“They were lovers?”
“Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. “I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Marianne died they’d been screwing around in the front of his Grand Am. They had a fight, she ran off into the trees. He went after her, thought he’d lost her somewhere in the forest, then found her with her head beaten to a pulp.”
“Weapon?”
“Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom-Trojan-matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case any way they can.”
“You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doubt in a jury?”
“Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but…”
I waited. There’s always a “but.” There wouldn’t be a story without one.
“There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.”
He flicked through the piles of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.
“What you got here,” said Elliot, “is a regular blood feud.”
9
THE FIRST FILES were blue and contained witness statements and other material assembled by the police in the aftermath of Marianne Larousse’s death. The historical file was green. Beside it was a slim, white file. I opened it, saw more clearly the photographs that lay within, then closed it carefully. I was not yet ready to deal with the reports on Marianne Larousse’s body.
I had taken on a little defense work in Maine in the past, so I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead of me. Atys Jones would be the most important element, of course, at least to begin with. Defendants will often tell an investigator things that they haven’t even told their attorney, sometimes out of sheer forgetfulness or the stress surrounding their arrest, other times because they trust the investigator more than their lawyer, especially if their lawyer is a hard-pressed public defender already overwhelmed by his or her caseload. The rule of thumb is that any additional information is passed on to the attorney, whether favorable or prejudicial to the case. Elliot had already received some statements and testimonials from those who knew Jones, including schoolteachers and former employers, in an effort to form a favorable profile of his client that could be presented to the jury, so that was a little less donkey work for me to do.
I’d have to go over the police reports with Jones as these would provide the basis for the charges against him, but also because he might pick up on mistakes made or witnesses that had not been contacted. The police reports would also be useful to me in checking statements, since they usually contained the addresses and phone numbers of those to whom the police had spoken. After that, the real legwork would begin: all of those witnesses would have to be reinterviewed because the early police reports were rarely in depth, the cops preferring to leave the detailed interviewing for the prosecutor’s investigators or the primary detective. Signed statements would have to be obtained, and while most witnesses would be willing to talk fewer would be willing to sign their names to a summary of their comments without a struggle. In addition, it was likely that the prosecutor’s investigators had spoken to them already and they often had a way of intimating to witnesses that they should not talk to the defendant’s investigator, placing another barrier in the way. All things considered I had a busy time ahead of me, and I might be able to do little more than scratch the surface of the case before I had to return to Maine.
I pulled the green file toward me and flipped it open. Some of the material inside dated back to the seventeenth century, and the earliest origins of Charleston. The most recent cutting came from1981.
“Somewhere in here may be part of the reason why Marianne Larousse died, and why Atys Jones is going to be tried for her murder,” said Elliot. “This is the weight that they carried with them, whether they knew it or not. This is what destroyed their lives.”
He had been rummaging in his kitchen cabinets as he spoke, and he now returned to the table with his right fist tightly closed.
“But in a way,” said Elliot softly, “this is really why we’re here today.”
And he opened his fist to let a stream of yellow rice cascade onto the tabletop.
Amy Jones
Age 98 when interviewed by Henry Calder in Red Bank, S.C., from “The Age of Slavery: Interviews with Former North and South Carolina Slaves,” ed. Judy and Nancy Buckingham (New Era, 1989)
I was born a slave in Colleton County. My pappy name Andrew and my mammy name Violet. They belong to the Larousse family. Marster Adgar was a good marster to his slaves. Him had about sixty families of slaves before the Yankees come and made a mess out of their lives.
Old Missus tell all the colored people to run. She come to us with a bagful of silver all sew up in a blanket, ’cause the Yankees apt to take all they valuables. She tell us that she couldn’t protect us no longer. They broke in the rice barn and share the rice out, but they not enough rice there to feed all the colored people. Worst nigger men and women follow the army, but us stay and watch the other chillun die.
Us wasn’t ready for what come. Us had no education, no land, no cow, no chicken. Yankees come and take all us had away, left us with freedom. They give us to understand us as free as our master was. Couldn’t write, so us just had to touch the pen and tell what name us wanted to go in. After the war, Marster Adgar give us one-third of what us make, now that us free. Pappy dead just before my mammy. They stay right to plantation and dead there after they free.
But they tole me. They tole me about Old Marster, Marster Adgar’s pappy. They tole me what he done…
To understand the crop is to understand the history, for the history is Carolina Gold.
Rice cultivation began here in the 1680s, when the rice seed reached Carolina from Madagascar. They called it Carolina Gold because of its quality and the color of its hull, and it made the families associated withit wealthy for generations. There were the Englishmen-the Heywards, the Draytons, the Middletons and the Alstons-and the Huguenots, among them the Ravenels, the Manigaults and the Larousses.
The Larousses were scions of Charleston aristocracy, one of a handful of families that controlled virtually all aspects of life in the city, from membership in the St. Cecilia Society to the organization of the social season which lasted from November to May. They valued their name and reputation above all else, and safeguarded both with money and the influence that it bought. They could not have suspected that their great wealth and security would be undermined by the actions of a single slave.