In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  Five minutes later I hit something hard, and I set the E-tool on the edge of the hole and used my fingers to pry up the hub of a wagon wheel with broken spokes the length of my hand radiating from it. I placed it on the slope, and in the next half hour I created next to it a pile of square nails, rotted wood as light as balsa, metal hinges, links of chain, a rusted wisp of a drinking cup, and a saw. The wood handle and the teeth had been almost totally eaten away by ground-water, but there was no mistaking the stubby, square, almost brutal shape; it was a surgeon's saw.

  I carried everything that I had found back to the boat. My clothes were streaked with mud; I stunk of sweat and mosquito repellent. My palms rang with popped water blisters. I wanted to wake up Bootsie, call Elrod or perhaps even the sheriff, to tell anybody who would listen about what I had found.

  But then I had to confront the foolishness of my thinking. How sane was any man, at least in the view of others, who would dig for Civil War artifacts in a swamp in the middle of the night in order to prove his sanity?

  In fact, that kind of behavior was probably not unlike a self-professed extraterrestrial traveler showing you his validated seat reservations on a UFO as evidence of his rationality.

  When I got back home I covered my boat with a tarp, took a shower, ate a ham-and-onion sandwich in the kitchen while night birds called to each other under the full moon, and decided that the general and I would not share our secrets with those whose lives and vision were defined by daylight and a rational point of view.

  Chapter 12

  I slept late the next morning, and when I awoke, I found a note from Bootsie on the icebox saying that she had taken Alafair shopping in town. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk, Grape-Nuts, and strawberries on a tray and carried it out to the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The morning was not hot yet, and blue jays flew in and out of the dappled shade and my neighbor's sprinkler drifted in an iridescent haze across my grass.

  Then I saw Rosie Gomez's motor-pool government car slow by our mailbox and turn into our drive. Her face was pointed at an upward angle so she could see adequately over the steering wheel. I got up from the table and waved her around back.

  She wore a white blouse and white skirt with black pumps, a wide black belt, and a black purse.

  "How you feeling?" she asked.

  "Pretty good. In fact, great."

  "Yeah?"

  "Sure."

  "You look okay."

  "I am okay, Rosie. Here, I'll get you some coffee."

  When I came back outside with the pot and another cup and saucer, she was sitting on the redwood bench, looking out over my duck pond and my neighbor's sugarcane fields. Her face looked cool and composed.

  "It's beautiful out here," she said.

  "I'm sorry Bootsie and Alafair aren't here. I'd like you to meet them."

  "Next time. I'm sorry I didn't come see you in the hospital. I'd left for New Orleans early that morning. I just got back."

  "What's up?"

  "About three weeks ago an old hooker in the Quarter called the Bureau and said she wanted to seriously mess up Julie Balboni for us. Except she was drunk or stoned and the agent who took the call didn't give it a lot of credence."

  "What'd she have to offer?"

  "Nothing, really. She just kept saying, 'He's hurting these girls. Somebody ought to fix that rotten dago. He's got to stop hurting these girls.' "

  "So what happened?"

  "Three days ago there was a power failure at the woman's apartment building on Ursulines. With the air conditioner off it didn't take long for the smell to leak through the windows to the courtyard. The M.E. says it was suicide."

  I watched her face. "You don't think it was?" I said.

  "How many women shoot themselves through the head with a .38 special?"

  "Maybe she was drunk and didn't care how she bought it."

  "Her refrigerator and cupboards were full of food. The apartment was neat, all her dishes were washed. There was a sack of delicatessen items on the table she hadn't put away yet. Does that suggest the behavior of a despondent person to you?"

  "What do they say at N.O.P D.?"

  "They don't. They yawn. They've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.'s. You think they want to turn the suicide of a hooker into another open homicide case?"

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know. I think you've been right about a tie with Balboni. The most common denominator that keeps surfacing in this case is prostitution in and around New Orleans. There isn't a pimp or chippy working in Jefferson or Orleans parishes who don't piece off their action to Julie Balboni."

  "That doesn't mean Julie's involved with killing anyone, Rosie."

  "Be honest with me. Do I continue to underwhelm you as a representative of Fart, Barf, and Itch?"

  "I'm not quite sure I—"

  "Yeah, I bet. What do pimps call the girls in the life? 'Cash on the hoof,' right?"

  "That's right."

  "Do you think anybody kills one of Balboni's hookers and gets away with it without his knowledge and consent?"

  "Except there's a bump in the road here. The man who murdered Kelly Drummond probably thought he was shooting at me. The mob doesn't kill cops. Not intentionally, anyway."

  "Maybe he's a cowboy, out of control. We've got rogue cops. The wiseguys have rogue shitheads."

  I laughed. "You're something else," I said.

  "Cut the patronizing attitude, Dave."

  "Sorry," I said, still smiling.

  Her eyes looked into mine and darkened.

  "I'm worried about you. You don't know how to keep your butt down," she said.

  "Everything's copacetic. Believe me."

  "Sure it is."

  "You know something I don't?"

  "Yes, human beings and money make a very bad combination," she said.

  "I'd appreciate it if you could stop speaking to me in hieroglyphics."

  "Few people care about the origins of money, Dave. All they see is a president's picture on a bill, not Julie Balboni's."

  "Let's spell it out, okay?"

  "A few of the locals have talked to the sheriff about your taking an extended leave. At least that's what I've heard."

  "He's not a professional cop, but he's a decent man. He won't give in to them."

  "He's an elected official. He's president of the Lions Club. He eats lunch once a week with the Chamber of Commerce."

  "He knows I wasn't drinking. The people in my AA group know it, too. So do the personnel at the hospital. Dr. Landry thinks somebody zapped me with LSD. What else can I say?"

  Her face became melancholy, and she looked out at the sunlight on the field with a distant, unfocused expression in her eyes.

  "What's the trouble?" I asked.

  "You don't hear what you're saying. Your reputation, maybe your job, are hanging in the balance now, and you think it's acceptable to tell people that somebody loaded your head with acid."

  "I never made strong claims on mental health, anyway." I tried to smile when I said it. But the skin around my mouth felt stiff and misshaped.

  "It isn't funny," she said. She stood up to go, and the bottom of her purse, with the .357 magnum inside, sagged against her hip. "I'm not going to let them do this to you, Dave."

  "Wait a minute, Rosie. I don't send other people out on the firing line."

  She began walking through the sideyard toward her car, her back as square and straight as a small door.

  "Rosie, did you hear me?" I said. "Rosie? Come back here and let's talk. I appreciate what you're trying to—"

  She got into her automobile, gave me the thumbs-up sign over the steering wheel, and backed out onto the dirt road by the bayou. She dropped the transmission into low and drove down the long tunnel of oaks without glancing back.

  Regardless of Rosie's intentions about my welfare, I still had not resolved the possibility that the racial murder I had witnessed in 1957 and the sack of skin and polished
bones Elrod Sykes had discovered in the Atchafalaya Basin were not somehow involved in this case.

  However, where do you start in investigating a thirty-five-year-old homicide that was never even reported as such?

  Although southern Louisiana, which is largely French Catholic, has a long and depressing record of racial prejudice and injustice, it never compared in intensity and violence to the treatment of black people in the northern portion of the state or in Mississippi, where even the murder of a child, Emmett Till, by two Klansmen in 1955 not only went unpunished but was collectively endorsed after the fact by the town in which it took place. There was no doubt that financial exploitation of black people in general, and sexual exploitation of black women in particular, were historically commonplace in our area, but lynching was rare, and neither I nor anyone I spoke to remembered a violent incident, other than the one I witnessed, or a singularly bad racial situation from the summer of 1957.

  The largest newspapers in Louisiana are the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. They also have the best libraries, or "morgues," of old newspapers and cross-referenced clippings. However, I started my strange odyssey into the past on the microfilm in the morgue of the Daily Iberian.

  Actually I had little hope of finding any information that would be helpful. During that era little was published in Louisiana newspapers about people of color, except in the police report or perhaps on a separate page that was designated for news about black marriages.

  But in my mind's eye I kept seeing the dead man's string-less boots and the rotted strips of rag about his pelvis instead of a belt. Had he been in custody? Was he being transported by a couple of cops who had decided to execute him? If that was the case, why wasn't he in handcuffs? Maybe they had locked the chain on him to sink his body, I thought. No, that couldn't be right. If the victim was being transported by cops, they would have kept him in cuffs until they had murdered him, then they would have removed the cuffs and weighted down the body. Also, why would cops want to sink the body in the Atchafalaya, anyway? They could have claimed that they stopped the car to let him relieve himself, he had taken off for the woods, and they had been forced to shoot him. That particular explanation about a prisoner's death was one that was seldom challenged.

  Then I found it, on the area news page dated July 27, 1957. A twenty-eight-year-old Negro man by the name of DeWitt Prejean had been arrested in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette, for breaking into the home of a white family and threatening the wife with a butcher knife. There was no mention of motivation or intent. In fact, the story was not about his arrest but about his escape. He had been in custody only eleven hours, had not even been formally charged, when two armed men wearing gloves and Halloween masks entered the parish prison at four in the morning, locked the night jailer in the restroom, and took DeWitt Prejean out of a downstairs holding cell.

  The story was no more than four column inches.

  I rolled the microfilm through the viewer, looking for a follow-up story. If it was there, I didn't find it, and I went through every issue of the Daily Iberian to February 1958.

  Every good cop who spends time in a newspaper morgue, particularly in the rural South, knows how certain kinds of news stories were reported or were not reported in the pre-civil-rights era. "The suspect was subdued" usually meant that somebody had had his light switch clicked off with a baton or blackjack. Cases involving incest and child molestation were usually not treated at all. Stories about prisoners dying in custody were little more than obituaries, with a tag line to the effect that an autopsy was pending.

  The rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a black man was a more complicated issue, however. The victim's identity was always protected by cops and prosecutors, even to the extent that sometimes the rapist was charged with another crime, one that the judge, if at all possible, would punish as severely as he would rape. But the level of white fear and injury was so collectively intense, the outrage so great, that the local paper would be compelled to report the story in such a way that no one would doubt what really happened, or what the fate of the rapist would be.

  Also, the 1957 story in the Iberian had mentioned that DeWitt Prejean had been taken from a holding cell eleven hours after his arrest.

  People didn't stay in holding cells eleven hours, particularly in a rural jail where a suspect could be processed into lock-down in twenty minutes.

  I left Bootsie a note, then drove to Lafayette and continued on north for another twenty miles into St. Landry Parish and the old jailhouse in Opelousas.

  The town had once been the home of James Bowie before he became a wealthy cotton merchant and slave trader in New Orleans. But during the 1950s it acquired another kind of notoriety, namely for its political corruption, an infamous bordello named Margaret's that had operated since the War Between the States, and its gambling halls, which were owned or controlled by the sheriff and which were sometimes raided by the state police when a legislative faction in Baton Rouge wanted to force a change in the parish representatives' vote.

  I parked my truck at the back of the courthouse square, right next to the brick shell of the old jail, whose roof had caved in on top of the cast-iron tank, perforated with small square holes, that had served as the lock-down area. As I walked under the live oaks toward the courthouse entrance, I looked through the jail's glassless windows at the mounds of soft, crumbled brick on the floor, the litter of moldy paper, and wondered where the two gloved men in Halloween masks had burst inside and what dark design they had planned for the Negro prisoner DeWitt Prejean.

  I got nowhere at the courthouse. The man who had been sheriff during the fifties was dead, and no one now in the sheriff's department remembered the case or the escape; in fact, I couldn't even find a record of DeWitt Prejean's arrest.

  "It happened. I didn't make it up," I said to the sheriff, who was in his late thirties. "I found the account in a 1957 issue of the Daily Iberian."

  "That might be," he answered. He wore his hair in a military crewcut and his jaws were freshly shaved. He was trying to be polite, but the light of interest kept fading from his eyes. "But they didn't always keep good records back then. Maybe some things happened that people don't want to remember, too, you know what I mean?"

  "No."

  He twirled a pencil around on his desk blotter.

  "Go talk to Mr. Ben. That is, if you want to," he said. "That's Mr. Ben Hebert. He was the jailer here for thirty years."

  "Was he the jailer in 1957?"

  "Yeah, he probably was."

  "You don't sound enthusiastic."

  He rubbed the calluses on his hands without looking up at me.

  "Put it this way," he said. "His only son ended up in Angola, his wife refused to see him on her deathbed, and there're still some black people who cross the street when they see him coming. Does that help form a picture for you?"

  I left the courthouse and went to the local newspaper to look for a follow-up story on the jailbreak. There was none. Twenty minutes later I found the old jailer on the gallery of his weathered wood-frame home across from a Popeye's fastfood restaurant. His yard was almost black with shade, carpeted with a wet mat of rotted leaves, his sidewalks inset with tethering rings, cracked and pyramided from the oak roots that twisted under them. The straw chair he sat in seemed about to burst from his huge bulk.

  I had to introduce myself twice before he responded. Then he simply said, "What you want?"

  "May I sit down, sir?"

  His lips were purple with age, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes. He breathed loudly, as though he had emphysema.

  "I ax you what you want," he said.

  "I wondered if you remembered a black man by the name of DeWitt Prejean."

  He looked at me carefully. His eyes were clear-blue, liquid, elongated, red along the rims.

  "A nigger, you say?" he asked.

  "That's right."

  "Yeah, I remember that sonofabitch. What about
him?"

  "Is it all right if I sit down, Mr. Hebert?"

  "Why should I give a shit?"

  I sat down in the swing. He put a cigarette in his mouth and searched in his shirt pocket for a match while his eyes went up and down my body. Gray hair grew out of his nose and on the back of his thick neck.

  "Were you on duty the night somebody broke him out of jail?" I said.

  "I was the jailer. A jailer don't work nights. You hire a man for that."

  "Do you remember what that fellow was charged with?"

  "He wasn't charged with nothing. It never got to that."

  "I wonder why he was still in a holding cell eleven hours after he was arrested."

  "They busted him out of the tank."

  "Not according to the newspaper."

  "That's why a lot of people use newspaper to wipe their ass with."

  "He went into a white woman's home with a butcher knife, did he?"

  "Find the nigger and ax him."

  "That's what puzzles me. Nobody seems to know what happened to this fellow, and nobody seems to care. Does that make sense to you?"

  He puffed on his cigarette. It was wet and splayed when he took it out of his mouth. I waited for him to speak but he didn't.

  "Did y'all just close the books on a jailbreak, Mr. Hebert?" I asked.

  "I don't remember what they done."

  "Was DeWitt Prejean a rapist?"

  "He didn't know how to keep his prick in his pants, if that's what you mean."

  "You think her husband broke him out?"

  "He might have."

  I looked into his face and waited.

  "That is, if he could," he said. "He was a cripple-man. He got shot up in the war."

  "Could I talk to him?"

  He tipped his cigarette into an ashtray and looked out toward the bright glare of sunlight on the edge of his yard. Across the street black people were going in and out of the Popeye's restaurant.

  "Talk to him all you want. He's in the cemetery, out by the tracks east of town," he said.

  "What about the woman?"

  "She moved away. Up North somewhere. What's your interest in nigger trouble that's thirty-five years old?"