In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

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.

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

"I don't know. I'll tell you what happened the night she got killed, though. They had a big blowup in the motel room. I could hear it coming through the walls. She said she wasn't nobody's chicken, she wanted her own action, her own girls, a place out on Lake Pontchartrain, maybe a spot in a movie.

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

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

"Who killed her, Cholo?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I clicked my nails on the plastic cassette that rested on my thigh.

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

"Who?" he said.

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

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

"Yes, he was."

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

"Hey, Loot, old-time lesson from your days at the First District," he said. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, from the New Orleans families does a cop. The guy who pulls something like that ends up a lot worse than Tommy Fig. His parts come off while he's still living."

He nodded like a sage delivering a universal truth, then hawked, sucked the saliva out of his mouth, and spat a bloody clot out onto the shell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought of the liberals I knew who spoke in such a cavalier fashion about pornography, who dismissed it as inconsequential or who somehow associated its existence with the survival of the First Amendment. I wondered what they would have to say about the film I had just watched. I wondered how they would like a theater that showed it to be located in their neighborhoods; I wondered how they would like the patrons of that theater to be around their children.

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

"Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic film that you need to know about," I said. "Evidently Julie has branched out into some dark stuff."

"What is it, what do you mean?"

"It's pretty sadistic, Rosie. It looks like the real thing, too."

"Can we connect it to Balboni?"

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

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

"Rosie, I-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We will, one way or another."

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and blew her nose. She blinked, and her eyes were shiny.

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

"It's that kind of weather."

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

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

"I've heard they make an ordinary porno movie for about five grand and get a six-figure return. I don't know about one like this."

"I'd like to lock up Cholo Manelli as a material witness."

"Even if we could do it, Rosie, it'd be a waste of time. Cholo's got the thinking powers of a cantaloupe but he doesn't roll over or cop pleas."

"You seem to say that almost with admiration."

"There're worse guys around."

"I have difficulty sharing your sympathies sometimes, Dave."

"Look, the film was made around New Orleans somewhere. Those were the docks in Algiers in the background. I'd like to make a copy and send it to N.O.P.D. Vice. They might recognize some of the players. This kind of stuff is their bailiwick, anyway."

"All right, let's get a print for the Bureau, too. Maybe Balboni's going across state lines with it." Then she picked up her purse and I saw a dark concern come into her face again.

"I'll buy you a drink," I said.

"Of what?"

"Whatever you like."

"I'm all right, Dave. We don't need to go to any bars."

"That's up to you. How about a Dr Pepper across the street or a spearmint snowball in the park?"

"That sounds nice."

We drove in my truck to the park. The sky was filling with afternoon rain clouds that had the bright sheen of steam. She tried to pretend that she was listening to my conversation, but her eyes seemed locked on a distant spot just above the horizon, as though perhaps she were staring through an inverted telescope at an old atrocity that was always aborning at the wrong moment in her mind.

I HAD TRIED SEVERAL TIMES THAT DAY TO PURSUE HOGMAN'S peculiar implication about the type of work done by DeWitt Prejean, the chained black man I had seen shot down in the Atchafalaya marsh in 1957. But neither the Opelousas chief of police nor the St. Landry Parish sheriff knew anything that was helpful about DeWitt Prejean, and when I finally reached the old jailer at his house he hung up the phone on me as soon as he recognized my voice.

Late that afternoon the sleeplessness of the previous night finally caught up with me, and I lay down in the hammock that I had stretched between two shade trees on the edge of the coulee in the backyard. I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sound of the water coursing over the rocks and to forget the images from Lou's apartment that seemed to live behind my eyelids like red paint slung from a brush. I could smell the ferns in the coulee, the networks of roots that trailed in the current, the cool odor of wet stone, the periwinkles that ruffled in the grass.

I had never thought of my coulee as a place where members of the Confederate Signal Corps would gather for a drink on a hot day. But out of the rain clouds and the smell of sulfur and the lightning that had already begun to flicker in the south, I watched the general descend, along with two junior officers, in the wicker basket of an observation balloon, one that looked sewn together from silk cuttings of a half-dozen colors. Five enlisted men moored the basket and balloon to the earth with ropes and helped the general down and handed him a crutch. By the mooring place were a table and chair and telegraph key with a long wire that was attached to the balloon's basket. The balloon tugged upward against its ropes and bobbled and shook in the wind that blew across my neighbor's sugarcane field.

One of the general's aides helped him to a canvas lawn chair by my hammock and then went away.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" he said.

"It surely is," I said.

"Ladies from all over Louisiana donated their silk dresses for the balloon. The wicker basket was made by an Italian pickle merchant in New Orleans. The view's extraordinary. In the next life I'm coming back as a bird. Would you like to take a ride up?"

"Not right now, thanks."

"A bad day for it?"

"Another time, general."

"You grieve for your friend?"

"Yes."

"You plan revenge, don't you? "

"The Lafayette cops are putting it down as a suicide."

"I want you to listen to me very carefully, lieutenant. No matter what occurs in your life, no matter how bad the circumstances seem to be, you must never consider a dishonorable act as a viable alternative."

"The times you lived in were different, general. This afternoon I watched a film that showed young women being beaten and tortured, perhaps even killed, by sadists and degenerates. This stuff is sold in stores and shown in public theaters. The sonsofbitches who make it are seldom arrested unless they get nailed in a mail sting."

"I'm not quite sure I follow all your allusions, but let me tell you of an experience we had three days ago. My standard-bearer was a boy of sixteen. He got caught in their crossfire in a fallow cornfield. There was no place for him to hide. He tried to surrender by waving his shirt over his head. They killed him anyway, whether intentionally or by accident, I don't know.

"By evening we retook the ground and recovered his body. It was torn by miniés as though wild dogs had chewed it. He was so thin you could count his bones with your fingers. In his haversack was his day's ration-a handful of black beans, some roasted acorns, and a dried sweet potato. That's the only food I could provide this boy who followed me unto the death. What do you think I felt toward those who killed him?"

"Maybe you were justified in your feelings."

"Yes, that's what I told myself throughout the night or when I remembered the bloodless glow that his skin gave off when we wrapped him for burial. Then an opportunity presented itself from aloft in our balloon I looked down upon a copse of hackberry trees. Hard by a surgeon's tent a dozen federals were squatting along a latrine with their breeches down to their ankles. Two hundred yards up the bayou, unseen by any of them, was one of our boats with a twelve-pounder on its bow. I simply had to tap the order on the telegrapher's key and our gunners would have loaded with grape and raked those poor devils through their own excrement. But that's not our way, is it?"

"Speak for yourself."

"Your pretense as cynic is unconvincing."

"Let me ask you a question, general. The women who donated their dresses and petticoats for your balloon… what if they were raped, sodomized, and methodically beaten and you got your hands on the men who did it to them?"

"They'd be arrested by my provost, tried in a provisional court, and hanged."

"You wouldn't find that the case today."

His long, narrow face was perplexed.

"Why not?" he said.

"I don't know. Maybe we have so much collective guilt as a society that we fear to punish our individual members."

He put his hat on the back of his head, crossed his good leg across his cork knee, and wet the end of a cheroot. Several of his enlisted men were kneeling by my coulee, filling their canteens. Their faces were dusty, their lips blackened with gunpowder from biting through cartridge papers. The patchwork silk balloon shuddered in the wind and shimmered with the silvery light of the coming rainstorm.

"I won't presume to be your conscience," the general said. "But as your friend who wishes to see you do no harm to yourself, I advise you to give serious thought about keeping your dead friend's weapon."

"I have."

"I think you're making a serious mistake, suh. You disappoint me, too."

He waved his hand impatiently at his aides, and they helped him to his feet.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," I said.

But the general was not one given to debate. He stumped along on his crutch and cork leg toward the balloon's basket, his cigar clenched at an upward angle in his teeth, his eyes flicking about at the wind-torn clouds and the lightning that trembled whitely like heated wires out on the Gulf.

The incoming storm blew clouds of dust out of my neighbor's canefield just as the general's balloon lifted him and his aides aloft, their telegraph wire flopping from the wicker basket like an umbilical cord.

When I woke from my dream, the gray skies were filled with a dozen silken hot-air balloons, painted in the outrageous colors of circus wagons, their dim shadows streaking across barn roofs, dirt roads, clapboard houses, general stores, clumps of cows, winding bayous, until the balloons themselves were only distant specks above the summer-green horizon outside Lafayette.

On Monday morning I went to Lou Girard's funeral in Lafayette. It was a boiling green-gold day. At the cemetery a layer of heat seemed to rise off the spongy grass and grow in intensity as the white sun climbed toward the top of the sky. During the graveside service someone was running a power mower behind the brick wall that separated the crypts from a subdivision. The mower coughed and backfired and echoed off the bricks like someone firing rounds from a small-caliber revolver. The eyes of the cops who stood at attention in full uniform kept watering from the heat and the smell of weed killer. When the police chief and a captain removed the flag from Lou's casket and folded it into a military square, there was no family member there to receive it. The casket remained closed during the ceremony. Before the casket was lowered into the ground, the department chaplin removed a framed picture of Lou in uniform from the top and set it on a folding table under the funeral canopy. Accidentally he tipped it with the back of his hand so that it fell face down on the linen.

I DROVE BACK HOME FOR LUNCH BEFORE HEADING FOR the office. It was cool under the ceiling fan in the kitchen, and the breeze swayed the baskets of impatiens that hung on hooks from the eave of the back porch. Bootsie set a glass of iced tea with mint leaves and a plate of ham-and-onion sandwiches and deviled eggs in front of me.

"Where's Alafair?" I said.

"Elrod took her and Tripod out to Spanish Lake," she said from the sink.

"To the movie location?"

"Yes, I think so."

When I didn't speak, she turned around and looked at me.

"Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

"Julie Balboni's out there, Boots."

"He lives here now, Dave. He's lots of places. I don't think we should start choosing where we go and don't go because of a man like that."

"I don't want Alafair around him."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd object."

"Boots, there's something I didn't tell you about. Saturday a hood named Cholo Manelli gave me a pornographic video that evidently Balboni and his people made. It's as dark as dark gets. There's one scene where it looks like a woman is actually beaten to death."

Her eyes blinked, then she said, "I'll go out to Spanish Lake and bring her home. Why don't you finish eating?"

"Don't worry about it. There's no harm done. I'll go get her before I go to the office."

"Can't somebody do something about him?"

"When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily."

"Where did you get that piece of Puritan theology?"

"It's not funny. The morons on the Chamber of Commerce who brought this guy here would screw up the recipe for ice water."

I heard her laugh and walk around behind me. Then I felt her hands on my shoulders and her mouth kiss the top of my head.

"Dave, you're just too much," she said, and hugged me across the chest.

I LISTENED TO THE NEWS ON THE RADIO AS I DROVE OUT TO Spanish Lake. A tropical storm off Cuba was gaining hurricane status and was expected to turn northwest toward the Gulf Coast. I glanced to the south, but the sky was brassy and hot and virtually free of clouds. Then as I passed the little watermelon and fruit stand at the end of West Main and headed out into the parish, my radio filled with static and my engine began to misfire.

The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the grass by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

"What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His glasses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

"It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

"Yeah, I ought to have something."

I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand passed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release button and the blade leaped open in his hand.

"This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

"I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

"I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

"Thanks for the loan of the knife."

I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oak trees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

"What happened to your clothes?" I said.

"I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."

"I'm not kidding you, Dave," Elrod said. He wore a collarless gray shirt, officer's striped trousers, and black suspenders. "She's a natural. Mikey said the same thing. She looks good from any camera angle. We worked her right into the scene."

"What about Tripod?" I said.

"He's in it, too," Alafair said.

"You're kidding?"

"We're getting him a membership in the Screen Actors Guild," Elrod said.

Elrod poured a paper cup of iced tea for me. The wind blew leaves out of the trees and flapped the corners of the checkered table covers. For the first time that day I could smell salt in the air.

"This looks like the good life," I said.

"Don't be too quick to judge," Elrod said. "A healthy lifestyle in southern California means running three miles on the beach in the morning, eating bean sprouts all day, and shoving five hundred bucks' worth of coke up your nose at night."

The other actors began drifting away from the table to return to work. Tripod was on his chain, eating a drumstick by the trunk of a tree. On the grass next to him was a model of a German Messerschmitt, its wooden fuselage bright with silver paint, its red-edged iron crosses and Nazi swastikas as darkly beguiling as the light in a serpent's eye.

"I gave her that. I hope you didn't mind," Elrod said.

"Where'd you get it?"

"From Murph, up there at the security building. I'm afraid he thinks I can get him on making props for Mikey or something. I think he's kind of a lonely guy, isn't he?"

"I don't know much about him."

"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 greaseballs 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 porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass 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?"

"Nobody 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 spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing 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 shirt 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 fishing 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 hell alone."

I sat down on the grass 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 nigger work," Hebert said. "He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the fuck 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 shit?"

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

"It wasn't the first time that nigger 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 goddamn liar." He leaned over to look past me at the mulatto woman, who was fishing 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. Sonofabitch 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 tortoiseshell 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 IN Lafayette, 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 glasses.

"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 glass-topped patio table. He poured two inches of whiskey into a glass 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. I believe 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 glass 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 assurance 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 God, 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 at the 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.

He tried to speak, and spittle gurgled on his exposed teeth and tongue and dripped off the point of his chin.

"What is it, Lou?"

The wind whipped and molded his shapeless brown suit against his body. He picked up a long stick that had been blown out of the tree above him and began scratching lines in the layers of dead leaves and pecan husks at his feet. He made an S, and then drew a straight line like an I and then put a half bubble on it and turned it into a P.

He dropped the stick to the ground and stared at me, his deformed face filled with expectation.