Now Landron was dead.
According to Adele Foster, the allegations of improper relationships made against Mobley had come as no surprise to her. She knew what Landron Mobley was like, knew what he liked to do to girls even while he was systematically flunking high school. And though her husband claimed to have cut off all ties with him, she had seen him talking to Landron a couple of weeks before his death, had seen Landron pat him on the arm as he leaned into the car, and had watched as James had passed him a small wad of bills from his wallet. She had confronted him that evening, only to be told that Landron was down on his luck since he’d lost his job, and he had only given him the money so that he would go away and leave James alone. She hadn’t believed him, though, and his patronage of LapLand had only confirmed her suspicions. By that time the distance between husband and wife was growing ever greater, and she had told me that it was to Elliot Norton, not James, that she had confessed her fears about Landron Mobley as she lay beside him in the small room above his office, the room in which he sometimes slept when working on a particularly demanding case but which now, increasingly, he used to satisfy other, more pressing, demands.
“Has he approached you for money?” she asked Elliot.
Elliot looked away. “Landron always needs money.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’ve known Landron for a long time, and yes, I’ve helped him out from time to time.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why?’”
“I don’t understand, that’s all. He wasn’t like the rest of you. I can see why he might have been useful to you when you were young and wild-”
He reached for her then-“I’m still wild”-but she forced him gently away.
“But now,” she continued, “what part can somebody like Landron Mobley have to play in your lives? You should have left him in your past.”
Eliot pushed back the sheets to stand naked in the moonlight, his back to her, and it seemed that his shoulders dropped briefly, the way a man’s shoulders will slump when exhaustion threatens to overcome him and he briefly accedes to it.
And then he said something strange.
“Some things you can’t leave in the past,” he said. “Some things follow you all through your life.”
That was all he said. Seconds later, she heard the sound of the shower from the bathroom, and knew that it was time to leave.
It was the last time that she and Elliot had made love.
But Elliot’s loyalty to Landron Mobley had gone beyond simply helping him out when he needed a few bucks. Elliot was representing his old friend in what could have turned out to be a very nasty rape case, a case now rendered null and void by Mobley’s death. In addition, Elliot appeared willing to destroy a long-standing friendship with Earl Larousse Jr. in order to defend a young black man with whom Elliot had no apparent connection. I pulled out the notes I had made so far and went through them once again, hoping to find something that I might have missed. It was only when I laid the sheets of paper side by side that I noticed one curious correspondence: Davis Smoot had been killed in Alabama only a few days before the disappearance of the Jones sisters in South Carolina. I went back to the notes I had jotted down while talking to Randy Burris about the events surrounding Smoot’s death and the hunt for, and subsequent arrest of, Tereus for the killing. According to what Tereus himself had told me, he had gone down to Alabama to seek the help of Smoot, who had fled South Carolina in February 1980, days after the alleged rape of Addy Jones, and had remained in hiding until at least July 1981, when he was confronted and killed by Tereus. He had denied to prosecutors that his confrontation with Smoot was in any way connected with rumors that Smoot had raped Addy. Addy Jones had subsequently given birth to her son Atys early in August 1980.
There had to be some mistake.
The sound of the cell phone pulled me away. I recognized the number on display immediately. The call was coming from the safe house. I picked it up on the second ring. There was no speech, just a tapping, as if somebody was banging the phone gently on the ground.
Tap-tap-tap.
“Hello?”
Tap-tap-tap.
I picked up my jacket and ran for the parking garage. The gaps between the taps were growing longer now and I knew for certain that the person at the other end was in trouble, that somebody’s strength was fading, and this was the only way that he or she could communicate.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “Hold on. Just hold on.”
There were three young black guys standing outside the safe house when I arrived, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. One of them was carrying a knife and he spun toward me as I ran from the car. He saw the gun in my hand and raised his hand in acquiescence.
“What happened?”
He didn’t answer, but an older guy behind him did.
“We heard glass breaking. We didn’t do nothin’.”
“Keep it that way. Just stay back.”
“Fuck you, man,” was the reply, but they made no further move toward the house.
The front door was locked so I made for the rear of the house. The back door was wide open but undamaged. The kitchen was empty but the ever present lemonade jug now lay shattered on the floor. Flies buzzed around the liquid pooled upon the cheap linoleum.
I found the old man in the living room. There was a sucking hole in his chest and he lay like a black angel lost in his own blood, red wings spreading outward from behind. In his left hand he held the phone while the fingers of his right scraped at the wooden boards. He had scraped so hard that he had torn the nails and drawn blood from his fingers. He was reaching for his wife. I could see her foot in the doorway, the slipper pulled back from her heel by the pressure of her bent toes. There was blood on the back of her leg.
I knelt by the old man and clasped his head, looking for something with which to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound. I was shrugging off my jacket when he reached for my shirt, gripping it tightly in his fist.
“Uh ent gap me mout’!” he whispered. His teeth were pink with blood. “Uh ent gap me mout’!”
I didn’t tell.
“I know,” I said, and I felt my voice break. “I know you didn’t. Who did this, Albert?”
“Plateye,” he hissed. “Plateye.”
He eased his grip on my shirt and reached again for his dead wife.
“Ginnie,” he called.
His voice faded.
“Ginnie,” he repeated, and then he was gone.
I let his head rest on the floor, then stood and moved toward the woman. She lay face down with two holes in the back of her dress: one low to the left of her spine, the other higher, close to her heart. There was no pulse.
I heard a noise on the floor behind me and turned to see one of the boys from outside the house standing in the kitchen doorway.
“Stay out!” I said. “Call 911.”
He took one more look at me, his eyes falling to the body of the old man, then disappeared.
No noise came from upstairs. The couple’s son Samuel, who had driven Atys to the house earlier in the week, lay naked and dead in the bathtub, the shower curtain clenched in his hand and the water from the shower head still beating down upon his face and body. He had taken two shots in the chest. When I searched the four rooms above I could find no trace of Atys, but the window of his room was broken and tiles had been dislodged from the kitchen roof. It looked like he might have jumped, which meant that Atys might still be alive.