“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“How come his door is unlocked?”
The man’s face creased in puzzlement. “You didn’t open it?’
“No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.”
The owner turned to the man with the pipe. “Anybody else asking after Tereus?”
“No, sir, just this man.”
“Look, I’m not trying to make any trouble,” I continued. “I just need to talk to Tereus. When was the last time that you saw him?”
“Few days ago,” said the owner, relenting. “Round about eight, after he finished over at the club. He had a pack with him, said he wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.”
“And the door was locked then?”
“Watched him lock it myself.”
Which meant that somebody had entered the building since the death of Atys Jones and had probably done what I had just done: gone into the apartment, either to find Tereus himself or something connected with him.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah, don’t mention it.”
“Unprovoked assault,” said the pipe smoker again. “Thass funny.”
The late afternoon deviants were already assembled in LapLand by the time I arrived, among them an elderly man in a torn shirt who rubbed his hand up and down his beer bottle in a manner that suggested he spent too much time alone thinking about women, and a middle-aged guy in a tatty business suit, his tie already at half-mast, and a shot glass before him. His briefcase lay at his feet. It had fallen open and now stood, slack-jawed, on the floor. It was empty. I wondered when he would pluck up the courage to tell his wife that he’d lost his job, that he’d been spending his days watching pole dancers or low-priced afternoon movies, that she didn’t have to iron his shirts anymore because, hell, he didn’t have to wear a shirt. In fact, he didn’t even have to get out of bed in the mornings if he didn’t feel like it and hey, you got a problem with that then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
I found Lorelei sitting at the bar, waiting for her turn to dance. She didn’t look too happy to see me, but I was used to that. The bartender made a move to intercept me, but I lifted a finger.
“My name’s Parker. You got a problem, you call Willie. Otherwise, back off.”
He backed off.
“Slow afternoon,” I said to Lorelei.
“They’re always slow,” she said, her head turning away from me to signal her lack of interest in engaging me in conversation. I figured that she’d taken an earful from her boss for talking too much the last time I visited, and didn’t want to be seen to repeat her mistake. “The only cash these guys got are nickels and dimes and Canadian quarters.”
“Well then, I guess you’ll be dancing for the love of your art.”
She shook her head and stared back at me over her shoulder. It wasn’t a friendly look.
“You think you’re funny? Maybe even think you got ‘charm’? Well, let me tell you something: you don’t. What you got I see here every night, in every guy who sticks a dollar bill in the crack of my ass. They come in, they think they’re better than me, they maybe even got some fantasy that I’ll look at them and I won’t want to take their money, I’ll just want to take them home and fuck them till their lights go out. Well, that just ain’t gonna happen, and if I don’t put out for free for them, I sure ain’t gonna put out for free for you, so if you want something from me, you show me green.”
She had a point. I put a fifty on the bar, but kept my finger firmly fixed on the nose.
“Call me cautious,” I said. “Last time, I think you reneged on our agreement.”
“You got to talk to Tereus, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I had to go through your boss to get to him. Literally. Where is Tereus?”
Her lips thinned. “You really got it in for that guy, don’t you? You ever get tired of pressuring people?”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’d prefer not to be here. I’d prefer not to be talking to you in this way. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I’m certainly no worse than you, so save the speeches. You don’t want my money? That’s fine.” The music came to a close, and the few customers clapped desultorily as the dancer gathered up her clothes and headed for the dressing room.
“You’re up,” I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.
“He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.”
“So I gather. Where is he?”
“He has a place in town.”
“He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.”
The bartender announced Lorelei’s name, and she grimaced. She slipped from her chair, the fifty still trapped between us.
“He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.”
“Where exactly?”
“You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.”
I released the fifty.
“Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them fucking Nazis.”
I nodded my thanks.
“And I still liked them better than you,” she added.
With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of “Love Child.” She had palmed the fifty.
Obviously, she planned to turn over her new leaf tomorrow.
Phil Poveda was sitting at his kitchen table that night, two cups of cold coffee still lying untouched close by, when the door opened behind him and he heard the padding of feet. He raised his head, and the lights danced in his eyes. He turned around in his chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The hook was poised above his head, and he recalled, in his final moments, Christ’s words to Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee:
I will make you fishers of men.
Poveda’s lips trembled as he spoke his last words.
“This won’t hurt, will it?”
And the hook descended.
23
I DROVE IN silence to Columbia. There was no music in the car. I seemed to drift along I-26, northwest through Dorchester, Orangeburg, and Calhoun counties, the lights of the cars that passed me in the darkness like flights of fireflies moving in parallel, slowly fading into the distance or lost to the twists and bends of the road.
And everywhere there were trees, and in the blackness beyond their margins the land brooded. How could it not? It had been tainted by its own history, enriched by the bodies of the dead that lay beneath the leaves and the rocks: British and Colonial, Confederate and Union, slave and freeman, the possessor and the possessed. Go north, to York and Lancaster counties, and there were trails once traversed by the night riders, their horses galloping through dirt and water, white-draped, mud-speckled, the riders urging them on, terrorizing, annihilating, stamping the first shoots of a new future into the dirt beneath the horses’ hooves.
And the blood of the dead ran into the earth and clouded the rivers, flowing from the mountain forests of poplar, red maple, and flowering dogwood, the sculpin and dace absorbing it into their system as it passed through their gills; and the river otters that plucked them from the water gulped them down, and the blood with them. It was in the mayflies and stoneflies that darkened the air of the Piedmont Shoals, in the black-sided darters that anchored themselves to the bottom of ponds to avoid being eaten, in the sunfish that hovered near the safety of the spider lilies, the beauty of their white flowers masking their ugly, arachnoid underparts.