DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

  "I went to the bossman in the field, say I don't care what Big Melon do, what them hacks do, it ain't my bidness, I just want my job back on the hog lot. He say, 'You better keep shut, boy, you better fill that bag, you better not put no dirt clods in it when you weigh in, neither, like you tried to do yesterday.' I say, 'Boss, what's I gonna do? I ain't put no dirt clods in my bag, I ain't give nobody trouble, I don't be carin' Big Melon want to grow dope for the hacks.' He knock me down with a horse quirt and put me in the sweat-box on Camp A for three days, in August, with the sun boilin' off them iron sides, with a bucket between my knees to go to the bat'room in."

  He had stopped eating now and his face looked solitary and bemused, as though his own experience had become strange and unfamiliar in his recounting of it.

  "You were a standup guy, Hogman. I always admired your courage," I said.

  "No, I was scared of them people, 'cause when I come out of the box I knowed the gunbulls was gonna kill me. I seen them do it befo', up on the levee, where they work them Red Hat boys double-time from cain't-see to cain't-see. They shot and buried them po' boys without never missin' a beat, just the way somebody run over a dog with a truck and keep right on goin'.

  "I had me a big Stella twelve-string guitar, bought it off a Mexican on Congress Street in Houston. I used to keep it in the count-man's cage so nobody wouldn't be foolin' with it while I was workin' or sleepin'. When I come out of the box and taken a shower and eat a big plate of rice and beans, I ax the count-man first thing for my guitar. He say, 'I'm sorry, Sam, but the bossman let Big Melon take it while you was in the box.'

  "I waited till that night and went to Big Melon's 'hunk,' that's what we call the place where a wolf stay with his punk. There's that big fat nigger sittin' naked on his mattress, like a big pile of black inner tubes, while the punk is playin' my guitar on the floor, lipstick and rouge all over his face and pink panties on his li'l ass.

  "I say, 'Melon, you or your punk fuck wit' my guitar again and I gone cut that black dick off. It don't matter if I go to the electric chair for it or not. I'm gonna joog you in the shower, in the chow line, or while you pumpin' your poke chops here. They's gonna be one fat nigger they gonna have to haul in a piano crate down to the graveyard.'

  "Melon smile at me and say, 'We just borrowed it, Hogman. We was gonna give it back. Here, you want Pookie to rub your back for you?'

  "But I knowed they was comin'. Two nights later, right befo' lockup, I was goin' to the toilet and I turn around and his punk is standin' in the do'. I say, 'What you want, Pookie?' He say, 'I'm sorry I was playin' your guitar, Hogman. I wants be yo' friend, maybe come stay up at your hunk some nights.'

  "When I reached down to pull up my britches, he come outta his back pocket with a dirk and aim it right at my heart. I catched him around the neck and bent him backwards, then I kept bendin' him backwards and squeezin' acrost his windpipe, and he was floppin' real hard, shakin' all over, he shit in his pants, 'cause I could smell it, then it went snap, just like you bust a real dry piece of firewood acrost your knee.

  "I look up and there's one of the hacks who's selling the dope. He say, 'Hogman, we ain't gonna let this be a problem. We'll just stuff this li'l bitch out yonder in the levee with them others. Won't nobody care, won't make no difference to nobody, not even to Big Melon. It'll just be our secret.'

  "All that time they'd been smarter than me. They sent Pookie to joog me, but they didn't care if he killed me or if I killed him. It worked out for them just fine. They knew I'd never cause them no trouble. They was right, too. I didn't sass, I done what they tole me, I even he'ped hoe them dope plants a couple of times."

  "I don't understand, Sam. You're telling me that the lynched black man was killed by one of these guards?"

  "I ain't said that. I said they was a bunch of them sellin' that dope. They was takin' it out of the pen in a police car. What was the name of that nigger you dug out of the sandbar?"

  "DeWitt Prejean."

  "I'll tell you this. He was fuckin' a white man's wife. Start axin' what he done for a livin', you'll find the people been causin' you all this grief."

  "Who's the guy I'm looking for?"

  "I said all I can say."

  "Look, Sam, don't be afraid of these gunbulls or cops from years ago. They can't harm you now."

  He put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, then took a pint bottle of rum from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb. He held the bottle below his mouth. His long fingers were glistening with grease from the pork chops he had eaten.

  "This still the state of Lou'sana, or are we livin' somewhere else these days?" he said.

  I COULDN'T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. I POURED A GLASS OF MILK AND walked down by the duck pond in the starlight. A pair of mudhens spooked out of the flooded reeds and skittered across the water's surface toward the far bank. The pieces of the case wouldn't come together. Were we looking for a serial killer who had operated all over the state, a local psychopath, a pimp, or perhaps even a hit man from the mob? Were cops involved? Hogman thought so, and even believed there was someone out there with the power to send him back to prison. But his perspective was colored by his own experience as a career recidivist. And what about the lynched black man, DeWitt Prejean? Would the solution to his murder in 1957 lead us to the deviate who had mutilated Cherry LeBlanc?

  No, the case was not as simple as Hogman had wanted me to think, even though he was obviously sincere and his fears about retribution were real. But I had no answers, either.

  Unfortunately, they would come in a way that I never anticipated. I saw Elrod come out of the lighted kitchen and walk down the slope toward the pond. He was shirtless and barefoot and his slacks were unbuttoned over his skivvies. He clutched a sheet of lined notebook paper in his right hand. He looked at me uncertainly, and his lips started to form words that obviously he didn't want to speak.

  "What's wrong?" I said.

  "The phone rang while I was in the kitchen. I answered it so y'all wouldn't get woke up."

  "Who was it? What's that in your hand?"

  "The sheriff. . ." He straightened the piece of paper in his fingers and read the words to himself, then looked up into my face. "It's a friend of yours, Lou Girard, Dave. The sheriff says maybe you should go over to Lafayette. He says, I'm sorry, man, he says your friend got drunk and killed himself."

  Elrod held the sheet of paper out toward me, his eyes looking askance at the duck pond. The moonlight was white on his hand.

  Chapter 16

  He did it with a dogleg twenty-gauge in his little garage apartment, whose windows were overgrown with bamboo and banana trees. Or at least that's what the investigative officer, Doobie Patout, was telling me when I got there at 4 a.m., just as the photographer was finishing and the paramedics were about to lift Lou's body out of a wide pool of blood and zipper it inside a black bag.

  "There's a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey on the drain-board and a spilled bottle of Valium on the coffee table," Doobie said. "I think maybe Lou just got real down and decided to do it."

  The single-shot twenty-gauge lay at the foot of a beige-colored stuffed chair. The top of the chair, the wall behind it, and the ceiling were streaked with blood. One side of Lou's face looked perfectly normal, the eye staring straight ahead like a blue marble pressed into dough. The opposite side of his face, where the jawbone should have been, had sunk into the rug like a broken pomegranate. Lou's right arm was pointed straight out onto the wood floor. At the end of his fingers, painted in red, were the letters SI.

  "You guys are writing it off as suicide?" I said.

  "That's the way it looks to me," Doobie said. The tops of his jug ears were scaled with sunburn. "He was in bad shape. The mattress is covered with piss stains, the sink's full of raw garbage. Go in the bedroom and take a whiff."

  "Why would a suicide try to write a note in his own blood?"

  "I think they change their minds when they know it's too late. Then they want to hold on any
way they can. They're not any different from anybody else. It was probably for his ex-wife. Her name's Silvia."

  "Where's his piece?"

  "On his dresser in the bedroom."

  "If Lou wanted to buy it, why wouldn't he use his .357?" I said. I scratched at a lead BB that had scoured upward along the wallpaper. "Why would he do it with twenty-gauge birdshot, then botch it?"

  "Because he was drunk on his ass. It wasn't an unusual condition for him."

  "He was helping me on a case, Doobie."

  "And?"

  "Maybe he found out something that somebody didn't want him to pass along."

  The paramedics lifted Lou's body off the rug, then lowered it inside the plastic bag, straightened his arms by his sides, and zipped the bag over his face.

  "Look, his career was on third base," Doobie said, as the medics worked the gurney past him. "His wife dumped him for another dyke, he was getting freebies from a couple of whores down at the Underpass, he was trembling and eating pills in front of the whole department every morning. You might believe otherwise, but there's no big mystery to what happened here tonight."

  "Lou had trouble with booze, but I think you're lying about his being on a pad with hookers. He was a good cop."

  "Think whatever you want. He was a drunk. That fact's not going to go away. I'm going to seal the place now. You want to look at anything else?"

  "Is it true you were an executioner up at Angola?"

  "None of your goddam business what I was."

  "I'm going to look around a little more. In the meantime I 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 attitudes, 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 butts, 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 shirt 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 the chambers 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 passed 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, Robicheaux."

  "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 Saturday, 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 glass-topped table and a furled beach umbrella.

  He wore white shorts and a green Hawaiian shirt 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 space 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 fishing, 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 flushing. Take a ride with me, lieutenant."

  I got into the passenger'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 shell parking lot.

  "Margot told him. She heard me on the phone," he said. "So last night we was all having dinner at this class place out on the highway, with some movie people there, people who still think Julie's shit 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 fucking 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-class niggers 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 fucking 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 shit, you rat-fuck your friends. I don't want you around no more.'

  "When I walked out, everybody in the restaurant was looking at me, like I was a bug, like I was somebody didn't have no business around regular people. Nobody 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-dick 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-dick or not. That's when he comes across my mouth with this big glass ashtray, the sonofabitch.

  "Here, you want to see what he's into, lieutenant," he said, pulled a video cassette 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 shirt 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 sunshine and out of focus. An indistinct man at another table read a newspaper; his eyes looked like diamonds embedded in his flesh.