In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "I think I saw him killed. Where's the man who was on duty the night of the jailbreak?"

  "Got drunk, got hisself run over by a train. Wait a minute, what did you say? You saw what?"

  "Sometimes rivers give up their dead, Mr. Hebert. In this instance it took quite a while. Y'all took his boot strings and his belt, didn't you?"

  "You do that with every prisoner."

  "You do it when they're booked and going into the tank. This guy was never booked. He was left in a holding cell for two armed men to find him. You didn't even leave him a way to take his own life."

  He stared at me, his face like a lopsided white cake.

  "I think one of the men who killed Prejean tried to kill me," I said. "But he murdered a young woman instead. A film actress. Maybe you read about it."

  He stood up and dropped his cigarette over the gallery railing into a dead scrub. He smelled like Vick's VapoRub, nicotine, and an old man's stale sweat. His breath rasped as though his lungs were filled with tiny pinholes.

  "You get the fuck off my gallery," he said, and walked heavily on a cane into the darkness of his house, and let the screen slam behind him.

  I STOPPED AT POPEYE'S ON PlNHOOK ROAD IN LAFAYETTE AND ate an order of fried chicken and dirty rice, then I drove down Pinhook through the long corridor of oak trees, which had been planted by slaves, down toward the Vermilion River bridge and old highway 90, which led through the little sugar town of Broussard to New Iberia.

  Just before the river I passed a Victorian home set back in a grove of pecan trees. Between the road and the wide, columned porch a group of workmen were trenching a water or sewer line of some kind. The freshly piled black dirt ran in an even line past a decorative nineteenth-century flatbed wagon that was hung with baskets of blooming impatiens. The bodies and work clothes of the men looked gray and indistinct in the leafy shade, then a hard gust of wind blew off the river through the trees, the dappled light shifted back and forth across the ground like a bright yellow net, and when I looked back at the workmen I saw them dropping their tools, straightening their backs, fitting on their military caps that were embroidered with gold acorns, picking up their stacked muskets, and forming into ranks for muster.

  The general sat in the spring seat of the wagon, his artificial leg propped stiffly on the iron rim of a wheel, a cigar in his mouth, the brim of his campaign hat set at a rakish angle over one eye.

  He screwed his body around in the wagon seat and raised his hat high over his head in salute to me.

  Gravel exploded like a fusillade of lead shot under my right fender. I cut the wheel back off the shoulder onto the pavement, then looked back at the wide sweep of leafy lawn under the pecan trees. A group of workmen were lowering a long strip of flexible plastic pipe into the ground like a white worm.

  Back in New Iberia I parked behind the sheriff's depart-ment and started inside the building. Two deputies were on their way out.

  "Hey, Dave, you're supposed to be in sick bay," one of them said.

  "I'm out."

  "Right. You look good."

  "Is the skipper in?"

  "Yeah. Sure. Hey, you look great. I mean it."

  He gave me the thumbs-up sign.

  His words were obviously well intended, but I remembered how I was treated after I stepped on a bouncing Betty in Vietnam—with a deference and kindness that not only separated me from those who had a lock on life but constantly reminded me that the cone of flame that had illuminated my bones had also given me a permanent nocturnal membership in a club to which I did not want to belong.

  The dispatcher stopped me on my way to the sheriff's office. He weighed over three hundred pounds and had a round red face and a heart condition. His left-hand shirt pocket was bursting with cellophane-wrapped cigars. He had just finished writing out a message on a pink memo slip. He folded it and handed it to me.

  "Here's another one," he said. He had lowered his voice, and his eyes were hazy with meaning.

  "Another what?"

  "Call from this same party that keeps bugging me."

  "Which party?"

  His eyebrows went up in half-moons.

  "The Spanish broad. Or Mexican. Or whatever she is."

  I opened the memo and looked at it. It read, Dave, why don't you return my calls ? I'm still waiting at the same place. Have I done wrong in some way? It was signed "Amber."

  "Amber?" I said.

  "You got eight or nine of them in your mailbox," he said. "Her last name sounded Spanish."

  "Who is she?"

  "How should I know? You're the guy she's calling."

  "All right, thanks, Wally," I said.

  I took all my mail out of my box, then shuffled through the pink memo slips one at a time.

  The ones from "Amber" were truly an enigma. A few examples:

  I've done what you asked. Please call.

  Dave, leave a message on my answering machine.

  It's me again. Am I supposed to drop dead?

  You 're starting to piss me off. If you don't want me to bother you again, say so. I'm getting tired of this shit.

  I'm sorry, Dave. I was hurt when I said those things. But don't close doors on me.

  I walked back to the dispatcher's cage.

  "There's no telephone number on any of these," I said.

  "She didn't leave one."

  "Did you ask her for one?"

  "No, I got the impression y'all were buddies or something. Hey, don't look at me like that. What is she, a snitch or something?"

  "I don't have any idea."

  "She sounds like she's ready to bump uglies, though."

  "Why don't you give some thought to your language, Wally?"

  "Sorry."

  "If she calls again, get her telephone number. If she doesn't want to give it to you, tell her to stop calling here."

  "Whatever you say."

  I wadded up the memo slips, dropped them into a tobacco-streaked brass cuspidor, and walked into the sheriff's office.

  A manila folder was open on his desk. He was reading from it, with both his elbows propped on the desk blotter and his fingertips resting lightly on his temples. His mouth looked small and downturned at the corners. On his wall was a framed and autographed picture of President Bush.

  "How you doing?" I said.

  "Oh, hello, Dave," he said, looking up at me over his glasses. "It's good to see you. How do you feel today?"

  "Just fine, sheriff."

  "You didn't need to come in. I wanted you to take a week or so off. Didn't Bootsie tell you?"

  "I went up to Opelousas this morning. I think I found out who those bones out in the Atchafalaya might belong to."

  "What?"

  "A couple of armed men broke a black prisoner named DeWitt Prejean out of the St. Landry Parish jail in 1957. The guy was in for threatening a white woman with a butcher knife. But it sounds like an attempted rape. Or maybe there's a possibility that something was going on with consent. The old jailer said something about Prejean not being able to keep his equipment in his pants. Maybe the woman and Prejean just got caught and Prejean got busted on a phony charge and set up for a lynching."

  The sheriff's eyes blinked steadily and he worked his teeth along his bottom lip.

  "I don't understand you," he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I've told you repeatedly that case belongs to St. Mary Parish. Why is it that you seem to shut your ears to whatever I say?"

  "Kelly Drummond's death doesn't belong to St. Mary Parish, sheriff. I think the man who killed her was after me because of that lynched black man."

  "You don't know that. You don't know that at all."

  "Maybe not. But what's the harm?"

  He rubbed his round cleft chin with his thumb. I could hear his whiskers scraping against the skin.

  "An investigation puts the right people in jail," he said. "You don't throw a rope around half the people in two or three parishes. And that's what you and that woman are doing."
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  "That's the problem, is it?"

  "You damn right it is. Thirty minutes ago Agent Gomez marched into my office with all her findings." He touched the edge of the manila folder with his finger. "According to Agent Gomez, New Iberia has somehow managed to become the new Evil Empire."

  I nodded.

  "The New Orleans mob is laundering its drug money through Bal-Gold Productions," he said. "Julie Balboni is running a statewide prostitution operation from Spanish Lake, he's also having prostitutes killed, and maybe he laced your Dr Pepper with LSD when he wasn't cutting illegal deals with the Teamsters. Did you know we had all those problems right here in our town, Dave?"

  "Julie's a walking shit storm. Who knows what his potential is?"

  "She also called some of our local business people moral weenies and chicken-hearted buttheads."

  "She has some eloquent moments."

  "Before she left my office she said she wanted me to know that she liked me personally but in all honesty she had to confess that she thought I was full of shit."

  "I see," I said, and fixed my eyes on a palm tree outside the window.

  The room was quiet. I could hear a jail trusty mowing the grass outside. The sheriff turned his Southwestern class ring on his finger.

  "I want you to understand something, Dave," he said. "I was the one who wanted that fat sonofabitch Balboni out of town. You were the one who thought he was a source of humor. But now we're stuck with him, and that's the way it is."

  "Why?"

  "Because he has legitimate business interests here. He's committed no crime here. In fact, there's no outstanding warrant on this man anywhere. He's never spent one day in jail."

  "I think that's the same shuck his lawyers try to sell."

  He exhaled his breath through his nose.

  "Go home. You've got the week off," he said.

  "I heard my leave might even be longer."

  He chewed on a fingernail.

  "Who told you that?" he said.

  "Is it true or not?"

  "You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don't look right. They bother me. There's a strange light in them. Go home, Dave."

  "People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn't sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff."

  "What can I say?" he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.

  When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.

  My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a glass of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer into the roots of the tomato plants by the coulee. She was in the row, on her hands and knees, and the rump of her pink shorts was covered with dirt.

  She raised up on her knees and smiled.

  "Did you eat yet?" she asked.

  "I stopped in Lafayette."

  "What were you doing over there?"

  "I went to Opelousas to run down a lead on that '57 lynching."

  "I thought the sheriff had said—"

  "He did. He didn't take well to my pursuing it."

  I sat down at the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. On the table were a pad of lined notebook paper and three city library books on Texas and southern history.

  "What's this?" I said.

  "Some books I checked out. I found out some interesting things."

  She got up from the row of tomato plants, brushing her hands, and sat down across from me. Her hair was damp on her forehead and flecked with grains of dirt. She picked up the note pad and began thumbing back pages. Then she set it down and looked at me uncertainly.

  "You know how dreams work?" she said. "I mean, how dates and people and places shift in and out of a mental picture that you wake up with in the morning? The picture seems to have no origin in your experience, but at the same time you're almost sure you lived it, you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "I looked up some of the things that, well, maybe you believe you saw out there in the mist."

  I drank out of my iced tea and looked down the sloping lawn at the duck pond and the bright, humid haze on my neighbor's sugarcane.

  "You see, Dave, according to these books, John Bell Hood never had a command in Louisiana," she said. "He fought at Gettysburg and in Tennessee and Georgia."

  "He was all through this country, Boots."

  "He lived here but he didn't fight here. You see, what's interesting, Dave, is that part of your information is correct but the rest you created from associations. Look here—"

  She turned the notebook around so I could see the notes she had taken. "You're right, he commanded the Texas Brigade," she said. "It was a famous cavalry outfit. But look here at this date. When you asked the general what the date was, he told you it was April 21, 1865, right?"

  "Right."

  "April 21 is Texas Independence Day, the day the battle of San Jacinto was fought between the Mexican army and the Texans in 1836. Don't you see, your mind mixed up two historical periods. Nothing happened out in that mist, Dave."

  "Maybe not," I said. "Wait here a minute, will you?"

  I walked to the front of the house, where my boat trailer was still parked, pulled back the tarp, which was dented with pools of rainwater, reached down inside the bow of the boat, and returned to the backyard.

  "What is it?"

  "Nothing."

  "Why'd you go out front?"

  "I was going to show you some junk I found out in the marsh."

  "What junk?"

  "Probably some stuff left by an old lumber crew. It's not important."

  Her face was puzzled, then her eyes cleared and she put her hand on top of mine.

  "You want to go inside?" she said.

  "Where's Alf?"

  "Playing over at Poteet's house."

  "Sure, let's go inside."

  "I'm kind of dirty."

  She waited for me to say something but I didn't. I stared at my iced-tea glass.

  "What is it, babe?" she said.

  "Maybe it's time to start letting go of the department."

  "Let go how?"

  "Hang it up."

  "Is that what you want?"

  "Not really."

  "Then why not wait awhile? Don't make decisions when you're feeling down, cher."

  "I think I've already been cut loose, Boots. They look at me like I have lobotomy stitches across my forehead."

  "Maybe you read it wrong, Dave. Maybe they want to help but they just don't know how."

  I didn't answer. Later, after we had made love in the warm afternoon gloom of our bedroom, I rose from the softness of her body and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. A moment later I felt her nails tick lightly on my back.

  "Ask the sheriff if he wants your resignation," she said.

  "It won't solve the problem."

  "Why won't it? Let them see how well they'll do without you."

  "You don't understand. I'm convinced Kelly Drummond's killer was after me. It's got something to do with that dead black man. That's the only thing that makes sense."

  "Why?"

  "We've gotten virtually nowhere in trying to find this serial killer or psychopath or whatever he is. So why would he want to come after me? But the lynched black man is another matter. I'm the only one making noise about it. That's the connection. Why doesn't the sheriff see that?"

  I felt her nails trace my vertebrae.

  "You want to believe that all people are good, Dave," she said. "When your friends don't act the way they should, you feel all this anger and then it turns inward on you."

  "I'm going to take down that guy, Boots. Even if I have to do it outside the department."

  It was quiet for a long time. Then I felt her weight shift on the mattress and I thought she was getting up to get dressed. Instead,
she rose to her knees, pressed her body hard against my back, and pulled my head against her breasts.

  "I'll always love you, Dave," she said. "I don't care if you're a cop or a commercial fisherman or if you hunt down this bastard and kill him, I'll always love you for the man you are."

  How do you respond to a statement like that?

  The phone call came at 9:30 that night. I answered it in the kitchen.

  "You're a hard man to catch," she said.

  "Who's this?"

  "The lady who's been trying to catch you, sugar."

  "How about giving me a name?"

  "It's Amber. Who else, darlin'?" Her voice sounded sleepy, indolent, in slow motion.

  "Ah, the lady of the mysterious phone messages."

  "You don't remember me? Don't hurt my feelings."

  "No, I'm sorry, I don't recall who you are. What can I do for you?"

  "It's me that's going to do you a big favor, darlin'. It's because I like you. It's because I remember you from New Orleans a long time ago."

  "I appreciate all this, but how about we cut to it?"

  "I'm gonna give you the guy you want, sweetheart."

  "Which guy are we talking about?"

  "He's a nasty ole pimp and he's been doin' some nasty things to his little girls."

  Through the back window I could see my neighbor burning field stumps in the dark. The sparks spun upward against the black sky.

  "What's his name, Amber?"

  "I've got a temporary problem, though. I want to go back to Florida for a little while, you know what I mean?"

  "What do you need?"

  "Just the air ticket and a little pin money. Three or four hundred dollars. That's not a lot to ask, is it?"

  "We might be able to arrange that. Would you like to come into my office?"

  "Oh, I don't know if I should do that. All those handsome men make me self-conscious. Do you know where Red's Bar is in Lafayette?"

  "On the north side?"

  "You got it, sugar. How about in an hour? I'll be at the bar, right by the door."

  "You wouldn't try to take me over the hurdles, would you, Amber?"

  "Tell me you don't recognize me and break my heart. Ooou, ooou," she said, and hung up.

  Who was she? The rhetoric, the flippant cynicism, the pout in the voice, the feigned little-girlishness, all spelled hooker. And the messages she had left at my office were obviously meant to indicate to others that there was a personal relationship between us. It sounded like the beginning of a good scam. But she had also sounded stoned. Or maybe she was simply crazy, I thought. Or maybe she was both stoned and crazy and simply running a hustle. Why not?