In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

  "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 shirt 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. Damn, 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 assignment 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, brass-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 pass.

  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 fishing 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 glass 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 Saturday. Why don't you take some time off?"

  "Saturday's a big day for us at the dock."

  "Mr. Robicheaux . . . 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."

&nb
sp; "Sure. Don't mention it. Another time."

  "Yes, that might be fine."

  "So long, Mr. Robicheaux."

  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 shiners out of the 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 minié 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?"

  "How much it worth?" Poteet said.

  "You can buy them for a dollar at a store in New Orleans."

  "You give me a dollar for it?" Poteet said.

  "Why don't you keep it instead, Po'?" I said, and rubbed the top of her head.

  "I don't want no nasty minié ball. It probably gone in somebody," she said, and flung it into the cornstalks.

  "Don't do that. You can use it in a slingshot or something," Alafair said. She crawled on hands and knees up the row and put the minié ball in the pocket of her jeans. Then she came back and lifted Tripod up in her arms. "Dave, who was that old man?" she said.

  "What old man?"

  "He got a stump," Poteet said.

  "A stump?"

  "That's right, got a stump for a leg, got an arm look like a shriveled-up bird's claw," Poteet said.

  "What are y'all talking about?" I said.

  "He was on a crutch, Dave. Standing there in the leaves," Alafair said.

  I knelt down beside them. "You guys aren't making a lot of sense," I said.

  "He was right up there in the corn leaves. Talking in the wind," Poteet said. "His mouth just a big hole in the wind without no sound coming out."

  "I bet y'all saw the scarecrow."

  "If scarecrows got B.O.," Poteet said.

  "Where'd this old man go?" I said.

  "He didn't go anywhere," Alafair said. "The wind started blowing real hard in the stalks and he just disappeared."

  "Disappeared?" I said.

  "That's right," Poteet said. "Him and his B.O."

  "Did he have a black coat on, like that scarecrow there?" I tried to smile, but my heart had started clicking in my chest.

  "No, suh, he didn't have no black coat on," Poteet said.

  "It was gray, Dave," Alafair said. "Just like your shirt."

  "Gray?" I said woodenly.

  "Except it had some gold on the shoulders," she said.

  She smiled at me as though she had given me a detail that somehow would remove the expression she saw on my face.

  My knees popped when I stood up.

  "You'd better come home for supper now, Alf," I said.

  "You mad, Dave? We done something wrong?" Alafair said.

  "Don't say 'we done,' little guy. No, of course, I'm not mad. It's just been a long day. We'll see you later, Poteet."

  Alafair swung on my hand as she held on to Tripod's leash, and we walked up the slope through the pecan trees toward the lighted gallery of our house. The thick layer of humus and leaves and moldy pecan husks cracked under our shoes. Behind the house the western horizon was still as blue as a robin's egg and streaked with low-lying pink clouds.

  "You're real tired, huh?" she said.

  "A little bit."

  "Take a nap."

  "Okay, little guy."

  "Then we can go to Vezey's for ice cream," she said. She grinned up at me.

  "Were they epaulets?" I said.

  "What?"

  "The gold you saw on his shoulders. Sometimes soldiers wear what they call epaulets on the shoulders of their coats."

  "How could he be a soldier? He was on a crutch. You say funny things sometimes, Dave."

  "I get it from a certain little fellow I know."

  "That man doesn't hurt children, does he?"

  "No, I'm sure he's harmless. Let's don't worry about it anymore."

  "Okay, big guy."

  "I'll feed Tripod. Why don't you go inside and wash your hands for supper?"

  The screen door slammed after her, and I looked back down the slope under the overhang of the trees at the corn garden in the fading twilight. The wind dented and bent the stalks and straightened the leaves and swirled a column of dust around the blank cheesecloth visage of the scarecrow. The dirt road was empty, the bait shop dark, the gray clouds of insects hovering over the far side of the bayou almost like a metamorphic and tangible shape in the damp heat and failing light. I stared at the cornstalks and the hot sky filled with angry birds, then pinched the moisture and salt out of my eyes and went inside the house.

  A TROPICAL STORM THAT HAD BEEN EXPECTED TO HIT THE Alabama coast changed direction and made landfall at Grand Isle, Louisiana. At false dawn the sky had been bone white, then a red glow spread across the eastern horizon as though a distant fire were burning out of control. The barometer dropped; the air became suddenly cooler; the bream began popping the bayou's darkening surface; and in less than an hour a line of roiling, lightning-forked clouds moved out of the south and covered the wetlands from horizon to horizon like an enormous black lid. The rain thundered like hammers on the wood dock and the bait shop's tin roof, filled our unrented boats with water, clattered on the islands of lily pads in the bayou, and dissolved the marsh into a gray and shapeless mist.

  Then I saw a sleek white cabin cruiser approaching the dock, its windows beaten with rain, riding in on its own wake as the pilot cut back the throttle. Batist and I were under the awning, carrying the barbecue pit into the lee of the shop. Batist had two inches of a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth; he squinted through the rain at the boat as it bumped against the strips of rubber tire nailed to the dock pilings.

  "Who that is?" he said.

  "I hate to think."

  "He wavin' at you, Dave. Hey, it's that drunk man done fell in the bayou the ot'er night. That man must surely love water."

  We set the barbecue pit under the eave of the building and got back inside. The rain was wh
ipping off the roof like frothy ropes. Through the screen window I could see Elrod and Kelly Drummond moving around inside the boat's cabin.

  "Oh, oh, he trying to get out on the dock, Dave. I ain't goin' out there to pull him out of the bayou this time, me. Somebody ought to give that man swimmin' lessons or a big rock, one, give people some relief."

  Our awning extended on wires all the way to the lip of the dock, and Elrod was trying to climb over the cruiser's gunwale into the protected area under the canvas. He was bare-chested, his white golf slacks soaked and pasted against his skin, his rubber-soled boat shoes sopping with water. His hand slipped off the piling, and he fell backward onto the deck, raked a fishing rod down with him and snapped it in half so that it looked like a broken coat hanger.

  I put on my rain hat and went outside.

  Elrod shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up at me in the rain. A purple and green rose was tattooed on his upper left chest.

  "I guess I haven't got my sea legs yet," he said.

  "Get back inside," I said, and jumped down into the boat.

  "We're going after speckled trout. They always hit in the rain. At least they do on the Texas coast."

  The rain was cold and stung like BBs. From two feet away I could smell the heavy surge of beer on his breath.

  "I'm going inside," I said, and pulled open the cabin door.

  "Sure. That's what I was trying to do. Invite you down for a sandwich or a Dr Pepper or a tonic or something," he said, and closed the cabin door behind us.

  Kelly Drummond wore leather sandals, a pair of jeans, and the Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name ironed on the back that Alafair had given to Elrod after he had fallen into the bayou. She picked up a towel and began rubbing Elrod's hair with it. Her green eyes were clear, her face fresh, as though she had recently awakened from a deep sleep.

  "You want to go fishing with us?" she said.

  "I wouldn't advise going out on the salt today. You'll probably get knocked around pretty hard out there."

  She looked at Elrod.

  "The wind'll die pretty soon," he said.

  "I wouldn't count on that," I said.

  "The guy who rented us the boat said it can take pretty heavy seas. This weather's not that big a deal, is it?" he said.

  On the floor was an open cooler filled with cracked ice, long-necked bottles of Dixie, soda pop, and tonic water.