In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead Read online

  I dropped the heavy spool into the sand, knelt in the shallows, and washed the mud off my skin. One hundred yards across the bay, I saw a boat with a cabin moored by the mouth of a narrow bayou. A Negro man stepped off the bow onto the bank, followed by two white men. Then I looked again and realized that something was terribly wrong. One of the white men had a pistol in his hand, and the black man's arms were pinioned at his sides with a thick chain that had been trussed around his upper torso.

  I stared in disbelief as the black man started running along a short stretch of beach, his head twisting back over his shoulder, and the man with the pistol took aim and fired. The first round must have hit him in the leg, because it crumpled under him as though the bone had been snapped in two with a hammer. He half rose to his feet, stumbled into the water, and fell sideways. I saw the bullets popping the surface around him as his kinky head went under. The man with the pistol waded after him and kept shooting, now almost straight down into the water, while the other white man watched from the bank.

  I didn't see the black man again.

  Then the two white men looked across the flat expanse of bay and saw me. I looked back at them, numbly, almost embarrassed, like a person who had opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment. Then they walked calmly back to their boat, with no sign of apprehension or urgency, as though I were not even worthy of notice.

  Later, I told the party chief, the sheriff's department, and finally anybody who would listen to me, about what I had seen. But their interest was short-lived; no body was ever found in that area, nor was any black man from around there ever reported as missing. As time passed, I tried to convince myself that the man in chains had eluded his tormentors, had held his breath for an impossibly long time, and had burst to the surface and a new day somewhere downstream. At age nineteen I did not want to accept the possibility that a man's murder could be treated with the social significance of a hangnail that had been snipped off someone's finger.

  At nine sharp the morning after I had stopped Elrod T. Sykes for drunk driving, a lawyer, not Elrod Sykes, was in my office. He was tall and had silver hair, and he wore a gray suit with red stones in his cuff links. He told me his name but it wouldn't register. In fact, I wasn't interested in anything he had to say.

  "Of course, Mr. Sykes is at your disposal," he said, "and both he and I appreciate the courtesy which you extended to him last night. He feels very bad about what happened, of course. I don't know if he told you that he was taking a new prescription for his asthma, but evidently his system has a violent reaction to it. The studio also appreciates—"

  "What is your name again, sir?"

  "Oliver Montrose."

  I hadn't asked him to sit down yet. I picked up several paper clips from a small tin can on my desk and began dropping them one by one on my desk blotter.

  "Where's Sykes right now, Mr. Montrose?"

  He looked at his watch.

  "By this time they're out on location," he said. When I didn't respond, he shifted his feet and added, "Out by Spanish Lake."

  "On location at Spanish Lake?"

  "Yes."

  "Let's see, that's about five miles out of town. It should take no longer than fifteen minutes to drive there from here. So thirty minutes should be enough time for you to find Mr. Sykes and have him sitting in that chair right across from me."

  He looked at me a moment, then nodded.

  "I'm sure that'll be no problem," he said.

  "Yeah, I bet. That's why he sent you instead of keeping his word. Tell him I said that, too."

  Ten minutes later the sheriff, with a file folder open in his hands, came into my office and sat down across from me. He had owned a dry-cleaning business and been president of the local Lions Club before running for sheriff. He wore rimless glasses, and he had soft cheeks that were flecked with blue and red veins. In his green uniform he always made me think of a nursery manager rather than a law officer, but he was an honest and decent man and humble enough to listen to those who had had more experience than he had.

  "I got the autopsy and the photographs on that LeBlanc girl," he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the red mark on the bridge of his nose. "You know, I've been doing this stuff five years now, but one like this—"

  "When it doesn't bother you anymore, that's when you should start to worry, sheriff."

  "Well, anyway, the report says that most of it was probably done to her after she was dead, poor girl."

  "Could I see it?" I said, and reached out my hand for the folder.

  I had to swallow when I looked at the photographs, even though I had seen the real thing only yesterday. The killer had not harmed her face. In fact, he had covered it with her blouse, either during the rape or perhaps before he stopped her young heart with an ice pick. But in the fourteen years that I had been with the New Orleans Police Department, or during the three years I had worked off and on for the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, I had seen few cases that involved this degree of violence or rage against a woman's body.

  Then I read through the clinical prose describing the autopsy, the nature of the wounds, the sexual penetration of the vagina, the absence of any skin samples under the girl's fingernails, the medical examiner's speculation about the moment and immediate cause of death, and the type of instrument the killer probably used to mutilate the victim.

  "Any way you look at it, I guess we're talking about a psychopath or somebody wired to the eyes on crack or acid," the sheriff said.

  "Yeah, maybe," I said.

  "You think somebody else would disembowel a nineteen-year-old girl with a scalpel or a barber's razor?"

  "Maybe the guy wants us to think he's a meltdown. He was smart enough not to leave anything at the scene except the ice pick, and it was free of prints. There weren't any prints on the tape he used on her wrists or mouth, either. She went out the front door of the jukejoint, by herself, at one in the morning, when the place was still full of people, and somehow he abducted her, or got her to go with him, between the front door and her automobile, which was parked only a hundred feet away."

  His eyes were thoughtful.

  "Go on," he said.

  "I think she knew the guy."

  The sheriff put his glasses back on and scratched at the corner of his mouth with one fingernail.

  "She left her purse at the table," I said. "I think she went outside to get something from her car and ran into somebody she knew. Psychopaths don't try to strongarm women in front of bars filled with drunk coonasses and oil-field workers."

  "What do we know about the girl?" I took my notebook out of the desk drawer and thumbed through it on top of the blotter.

  "Her mother died when she was twelve. She quit school in the ninth grade and ran away from her father a couple of times in Mamou. She was arrested for prostitution in Lafayette when she was sixteen. For the last year or so she lived here with her grandparents, out at the end of West Main. Her last job was waitressing in a bar about three weeks ago in St. Martinville. Few close friends, if any, no current or recent romantic involvement, at least according to the grandparents. She didn't have a chance for much of a life, did she?"

  I could hear the sheriff rubbing his thumb along his jawbone.

  "No, she didn't," he said. His eyes went out the window then refocused on my face. "Do you buy that about no romantic involvement?"

  "No."

  "Neither do I. Do you have any other theories except that she probably knew her killer?"

  "One."

  "What?"

  "That I'm all wrong, that we are dealing with a psychopath or a serial killer."

  He stood up to leave. He was overweight, constantly on a diet, and his stomach protruded over his gunbelt, but his erect posture always gave him the appearance of a taller and trimmer man than he actually was.

  "I'm glad we operate out of this office with such a sense of certainty, Dave," he said. "Look, I want you to use everything available to us on this one. I want to nail this sonofabitc
h right through the breastbone."

  I nodded, unsure of his intention in stating the obvious.

  "That's why we're going to be working with the FBI on this one," he said.

  I kept my eyes flat, my hands open and motionless on the desk blotter.

  "You called them?" I said.

  "I did, and so did the mayor. It's a kidnapping as well as a rape and murder, Dave."

  "Yeah, that could be the case."

  "You don't like the idea of working with these guys?"

  "You don't work with the feds, sheriff. You take orders from them. If you're lucky, they won't treat you like an insignificant local douche bag in front of a television camera. It's a great learning exercise in humility."

  "No one can ever accuse you of successfully hiding your feelings, Dave."

  Almost thirty minutes from the moment the attorney, Oliver Montrose, had left my office, I looked out my window and saw Elrod T. Sykes pull his lavender Cadillac into a no parking zone, scrape his white-walls against the curb, and step out into the bright sunlight. He wore brown striped slacks, shades, and a lemon-yellow short-sleeve shirt. The attorney got out on the passenger's side, but Sykes gestured for him to stay where he was. They argued briefly, then Sykes walked into the building by himself.

  He had his shades in his hand when he stepped inside my office door, his hair wet and freshly combed, an uneasy grin at the corner of his mouth.

  "Sit down a minute, please," I said.

  The skin around his eyes was pale with hangover. He sat down and touched at his temple as though it were bruised.

  "I'm sorry about sending the mercenary. It wasn't my idea," he said.

  "Whose was it?"

  "Mikey figures he makes the decisions on anything that affects the picture."

  "How old are you, Mr. Sykes?"

  He widened his eyes and crimped his lips.

  "Forty. Well, actually forty-three," he said.

  "Did you have to ask that man's permission to drive an automobile while you were drunk?"

  He blinked as though I'd struck him, then made a wet noise in his throat and wiped his mouth with the backs of his fingers.

  "I really don't know what to say to you," he said. He had a peculiar, north Texas accent, husky, slightly nasal, like he had a dime-sized piece of melting ice in his cheek. "I broke my word, I'm aware of that. But I'm letting other people down, too, Mr. Robicheaux. It costs ten thousand dollars an hour when you have to keep a hundred people standing around while a guy like me gets out of trouble."

  "I hope y'all work it out."

  "I guess this is the wrong place to look for aspirin and sympathy, isn't it?"

  "A sheriff's deputy from St. Mary Parish is going to meet us with a boat at the Chitimacha Indian reservation, Mr. Sykes. I think he's probably waiting on us right now."

  "Well, actually I'm looking forward to it. Did I tell you last night my grandpa was a Texas ranger?"

  "No, you didn't." I looked at my watch.

  "Well, it's a fact, he was. He worked with Frank Hammer, the ranger who got Bonnie and Clyde right up there at Arcadia, Louisiana." He smiled at me. "You know what he used to tell me when I was a kid? 'Son, you got two speeds— wide-open and fuck it.' I swear he was a pistol. He—"

  "I'd like to explain something to you. I don't want you to take offense at it, either."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Yesterday somebody raped and murdered a nineteen-year-old girl on the south side of the parish. He cut her breasts off, he pulled her entrails out of her stomach, he pushed twigs up her vagina. I don't like waiting in my office for you to show up when it's convenient, I'm not interested in your film company's production problems, and on this particular morning I'd appreciate it if you'd leave your stories about your family history to your publicity people."

  His eyes tried to hold on mine, then they watered and glanced away.

  "I'd like to use your bathroom, please," he said. "I'm afraid I got up with a case of the purple butterflies."

  "I'll be out front. I'll see you there in two minutes, Mr. Sykes."

  The sky was bright and hazy, the wind hot as a flame as we drove toward the Atchafalaya River. I had to stop the truck twice to let Elrod Sykes vomit by the side of the road.

  It felt strange to go back into that part of the Atchafalaya Basin after so many years. In July of 1957, after the hurricane had passed through and the rains had finally stopped, the flooded woods and willow islands, the canals whose canopies were so thick that sunlight seldom struck the water, the stretches of beach along the bays had smelled of death for weeks. The odor, which was like the heavy, gray, salty stench from a decaying rat, hung in the heat all day, and at night it blew through the screen windows on the quarter-boat and awaited you in the morning when you walked through the galley into the dining room.

  Many of the animals that did not drown starved to death. Coons used to climb up the mooring ropes and scratch on the galley screen for food, and often we'd take rabbits out of the tops of trees that barely extended above the current and carry them on the jugboat to the levee at Charenton. Sometimes at night huge trees with root systems as broad as barn roofs floated by in the dark and scraped the hull with their branches from the bow to the stern. One night when the moon was full and yellow and low over the willow islands, I heard something hit the side of the boat hard, like a big wood fist rolling its knuckles along the planks. I stood on my bunk and looked through the screen window and saw a houseboat, upside down, spinning in the current, a tangle of fishing nets strung out of one window like flotsam from an eye socket.

  I thought about the hundreds of people who had either been crushed under a tidal wave or drowned in Cameron Parish, their bodies washed deep into the marshes along the Calcasieu River, and again I smelled that thick, fetid odor on the wind. I could not sleep again until the sun rose like a red molten ball through the mists across the bay.

  It didn't take us long to find the willow island where Elrod Sykes said he had seen the skeletal remains of either an Indian or a black person. We crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya in a sheriff's department boat with two outboard engines mounted on the stern, took a channel between a row of sandbars whose sun-dried crests looked like the backs of dolphin jumping in a school, crossed a long bay, and slid the boat onto a narrow strip of beach that bled back into a thick stand of willow trees and chains of flooded sinkholes and sand bogs.

  Elrod Sykes stepped off the bow onto the sand and stared into the trees. He had taken off his shirt and he used it to wipe the sweat off his tanned chest and shoulders.

  "It's back in yonder," he said, and pointed. "You can see my footprints where I went in to take a whiz."

  The St. Mary Parish deputy fitted a cloth cap on his head and sprayed his face, neck, and arms with mosquito dope, then handed the can to me.

  "If I was you, I'd put my shirt on, Mr. Sykes," he said. "We used to have a lot of bats down here. Till the mosquitoes ate them all."

  Sykes smiled good-naturedly and waited for his turn to use the can of repellent.

  "I bet you won't believe this," the deputy said, "but it's been so dry here on occasion that I seen a catfish walking down the levee carrying his own canteen."

  Sykes's eyes crinkled at the corners, then he walked ahead of us into the gloom, his loafers sinking deep into the wet sand.

  "That boy's a long way from his Hollywood poontang, ain't he?" the deputy said behind me.

  "How about putting the cork in the humor for a while?" I said.

  "What?"

  'The man grew up down South. You're patronizing him."

  "I'm wha—"

  I walked ahead of him and caught up with Sykes just as he stepped out of the willows into a shallow, water-filled depression between the woods and a sandbar. The water was stagnant and hot and smelled of dead garfish.

  "There," he said. "Right under the roots of that dead tree. I told y'all."

  A barkless, sun-bleached cypress tree lay crossways in a sandbar, the wate
r-smooth trunk eaten by worms, and gathered inside the root system, as though held by a gnarled hand, was a skeleton crimped in an embryonic position, wrapped in a web of dried algae and river trash.

  The exposed bone was polished and weathered almost black, but sections of the skin had dried to the color and texture of desiccated leather. Just as Sykes had said, a thick chain encased with rust was wrapped around the arms and rib cage. The end links were fastened with a padlock as wide as my hand.

  I tore a willow branch off a tree, shucked off the leaves with my Puma knife, and knelt down in front of the skeleton.

  "How do you reckon it got up under those roots?" Sykes said.

  "A bad hurricane came through here in '57," I said. "Trees like this were torn out of the ground like carrots. My bet is this man's body got caught under some floating trees and was covered up later in this sandbar."

  Sykes knelt beside me.

  "I don't understand," he said. "How do you know it happened in '57? Hurricanes tear up this part of the country all the time, don't they?"

  "Good question, podna," I said, and I used the willow branch to peel away the dried web of algae from around one shinbone, then the other.

  "That left one's clipped in half," Sykes said.

  "Yep. That's where he was shot when he tried to run away from two white men."

  "You clairvoyant or something?" Sykes said.

  "No, I saw it happen. About a mile from here."