take to heart, because we know it is right and true. Homosexuality is against God’s law. Baby killing is against God’s law. The mixing of bloods, the undermining of the institutions of marriage and the family, the elevation of non-Christian worship above the one true religion of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, all are against God’s law, and this man, the Reverend Faulkner, has taken a stand against it. Now his only hope for a fair trial is if he can assemble himself the best defense possible, and to do that he needs funds to get himself out of jail and pay the finest attorneys that money can buy. And that’s where you folks come in: you give what you can. I count maybe one hundred here. You give twenty bucks each, and I know that’s a lot for some of you people, and we got two thousand dollars. If those of you that can afford it give a little more, well, then that’s all for the better.
“Because you mark my words: it is not just one man who is facing a false trial. It is a way of life. It is our way of life, our beliefs, our faith, our futures that will be on trial in that courtroom. The Reverend Aaron Faulkner represents us all, and if he falls, then we fall with him. God is with us. God will give us strength. Hail Victory! Hail Victory!”
The chant was taken up by the crowd as men moved among them with buckets, collecting donations. I saw the odd ten or five slipped in, but most gave twenties, even fifties or hundreds. At a conservative estimate, I reckoned Bowen’s work this afternoon had probably made three thousand dollars. According to that day’s paper, which had carried some advance coverage of the rally, Bowen’s people had been working flat out since shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, encouraging everything from yard sales and bake-offs to a draw for a new Dodge truck donated by a sympathetic auto dealer, with thousands of tickets already sold at twenty dollars a pop. Bowen had even succeeded in galvanizing into action those who would not usually have been drawn to his cause, the vast constituency of the faithful who saw in Faulkner a man of God being persecuted for beliefs that were similar, if not identical, to their own. Bowen had taken Faulkner’s arrest and approaching trial and made it a matter of faith and goodness, a battle between those who feared and loved the Lord and those who had turned their backs on Him. When the subject of violence was raised Bowen usually skirted the issue, arguing that Faulkner’s message was pure and that he could not be held accountable for the actions of others, even if those actions were justified in many cases. Racist insults would be kept for the old guard and for those occasions where TV cameras and microphones were absent or forbidden. Today, he was preaching to the new converts and those who had yet to be converted.
Bowen stepped from the stage and people moved forward to shake his hand. Just inside the gate, two trestle tables had been set up so that the women behind them could display the items they had brought for sale: Johnny Reb flags, Nazi battle flags decorated with eagles and swastikas, bumper stickers announcing that the driver was WHITE BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY GRACE. There were also cassettes and CDs of country and western music, although I figured that they weren’t the kind Louis would have wanted in his collection. Pretty soon, the two women were doing steady business.
A man appeared at my side. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt, with a baseball cap perched incongruously on his head. His skin was reddish purple, and peeling badly. Clumps of fair hair hung on grimly to his skull like sparse vegetation on a hostile landscape. Shades concealed his eyes. I could see an earpiece in his left ear, connected to a unit at his belt. Immediately, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was the strangeness of his appearance, but there was a sense of unreality about him. There was also a smell emanating from him, like the odor left after an oil fire has been extinguished.
He smelled of slow burning.
“Mr. Bowen would like to talk to you,” he said.
“It was the Ramones,” I said. “On the CD player. I’ll make him a copy if he’d like it.”
He didn’t blink.
“Like I said, Mr. Bowen wants to talk to you.”
I shrugged and followed him through the crowd. Bowen had almost finished glad-handing the troops, and as I watched, he stepped behind the truck to a small area enclosed by a white tarp that stretched from the bed of the truck. Beneath it were chairs, a portable a/c unit, and a table with a cooler on top. I was shown through to Bowen, who sat in one of the chairs sipping from a can of Pepsi. The cap-wearing man stayed but the other people bustling outside moved away to give us some privacy. Bowen offered me a drink. I declined.
“We didn’t expect to see you down here today, Mr. Parker,” he said. “You considering joining our cause?”
“I don’t see much of one,” I said, “unless you call hustling rednecks for dimes a cause.”
Bowen exchanged a look of mock disappointment with the other man. There was blood in Bowen’s eyes. Although he was ostensibly in charge, he appeared to defer to the man in the suit. Even his posture suggested that he was somehow afraid of him, his body turned slightly away from the other man, his head lowered. He looked like a cowering dog.
“I should have introduced you,” he said. “Mr. Parker, this is Mr. Kittim. Sooner or later, Mr. Kittim is going to teach you a harsh lesson.”
Kittim removed his sunglasses. The eyes revealed were empty and green, like raw, flawed emeralds.
“Forgive me if I don’t shake hands,” I said to him. “You look like bits of you might start to drop off.”
Kittim didn’t react, but the smell of oil grew stronger. Even Bowen’s nose wrinkled slightly.
Bowen finished his cola and tossed it in the garbage bag.
“Why are you here, Mr. Parker? If I was to get up on that stage and announce to the crowd who you are, I think your chances of getting back to Charleston unscathed would be very slim.”
Maybe I should have been surprised that Bowen knew that I was staying in Charleston, but I wasn’t.
“Keeping track of my movements, Bowen? I’m flattered. By the way, it’s not a stage. It’s a truck. Don’t get above yourself. You want to tell the morons who I am, go right ahead. The TV cameras will eat it up. As for why I’m here, I wanted to take a look at you, see if you’re really as dumb as you seem to be.”
“Why am I dumb?”
“Because you’re aligning yourself with Faulkner, and if you were smart you’d see that he’s crazy, even crazier than your friend here.”
Bowen’s eyes flicked toward the other man. “I don’t think Mr. Kittim is crazy,” he said. The words left a sour taste in his mouth. I could see it in the curl of his lips.
I followed his glance. There were flakes of dried skin caught in Kittim’s remaining hair and his face almost throbbed with the pain of his condition. He seemed to be slowly disintegrating. His was a Catch-22 situation: looking and feeling the way he did, he’d have to be crazy not to be crazy.
“The Reverend Faulkner is a man unjustly persecuted,” resumed Bowen. “All I want to see is justice done, and justice will result in his vindication and release.”
“Justice is blind, not stupid, Bowen.”
“Sometimes it’s both.” He stood up. We were almost the same height but he was broader than I was. “The Reverend Faulkner is about to become a figurehead for a new movement, a unifying force. We’re bringing more people into our fold day by day. With people come money and power and influence. This isn’t complex, Mr. Parker. It’s very simple. Faulkner is the means. I am the end. Now, I’d advise you to go and take in some of the sights of South Carolina while you still can. I have a feeling it may be the last chance that you have. Mr. Kittim will escort you back to your car.”
With Kittim at my side, I walked through the crowd. The TV crews had packed up and left. Children had joined the celebrations, running in between the legs of their parents. Music was playing from the trestle tables, country music that spoke of war and vengeance. Barbecues had been set up, and the smell of burning meat filled the air. Close by one of them, a man with slicked-back hair bit greedily into a hot dog. I looked away before he could see me staring at him. I recognized him as the man who had followed me from the airport to Charleston Place and who had then pointed me out to Earl Larousse Jr. Both Atys Jones and Willie Wyman had confirmed to me that the late Landron Mobley, in addition to being a client of Elliot’s, had been one of Bowen’s attack dogs. Mobley, it seemed, had also been helping the Larousses hunt down Atys before Marianne’s death. Now another link between the Larousses and Bowen had been revealed.
At my car I turned to Kittim. He had replaced his sunglasses, obscuring his eyes. An object lay on the ground between us. He pointed his finger at it.
“You dropped something,” said Kittim.
It was a black skullcap, ringed with a red and gold band. Blood had soaked into it. It hadn’t been there when I’d parked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I suggest you take it with you. I’m sure you know some old kikes who’d be glad to receive it. It might answer some questions that they have.”
He backed away from me, made a pistol from the finger and thumb of his right hand, then fired it at me as a farewell.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
I picked up the skullcap from the ground and wiped the dirt from it. There was no name inside it, but I knew that it could only have come from one source. I drove as far as the nearest strip mall and made a call to New York.
• • •
When the end of the working day came with no contact from Elliot, I decided to go looking for him. I drove out to his house, but the workmen hadn’t seen him since the day before, and as far as they could tell, he hadn’t slept in the house the previous night. I headed back to Charleston and decided to check the tag number of Elliot’s dining companion from earlier in the week. I took out my laptop, and ignoring the E-mail notifications, went straight to the Web. I entered the license plate on three databases, including the huge NCI and CDB Infotek services as well as SubTrace, which flirted with illegality and was more expensive than regular searches but was faster too. I red-flagged the SubTrace request and got a response less than an hour later. Elliot had been arguing with one Adele Foster of 1200 Bees Tree Drive, Charleston. I found Bees Tree on my DeLorme street atlas and headed out.
Number 1200 was an impressive classical revival tabby manse that must have been more than a century old, its facade constructed from a mixture of oyster shell and lime mortar and dominated by a two-tiered entry porch supported by slender white columns. The SUV was parked to the right of the house. I walked slowly up the central staircase, stood in the shade of the porch, and rang the doorbell. The sound of it echoed in the hallway beyond, eventually losing itself in the sound of firm footsteps on the boards before the door opened. I half-expected Hattie McDaniel to be standing before me in a pinafore, but instead it was the woman I had seen arguing with Elliot Norton on my first night in town. Behind her, dark wood extended through the empty white hallway like muddy water through snow.
“Yes?”
And suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I had come here, except that I couldn’t find Elliot and something told me that the argument I had witnessed went beyond any professional issue, that there was more between them than a typical client-lawyer relationship. Also, seeing her up close for the first time, I was confirmed in another suspicion that I had: she was wearing widow’s weeds. All she needed was a hat and a veil and the look would have been complete.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.”
I was about to reach into my pocket for ID but a movement on her face stopped me. Her expression didn’t soften, exactly, but something flashed across it, like a tree moving in the wind that briefly allows moonlight to flash through its branches and illuminate the bare ground beneath.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said softly. “You’re the one that he hired.”
“If you mean Elliot Norton, then yes, I’m the one.”
“Did he send you here?” There was no hostility in the question. Instead, I thought there was something almost plaintive in it.
“No, I saw you… talking to him in a restaurant two nights ago.”
Briefly, she smiled. “I’m not sure that ‘talking’ was what we were doing. Did he tell you who I was?”
“To be honest, I didn’t tell him that I’d seen you together, but I made a note of your license plate.”
She pursed her lips. “How very farsighted of you. Is that how you usually behave: making notes on women you’ve never met?”
If she was expecting me to act embarrassed, she was disappointed.
“Sometimes,” I said. “I’m trying to give it up, but the flesh is weak.”
“So why are you here?”
“I was wondering if you might have seen Elliot.”
Instantly, there was worry on her face.
“Not since that night. Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. Can I come in, Ms. Foster?”
She blinked. “How do you know my name? No, let me guess, the same way you found out where I live, right? Jesus, nothing’s private anymore.”
I waited, anticipating the closing of the door in my face. Instead, she stepped to one side and gestured for me to enter. I followed her into the hallway and the door closed softly behind me.
There was no furniture in the hall, not even a hat stand. Before me, a staircase swept up to the second floor and the bedrooms. To my right was a dining room, a bare table surrounded by ten chairs at its center. To my left was a living room. I followed her into it. She took a seat at one end of a pale gold couch, and I eased myself into an armchair close by. Somewhere, a clock ticked, but otherwise the house was silent.
“Elliot’s missing?”
“I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.”
She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.
“And you thought that I might know where he is?”
“You met him for dinner. I figured that you might be friends.”
“What kind of friends?”
“The kind that have dinner together. What do you want me to say, Ms. Foster?”
“I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.”
I started to apologize but she waved it away. “It’s not important,” she said. “I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?”
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.
“Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.” She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “We all are.”
“Can I ask what happened?”
She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. “He killed himself.” She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.”
She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.
“Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.”
I waited.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “But if Elliot’s gone…”
The way that she said the word “gone” made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.
“Elliot was my lover,” she said at last.
“Was?”
“It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”
“When did it begin?”
“Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”
“Did your husband know?”
She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”
“To Elliot?”
“He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”
“How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”
“That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”
“So why were you arguing with him at dinner?”
She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.
“Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”
The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.
“What do you mean by ‘them all’?”
“Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”
“Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.
Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.”
“What happened to Grady Truett?”
“Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”
“And you think the two deaths are connected?”
“Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.”
“Were any of them close to Marianne Larousse?”
“No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.”
“And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?”
She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.
“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”
“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”
“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”
“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”
Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents.
The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.
Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.
Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.
But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.
“Her,” she said. “He was afraid of her.”
• • •
We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.
“Did you show these to the police?”
She shook her head. “Elliot told me not to.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.”
I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.
“Is this a real place?”
She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.”
“I can’t do that until I find him.”
“I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.”
This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.
She scowled. “He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No—” she corrected herself—“I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.”
And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.
“You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?”
“No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.”
I laid the drawings down carefully on the table.
“You know where he might have gone?”
“I followed him, two or three times. He always went to the same place, because it was where Mobley liked to go when he was in town. It’s called LapLand.”
And while I sat talking to Adele Foster, surrounded by images of spectral women, a disheveled man wearing a bright red shirt, blue jeans, and battered sneakers strolled up Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of New York and stood in the shadow of the Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York. It was a warm evening and he had taken a cab down here, electing not to endure the heat and discomfort of the subway. A daisy chain of children floated by, suspended between two women wearing T-shirts identifying them as members of a Jewish community group. One of the children, a little girl with dark curls, smiled up at him as she passed and he smiled back at her, watching her as she was carried around the corner and out of his sight.
He walked up the steps, opened the door, and moved into the neo-Gothic main hall. He heard footsteps approach from behind and turned to see an old man with a sweeping brush in his hand.
“Can I help you?” said the cleaner.
The visitor spoke.
“I’m looking for Ben Epstein,” he said.
“He is not here,” came the reply.
“But he does come here?”
“Sometimes,” the old man conceded.
“You expecting him this evening?”
“Maybe. He comes, he goes.”
The visitor found a chair in the shadows, turned it so that its back was facing the door, and sat down carefully upon it, wincing slightly as he lowered himself down. He rested his chin on his forearms and regarded the old man.
“I’ll wait. I’m very patient.”
The old man shrugged, and began sweeping.
Five minutes went by.
“Hey,” said the visitor. “I said I was patient, not made of fucking stone. Go call Epstein.”
The old man flinched but kept sweeping.
“I can’t help you.”
“I think you can,” said the visitor, and his tone made the old man freeze. The visitor had not moved, but the geniality and passivity that had made the little girl smile at him was now entirely gone. “You tell him it’s about Faulkner. He’ll come.”
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again there was only spiraling dust where the old man had stood.
Angel closed his eyes again, and waited.
It was almost seven when Epstein arrived, accompanied by two men whose loose shirts did not quite manage to hide the weapons they carried. When he saw the man seated on the chair, Epstein relaxed and indicated to his companions that they could leave him be. Then he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Angel.
“You know who I am?” asked Angel.
“I know,” said Epstein. “You are called Angel. A strange name, I think, for I see nothing angelic about you.”
“There’s nothing angelic to see. Why the guns?”
“We are under threat. We believe we have already lost a young man to our enemies. Now we may have found the man responsible for his death. Did Parker send you?”
“No, I came here alone. Why would you think Parker sent me?”
Epstein looked surprised. “We spoke with him, not long before we learned of your presence here. We assumed that the two occurrences were related.”
“Great minds thinking alike, I guess.”
Epstein sighed. “He quoted Torah to me once. I was impressed. You, I think, even with your great mind, will not be quoting Torah. Or Kaballah.”
“No,” admitted Angel.
“I was reading, before I came to you: the Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Brightness. I have long been considering its significance, more often now since the death of my own son. I had hoped to find meaning in his sufferings, but I am not wise enough to understand what is written.”
“You think suffering has to have meaning?”
“Everything has meaning. All things are the work of the Divine.”
“In that case, I got some harsh words to say to the Divine when I see Him.”
Epstein spread his hands. “Say them. He is always listening, always watching.”
“I don’t think so. You think He was listening and watching when your son died? Or worse: maybe He was and just decided not to do anything about it.”
The old man winced involuntarily at the hurt that Angel’s words caused him, but the younger man did not appear to notice. Epstein took in the rage and grief on his face. “Are you talking about my son, or yourself?” he asked gently.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“He is the Creator: all things come from Him. I do not pretend to know the ways of the Divine. That is why I read Kaballah. I do not yet understand all that it says, but I am beginning to comprehend a little.”
“And what does it say to explain the torture and death of your son?”
This time, even Angel recognized the pain that he had caused.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reddening. “Sometimes, I get angry.”
Epstein nodded—“I too get angry.”—then resumed.
“I think it speaks of harmony between the upper and lower worlds, between the visible and the unseen, between good and evil. World above, world below, with angels moving in between. Real angels, not nominal ones.”
He smiled.
“And because of what I have read I wonder, sometimes, about the nature of your friend Parker. It is written in the Zohar that angels must put on the garment of this world when they walk upon it. I wonder now if this is true of angels both good and evil, that both hosts must walk this world in disguise. It is said of the dark angels that they will be consumed by another manifestation, the destroying angels, armed with plagues and the avenging wrath of the fury of the Divine, two hosts of His servants fighting against one another, for the Almighty created evil to serve His purposes, just as He created good. I must believe that or else the death of my son has no meaning. I must believe that his suffering is part of a larger pattern that I cannot comprehend, a sacrifice in the name of the greater, ultimate good.”
He leaned forward on his chair.
“Perhaps your friend is such an angel,” he concluded. “An agent of the Divine: a destroyer, yet a restorer of the harmony between worlds. Perhaps, just as his true nature is hidden from us, so too it may be hidden even from himself.”
“I don’t think Parker is an angel,” said Angel. “I don’t think he does either. If he starts saying he is, his girlfriend will have him committed.”
“You think these are an old man’s fancies? Perhaps they are. An old man’s fancies, then.” He dismissed them with a graceful sweep of his hand. “So why are you here, Mr. Angel?”
“To ask for something.”
“I will give you all that I can. You punished the one who took my son from me.” For it was Angel who had killed Pudd, who had in turn killed Epstein’s son Yossi; Pudd, or Leonard, the son of Aaron Faulkner.
“That’s right,” said Angel. “Now I’m going to kill the one who sent him.”
Epstein blinked once.
“He is in jail.”
“He’s going to be released.”
“If they let him go, men will come. They will protect him, and they will take him out of your reach. He is important to them.”
Angel found himself distracted by the old man’s words. “I don’t understand. Why is he so important?”
“Because of what he represents,” replied Epstein. “Do you know what evil is? It is the absence of empathy: from that, all evil springs. Faulkner is a void, a being completely without empathy, and that is as close to absolute evil as this world can bear. But Faulkner is worse still, for he has the capacity to drain empathy from others. He is like a spiritual vampire, spreading his infection. And such evil draws evil to itself, both men and angels, and that is why they seek to protect him.
“But your friend Parker is tormented by empathy, by his capacity to feel. He is all that Faulkner is not. He is destructive, and angry, but it is a righteous anger, not merely wrath, which is sinful and works against the Divine. I look to your friend and I see a greater purpose in action. If evil and good are both creations of the Almighty, then the evil visited on Parker, the loss of his wife and child, was an instrument of the greater good, just like Yossi’s death. Look at the men that he has hunted down as a result, the peace that he has brought to others, living and dead, the balance that he has restored, all born of the sorrow that he has endured, that he continues to endure. In his response to all that he has suffered, I, for one, see the work of the Divine.”
Angel shook his head in disbelief.
“So this is some kind of test for him, for all of us?”
“No, not a test: an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of salvation, to create that salvation for ourselves, maybe even to become salvation itself.”
“I’m more concerned with this world than the next.”
“There is no difference. They are not separate, but linked. Heaven and hell begin here.”
“Well, one of them sure does.”
“You are a wrathful man, are you not?”
“I’m getting there. I hear another sermon and I’ll arrive.”
Epstein raised his hands in surrender.
“So you are here because you want our help? Our help with what?”
“Roger Bowen.”
Epstein’s smile widened.
“That,” he said, “will be a pleasure.”