In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 39

"Alafair, can you go find Hogman and tell him we need to do that scene again in about fifteen minutes?" Elrod said.

"Sure, El," she said, swung her legs over the bench, scooped Tripod over her shoulder, and ran off through the trees.

"Look, El, I appreciate your working Alafair into your movie, but frankly I don't want her out here as long as Julie Balboni's around."

"I thought you heard."

"What?"

"Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseb.a.l.l.s out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew."

"What do you mean he told him off?"

"He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his p.o.r.no actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his a.s.s back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey. . . What's the matter?"

"What did Julie have to say?"

"He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks."

"Where is he now?"

"He drove off with his whole crew in his limo."

"I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman."

"He's on the other side of the lake."

"Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight."

"He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair."

"We're not going to be here for it."

"You won't let her be in the film?"

"n.o.body humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it."

The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish sp.a.w.ning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were ma.s.sing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.

LATER, AFTER I HAD TAKEN ALAFAIR HOME AND CHECKED IN AT the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.

He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his s.h.i.+rt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.

Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fis.h.i.+ng as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.

Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.

"Why you keep bothering me?" he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.

"I need to know what kind of work DeWitt Prejean did," I said.

"You what?" His lips were as purple as though they had been painted, his teeth small and yellow as pieces of corn.

"Just what I said."

"You leave me the h.e.l.l alone."

I sat down on the gra.s.s by the edge of the slope.

"It's not my intention to bother you, Mr. Hebert," I said. "But you're refusing to cooperate with a police investigation and you're creating problems for both of us."

"He done . . . I don't know what he done. What difference does it make?" His eyes glanced sideways at the mulatto woman.

"You seem to have a good memory for detail. Why not about DeWitt Prejean?"

The woman rose from her seat on the bucket and walked farther down the bank, trailing her cork bobber in the water.

"He done n.i.g.g.e.r work," Hebert said. "He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the f.u.c.k you think he did?"

"That doesn't sound right to me. I think he did some other kind of work, too."

His nostrils were dilated, as though a bad odor were rising from his own lap.

"He was in bed with a white woman here. Is that what you want to know?"

"Which woman?"

"I done tole you. The wife of a cripple-man got shot up in the war."

"He raped her?"

"Who gives a s.h.i.+t?"

"But the crippled man didn't break Prejean out of jail, Mr. Hebert."

"It wasn't the first time that n.i.g.g.e.r got in trouble over white women. There's more than one man wanted to see him put over a fire."

"Who broke him out?"

"I don't know and I don't care."

"Mr. Hebert, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm just going to go away?"

The skin of his chest was sickly white, and under it were nests of green veins."It was better back then," he said. "You know it was."

"What kind of work did he do, Ben?"

"Drove a truck."

"For whom?"

"It was down in Lafayette. He worked for a white man there till he come up here. Don't know nothing about the white man. You saying I do, then you're a G.o.dd.a.m.n liar." He leaned over to look past me at the mulatto woman, who was fis.h.i.+ng among a group of willows now. Then his face snapped back at me. "I brung her out here 'cause she works for me. 'Cause I can't get in and out of the car good by myself."

"What kind of truck did he drive?" I asked.

"Beer truck. No, that wasn't it. Soda pop. Sonofab.i.t.c.h had a soda pop truck route when white people was making four dollars a day in the rice field." He set down his cane pole and began rolling a cigarette. His fingernails looked as thick and horned as tortoisesh.e.l.l against the thin white square of paper into which he poured tobacco. His fingers trembled almost uncontrollably with anger and defeat.

I DROVE TO TWINKY LEMOYNE'S BOTTLING WORKS INLafayette, but it was closed for the day. Twenty minutes later I found Lemoyne working in his yard at home. The sky was the pink of salmon eggs, and the wind thrashed the banana and lime trees along the side of his house. He had stopped pruning the roses on his trellis and had dropped his shears in the baggy back pocket of his faded denim work pants.

"A lot of bad things happened back in that era between the races. But we're not the same people we used to be, are we?" he said.

"I think we are."

"You seem unable to let the past rest, sir."

"My experience has been that you let go of the past by addressing it, Mr. Lemoyne."

"For some reason I have the feeling that you want me to confirm what so far are only speculations on your part." There were tiny pieces of grit in his combed sandy hair and a film of perspiration and rose dust on his gla.s.ses.

"Read it like you want. But somehow my investigation keeps winding its way back to your front door."

He began snipping roses again and placing them stem down in a milk bottle full of green water. His two-story peaked white house in an old residential neighborhood off St. Mary Boulevard in Lafayette was surrounded by spectacular moss-hung oak trees and walls of bamboo and soft pink brick.

"Should I call my lawyer? Is that what you're suggesting?"

"You can if you want to. I don't think it'll solve your problem, though."

"I beg your pardon." His shears hung motionlessly over a rose.

"I think you committed a murder back in 1957, but in all probability you don't have the psychology of a killer. That means that you probably live with an awful guilt, Mr. Lemoyne. You go to bed with it and you wake with it. You drag it around all day long like a clanking chain."

"Why is it that you seem to have this fixation about me? At first you accused me of being involved with a New Orleans gangster. Now this business about the murdered Negro."

"I saw you do it."

His egg-shaped face was absolutely still. Blood pooled in his cheeks like pink flowers.

"I was only nineteen," I said. "I watched y'all from across the bay. The black man tried to run, and one of you shot him in the leg, then continued shooting him in the water. You didn't even think me worthy of notice, did you? You were right, too. No one ever paid much attention to my story. That was a hard lesson for a nineteen-year-old."

He closed the shears, locked the clasp on the handles, and set them down on a gla.s.s-topped patio table. He poured two inches of whiskey into a gla.s.s with no ice and squeezed a lemon into it. He seemed as solitary as a man might who had lived alone all his life.

"Would you care for one?" he said.

"No, thank you."

"I have high blood pressure and shouldn't drink, but I put lemon in it and convince myself that I'm drinking something healthy along with the alcohol. It's my little joke with myself." He took a deep breath.

"You want to tell me about it?"

"I don't think so. Am I under arrest?"

"Not right now. But I think that's the least of your problems."

"You bewilder me, sir."

"You're partners in a security service with Murphy Doucet. A fellow like that doesn't fit in the same shoe box with you."

"He's an ex-police officer. He has the background that I don't."

"He's a resentful and angry man. He's also anti-Semitic. One of your black employees told me you're good to people of color. Why would a man such as yourself go into business with a bigot?"

"He's uneducated. That doesn't mean he's a bad person."

"I believe he's been blackmailing you, Mr. Lemoyne. Ibelieve he was the other white man I saw across the bay with DeWitt Prejean."

"You can believe whatever you wish."

"We still haven't gotten to what's really troubling you, though, have we? It's those young women, isn't it?"

His eyes closed and opened, and then he looked away at the south where lightning was forking into the Gulf and the sky looked like it was covered with the yellow-black smoke from a chemical fire.

"I don't . . . I don't . . ." he began, then finished his whiskey and set his gla.s.s down. He wiped at the wet ring with the flat of his hand as though he wanted to scrub it out of the tabletop.

"That day you stopped me out under the trees at the lake," I said, "you wanted a.s.surance that it was somebody else, somebody you don't know, who mutilated and killed those girls, didn't you? You didn't want that sin on your conscience as well as Prejean's murder."

"My G.o.d, man, give some thought to what you're saying. You're telling me I'm responsible for a fiend being loose in our midst."

"Call your attorney and come into the office and make a statement. End it now, Mr. Lemoyne. You'll probably get off with minimum time on Prejean's death. You've got a good reputation and a lot of friends. You might even walk."

"Please leave."

"It won't change anything."

He turned away from me and gazed at the approaching storm. Leaves exploded out of the trees that towered above his garden walls.

"Go do what you have to do, but right now please respect my privacy," he said.

"You strayed out of the gentleman's world a long time ago."

"Don't you have any sense of mercy?"

"Maybe you should come down to my office and look atthe morgue photographs of Cherry LeBlanc and a girl we pried out of an oil barrel down in Vermilion Parish."

He didn't answer. As I let myself out his garden gate I glanced back at him. His cheeks were red and streaked with moisture as though his face had been glazed by freezing winds.

THAT EVENING THE WEATHERMAN SAID THE HURRICANE HAD become stationary one hundred miles due south of Mobile. As I fell asleep later with the window open on a lightning-charged sky, I thought surely the electricity would bring the general back in my dreams.

Instead, it was Lou Girard who stood under the wind-tormented pecan trees at three in the morning, his jaw shot away at the hinge, a sliver of white bone protruding from a flap of skin by his ear.