DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  He didn't even look up at me when he spoke. But everybody in the restaurant heard what he said. "I think you're losing it, Dave. Stop being a hired dildo for the local dipshits or get yourself some better tranqs."

  Chapter 8

  It was ten a.m. Batist had gone after a boat with a fouled engine down the bayou, and the bait shop and dock were empty. The tin roof was expanding in the heat, buckling and pinging against the bolts and wood joists. I pulled a can of Dr Pepper out of the crushed ice in the cooler and sat outside in the hot shade by myself and drank it. Green dragonflies hung suspended over the cattails along the bayou's banks; a needlenose gar that had probably been wounded by a boat propeller turned in circles in the dead current, while a school of minnows fed off a red gash behind its gills; a smell like dead snakes, sour mud, and rotted hyacinth vines blew out of the marsh on the hot wind.

  I didn't want to even think about the events of this morning. The scene in the restaurant was like a moment snipped out of a drunk dream, in which I was always out of control, publicly indecent or lewd in the eyes of others.

  The soda can grew warm in my palm. The sky in the south had a bright sheen to it like blue silk. I hoped that it would storm that afternoon, that rain would thunder down on the marsh and bayou, roar like grapeshot on the roof of my house, pour in gullies through the dirt and dead leaves under the pecan trees in my yard.

  I heard Bootsie behind me. She sat down in a canvas chair by a spool table and crossed her legs. She wore white shorts, sandals, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. There were sweat rings under her arms, and the down on top of her thighs had been burned gold by the sun.

  We met at a dance on Spanish Lake during the summer of 1957, and a short time later we lost our virginity together in my father's boathouse, while the rain fell out of the sunlight and dripped off the eaves and the willow trees into the lake and the inside of the boathouse trembled with a wet green-yellow light.

  But even at that age I had already started my long commitment to sour mash straight up with a sweating Jax on the side. Bootsie and I would go separate ways, far from Bayou Teche and the provincial Cajun world in which we had grow up. I would make the journey to Vietnam as one of our new colonials and return with a junkyard in my hip and thigh and nocturnal memories that neither whiskey nor army hospital dope could kill. She would marry an oil-field pilot who would later tip a guy wire on an offshore rig and crash his helicopter right on top of the quarter-boat; then she would discover that her second husband, an accounting graduate from Tulane, was a bookkeeper for the Mafia, although his career with them became short-lived when they shotgunned him and his mistress to death in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack.

  She had lupus disease that we had knocked into remission with medication, but it still lived in her blood like a sleeping parasite that waited for its moment to attack her kidneys and sever her connective tissue. She was supposed to avoid hard sunlight, but again and again I came home from work and found her working in the yard in shorts and a halter, her hot skin filmed with sweat and grains of dirt.

  "Did something happen at work?" she said.

  "I had some trouble at Del's."

  "What?"

  "I busted up one of Baby Feet Balboni's lowlifes."

  "In the restaurant?"

  "Yeah, that's where I did it."

  "What did he do?"

  "He put his hand on me." I set down my soda can and propped my forearms on my thighs. I looked out at the sun's reflection in the brown water.

  "Have you been back to the office?" she said.

  "Not yet. I'll probably go in later."

  She was quiet a moment.

  "Have you talked to the sheriff?" she asked.

  "There's not really much to talk about. The guy could make a beef but he won't. They don't like to get messed up in legal action against cops."

  She uncrossed her legs and brushed idly at her knee with her fingertips.

  "Dave, is something else going on, something you're not telling me about?"

  "The guy put his hand on my shoulder and I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I would have done it if this guy named Manelli hadn't stepped in front of me."

  I saw her breasts rise and fall under her shirt. Far down the bayou Batist was towing a second boat behind his outboard and the waves were slapping the floating hyacinths against the banks. She got up from her chair and stood behind me. She worked her fingers into my shoulders. I could feel her thigh touch my back.

  "New Iberia is never going to be the same place we grew up in. That's just the way things are," she said.

  "It doesn't mean I have to like it."

  "The Balboni family was here a long time. We survived, didn't we? They'll make their movie and go away."

  "There're too many people willing to sell it down the drain."

  "Sell what?"

  "Whatever makes a dollar for them. Redfish and sac-a-lait to restaurants, alligators to the Japanese. They let oil companies pollute the oyster beds and cut canals through the marsh so salt water can eat up thousands of square miles of wetlands. They take it on their knees from anybody who's got a checkbook."

  "Let it go, Dave."

  "I think a three-day open season on people would solve a lot of our problems."

  "Tell the sheriff what happened. Don't let it just hang there."

  "He's worried about some guys at the Chamber of Commerce, Bootsie. He's a good guy most of the time, but these are the people he's spent most of his life around."

  "I think you should talk to him."

  "All right, I'm going to take a shower, then I'll call him."

  "You're not going to the office?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe later."

  Batist cut the engine on his boat and floated on the swell into the dock and bumped against the strips of rubber tire we had nailed to the pilings. His shirt was piled on the board seat beside him, and his black shoulders and chest were beaded with sweat. His head looked like a cannon-ball. He grinned with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

  I was glad for the distraction.

  "I was up at the fo'-corners," he said. "A man there said you mopped up the restaurant flo' with one of them dagos."

  Thanks, Batist, I thought.

  I SHOWERED IN WATER THAT WAS SO COLD IT LEFT ME breathless, changed clothes, and drove to the bottling works down by the Vermilion River in Lafayette. The two-story building was an old one, made of yellow brick, and surrounded by huge live-oak trees. In back was a parking lot, which was filled with delivery trucks, and a loading dock, where a dozen black men were rattling crates of soda pop out of the building's dark interior and stacking them inside the waiting trucks. Their physical strength was incredible. Some of them would pick up a half-dozen full cases at a time and lift them easily to eye level. Their muscles looked like water-streaked black stone.

  I asked one of them where I could find Twinky Hebert Lemoyne.

  "Mr. Twinky in yonder, in the office. Better catch him quick, though. He fixin' to go out on the route," he said.

  "He goes out on the route?"

  "Mr. Twinky do everyt'ing, suh."

  I walked inside the warehouse to a cluttered, windowed office whose door was already open. The walls and cork boards were papered with invoices, old church calendars, unframed photographs of employees and fishermen with thick-bellied large-mouth bass draped across their hands. Lemoyne's face was pink and well-shaped, his eyebrows sandy, his gray hair still streaked in places with gold. He sat erect in his chair, his eyes behind his rimless glasses concentrated on the papers in his hands. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a loose burnt-orange tie (a seersucker coat hung on the back of the chair) and a plastic pen holder in his pocket; his brown shoes were shined; his fingernails were trimmed and clean. But he had the large shoulders and hands of a workingman, and he radiated the kind of quiet, hard-earned physical power that in some men neither age nor extra weight seems to diminish.

  There was no air conditioning in his offi
ce, and he had weighted all the papers on his desk to keep them from blowing away in the breeze from the oscillating fan.

  After I had introduced myself, he gazed out at the loading dock a moment, then lifted his hands from the desk blotter and put them down again as though somehow we had already reached a point in our conversation where there was nothing left to be said.

  "Can I sit down?" I said.

  "Go ahead. But I think you're wasting your time here."

  "It's been a slow day." I smiled at him.

  "Mr. Robicheaux, I don't have any idea in the world why either you or that Mexican woman is interested in me. Could you be a little bit more forthcoming?"

  "Actually, until yesterday I don't believe I ever heard your name."

  "What should I make of that?"

  "The problem is you and a few others tried to stick a couple of thumbtacks in my boss's head." I smiled again.

  "Listen, that woman came into my office yesterday and accused me of working with the Mafia."

  "Why would she do that?"

  "You tell me, please."

  "You own half of a security service with Murphy Doucet?"

  "That's right, I surely do. Can you tell me what y'all are looking for, why y'all are in my place of business?"

  "When you do business with a man like Julie Balboni, you create a certain degree of curiosity about yourself."

  "I don't do business with this man, and I don't know anything about him. I bought stock in this motion picture they're making. A lot of business people around here have. I've never met Julie Balboni and I don't plan to. Are we clear on this, sir?"

  "My boss says you're a respected man. It looks like you have a good business, too. I'd be careful who I messed with, Mr. Lemoyne."

  "I'm not interested in pursuing the subject." He fixed his glasses, squared his shoulders slightly, and picked up several sheets of paper in his hands.

  I drummed my fingers on the arms of my chair. Outside I could hear truck doors slamming and gears grinding.

  "I guess I didn't explain myself very well," I said.

  "You don't need to," he said, and looked up at the clock on the wall.

  "You're a solid businessman. There's nothing wrong with buying stock in a movie company. There's nothing wrong with providing a security service for it, either. But a lady who's not much taller than a fireplug asks you a couple of questions and you try to drop the dime on her. That doesn't seem to fit, Mr. Lemoyne."

  "There're people out there committing rapes, armed robberies, selling crack to children, God only knows what else, but you and that woman have the nerve to come in here and question me because I have a vague business relationship with a movie production. You don't think that's reason to make someone angry? What's wrong with you people?"

  "Are your employees union?"

  "No, they're not."

  "But your partner in your security service is a Teamster steward. I think you're involved in some strange contradictions, Mr. Lemoyne."

  He rose from his chair and lifted a set of keys out of his desk drawer.

  "I'm taking a new boy out on his route today. I have to lock up now. Do you want to stay around and talk to anybody else?" he said.

  "No, I'll be on my way. Here's my business card in case you might like to contact me later."

  He ignored it when I extended it to him. I placed it on his desk.

  "Thank you for your time, sir," I said, and walked back out onto the loading dock, into the heated liquid air, the blinding glare of light, the chalky smell of crushed oyster shells in the unsurfaced parking lot.

  When I was walking out to my pickup truck, I recognized an elderly black man who used to work in the old icehouse in New Iberia years ago. He was picking up litter out by the street with a stick that had a nail in the end of it. He had a rag tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, and the rotted wet undershirt he wore looked like strips of cheesecloth on his body.

  "How do you like working here, Dallas?" I said.

  "I like it pretty good."

  "How does Mr. Twinky treat y'all?"

  His eyes glanced back toward the building, then he grinned.

  "He know how to make the eagle scream, you know what I mean?"

  "He's tight with a dollar?"

  "Mr. Twinky so tight he got to eat a whole box of Ex-Lax so he don't squeak when he walk."

  "He's that bad?"

  He tapped some dried leaves off the nail of his stick against the trunk of an oak tree.

  "That's just my little joke," he said. "Mr. Twinky pay what he say he gonna pay, and he always pay it on time. He good to black folks, Mr. Dave. They ain't no way 'round that."

  When I got back to New Iberia I didn't go to the office. Instead, I called from the house. The sheriff wasn't in.

  "Where is he?" I said.

  "He's probably out looking for you," the dispatcher said. "What's going on, Dave?"

  "Nothing much."

  "Tell that to the greaseball you bounced off the furniture this morning."

  "Did he file a complaint?"

  "No, but I heard the restaurant owner dug the guy's tooth out of the counter with a screwdriver. You sure know how to do it, Dave."

  "Tell the sheriff I'm going to check out some stuff in New Orleans. I'll call him this evening or I'll see him in the office early in the morning."

  "I got the impression it might be good if you came by this afternoon."

  "Is Agent Gomez there?"

  "Yeah, hang on."

  A few seconds later Rosie picked up the extension.

  "Dave?"

  "How you doing?"

  "I'm doing fine. How are you doing?"

  "Everything's copacetic. I just talked with your man Twinky Lemoyne."

  "Oh?"

  "It looks like you put your finger in his eye."

  "Why'd you go over there?"

  "You never let them think they can make you flinch."

  "Hang on a minute. I want to close the door." Then a moment later she scraped the receiver back up and said, "Dave, what happens around here won't affect my job or career to any appreciable degree. But maybe you ought to start thinking about covering your butt for a change."

  "I had a bad night last night and I acted foolishly this morning. It's just one of those things," I said.

  "That's not what I'm talking about, and I think you know it. When you chase money out of a community, people discover new depths in themselves."

  "Have you gotten any feedback on the asphyxiated girl down in Vermilion Parish?"

  "I just got back from the coroner's office. She's still Jane Doe."

  "You think we're dealing with the same guy?"

  "Bondage, humiliation of the victim, a prolonged death, probable sexual violation, it's the same creep, you'd better believe it." I could hear an edge in her voice, like a sliver of glass.

  "I've got a couple of theories, too," she said. "He's left his last two victims where we could find them. Maybe he's becoming more compulsive, more desperate, less in control of his technique. Most psychopaths eventually reach a point where they're like sharks in feeding frenzy. They never satisfy the obsession."

  "Or he wants to stick it in our faces?"

  "You got it."

  "Everything you say may be true, Rosie, but I think prostitution is connected with this stuff somewhere. You want to take a ride to New Orleans with me this afternoon?"

  "A Vermilion Parish sheriff's detective is taking me out on the levee where you all found the girl last night. Do all these people spit Red Man?"

  "A few of the women deputies don't."

  I heard her laugh into the telephone.

  "Watch out for yourself, slick," she said.

  "You, too, Rosie."

  Neither Bootsie nor Alafair was home. I left them a note, packed a change of clothes in a canvas bag in case I had to stay overnight, and headed for I-10 and New Orleans as the temperature climbed to one hundred degrees and the willows along the bayou drooped motio
nlessly in the heat as though all the juices had been baked out of their leaves.

  I DROVE DOWN THE ELEVATED INTERSTATE AND CROSSED the Atchafalaya Basin and its wind-ruffled bays dotted with oil platforms and dead cypress, networks of canals and bayous, sand bogs, willow islands, stilt houses, flooded woods, and stretches of dry land where the mosquitoes swarmed in gray clouds out of the tangles of brush and intertwined trees. Then I crossed the wide, yellow sweep of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge, and forty-five minutes later I was rolling through Jefferson Parish, along the shores of Lake Pontchar-train, into New Orleans. The lake was slate green and capping, the sky almost white in the heat, and the fronds on the palm trees were lifting and rattling dryly in the hot breeze. The air smelled of salt and stagnant water and dead vegetation among the sand bogs on the west side of the highway; the asphalt looked like it could fry the palm of your hand.

  But there were no rain clouds on the horizon, no hint of relief from the scorching white orb in the sky or the humidity that crawled and ran on the skin like angry insects.

  I was on the New Orleans police force for fourteen years, first as a beat cop and finally as a lieutenant in Homicide. I never worked Vice, but there are few areas in New Orleans law enforcement that don't eventually lead you back into it. Without its pagan and decadent ambiance, its strip shows, hookers, burlesque spielers, taxi pimps, and brain-damaged street dopers, the city would be as attractive to most tourists as an agrarian theme park in western Nebraska.

  The French Quarter has two populations, almost two sensory climates. Early in the morning black children in uniforms line up to enter the Catholic elementary school by the park; parishioners from St. Louis Cathedral have coffee au lait and beignets and read the newspaper at the outdoor tables in the Cafe du Monde; the streets are still cool, the tile roofs and pastel stucco walls of the buildings streaked with moisture, the scrolled ironwork on the balconies bursting with flowers; families have their pictures sketched by the artists who set up their easels along the piked fence in Jackson Square; in the background the breeze off the river blows through the azalea and hibiscus bushes, the magnolia blossoms that are as big as fists, and the clumps of banana trees under the equestrian statue of Andy Jackson; and as soon as you head deeper into the Quarter, under the iron, green-painted colonnades, you can smell the cold, clean odor of fresh fish laid out on ice, of boxed strawberries and plums and rattlesnake watermelons beaded with water from a spray hose.