In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead Read online

  "I wasn't drunk," he said. "This guy with the bad arm and one leg, he said to me, 'You and your friend, the police officer in town, must repel them.' He was standing by the water, in the fog, on a crutch. He looked right in my face when he said it."

  "I see."

  "What do you think he meant?"

  "I'm afraid I wouldn't know, partner."

  "I got the notion he thought you would."

  "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think you're imagining all this and I'm not going to pursue it any further. Instead, how about your clarifying something Ms. Drummond said earlier?"

  "What's that?"

  "Why is it a problem to your director, this fellow Mikey, if you come out to my place?"

  "She told you that?"

  "That's what the lady said."

  "Well, the way he put it was 'Stay out of that cop's face, El. Don't give him reason to be out here causing us trouble. We need to remember that a lot of things happened in this part of the country that are none of our business.' "

  "He's worried about the dead black man you found?" I said. "That doesn't make too much sense."

  "You got another one of these?" he said, and held up his empty bottle.

  "Why is he worried about the black man?"

  "When Mikey worries, it's about money, Mr. Robicheaux. Or actually about the money he needs to make the kind of pictures he wants. He did a mini-series for television on the Holocaust. It lost ten million dollars for the network. Nobody's lining up to throw money at Mikey's projects right now."

  "Julie Balboni is."

  "You ever heard of a college turning down money from a defense company because it makes napalm?"

  He opened and closed his mouth as though he were experiencing cabin pressure in an airplane. The moon was up now, and in the glow of light through the tree branches the skin of his face looked pale and grained, stretched tight against the bone. "Mr. Robicheaux . . . Dave . . . I'm being honest with you, I need a drink."

  "We'd better go inside and get you one, then. I'll make you a deal, though. Maybe you might want to think about going to a meeting with me. I don't necessarily mean that you belong there. But some people think it beats waking up like a chainsaw every morning."

  He looked away at a lighted boat on the bayou.

  "It's just a thought. I didn't mean to be intrusive," I said. "Let's go inside."

  "You ever see lights out in the cypress trees at night?"

  "It's swamp gas. It ignites and rolls across the water's surface like ball lightning."

  "No, sir, that's not what it is," he said. "They had lanterns hanging on some of their ambulances. The horses got mired in the bogs. A lot of those soldiers had maggots in their wounds. That's the only reason they lived. The maggots ate out the infection."

  I wasn't going to talk any more about the strange psychological terrain that evidently he had created as a petting zoo for all the protean shapes that lived in his unconscious.

  I put the bag of alfalfa pellets on top of the hutches and turned to go back to the house.

  "That general said something else," Elrod said behind me.

  I waved my hand negatively and kept walking.

  "Well, I cain't blame you for not listening," he said. "Maybe I was drunk this time. How could your father have his adjutant's pistol?"

  I stopped.

  "What?" I said.

  "The general said, 'Your friend's father took the revolver of my adjutant, Major Moss.' . . . Hey, Mr. Robicheaux, I didn't mean to say the wrong thing, now."

  I chewed on the corner of my lip and waited before I spoke again.

  "Elrod, I've got the feeling that maybe I'm dealing with some kind of self-manufactured mojo-drama here," I said. "Maybe it's related to the promotion of your film, or it might have something to do with a guy floating his brain in alcohol too long. But no matter how you cut it, I don't want anyone, and I mean anyone, to try to use a member of my family to jerk me around."

  He turned his palms up and his long eyelashes fluttered.

  "I don't know what to say. I apologize to you, sir," he said. Then his eyes focused on nothing and he pinched his mouth in his hand as though he were squeezing a dry lemon.

  At eleven that night I undressed and lay down on the bed next to Bootsie. The window fan billowed the curtains and drew the breeze across the streets, and I could smell watermelons and night-blooming jasmine out in the moonlight. The closet door was open, and I stared at the wooden foot-locker that was set back under my hangered shirts and trousers. Bootsie turned her head on the pillow and brushed her fingers along the side of my face.

  "Are you mad at me?" she said.

  "No, of course not."

  "They seem to be truly nice people. It would have been wrong not to invite them in."

  "Yeah, they're not bad."

  "But when you came back inside with Elrod, you looked bothered about something. Did something happen?"

  "He says he talks with dead people. Maybe he's crazy. I don't know, Boots, I—"

  "What is it, Dave?" She raised herself on her elbow and looked into my face.

  "He said this dead Confederate general told him that my father took his adjutant's revolver."

  "He had too much to drink, that's all."

  I continued to stare at the closet. She smiled at me and pressed her body against me.

  "You had a long day. You're tired," she said. "He didn't mean any harm. He probably won't remember what he said tomorrow."

  "You don't understand, Boots," I said, and sat up on the edge of the bed.

  "Understand what?" She put her hand on my bare back. "Dave, your muscles are tight as iron. What's the matter?"

  "Just a minute."

  I didn't want to fall prey to superstition or my own imaginings or Elrod Sykes's manipulations. But I did. I clicked on the table lamp and pulled my old footlocker out of the closet. Inside a half-dozen shoe boxes at the bottom were the memorabilia of my childhood years with my father back in the 1940s: my collections of baseball cards, Indian banner stones and quartz arrow points, and the minié balls that we used to find in a freshly plowed sugarcane field right after the first rain.

  I took out a crushed shoe box that was tied with kite twine and sat back down on the bed with it. I slipped off the twine, removed the top of the box, and set it on the nightstand.

  "This was the best gift my father ever gave me," I said. "On my brother's and my birthday he'd always fix cush-cush and sausage for our breakfast, and we'd always find an unusual present waiting for us by our plate. On my twelfth birthday I got this."

  I lifted the heavy revolver out of the box and unwrapped the blackened oil rag from it.

  "He had been laid off in the oil field and he took a job tearing down some old slave quarters on a sugar plantation about ten miles down the bayou. There was one cabin separate from the others, with a brick foundation, and he figured it must have belonged to the overseer. Anyway, when he started tearing the boards out of the walls he found some flattened minié' balls in the wood, and he knew there had probably been a skirmish between some federals and Confederates around there. Then he tore out what was left of the floor, and in a crawl space, stuck back in the bricks, was this Remington .44 revolver."

  It had been painted with rust and cobweb when my father had found it, the cylinder and hammer frozen against the frame, the wood grips eaten away by mold and insects, but I had soaked it for a week in gasoline and rubbed the steel smooth with emery paper and rags until it had the dull sheen of an old nickel.

  "It's just an antique pistol your father gave you, Dave," she said. "Maybe you said something about it to Elrod. Then he got drunk and mixed it up with some kind of fantasy he has."

  "No, he said the officer's name." I opened the nightstand drawer and took out a small magnifying glass. "He said it had belonged to a Major Moss."

  "So what?"

  "Boots, there's a name cut into the trigger guard. I haven't thought about it in years. I couldn't have mentioned i
t to him."

  I rested the revolver across my thighs and looked through the magnifying glass at the soft glow of light off the brass housing around the trigger. The steel felt cold and slick with oil against my thighs.

  "Take a look," I said, and handed her the glass and the revolver.

  She folded her legs under her and squinted one eye through the glass. "It says 'CSA,' " she said.

  "Wrong place. Right at the back of the guard."

  She held the pistol closer to the glass. Then she looked up at me and there were white spots in her cheeks.

  "J. Moss." Her voice was dry when she said it. Then she said the name again. "It says J. Moss."

  "It sure does."

  She wrapped the blackened oil cloth around the pistol and replaced it in the shoe box. She put her hand in mine and squeezed it.

  "Dave?"

  "Yes?"

  "I think Elrod Sykes is a nice man, but we mustn't have him here again."

  She turned out the light, lay back on the pillow, and looked out at the moonlight in the pecan trees, her face caught with a private, troubled thought like the silent beating of a bird's wings inside a cage.

  Chapter 5

  Early the next morning the sheriff stopped me in the corridor as I was on my way to my office.

  "Special. Agent Gomez is here," he said. A smile worked at the corner of his mouth.

  "Where?"

  "In your office."

  "So?"

  "I think it's a break the FBI's working with us on this one."

  "You told me that before."

  "Yeah, I did, didn't I?" His eyes grew brighter, then he looked away and laughed out loud.

  "What's the big joke?" I asked.

  "Nothing." He rubbed his lips with his knuckle, and his eyes kept crinkling at the corners.

  "Let me ask you something between insider jokes," I said. "Why is the FBI coming in on this one so early? They don't have enough work to do with the resident wiseguys in New Orleans?"

  "That's a good question, Dave. Ask Agent Gomez about that and give me feedback later." He walked off smiling to himself. Uniformed deputies in the corridor were smiling back at him.

  I picked up my mail, walked through my office door, and stared at the woman who was sitting in my chair and talking on my telephone. She was looking out the window at a mockingbird on a tree limb while she talked. She turned her head long enough to point to a chair where I could sit down if I wished.

  She was short and dark-skinned, and her thick, black hair was chopped stiffly along her neck. Her white suit coat hung on the back of my chair. There was a huge silk bow on her blouse of the sort that Bugs Bunny might wear.

  Her eyes flicked back at me again, and she took the telephone receiver away from her ear and slipped her hand over the mouthpiece.

  "Have a seat. I'll be right with you," she said.

  "Thank you," I said.

  I sat down, looked idly through my mail, and a moment later heard her put down the phone receiver.

  "Can I help you with something?" she asked.

  "Maybe. My name's Dave Robicheaux. This is my office."

  Her face colored.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "A call came in for me on your extension, and I automatically sat behind your desk."

  "It's all right."

  She stood up and straightened her shoulders. Her breasts looked unnaturally large and heavy for a woman her height. She picked up her purse and walked around the desk.

  "I'm Special Agent Rosa Gomez," she said. Then she stuck her hand out, as though her motor control was out of sync with her words.

  "It's nice to know you," I said.

  "I think they're putting a desk in here for me."

  "Oh?"

  "Do you mind?"

  "No, not at all. It's very nice to have you here."

  She remained standing, both of her hands on her purse, her shoulders as rigid as a coat hanger.

  "Why don't you sit down, Ms. . . . Agent Gomez?"

  "Call me Rosie. Everyone calls me Rosie."

  I sat down behind my desk, then noticed that she was looking at the side of my head. Involuntarily I touched my hair.

  ".You've been with the Bureau a long time?" I said.

  "Not really."

  "So you're fairly new?"

  "Well, just to this kind of assignment. I mean, out in the field, that sort of thing." Her hands looked small on top of her big purse. I think it took everything in her to prevent them from clenching with anxiety. Then her eyes focused again on the side of my head.

  "I have a white patch in my hair," I said.

  She closed then opened her eyes with embarrassment.

  "Someone once told me I have skunk blood in me," I said.

  "I think I'm doing a lot of wrong things this morning," she said.

  "No, you're not."

  But somebody at Fart, Barf, and Itch is, I thought.

  Then she sat erect in her chair and concentrated her vision on something outside the window until her face became composed again.

  "The sheriff said you don't believe we're dealing with a serial killer or a random killing," she said.

  "That's not quite how I put it. I told him I think she knew the killer."

  "Why?"

  "Her father appears to have been a child molester. She was streetwise herself. She had one prostitution beef when she was sixteen. Yesterday I found out she was still hooking—out of a club in St. Martinville. A girl like that doesn't usually get forced into cars in front of crowded jukejoints."

  "Maybe she went off with a john."

  "Not without her purse. She left it at her table. In it we found some—"

  "Rubbers," she said.

  "That's right. So I don't think it was a john. In her car we found a carton of cigarettes, a brand-new hairbrush, and a half-dozen joints in a Baggy in the trunk. I think she went outside to get some cigarettes, a joint, or the hairbrush, she saw somebody she knew, got in his car, and never came back."

  "Maybe it was an old customer, somebody she trusted. Maybe he told her he just wanted to set something up for later."

  "It doesn't fit. A john doesn't pay one time, then come back the next time with a razor blade or scalpel."

  She put her thumbnail between her teeth. Her eyes were brown and had small lights in them.

  "Then you think the killer is from this area, she knew him, and she trusted him enough to get in the car with him?"

  "I think it's something like that."

  "We think he's a psychopath, possibly a serial killer."

  "We?"

  "Well, actually I. I had a behavioral profile run on him. Everything he did indicates a personality that seeks control and dominance. During the abduction, the rape, the killing itself, he was absolutely in control. He becomes sexually aroused by power, by instilling fear and loathing in a woman, by being able to smother her with his body. In all probability he has ice water in his veins."

  I nodded and moved some paper clips around on my desk blotter.

  "You don't seem impressed," she said.

  "What do you make of the fact that he covered her face with her blouse?" I said.

  "Blindfolding humiliates the victim and inspires even greater terror in her."

  "Yeah, I guess it does."

  "But you don't buy the profile."

  "I'm not too keen on psychoanalysis. I belong to a twelve-step fellowship that subscribes to the notion that most bad or evil behavior is generated by what we call a self-centered fear. I think our man was afraid of Cherry LeBlanc. I don't think he could look into her eyes while he raped her."

  She reached for a folder she had left on the corner of my desk.

  "Do you know how many similar unsolved murders of women have been committed in the state of Louisiana in the last twenty-five years?"

  "I sent in an information-search request to Baton Rouge yesterday."

  "We have an unfair advantage on you in terms of resources," she said. She leafed through the printouts t
hat were clipped together at the top of the folder. Behind her, I saw two uniformed deputies grinning at me through the glass in my office partition.

  "Excuse me," I said, got up, closed the door, and sat back down again.

  "Is this place full of comedians?" she said. "I seem to make a lot of people smile."

  "Some of them don't get a lot of exposure to the outside world."

  "Anyway, narrowing it down to the last ten years, there are at least seventeen unsolved homicides involving females that share some similarity with the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. You want to take a look?" she said, and handed me the folder. "I have to go down to the sheriff's office and get my building keys. I'll be right back."

  It was grim material to read. There was nothing abstruse about the prose. It was unimaginative, flat, brutally casual in its depiction of the bestial potential among the human family, like a banal rendering of our worst nightmares: slasher cases, usually involving prostitutes; the garroting of housewives who had been abducted in broad daylight in supermarket and bowling-alley parking lots; the roadside murders of women whose cars had broken down at night; prostitutes who had probably been set on fire by their pimps; the drowning of two black women who had been wrapped to an automobile engine block with barbed wire.

  In almost all the cases rape, sodomy, or torture of some kind was involved. And what bothered me most was the fact that the perpetrators were probably still out there, unless they were doing time for other crimes; few of them had known their victims, and consequently few of them would ever be caught.

  Then I noticed that Rosie Gomez had made check marks in the margins by six cases that shared more common denominators with the death of Cherry LeBlanc than the others: three runaways who had been found buried off highways in a woods; a high school girl who had been raped, tied to a tree in a fish camp at Lake Chicot, and shot at point-blank range; two waitresses who had gone off from their jobs without explanation and a few hours later had been thrown, bludgeoned to death, into irrigation ditches.

  Their bodies had all showed marks, in one way or another, of having been bound. They had all been young, working class, and perhaps unsuspecting when a degenerate had come violently and irrevocably into their lives and had departed without leaving a sign of his identity.