I went back downstairs and was standing in the yard when the police arrived. My gun was back in its holster and I was holding my license and permit. Naturally, the cops took my gun and my phone away and made me sit in a car until the detectives arrived. By now, a crowd had gathered and the uniforms were doing their best to keep them back, the lights on the Crown Vics casting firework glows across the faces and houses. There were a lot of cars because the Charleston PD assigned only one officer to a car, with the exception of the safe streets unit, two officers from which had arrived on the scene within minutes of the call. The mobile crime scene unit, an old converted bookmobile, had also pulled up by the time a pair of detectives from the violent crimes unit decided that they wanted to talk to me.
I had told them to find Atys Jones and they were already looking for him, although not as a potential victim but as a suspect in two further murders. They were wrong, of course. I knew that they were wrong.
At a gas station in South Portland, the hunched man stood over the Nissan and filled the car with twenty dollars’ worth of gas. There was only one other vehicle at the pumps: an ’86 Chevy C-10 with a busted right wing that had cost its new owner the grand total of eleven hundred dollars, half down with the rest to pay by the end of the year. It was the first car Bear had owned in more than half a decade and he was hugely proud of it. Now, instead of bumming rides to the co-op, he was there waiting each morning when they opened up, music blaring from the Chevy’s tinny stereo.
Bear hardly glanced at the other man close by. He had seen enough strange men in prison to know that the best thing to do in their presence was to mind his own business. He gassed the car with money borrowed from his sister, checked the pressure on every tire, then drove away.
Cyrus had paid the bored gas station attendant in advance and was aware that the young man was still watching him, mesmerized by Cyrus’s crooked body. Although used to the revulsion of others, Cyrus still considered it bad manners to be too obvious about it. The boy was lucky that he was safe behind the glass and that Cyrus had other things to occupy him. Still, if he had time he might come back and teach him that it was rude to stare. Cyrus finished fueling, sat in the car, and took his notebook from beneath the seat. He had been keeping careful notes of all that he saw and did, because it was important that he did not forget anything useful.
The boy went into the notebook, along with Cyrus’s other observations that evening: the movements of the redheaded woman in her house and the brief, troubling sighting of the large black man who now shared it with her. It made Cyrus unhappy.
Cyrus didn’t like getting the blood of men upon him.
19
THE HEADQUARTERS OF the Charleston PD occupied a redbrick structure on Lockwood Boulevard, opposite the Joe Riley Stadium and facing out over Brittlebank Park and the Ashley River. The interview room didn’t have much of a view, though, unless you counted the faces of the two irate detectives currently sharing it with me.
To understand the Charleston Police Department, you had to understand Chief Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg had been chief since 1982 and was that contradiction in terms, a popular police chief. In his eighteen years in charge he had introduced a range of innovations that had contributed to containing, and in some cases reducing, the crime rate in Charleston: everything from “Weed and Seed” programs in poorer areas to issuing running shoes to officers to enable them to chase felons more effectively. Homicide rates had consistenly dropped in that time, allowing Charleston to compare favorably with any Southern city of similar size.
Unfortunately, the deaths of Albert, Ginnie, and Samuel Singleton meant that any hopes of matching the previous year’s figures were pretty much gone, and anybody even remotely connected with holing the good ship Crime Statistics below the waterline was likely to be very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.
I was very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.
After an hour spent waiting in a locked patrol car outside the East Side house, I was brought to a room painted in two shades of ugly and furnished by Functional-R-Us. A cup of coffee had since grown cold in front of me. The two detectives who questioned me weren’t noticeably warmer.
“Elliot Norton,” the first repeated. “You say you’re working for Elliot Norton.”
His name was Adams, and there were patches of sweat beneath the arms of his blue shirt. His skin was blue black and his eyes were bloodshot. I’d already told him twice that I was working for Elliot Norton, and we’d gone through Albert’s final words half-a-dozen times, but Adams saw no reason why I shouldn’t do it all again.
“He hired me to do some background work on the Jones case,” I said. “We picked Atys up from the Richland County lockup and took him to the Singleton place. It was supposed to be a temporary safe house.”
“Mistake Number Two,” said Adams ’s partner. His last name was Addams, and he was as pale as his partner was dark. Somebody in the Charleston PD had a warped sense of humor. It was only the third time that he had spoken since the interview had begun.
“What was Mistake Number One?” I asked.
“Getting involved with the Jones case in the first place,” he replied. “Or maybe stepping off the plane at Charleston International. See, now you got three mistakes.”
He smiled. I smiled back. It was only polite.
“Doesn’t it get confusing, you being called Addams and him being called Adams?”
Addams scowled. “No, see I’m A dd ams, with two d s. He’s A d ams, with one d. It’s easy.”
He seemed serious about it. The Charleston PD offered an ascending scale of incentive pay based on educational achievement, from 7 percent for an associate’s degree to 22 percent for a Ph.D. I knew this from reading and re-reading the notices on the board behind Addams’s head. I was guessing that the incentive box on Addams’s pay slip was pretty empty, unless they gave him a nickel a month for his high school diploma.
“So,” his partner resumed, “you pick him up, drop him at the safe house, go back to your hotel…?”
“Clean my teeth, go to bed, get up, check on Atys, make some calls-”
“Who’d you call?”
“Elliot, some people back in Maine.”
“What did you say to Norton?”
“Nothing much. We just touched base. He asked me if I was making any progress and I told him that I was just getting started.”
“Then what did you do?”
We had reached the point, once again, where the paths of truth and untruth diverged. I opted for the middle ground, hoping to pick up the path of truth again later.
“I went to a strip joint.”
Adams ’s right eyebrow made an ecclesiastical arch of disapproval.
“Why’d you do that?”
“I was bored.”
“Norton pay you to go to strip joints?”
“It was my lunch break. I was on my own time.”
“And after?”
“Went back to the hotel. Had dinner. Bed. This morning: tried calling Elliot, had no luck, checked witness statements, went back to my hotel room. The call came about an hour later.”
Adams rose wearily from the table and exchanged a look with his partner.
“Doesn’t sound to me like Norton was getting his money’s worth,” he said.
For the first time, I picked up on his use of the past tense.