In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 37

"I'm going to look around a little more. In the meantimeI want to ask you a favor, Doobie. I'd appreciate your waiting outside. In fact, I'd really appreciate your staying as far away from me as possible."

"You'd appreciate it-"

"Yes. Thanks very much."

His breath was stale, his eyes liquid and resentful. Then the interest went out of them and he glanced outside at the pale glow of the sun on the eastern horizon. He stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, walked out onto the porch, and watched the paramedics load Lou's body into the back of the ambulance, not out of fear of me or even personal humiliation; he was simply one of those law officers for whom insensitivity, cynicism, cruelty, and indifference toward principle eventually become normal and interchangeable att.i.tudes, one having no more value or significance than another.

In the sink, on top of a layer of unwashed dishes, was a pile of garbage-coffee grounds, banana peels, burned oatmeal, crushed beer cans, cigarette b.u.t.ts, wadded newspapers. The trash can by the icebox was empty, except for a line of wet coffee grounds that ran from the lip of the can to the bottom, where a solitary banana peel rested.

In the bedroom one drawer was open in the dresser. On top of the dresser were a roll of white socks, a framed photograph of Lou and his wife at a Las Vegas wedding chapel, Lou's holstered revolver, and the small notebook with a pencil attachment that he always carried in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. The first eight pages were filled with notes about an accidental drowning and a stabbing in a black nightclub. The next few pages had been torn out. Tiny bits of paper clung to the wire spirals, and the first blank page had no pencil impressions on it from the previous one.

In his sock drawer I found a bottle of vodka and his "throw-down," an old .32 revolver with worn bluing, taped wooden grips, and serial numbers that had been eaten and disfigured with acid. I flipped open the cylinder. Five of thechambers were loaded, and the sixth had been left empty for the hammer to rest on.

I started to replace the revolver in the drawer; instead, I pushed the drawer shut and dropped the revolver into my pants pocket.

On the way out of the apartment I looked again at Lou's blood on the floor. Doobie Patout's shoes had tracked through the edge of it and printed the logo of his rubber heel brightly on the wood.

What a way to exit thirty-seven years of law enforcement, I thought. You died face down in a rented garage apartment that wouldn't meet the standards of public housing; then your colleagues write you off as a drunk and step in your blood.

I looked at the smudged letters SI again. What were you trying to tell us, Lou?

Doobie Patout locked the door behind me when I walked outside. A red glow was spreading from the eastern horizon upward into the sky.

"This is what I think happened, Doobie. You can do with it what you want," I said. "Somebody found Lou pa.s.sed out and tossed the place. After he ripped some pages out of Lou's notebook, he put Lou's twenty-gauge under his chin."

"If he tossed the place first, he would have found Lou's .357, right? Why wouldn't he use it? That's the first thing you jumped on, Rob.i.+.c.heaux."

"Because he would have had to put it in Lou's hand. He didn't want to wake him up. It was easier to do it with the shotgun."

His eyes fixed on mine; then they became murky and veiled as they studied a place in the air about six inches to the right of my face. A dead palm tree in the small yard clattered in the warm morning breeze.

IT WAS SAt.u.r.dAY, AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO GO TO THE OFFICE, but I called Rosie at the motel where she was living and told her about Lou's death.

At noon of the same day Cholo Manelli drove a battered fire-engine-red Cadillac convertible down the dirt road by the bayou and parked by the dock just as I was headed up to the house for lunch. The left front fender had been cut away with an acetylene torch and looked like an empty eye socket. The top was down, and the back seat and the partly opened trunk were filled with wrought-iron patio furniture, including a gla.s.s-topped table and a furled beach umbrella.

He wore white shorts and a green Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt with pink flamingoes printed on it. He squinted up at me from under his white golf cap, which was slanted over one eye. When he grinned I saw that an incisor tooth was broken off in his lower mouth and there was still blood in the empty s.p.a.ce above his gum.

"I wanted to say good-bye," he said. "Give you something, too."

"Where you going, Cholo?"

"I thought I might go to Florida for a while, take it easy, maybe open up a business like you got. Do some marlin fis.h.i.+ng, stuff like that. Look, can we talk someplace a minute?"

"Sure. Come on inside the shop."

"No, you got customers around and I got a bad problem with language. It don't matter what I say, it comes out sounding like a toilet flus.h.i.+ng. Take a ride with me, lieutenant."

I got into the pa.s.senger's seat, and we drove down to the old grocery store with the wide gallery at the four-corners. The white-painted iron patio furniture vibrated and rattled in the back seat. On the leg of one chair was the green trademark of Holiday Inn. Cholo parked in the shade of the huge oak tree that stretched over the store's gallery.

"What's with the furniture?" I said.

"The owner wanted me to take it when I checked out. He said he's been needing some new stuff, it's a write-off, anyway, and I'm kind of doing him a favor. They got po'-boys in here? It's on me."

Before I could answer he went inside the store and came back with two shrimp-and-fried-oyster sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise, lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. He unwrapped the wax paper on his and chewed carefully on one side of his mouth.

"What's going on, Cholo?" I said.

"Just like I said, it's time to hang it up."

"You had some problems with Baby Feet?"

"Maybe."

"Because you called an ambulance for me?"

He stopped chewing, removed a piece of lettuce from his teeth, and flicked it out onto the sh.e.l.l parking lot.

"Margot told him. She heard me on the phone," he said. "So last night we was all having dinner at this cla.s.s place out on the highway, with some movie people there, people who still think Julie's s.h.i.+t don't stink, and Julie says, 'Did y'all know Cholo thinks he's Florence Nightingale? That it's his job to take care of people who get hurt on ball fields, even though that means betraying his old friends?'

"I say, 'What are you talking, Julie? Who's f.u.c.king Florence Nightingale or whatever?'

"He don't even look at me. He says to all the others, 'So we're gonna get Cholo another job 'cause he don't like what he's doing now. He's gonna start work in one of my restaurants, down the street from the Iberville project. Bus dishes for a little while, get the feel of things, make sure the toilets are clean, 'cause a lot of middle-cla.s.s n.i.g.g.e.rs eat in there and they don't like dirty toilets. What d'you say, Cholo?'

"Everybody at the table's grinning and I go, 'I ain't done anything wrong, Julie. I made a f.u.c.king phone call. What if the guy'd died out there?'

"Julie goes, 'There you go again, Cholo. Always opening your face when you ain't supposed to. Maybe you ought to leave the table. You got wax in your ears, you talk s.h.i.+t, you rat-f.u.c.k your friends. I don't want you around no more.'

"When I walked out, everybody in the restaurant waslooking at me, like I was a bug, like I was somebody didn't have no business around regular people. n.o.body ever done anything like that to me."

His face was bright with perspiration in the warm shade. He rubbed his nose on the back of his wrist.

"What happened to your tooth, Cholo?" I asked.

"I went down to Julie's room last night. I told him that he was a douche bag, I wouldn't work for him again if he begged me, that just like Cherry LeBlanc told him, he's a needle-d.i.c.k and the only reason a broad like Margot stays with him is because what she's got is so wore out it's like the Grand Canyon down there and it don't matter if he's a needle-d.i.c.k or not. That's when he comes across my mouth with this big gla.s.s ashtray, the sonofab.i.t.c.h.

"Here, you want to see what he's into, lieutenant," he said, pulled a video ca.s.sette out of the glove box, and put it in my hand. "Go to the movies."

"Wait a minute. What's this about Cherry LeBlanc?"

"If he tells you he never knew her, ask him about this. Julie forgot he told me to take some souvenir pictures when we drove over to Biloxi once. Is that her or not?"

He slipped a black-and-white photograph from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and placed it in my hand. In it, Julie and Cherry LeBlanc sat at an outdoor table under an umbrella. They wore swimsuits and held napkin-wrapped drinks in their hands; both were smiling. The background was hazy with suns.h.i.+ne and out of focus. An indistinct man at another table read a newspaper; his eyes looked like diamonds embedded in his flesh.

"I want you to be straight with me, Cholo. Did Feet kill her?" I said.

"I don't know. I'll tell you what happened the night she got killed, though. They had a big blowup in the motel room. I could hear it coming through the walls. She said she wasn't n.o.body's chicken, she wanted her own action, her own girls, a place out on Lake Pontchartrain, maybe a spot in a movie.

So he goes, 'There's broads who'd do an awful lot just to be in the same room with me, Cherry. Maybe you ought to count your blessings.' That's when she started to make fun of him. She said he looked like a whale with hair on it, and besides that, he had a putz like a Vienna sausage.

"The next thing I know she's roaring out of the place and Julie's yelling into the phone at somebody, I don't know who, all I heard him say was Cherry is a f.u.c.king nightmare who's snorting up six hundred dollars' worth of his c.o.ke a day and he don't need any more nightmares in his life, particularly a teenage moron who thinks she can go apes.h.i.+t any time she feels like it."

"Who killed her, Cholo?"

He tossed his unfinished po'-boy sandwich at a rusted trash barrel. He missed, and the bread, shrimp, and oysters broke apart on the ground.

"Come on, lieutenant. You know how it works. A guy like Julie don't do hits. He says something to somebody, then he forgets it. If it's a special kind of job, maybe somebody calls up a geek, a guy with real sick thoughts in his head.

"Look, you remember a street dip in New Orleans named Tommy Figorelli, people used to call him Tommy Fig, Tommy Fingers, Tommy Five? Used to be a part-time meat cutter in a butcher shop on Louisiana Avenue? He got into trouble for something besides picking pockets, he molested a couple of little girls, and one of them turned out to be related to the Giacano family. So the word went out that Tommy Fig was anybody's f.u.c.k, but it wasn't supposed to be no ordinary hit, not for what he done. Did I ever tell you I worked in the kitchen up at Angola? That's right. So when Tommy got taken out, three guys done it, and when that butcher shop opened on Monday morning, it was the day before Christmas, see, Tommy was hung in parts, freeze-dried and clean, all over the shop like tree ornaments.

"That sounds sick, don't it, but the people who ran the shop didn't have no use for a child molester, either, and toshow how they felt, they called up some guys from the Giacano family and they had a party with eggnog and fruitcake and music and Tommy Fig twirling around in pieces on the blades of the ceiling fan.

"What I'm saying, lieutenant, is I ain't gonna get locked up as a material witness and I ain't going before no grand jury, I been that route before, eight months in the New Orleans city prison, with a half-dozen guys trying to whack me out, even though I was standup and was gonna take the fall for a couple of guys I wouldn't p.i.s.s on if they was burning to death."

"You're sure Julie didn't catch up with Cherry LeBlanc later that same night?"

"It ain't his style. But then-" He poked his tongue into the s.p.a.ce where his incisor tooth was broken off-"who knows what goes on in Julie's head? He had the hots for the LeBlanc broad real bad, and she knew how to kick a c.o.ke bottle up his a.s.s. Go to the movies, lieutenant, make up your own mind. Hey, but remember something, okay? I didn't have nothing to do with this movie s.h.i.+t. You seen my rap sheet. When maybe I done something to somebody, I ain't saying I did, the guy had it coming. The big word there is the guy, lieutenant, you understand what I'm saying?"

I clicked my nails on the plastic ca.s.sette that rested on my thigh.

"A Lafayette detective named Lou Girard was killed last night. Did you hear anything about it?" I said.

"Who?" he said.

I said Lou's name again and watched Cholo's face.

"I never heard of him. Was he a friend of yours or something?"

"Yes, he was."

He yawned and watched two black children sailing a Frisbee on the gallery of the grocery store. Then the light of recognition worked its way into his eyes and he looked back at my face.

"Hey, Loot, old-time lesson from your days at the First District," he said. "n.o.body, and I mean n.o.body, from the New Orleans families does a cop. The guy who pulls something like that ends up a lot worse than Tommy Fig. His parts come off while he's still living."

He nodded like a sage delivering a universal truth, then hawked, sucked the saliva out of his mouth, and spat a b.l.o.o.d.y clot out onto the sh.e.l.l.

A HALF HOUR LATER I CLOSED THE BLINDS IN THE SHERIFF'Sempty office and used his VCR to watch the ca.s.sette that Cholo had given me. Then I clicked it off, went to the men's room, rinsed my face in the lavatory, and dried it with paper towels.

"Something wrong, Dave?" a uniformed deputy standing at the urinal said.

"No, not really," I said. "I look like something's wrong?"

"There's some kind of stomach flu going around. I thought you might have a touch of it, that's all."

"No, I'm feeling fine, Harry."

"That's good," he said, and glanced away from my face.

I went back inside the sheriff's office, opened the blinds, and watched the traffic on the street, the wind bending the tops of some myrtle trees, a black kid riding his bike down the sidewalk with a fis.h.i.+ng rod propped across his handlebars.

I thought of the liberals I knew who spoke in such a cavalier fas.h.i.+on about p.o.r.nography, who dismissed it as inconsequential or who somehow a.s.sociated its existence with the survival of the First Amendment. I wondered what they would have to say about the film I had just watched. I wondered how they would like a theater that showed it to be located in their neighborhoods; I wondered how they would like the patrons of that theater to be around their children.

Finally I called Rosie at her motel. I told her where I was.

"Cholo Manelli gave me a p.o.r.nographic film that youneed to know about," I said. "Evidently Julie has branched out into some dark stuff."

"What is it, what do you mean?"

"It's pretty s.a.d.i.s.tic, Rosie. It looks like the real thing, too."

"Can we connect it to Balboni?"

"I doubt if Cholo would ever testify, but maybe we can find some of the people who made the film."

"I'll be over in a few minutes."

"Rosie, I-"

"You don't think I'm up to looking at it?"

"I don't know that it'll serve any purpose."

"If you don't want to hang around, Dave, just stick the tape in my mailbox."

Twenty minutes later she came through the door in a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a short-sleeve denim s.h.i.+rt with purple and white flowers sewn on it. I closed the blinds again and started the film, except this time I used the fast-forward device to isolate the violent scenes and to get through it as quickly as possible.

When the screen went blank I pulled the blinds and filled the room with sunlight. Rosie sat very still and erect, her hands in her lap. Her nostrils were pinched when she breathed. Then she stood and looked out the window a moment.

"The beating of those girls . . . I've never seen anything like that," she said.

I heard her take a breath and let it out, then she turned back toward me.

"They weren't acting, were they?" she said.

"I don't think so. It's too convincing for a low-rent bunch like this."

"Dave, we've got to get these guys."

"We will, one way or another."

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and blew her nose. She blinked, and her eyes were s.h.i.+ny.

"Excuse me, I have hay fever today," she said.

"It's that kind of weather."

Then she had to turn and look out the window again. When she faced me again, her eyes had become impa.s.sive.

"What's the profit margin on a film like this?" she said.