In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  But by late afternoon another crowd moves into the Quarter. Most of them are innocuous—college kids, service personnel, Midwestern families trying to see past the spielers into the interiors of the strip houses, blue-suited Japanese businessmen hung with cameras, rednecks from dry counties in Mississippi. But there's another kind, too—grifters, Murphy artists, dips and stalls, coke and skag dealers, stables of hookers who work the hotel trade only, and strippers who hook out of taxicabs after 2 a.m.

  They have the franchise on the worm's-eye view of the world. They're usually joyless, indifferent to speculations about mortality, bored with almost all forms of experience. Almost all of them either free-base, mainline, do coke, or smoke crack. Often they straighten out the kinks with black speed.

  They view ordinary people as carnival workers do rubes; they look upon their victims with contempt, sometimes with loathing. Most of them cannot think their way out of a paper bag; but the accuracy of their knowledge about various bondsmen, the hierarchy of the local mob, the law as it applies to themselves, and cops and judges on a pad, is awesome.

  As the streets began to cool and turn purple with shadow, I went from one low-rent club to the next amid the din of Dixieland and rockabilly bands, black kids with clip-on taps dancing on the sidewalk for the tourists, spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests hollering at college boys, "No cover, no minimum, you studs, come on in and get your battery charged."

  Jimmie Ryan's red mustache and florid, good-humored face made you think of a nineteenth-century bartender. But he was also known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you, in one way or another, with any form of illegal activity in New Orleans.

  Inside the crook of both his arms his veins were laced with scar tissue, like flattened gray garden snakes.

  He tilted his straw boater back on his head and drank from his beer. Above him, a topless girl in a sequined G-string danced barefoot on a runway, her hips moving like water to the music from the jukebox, her skin rippled with neon light, her mouth open in feigned ecstasy.

  "How you been, Streak?" he said.

  "Pretty good, Jimmie. How's the life?" I said.

  "I ain't exactly in it anymore. Since I got off the super-fluid, I more or less went to reg'lar employment, you know what I mean? Being a human doorbell for geeks and dipshits has got some serious negative drawbacks, I'm talking about self-esteem here, this town's full of sick people, Streak, who needs it is what I'm trying to say."

  "I see. Look, Jimmie, do you know anybody who might be trying to recruit girls out of the parishes?"

  He leaned his elbows back on the bar. His soft stomach swelled out of his striped vest like a water-filled bottom-heavy balloon.

  "You mean somebody putting together his own stable?" he asked.

  "Maybe."

  "A guy who goes out looking for the country girls, the ones who's waiting for a big sugar daddy or is about to get run out of town, anyway?"

  "Possibly."

  "It don't sound right."

  "Why?"

  "New Orleans is full of them. Why bring in more and drive the prices down?"

  "Maybe this guy does more than just pimp, Jimmie. Maybe he likes to hurt them. You know a guy like that?"

  "We're talking about another type guy now, somebody who operates way down on the bottom of the food chain. When I was in the business of dimeing for somebody, making various kinds of social arrangements around the city, I made it a point not to know no guys like that, in fact, maybe I'm a little bit taken aback here you think I associate with them kind of people."

  "I respect your knowledge and your judgment, Jimmie. That's why I came to you instead of someone else. My problem is two dead girls in Vermilion and Iberia parishes. The same guy may have killed others."

  He removed something from the back of his teeth with his little finger.

  "The city ain't like it used to be," he said. "It's turning to shit."

  "Okay—"

  "Years ago there were certain understandings with New Orleans cops. A guy got caught doing the wrong stuff, I'm talking about sick stuff, molesting a child, robbing and beating up old people, something like that, it didn't go to the jail-house. They stomped the shit out of the guy right there, I mean they left him with his brains running out of his nose.

  "Today, what'd you got? Try to take a stroll by the projects and see what happens. Look, Streak, I don't know what you're looking for, but there's one special kind of cocksucker that comes to mind here, a new kind of guy in the city, why somebody don't walk him outside, maybe punch his ticket real hard, maybe permanent, you know what I'm saying, I don't know the answer to that one, but when you go down to the bus depot, you might think about it, I mean you're from out of town, right, and there ain't nobody, I mean nobody, gonna be upset if this kind of guy maybe gets ripped from his liver to his lights."

  "The bus depot?"

  "You got it. There's three or four of them. One of them stands out like shit in an ice-cream factory. Nothing against colored people."

  I had forgotten what a linguistic experience a conversation with Jimmie the Dime could be.

  He suppressed a beer belch and stared up at the girl on the runway.

  "Could Baby Feet Balboni be involved in this?" I asked.

  He rolled a matchstick on his tongue, looked upward at an oblique angle to a spot on the ceiling.

  "Take a walk with me, breathe the night air, this place is like the inside of an ashtray. Some nights I think somebody poured battery acid in my lungs," he said.

  I walked outside with him. The sidewalks were filled with tourists and revelers drinking beer out of deep paper cups. Jimmie looked up and down the street, blew air out his nose, smoothed his mustache with one knuckle.

  "You're using the names of local personalities now," he said.

  "It stays with me, Jimmie. Nobody'll know where it came from."

  "Anything I might know about this certain man is already public knowledge, so it probably won't do no good for me to be commenting on the issue here."

  "There's no action around here that doesn't get pieced off to Julie one way or another. Why should procuring be any different?"

  "Wrong. There's fifteen-year-old kids in the projects dealing rock, girls, guns, Mexican brown, crank, you name it, the Italians won't fool with it, it's too uncontrollable. You looking for a guy who kills hookers? It ain't Feet, lieutenant. The guy's got sub-zero feelings about people. I saw him wipe up a barroom in Algiers with three guys from the Giacano family who thought they could come on like wise-asses in front of their broads. He didn't even break a sweat. He even stopped stomping on one guy just so he could blow a long fart."

  "Thanks for your time, Jimmie. Get in touch if you hear anything, all right?"

  "What do I know? We're living in sick times. You want my opinion? Open up some prison colonies at the North Pole, where those penguins live. Get rid of the dirt bags, bring back some decency, before the whole city becomes a toilet." He rocked on the balls of his feet. His lips looked purple in the neon glow from the bar, his face an electric red, as though it were flaming from sunburn.

  I gave him my business card. When I was down the block, under the marquee of a pornographic theater, and looked back at him, he was picking his teeth with it.

  I HIT TWO BIKER BARS ACROSS THE RIVER IN ALGIERS, WHERE a few of the mamas hooked so their old men would have the money they needed to deal guns or dope. Why they allowed themselves to be used on that level was anybody's guess. But with some regularity they were chain-whipped, gang-raped, nailed through their hands to trees, and they usually came back for more until sometimes they were murdered and dumped in a swamp. One form of their sad, ongoing victimization probably makes about as much sense as another.

  The ones who would talk to me all had the same odor, like sweaty leather, the warm female scent of unwashed hair, reefer smoke and nicotine, and engine grease rubbed into denim. But they had little knowledge or interest about anything outside of their t
ribal and atavistic world.

  I found a mulatto pimp off Magazine who also ran a shooting gallery that specialized in black-tar heroin, which was selling at twenty-five dollars a hit and was back in fashion with adult addicts who didn't want to join the army of psychotic meltdowns produced by crack in the projects.

  His name was Camel; he had one dead eye, like a colorless marble, and he wore a diamond clipped in one nostril and his hair shaved in ridges and dagger points. He peeled back the shell on a hard-boiled egg with his thumb at the sandwich counter of an old dilapidated grocery and package store with wood-bladed fans on the ceiling. His skin had the bright copper shine of a newly minted penny.

  After he had listened to me for a while, he set his egg on a paper napkin and folded his long fingers reflectively.

  "This is my neighborhood, place where all my friends live, and don't nobody here hurt my ladies," he said.

  "I didn't say they did, Camel. I just want you to tell me if you've heard about anybody who might be recruiting out in the parishes. Maybe a guy who's seriously out of control."

  "I don't get out of the neighborhood much no mo'. Age creeping up on me, I guess."

  "It's been a hot day, partner. My tolerance for bullshit is way down. You're dealing Mexican skag for Julie Balboni, and you know everything that's going on in this town."

  "What's that name again?"

  I looked into his face for a long moment. He scraped at a bit of crust on the comer of his dead eye with his fingernail.

  "You're a smart man, Camel. Tell me honestly, do you think you're going to jerk me around and I'm just going to disappear?"

  He unscrewed the cap on a Tabasco bottle and began dotting drops of hot sauce on his egg.

  "I heard stories about a white guy, they say a strange guy reg'lar peoples in the bidness don't like to fool with," he said.

  "All right—"

  "You're looking in the wrong place."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The guy don't live around here. He sets the girls up on the Airline Highway, in Jefferson Parish, puts one in charge, then comes back to town once in a while to check everything out."

  "I see, a new kind of honor system. What are you trying to feed me, Camel?"

  "You're not hearing me. The reg'lar peoples stay away from him for a reason. His chippies try to short him, they disappear. The word there is disappear, gone from the crib, blipped off the screen. Am I getting this acrost to you all right?"

  "What's his name?"

  "Don't know, don't want to know. Ax yourself something. Why y'all always come to a nigger to solve your problem? We ain't got nothing like that in a black neighborhood."

  "We'll see you around, Camel. Thanks for your help. Say, what's the name of the black guy working the bus depot?"

  "I travel by plane, my man. That's what everybody do today," he said, and licked the top of the peeled egg before he put it in his mouth.

  For years the Airline had been the main highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. When I-10 was built, the Airline became a secondary road and was absorbed back into that quasi-rural slum culture that has always characterized the peckerwood South: ramshackle nightclubs with oyster-shell parking lots; roach-infested motels that feature water beds and pornographic movies and rent rooms by the day or week; truck stops with banks of rubber machines in the restrooms; all-night glaringly lit cafes where the smell of fried food permeates the counters and stools as tangibly as a film of grease.

  I went to three clubs and got nowhere. Each time I walked through the door the bartender's eyes glanced up to meet me as they would somebody who had been expected all evening. As soon as I sat at the bar the girls went to the women's room or out the back door. The electronic noise of the country bands was deafening, the amplified squelch in the microphones like metal raking on a blackboard. When I tried to talk to someone, the person would nod politely in the din as though a man without vocal cords were speaking to him, then go back to his drink or stare in the opposite direction through the layers of cigarette smoke.

  I gave up and walked back to my truck, which was parked between the clapboard side of a nightclub and a squat six-room motel with a small yellow lawn and a dead palm tree by the drive-in registration window. The air smelled of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks by the river, dust from the shell parking lot, liquor and beer from a trash barrel filled with empty bottles. The sky out over the Gulf trembled with dry lightning.

  I didn't hear her behind me.

  "Everybody on the strip knew you were coming two hours ago, cutie," she said.

  I turned and squinted my eyes at her. She drank out of her beer bottle, then puffed off her cigarette. Her face was porcine, her lipstick on crooked, her dyed red hair lacquered like tangled wire on her head. She put one hand on her hip and waited for me to recognize her.

  "Charlotte?"

  "What a memory. Have I tubbed up on you?"

  "No, not really. You're looking good."

  She laughed to herself and blew her cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the dark.

  Thirty years ago she had been a stripper and hooker on Bourbon Street, then the mistress of a loanshark who blew his brains out, the wife of an alcoholic ex-police sergeant who ended up in Angola for doping horses at the Fairgrounds, and the last I heard the operator of a massage parlor in Algiers.

  "What are you doing out here on the Airline?" I said.

  "I run the dump next door," she said, and nodded toward the motel. "Hey, I got to sit down. I really got crocked tonight." She shook a wooden chair loose from the trash pile by the side of the nightclub and sat down in it with her knees splayed and took another drink from her beer bottle. An exhaust fan from a restroom was pinging above her head. "I already heard what you're looking for, Streak. A guy bringing the chickens in from the country, right?"

  "Do you know who he is?"

  "They come and they go. I'm too old to keep track of it anymore."

  "I'd sure like to talk to this guy, Charlotte."

  "Yeah, somebody ought to run an iron hook through his balls, all right, but it's probably not going to happen."

  "Why not?"

  "You got the right juice, the play pen stays open."

  "He's connected?"

  "What do you think?"

  "With the Balboni family?"

  "Maybe. Maybe he's got juice with the cops or politicians. There's lots of ways to stay in business."

  "But one way or another, most of them go down. Right?"

  She raised her beer bottle to her mouth and drank.

  "I don't think anybody is going to be talking about this guy a whole lot," she said. "You hear stories, you know what I mean? That this guy you're looking for is somebody you don't want mad at you, that he can be real hard on his chippies."

  "Is it true?"

  She set her empty bottle down on the shells and placed her hands loosely in her lap. For a moment the alcoholic shine left her eyes and her expression became strangely introverted, as though she were focusing on some forgotten image deep inside herself.

  "When you're in the life, you hear a lot of bad stories, cutie. That's because there aren't many good ones," she said.

  "The man I'm looking for may be a serial killer, Charlotte."

  "That kind of guy is a john, not a pimp, Streak." She leaned on her forearms, puffing on her cigarette, staring at the hundreds of bottle caps pressed into the dirt at her feet. Her lacquered hair was wreathed in smoke. "Go on back home. You won't change anything here. Everybody out on this road signed up for it one way or another."

  "Nobody signed up to be dead."

  She didn't reply. She scratched a mosquito bite on her kneecap and looked at a car approaching the motel registration window.

  "Who's the main man working the bus depot these days?" I said.

  "That's Downtown Bobby Brown. He went up on a short-eyes once. Now he's a pro, a real piece of shit. Go back to your family, Streak, before you start to like your work."


  She flipped her cigarette away backhandedly, got to her feet, straightened her dress on her elephantine hips, winked at me as though she might be leaving a burlesque stage, and walked delicately across the oyster shells toward her motel and the couple who waited impatiently for her in the heat and the dust and the snapping of an electric bug killer over the registration window.

  YOU CAN FIND THE PREDATORS AT THE BUS DEPOT ALMOST ANY time during the twenty-four-hour period. But they operate best during the late hours. That's usually when the adventurers from Vidalia or De Ridder or Wiggins, Mississippi, have run out of money, energy, and hope of finding a place to sleep besides an empty building or an official shelter where they'll be reported as runaways. It's not hard to spot the adventurers, either. The corners of their mouths are downturned, their hair is limp and lies like moist string on their necks; often their hands and thin arms are flecked with home-grown tattoos; they wash under their arms with paper towels and brush their teeth in the depot restroom.

  I watched him walk across the waiting room, a leather satchel slung on a strap over his shoulder, his eyes bright, a rain hat at an angle on his head, his tropical white shirt hanging outside his khakis. A gold cross was painted on the side of his satchel.

  The two girls were white, both blond, dressed in shapeless jeans, tennis shoes without socks, blouses that looked salt-faded and stiff with dried perspiration. When he talked with them, his happy face made me think of a mythical goat-footed balloonman whistling far and wee to children in springtime. Then from his satchel he produced candy bars and ham sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, plums and red apples that would dwarf a child's hand.

  The girls both bent into their sandwiches, then he was sitting next to them, talking without stop, the smile as wide as an ax blade, the eyes bright as an elf's, the gold cross on his satchel winking with light under his black arm.