In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "I want you to be straight with me, Cholo. Did Feet kill her?" I said.

  "I don't know. I'll tell you what happened the night she got killed, though. They had a big blowup in the motel room. I could hear it coming through the walls. She said she wasn't nobody's chicken, she wanted her own action, her own girls, a place out on Lake Pontchartrain, maybe a spot in a movie.

  So he goes, 'There's broads who'd do an awful lot just to be in the same room with me, Cherry. Maybe you ought to count your blessings.' That's when she started to make fun of him. She said he looked like a whale with hair on it, and besides that, he had a putz like a Vienna sausage.

  "The next thing I know she's roaring out of the place and Julie's yelling into the phone at somebody, I don't know who, all I heard him say was Cherry is a fucking nightmare who's snorting up six hundred dollars' worth of his coke a day and he don't need any more nightmares in his life, particularly a teenage moron who thinks she can go apeshit any time she feels like it."

  "Who killed her, Cholo?"

  He tossed his unfinished po'-boy sandwich at a rusted trash barrel. He missed, and the bread, shrimp, and oysters broke apart on the ground.

  "Come on, lieutenant. You know how it works. A guy like Julie don't do hits. He says something to somebody, then he forgets it. If it's a special kind of job, maybe somebody calls up a geek, a guy with real sick thoughts in his head.

  "Look, you remember a street dip in New Orleans named Tommy Figorelli, people used to call him Tommy Fig, Tommy Fingers, Tommy Five? Used to be a part-time meat cutter in a butcher shop on Louisiana Avenue? He got into trouble for something besides picking pockets, he molested a couple of little girls, and one of them turned out to be related to the Giacano family. So the word went out that Tommy Fig was anybody's fuck, but it wasn't supposed to be no ordinary hit, not for what he done. Did I ever tell you I worked in the kitchen up at Angola? That's right. So when Tommy got taken out, three guys done it, and when that butcher shop opened on Monday morning, it was the day before Christmas, see, Tommy was hung in parts, freeze-dried and clean, all over the shop like tree ornaments.

  "That sounds sick, don't it, but the people who ran the shop didn't have no use for a child molester, either, and to show how they felt, they called up some guys from the Giacano family and they had a party with eggnog and fruitcake and music and Tommy Fig twirling around in pieces on the blades of the ceiling fan.

  "What I'm saying, lieutenant, is I ain't gonna get locked up as a material witness and I ain't going before no grand jury, I been that route before, eight months in the New Orleans city prison, with a half-dozen guys trying to whack me out, even though I was standup and was gonna take the fall for a couple of guys I wouldn't piss on if they was burning to death."

  "You're sure Julie didn't catch up with Cherry LeBlanc later that same night?"

  "It ain't his style. But then—" He poked his tongue into the space where his incisor tooth was broken off—"who knows what goes on in Julie's head? He had the hots for the LeBlanc broad real bad, and she knew how to kick a Coke bottle up his ass. Go to the movies, lieutenant, make up your own mind. Hey, but remember something, okay? I didn't have nothing to do with this movie shit. You seen my rap sheet. When maybe I done something to somebody, I ain't saying I did, the guy had it coming. The big word there is the guy, lieutenant, you understand what I'm saying?"

  I clicked my nails on the plastic cassette that rested on my thigh.

  "A Lafayette detective named Lou Girard was killed last night. Did you hear anything about it?" I said.

  "Who?" he said.

  I said Lou's name again and watched Cholo's face.

  "I never heard of him. Was he a friend of yours or something?"

  "Yes, he was."

  He yawned and watched two black children sailing a Frisbee on the gallery of the grocery store. Then the light of recognition worked its way into his eyes and he looked back at my face.

  "Hey, Loot, old-time lesson from your days at the First District," he said. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, from the New Orleans families does a cop. The guy who pulls something like that ends up a lot worse than Tommy Fig. His parts come off while he's still living."

  He nodded like a sage delivering a universal truth, then hawked, sucked the saliva out of his mouth, and spat a bloody clot out onto the shell.

  A HALF HOUR LATER I CLOSED THE BLINDS IN THE SHERIFF'S empty office and used his VCR to watch the cassette that Cholo had given me. Then I clicked it off, went to the men's room, rinsed my face in the lavatory, and dried it with paper towels.

  "Something wrong, Dave?" a uniformed deputy standing at the urinal said.

  "No, not really," I said. "I look like something's wrong?"

  "There's some kind of stomach flu going around. I thought you might have a touch of it, that's all."

  "No, I'm feeling fine, Harry."

  "That's good," he said, and glanced away from my face.

  I went back inside the sheriff's office, opened the blinds, and watched the traffic on the street, the wind bending the tops of some myrtle trees, a black kid riding his bike down the sidewalk with a fishing rod propped across his handlebars.

  I thought of the liberals I knew who spoke in such a cavalier fashion about pornography, who dismissed it as inconsequential or who somehow associated its existence with the survival of the First Amendment. I wondered what they would have to say about the film I had just watched. I wondered how they would like a theater that showed it to be located in their neighborhoods; I wondered how they would like the patrons of that theater to be around their children.

  Finally I called Rosie at her motel. I told her where I was.

  "Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic film that you need to know about," I said. "Evidently Julie has branched out into some dark stuff."

  "What is it, what do you mean?"

  "It's pretty sadistic, Rosie. It looks like the real thing, too."

  "Can we connect it to Balboni?"

  "I doubt if Cholo would ever testify, but maybe we can find some of the people who made the film."

  "I'll be over in a few minutes."

  "Rosie, I—"

  "You don't think I'm up to looking at it?"

  "I don't know that it'll serve any purpose."

  "If you don't want to hang around, Dave, just stick the tape in my mailbox."

  Twenty minutes later she came through the door in a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a short-sleeve denim shirt with purple and white flowers sewn on it. I closed the blinds again and started the film, except this time I used the fast-forward device to isolate the violent scenes and to get through it as quickly as possible.

  When the screen went blank I pulled the blinds and filled the room with sunlight. Rosie sat very still and erect, her hands in her lap. Her nostrils were pinched when she breathed. Then she stood and looked out the window a moment.

  "The beating of those girls . . . I've never seen anything like that," she said.

  I heard her take a breath and let it out, then she turned back toward me.

  "They weren't acting, were they?" she said.

  "I don't think so. It's too convincing for a low-rent bunch like this."

  "Dave, we've got to get these guys."

  "We will, one way or another."

  She took a Kleenex out of her purse and blew her nose. She blinked, and her eyes were shiny.

  "Excuse me, I have hay fever today," she said.

  "It's that kind of weather."

  Then she had to turn and look out the window again. When she faced me again, her eyes had become impassive.

  "What's the profit margin on a film like this?" she said.

  "I've heard they make an ordinary porno movie for about five grand and get a six-figure return. I don't know about one like this."

  "I'd like to lock up Cholo Manelli as a material witness."

  "Even if we could do it, Rosie, it'd be a waste of time. Cholo's got the thinking powers of a cantaloupe but he doesn't roll over
or cop pleas."

  "You seem to say that almost with admiration."

  "There're worse guys around."

  "I have difficulty sharing your sympathies sometimes, Dave."

  "Look, the film was made around New Orleans somewhere. Those were the docks in Algiers in the background. I'd like to make a copy and send it to N.O.P.D. Vice. They might recognize some of the players. This kind of stuff is their bailiwick, anyway."

  "All right, let's get a print for the Bureau, too. Maybe Balboni's going across state lines with it." Then she picked up her purse and I saw a dark concern come into her face again.

  "I'll buy you a drink," I said.

  "Of what?"

  "Whatever you like."

  "I'm all right, Dave. We don't need to go to any bars."

  "That's up to you. How about a Dr Pepper across the street or a spearmint snowball in the park?"

  "That sounds nice."

  We drove in my truck to the park. The sky was filling with afternoon rain clouds that had the bright sheen of steam. She tried to pretend that she was listening to my conversation, but her eyes seemed locked on a distant spot just above the horizon, as though perhaps she were staring through an inverted telescope at an old atrocity that was always aborning at the wrong moment in her mind.

  I HAD TRIED SEVERAL TIMES THAT DAY TO PURSUE HOGMAN'S peculiar implication about the type of work done by DeWitt Prejean, the chained black man I had seen shot down in the Atchafalaya marsh in 1957. But neither the Opelousas chief of police nor the St. Landry Parish sheriff knew anything that was helpful about DeWitt Prejean, and when I finally reached the old jailer at his house he hung up the phone on me as soon as he recognized my voice.

  Late that afternoon the sleeplessness of the previous night finally caught up with me, and I lay down in the hammock that I had stretched between two shade trees on the edge of the coulee in the backyard. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sound of the water coursing over the rocks and to forget the images from Lou's apartment that seemed to live behind my eyelids like red paint slung from a brush. I could smell the ferns in the coulee, the networks of roots that trailed in the current, the cool odor of wet stone, the periwinkles that ruffled in the grass.

  I had never thought of my coulee as a place where members of the Confederate Signal Corps would gather for a drink on a hot day. But out of the rain clouds and the smell of sulfur and the lightning that had already begun to flicker in the south, I watched the general descend, along with two junior officers, in the wicker basket of an observation balloon, one that looked sewn together from silk cuttings of a half-dozen colors. Five enlisted men moored the basket and balloon to the earth with ropes and helped the general down and handed him a crutch. By the mooring place were a table and chair and telegraph key with a long wire that was attached to the balloon's basket. The balloon tugged upward against its ropes and bobbled and shook in the wind that blew across my neighbor's sugarcane field.

  One of the general's aides helped him to a canvas lawn chair by my hammock and then went away.

  "Magnificent, isn't it?" he said.

  "It surely is," I said.

  "Ladies from all over Louisiana donated their silk dresses for the balloon. The wicker basket was made by an Italian pickle merchant in New Orleans. The view's extraordinary. In the next life I'm coming back as a bird. Would you like to take a ride up?"

  "Not right now, thanks."

  "A bad day for it?"

  "Another time, general."

  "You grieve for your friend?"

  "Yes."

  "You plan revenge, don't you ? "

  "The Lafayette cops are putting it down as a suicide."

  "I want you to listen to me very carefully, lieutenant. No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative."

  "The times you lived in were different, general. This afternoon I watched a film that showed young women being beaten and tortured, perhaps even killed, by sadists and degenerates. This stuff is sold in stores and shown in public theaters. The sonsofbitches who make it are seldom arrested unless they get nailed in a mail sting."

  "I'm not quite sure I follow all your allusions, but let me tell you of an experience we had three days ago. My standard-bearer was a boy of sixteen. He got caught in their crossfire in a fallow cornfield. There was no place for him to hide. He tried to surrender by waving his shirt over his head. They killed him anyway, whether intentionally or by accident, I don't know.

  "By evening we retook the ground and recovered his body. It was torn by miniés as though wild dogs had chewed it. He was so thin you could count his bones with your fingers. In his haversack was his day's ration—a handful of black beans, some roasted acorns, and a dried sweet potato. That's the only food I could provide this boy who followed me unto the death. What do you think I felt toward those who killed him?"

  "Maybe you were justified in your feelings."

  "Yes, that's what I told myself throughout the night or when I remembered the bloodless glow that his skin gave off when we wrapped him for burial. Then an opportunity presented itself from aloft in our balloon I looked down upon a copse of hackberry trees. Hard by a surgeon's tent a dozen federals were squatting along a latrine with their breeches down to their ankles. Two hundred yards up the bayou, unseen by any of them, was one of our boats with a twelve-pounder on its bow. I simply had to tap the order on the telegrapher's key and our gunners would have loaded with grape and raked those poor devils through their own excrement. But that's not our way, is it?"

  "Speak for yourself."

  "Your pretense as cynic is unconvincing."

  "Let me ask you a question, general. The women who donated their dresses and petticoats for your balloon . . . what if they were raped, sodomized, and methodically beaten and you got your hands on the men who did it to them?"

  "They'd be arrested by my provost, tried in a provisional court, and hanged."

  "You wouldn't find that the case today."

  His long, narrow face was perplexed.

  "Why not?" he said.

  "I don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."

  He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.

  "I won't presume to be your conscience," the general said. "But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."

  "I have."

  "I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."

  He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.

  "I'm sorry you feel that way," I said.

  But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.

  The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.

  When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.

  On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At th
e cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy grass and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.

  I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a glass of iced tea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.

  "Where's Alafair?" I said.

  "Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.

  "To the movie location?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.

  "Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

  "Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."

  "He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."

  "I don't want Alafair around him."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."

  "Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Saturday a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."