In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 20

"That's the way it looks from here."

She rose from her chair, closed the office door, then stood by my desk. She wore a white silk blouse with a necklace of black wooden beads. Her fingers were hooked in front of her stomach like an opera singer's.

"Julie's been a longtime embarra.s.sment to the feds," I continued. "He's connected to half the crime in New Orleans and so far he's never spent one day in the bag."

"When I was sixteen something happened to me that I thought I'd never get over." There was a flush of color in her throat. "Not just because of what two drunken crew leaders did to me in the back of a migrant farmworkers' bus, either. It was the way the cops treated it. In some ways that was even worse. Have I got your attention, sir?"

"You don't need to do this, Rosie."

"Like h.e.l.l I don't. The next day I was sitting with my father in the waiting room outside the sheriff's office. I heard two deputies laughing about it. They not only thought it was funny, one of them said something about pepper-belly poontang. I'll never forget that moment. Not as long as I live."

I folded up my pocket knife and stared at the tops of my fingers. I brushed the pencil shavings off my fingers into the wastebasket.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"When I went to work for the Bureau, I swore I'd never see a woman treated the way I was. So I take severe exception to your remarks, Dave. I'd like to bust Julie Balboni, but that has nothing to do with the way I feel about the man who raped and murdered these women."

"Where'd this happen?"

"In a migrant camp outside of Bakersfield. It's not an unusual story. Ask any woman who's ever been on a crew bus."

"I think you're a solid cop, Rosie. I think you'll nail any perp you put in your sights."

"Then change your G.o.dd.a.m.n att.i.tude."

"All right."

She was waiting for me to say something else, but I didn't.

Her shoulders sagged and she started back toward her desk. Then she turned around. Her eyes were wet.

"That's all you've got to say?" she asked.

"No, it's not."

"What, then?"

"I'm proud to be working with you. I think you're a standup lady."

She started to take a Kleenex out of her purse, then she snapped the purse shut again and took a breath.

"I'm going down the hall a minute," she said.

"All right."

"Are we both clear about the priority in this investigation, Dave?"

"Yeah, I think we are."

"Good. Because I don't want to have this kind of discussion again."

"Let me mention just one thing before you go. Several years ago my second wife was murdered by some drug dealers. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes."

"One way or another, the guys and the woman who killed her went down for it. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the old anger comes back. Even though these people took a heavy fall, for a couple of them the whole trip, sometimes it still doesn't seem enough. You know the feeling I'm talking about, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Fair enough." Then I said, "You're sure you don't want to come home and have lunch with us today?"

"This isn't the day for it, Dave. Thanks, anyway," she said, and went out the door with her purse clutched under her arm, her face set as impa.s.sively as a soldier's.

Elrod Sykes called the office just after I had returned from lunch. His voice was deep, his accent more p.r.o.nounced.

"You know where there're some ruins of an old plantation house south of your boat dock?" he asked.

"What about it?"

"Can you meet me there in a half hour?"

"What for?"

"I want to talk to you, that's what for."

"Talk to me now, Elrod, or come into the office."

"I get nervous down there. For some reason police uniforms always make me think of a breathalyzer machine. I don't know why that might be."

"You sound like your boat might have caught the early tide."

"Who cares? I want to show you something. Can you be there or not?"

"I don't think so."

"What the f.u.c.k is with you? I've got some information about Kelly's death. You want it or not?"

"Maybe you ought to give some thought as to how you talk to people."

"I left my etiquette in Kelly's family plot up in Kentucky. I'll meet you in thirty minutes. If you're not interested, f.u.c.k you, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

He hung up the phone. I had the feeling I was beginning to see the side of Elrod's personality that had earned him the attention of the tabloids.

Twenty minutes later I drove my pickup truck down a dirt lane through a canebrake to the ruins of a sugar planter's home that had been built on the bayou in the 1830s. In 1863 General Banks's federal troops had dragged the piano outside and smashed it apart in the coulee, then as an afterthought had torched the slave quarters and the second story of the planter's home. The roof and cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick sh.e.l.l, the cisterns and outbuildings had decayed into humus, the smithy's forge was an orange smear in the damp earth, and vandals had knocked down most of the stone markers in the family cemetery and, looking for gold and silver coins, had pried up the flagstones in the fireplaces.

Why spend time with a rude drunk, particularly on the drunk's terms?

Because it's difficult to be hard-nosed or righteous toward a man who, for the rest of his life, will probably wake sweating in the middle of the night with a recurring nightmare or whose series of gray dawns will offer no promise of light except that first shuddering razor-edged rush that comes out of a whiskey gla.s.s.

I leaned against the fender of my truck and watched Elrod's lavender Cadillac come down the dirt lane and intothe shade of the oak trees that grew in front of the ruined house. The security guard from the set, Murphy Doucet, was behind the wheel, and Elrod sat in the pa.s.senger's seat, his tanned arm balanced on the window ledge, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.

"How you doing today, Detective Rob.i.+.c.heaux?" Doucet said.

"Fine. How are you?"

"Like they say, we all chop cotton for the white man one way or another, you know what I mean?" he said, and winked.

He rubbed the white scar that was embossed like a chicken's foot on his throat and opened a newspaper on the steering wheel. Elrod came around the side of the Cadillac in blue swimming shorts, a beige polo s.h.i.+rt, and brand-new Nike running shoes.

He drank from his Coca-Cola can, set it on the hood of the car, then put a breath mint in his mouth. His eyes wandered around the clearing, then focused wanly on the sunlight winking off the bayou beyond the willow trees.

"Would you like to continue our conversation?" I said.

"You think I was out of line or something?"

"What did you want to tell me, Elrod?"

"Take a walk with me out yonder in those trees and I'll show you something."

"The old cemetery?"

"That isn't it. Something you probably don't know about."

We walked through a thicket of stunted oaks and hack-berry trees, briars and dead morning-glory vines, to a small cemetery with a rusted and sagging piked iron fence around it. Pines with deep-green needles grew out of the graves. A solitary brick crypt had long ago collapsed in upon itself and become overgrown with wild roses and showers of four o'-clocks.

Elrod stood beside me, and I could smell the scent ofbourbon and spearmint on his breath. He looked out into the dazzling sunlight but his eyes didn't squint. They had a peculiar look in them, what we used to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

"There," he said, "in the shade, right on the edge of those hackberry trees. You see those depressions?"

"No."

He squeezed my arm hard and pointed.

"Right where the ground slopes down to the bayou," he said, and walked ahead of me toward the rear of the property. He pointed down at the ground. "There's four of them. You stick a shovel in here and you'll bring up bone."

In a damp area, where rainwater drained off the incline into a narrow coulee, there was a series of indentations that were covered with mushrooms.

"What's the point of all this?" I said.

"They were cooking mush in an iron pot and an artillery sh.e.l.l got all four of them. The general put wood crosses on their graves, but they rotted away a long time ago. He was a h.e.l.l of an officer, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

"I'll be going now," I said. "I'd like to help you, Elrod, but I think you've marked your own course."

"I've been with these guys. I know what they went through. They had courage, by G.o.d. They made soup out of their shoes and rifle b.a.l.l.s out of melted nails and wagonwheel rims. There was no way in h.e.l.l they were going to quit."

I turned and began walking back to my truck. Through the shade I could see the security guard urinating by the open door of the Cadillac. Elrod caught up with me. His hand clenched on my arm again.

"You want to write me off as a wet-brain, that's your business," he said. "You don't care about what these guys went through, that's your business, too. I didn't bring you out here for this, anyway."

"Then why am I here?"

He turned me toward him with his hand.

"Because I don't like somebody carrying my oil can," he said.

"What?"

"That's a Texas expression. It means I don't want somebody else toting my load. You've convinced yourself the guy who killed Kelly thought he had you in his sights. That's right, isn't it?"

"Maybe."

"What makes you so G.o.dd.a.m.n important?"

I continued to walk toward my truck. He caught up with me again.

"You listen to me," he said. "Before she was killed I had a blowout with Mikey. I told him the script stinks, the screenwriters he's hired couldn't get jobs writing tampon ads, he's nickel-and-dimeing the whole project to death, and I'm walking off the set unless he gets his head on straight. The greaseb.a.l.l.s heard me."

"Which greaseb.a.l.l.s?"

"Balboni's people. They're all over the set. They killed Kelly to keep me in line."

His facial skin high up on one cheek crinkled and seemed almost to vibrate.

"Take it easy, El."

"They made her an object lesson, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

I touched his arm with my hand.

"Maybe Julie's involved, maybe not," I said. "But if he is, it's not because of you. You've got to trust me on this one."

He turned his face away and pushed at one eye with the heel of his hand.

"When Julie and his kind create object lessons, they go right to the source of their problem," I said. "They don't select out innocuous people. It causes them too many problems."

I heard his breath in his throat.

"I made them keep the casket closed," he said. "I told thefuneral director in Kentucky, if he let her parents see her like that, I'd be back, I'd-"

I put my arm over his shoulder and walked back through the cemetery with him.

"Let's go back to town and have something to eat," I said. "Like somebody said to me this morning, it's no good to kick ourselves around the block, is it? What do you think?"

"She's dead. I cain't see her, either. It's not right."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I see those soldiers but I cain't see her. Why's that? It doesn't make any sense."