In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Chapter 12

I slept late the next morning, and when I awoke, I found a note from Bootsie on the icebox saying that she had taken Alafair shopping in town. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk, Grape-Nuts, and strawberries on a tray and carried it out to the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The morning was not hot yet, and blue jays flew in and out of the dappled shade and my neighbor's sprinkler drifted in an iridescent haze across my grass.

Then I saw Rosie Gomez's motor-pool government car slow by our mailbox and turn into our drive. Her face was pointed at an upward angle so she could see adequately over the steering wheel. I got up from the table and waved her around back.

She wore a white blouse and white skirt with black pumps, a wide black belt, and a black purse.

"How you feeling?" she asked.

"Pretty good. In fact, great."

"Yeah?"

"Sure."

"You look okay."

"I am okay, Rosie. Here, I'll get you some coffee."

When I came back outside with the pot and another cup and saucer, she was sitting on the redwood bench, looking out over my duck pond and my neighbor's sugarcane fields. Her face looked cool and composed.

"It's beautiful out here," she said.

"I'm sorry Bootsie and Alafair aren't here. I'd like you to meet them."

"Next time. I'm sorry I didn't come see you in the hospital. I'd left for New Orleans early that morning. I just got back."

"What's up?"

"About three weeks ago an old hooker in the Quarter called the Bureau and said she wanted to seriously mess up Julie Balboni for us. Except she was drunk or stoned and the agent who took the call didn't give it a lot of credence."

"What'd she have to offer?"

"Nothing, really. She just kept saying, 'He's hurting these girls. Somebody ought to fix that rotten dago. He's got to stop hurting these girls.' "

"So what happened?"

"Three days ago there was a power failure at the woman's apartment building on Ursulines. With the air conditioner off it didn't take long for the smell to leak through the windows to the courtyard. The M.E. says it was suicide."

I watched her face. "You don't think it was?" I said.

"How many women shoot themselves through the head with a.38 special?"

"Maybe she was drunk and didn't care how she bought it."

"Her refrigerator and cupboards were full of food. The apartment was neat, all her dishes were washed. There was a sack of delicatessen items on the table she hadn't put away yet. Does that suggest the behavior of a despondent person to you?"

"What do they say at N.O.P D.?"

"They don't. They yawn. They've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.'s. You think they want to turn the suicide of a hooker into another open homicide case?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I think you've been right about a tie with Balboni. The most common denominator that keeps surfacing in this case is prostitution in and around New Orleans. There isn't a pimp or chippy working in Jefferson or Orleans parishes who don't piece off their action to Julie Balboni."

"That doesn't mean Julie's involved with killing anyone, Rosie."

"Be honest with me. Do I continue to underwhelm you as a representative of Fart, Barf, and Itch?"

"I'm not quite sure I-"

"Yeah, I bet. What do pimps call the girls in the life? 'Cash on the hoof,' right?"

"That's right."

"Do you think anybody kills one of Balboni's hookers and gets away with it without his knowledge and consent?"

"Except there's a bump in the road here. The man who murdered Kelly Drummond probably thought he was shooting at me. The mob doesn't kill cops. Not intentionally, anyway."

"Maybe he's a cowboy, out of control. We've got rogue cops. The wiseguys have rogue shitheads."

I laughed. "You're something else," I said.

"Cut the patronizing attitude, Dave."

"Sorry," I said, still smiling.

Her eyes looked into mine and darkened.

"I'm worried about you. You don't know how to keep your butt down," she said.

"Everything's copacetic. Believe me."

"Sure it is."

"You know something I don't?"

"Yes, human beings and money make a very bad combination," she said.

"I'd appreciate it if you could stop speaking to me in hieroglyphics."

"Few people care about the origins of money, Dave. All they see is a president's picture on a bill, not Julie Balboni's."

"Let's spell it out, okay?"

"A few of the locals have talked to the sheriff about your taking an extended leave. At least that's what I've heard."

"He's not a professional cop, but he's a decent man. He won't give in to them."

"He's an elected official. He's president of the Lions Club. He eats lunch once a week with the Chamber of Commerce."

"He knows I wasn't drinking. The people in my AA group know it, too. So do the personnel at the hospital. Dr. Landry thinks somebody zapped me with LSD. What else can I say?"

Her face became melancholy, and she looked out at the sunlight on the field with a distant, unfocused expression in her eyes.

"What's the trouble?" I asked.

"You don't hear what you're saying. Your reputation, maybe your job, are hanging in the balance now, and you think it's acceptable to tell people that somebody loaded your head with acid."

"I never made strong claims on mental health, anyway." I tried to smile when I said it. But the skin around my mouth felt stiff and misshaped.

"It isn't funny," she said. She stood up to go, and the bottom of her purse, with the.357 magnum inside, sagged against her hip. "I'm not going to let them do this to you, Dave."

"Wait a minute, Rosie. I don't send other people out on the firing line."

She began walking through the sideyard toward her car, her back as square and straight as a small door.

"Rosie, did you hear me?" I said. "Rosie? Come back here and let's talk. I appreciate what you're trying to-"

She got into her automobile, gave me the thumbs-up sign over the steering wheel, and backed out onto the dirt road by the bayou. She dropped the transmission into low and drove down the long tunnel of oaks without glancing back.

Regardless of Rosie's intentions about my welfare, I still had not resolved the possibility that the racial murder I had witnessed in 1957 and the sack of skin and polished bones Elrod Sykes had discovered in the Atchafalaya Basin were not somehow involved in this case.

However, where do you start in investigating a thirty-five-year-old homicide that was never even reported as such?

Although southern Louisiana, which is largely French Catholic, has a long and depressing record of racial prejudice and injustice, it never compared in intensity and violence to the treatment of black people in the northern portion of the state or in Mississippi, where even the murder of a child, Emmett Till, by two Klansmen in 1955 not only went unpunished but was collectively endorsed after the fact by the town in which it took place. There was no doubt that financial exploitation of black people in general, and sexual exploitation of black women in particular, were historically commonplace in our area, but lynching was rare, and neither I nor anyone I spoke to remembered a violent incident, other than the one I witnessed, or a singularly bad racial situation from the summer of 1957.

The largest newspapers in Louisiana are the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. They also have the best libraries, or "morgues," of old newspapers and cross-referenced clippings. However, I started my strange odyssey into the past on the microfilm in the morgue of the Daily Iberian.

Actually I had little hope of finding any information that would be helpful. During that era little was published in Louisiana newspapers about people of color, except in the police report or perhaps on a separate page that was designated for news about black marriages.

But in my mind's eye I kept seeing the dead man's string-less boots and the rotted strips of rag about his pelvis instead of a belt. Had he been in custody? Was he being transported by a couple of cops who had decided to execute him? If that was the case, why wasn't he in handcuffs? Maybe they had locked the chain on him to sink his body, I thought. No, that couldn't be right. If the victim was being transported by cops, they would have kept him in cuffs until they had murdered him, then they would have removed the cuffs and weighted down the body. Also, why would cops want to sink the body in the Atchafalaya, anyway? They could have claimed that they stopped the car to let him relieve himself, he had taken off for the woods, and they had been forced to shoot him. That particular explanation about a prisoner's death was one that was seldom challenged.

Then I found it, on the area news page dated July 27, 1957. A twenty-eight-year-old Negro man by the name of DeWitt Prejean had been arrested in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette, for breaking into the home of a white family and threatening the wife with a butcher knife. There was no mention of motivation or intent. In fact, the story was not about his arrest but about his escape. He had been in custody only eleven hours, had not even been formally charged, when two armed men wearing gloves and Halloween masks entered the parish prison at four in the morning, locked the night jailer in the restroom, and took DeWitt Prejean out of a downstairs holding cell.

The story was no more than four column inches.

I rolled the microfilm through the viewer, looking for a follow-up story. If it was there, I didn't find it, and I went through every issue of the Daily Iberian to February 1958.

Every good cop who spends time in a newspaper morgue, particularly in the rural South, knows how certain kinds of news stories were reported or were not reported in the pre-civil-rights era. "The suspect was subdued" usually meant that somebody had had his light switch clicked off with a baton or blackjack. Cases involving incest and child molestation were usually not treated at all. Stories about prisoners dying in custody were little more than obituaries, with a tag line to the effect that an autopsy was pending.

The rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a black man was a more complicated issue, however. The victim's identity was always protected by cops and prosecutors, even to the extent that sometimes the rapist was charged with another crime, one that the judge, if at all possible, would punish as severely as he would rape. But the level of white fear and injury was so collectively intense, the outrage so great, that the local paper would be compelled to report the story in such a way that no one would doubt what really happened, or what the fate of the rapist would be.

Also, the 1957 story in the Iberian had mentioned that DeWitt Prejean had been taken from a holding cell eleven hours after his arrest.

People didn't stay in holding cells eleven hours, particularly in a rural jail where a suspect could be processed into lock-down in twenty minutes.

I left Bootsie a note, then drove to Lafayette and continued on north for another twenty miles into St. Landry Parish and the old jailhouse in Opelousas.

The town had once been the home of James Bowie before he became a wealthy cotton merchant and slave trader in New Orleans. But during the 1950s it acquired another kind of notoriety, namely for its political corruption, an infamous bordello named Margaret's that had operated since the War Between the States, and its gambling halls, which were owned or controlled by the sheriff and which were sometimes raided by the state police when a legislative faction in Baton Rouge wanted to force a change in the parish representatives' vote.

I parked my truck at the back of the courthouse square, right next to the brick shell of the old jail, whose roof had caved in on top of the cast-iron tank, perforated with small square holes, that had served as the lock-down area. As I walked under the live oaks toward the courthouse entrance, I looked through the jail's glassless windows at the mounds of soft, crumbled brick on the floor, the litter of moldy paper, and wondered where the two gloved men in Halloween masks had burst inside and what dark design they had planned for the Negro prisoner DeWitt Prejean.

I got nowhere at the courthouse. The man who had been sheriff during the fifties was dead, and no one now in the sheriff's department remembered the case or the escape; in fact, I couldn't even find a record of DeWitt Prejean's arrest.

"It happened. I didn't make it up," I said to the sheriff, who was in his late thirties. "I found the account in a 1957 issue of the Daily Iberian."

"That might be," he answered. He wore his hair in a military crewcut and his jaws were freshly shaved. He was trying to be polite, but the light of interest kept fading from his eyes. "But they didn't always keep good records back then. Maybe some things happened that people don't want to remember, too, you know what I mean?"

"No."

He twirled a pencil around on his desk blotter.

"Go talk to Mr. Ben. That is, if you want to," he said. "That's Mr. Ben Hebert. He was the jailer here for thirty years."

"Was he the jailer in 1957?"

"Yeah, he probably was."

"You don't sound enthusiastic."

He rubbed the calluses on his hands without looking up at me.

"Put it this way," he said. "His only son ended up in Angola, his wife refused to see him on her deathbed, and there're still some black people who cross the street when they see him coming. Does that help form a picture for you?"

I left the courthouse and went to the local newspaper to look for a follow-up story on the jailbreak. There was none. Twenty minutes later I found the old jailer on the gallery of his weathered wood-frame home across from a Popeye's fastfood restaurant. His yard was almost black with shade, carpeted with a wet mat of rotted leaves, his sidewalks inset with tethering rings, cracked and pyramided from the oak roots that twisted under them. The straw chair he sat in seemed about to burst from his huge bulk.

I had to introduce myself twice before he responded. Then he simply said, "What you want?"

"May I sit down, sir?"

His lips were purple with age, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes. He breathed loudly, as though he had emphysema.

"I ax you what you want," he said.

"I wondered if you remembered a black man by the name of DeWitt Prejean."

He looked at me carefully. His eyes were clear-blue, liquid, elongated, red along the rims.

"A nigger, you say?" he asked.

"That's right."

"Yeah, I remember that sonofabitch. What about him?"

"Is it all right if I sit down, Mr. Hebert?"

"Why should I give a shit?"

I sat down in the swing. He put a cigarette in his mouth and searched in his shirt pocket for a match while his eyes went up and down my body. Gray hair grew out of his nose and on the back of his thick neck.

"Were you on duty the night somebody broke him out of jail?" I said.

"I was the jailer. A jailer don't work nights. You hire a man for that."

"Do you remember what that fellow was charged with?"

"He wasn't charged with nothing. It never got to that."

"I wonder why he was still in a holding cell eleven hours after he was arrested."

"They busted him out of the tank."

"Not according to the newspaper."

"That's why a lot of people use newspaper to wipe their ass with."

"He went into a white woman's home with a butcher knife, did he?"

"Find the nigger and ax him."

"That's what puzzles me. Nobody seems to know what happened to this fellow, and nobody seems to care. Does that make sense to you?"

He puffed on his cigarette. It was wet and splayed when he took it out of his mouth. I waited for him to speak but he didn't.

"Did y'all just close the books on a jailbreak, Mr. Hebert?" I asked.

"I don't remember what they done."

"Was DeWitt Prejean a rapist?"

"He didn't know how to keep his prick in his pants, if that's what you mean."

"You think her husband broke him out?"

"He might have."

I looked into his face and waited.

"That is, if he could," he said. "He was a cripple-man. He got shot up in the war."

"Could I talk to him?"

He tipped his cigarette into an ashtray and looked out toward the bright glare of sunlight on the edge of his yard. Across the street black people were going in and out of the Popeye's restaurant.

"Talk to him all you want. He's in the cemetery, out by the tracks east of town," he said.

"What about the woman?"

"She moved away. Up North somewhere. What's your interest in nigger trouble that's thirty-five years old?"

"I think I saw him killed. Where's the man who was on duty the night of the jailbreak?"

"Got drunk, got hisself run over by a train. Wait a minute, what did you say? You saw what?"

"Sometimes rivers give up their dead, Mr. Hebert. In this instance it took quite a while. Y'all took his boot strings and his belt, didn't you?"

"You do that with every prisoner."

"You do it when they're booked and going into the tank. This guy was never booked. He was left in a holding cell for two armed men to find him. You didn't even leave him a way to take his own life."

He stared at me, his face like a lopsided white cake.

"I think one of the men who killed Prejean tried to kill me," I said. "But he murdered a young woman instead. A film actress. Maybe you read about it."

He stood up and dropped his cigarette over the gallery railing into a dead scrub. He smelled like Vick's VapoRub, nicotine, and an old man's stale sweat. His breath rasped as though his lungs were filled with tiny pinholes.

"You get the fuck off my gallery," he said, and walked heavily on a cane into the darkness of his house, and let the screen slam behind him.

I STOPPED AT POPEYE'S ON PlNHOOK ROAD IN LAFAYETTE AND ate an order of fried chicken and dirty rice, then I drove down Pinhook through the long corridor of oak trees, which had been planted by slaves, down toward the Vermilion River bridge and old highway 90, which led through the little sugar town of Broussard to New Iberia.

Just before the river I passed a Victorian home set back in a grove of pecan trees. Between the road and the wide, columned porch a group of workmen were trenching a water or sewer line of some kind. The freshly piled black dirt ran in an even line past a decorative nineteenth-century flatbed wagon that was hung with baskets of blooming impatiens. The bodies and work clothes of the men looked gray and indistinct in the leafy shade, then a hard gust of wind blew off the river through the trees, the dappled light shifted back and forth across the ground like a bright yellow net, and when I looked back at the workmen I saw them dropping their tools, straightening their backs, fitting on their military caps that were embroidered with gold acorns, picking up their stacked muskets, and forming into ranks for muster.

The general sat in the spring seat of the wagon, his artificial leg propped stiffly on the iron rim of a wheel, a cigar in his mouth, the brim of his campaign hat set at a rakish angle over one eye.

He screwed his body around in the wagon seat and raised his hat high over his head in salute to me.

Gravel exploded like a fusillade of lead shot under my right fender. I cut the wheel back off the shoulder onto the pavement, then looked back at the wide sweep of leafy lawn under the pecan trees. A group of workmen were lowering a long strip of flexible plastic pipe into the ground like a white worm.

Back in New Iberia I parked behind the sheriff's depart-ment and started inside the building. Two deputies were on their way out.

"Hey, Dave, you're supposed to be in sick bay," one of them said.

"I'm out."

"Right. You look good."

"Is the skipper in?"

"Yeah. Sure. Hey, you look great. I mean it."

He gave me the thumbs-up sign.

His words were obviously well intended, but I remembered how I was treated after I stepped on a bouncing Betty in Vietnam-with a deference and kindness that not only separated me from those who had a lock on life but constantly reminded me that the cone of flame that had illuminated my bones had also given me a permanent nocturnal membership in a club to which I did not want to belong.

The dispatcher stopped me on my way to the sheriff's office. He weighed over three hundred pounds and had a round red face and a heart condition. His left-hand shirt pocket was bursting with cellophane-wrapped cigars. He had just finished writing out a message on a pink memo slip. He folded it and handed it to me.

"Here's another one," he said. He had lowered his voice, and his eyes were hazy with meaning.

"Another what?"

"Call from this same party that keeps bugging me."

"Which party?"

His eyebrows went up in half-moons.

"The Spanish broad. Or Mexican. Or whatever she is."

I opened the memo and looked at it. It read, Dave, why don't you return my calls? I'm still waiting at the same place. Have I done wrong in some way? It was signed "Amber."

"Amber?" I said.

"You got eight or nine of them in your mailbox," he said. "Her last name sounded Spanish."

"Who is she?"

"How should I know? You're the guy she's calling."

"All right, thanks, Wally," I said.

I took all my mail out of my box, then shuffled through the pink memo slips one at a time.

The ones from "Amber" were truly an enigma. A few examples:

I've done what you asked. Please call.

Dave, leave a message on my answering machine.

It's me again. Am I supposed to drop dead?

You 're starting to piss me off. If you don't want me to bother you again, say so. I'm getting tired of this shit.

I'm sorry, Dave. I was hurt when I said those things. But don't close doors on me.

I walked back to the dispatcher's cage.

"There's no telephone number on any of these," I said.

"She didn't leave one."

"Did you ask her for one?"

"No, I got the impression y'all were buddies or something. Hey, don't look at me like that. What is she, a snitch or something?"

"I don't have any idea."

"She sounds like she's ready to bump uglies, though."

"Why don't you give some thought to your language, Wally?"

"Sorry."

"If she calls again, get her telephone number. If she doesn't want to give it to you, tell her to stop calling here."

"Whatever you say."

I wadded up the memo slips, dropped them into a tobacco-streaked brass cuspidor, and walked into the sheriff's office.

A manila folder was open on his desk. He was reading from it, with both his elbows propped on the desk blotter and his fingertips resting lightly on his temples. His mouth looked small and downturned at the corners. On his wall was a framed and autographed picture of President Bush.

"How you doing?" I said.

"Oh, hello, Dave," he said, looking up at me over his glasses. "It's good to see you. How do you feel today?"

"Just fine, sheriff."

"You didn't need to come in. I wanted you to take a week or so off. Didn't Bootsie tell you?"

"I went up to Opelousas this morning. I think I found out who those bones out in the Atchafalaya might belong to."

"What?"

"A couple of armed men broke a black prisoner named DeWitt Prejean out of the St. Landry Parish jail in 1957. The guy was in for threatening a white woman with a butcher knife. But it sounds like an attempted rape. Or maybe there's a possibility that something was going on with consent. The old jailer said something about Prejean not being able to keep his equipment in his pants. Maybe the woman and Prejean just got caught and Prejean got busted on a phony charge and set up for a lynching."

The sheriff's eyes blinked steadily and he worked his teeth along his bottom lip.

"I don't understand you," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"I've told you repeatedly that case belongs to St. Mary Parish. Why is it that you seem to shut your ears to whatever I say?"

"Kelly Drummond's death doesn't belong to St. Mary Parish, sheriff. I think the man who killed her was after me because of that lynched black man."

"You don't know that. You don't know that at all."

"Maybe not. But what's the harm?"

He rubbed his round cleft chin with his thumb. I could hear his whiskers scraping against the skin.

"An investigation puts the right people in jail," he said. "You don't throw a rope around half the people in two or three parishes. And that's what you and that woman are doing."

"That's the problem, is it?"

"You damn right it is. Thirty minutes ago Agent Gomez marched into my office with all her findings." He touched the edge of the manila folder with his finger. "According to Agent Gomez, New Iberia has somehow managed to become the new Evil Empire."

I nodded.

"The New Orleans mob is laundering its drug money through Bal-Gold Productions," he said. "Julie Balboni is running a statewide prostitution operation from Spanish Lake, he's also having prostitutes killed, and maybe he laced your Dr Pepper with LSD when he wasn't cutting illegal deals with the Teamsters. Did you know we had all those problems right here in our town, Dave?"

"Julie's a walking shit storm. Who knows what his potential is?"

"She also called some of our local business people moral weenies and chicken-hearted buttheads."

"She has some eloquent moments."

"Before she left my office she said she wanted me to know that she liked me personally but in all honesty she had to confess that she thought I was full of shit."

"I see," I said, and fixed my eyes on a palm tree outside the window.

The room was quiet. I could hear a jail trusty mowing the grass outside. The sheriff turned his Southwestern class ring on his finger.

"I want you to understand something, Dave," he said. "I was the one who wanted that fat sonofabitch Balboni out of town. You were the one who thought he was a source of humor. But now we're stuck with him, and that's the way it is."

"Why?"

"Because he has legitimate business interests here. He's committed no crime here. In fact, there's no outstanding warrant on this man anywhere. He's never spent one day in jail."

"I think that's the same shuck his lawyers try to sell."

He exhaled his breath through his nose.

"Go home. You've got the week off," he said.

"I heard my leave might even be longer."

He chewed on a fingernail.

"Who told you that?" he said.

"Is it true or not?"

"You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don't look right. They bother me. There's a strange light in them. Go home, Dave."

"People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn't sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff."

"What can I say?" he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.

When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.

My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a glass of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer into the roots of the tomato plants by the coulee. She was in the row, on her hands and knees, and the rump of her pink shorts was covered with dirt.

She raised up on her knees and smiled.

"Did you eat yet?" she asked.

"I stopped in Lafayette."

"What were you doing over there?"

"I went to Opelousas to run down a lead on that '57 lynching."

"I thought the sheriff had said-"

"He did. He didn't take well to my pursuing it."

I sat down at the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. On the table were a pad of lined notebook paper and three city library books on Texas and southern history.

"What's this?" I said.

"Some books I checked out. I found out some interesting things."

She got up from the row of tomato plants, brushing her hands, and sat down across from me. Her hair was damp on her forehead and flecked with grains of dirt. She picked up the note pad and began thumbing back pages. Then she set it down and looked at me uncertainly.

"You know how dreams work?" she said. "I mean, how dates and people and places shift in and out of a mental picture that you wake up with in the morning? The picture seems to have no origin in your experience, but at the same time you're almost sure you lived it, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"I looked up some of the things that, well, maybe you believe you saw out there in the mist."

I drank out of my iced tea and looked down the sloping lawn at the duck pond and the bright, humid haze on my neighbor's sugarcane.

"You see, Dave, according to these books, John Bell Hood never had a command in Louisiana," she said. "He fought at Gettysburg and in Tennessee and Georgia."

"He was all through this country, Boots."

"He lived here but he didn't fight here. You see, what's interesting, Dave, is that part of your information is correct but the rest you created from associations. Look here-"

She turned the notebook around so I could see the notes she had taken. "You're right, he commanded the Texas Brigade," she said. "It was a famous cavalry outfit. But look here at this date. When you asked the general what the date was, he told you it was April 21, 1865, right?"

"Right."

"April 21 is Texas Independence Day, the day the battle of San Jacinto was fought between the Mexican army and the Texans in 1836. Don't you see, your mind mixed up two historical periods. Nothing happened out in that mist, Dave."

"Maybe not," I said. "Wait here a minute, will you?"

I walked to the front of the house, where my boat trailer was still parked, pulled back the tarp, which was dented with pools of rainwater, reached down inside the bow of the boat, and returned to the backyard.

"What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Why'd you go out front?"

"I was going to show you some junk I found out in the marsh."

"What junk?"

"Probably some stuff left by an old lumber crew. It's not important."

Her face was puzzled, then her eyes cleared and she put her hand on top of mine.

"You want to go inside?" she said.

"Where's Alf?"

"Playing over at Poteet's house."

"Sure, let's go inside."

"I'm kind of dirty."

She waited for me to say something but I didn't. I stared at my iced-tea glass.

"What is it, babe?" she said.

"Maybe it's time to start letting go of the department."

"Let go how?"

"Hang it up."

"Is that what you want?"

"Not really."

"Then why not wait awhile? Don't make decisions when you're feeling down, cher."

"I think I've already been cut loose, Boots. They look at me like I have lobotomy stitches across my forehead."

"Maybe you read it wrong, Dave. Maybe they want to help but they just don't know how."

I didn't answer. Later, after we had made love in the warm afternoon gloom of our bedroom, I rose from the softness of her body and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. A moment later I felt her nails tick lightly on my back.

"Ask the sheriff if he wants your resignation," she said.

"It won't solve the problem."

"Why won't it? Let them see how well they'll do without you."

"You don't understand. I'm convinced Kelly Drummond's killer was after me. It's got something to do with that dead black man. That's the only thing that makes sense."

"Why?"

"We've gotten virtually nowhere in trying to find this serial killer or psychopath or whatever he is. So why would he want to come after me? But the lynched black man is another matter. I'm the only one making noise about it. That's the connection. Why doesn't the sheriff see that?"

I felt her nails trace my vertebrae.

"You want to believe that all people are good, Dave," she said. "When your friends don't act the way they should, you feel all this anger and then it turns inward on you."

"I'm going to take down that guy, Boots. Even if I have to do it outside the department."

It was quiet for a long time. Then I felt her weight shift on the mattress and I thought she was getting up to get dressed. Instead, she rose to her knees, pressed her body hard against my back, and pulled my head against her breasts.

"I'll always love you, Dave," she said. "I don't care if you're a cop or a commercial fisherman or if you hunt down this bastard and kill him, I'll always love you for the man you are."

How do you respond to a statement like that?

The phone call came at 9:30 that night. I answered it in the kitchen.

"You're a hard man to catch," she said.

"Who's this?"

"The lady who's been trying to catch you, sugar."

"How about giving me a name?"

"It's Amber. Who else, darlin'?" Her voice sounded sleepy, indolent, in slow motion.

"Ah, the lady of the mysterious phone messages."

"You don't remember me? Don't hurt my feelings."

"No, I'm sorry, I don't recall who you are. What can I do for you?"

"It's me that's going to do you a big favor, darlin'. It's because I like you. It's because I remember you from New Orleans a long time ago."

"I appreciate all this, but how about we cut to it?"

"I'm gonna give you the guy you want, sweetheart."

"Which guy are we talking about?"

"He's a nasty ole pimp and he's been doin' some nasty things to his little girls."

Through the back window I could see my neighbor burning field stumps in the dark. The sparks spun upward against the black sky.

"What's his name, Amber?"

"I've got a temporary problem, though. I want to go back to Florida for a little while, you know what I mean?"

"What do you need?"

"Just the air ticket and a little pin money. Three or four hundred dollars. That's not a lot to ask, is it?"

"We might be able to arrange that. Would you like to come into my office?"

"Oh, I don't know if I should do that. All those handsome men make me self-conscious. Do you know where Red's Bar is in Lafayette?"

"On the north side?"

"You got it, sugar. How about in an hour? I'll be at the bar, right by the door."

"You wouldn't try to take me over the hurdles, would you, Amber?"

"Tell me you don't recognize me and break my heart. Ooou, ooou," she said, and hung up.

Who was she? The rhetoric, the flippant cynicism, the pout in the voice, the feigned little-girlishness, all spelled hooker. And the messages she had left at my office were obviously meant to indicate to others that there was a personal relationship between us. It sounded like the beginning of a good scam. But she had also sounded stoned. Or maybe she was simply crazy, I thought. Or maybe she was both stoned and crazy and simply running a hustle. Why not?

There are always lots of possibilities when you deal with that vast army of psychological mutants for whom police and correctional and parole officers are supposed to be lifetime stewards. I once knew a young psychiatrist from Tulane who wanted to do volunteer counseling in the women's prison at St. Gabriel. He lasted a month. The inkblot tests he gave his first subjects not only drove him into clinical depression but eventually caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.

I made a call to the home of an AA friend named Lou Girard who was a detective sergeant in Vice at the Lafayette Police Department. He was one of those who drifted in and out of AA and never quite let go of the old way of life, but he was still a good cop and he would have made lieutenant had he not punched out an obnoxious local politician at Democratic headquarters.

"What's her name again?" he said.

I told him.

"Yeah, there's one broad around calls herself Amber, but she's a Mexican," he said. "You said this one sounds like she's from around here?"

"Yep."

"Look, Dave, these broads got about two dozen names they trade around-Ginger, Consuela, Candy, Pepper, there's even a mulatto dancer named Brown Sugar. Anyway, there're three or four hookers that float in and out of Red's. They're low-rent, though. Their Johns are oil-field workers and college boys, mostly."

"I'm going to drive over there in a few minutes. Can you give me some backup?"

"To check out a snitch?"

"Maybe she's not just a snitch."

"What about your own guys?"

"I'm supposed to be on sick leave right now."

"Is something wrong over there, Dave?"

"Things could be better."

"All right, I'll meet you behind the bar. I'll stay in my car, though. For some reason my face tends to empty out a place. Or maybe I need a better mouth wash."

"Thanks for doing this."

"It beats sitting at home listening to my liver rot."

Red's Bar was located in a dilapidated, racially mixed neighborhood of unsurfaced streets, stagnant rain ditches coated with mosquitoes, and vacant lots strewn with lawn trash and automobile parts. Railway tracks intersected people's dirt yards at crazy angles, and Southern Pacific freight cars often lumbered by a few feet from clotheslines and privies and bedroom windows.

I parked my truck in the shadows behind the bar. The shell parking lot was covered with hundreds of flattened beer cans, and the bushes that bordered the neighbor's property stank from all the people who urinated into them nightly. The owner of Red's had built his bar by knocking out the front wall of a frame house and attaching a neon-lit house trailer to it perpendicularly. Originally he had probably intended it to be the place it looked like-a low-bottom bar where you didn't have to make comparisons or where you could get laid and not worry about your own inadequacies.

But the bar became a success in ways that the owner didn't anticipate. He hired black musicians because they were cheap, and through no fault of his own he ended up with one of the best new zydeco bands in southwestern Louisiana. And on Saturday nights he french-fried potatoes in chicken fat and served them free on newspaper to enormous crowds that spilled out into the parking lots.

But tonight wasn't Saturday, there was no band; little sound except the jukebox's came from the bar, and the dust from my truck tires floated in a cloud across the bushes that were sour with urinated beer.

Lou Girard got out of his car and walked over to my window. He was a huge man, his head as big as a basketball, who wore cowboy boots with his suits and a chrome-plated.357 magnum in a hand-tooled belt holster. He also carried a braided slapjack in his back pocket and handcuffs that he slipped through the back of his belt.

"It's good to see you, Streak," he said.

"You too, Lou. How's everything at home?"

"My wife finally took off with her beautician. A woman, I'm talking about. I guess I finally figured out why she seemed a little remote in the sack. What are we doing tonight?"

"I'll go inside and look around. I'd like you to be out here to cover my back. It's not a big deal."

He looked at the clapboard back of the bar, at the broken windows and the overflow of the garbage cans, and hooked his thumb in his belt.

"When'd you start needing backup for bullshit like this?"

"Maybe I'm getting over the hill for it."

"Be serious, my friend."

"You know about Kelly Drummond being killed?"

"That actress? Yeah, sure."

"I think maybe the shooter was after me. I don't want to walk into a setup."

"This is a weird fucking place for a setup, Dave. Why would a guy want to bring a cop to a public place in Lafayette for a whack?"

"Why do these guys do anything?"

"You have any idea who the shooter might be?"

"Maybe a guy who was in on a lynching thirty-five years ago."

He nodded and his eyes became veiled.

"That doesn't sound plausible to you?" I asked.

"What's plausible? I try to get off the booze and my liver swells up like a football, my wife turns out to be a dyke, and for kicks I'm standing by a bunch of bushes that stink like somebody with a kidney disease pissed on them."

I pulled my tropical shirt out of my khakis, stuck my.45 inside the back of my belt, and walked through the rear entrance of the building.

The inside smelled like refrigerated bathroom disinfectant and tobacco smoke. The wood floors were warped and covered with cigarette burns that looked like black insects. Some college boys were playing the jukebox and drinking pitcher beer at the bar, and two or three couples were dancing in the adjacent room. A lone biker, with a lion's mane of blond hair and arms wrapped with jailhouse art, hit the cue ball so hard on the pool table that it caromed off the side of the jukebox. But it was a dead night at Red's, and the only female at the bar was an elderly woman who was telling a long tale of grief and discontent to a yawning bartender.

"What'll you have?" he said to me.

"Has Amber been in?"

He shook his head to indicate either that she had not or he had no idea whom I was talking about.

"She hasn't been here?"

"What do you want to drink?"

"A 7 Up."

He opened it and poured it into a glass full of ice. But he didn't serve it to me. He walked to the rear of the long bar, which was empty, set it down, and waited for me. When he leaned on the bar, the biceps of his brown arms ridged with muscles like rocks. I walked down the length of the bar and sat on the stool in front of him.

"Which Amber you looking for?" he asked.

"I only know one."

"She don't come in here reg'lar. But I could call somebody who probably knows where she's at. I mean if we're talking about the same broad."

"A Mexican?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"She talks like a Mexican?"

"Yeah. What's a Mexican supposed to talk like?"

"That's not the one I'm looking for, then."

"Enjoy your 7 Up," he said, and walked away from me.

I waited a half hour. The biker went out and I heard him kick-start his motorcycle and peel down the dirt street in a roar of diminishing thunder. Then the college boys left and the bar was almost deserted. The bartender brought me another 7 Up. I reached for my billfold.

"It's on the house," he said.

"It's my birthday?" I said.

"You're a cop."

"I'm a cop?"

"It don't matter to me. I like having cops in. It keeps the riffraff out."

"Why do you think I'm a cop, partner?"

"Because I just went out back for a breath of air and Lou Girard was taking a leak on our banana trees. Tell Lou thanks a lot for me."

So I gave it up and walked back outside into the humid night, the drift of dust off the dirt road, and the heat lightning that flickered silently over the Gulf.

"I'm afraid it's a dud," I said to Lou through his car window. "I'm sorry to get you out for nothing."

"Forget it. You want to get something to eat?"

"No, I'd better head home."

"This hooker, Amber, her full name is Amber Martinez. I heard she was getting out of the life. But I can pick her up for you."

"No, I think somebody was just jerking me around."

"Let me know if I can do anything, then."

"All right. Thanks again. Goodnight, Lou."

"Goodnight, Dave."

I watched him drive around the side of the building and out onto the dirt street. Raindrops began to ping on the top of my truck.

But maybe I was leaving too early, I thought. If the bartender had made Lou Girard, maybe the woman had, too.

I went back inside. All the bar stools were empty. The bartender was rinsing beer mugs in a tin sink. He looked up at me.

"She still ain't here. I don't know what else to tell you, buddy," he said.

I put a quarter in the jukebox and played an old Clifton Chenier record, Hey 'Tite Fille, then I walked out onto the front steps. The rain was slanting across the neon glow of the Dixie beer sign and pattering in the ditches and on the shell parking lot. Across the street were two small frame houses, and next to them was a vacant lot with a vegetable garden and three dark oaks in it and an old white Buick parked in front. Then somebody turned on a light inside the house next to the lot, and I saw the silhouette of somebody in the passenger seat of the Buick. I saw the silhouette as clearly as if it had been snipped out of tin, and then I saw the light glint on a chrome or nickel-plated surface as brightly as a heliograph.

The shots were muffled in the rain-pop, pop, like Chinese firecrackers under a tin can-but I saw the sparks fly out from the pistol barrel through the interior darkness of the Buick. The shooter had fired at an odd angle, across the seat and through the back window, but I didn't wait to wonder why he had chosen an awkward position to take a shot at me.

I pulled the.45 from under my shirt, dropped to my knees behind the bumper of a pickup truck, and began firing with both hands extended in front of me. I let off all eight rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. The roar was deafening, like someone had slapped both his palms violently against my eardrums. The hollow-points exploded the glass out of the Buick's windows, cored holes like a cold chisel through the doors, whanged off the steering wheel and dashboard, and blew the horn button like a tiddly-wink onto the hood.

The slide locked open on the empty magazine, and the last spent casing tinkled on the flattened beer cans at my feet. I stood erect, still in the lee of the pickup truck, slipped the empty magazine out of the.45's butt, inserted a fresh one, and eased a round into the chamber. The street was quiet except for the pattering of the rain in the ditches. Then I heard a siren in the distance and the bar door opening behind me.

"What the fuck's going on?" the bartender said, his whole body framed in the light. "You fucking crazy or something?"

"Get back inside," I said.

"We never had trouble here. Where the fuck are you from? People lose licenses because of bullshit like this."

"Do you want to get shot?"

He slammed the door shut, locked it, and pulled the blinds.

I started across the street just as an electrical short in the Buick caused the horn to begin blowing non-stop. I kept the.45 pointed with both hands at the Buick's windows and moved in a circle around the front of the car. No one was visible above the level of the windows nor was there any movement inside. The hollow-points had cut exit holes the size of half-dollars in the passenger door.

A Lafayette city police car came hard around the corner, its emergency lights whirling in the rain. The police car stopped twenty yards from the Buick and both front doors sprang open. I could see the cop in the passenger's seat pulling his pump shotgun out of its vertical mount on the dashboard. I got my badge holder out of my back pocket and held it high over my head.

"Lay your weapon on the ground and step back from the car," the driver said, aiming his revolver at me between the door and the jamb.

I held my right arm at a ninety-degree angle, the barrel pointing into the sky.

"I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. "I'm complying with your request."

I crouched in the beam of their headlights, laid my.45 by the front tire of the Buick, and raised back up again.

"Step away from it," the driver said.

"You got it," I said, and almost lost my balance in the rain ditch.

"Walk this way. Now," the driver said.

People were standing on their front porches and the rain was coming down harder in big drops that stung my eyes. I kept my badge turned outward toward the two Lafayette city cops.

"I've identified myself. Now how about jacking it down a couple of notches?" I said.

The cop with the shotgun pulled my badge holder out of my hand and looked at it. Then he flexed the tension out of his shoulders, made a snuffing sound in his nose, and handed me back my badge.

"What the hell's going on?" he said.

"Somebody took two shots at me. In that Buick. I think maybe he's still inside."

They both looked at each other.

"You're saying the guy's still in there?" the driver said.

"I didn't see him go anywhere."

"Fuck, why didn't you say so?"

I didn't get a chance to answer. Just then, Lou Girard pulled abreast of the police car and got out in the rain.

"Damn, Dave, I thought you'd gone home. What happened?"

"Somebody opened up on me," I said.

"You know this guy?" the cop with the shotgun said.

"Hell, yes, I do. Put your guns away. What's wrong with you guys?" Lou said.

"Lou, the shooter fired at me twice," I said. "I put eight rounds into the Buick. I think he's still in there."

"What?" he said, and ripped his.357 from his belt holster. Then he said to the two uniformed cops, "What have you fucking guys been doin' out here?"

"Hey, Lou, come on. We didn't know who this-"

"Shut up," he said, walked up to the Buick, looked inside, then jerked open the passenger door. The interior light went on.

"What is it?" the cop with the shotgun said.

Lou didn't answer. He replaced his revolver in his holster and reached down with his right hand and felt something on the floor of the automobile.

I walked toward him. "Lou?" I said.

His hands felt around on the seat of the car, then he stepped back and studied the ground and the weeds around his feet as though he were looking for something.

"Lou?"

"She's dead, Dave. It looks like she caught one right through the mouth."

"She?" I said. I felt the blood drain from my heart.

"You popped Amber Martinez," he said.

I started forward and he caught my arm. The headlights of the city police car were blinding in the rain. He pulled me past the open passenger door, and I saw a diminutive woman in an embryonic position, a white thigh through a slit in a cocktail dress, a mat of brown hair that stuck wetly to the floor carpet.

Our faces were turned in the opposite direction from the city cops'. Lou's mouth was an inch from my ear. I could smell cigarettes, bourbon, and mints on his breath.

"Dave, there's no fucking gun," he whispered hoarsely.

"I saw the muzzle flashes. I heard the reports."

"It's not there. I got a throw-down in my glove compartment. Tell me to do it."

I stared woodenly at the two uniformed cops, who stood in hulking silhouette against their headlights like gargoyles awaiting the breath of life.