I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.
“You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.”
That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.
“Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.”
“They haven’t succeeded yet,” I replied.
For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the under-current to his comments rippled his surface good humor.
“That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.”
“I know.”
He nodded.
“If you’re ever in Virginia…”
“I’ll keep driving.”
He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.
From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love-that much I knew for certain-but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me.
And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.
“It’s Elliot Norton,” she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s an old friend.”
I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.
“Hussy,” I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.
“Excuse me?” said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His southern accent was stronger than I remembered.
“I said ‘hussy.’ It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use ‘whore,’ or ‘leech’ if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.”
“Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?”
“Not usually. By the way, I found a nest of your peers at the bottom of my garden this morning.”
“I won’t even ask. How you doing, Charlie?”
“I’m good. It’s been a while, Elliot.”
Elliot Norton had been an assistant attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office when I was a detective. We had managed to get on pretty well together both professionally and personally on those occasions when our paths crossed, until he got married and moved back home to South Carolina, where he was now practicing law in Charleston. I still received a Christmas card from him each year. I’d met him the previous September for dinner in Boston when he was dealing with the sale of some property in the White Mountains, and had stayed in his house some years before when Susan, my late wife, and I were passing through South Carolina during the early months of our marriage. He was in his late thirties now, prematurely gray and divorced from his wife, a woman named Alicia who was pretty enough to stop traffic on rainy days. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the breakup, although I figured Elliot for the kind of guy who might have strayed from the marital fold on occasion. When we’d had dinner, at Sonsi on Newbury, the girls in their summer dresses passing by the open doors, his eyes had practically been out on stalks, like those of a character in a Tex Avery cartoon.
“Well, we Southern folks tend to keep pretty much to ourselves,” he drawled. “Plus we’re kinda busy, what with keeping the coloreds in check and all.”
“It’s good to have a hobby.”
“That it is. You still private detecting?”
The small talk had come to a pretty sudden end, I thought.
“Some,” I confirmed.
“You in the market for work?”
“Depends upon the kind.”
“I have a client due for trial. I could do with some help.”
“ Maine is a long way from South Carolina, Elliot.”
“That’s why I’m calling you. This isn’t something that the local snoops are too interested in.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“Nineteen-year-old male accused of raping his girlfriend, then beating her to death. His name is Atys Jones. He’s black. His girlfriend was white, and wealthy.”
“That’s pretty bad.”
“He says he didn’t do it.”
“And you believe him?”
“And I believe him.”
“With respect, Elliot, the jails are full of guys who say they didn’t do it.”
“I know. I helped to put some of them away, and I know they did it. But this one’s different. He’s innocent. I’ve bet the homestead on it. Literally: my house is security on his bail.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I need somebody to help me move him to a safe house then look around, check witness statements; someone who isn’t from around here and isn’t likely to be scared off too easy. It’s a week’s work, maybe a day or two more. Look, Charlie, this kid had a death sentence passed on him before he even set foot in a courtroom. As things stand, he may not live to see his trial.”
“Where is he now?”
“ Richland County lockup, but I can’t leave him in there for too much longer. I took over the case from the public defender and now rumor is that some lowlifes from the Skinhead Riviera may try to make a name for themselves by shanking the kid in case I get him off. That’s why I’ve arranged bail. Atys Jones is a sitting duck in Richland.”
I leaned back against the rail of my porch. Walter came out with a rubber bone in his mouth and pressed it into my hand. He wanted to play. I knew how he felt. It was a bright autumn day, my girlfriend was radiant with the knowledge that our first child was slowly growing inside her, and we were pretty comfortable financially. That kind of situation encourages you to kick back for a time and enjoy it while it lasts. I needed Elliot Norton’s client like I needed scorpions in my shoes.
“I don’t know, Elliot. Every time you open your mouth, you give me another good reason to close my ears.”
“Well, while I have your attention you may as well hear the worst of it. The girl’s name was Marianne Larousse. She was Earl Larousse’s daughter.”
With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer.