DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "Did you do what they say, Dave?" I could see the shine of fear in her brown eyes.

  "I don't know. But I never shot at anybody who didn't try to hurt me first. You have to believe me on that, Alf. I'm not sure what happened last night, but sooner or later I probably will. In the meantime, guys like you and me and Bootsie have to be standup and believe in each other."

  I brushed her bangs away from her eyes. She looked for a long time at the whirling blades of the window fan and the shadows they made on the bed.

  "They don't have any right," she said.

  "Who?"

  "Those people. They don't have the right to talk about you like that."

  "They have the right to read what's in the newspaper, don't they?"

  "The lady at the counter was saying something just before we walked in. I heard her through the screen. She said, 'If he's gone back to drinking, it don't surprise me he done that, no.' That's when the man started reading out loud from the newspaper."

  I picked her up by the waist and sat her on the bed. Her muscular body felt as compact as a small log.

  "Look, little guy," I said, "drinking isn't part of my life anymore. I gave it to my Higher Power." I stroked her hair and saw a smile begin to grow at the edge of her mouth and eyes.

  "Dave?"

  "What?"

  "What's it mean when you say somebody's got to be standup?"

  "No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy."

  She was grinning broadly now, her wide-set teeth white in the shadows of the room.

  "Where's Bootsie?" I asked.

  "Fixing supper."

  "What are we having?"

  "Sac-a-lait and dirty rice."

  "Did you know they run freight trains on that in Louisiana?"

  She started bouncing on the edge of the bed, then my words sank in. "What? Freight. . . what?" she said.

  "Let me get dressed, little guy, then we'll check out the food situation."

  My explanation to Alafair was the best I could offer, but the truth was I needed to get to an AA meeting. Since the night I had seen the general and his soldiers in the mist, I had talked once over the phone to my AA sponsor but had not attended a meeting, which was the place I needed to be most. What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call non-alcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.

  The popular notion exists that Catholic priests become privy to the darkest corners of man's soul in the confessional. The truth is otherwise. Any candid Catholic minister will tell you that most people's confessions cause eye-crossing boredom in the confessor, and the average weekly penitent usually owns up to a level of moral failure on par with unpaid parking violations and overdue library books.

  But at AA meetings, I've heard it all at one time or another: extortion, theft, forgery, armed robbery, child molestation, sodomy with animals, arson, prostitution, vehicular homicide, and the murder of prisoners and civilians in Vietnam.

  I went to an afternoon meeting on the second floor of an Episcopalian church. I knew almost everyone there: a few housewives, a black man who ran a tree nursery, a Catholic nun, an ex-con bartender named Tee Neg who was also my sponsor, a woman who used to hook in the Column Hotel Bar in Lafayette, a psychologist, a bakery owner, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific, and a man who was once a famous aerialist with Ringling Brothers.

  I told them the whole story about my psycho-historical encounters and left nothing out. I told them about the electricity that snapped and flickered like serpents' tongues in the mist, my conversations with the general, even the unwashed odor that rose from his clothes, the wounds in his men that maggots had eaten as slick as spoons.

  As is usual with one's dramatic or surreal revelations at an AA meeting, the response was somewhat humbling. They listened attentively, their eyes sympathetic and good-natured, but a number of the people there at one time or another had ripped out their own wiring, thought they had gone to hell without dying, tried to kill themselves, or been one step away from frontal lobotomies.

  When I had finished, the leader of the meeting, a pipeline welder, said, "Damn, Dave, that's the best endorsement of Dr Pepper I ever heard. You ought to call up them sonsof-bitches and get that one on TV."

  Then everyone laughed and the world didn't seem so bad after all.

  When I left the meeting I bought a spearmint snowball in the city park on Bayou Teche and used the outdoor pay phone by the recreation building. Through the moss-hung oak trees I could see kids diving into the public pool, their tan bodies glistening with water in the hot sunlight.

  It took a couple of minutes to get the Lafayette coroner on the line. He was a hard-nosed choleric pathologist named Sol lie Rothberg, whom cops quickly learned to treat diplomatically.

  "I wondered what you had on the Amber Martinez shooting," I said.

  I could hear the long-distance wires humming in the receiver.

  "Robicheaux?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "Why are you calling me?"

  "I just told you."

  "It's my understanding you're suspended."

  "So what? Your medical findings are a matter of public record, aren't they?"

  "When they become public they are. Right now they aren't public."

  "Come on, Sollie. Somebody's trying to deep-fry my cojones in a skillet."

  In my mind's eye I could see him idly throwing paper clips at his wastebasket.

  "What's the big mystery I can clear up for you?" he said.

  "What caliber weapon killed her?"

  "From the size of the wound and the impact of the round, I'd say a .45."

  "What do you mean 'size' ?"

  "Just what I said."

  "What about the round?"

  "It passed through her. There wasn't much to recover. It was a clean exit wound."

  "It was a copper-jacketed round?"

  "That's my opinion. In fact, I know it was. The exit hole wasn't much larger in diameter than the entry."

  I closed and opened my eyes. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

  "You there?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, Sollie. I use hollow-points."

  I could hear birds singing in the trees, and the surface of the swimming pool seemed to be dancing with turquoise light.

  "Anything else?" he asked.

  "Yeah, time of death."

  "You're crowding me."

  "Sollie, I keep seeing the back of her head. Her hair had stuck to the carpet. The blood had already dried, hadn't it?"

  "I can't tell you about that because I wasn't there."

  "Come on, you know what I'm asking you."

  "Did she die earlier, you want to know?"

  "Look, partner, you're my lifeline. Don't be jerking me around."

  "How about I go you one better? Did she die in that car, you want to ask me?"

  I had learned long ago not to interfere with or challenge Sollie's moods, intentions, or syntax.

  "It's gravity," he said. "The earth's always pulling on us, trying to suck us into the ground."

  "What?"

  "It's what the shooter didn't think about," he said. "Blood's just like anything else. It goes straight down. You stop the heart, in this case the brain and then the heart, and the blood takes the shortest course to the ground. You with me?"

  "Not quite."

  "The blood settles out in the lowest areas of where the body is lying. The pictures show the woman curled up on her side on the floor of the Buick. Her head was higher than her knees. But the autopsy indicates that she was lying full length on her back at the time of death. She also had high levels of alcohol and cocaine in her blood. I suspect she may have been passed out when she died."

  "She was shot somewhere else and moved?"

  "Unless the dea
d are walking around on their own these days."

  "You've really been a friend, Sollie."

  "Do you ever carry anything but a .45? A nine-millimeter or a .357 sometimes?"

  "No, I've always carried the same Colt .45 auto I brought back from Vietnam."

  "How many people know that?"

  "Not many. Mostly cops, I guess."

  "That thought would trouble me. So long, Robicheaux."

  But the moment was not one for brooding. I walked back to the hot-dog stand and bought snowballs for a half-dozen kids. When a baseball bounced my way from the diamond, I scooped it up in my palms, rubbed the roughness of the horse hide, fitted my fingers on the stitches, and whipped a side-arm slider into the catcher's glove like I was nineteen years old and could blow a hole through the backstop.

  That night I called Lou Girard at his home in Lafayette, told him about my conversations with the coroner and the mulatto woman across from the bar, and asked him if anyone had vacuumed the inside of the Buick.

  "Dave, I'm afraid this case isn't the first thing on everybody's mind around here," he said.

  "Why's that?"

  "The detective assigned to it thinks you're a pain in the ass and you should have stayed in your own territory."

  "When's the last time anyone saw Amber Martinez?"

  "Three or four days ago. She was a bender drinker and user. She was supposed to be getting out of the life, but I think she'd work up a real bad Jones and find a candy man to pick up her tab until she ended up in a tank or a detox center somewhere."

  "Who was her pimp?"

  "Her husband. But he's been in jail the last three weeks on a check-writing charge. Whoever killed her probably got her out of a bar someplace."

  "Yeah, but he knew her before. He used another woman to keep leaving Amber's name on messages at my office."

  "If I can get the Buick vacuumed, what are we looking for?"

  "I know I saw gun flashes inside the car. But there weren't any holes in the front of the bar. See what you come up with."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why don't you forget the forensic bullshit and concentrate on what your nose tells you?"

  "What's that?"

  "This isn't the work of some lone fuckhead running around. It has the smell of the greaseballs all over it. One smart greaseball in particular."

  "You think this is Julie's style?"

  "I worked two years on a task force that tried to get an indictment on the Bone. When he gets rid of a personal enemy, he puts a meat hook up the guy's rectum. If he wants a cop or a judge or a labor official out of the way, he does it long distance, with a whole collection of lowlifes between him and the target."

  "That sounds like our man, all right."

  "Can I give you some advice?"

  "Go ahead."

  "If Balboni is behind this, don't waste your time trying to make a case against him. It doesn't work. The guy's been oiling jurors and judges and scaring the shit out of witnesses for twenty years. You wait for the right moment, the right situation, and you smoke him."

  "I'll see you, Lou. Thanks for your help."

  "All right, excuse me. Who wants to talk about popping a cap on a guy like Balboni? Amber Martinez probably did herself. Take it easy, Dave."

  At six the next morning I took a cup of coffee and the newspaper out on the gallery and sat down on the steps. The air was cool and blue with shadow under the trees and the air smelled of blooming four o'clocks and the pecan husks that had moldered into the damp earth.

  While I read the paper I could hear boats leaving my dock and fishermen's voices out on the water. Then I heard someone walking up the incline through the leaves, and I lowered the newspaper and saw Mikey Goldman striding toward me like a man in pursuit of an argument.

  He wore shined black loafers with tassels on them, a pink polo shirt that hung out of his gray slacks, and a thick gold watch that gleamed like soft butter on his wrist. His mouth was a tight seam, down-turned at the corners, his jaw hooked forward, his strange, pale, bulging eyes flicking back and forth across the front of my house.

  "I want a word with you," he said.

  "How are you today, Mr. Goldman," I said.

  "It's 6 a.m., I'm at your house instead of at work; I got four hours' sleep last night. Guess."

  "Do I have something to do with your problem?"

  "Yeah, you do. You keep showing up in the middle of my problem. Why is that, Mr. Robicheaux?"

  "I don't have any idea."

  "I do. It's because Elrod had got some kind of hard-on for you and it's about to fuck my picture in a major way."

  "I'd appreciate it if you didn't use that kind of language around my home."

  "You got a problem with language? That's the kind of stuff that's on your mind? What's wrong with you people down here? The mosquitoes pass around clap of the brain or something?"

  "What is it you want, sir?"

  "He asks me what I want?" he said, looking around in the shadows as though there were other listeners there. "Elrod doesn't like to see you get taken over the hurdles. Frankly I don't either. Maybe for other reasons. Namely nobody carries my load, nobody takes heat for me, you understand what I'm saying?"

  "No."

  He cleared something from a nostril with his thumb and forefinger.

  "What is it with you, you put your head in a bucket of wet cement every morning?" he asked.

  "Can I be frank, too, Mr. Goldman?"

  "Be my guest."

  "A conversation with you is a head-numbing experience. I don't think any ordinary person is ready for it."

  "Let me try to put it in simple words that you can understand," he said. "You may not know it, but I try to be a fair man. That means I don't like somebody else getting a board kicked up his ass on my account. I'm talking about you. Your own people are dumping on you because they think you're going to chase some big money out of town. I leave places or I stay in places because I want to. Somebody gets in my face, I deal with it, personal. You ask anybody in the industry. I don't rat-fuck people behind their back."

  I set down my coffee cup, folded the newspaper on the step, and walked out into the trees toward his parked automobile. I waited for him to follow me.

  "Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?" I said.

  "No, of course not. I'm just out here to give you my personal profile. Listen to me, I'm going to finish this picture, then I'm never coming back to this state. In fact, I'm not even going to fly over it. But in the meantime no more of my people are going to the hospital."

  "What?"

  "Good, the flashbulb went off."

  "What happened?" I said.

  "Last night we'd wrapped it up and everybody had headed home. Except Elrod and this kid who does some stunt work got loaded and Elrod decides he's going to 'front Julie Balboni. He picks up a Coke bottle and starts banging on Julie's trailer with it. Julie opens the door in his jockey undershorts, and there's a twenty-year-old local broad trying to put on her clothes behind him. So Elrod calls him a coward and a dago bucket of shit and tells him he can fix him up in L.A. with Charlie Manson's chippies, like they got hair under their arms and none on their heads and they're more Julie's speed. Then El tells him that Julie had better not cause his buddy Robicheaux any more grief or El's going to punch his ticket for him, and if he finds out Julie murdered Kelly he's going to do it anyway, big time, with a shotgun right up Balboni's cheeks.

  "I don't know what Balboni was doing with the broad, but he had some handcuffs. He walked outside, clamped one on El's wrist, the other on a light pole, and said, 'You're a lucky man, Elrod. You're a valuable piece of fruit. But your friend there, he don't have any luck at all.' Then he stomped the shit out of the stunt kid. 'Stomped' is the word, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean with his feet. He busted that kid's nose, stove in his ribs, and ripped his ear loose from his head."

  "Why didn't you stop it?"

  "I wasn't there. I got all this from the kid a
t the hospital. That's why I didn't get any sleep last night."

  "Is the kid pressing charges?"

  "Get real. He was on a flight back to Los Angeles this morning with enough dope in him to tranquilize a rhinoceros."

  "What do you want with me?"

  "I want you to take care of Elrod. I don't want him hurt."

  "Tell me the truth. Do you have any concerns at all except making your pictures?"

  "Yeah, human beings. If you don't accept that, I say fuck you."

  His tense, protruding eyes reminded me of hard-boiled eggs. I looked away from him, felt my palm close and unclose against my trousers. The sunlight on the bayou was like a yellow flare burning under the water.

  "I'm not in the baby-sitting business, Mr. Goldman," I said. "My advice is that you tell all this to the sheriff's department. Right now I'm still suspended. I'm going back and finish my coffee now. We'll see you around."

  "It's Dogpatch. I'm in a cartoon. I talk, nobody hears me." He tapped himself on the cheek. "Maybe I'm dead and this is hell."

  "What else do you want to say?" I heard the heat rising in my own voice.

  "You accuse me of not having any humanity. Then I tell you Elrod's striking matches on Balboni's balls on your account and you blow me off. You want Balboni to put his foot through El's face?"

  "He's your business partner. You brought him here. You didn't worry about the origins of his money till you—"

  "That's all true. The question is what do we do now?"

  "We?"

  "Right. I'm getting through. Everybody around here doesn't have meatloaf for brains after all."

  "There's no we in this. I'll talk to Elrod, I'll take him to AA meetings, but he's not my charge."

  "Good. Tell him that. I'm on my way to work. Dump him in a cab."

  "What?"

  "He's down there in your bait shop. Drunk. I think you have a serious hearing problem. Get some help."

  He stuck a peppermint candy cane in the corner of his mouth and walked back down the slope to his automobile, his shoulders rolling under his polo shirt, his jaws cracking the candy between his teeth, his profile turned into the freshening breeze like a gladiator's.

  Chapter 14