He didn’t reply, and his partner hustled me on.
My possessions were handed back to me, minus my gun. I was given a slip and told that the gun was not being returned to me for the time being. Through the doors I could see prisoners in jail blues arriving to work on the lawns and clear garbage from the flower beds. I wondered how much trouble I’d have getting a cab.
“You planning on leaving Charleston in the near future?” asked Addams.
“No. Not after this.”
“Well, you make a move and you let us know, y’hear?”
I made for the door but found Addams’s hand resting against my chest. “You remember this, Mr. Parker: I got a bad feeling about you. I made some calls while you was in here and I didn’t like one thing that I heard. I don’t want you starting one of your crusades in Chief Greenberg’s city, you understand me? So just to guard against that, and to make sure that you call on us again when you’re leaving, we’ll be holding on to that Smith 10 of yours until your plane starts heading down the runway. Then maybe we’ll give you your cannon back.”
The hand dropped, and Addams opened the door for me.
“Be seeing you,” he said.
I stopped, frowned, and clicked my fingers.
“Which one were you again?”
“Addams.”
“With one d.”
“Two d s.”
I nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”
When I got back to my hotel I barely had enough energy to undress before I fell into my bed and slept soundly until after ten. I didn’t dream. It was as if the deaths of the night before had never happened.
But Charleston had not yielded up the last of its bodies. While the cockroaches skittered across the cracked sidewalks to hide from the daylight and the last of the night owls made for their beds, a man named Cecil Exley was walking to the site of the small bakery and coffee shop that he owned over on East Bay. There was work to be done, fresh bread and croissants to be baked, and although the clock had not yet struck six, Cecil was already running late.
At the corner of Franklin and Magazine, he began to slow down slightly. The bulk of the old Charleston jail loomed over him, a testament to misery and grief. A low white wall surrounded a yard thick with long grass, at the center of which stood the jail itself. The red bricks that had formed its sidewalks were missing in places, stolen, presumably, by those who felt their need was greater than the demands of history. Twin four-story towers topped with battlements and weeds stood at either side of the locked main gate, its bars and the bars of the windows around and above it stained red with oxidized rust. The concrete had crumbled and fallen from around the frames, exposing the brickwork beneath, as the old building succumbed to slow decay.
Denmark Vesey and his coconspirators in the ill-fated slave revolt of 1822 had been chained up in the whipping house for blacks at the back of the jail before their execution, most of them led to the gallows still proclaiming their innocence and one of them, Bacchus Hammett, even laughing as they placed the noose around his neck. Many others had passed through its gates before and since. There was nowhere else in Charleston, Cecil Exley believed, where the past and the present were so closely linked, where it was possible to stand quietly on an early morning and feel the aftershocks of past violence still shuddering through new days. It was Cecil’s habit to pause occasionally at the gates of the old jail and say a short, silent prayer for those who had languished there at a time when men with skin the color of Cecil’s could not even arrive in Charleston as part of a ship’s crew without being consigned to a cell for the duration of their visit.
To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest but, as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.
“Hey,” said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. “Hey,” he repeated. “You okay in there?”
The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.
“Hey,” said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.
Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood-too much blood to have merely soaked down-on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck.
The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.
20
IT WAS ADAMS who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.”
I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.
“Do you have a time of death?” I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.
“Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV light. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.”
I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.
“You going to talk to the Larousses?”
Adams finished off his toast. “My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.”
“Or maybe even sooner.”
Adams waved a finger at me in warning. “That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.” He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. “But, since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?”
I stayed silent.
“I mean,” he continued, “the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?”
I almost spit in contempt.