DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

"When you were a patrolman. In the Quarter. Julie said he saved your life."

  "He did, huh?"

  Cholo shrugged his shoulders.

  "That's what the man said, lieutenant. What do I know?"

  "Take the hint, Cholo. Our detective isn't a conversationalist," the woman said, without removing her eyes from her cards. She clacked her lacquered nails on the glass tabletop, and her lips made a dry, sucking sound when she puffed on her cigarette.

  "You working on that murder case? The one about that girl?" he said.

  "How'd you know about that?"

  His eyes clicked sideways.

  "It was in the newspaper," he said. "Julie and me was talking about it this morning. Something like that's disgusting. You got a fucking maniac on the loose around here. Somebody ought to take him to a hospital and kill him."

  Baby Feet emerged resplendent from the sliding glass door of his room. He wore a white suit with gray pin stripes, a purple shirt scrolled with gray flowers, a half-dozen gold chains and medallions around his talcumed neck, tasseled loafers that seemed as small on his feet as ballet slippers.

  "You look beautiful, Julie," Cholo said.

  "Fucking A," Baby Feet said, lighting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth with a tiny gold lighter.

  "Can I go with y'all?" Cholo asked.

  "Keep an eye on things here for me."

  "Hey, you told me last night I could go."

  "I need you to take my calls."

  "Margot don't know how to pick up a phone anymore?" Cholo said.

  "My meter's running, Julie," I said.

  "We're going out to dinner tonight with some interesting people," Baby Feet said to Cholo. "You'll enjoy it. Be patient."

  "They're quite excited about the possibility of meeting you. They called and said that, Cholo," the woman said.

  "Margot, why is it you got calluses on your back? Somebody been putting starch in your sheets or something?" Cholo said.

  I started walking toward my truck. The sunlight off the cement by the poolside was blinding. Baby Feet caught up with me. One of his other women dove off the board and splashed water and the smell of chlorine and suntan oil across my back.

  "Hey, I live in a fucking menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don't go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"

  I got in the truck.

  "Where we going, Feet?" I said.

  "Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I'm not the source of any problems you got around here. The coke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it's baby powder. If it was coming from some people I've been associated with in New Orleans, and I'm talking about past associations, you understand, it'd go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."

  I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.

  "I don't work narcotics, Julie, and I'm not good at passing on bullshit, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."

  "Oh, yeah? What girl's that?"

  "The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."

  "I don't guess I heard about it."

  I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the passing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.

  "You don't read the local papers?" I said.

  "I been busy. You saying I talk bullshit, Dave?"

  "Put it this way, Feet. If you've got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."

  He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.

  "We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I'm going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town's flat-ass broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake—" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat from imaginary federal troops. "We're going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don't like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole fucking operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those coonass jackoffs in the Chamber of Commerce."

  "You're telling me you're in the movie business?"

  "Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"

  I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.

  "I'm sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."

  "I'm going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.

  "I don't think I'd be up to it."

  "Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine a.m. on weed or whites, and Mikey's got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain't shitting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."

  I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken's foot on his throat, approached my window.

  "We'll see you, Feet," I said.

  "You don't want to look around?"

  "Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds and drove back through the pecan trees to the highway, the sun's reflection bouncing on my hood like a yellow balloon.

  It happened my second year on the New Orleans police force, when I was a patrolman in the French Quarter and somebody called in a prowler report at an address on Dumaine. The lock on the iron gate was rusted and had been bent out of the jamb with a bar and sprung back on the hinges. Down the narrow brick walkway I could see bits of broken glass, like tiny rat's teeth, where someone had broken out the overhead light bulb. But the courtyard ahead was lighted, filled with the waving shadows of banana trees and palm fronds, and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio or television set.

  I slipped my revolver out of its holster and moved along the coolness of the bricks, through a ticking pool of water, to the entrance of the courtyard, where a second scrolled-iron gate yawned back on its hinges. I could smell the damp earth in the flower beds, spearmint growing against a stucco wall, the thick clumps of purple wisteria that hung from a tile roof.

  Then I smelled him, even before I saw him, an odor that was at once like snuff, synthetic wine, rotting teeth, and stomach bile. He was a huge black man, dressed in a Donald Duck T-shirt, filthy tennis shoes, and a pair of purple slacks that were bursting on his thighs. In his left hand was a drawstring bag filled with goods from the apartment he'd just creeped. He swung the gate with all his weight into my hand, snapped something in it like a Popsicle stick breaking, and sent my revolver skidding across the flagstones.

  I tried to get my baton loose, but it was his show now. He came out of his back pocket with a worn one-inch .38, the grips wrapped with black electrician's tape, and screwed the barrel into my ear. There was a dark clot of blood in his right eye, and his breath slid across the side of my face like an unwashed hand.

  "Get back in the walkway, motherfucker," he whispered.

  We stumbled backward into the gloom. I could hear revelers out on the street, a beer can tinkling along the cement.

  "Don't be a dumb guy," I said.

  "Shut up," he said. Then, almost as an angry afterthought, he drove my head into the bricks. I fell to my knees in the water, my baton twisted uselessly in my belt.

  His eyes were dilated, his hair haloed with sweat, his pulse leaping in his neck. He was a cop's worst possible adversary i
n that situation—strung-out, frightened, and stupid enough to carry a weapon on a simple B & E.

  "Why'd you have to come along, man? Why'd you have to do that?" he said.

  His thumb curled around the spur of the pistol's hammer and I heard the cylinder rotate and the chamber lock into place.

  "There're cops on both ends of the street," I said. "You won't get out of the Quarter."

  "Don't say no more, man. It won't do no good. You messed everything up."

  He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blew out his breath, and pointed the pistol downward at my chest.

  Baby Feet had on only a bathrobe, his jockey underwear, and a pair of loafers without socks when he appeared in the brick walkway behind the black man.

  "What the fuck do you think you're doing here?" he said.

  The black man stepped back, the revolver drifting to his thigh.

  "Mr. Julie?" he said.

  "Yeah. What the fuck you doing? You creeping an apartment in my building?"

  "I didn't know you was living here, Mr. Julie."

  Baby Feet took the revolver out of the black man's hand and eased down the hammer.

  "Walter, if I want to, I can make you piss blood for six months," he said.

  "Yes, suh, I knows that."

  "I'm glad you've taken that attitude. Now, you get your sorry ass out of here." He pushed the black man toward the entrance. "Go on." He kept nudging the black man along the bricks, then he kicked him hard, as fast as a snake striking, between the buttocks. "I said go on, now." He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man's crotch. Tears welled up in the man's eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. "Move it, Walter, unless you want balls the size of coconuts."

  The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the shells from the .38 on the sidewalk, and flung the .38 into the darkness after the black man.

  "Come on upstairs and I'll put your hand in some ice," he said.

  I had found my hat and revolver.

  "I'm going after that guy," I said.

  "Pick him up in the morning. He shines shoes in a barbershop on Calliope and St. Charles. You sure you want to stay in this line of work, Dave?"

  He laughed, lit a purple-and-gold cigarette, and put his round, thick arm over my shoulders.

  The sheriff was right: Baby Feet might be a movie producer, but he could never be dismissed as a thespian.

  Chapter 4

  My brief visit with Julie Balboni should have been a forgettable and minor interlude in my morning. Instead, my conversation with him in the truck had added a disturbing question mark in the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. He said he had heard nothing about it, nor had he read about it in the local newspaper. This was ten minutes after Cholo Manelli had told me that he and Baby Feet had been talking about the girl's death earlier.

  Was Baby Feet lying or was he simply not interested in talking about something that wasn't connected with his well-being? Or had the electroshock therapists in Mandeville overheated Cholo's brain pan?

  My experience with members of the Mafia and sociopaths in general has been that they lie as a matter of course. They are convincing because they often lie when there is no need to. To apply some form of forensic psychology in attempting to understand how they think is as productive as placing your head inside a microwave oven in order to study the nature of electricity.

  I spent the rest of the day retracing the geography of Cherry LeBlanc's last hours and trying to recreate the marginal world in which she had lived. At three that afternoon I parked my truck in the shade by the old wood-frame church in St. Martinville and looked at a color photograph of her that had been given to me by the grandparents. Her hair was black, with a mahogany tint in it, her mouth bright red with too much lipstick, her face soft, slightly plump with baby fat; her dark eyes were bright and masked no hidden thought; she was smiling.

  Busted at sixteen for prostitution, dead at nineteen, I thought. And that's what we knew about. God only knew what else had befallen her in her life. But she wasn't born a prostitute or the kind of girl who would be passed from hand to hand until someone opened a car door for her and drove her deep into a woods, where he revealed to her the instruments of her denouement, perhaps even convinced her that this moment was one she had elected for herself.

  Others had helped her get there. My first vote would be for the father, the child molester, in Mamou. But our legal system looks at nouns, seldom at adverbs.

  I gazed at the spreading oaks in the church's graveyard, where Evangeline and her lover Gabriel were buried. The tombstones were stained with lichen and looked cool and gray in the shade. Beyond the trees, the sun reflected off Bayou Teche like a yellow flame.

  Where was the boyfriend in this? I thought. A girl that pretty either has a beau or there is somebody in her life who would like to be one. She hadn't gone far in school, but necessity must have given her a survivor's instinct about people, about men in particular, certainly about the variety who drifted in and out of a south Louisiana jukejoint.

  She had to know her killer. I was convinced of that.

  I walked to the bar, a ramshackle nineteenth-century wooden building with scaling paint and a sagging upstairs gallery. The inside was dark and cool and almost deserted. A fat black woman was scrubbing the front windows with a brush and a bucket of soap and water. I walked the length of the bar to the small office in back where I had found the owner before. Along the counter in front of the bar's mirror were rows upon rows of bottles—dark green and slender, stoppered with wet corks; obsidian black with arterial-red wax seals; frosted-white, like ice sawed out of a lake; whiskey-brown, singing with heat and light.

  The smell of the green sawdust on the floor, the wood-handled beer taps dripping through an aluminum grate, the Collins mix and the bowls of cherries and sliced limes and oranges, they were only the stuff of memory, I told myself, swallowing. They belong to your Higher Power now. Just like an old girlfriend who winks at you on the street one day, I thought. You already gave her up. You just walk on by. It's that easy.

  But you don't think about it, you don't think about it, you don't think about it.

  The owner was a preoccupied man who combed his black hair straight back on his narrow head and kept his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket. The receipts and whiskey invoices on his desk were a magnet for his eyes. My questions couldn't compete. He kept running his tongue behind his teeth while I talked.

  "So you didn't know anything about her friends?" I said.

  "No, sir. She was here three weeks. They come and they go. That's the way it is. I don't know what else to tell you."

  "Do you know anything about your bartenders?"

  His eyes focused on a spot inside his cigarette smoke.

  "I'm not understanding you," he said.

  "Do you hire a bartender who hangs around with ex-cons or who's in a lot of debt? I suspect you probably don't. Those are the kind of guys who set up their friends with free doubles or make change out of an open drawer without ringing up the sale, aren't they?"

  "What's your point?"

  "Did you know she had been arrested for prostitution?"

  "I didn't know that."

  "You hired her because you thought she was an honor student at USL?"

  The corner of his mouth wrinkled slightly with the beginnings of a smile. He stirred the ashes in the ashtray with the tip of his cigarette.

  "I'll leave you my card and a thought, Mr. Trajan. One way or another we're going to nail the guy who killed her. In the meantime, if he kills somebody else and I find out that you held back information on me, I'll be back with a warrant for your arrest."

  "I don't care for the way you're talking to me."

  I left his office without replying and walked back down the length of the bar. The black woman was now outside, washing the front window. She put down her scrub brush, flung the whole bucket of soapy water on the glass, then began rinsing it off with a hose. Her skin was
the color of burnt brick, her eyes turquoise, her breasts sagging like water-filled balloons inside her cotton-print dress. I opened my badge in my palm.

  "Did you know the white girl Cherry LeBlanc?" I asked.

  "She worked here, ain't she?" She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the glass.

  "Do you know if she had a boyfriend, tante?”

  "If that's what you want to call it."

  "What do you mean?" I asked, already knowing the answer that I didn't want to hear.

  "She in the bidness."

  "Full time, in a serious way?"

  "What you call sellin' out of your pants?"

  "Was Mr. Trajan involved?"

  "Ax him."

  "I don't think he was, otherwise you wouldn't be telling me these things, tante." I smiled at her.

  She began refilling the bucket with clear water. She suddenly looked tired.

  "She a sad girl," she said. She wiped the perspiration off her round face with her palm and looked at it. "I tole her they ain't no amount of money gonna he'p her when some man make her sick, no. I tole her a pretty white girl like her can have anything she want—school, car, a husband wit' a job on them oil rig. When that girl dress up, she look like a movie star. She say, 'Jennifer, some people is suppose' to have only what other people let them have.' Lord God, her age and white and believing somet'ing like that."

  "Who was her pimp, Jennifer?"

  "They come here for her."

  "Who?"

  "The mens. When they want her. They come here and take her home."

  "Do you know who they were, their names?"

  "Them kind ain't got no names. They just drive their car up when she get off work and that po' girl get in."

  "I see. All right, Jennifer, this is my card with my telephone number on it. Would you call me if you remember anything else that might help me?"

  "I don't be knowin' anything else, me. She wasn't goin' to give the name of some rich white man to an old nigger."

  "What white man?"

  "That's what I tellin' you. I don't know, me."

  "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying."

  "You don't understand English, you? Where you from? She say they a rich white man maybe gonna get her out of sellin' jellyroll. She say that the last time I seen her, right befo' somebody do them awful t'ings to that young girl. Mister, when they in the bidness, every man got a sweet word in his mouth, every man got a special way to keep jellyroll in his bed and the dollar in his pocket."