In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead Read online

  "That's right. Let's find out how these guys developed an interest in the War Between the States."

  "You know what 'transfer' is in psychology?"

  "What's the point?"

  "Earlier you suggested that maybe I had a private agenda about Julie Balboni. Do you think that perhaps it's you who's taking the investigation into a secondary area?"

  "Could be. But you can't ever tell what'll fly out of the tree until you throw a rock into it."

  It was a flippant thing to say. But at the time it seemed innocent and of little more consequence than the warm breeze blowing across the cane and the plum-colored thunderclouds that were building out over the Gulf.

  Sam "Hogman" Patin lived on the bayou south of town in a paintless wood-frame house overgrown with banana trees and with leaf-clogged rain gutters and screens that were orange with rust. The roof was patched with R.C. Cola signs, the yard a tangle of weeds, automobile and washing-machine parts, morning-glory vines, and pig bones; the gallery and one corner of the house sagged to one side like a broken smile.

  I had waited until later in the day to talk to him at his house. I knew that he wouldn't have talked to me in front of other people at the movie set, and actually I wasn't even sure that he would tell me anything of importance now. He had served seventeen years in Angola, the first four of which he had spent on the Red Hat gang. These were the murderers, the psychotics, and the uncontrollable. They wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats that had been dipped in red paint, always ran double-time under the mounted gunbulls, and were punished on anthills, in cast-iron sweatboxes, or with the Black Betty, a leather whip that could flay a man's back to marmalade.

  Hogman would probably still be in there, except he got religion and a Baptist preacher in Baton Rouge worked a pardon for him through the state legislature. His backyard was dirt, deep in shadow from the live-oak trees, and sloped away to the bayou, where a rotted-out pirogue webbed with green algae lay half-submerged in the shallows. He sat in a straight-backed wood chair under a tree that was strung with blue Milk of Magnesia bottles and crucifixes fashioned out of sticks and aluminum foil. When the breeze lifted out of the south, the whole tree sang with silver and blue light.

  Hogman tightened the key on a new string he had just strung on his guitar. His skin was so black it had a purple sheen to it; and his hair was grizzled, the curls ironed flat against his head. His shoulders were an ax handle wide, the muscles in his upper arms the size of grapefruit. There wasn't a tablespoon of fat on his body. I wondered what it must have been like to face down Hogman Patin back in the days when he carried a barber's razor on a leather cord around his neck.

  "What did you want to tell me, Sam?" I asked.

  "One or two t'ings that been botherin' me. Get a chair off the po'ch. You want some tea?"

  "No, that's fine, thank you."

  I lifted a wicker chair off the back porch and walked back to the oak tree with it. He had slipped three metal picks onto his fingers and was running a blues progression up the neck of the guitar. He mashed the strings into the frets so that the sound continued to reverberate through the dark wood after he had struck the notes with his steel picks. Then he tightened the key again and rested the big curved belly of the twelve-string on his thigh.

  "I don't like to have no truck with white folks' bidness," he said. "But it bother me, what somebody done to that girl. It been botherin' me a whole lot."

  He picked up from the dirt a jelly glass filled with iced tea and drank out of it.

  "She was messin' in somet'ing bad, wouldn't listen to me or pay me no mind about it, neither. When they that age, they know what they wanta do."

  "Messing in what?"

  "I talked to her maybe two hours befo' she left the juke. I been knowing that girl a long time. She love zydeco and blues music. She tell me, 'Hogman, in the next life me and you is gonna get married.' That's what she say. I tole her, 'Darlin', don't let them mens use you for no chicken.'

  "She say, 'I ain't no chicken, Hogman. I going to New Orleans. I gonna have my own coop. Them others gonna be the chickens. I gonna have me a townhouse on Lake Pontchartrain.'"

  "Wait a minute, Sam. She told you she was going to have other girls working for her?"

  "That's what I just tole you, ain't I?"

  "Yes, you did."

  "I say, 'Don't be talkin' like that. You get away from them pimps, Cherry. Them white trash ain't gonna give you no townhouse. They'll use you up, t'row you away, then find some other girl just like you, I mean in five minutes, that quick.'

  "She say, 'No, they ain't, 'cause I got the mojo on the Man, Hogman. He know it, too.'

  "You know, when she say that, she smile up at me and her face look heart shape, like she just a little girl doin' some innocent t'ing 'stead of about to get herself killed."

  "What man did she mean?"

  "Probably some pimp tole her she special, she pretty, she just like a daughter to him. I seen the same t'ing in Angola. It ain't no different. A bunch take a young boy down on the flo', then when they get finish with him, he ready, he glad to put on a dress, makeup, be the punk for some wolf gonna take care of him, tell him he ain't just somebody's poke chops in the shower stall."

  "Why'd you wait to tell me this?"

  " 'Cause ain't nothin' like this ever happen 'round here befo'. I don't like it, me. No, suh."

  "I see."

  He splayed his long fingers on the belly of the guitar. The nails were pink against his black skin. His eyes looked off reflectively at the bayou, where fireflies were lighting in the gloom above the flooded cattails.

  Finally he said, "I need to tell you somet'ing else."

  "Go ahead, Sam."

  "You mixed up with that skeleton they found over in the Atchafalaya, ain't you?"

  "How'd you know about that?"

  "When somebody find a dead black man, black people know about it. That man didn't have on no belt, didn't have no strings in his boots, did he?"

  "That wasn't in the newspaper, podna."

  "The preacher they call up to do the burial is my first cousin. He brought a suit of clothes to the mo'tuary to dress the bones in. They was a black man workin' there, and my cousin say, 'That fella was lynched, wasn't he?' The black man say, 'Yeah, they probably drug him out of bed to do it, too. Didn't even have time to put strings in his boots or run a belt through his britches.' "

  "What are you telling me, Sam?"

  "I remember somet'ing, a long time ago, maybe thirty, thirty-five years back." He patted one hand on top of the other and his eyes became muddy.

  "Just say it, Sam."

  "A bluejay don't set on a mockin'bird's nest. I ain't got no use for that stuff in people, neither. The Lord made people a different color for a reason."

  He shook his head back and forth, as though he were dispelling a troubling thought.

  "You're not talking about a rape, are you?"

  "White folk call it rape when it fit what they want," he said. "They see what they need to see. Black folk cain't be choicy. They see what they gots to see. They was a black man, no, that ain't right, this is a nigger I'm talkin' about, and he was carryin' on with a white woman whose husband he worked for. Black folk knowed it, too. They tole him he better stop what he doin' befo' the cars start comin' down in the quarters and some innocent black man end up on a tree. I t'ink them was the bones you drug up in that sandbar."

  "What was his name?"

  "Who care what his name? Maybe he got what he ax for. But them people who done that still out there. I say past is past. I say don't be messin' in it."

  "Are you cautioning me?"

  "When I was in the pen, yo' daddy, Mr. Aldous, brought my mother food. He care for her when she sick, he pay for her medicine up at the sto'. I ain't forgot that, me."

  "Sam, if you have information about a murder, the law requires that you come forward with it."

  "Whose law? The law that run that pen up there? You want to find bodies, go dig in that levee for s
ome of them boys the gunbulls shot down just for pure meanness. I seen it." He touched the corner of his eye with one long finger. "The hack get drunk on corn liquor, single out some boy on the wheelbarrow, holler out, 'Yow! You! Nigger! Run!' Then he'd pop him with his .45, just like bustin' a clay duck."

  "What was the white woman's name?"

  "I got to be startin' my supper now."

  "Was the dead man in a jail?"

  "Ain't nobody interested back then, ain't nobody interested now. You give it a few mo' years, we all gonna be dead. You ain't goin' change nothin' for a nigger been in the river thirty years. You want to do some good, catch the pimp tore up that young girl. 'Cause sho' as God made little green apples, he gonna do it again."

  He squinted one eye in a shaft of sunlight that fell through the tree branches and lighted one half of his face like an ebony stage mask that was sewn together from mismatched parts.

  It was almost dusk when I got home that evening, but the sky was still as blue as a robin's egg in the west and the glow of the late sun looked like pools of pink fire in the clouds. After I ate supper, I walked down to the bait shop to help Batist close up. I was pulling back the canvas awning on the guy wires over the spool tables when I saw the sheriff's car drive down the dirt road and park under the trees.

  He walked down the dock toward me. His face looked flushed from the heat, puffy with fatigue.

  "I guarantee you, it's been one scorcher of a day," he said, went inside the shop, and came back with a sweating bottle of orange pop in his hand. He sat down at a table and wiped the sweat off his neck with his handkerchief. Grains of ice slid down the neck of the pop bottle.

  "What's up, sheriff?" I said.

  "Have you seen Rosie this afternoon?" He took a drink out of the bottle.

  I sat down across from him. Waves from a passing boat slapped against the pilings under the dock.

  "We went out to the movie location, then she went to Lafayette to check out a couple of things," I said.

  "Yeah, that's why I'm here."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I've gotten about a half-dozen phone calls this afternoon. I'm not sure what you guys are doing, Dave."

  "Conducting a murder investigation."

  "Oh, yeah? What does the director of a motion picture have to do with the death of Cherry LeBlanc?"

  "Goldman got in your face?"

  "He didn't. But you seem to have upset a few other people around here. Let's see, I received calls from two members of the Chamber of Commerce; Goldman's lawyer, who says you seem to be taking an undue interest in our visiting film community; and the mayor, who'd like to know what the hell my people think they're doing. If that wasn't enough, I also got a call from a Teamster official in Lafayette and a guy named Twinky Hebert Lemoyne who runs a bottling plant over there. Are you two working on some kind of negative outreach program? What was she doing over in Lafayette Parish?"

  "Ask her."

  "I have a feeling she was sent over there."

  "She was checking out the Teamsters' involvement with Goldman and Julie Balboni."

  "What does that have to do with our investigation?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. What did this guy Twinky Lemoyne call about?"

  "He owns half of a security service with a guy named Murphy Doucet. Lemoyne said Rosie came out to his bottling plant, asked him questions that were none of her business, and told him that he should give second thought to doing business with the mob. Do you know who Twinky Lemoyne is?"

  "Not really."

  "He's a wealthy and respected man in Lafayette. In fact, he's a decent guy. What are y'all trying to do, Dave?"

  "You sent me to invite Julie Balboni out of town. But now we find that Julie has made himself a big part of the local economy. I think that's the problem, sheriff, not me and Rosie."

  He rubbed his whiskers with the backs of his fingers.

  "Maybe it is," he said finally, "but there's more than one way to do things."

  "What would you suggest that we do differently?"

  His eyes studied a turkey buzzard that floated on the hot-air currents above the marsh.

  "Concentrate on nailing this psychopath. For the time being forget about Balboni," he said. His eyes didn't come back to meet mine when he spoke.

  "Maybe Julie's involved."

  "He's not. Julie doesn't do anything unless it's for money."

  "I'm getting the strong feeling that the Spanish Lake area is becoming off limits."

  "No, I didn't say that. It's a matter of priorities. That brings up another subject, too—the remains of that black man you found out in the Atchafalaya Basin."

  "Yes?"

  "That's St. Mary Parish's jurisdiction. Let them work the case. We've got enough on our own plate."

  "They're not going to work it."

  "Then that's their choice."

  I didn't speak for a moment. The twilight was almost gone. The air was heavy and moist and full of insects, and out in the cypress I could hear wood ducks fluttering across the surface of the water.

  "Would you like another cold drink?" I asked.

  "No, this is fine," he answered.

  "I'd better help Batist lock up, then. We'll see you, sheriff," I said, and went inside the bait shop. I didn't come back out until I heard his car start and head down the dirt road.

  Sam "Hogman" Patin was wrong. Cherry LeBlanc's killer would not merely find another victim in the future. He already had.

  Chapter 7

  I got the call at eleven o'clock that night. A fisherman running a trotline by the levee, way down in the bottom of Vermilion Parish, almost to the salt water, had seen a lidless oil drum half submerged on its side in the cattails. He would have paid little attention to it, except for the fact that he saw the backs of alligator gars arching out of the water in the moonlight as they tore at something inside the barrel.

  I drove down the narrow dirt track on top of the levee through the miles of flooded sawgrass that eventually bled into the Gulf. Strips of black cloud floated across the moon, and up ahead I could see an ambulance and a collection of sheriff's cars parked on the levee in a white and red glow of floodlamps, burning flares, and revolving emergency lights.

  The girl was already in a body bag inside the ambulance. The coroner was a tired, overweight Jewish man with emphysema and a terrible cigarette odor whom I had known for years. There were deep circles under his eyes, and he kept rubbing mosquito repellent onto his face and fat arms.

  Down the bank a Vermilion Parish plainclothes was interviewing the fisherman, whose unshaven face looked bloodless and gray in the glare of the floodlamps.

  "You want to see her, Dave?" the coroner asked.

  "Should I?"

  "Probably."

  We climbed into the back of the ambulance. Even with the air conditioner running, it was hot and stale-smelling inside.

  "I figure she was in the water only a couple of days, but she's probably been dead several weeks," he said. "The barrel was probably on the side of the levee, then it rolled into the water. Otherwise, the crabs and the gars would have torn her up a lot worse."

  He pulled the zipper from the girl's head all the way down to her ankles.

  I took a breath and swallowed.

  "I'd say she was in her early twenties, but I'm guessing," he said. "As you can see, we won't get much in the way of prints. I don't think an artist will be able to recreate what her face looked like, either. Cause of death doesn't appear to be a mystery—asphyxiation with a plastic bag taped around her neck. The same electrician's tape he used to bind her hands and ankles. Rape, sodomy, sexual degradation, that kind of stuff? When their clothes are gone, you can put it in the bank."

  "No rings, bracelets, tattoos?"

  He shook his head.

  "Have they found anything out there?"

  "Nothing."

  "Tire tracks?"

  "Not after all the rain we've had."

  "Do y'all have any missing-persons reports
that come with—"

  "Nope."

  A long strand of her blond hair hung outside the bag. For some reason it bothered me. I picked it up and placed it on her forehead. The coroner looked at me strangely.

  "Why would he stuff her in a barrel?" I said.

  "Dave, the day you can put yourself inside the head of a cocksucker like that, that's the day you eat your gun."

  I stepped back outside into the humid brilliance of the floodlamps, then walked along the slope of the levee and down by the water's edge. The darkness throbbed with the croaking of frogs, and fireflies were lighting in the tops of the sawgrass. The weeds along the levee had been trampled by cops' feet; fresh cigarette butts floated in the water; a sheriff's deputy was telling two others a racial joke.

  The Vermilion Parish plainclothes finished interviewing the fisherman, put his notebook in his shirt pocket, and walked up the slope to his car. The fisherman continued to stand by his pirogue, scratching at the mosquito bites on his arms, evidently unsure of what he was supposed to do next. Sweat leaked out of the band of his cloth cap and glistened on his jawbones. When I introduced myself, his handshake, like most Cajun men's, was effeminate.

  "I ain't never seen nothing like that, me," he said. "I don't want to never see nothing like that again, neither."

  The bottom of his pirogue was piled with mudcat. They quivered on top of each other, their whiskers pasted back against their yellow sides and bloated white bellies. On the seat of his pirogue was a headlamp with an elastic strap on it.

  "When'd you first see that metal barrel?" I said.

  "Tonight."

  "Do you come down here often?" I asked.

  "Not too often, no, suh."

  "You've got a nice bunch of fish there."

  "Yeah, they feed good when the moon's up."

  I gazed into the bottom of his pirogue, at the wet shine of moonlight on the fish's sides, the tangles of trotlines and corks, and a long object wrapped in a canvas tarp under the seat.

  I caught the pirogue by the gunwale and slid it partly up on the mudbank.

  "Do you mind if I look at this?" I said, and flipped back the folds of the canvas tarp.