DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead Read online

  My respect for Rosie Gomez's ability was appreciating.

  She walked back through the door, clipping two keys onto a ring.

  "You want to talk while we take a ride out to Spanish Lake?" I said.

  "What's at Spanish Lake?"

  "A movie director I'd like to meet."

  "What's that have to do with our case?"

  "Probably nothing. But it beats staying indoors."

  "Sure. I have to make a call to the Bureau, then I'll be right with you."

  "Let me ask you an unrelated question," I said.

  "Sure."

  "If you found the remains of a black man, and he had on no belt and there were no laces in his boots, what speculation might you make about him?"

  She looked at me with a quizzical smile.

  "He was poor?" she said.

  "Could be. In fact, someone else told me about the same thing in a less charitable way."

  "No," she said. She looked thoughtfully into space, puffed out one jaw, then the other, like a chipmunk might. "No, I'd bet he'd been in jail, in a parish or a city holding unit of some kind, where they were afraid he'd do harm to himself."

  "That's not bad," I said. Not at all, I thought. "Well, let's take a ride."

  I waited for her outside in the shade of the building. I was sweating inside my shirt, and the sunlight off the cement parking lot made my eyes film. Two of the uniformed deputies who had been grinning through my glass earlier came out the door with clipboards in their hands, then stopped when they saw me. The taller one, a man named Rufus Arceneaux, took a matchstick out of his mouth and smiled at me from behind his shades.

  "Hey, Dave," he said, "does that gal wear a Bureau buzzer on each of her boobs or is she just a little top-heavy?"

  They were both grinning now. I could hear bottleflies buzzing above an iron grate in the shade of the building.

  "You guys can take this for what it's worth," I said. "I don't want you to hold it against me, either, just because I outrank you or something like that. Okay?"

  "You gotta make plainclothes before you get any federal snatch?" Arceneaux said, and put the matchstick back in the corner of his mouth.

  I put on my sunglasses, folded my seersucker coat over my arm, and looked across the street at a black man selling rattlesnake watermelons off the tailgate of a pickup truck.

  "If y'all want to act like public clowns, that's your business," I said. "But you'd better wipe that stupid expression off your faces when you're around my partner. Also, if I hear you making remarks about her, either to me or somebody else, we're going to take it up in a serious way. You get my drift?"

  Arceneaux rotated his head on his neck, then pulled the front of his shirt loose from his damp skin with his fingers.

  "Boy, it's hot, ain't it?" he said. "I think I'm gonna come in this afternoon and take a cold shower. You ought to try it too, Dave. A cold shower might get the wrong thing off your mind."

  They walked into the shimmering haze, their leather holsters and cartridge belts creaking on their hips, the backs of their shirts peppered with sweat.

  Rosie Gomez and I turned off the highway in my pickup truck and drove down the dirt lane through the pecan orchard toward Spanish Lake, where we could see elevated camera platforms and camera booms silhouetted against the sun's reflection on the water. A chain was hung across the road between a post and the side of the wood-frame security building. The security guard, the wiry man with the white scar embossed on his throat like a chicken's foot, approached my window. His face looked pinched and heated in the shadow of his bill cap.

  I showed him my badge.

  "Yeah, y'all go on in," he said. "You remember me, Detective Robicheaux?"

  His hair was gray, cut close to the scalp, and his skin was browned and as coarse as a lizard's from the sun. His blue eyes seemed to have an optical defect of some kind, a nervous shudder like marbles clicking on a plate.

  "It's Doucet, isn't it?" I said.

  "Yes, sir, Murphy Doucet. You got a good memory. I used to be with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department when you were with N.O.P.D."

  His stomach was as flat as a shingle. He wore a .357 chrome-plated revolver, and also a clip-on radio, a can of Mace, and a rubber baton on his belt.

  "It looks like you're in the movie business now," I said.

  "Just for a while. I own half of a security service now and I'm a steward for the Teamsters out of Lafayette, too. So I'm kind of on board both ways here."

  "This is Special Agent Gomez from the FBI. We'd like to talk to Mr. Goldman a few minutes if he's not too busy."

  "Is there been some kind of trouble?"

  "Is Mr. Goldman here?"

  "Yes, sir, that's him right up yonder in the trees. I'll tell him y'all on your way." He started to take his radio off his belt.

  "That's all right. We'll find him."

  "Yes, sir, anything you say."

  He dropped the chain and waited for us to pass. In the rearview mirror I saw him hook it to the post again. Rosie Gomez was looking at the side of my face.

  "What is it?" she said.

  "The Teamsters. Why does a Hollywood production company want to come into a depressed rural area and contract for services from the Teamsters? They can hire labor around here for minimum wage."

  "Maybe they do business with unions as a matter of course."

  "Nope, they usually try to leave their unions back in California. I've got a feeling this has something to do with Julie Balboni being on board the ark."

  I watched her expression. She looked straight ahead.

  "You know who Baby Feet Balboni is, don't you?" I said.

  "Yes, Mr. Balboni is well known to us."

  "You know he's in New Iberia, too, don't you?"

  She waited before she spoke again. Her small hands were clenched on her purse.

  "What's your implication?" she said.

  "I think the Bureau has more than one reason for being in town."

  "You think the girl's murder has secondary importance to me?"

  "No, not to you."

  "But probably to the people I work under?"

  "You'd know that better than I."

  "You don't think well of us, do you?"

  "My experience with the Bureau was never too good. But maybe the problem was mine. As the Bible says, I used to look through a glass darkly. Primarily because there was Jim Beam in it most of the time."

  "The Bureau's changed."

  "Yeah, I guess it has."

  Yes, I thought, they hired racial minorities and women at gunpoint, and they stopped wire-tapping civil-rights leaders and smearing innocent people's reputations after their years of illegal surveillance and character assassination were finally exposed.

  I parked the truck in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak tree, and we walked toward the shore of the lake, where a dozen people listened attentively to a man in a canvas chair who waved his arms while he talked, jabbed his finger in the air to make a point, and shrugged his powerful shoulders as though he were desperate in his desire to be understood. His voice, his manner, made me think of a hurricane stuffed inside a pair of white tennis shorts and a dark blue polo shirt.

  "—the best fucking story editor in that fucking town," he was saying. "I don't care what those assholes say, they couldn't carry my fucking jock strap. When we come out of the cutting room with this, it's going to be solid fucking gold. Has everybody got that? This is a great picture. Believe it, they're going to spot their pants big time on this one."

  His strained face looked like a white balloon that was about to burst. But even while his histrionics grew to awesome levels and inspired mute reverence in his listeners, his eyes drifted to me and Rosie, and I had a feeling that Murphy Doucet, the security guard, had used his radio after all.

  When we introduced ourselves and showed him our identification, he said, "Do you have telephones where you work?"

  "I beg your pardon?" I said.

  "Do you have telephones w
here you work? Do you have people there who know how to make appointments for you?"

  "Maybe you don't understand, Mr. Goldman. During a criminal investigation we don't make appointments to talk to people."

  His face flexed as though it were made of white rubber.

  "You saying you're out here investigating some crime? What crime we talking about here?" he said. "You see a crime around here?" He swiveled his head around. "I don't see one."

  "We can talk down at the sheriff's office if you wish," Rosie said.

  He stared at her as though she had stepped through a hole in the dimension.

  "Do you have any idea of what it costs to keep one hundred and fifty people standing around while I'm playing pocket pool with somebody's criminal investigation?" he said.

  "You heard what she said. What's it going to be, partner?" I asked.

  "Partner? " he said, looking out at the lake with a kind of melancholy disbelief on his face. "I think I screwed up in an earlier incarnation. I probably had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. That's gotta be it."

  Then he rose and faced me with the flat glare of a boxer waiting for the referee to finish with the ring instructions.

  "You want to take a walk or go in my trailer?" he said. "The air conditioner in my trailer is broken. You could fry eggs on the toilet seat. What d'you want to do?"

  "This is fine," I said.

  "Fine, huh?" he said, as though he were addressing some cynical store of private knowledge within himself. "What is it you want to say, Mr. Robicheaux?"

  He walked along the bank of the lake, his hair curling out of his polo shirt like bronze wire. His white tennis shorts seemed about to rip at the seams on his muscular buttocks and thighs.

  "I understand that you've cautioned some of your people to stay away from me. Is that correct?" I said.

  "What people? What are you talking about?"

  "I believe you know what I'm talking about."

  "Elrod and his voice out in the fog? Elrod and skeletons buried in a sandbar? You think I care about stuff like that? You think that's what's on my mind when I'm making a picture?" He stopped and jabbed a thick finger at me. "Hey, try to understand something here. I live with my balls in a skillet. It's a way of life. I got no interest, I got no involvement, in people's problems in a certain locale. Is that supposed to be bad? Is it all right for me to tell my actors what I think? Are we all still working on a First Amendment basis here?"

  A group of actors in sweat-streaked gray and blue uniforms, eating hamburgers out of foam containers, walked past us. I turned and suddenly realized that Rosie was no longer with us.

  "She probably stepped in a hole," Goldman said.

  "I think you are worried about something, Mr. Goldman. I think we both know what it is, too."

  He took a deep breath. The sunlight shone through the oak branches over his head and made shifting patterns of shadow on his face.

  "Let me try to explain something to you," he said. "Most everything in the film world is an illusion. An actor is somebody who never liked what he was. So he makes up a person and that's what he becomes. You think John Wayne came out of the womb John Wayne? He and a screenwriter created a character that was a cross between Captain Bligh and Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Duke played it till he dropped.

  "Elrod's convinced himself he has magic powers. Why? Because he melted his head five years ago and he has days when he can't tie his shoestrings without a diagram. So instead of admitting that maybe he's got baked mush between his ears, he's a mystic, a persecuted clairvoyant."

  "Let's cut the dog shit, Mr. Goldman. You're in business with Baby Feet Balboni. That's your problem, not Elrod Sykes."

  "Wrong."

  "You know what a 'fall partner' is?"

  "No."

  "A guy who goes down on the same bust with you."

  "So?"

  "Julie doesn't have fall partners. His hookers do parish time for him, his dealers do it for him in Angola, his accountants do it in Atlanta and Lewisburg. I don't think Julie has ever spent a whole day in the bag."

  "Neither have I. Because I don't break the law."

  "I think he'll cannibalize you."

  He looked away from me, and I saw his hands clench and unclench and the veins pulse in his neck.

  "You look here," he said. "I worked nine years on a mini-series about the murder of six million people. I went to Auschwitz and set up cameras on the same spots the S.S. used to photograph the people being pulled out of the boxcars and herded with dogs to the ovens. I've had survivors tell me I'm the only person who ever described on film what they actually went through. I don't give a fuck what any critic says, that series will last a thousand years. You get something straight, Mr. Robicheaux. People might fuck me over as an individual, but they'll never fuck me over as a director. You can take that to the bank."

  His pale eyes protruded from his head like marbles.

  I looked back at him silently.

  "There's something else?" he said.

  "No, not really."

  "So why the stare? What's going on?"

  "Nothing. I think you're probably a sincere man. But as someone once told me, hubris is a character defect better left to the writers of tragedy."

  He pressed his fingers on his chest.

  "I got a problem with pride, you're saying?"

  "I think Jimmy Hoffa was probably the toughest guy the labor movement ever produced," I said. "Then evidently he decided that he and the mob could have a fling at the dirty boogie together. I used to know a button man in New Orleans who told me they cut Hoffa into hundreds of pieces and used him for fish chum. I believe what he said, too."

  "Sounds like your friend ought to take it to a grand jury."

  "He can't. Three years ago one of Julie's hired lowlifes put a crack in his skull with a cold chisel. Just for kicks. He sells snowballs out of a cart in front of the K & B drugstore on St. Charles now. We'll see you around, Mr. Goldman."

  I walked away through the dead leaves and over a series of rubber-coated power cables that looked like a tangle of black snakes. When I looked back at Mikey Goldman, his eyes were staring disjointedly into space.

  Chapter 6

  Rosie was waiting for me by the side of the pickup truck under the live-oak tree. The young sugarcane in the fields was green and bending in the wind. She fanned herself with a manila folder she had picked up off the truck seat.

  "Where did you go?" I asked.

  "To talk to Hogman Patin."

  "Where is he?"

  "Over there, with those other black people, under the trees. He's playing a street musician in the film."

  "How'd you know to talk to him?"

  "You put his name in the case file, and I recognized him from his picture on one of his albums."

  "You're quite a cop, Rosie."

  "Oh, I see. You didn't expect that from an agent who's short, Chicana, and a woman?"

  "It was meant as a compliment. How about saving that stuff for the right people? What did Hogman have to say?"

  Her eyes blinked at the abruptness of my tone.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to sound like that. I still have my mind on Goldman. I think he's hiding some serious problems, and I think they're with Julie Balboni. I also think there might be a tie-in between Julie and Cherry LeBlanc."

  She looked off at the group of black people under the trees.

  "You didn't bother to tell me that earlier," she said.

  "I wasn't sure about it. I'm still not."

  "Dave, I'll be frank with you. Before I came here I read some of your history. You seem to have a way of doing things on your own. Maybe you've been in situations where you had no other choice. But I can't have a partner who holds out information on me."

  "It's a speculation, Rosie, and I just told you about it."

  "Where do you think there might be a tie-in?" she said, and her face became clear again.

&nbs
p; "I'm not sure. But one of his hoods, a character named Cholo Manelli, told me that he and Julie had been talking about the girl's death. Then ten minutes later Julie told me he hadn't heard or read anything about it. So one of them is lying, and I think it's Julie."

  "Why not the hood, what's his name, Cholo?"

  "When a guy like Cholo lies or tries to jerk somebody around, he doesn't involve his boss's name. He has no doubt about how dangerous that can be. Anyway, what did you get from Hogman?"

  "Not much. He just pointed at you and said, 'Tell that other one yonder ain't every person innocent, ain't every person listen when they ought to, either.' What do you make of that?"

  "Hogman likes to be an enigma."

  "Those scars on his arms—"

  "He had a bunch of knife beefs in Angola. Back in the 1940s he murdered a white burial-insurance collector who was sleeping with his wife. Hogman's a piece of work, believe me. The hacks didn't know how to deal with him. They put him in the sweat box on Camp A for eighteen days one time."

  "How'd he kill the white man?"

  "With a cane knife on the white man's front gallery. In broad daylight. People around here talked about that one for a long time."

  I could see a thought working in her eyes.

  "He's not a viable suspect, Rosie," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "Hogman's not a bad guy. He doesn't trust white people much, and he's a little prideful, but he wouldn't hurt a nineteen-year-old girl."

  "That's it? He's not a bad guy? Although he seems to have a lifetime history of violence with knives? Good God."

  "Also the nightclub owner says Hogman never left the club that night."

  She got in the truck and closed the door. Her shoulders were almost below the level of the window. I got in on the driver's side and started the engine.

  "Well, that clears all that up, then," she said. "I guess the owner kept his eyes on our man all night. You all certainly have an interesting way of conducting an investigation."

  "I'll make you a deal. I'll talk with Hogman again if you'll check out this fellow Murphy Doucet."

  "Because he's with the Teamsters?"