In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 16

"I wish I had your confidence. It looks like you got some people's attention over in Jefferson Parish, too."

"I don't understand."

"The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department seems to think we may have a loose cannon cras.h.i.+ng around on our deck."

"What's their problem?"

"You didn't check in with them, you didn't coordinate with anybody, you simply went up and down the Airline Highway on your own, questioning hookers and bartenders about a pimp with no name."

"So?"

He rubbed the cleft in his round chin, then dropped the flat of his hand on his thigh.

"They say you screwed up a surveillance, that you blew a sting operation of some kind," he said.

"How?"

"I don't know."

"It sounds like bulls.h.i.+t to me, sheriff. It sounds like cops on a pad who don't want outsiders walking around on their turf."

"Maybe that's true, Dave, but I'm worried about you. I think you're overextending yourself and you're not hearing me when I talk to you about it."

"Did Twinky Lemoyne call?"

"No. Why should he?"

"I went over to Lafayette and questioned him yesterday afternoon."

He removed his rimless gla.s.ses, wiped them with a Kleenex, and put them back on. His eyes came back to meet mine.

"This was after I talked to you about involving people in the investigation who seem to have no central bearing in it?" he asked.

"I'm convinced that somehow Baby Feet was mixed up with Cherry LeBlanc, sheriff. Twinky Lemoyne has business ties to Feet. The way I read it, that makes him fair game."

"I'm really sorry to hear this, Dave."

"An investigation clears as well as implicates people. His black employees seem to think well of him. He didn't call in a complaint about my talking to him, either. Maybe he's an all-right guy."

"You disregarded my instructions, Dave."

"I saw the bodies of both those girls, sheriff."

"And?"

"Frankly I'm not real concerned about whose toes I step on."

He rose from his chair and tucked his s.h.i.+rt tightly into his gunbelt with his thumbs while his eyes seemed to study an unspoken thought in midair.

"I guess at this point I have to tell you something of a personal nature," he said. "I don't care for your tone, sir. I don't care for it in the least."

I picked up my coffee cup and sipped off it and looked at nothing as he walked out of the room.

ROSIE GOMEZ WAS DOWN IN VERMILION PARISH ALMOST ALL day. When she came back into the office late that afternoon her face was flushed from the heat and her dark hair stuck damply to her skin. She dropped her purse on top of her desk and propped her arms on the side of the air-conditioning unit so the windstream blew inside her sleeveless blouse.

"I thought Texas was the hottest place on earth. How did anyone ever live here before air conditioning?" she said.

"How'd you make out today?"

"Wait a minute and I'll tell you. d.a.m.n, it was hot out there. What happened to the rain?"

"I don't know. It's unusual."

"Unusual? I felt like I was being cooked alive inside wet cabbage leaves. I'm going to ask for my next a.s.signment in the Aleutians."

"I'm afraid you'll never make the state Chamber of Commerce, Rosie."

She walked back to her desk, blowing her breath up into her face, and opened her purse.

"What'd you do today?" she asked.

"I tried to run down some of those old cases, but they're pretty cold now-people have quit or retired or don't remember, files misplaced, that sort of thing. But there's one interesting thing here-" I spread a dozen National Crime Information Center fax sheets over the top of my desk. "If one guy committed several of these unsolved murders, it doesn't look like he ever operated outside the state. In other words, there don't seem to be any unsolved female homicides that took place during the same time period in an adjoining area in Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi.

"So this guy may not only be homegrown but for one reason or another he's confined his murders to the state of Louisiana."

"That'd be a new one," she said. "Serial killers usually travel, unless they prey off a particular local community, like gays or streetwalkers. Anyway, look at what jumped up out of the weeds today."

She held up a plastic Ziploc bag with a wood-handled, bra.s.s-tipped pocket knife inside. The single blade was opened and streaked with rust.

"Where'd you find it?"

"A half mile back down the levee from where the girl was found in the barrel. It was about three feet down from the crest."

"You covered all that ground by yourself?"

"More or less."

I looked at her a moment before I spoke again. "Rosie, you're kind of new to the area, but that levee is used by fishermen and hunters all the time. Sometimes they drop stuff."

"All my work for nothing, huh?" She smiled and lifted a strand of hair off her eyebrow.

"I didn't say that-"

"I didn't tell you something else. I ran into an elderly black man down there who sells catfish and frog legs off the back of his pickup truck. He said that about a month ago, late at night, he saw a white man in a new blue or black car looking for something on the levee with a flashlight. Just like that alligator poacher you questioned, he wondered why anybody would be down there at night with a new automobile. He said the man with the light wasn't towing a boat trailer and he didn't have a woman with him, either. Evidently he thinks those are the only two reasonable explanations for anyone ever going down there."

"Could he give you a description of the white man?"

"No, he said he was busy stringing a trotline between some duck blinds. What's a trotline, anyway?"

"You stretch a long piece of twine above the water and tie it to a couple of stumps or flooded trees. Then intermittently you hang twelve-inch pieces of weighted line with baited hooks into the water. Catfish feed by the moon, and when they hook themselves, they usually work the hook all the way through their heads and they're still on the trotline when the fisherman picks it up in the morning."

I sat on the corner of her desk and picked up the plastic bag and looked at the knife. It was the kind that was made in Pakistan or Taiwan and could be purchased for two dollars on the counter of almost any convenience store.

"If that was our man, what do you think happened?" I said.

"Maybe that's where he bound her with the electrician's tape. He used the knife to slice the tape, then dropped it. He either searched for it that night or came back another night when he discovered it was missing."

"I don't want to mess up your day, Rosie, but our man doesn't seem to leave fingerprints. At least there were none on the electrician's tape in the two murders that we think he committed. Why should he worry about losing the knife?"

"He needs to orchestrate, to be in control. He can't abide accidents."

"He left the ice pick in Cherry LeBlanc."

"Because he meant to. He gave us the murder weapon; it'll never be found on him. But he didn't plan to give us his pocket knife. That bothers him."

"That's not a bad theory. Our man is all about power, isn't he?"

She stood her purse up straight and started to snap it shut. It clunked on the desk when she moved it. She reached inside and lifted out her .357 magnum revolver, which looked huge in her small hand, and replaced it on top of her billfold. She snapped the catch on the purse.

"I said the obsession is about power, isn't it?"

"Always, always, always," she said.

The concentration seemed to go out of her eyes, as though the day's fatigue had just caught up with her.

"Rosie?"

"What is it?"

"You feel okay?"

"I probably got dehydrated out there."

"Drop the knife off with our fingerprint man and I'll buy you a Dr Pepper."

"Another time. I want to see what's on the knife."

"This time of day our fingerprint man is usually backed up. He probably won't get to it until tomorrow."

"Then he's about to put in for some overtime."

She straightened her shoulders, slung her purse on her shoulder, and walked out the door into the corridor. A deputy with a girth like a hogshead nodded to her deferentially and stepped aside to let her pa.s.s.

When I was helping Batist clean up the shop that evening I remembered that I hadn't called Elrod Sykes about his invitation to go fis.h.i.+ng out on the salt. Or maybe I had deliberately pushed it out of my mind. I knew that Bootsie was probably right about Elrod. He was one of the walking wounded, the kind for whom you always felt sympathy, but you knew eventually he'd rake a whole dustpan of broken gla.s.s into your head.

I called up to the house and got the telephone number that he had left with Bootsie. While Elrod's phone was ringing, I gazed out the screen window at Alafair and a little black girl playing with Tripod by the edge of a corn garden down the road. Tripod was on his back, rolling in the baked dirt, digging his claws into a deflated football. Even though there was still moisture in the root systems, the corn looked sere and red against the late sun, and when the breeze lifted in the dust the leaves crackled dryly around the scarecrow that was tilted at an angle above the children's heads.

Kelly Drummond answered the phone, then put Elrod on.

"You cain't go?" he said.

"No, I'm afraid not."

"Tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day. Why don't you take some time off?"

"Sat.u.r.day's a big day for us at the dock."

"Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux . . . Dave . . . is there some other problem here? I guess I was pretty fried when I was at your house."

"We were glad to have you all. How about I talk with you later? Maybe we'll go to a meeting, if you like."

"Sure," he said, his voice flat. "That sounds okay."

"I appreciate the invitation. I really do."

"Sure. Don't mention it. Another time."

"Yes, that might be fine."

"So long, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

The line went dead, and I was left with the peculiar sensation that I had managed both to be dishonest and to injure the feelings of someone I liked.

Batist and I cleaned the ashes out of the barbecue pit, on which we cooked sausage links and split chickens with a sauce piquante and sold them at noon to fishermen for three-ninety-five a plate; then we seined the dead s.h.i.+ners out ofthe bait tanks, wiped down the counters, swept the grained floors clean, refilled the beer and soda-pop coolers, poured fresh crushed ice over the bottles, loaded the candy and cigarette machines, put the fried pies, hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet in the icebox in case Tripod got into the shop again, folded up the beach umbrellas on the spool tables, slid back the canvas awning that stretched on wires over the dock, emptied water out of all our rental boats, ran a security chain through a welded ring on the housing of all the outboard engines, and finally latched the board flaps over the windows and turned keys in all the locks.

I walked across the road and stopped by the corn garden where Alafair and the black girl were playing. A pickup truck banged over the ruts in the road and dust drifted across the cornstalks. Out in the marsh, a solitary frog croaked, then the entire vault of sky seemed to ache with the reverberation of thousands of other frogs.

"What's Tripod been into today?" I said.

"Tripod's been good. He hasn't been into anything, Dave," Alafair said. She picked Tripod up and thumped him down on his back in her lap. His paws pumped wildly at the air.

"What you got there, Poteet?" I said to the little black girl. Her pigtails were wrapped with rubber bands and her elbows and knees were gray with dust.

"Found it right here in the row," she said, and opened her hand. "What that is, Mr. Dave?"

"I told you. It's a minie ball," Alafair said.

"It don't look like no ball to me," Poteet said.

I picked it out of her hand. It was smooth and cool in my palm, oxidized an off-white, cone-shaped at one end, grooved with three rings, and hollowed at the base. The French contribution to the science of killing people at long distances. It looked almost phallic.

"These were the bullets that were used during the War Between the States, Poteet," I said, and handed it back to her.

"Confederate and federal soldiers fought all up and down this bayou."

"That's the war Alafair say you was in, Mr. Dave?"

"Do I look that old to you guys?"