THERE WAS A message waiting for me when I got back to my hotel. It was from Phil Poveda. He wanted me to call him. He didn’t sound panicked, or fearful. In fact, I thought I detected a note of relief in his voice. First, though, I called Rachel. Bruce Taylor, one of the patrolmen out of Scarborough, was in the kitchen when she answered, drinking coffee and eating a cookie. It made me feel better knowing that the cops were dropping by as MacArthur had promised and that somewhere the Klan Killer was being intolerant of lactose, among other things.
“Wallace has been by a few times as well,” said Rachel.
“How is Mr. Lonelyheart?”
“He went shopping in Freeport. He bought himself a couple of jackets in Ralph’s, some new shirts and ties. He’s a work in progress, but there’s potential there. And Mary really seems to be his type.”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘easygoing.’ Now go away. I have an attractive man in uniform to take care of.”
I hung up and dialed Phil Poveda’s number.
“It’s Parker,” I said, when he picked up the phone.
“Hey,” he replied. “Thanks for calling.” He sounded upbeat, almost cheerful. This was a far cry from the Phil Poveda who had threatened me with a gun two days before. “I’ve just been putting my affairs in order. You know, wills and shit. I’m a pretty wealthy man, I just never knew it. Admittedly, I’ll have to die to capitalize on it, but that’s cool.”
“Mr. Poveda, are you feeling okay?” It was kind of a redundant question. Phil Poveda appeared to be feeling better than okay. Unfortunately, I figured Phil Poveda felt that way because his sanity was falling down around his ears.
“Yeah,” he said, and for the first time a twinge of doubt crept into his voice. “Yeah, I think so. You were right: Elliot’s dead. They found his car. It was on the news.”
I didn’t reply.
“Like you said, that leaves just me and Earl and, unlike Earl, I don’t have my daddy and my Nazi friends to protect me.”
“You mean Bowen.”
“Uh-huh, Bowen and that Aryan freak of his. But they won’t be able to protect him forever. Someday, he’ll find himself alone, and then…”
He let himself trail off before resuming.
“I just want it all to be over.”
“Everything: the killing, the guilt. Hell, the guilt most of all. You got time, we can talk about it. I got time. Not much, though, not much. Time’s running out for me. Time’s running out for all of us.”
I told him I’d be right over. I also wanted to tell him to stay away from the medicine cabinet and any sharp objects, but by then the glimmer of sanity that had briefly shone through had been swallowed up by the dark clouds in his brain. He just said “Cool!” and put down the phone.
I packed my bags and checked out of the hotel. Whatever happened next, I wouldn’t be back in Charleston for a while.
Phil Poveda answered his door wearing shorts, deck shoes, and a white T-shirt depicting Jesus Christ pulling back his robes to reveal the thorn-enclosed heart within.
“Jesus is my savior,” explained Phil. “Every time I look in the mirror, I’m reminded of that fact. He is ready to forgive me.”
Poveda’s pupils had shrunk to the size of pinheads. Whatever he was on was strong stuff. You could have given it to the folks on the Titanic and watched them descend beneath the waves with beatific smiles on their faces. He shepherded me into his neat oak kitchen and made decaf coffee for both of us. For the next hour, his coffee sat untouched beside him. Pretty soon, I’d laid mine aside as well.
After hearing Phil Poveda’s tale, I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat or drink again.
* * *
The bar, Obee’s, is gone now. It was a roadhouse dive off Bluff Road, a place where clean-cut college boys could get five-dollar blow jobs from poor blacks and poorer whites out among the trees that descended in dark concave down to the banks of the Congaree, then return to their buddies, high-fiving and grinning, while the women washed their mouths out from the tap in the yard. But close to where it once stood is a new structure: the Swamp Rat, where Atys Jones and Marianne Larousse spent their last hours together before her death.
The Jones sisters used to drink in Obee’s, though one of them, Addy, was barely seventeen and the older sister, Melia, by a quirk of nature, looked younger still. By then, Addy had already given birth to her son, Atys: the fruit, it appeared, of an ill-fated liaison with one of her momma’s passing boyfriends, the late Davis “Boot” Smoot, a liaison that might have been classified as rape had she seen fit to report it. So Addy had begun to raise the boy with her grandma, for her mother couldn’t bear to look at her. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t be there for her mother to ignore, for on this night all traces of Addy and her sister were about to be erased from this earth.
They were drunk and swaying slightly as they emerged from the bar, a chorus of whistles and catcalls sending them on their way, a boozy wind in their sails. Addy tripped and landed on her ass, and her sister doubled over with laughter. She hauled the younger girl up, her skirt rising to reveal her nakedness, and as they stood swaying they saw the young men packed into the car, the ones in the back climbing over one another to catch a glimpse. Embarrassed and not a little afraid, even in their drunkenness, the laughter of the young women faded and they aimed for the road, their heads down.
They had walked only a few yards when they heard the sound of the car behind them and the headlights picked them out among the stones and fallen pine needles on the road. They looked behind them. The huge twin eyes were almost upon them, and then the car was alongside and one of the rear doors had opened. A hand reached out for Addy, grasping. It tore her dress and drew ragged parallel cuts along her arm.
The girls started running into the undergrowth toward the smell of water and rotting vegetation. The car pulled in by the side of the road, the lights died, and with whoops and war cries, the chase was on.
• • •
“We used to call them whores,” said Poveda. His eyes were still unnaturally bright. “And they were, or as good as. Landron knew all about them. That was why we let him hang out with us, because Landron knew all the whores, the girls who’d let you fuck them for a six-pack of beer, the girls who wouldn’t talk if you maybe had to force them a little. It was Landron who told us about the Jones sisters. One of them had a child, and she couldn’t have been but sixteen when it was born. And the other one, Landron said she was just crying out for it, took it anyway she could. Hell, they didn’t even wear panties. Landron said that was so the men could get in and out easier. I mean, what kind of girls were they, drinking in bars like that, going around buck naked under their skirts? They were advertising it, so why not sell? They might even have enjoyed it, if they’d heard us out. And we’d have paid them. We had money. We didn’t want it for nothing.”
He was in his own place now, no longer Phil Poveda, a late thirty-something software engineer with a paunch and a mortgage. Instead, he was a boy again. He was back with the others, running through the long grass, his breath catching in his throat, feeling the ache at his crotch.
“Hey, hold up!” he cried. “Hold up, we got money!”
And around him, the others cracked up laughing, because it was Phil, and Phil knew how to have a good time. Phil always made them laugh. Phil was a funny guy.
They chased the girls into the Congaree and along Cedar Creek, Truett stumbling and falling into the water, James Foster helping him to his feet again. They caught up with them where the waters began to grow deeper, close by the first of the big cypress trees with their swollen boles. Melia fell, tripping on an exposed root, and before her sister could pull her to her feet they were on them. Addy struck out at the man nearest her, her small fist impacting above his eye, and Landron Mobley hit her so hard in response that he broke her jaw and she fell back, dazed.
“You fucking bitch,” Landron said. “You fucking, fucking bitch.” And there was something in his voice, the low menace, that made the others pause; even Phil, who was struggling to hold on to Melia. And they knew then that it was going down, that there was no turning back. Earl Larousse and Grady Truett held Addy down for Landron while the others stripped her sister. Elliot Norton, Phil, and James Foster looked at each other, then Phil pushed Melia to the ground and soon he, like Landron, was moving inside, the two men falling into a rhythm beside each other while the night insects buzzed around them, attracted by the scent of them, feeding on the men and on the women, and probing at the blood that began to seep into the ground.
It was Phil’s fault, in the end. He was getting off the girl, breathing hard, his face turned away from her, looking toward her sister and her sister’s ruined face, the import of what they were doing gradually dawning on him now that he had spent himself, when suddenly he felt the impact at his groin and he tumbled sideways, the shock already transforming itself into a burning at the pit of his stomach. Then Melia was on her feet and running away from the swamp, heading east toward the Larousse tract and the main road beyond.
Mobley was the first to head after her, then Foster. Elliot, torn between taking his turn with the girl on the ground or stopping her sister, stood unmoving for a time before running after his friends. Grady and Earl were already pushing at each other, joshing as they fought for their chance with Addy.
The purchase of the karst had been an expensive mistake for the Larousse family. The land was honeycombed by underwater streams and caves, and they had almost lost a truck down a sinkhole following a collapse before they discovered that the limestone deposits weren’t even big enough to justify quarrying. Meanwhile, successful mines were being dug in Cayce, about twenty miles upriver, and Wynnsboro, up 77 toward Charlotte, and then there were the tree huggers protesting at the potential threat to the swamp. The Larousses turned their attentions in other directions, leaving the land as a reminder to themselves never to be caught out like that again.
Melia passed some fallen, rusted fencing, and a bullet-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign. Her feet were torn and bleeding, but she kept moving. There were houses beyond the karst, she knew. There would be help for her there, help for her sister. They would come for them and take them to safety and—
She heard the men behind her, closing rapidly. She peered back, still running, and suddenly her toes were no longer on solid ground but were suspended over some deep, dark place. She teetered on the brink of the sinkhole, smelling the filthy, polluted water below, then her balance failed her and she plummeted over the edge. She landed with a splash far below, emerging seconds later choking and coughing, the water burning her eyes, her skin, her privates. She looked up and saw the three men silhouetted against the stars. With slow strokes, she swam for the edges of the hole. She tried to find a handhold, but her fingers kept slipping on the stone. She heard the men talking, and one of them disappeared. Her arms and legs moved slowly as she kept herself afloat in the dank, viscous waters. The burning was getting worse now, and she had trouble keeping her eyes open. From above, there came a new light. She stared up in time to see the rag flare and then the gasoline can was falling, falling…
The sinkholes had, over the years, become a dumping ground for poisons and chemicals, the waste infecting the water supply and slowly, over time, entering the Congaree itself, for all of these hidden streams ultimately connected with the great river. Many of the substances dumped in the hole were dangerous. Some were corrosives, others weedkillers. Most, though, had one thing in common.
They were highly flammable.
The three men stepped back hurriedly as a pillar of flame shot up from the depths of the hole, illuminating the trees, the broken ground, the abandoned machinery, and their faces, shocked and secretly delighted at the effect they had achieved.
One of them wiped his hands on the remains of the old sheet he had torn for use as a wick, trying to rid himself of the worst of the gasoline.
“Fuck her,” said Elliot Norton. He wrapped the rag around a stone and tossed it into the inferno. “Let’s go.”
• • •
I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection.
I was watching a man go insane.
“Go on,” I said. “Finish it.”
• • •
“Finish her,” said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.
“What?”
“Finish her,” repeated Mobley. “Kill her.”
“I can’t do that,” said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.
“You fucked her quick enough,” said Mobley. “You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.” He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.
“Why me?” he whined.
“Why any of us?” asked Mobley.
“I’m not doing it,” said Earl.
Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. “Do it,” said Mobley, “or I’ll kill you instead.”
Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.
Larousse began to cry. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this.”
Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.
“Please,” he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.
“No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now—” He turned his attention back to Larousse. “Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!”
Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.
The girl on the ground was long dead.
“You did good,” said Mobley. The knife was gone. “You’re a regular killer, Earl.” He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. “A regular killer.”
• • •
“Mobley took her away,” said Poveda. “People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a gravedigger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.” He swallowed. “At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.”
“And Melia?” I asked.
“She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.”
“And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?”
He shook his head. “It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.
“But somebody found out,” he concluded. “Somebody’s making us pay. Marianne was killed. James took his own life. Grady got his throat cut. Mobley was murdered, then Elliot. Someone is hunting us down, punishing us. I’m next. That’s why I had to get my affairs in order.”
He smiled.
“I’m leaving it all to charity. You think that’s a good thing to do? I think so. I think it’s a good thing.”
“You could go to the police. You could tell them what you did.”
“No, that’s not the way. I have to wait.”
“I could go to the police.”
He shrugged. “You could, but I’ll just say you made it all up. My lawyer will have me out in a matter of hours, if they even bother to take me in at all, then I’ll be back here, waiting.”
I stood.
“Jesus will forgive me,” said Poveda. “He forgives us all. Doesn’t He?”
Something flickered in his eyes, the last dying thrashing of his sanity before it sank beneath the waves.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if there’s that much forgiveness in the universe.”
The Congaree. The spate of recent deaths. The link between Elliot and Atys Jones. The T-bar in Landron Mobley’s chest, and the smaller version of it that hung from the neck of the man with the damaged eyes.
Tereus. I had to find Tereus.
• • •
The old man still sat on the worn steps of the rooming house, smoking his pipe and watching the traffic go by. I asked him for the number of Tereus’s room.
“Number 8, but he ain’t there,” he told me.
“You know, I think you may be bad luck for me,” I said. “Whenever I come here, Tereus is gone but you’re taking up porch space.”
“Thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face.”
“Yeah, Tereus’s.”
I walked past him and headed up the stairs. He watched me go.
I knocked on the door to 8, but there was no reply. From the rooms at either side I could hear competing radios playing, and stale cooking smells clung to the carpets and the walls. I tried the handle and it turned easily, the door opening onto a room with a single unmade bed, a punch-drunk couch and a gas stove in one corner. There was barely enough room between the stove and the bed for a thin man to squeeze by and look out of the small, grime-caked window. To my left was a toilet and shower stall, both reasonably clean. In fact, the room might have been threadbare, but it wasn’t dirty. Tereus had done his best to make something of it: new drapes hung from the plastic rail at the window, and a cheap framed print of roses in a vase hung on the wall. There was no TV, no radio, no books. The mattress had been torn from the bed and thrown in a corner, and clothes were scattered around the room, but I guessed that whoever had trashed the place had found nothing. Anything of value Tereus owned he kept elsewhere, in his true home.
I was about to leave when the door opened behind me. I turned to find a big, overweight black man in a bright shirt blocking my way out. He had a cigarette in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Behind him, I could see the old man puffing on his pipe.
“Can I help you with something?” asked the man with the bat.
“You the super?”
“I’m the owner, and you’re trespassing.”
“I was looking for somebody.”
“Well, he ain’t here, and you got no right to be in his place.”
“I’m a private detective. My name is—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what your name is. You just get out of here now before I have to defend myself against an unprovoked assault.”
The old man with the pipe chuckled. “Unprovoked assault,” he echoed. “Thass good.” He shook his head in merriment and blew out a puff of smoke.
I walked to the door and the big man stood to one side to let me pass. He still filled most of the doorway and I had to breathe in deeply to squeeze by. He smelled of drain cleaner and Old Spice. I paused at the stairs.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“How come his door is unlocked?”
The man’s face creased in puzzlement. “You didn’t open it?’
“No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.”
The owner turned to the man with the pipe. “Anybody else asking after Tereus?”
“No, sir, just this man.”
“Look, I’m not trying to make any trouble,” I continued. “I just need to talk to Tereus. When was the last time that you saw him?”
“Few days ago,” said the owner, relenting. “Round about eight, after he finished over at the club. He had a pack with him, said he wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.”
“And the door was locked then?”
“Watched him lock it myself.”
Which meant that somebody had entered the building since the death of Atys Jones and had probably done what I had just done: gone into the apartment, either to find Tereus himself or something connected with him.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah, don’t mention it.”
“Unprovoked assault,” said the pipe smoker again. “Thass funny.”
The late afternoon deviants were already assembled in LapLand by the time I arrived, among them an elderly man in a torn shirt who rubbed his hand up and down his beer bottle in a manner that suggested he spent too much time alone thinking about women, and a middle-aged guy in a tatty business suit, his tie already at half-mast, and a shot glass before him. His briefcase lay at his feet. It had fallen open and now stood, slack-jawed, on the floor. It was empty. I wondered when he would pluck up the courage to tell his wife that he’d lost his job, that he’d been spending his days watching pole dancers or low-priced afternoon movies, that she didn’t have to iron his shirts anymore because, hell, he didn’t have to wear a shirt. In fact, he didn’t even have to get out of bed in the mornings if he didn’t feel like it and hey, you got a problem with that then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
I found Lorelei sitting at the bar, waiting for her turn to dance. She didn’t look too happy to see me, but I was used to that. The bartender made a move to intercept me, but I lifted a finger.
“My name’s Parker. You got a problem, you call Willie. Otherwise, back off.”
He backed off.
“Slow afternoon,” I said to Lorelei.
“They’re always slow,” she said, her head turning away from me to signal her lack of interest in engaging me in conversation. I figured that she’d taken an earful from her boss for talking too much the last time I visited, and didn’t want to be seen to repeat her mistake. “The only cash these guys got are nickels and dimes and Canadian quarters.”
“Well then, I guess you’ll be dancing for the love of your art.”
She shook her head and stared back at me over her shoulder. It wasn’t a friendly look.
“You think you’re funny? Maybe even think you got ‘charm’? Well, let me tell you something: you don’t. What you got I see here every night, in every guy who sticks a dollar bill in the crack of my ass. They come in, they think they’re better than me, they maybe even got some fantasy that I’ll look at them and I won’t want to take their money, I’ll just want to take them home and fuck them till their lights go out. Well, that just ain’t gonna happen, and if I don’t put out for free for them, I sure ain’t gonna put out for free for you, so if you want something from me, you show me green.”
She had a point. I put a fifty on the bar, but kept my finger firmly fixed on the nose.
“Call me cautious,” I said. “Last time, I think you reneged on our agreement.”
“You got to talk to Tereus, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I had to go through your boss to get to him. Literally. Where is Tereus?”
Her lips thinned. “You really got it in for that guy, don’t you? You ever get tired of pressuring people?”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’d prefer not to be here. I’d prefer not to be talking to you in this way. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I’m certainly no worse than you, so save the speeches. You don’t want my money? That’s fine.” The music came to a close, and the few customers clapped desultorily as the dancer gathered up her clothes and headed for the dressing room.
“You’re up,” I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.
“He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.”
“So I gather. Where is he?”
“He has a place in town.”
“He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.”
The bartender announced Lorelei’s name, and she grimaced. She slipped from her chair, the fifty still trapped between us.
“He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.”
“Where exactly?”
“You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.”
I released the fifty.
“Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them fucking Nazis.”
I nodded my thanks.
“And I still liked them better than you,” she added.
With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of “Love Child.” She had palmed the fifty.
Obviously, she planned to turn over her new leaf tomorrow.
• • •
Phil Poveda was sitting at his kitchen table that night, two cups of cold coffee still lying untouched close by, when the door opened behind him and he heard the padding of feet. He raised his head, and the lights danced in his eyes. He turned around in his chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The hook was poised above his head, and he recalled, in his final moments, Christ’s words to Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee:
I will make you fishers of men.
Poveda’s lips trembled as he spoke his last words.
“This won’t hurt, will it?”
And the hook descended.