The Clouds Roll Away (12 page)
“He's a snitch. You can't trust him. Anything else?”
“I don't know . . .”
“What?”
“He's your source. I don't want to interfere.”
He grunted. “I can tell.”
“The baggie seems way too light.”
“Snitches never work for free.”
“I mean
really
light. A fraction of what we paid for.” I held the baggie in the palm of my hand. It contained maybe six white rocks, instead of the quarry load that our five hundred bucks should have bought. “I'll put it in an envelope, you can check it later,” I said. “But just so you know, he either kept some cash or some product.”
The detective coughed. Then groaned.
“When's your next surveillance?” I asked.
“Friday. I'll be fine.”
“Yeah,” I said, returning his own words back to him. “You'll be fine. Eventually.”
T
he flat landscape east of Richmond was once a shallow sea, an ancient outwash accepting sediment that eroded from the Appalachian Mountains hundreds of miles to the west. In fact, the sea received so much sediment that a wide plain of thinly layered soils now separated Virginia's extremes of mountain and ocean. On Wednesday, December 13, I drove down Lott Carey Road and searched for a driveway that DeMott assured me was there.
I finally found the dirt road. It was covered with dry walnut shells that exploded under my tires and made the lowland plain seem even more timeless, as if the fallow fields might suddenly bloom with torn and ragged soldiers staggering home from a lost cause, the air still acrid from an incinerated city. As if I could pass wooden grave markers watered by the blood of the dead and dilapidated plantation houses waiting for once-beautiful women to step inside, their faces etched with bitterness.
Out here, it could still be April 1865.
The road came to an end at a cedar-sided rambler with an attached Airstream trailer. Unfettered leaves filled the yard. Cats lounged on the trailer's front steps, tails twitching lazily.
I parked the car, walked through the sibilant leaves, and reached over the cats to knock on the trailer door.
Angela Crell swung it open. “You're early,” she said.
“I can come back.”
“My daughter's not here and I gotta feed Daddy.” She had a raspy voice. “You mind?”
The trailer smelled of cigarettes and that odd molecular odor that clings to new fabric, apparently coming from the sheets of satin hanging from the ceiling. Red, yellow, blue, white. Angela Crell pushed the fabric aside, like a woman swashbuckling through a satin forest.
In the next room, where the trailer connected to the house, an old man sat in a wheelchair. Calico quilts covered his lap. His emaciated face was set like parched clay.
He stared at Angela Crell. Then shifted his eyes toward me.
“Tina's not back yet,” she said in her froggy voice. Loud, as if he were deaf. “It's time to eat.”
His eyes filled with emotion.
“Yeah, somebody's here,” she said. “But don't worry, she just wants some sewing.”
She rummaged through a box on the couch under windows facing the backyard. When she stood, she held a small can, shaking it hard, looking at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were a tremulous green-gray, like tropical fish caught in the netted skin of a devoted smoker. “You're gonna have to hold this a sec.”
Standing next to the man, I could smell his rheumy breath and felt cold air leaking through the thin windows above the couch. Angela Crell snapped open the can, releasing a cloying odor of fake vanilla. She handed the can to me and reached under the man's quilt, pulling out a narrow plastic tube. She pried off the capped end and set a small funnel in the opening. With one hand holding the tube, she balanced the funnel with the other.
“Okay, go ahead, pour.”
The viscous beige fluid filled up the funnel, slowly draining into the narrow tube. I waited, pouring at her direction.
She gave the old man a soft smile.
“Daddy, 'member this song?”
On a table next to the couch, a small radio played. She sang along in her throaty voice, about what the night wind said to a lamb, and I watched her father's eyes reach out with greedy love and gratitude and an attachment that forced me to look away. I did not want to feel anything. Not for this man.
On the windowsill family photographs showed a pretty woman with rolled hair. A small child grinning from a tricycle. A school portrait of a dark-haired girl with eyes like Angela Crell's. The oldest photograph's sepia hues matched the faded leaves outside. Wearing his Confederate cap, the famous general held an unwavering gaze. There was no telling whether the portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest was taken before or after the Civil War, before the South came tumbling down, or after, when Forrest launched plans for his family circle, a poisoned-arrow enterprise named with a confusion of Greek and Scottish words.
The Kuklos Klan.
When the can was empty, Angela Crell lifted the funnel from the tube, her voice rasping with words about goodness and light. She pushed the cap into the tube's end and tucked the quilts around her father.
“Ring the bell if you need anything.” She reached over, turning up the radio.
We wound back through the satin forest to the trailer. Angela lit up a Salem, taking a long drag, sucking hard like somebody coming up from deep water. Beside her on a wide table sat a sewing machine.
I waited, figuring she needed another hit.
She took it and stared at the floor littered with torn thread.
“You wired?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“Are you recording me?”
“No.”
She waved the cigarette. “Whatever. They didn't do it.”
“Who?”
She leaned forward, speaking into my coat. “The Klan did not light up that cross.”
I opened my coat, moving the blazer too. Her eyes lingered on my hip holster. “I'm not wearing a wire. What about the car bomb?”
“Wasn't them neither,” she said.
“Then who was it?”
She gave a tense smile, revealing front teeth that crossed over each other. “I'm only talking to you because some things need setting straight.”
“Things like what?”
“These old guys couldn't light a candle, forget about a cross. You saw my daddy. Does he look like he could do that?”
I glanced around the room, running my eyes over the bright satin. “And you're sewing, what, choir robes?”
She tapped the cigarette against the ashtray. “I'm just saying is, if the FBI's watching my daddy, it's a waste of time. He's done. He can't even talk. The cancer took his tongue. So don't pin this on them.”
“Miss Crell, the Klan left its signature at the crime scene.”
“And you want me to believe you don't got a wire on. You sure do sound like a lawyer.”
“I'm not a lawyer. I don't have a wire.”
She waved the cigarette again.
I gave her a moment, studying her face. Her eyes were electric, cheekbones high, her frame as delicate as a ballerina's. And I'd seen the tender smile she bestowed on her father. But her beauty had a corrosive edge to it, as if the attitudes swirling around her had dripped like battery acid. According to DeMott, she once worked as a nurse, doing hospice in the county. She took care of his grandmother and some of the older black women living on land the Fieldings rented out. DeMott claimed Angela Crell treated her patients equally, black and white, but her seamstress talents were one of those open secrets small places whisper about.
“DeMott says you took care of his grandmother.”
“Good woman,” she said. “I like that family. Well, some of them.”
“And you took care of some black people near Weyanoke.”
She looked at me, disdain in her eyes. “You think I'm okay with them, long as they're dying?”
“I didn't say that.”
She lit another cigarette. “You know what bothers me more? The TV reporters. Making it sound like this guy's totally innocent.”
“Who?”
“That rapper, whatever his name is. I saw the story they did on
Entertainment Tonight
. Made me mad as hell. He talked like he's a victim.”
“He is.”
“You ever listen to his music? My daughter plays it. I hear stuff about how evil the white man is, how great it is to kill cops. If the Klan ever said something like that, I swear, you Feds would come after every last one of them. But this guy does it and makes millions of dollars. Nobody bats an eye. When somebody gives that trash back to him, suddenly he's the victim. Give me a break.”
“Miss Crell, a teenager died in that car. He was incinerated. Judging by the satin you've got in here, somebody's holding Klan meetings.”
She smashed the cigarette in the ashtray. “I'm trying to raise a kid and take care of my daddy. So I take measurements; I sew robes. I don't ask questions. It's how we get by.”
“Do they pick up the robes?”
I saw fear in her eyes.
“You going to haul me into court?”
“I can keep you out of court. With conditions.”
“I knew this was a bad idea.” She lit another cigarette, fingers shaking.
Dropping my voice, I explained how confidential sources worked. If I could rely on her for crucial information, if revealing her name would compromise the FBI's ability to fight crime, I could keep her identity anonymous. “You've leveled with me up to this point,” I said, “and I appreciate it. If you want to stay out of court or jail, keep your business, then . . .”
I let the rest hang in the smoky air.
“I mail the robes,” she said, sighing. “Post office boxes only. Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas.”
“What about Virginia?”
She stared at the floor again. She was a woman who probably never got many choices, who played the hand she was dealt. I saw no ring on her finger, but there was a daughter. No mother, but a father whose neediness pulled like a physical hunger. And a background of bigotry for a nurse who earned a reputation of tenderness and mercy for both white and black patients. Angela Crell knew what most people realize too late: nobody, but nobody, gets out alive.
“You give me your word?” she said.
“Yes.”
She spoke staring at the floor, her voice a low rumble. “My mama sewed the robes before me. She taught me how to work the satin. But when I was grown, the orders stopped coming in. You couldn't support a rabbit. I'd stitch a robe for somebody's funeral, something for the man to be buried in.” She looked up, giving a soft laugh. “Like Jesus would want to see that, right? I went to nursing school and took up the hospice work because it meant I could stay in the county and be here when Tina came home from school. But about three years ago, the orders started coming in. Robes, emblems. Flags. Lots of them. When the doctors found the cancer in Daddy, he needed help and there was enough sewing I could quit nursing and take care of him.”
“So these are new robes, for new recruits?”
Her green eyes filled with turmoil. “You gotta let me keep my business. It's the only support we got.”
“I won't interfere. Where in Virginia are they coming from?”
“I never get their real names. They go by Grand Wizard, stuff like that.”
The trailer door whipped open and a large girl stomped inside. She stared at me, narrowing her gray-green eyes.
“You was supposed to be here an hour ago,” Angela Crell said.
The girl's mouth was red and swollen. “I'm here now.”
“Get in the house and start on dinner.”
The girl stomped through the satin forest and her mother turned to me, speaking loudly enough to be overheard.
“I'll call you when the order's ready,” she said. “About a week. Thanks for stopping by.”
I took my cue, silently handing her my card and walking outside. The cats still roosted on the steps, and the wind was picking up the dead leaves, swirling them in the air, stirring them inside an invisible cauldron.
D
riving back to town, I listened to a voice mail from Milky Lewis, then swung by the Lucky Strike building.
Milky was standing on a six-foot wooden ladder in the art gallery, hanging pictures on the brick walls painted white. In the varnished yellow pine floor, his dark reflected image looked like a shadow.
“You g-gotta help my c-cousin.”
“We're talking about Zennie?” I asked.
“I ever t-talked to you about some other c-cousin?”
“Milky, I'm not sure what you mean by helping her, but that's not really my job. I want to talk with her, but I can't make promises.”
He jumped off the ladder, landing with a shuddering thud. “Sh-she got herself a k-kid. You know that?”
“Let's take this up after the new year,” I said. “I got shifted off that case. And what I'm working right now is urgent.”
“Urgent? That g-girl could die.” He squinted his amber eyes. “I ever asked you for one f-favor?”
“No.”
“No.” He handed me a slip of paper with an address scrawled in blue pen. “T-talk to her. Make her listen.”
Make her listen. Good one. “Milky, if I led you to believeâ”
“Her boy's not but f-five years old.”
I sighed.
“One more thing,” he said. “D-don't make her mad.”
