In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"

  "Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."

  "Can't somebody do something about him?"

  "When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."

  "Where did you get that piece of Puritan theology?"

  "It's not funny. The morons on the Chamber of Commerce who brought this guy here would screw up the recipe for ice water."

  I heard her laugh and walk around behind me. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and her mouth kiss the top of my head.

  "Dave, you're just too much," she said, and hugged me across the chest.

  I LISTENED TO THE NEWS ON THE RADIO AS I DROVE OUT TO Spanish Lake. A tropical storm off Cuba was gaining hurricane status and was expected to turn northwest toward the Gulf Coast. I glanced to the south, but the sky was brassy and hot and virtually free of clouds. Then as I passed the little watermelon and fruit stand at the end of West Main and headed out into the parish, my radio filled with static and my engine began to misfire.

  The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the grass by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

  "What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His glasses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

  "It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

  "Yeah, I ought to have something."

  I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand passed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release button and the blade leaped open in his hand.

  "This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

  "I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

  "I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

  "Thanks for the loan of the knife."

  I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oak trees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

  "What happened to your clothes?" I said.

  "I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."

  "I'm not kidding you, Dave," Elrod said. He wore a collarless gray shirt, officer's striped trousers, and black suspenders. "She's a natural. Mikey said the same thing. She looks good from any camera angle. We worked her right into the scene."

  "What about Tripod?" I said.

  "He's in it, too," Alafair said.

  "You're kidding?"

  "We're getting him a membership in the Screen Actors Guild," Elrod said.

  Elrod poured a paper cup of iced tea for me. The wind blew leaves out of the trees and flapped the corners of the checkered table covers. For the first time that day I could smell salt in the air.

  "This looks like the good life," I said.

  "Don't be too quick to judge," Elrod said. "A healthy lifestyle in southern California means running three miles on the beach in the morning, eating bean sprouts all day, and shoving five hundred bucks' worth of coke up your nose at night."

  The other actors began drifting away from the table to return to work. Tripod was on his chain, eating a drumstick by the trunk of a tree. On the grass next to him was a model of a German Messerschmitt, its wooden fuselage bright with silver paint, its red-edged iron crosses and Nazi swastikas as darkly beguiling as the light in a serpent's eye.

  "I gave her that. I hope you didn't mind," Elrod said.

  "Where'd you get it?"

  "From Murph, up there at the security building. I'm afraid he thinks I can get him on making props for Mikey or something. I think he's kind of a lonely guy, isn't he?"

  "I don't know much about him."

  "Alafair, can you go find Hogman and tell him we need to do that scene again in about fifteen minutes?" Elrod said.

  "Sure, El," she said, swung her legs over the bench, scooped Tripod over her shoulder, and ran off through the trees.

  "Look, El, I appreciate your working Alafair into your movie, but frankly I don't want her out here as long as Julie Balboni's around."

  "I thought you heard."

  "What?"

  "Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseballs out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew."

  "What do you mean he told him off?"

  "He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey. . . What's the matter?"

  "What did Julie have to say?"

  "He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks."

  "Where is he now?"

  "He drove off with his whole crew in his limo."

  "I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman."

  "He's on the other side of the lake."

  "Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight."

  "He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair."

  "We're not going to be here for it."

  "You won't let her be in the film?"

  "Nobody humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it."

  The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.

  Later, after I had taken Alafair home and checked in at the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.

  He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his shirt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.

  Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fishing as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.

  Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.

  "Why you keep botherin
g me?" he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.

  "I need to know what kind of work DeWitt Prejean did," I said.

  "You what?" His lips were as purple as though they had been painted, his teeth small and yellow as pieces of corn.

  "Just what I said."

  "You leave me the hell alone."

  I sat down on the grass by the edge of the slope.

  "It's not my intention to bother you, Mr. Hebert," I said. "But you're refusing to cooperate with a police investigation and you're creating problems for both of us."

  "He done . . . I don't know what he done. What difference does it make?" His eyes glanced sideways at the mulatto woman.

  "You seem to have a good memory for detail. Why not about DeWitt Prejean?"

  The woman rose from her seat on the bucket and walked farther down the bank, trailing her cork bobber in the water.

  "He done nigger work," Hebert said. "He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the fuck you think he did?"

  "That doesn't sound right to me. I think he did some other kind of work, too."

  His nostrils were dilated, as though a bad odor were rising from his own lap.

  "He was in bed with a white woman here. Is that what you want to know?"

  "Which woman?"

  "I done tole you. The wife of a cripple-man got shot up in the war."

  "He raped her?"

  "Who gives a shit?"

  "But the crippled man didn't break Prejean out of jail, Mr. Hebert."

  "It wasn't the first time that nigger got in trouble over white women. There's more than one man wanted to see him put over a fire."

  "Who broke him out?"

  "I don't know and I don't care."

  "Mr. Hebert, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm just going to go away?"

  The skin of his chest was sickly white, and under it were nests of green veins. "It was better back then," he said. "You know it was."

  "What kind of work did he do, Ben?"

  "Drove a truck."

  "For whom?"

  "It was down in Lafayette. He worked for a white man there till he come up here. Don't know nothing about the white man. You saying I do, then you're a goddamn liar." He leaned over to look past me at the mulatto woman, who was fishing among a group of willows now. Then his face snapped back at me. "I brung her out here 'cause she works for me. 'Cause I can't get in and out of the car good by myself."

  "What kind of truck did he drive?" I asked.

  "Beer truck. No, that wasn't it. Soda pop. Sonofabitch had a soda pop truck route when white people was making four dollars a day in the rice field." He set down his cane pole and began rolling a cigarette. His fingernails looked as thick and horned as tortoiseshell against the thin white square of paper into which he poured tobacco. His fingers trembled almost uncontrollably with anger and defeat.

  I DROVE TO TWINKY LEMOYNE'S BOTTLING WORKS IN Lafayette, but it was closed for the day. Twenty minutes later I found Lemoyne working in his yard at home. The sky was the pink of salmon eggs, and the wind thrashed the banana and lime trees along the side of his house. He had stopped pruning the roses on his trellis and had dropped his shears in the baggy back pocket of his faded denim work pants.

  "A lot of bad things happened back in that era between the races. But we're not the same people we used to be, are we?" he said.

  "I think we are."

  "You seem unable to let the past rest, sir."

  "My experience has been that you let go of the past by addressing it, Mr. Lemoyne."

  "For some reason I have the feeling that you want me to confirm what so far are only speculations on your part." There were tiny pieces of grit in his combed sandy hair and a film of perspiration and rose dust on his glasses.

  "Read it like you want. But somehow my investigation keeps winding its way back to your front door."

  He began snipping roses again and placing them stem down in a milk bottle full of green water. His two-story peaked white house in an old residential neighborhood off St. Mary Boulevard in Lafayette was surrounded by spectacular moss-hung oak trees and walls of bamboo and soft pink brick.

  "Should I call my lawyer? Is that what you're suggesting?"

  "You can if you want to. I don't think it'll solve your problem, though."

  "I beg your pardon." His shears hung motionlessly over a rose.

  "I think you committed a murder back in 1957, but in all probability you don't have the psychology of a killer. That means that you probably live with an awful guilt, Mr. Lemoyne. You go to bed with it and you wake with it. You drag it around all day long like a clanking chain."

  "Why is it that you seem to have this fixation about me? At first you accused me of being involved with a New Orleans gangster. Now this business about the murdered Negro."

  "I saw you do it."

  His egg-shaped face was absolutely still. Blood pooled in his cheeks like pink flowers.

  "I was only nineteen," I said. "I watched y'all from across the bay. The black man tried to run, and one of you shot him in the leg, then continued shooting him in the water. You didn't even think me worthy of notice, did you? You were right, too. No one ever paid much attention to my story. That was a hard lesson for a nineteen-year-old."

  He closed the shears, locked the clasp on the handles, and set them down on a glass-topped patio table. He poured two inches of whiskey into a glass with no ice and squeezed a lemon into it. He seemed as solitary as a man might who had lived alone all his life.

  "Would you care for one?" he said.

  "No, thank you."

  "I have high blood pressure and shouldn't drink, but I put lemon in it and convince myself that I'm drinking something healthy along with the alcohol. It's my little joke with myself." He took a deep breath.

  "You want to tell me about it?"

  "I don't think so. Am I under arrest?"

  "Not right now. But I think that's the least of your problems."

  "You bewilder me, sir."

  "You're partners in a security service with Murphy Doucet. A fellow like that doesn't fit in the same shoe box with you."

  "He's an ex-police officer. He has the background that I don't."

  "He's a resentful and angry man. He's also anti-Semitic. One of your black employees told me you're good to people of color. Why would a man such as yourself go into business with a bigot?"

  "He's uneducated. That doesn't mean he's a bad person."

  "I believe he's been blackmailing you, Mr. Lemoyne. I believe he was the other white man I saw across the bay with DeWitt Prejean."

  "You can believe whatever you wish."

  "We still haven't gotten to what's really troubling you, though, have we? It's those young women, isn't it?"

  His eyes closed and opened, and then he looked away at the south where lightning was forking into the Gulf and the sky looked like it was covered with the yellow-black smoke from a chemical fire.

  "I don't . . . I don't . . ." he began, then finished his whiskey and set his glass down. He wiped at the wet ring with the flat of his hand as though he wanted to scrub it out of the tabletop.

  "That day you stopped me out under the trees at the lake," I said, "you wanted assurance that it was somebody else, somebody you don't know, who mutilated and killed those girls, didn't you? You didn't want that sin on your conscience as well as Prejean's murder."

  "My God, man, give some thought to what you're saying. You're telling me I'm responsible for a fiend being loose in our midst."

  "Call your attorney and come into the office and make a statement. End it now, Mr. Lemoyne. You'll probably get off with minimum time on Prejean's death. You've got a good reputation and a lot of friends. You might even walk."

  "Please leave."

  "It won't change anything."

  He turned away from me and gazed at the approaching storm. Leaves exploded out
of the trees that towered above his garden walls.

  "Go do what you have to do, but right now please respect my privacy," he said.

  "You strayed out of the gentleman's world a long time ago."

  "Don't you have any sense of mercy?"

  "Maybe you should come down to my office and look at the morgue photographs of Cherry LeBlanc and a girl we pried out of an oil barrel down in Vermilion Parish."

  He didn't answer. As I let myself out his garden gate I glanced back at him. His cheeks were red and streaked with moisture as though his face had been glazed by freezing winds.

  That evening the weatherman said the hurricane had become stationary one hundred miles due south of Mobile. As I fell asleep later with the window open on a lightning-charged sky, I thought surely the electricity would bring the general back in my dreams.

  Instead, it was Lou Girard who stood under the wind-tormented pecan trees at three in the morning, his jaw shot away at the hinge, a sliver of white bone protruding from a flap of skin by his ear.

  He tried to speak, and spittle gurgled on his exposed teeth and tongue and dripped off the point of his chin.

  "What is it, Lou?"

  The wind whipped and molded his shapeless brown suit against his body. He picked up a long stick that had been blown out of the tree above him and began scratching lines in the layers of dead leaves and pecan husks at his feet. He made an S, and then drew a straight line like an I and then put a half bubble on it and turned it into a P.

  He dropped the stick to the ground and stared at me, his deformed face filled with expectation.

  Chapter 18

  The connection had been there all along. I just hadn't looked in the right place. As soon as I went into the office at 8 a.m. the next morning I called the probation and parole officer in Lafayette and asked the supervising P.O. to pull the file on Cherry LeBlanc.

  "Who busted her on the prostitution charge?" I said.

  I heard him leafing back and forth through the pages in the file.

  "It wasn't one officer. There was a state-police raid on a bar and some trailers out on the Breaux Bridge highway."

  S.P. Yes, the state police. Thanks, Lou, old friend.