In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Chapter 5

Early the next morning the sheriff stopped me in the corridor as I was on my way to my office.

"Special. Agent Gomez is here," he said. A smile worked at the corner of his mouth.

"Where?"

"In your office."

"So?"

"I think it's a break the FBI's working with us on this one."

"You told me that before."

"Yeah, I did, didn't I?" His eyes grew brighter, then he looked away and laughed out loud.

"What's the big joke?" I asked.

"Nothing." He rubbed his lips with his knuckle, and his eyes kept crinkling at the corners.

"Let me ask you something between insider jokes," I said. "Why is the FBI coming in on this one so early? They don't have enough work to do with the resident wiseguys in New Orleans?"

"That's a good question, Dave. Ask Agent Gomez about that and give me feedback later." He walked off smiling to himself. Uniformed deputies in the corridor were smiling back at him.

I picked up my mail, walked through my office door, and stared at the woman who was sitting in my chair and talking on my telephone. She was looking out the window at a mockingbird on a tree limb while she talked. She turned her head long enough to point to a chair where I could sit down if I wished.

She was short and dark-skinned, and her thick, black hair was chopped stiffly along her neck. Her white suit coat hung on the back of my chair. There was a huge silk bow on her blouse of the sort that Bugs Bunny might wear.

Her eyes flicked back at me again, and she took the telephone receiver away from her ear and slipped her hand over the mouthpiece.

"Have a seat. I'll be right with you," she said.

"Thank you," I said.

I sat down, looked idly through my mail, and a moment later heard her put down the phone receiver.

"Can I help you with something?" she asked.

"Maybe. My name's Dave Robicheaux. This is my office."

Her face colored.

"I'm sorry," she said. "A call came in for me on your extension, and I automatically sat behind your desk."

"It's all right."

She stood up and straightened her shoulders. Her breasts looked unnaturally large and heavy for a woman her height. She picked up her purse and walked around the desk.

"I'm Special Agent Rosa Gomez," she said. Then she stuck her hand out, as though her motor control was out of sync with her words.

"It's nice to know you," I said.

"I think they're putting a desk in here for me."

"Oh?"

"Do you mind?"

"No, not at all. It's very nice to have you here."

She remained standing, both of her hands on her purse, her shoulders as rigid as a coat hanger.

"Why don't you sit down, Ms… Agent Gomez?"

"Call me Rosie. Everyone calls me Rosie."

I sat down behind my desk, then noticed that she was looking at the side of my head. Involuntarily I touched my hair.

".You've been with the Bureau a long time?" I said.

"Not really."

"So you're fairly new?"

"Well, just to this kind of assignment. I mean, out in the field, that sort of thing." Her hands looked small on top of her big purse. I think it took everything in her to prevent them from clenching with anxiety. Then her eyes focused again on the side of my head.

"I have a white patch in my hair," I said.

She closed then opened her eyes with embarrassment.

"Someone once told me I have skunk blood in me," I said.

"I think I'm doing a lot of wrong things this morning," she said.

"No, you're not."

But somebody at Fart, Barf, and Itch is, I thought.

Then she sat erect in her chair and concentrated her vision on something outside the window until her face became composed again.

"The sheriff said you don't believe we're dealing with a serial killer or a random killing," she said.

"That's not quite how I put it. I told him I think she knew the killer."

"Why?"

"Her father appears to have been a child molester. She was streetwise herself. She had one prostitution beef when she was sixteen. Yesterday I found out she was still hooking-out of a club in St. Martinville. A girl like that doesn't usually get forced into cars in front of crowded jukejoints."

"Maybe she went off with a john."

"Not without her purse. She left it at her table. In it we found some-"

"Rubbers," she said.

"That's right. So I don't think it was a john. In her car we found a carton of cigarettes, a brand-new hairbrush, and a half-dozen joints in a Baggy in the trunk. I think she went outside to get some cigarettes, a joint, or the hairbrush, she saw somebody she knew, got in his car, and never came back."

"Maybe it was an old customer, somebody she trusted. Maybe he told her he just wanted to set something up for later."

"It doesn't fit. A john doesn't pay one time, then come back the next time with a razor blade or scalpel."

She put her thumbnail between her teeth. Her eyes were brown and had small lights in them.

"Then you think the killer is from this area, she knew him, and she trusted him enough to get in the car with him?"

"I think it's something like that."

"We think he's a psychopath, possibly a serial killer."

"We?"

"Well, actually I. I had a behavioral profile run on him. Everything he did indicates a personality that seeks control and dominance. During the abduction, the rape, the killing itself, he was absolutely in control. He becomes sexually aroused by power, by instilling fear and loathing in a woman, by being able to smother her with his body. In all probability he has ice water in his veins."

I nodded and moved some paper clips around on my desk blotter.

"You don't seem impressed," she said.

"What do you make of the fact that he covered her face with her blouse?" I said.

"Blindfolding humiliates the victim and inspires even greater terror in her."

"Yeah, I guess it does."

"But you don't buy the profile."

"I'm not too keen on psychoanalysis. I belong to a twelve-step fellowship that subscribes to the notion that most bad or evil behavior is generated by what we call a self-centered fear. I think our man was afraid of Cherry LeBlanc. I don't think he could look into her eyes while he raped her."

She reached for a folder she had left on the corner of my desk.

"Do you know how many similar unsolved murders of women have been committed in the state of Louisiana in the last twenty-five years?"

"I sent in an information-search request to Baton Rouge yesterday."

"We have an unfair advantage on you in terms of resources," she said. She leafed through the printouts that were clipped together at the top of the folder. Behind her, I saw two uniformed deputies grinning at me through the glass in my office partition.

"Excuse me," I said, got up, closed the door, and sat back down again.

"Is this place full of comedians?" she said. "I seem to make a lot of people smile."

"Some of them don't get a lot of exposure to the outside world."

"Anyway, narrowing it down to the last ten years, there are at least seventeen unsolved homicides involving females that share some similarity with the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. You want to take a look?" she said, and handed me the folder. "I have to go down to the sheriff's office and get my building keys. I'll be right back."

It was grim material to read. There was nothing abstruse about the prose. It was unimaginative, flat, brutally casual in its depiction of the bestial potential among the human family, like a banal rendering of our worst nightmares: slasher cases, usually involving prostitutes; the garroting of housewives who had been abducted in broad daylight in supermarket and bowling-alley parking lots; the roadside murders of women whose cars had broken down at night; prostitutes who had probably been set on fire by their pimps; the drowning of two black women who had been wrapped to an automobile engine block with barbed wire.

In almost all the cases rape, sodomy, or torture of some kind was involved. And what bothered me most was the fact that the perpetrators were probably still out there, unless they were doing time for other crimes; few of them had known their victims, and consequently few of them would ever be caught.

Then I noticed that Rosie Gomez had made check marks in the margins by six cases that shared more common denominators with the death of Cherry LeBlanc than the others: three runaways who had been found buried off highways in a woods; a high school girl who had been raped, tied to a tree in a fish camp at Lake Chicot, and shot at point-blank range; two waitresses who had gone off from their jobs without explanation and a few hours later had been thrown, bludgeoned to death, into irrigation ditches.

Their bodies had all showed marks, in one way or another, of having been bound. They had all been young, working class, and perhaps unsuspecting when a degenerate had come violently and irrevocably into their lives and had departed without leaving a sign of his identity.

My respect for Rosie Gomez's ability was appreciating.

She walked back through the door, clipping two keys onto a ring.

"You want to talk while we take a ride out to Spanish Lake?" I said.

"What's at Spanish Lake?"

"A movie director I'd like to meet."

"What's that have to do with our case?"

"Probably nothing. But it beats staying indoors."

"Sure. I have to make a call to the Bureau, then I'll be right with you."

"Let me ask you an unrelated question," I said.

"Sure."

"If you found the remains of a black man, and he had on no belt and there were no laces in his boots, what speculation might you make about him?"

She looked at me with a quizzical smile.

"He was poor?" she said.

"Could be. In fact, someone else told me about the same thing in a less charitable way."

"No," she said. She looked thoughtfully into space, puffed out one jaw, then the other, like a chipmunk might. "No, I'd bet he'd been in jail, in a parish or a city holding unit of some kind, where they were afraid he'd do harm to himself."

"That's not bad," I said. Not at all, I thought. "Well, let's take a ride."

I waited for her outside in the shade of the building. I was sweating inside my shirt, and the sunlight off the cement parking lot made my eyes film. Two of the uniformed deputies who had been grinning through my glass earlier came out the door with clipboards in their hands, then stopped when they saw me. The taller one, a man named Rufus Arceneaux, took a matchstick out of his mouth and smiled at me from behind his shades.

"Hey, Dave," he said, "does that gal wear a Bureau buzzer on each of her boobs or is she just a little top-heavy?"

They were both grinning now. I could hear bottleflies buzzing above an iron grate in the shade of the building.

"You guys can take this for what it's worth," I said. "I don't want you to hold it against me, either, just because I outrank you or something like that. Okay?"

"You gotta make plainclothes before you get any federal snatch?" Arceneaux said, and put the matchstick back in the corner of his mouth.

I put on my sunglasses, folded my seersucker coat over my arm, and looked across the street at a black man selling rattlesnake watermelons off the tailgate of a pickup truck.

"If y'all want to act like public clowns, that's your business," I said. "But you'd better wipe that stupid expression off your faces when you're around my partner. Also, if I hear you making remarks about her, either to me or somebody else, we're going to take it up in a serious way. You get my drift?"

Arceneaux rotated his head on his neck, then pulled the front of his shirt loose from his damp skin with his fingers.

"Boy, it's hot, ain't it?" he said. "I think I'm gonna come in this afternoon and take a cold shower. You ought to try it too, Dave. A cold shower might get the wrong thing off your mind."

They walked into the shimmering haze, their leather holsters and cartridge belts creaking on their hips, the backs of their shirts peppered with sweat.

Rosie Gomez and I turned off the highway in my pickup truck and drove down the dirt lane through the pecan orchard toward Spanish Lake, where we could see elevated camera platforms and camera booms silhouetted against the sun's reflection on the water. A chain was hung across the road between a post and the side of the wood-frame security building. The security guard, the wiry man with the white scar embossed on his throat like a chicken's foot, approached my window. His face looked pinched and heated in the shadow of his bill cap.

I showed him my badge.

"Yeah, y'all go on in," he said. "You remember me, Detective Robicheaux?"

His hair was gray, cut close to the scalp, and his skin was browned and as coarse as a lizard's from the sun. His blue eyes seemed to have an optical defect of some kind, a nervous shudder like marbles clicking on a plate.

"It's Doucet, isn't it?" I said.

"Yes, sir, Murphy Doucet. You got a good memory. I used to be with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department when you were with N.O.P.D."

His stomach was as flat as a shingle. He wore a.357 chrome-plated revolver, and also a clip-on radio, a can of Mace, and a rubber baton on his belt.

"It looks like you're in the movie business now," I said.

"Just for a while. I own half of a security service now and I'm a steward for the Teamsters out of Lafayette, too. So I'm kind of on board both ways here."

"This is Special Agent Gomez from the FBI. We'd like to talk to Mr. Goldman a few minutes if he's not too busy."

"Is there been some kind of trouble?"

"Is Mr. Goldman here?"

"Yes, sir, that's him right up yonder in the trees. I'll tell him y'all on your way." He started to take his radio off his belt.

"That's all right. We'll find him."

"Yes, sir, anything you say."

He dropped the chain and waited for us to pass. In the rearview mirror I saw him hook it to the post again. Rosie Gomez was looking at the side of my face.

"What is it?" she said.

"The Teamsters. Why does a Hollywood production company want to come into a depressed rural area and contract for services from the Teamsters? They can hire labor around here for minimum wage."

"Maybe they do business with unions as a matter of course."

"Nope, they usually try to leave their unions back in California. I've got a feeling this has something to do with Julie Balboni being on board the ark."

I watched her expression. She looked straight ahead.

"You know who Baby Feet Balboni is, don't you?" I said.

"Yes, Mr. Balboni is well known to us."

"You know he's in New Iberia, too, don't you?"

She waited before she spoke again. Her small hands were clenched on her purse.

"What's your implication?" she said.

"I think the Bureau has more than one reason for being in town."

"You think the girl's murder has secondary importance to me?"

"No, not to you."

"But probably to the people I work under?"

"You'd know that better than I."

"You don't think well of us, do you?"

"My experience with the Bureau was never too good. But maybe the problem was mine. As the Bible says, I used to look through a glass darkly. Primarily because there was Jim Beam in it most of the time."

"The Bureau's changed."

"Yeah, I guess it has."

Yes, I thought, they hired racial minorities and women at gunpoint, and they stopped wire-tapping civil-rights leaders and smearing innocent people's reputations after their years of illegal surveillance and character assassination were finally exposed.

I parked the truck in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak tree, and we walked toward the shore of the lake, where a dozen people listened attentively to a man in a canvas chair who waved his arms while he talked, jabbed his finger in the air to make a point, and shrugged his powerful shoulders as though he were desperate in his desire to be understood. His voice, his manner, made me think of a hurricane stuffed inside a pair of white tennis shorts and a dark blue polo shirt.

"-the best fucking story editor in that fucking town," he was saying. "I don't care what those assholes say, they couldn't carry my fucking jock strap. When we come out of the cutting room with this, it's going to be solid fucking gold. Has everybody got that? This is a great picture. Believe it, they're going to spot their pants big time on this one."

His strained face looked like a white balloon that was about to burst. But even while his histrionics grew to awesome levels and inspired mute reverence in his listeners, his eyes drifted to me and Rosie, and I had a feeling that Murphy Doucet, the security guard, had used his radio after all.

When we introduced ourselves and showed him our identification, he said, "Do you have telephones where you work?"

"I beg your pardon?" I said.

"Do you have telephones where you work? Do you have people there who know how to make appointments for you?"

"Maybe you don't understand, Mr. Goldman. During a criminal investigation we don't make appointments to talk to people."

His face flexed as though it were made of white rubber.

"You saying you're out here investigating some crime? What crime we talking about here?" he said. "You see a crime around here?" He swiveled his head around. "I don't see one."

"We can talk down at the sheriff's office if you wish," Rosie said.

He stared at her as though she had stepped through a hole in the dimension.

"Do you have any idea of what it costs to keep one hundred and fifty people standing around while I'm playing pocket pool with somebody's criminal investigation?" he said.

"You heard what she said. What's it going to be, partner?" I asked.

"Partner? " he said, looking out at the lake with a kind of melancholy disbelief on his face. "I think I screwed up in an earlier incarnation. I probably had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. That's gotta be it."

Then he rose and faced me with the flat glare of a boxer waiting for the referee to finish with the ring instructions.

"You want to take a walk or go in my trailer?" he said. "The air conditioner in my trailer is broken. You could fry eggs on the toilet seat. What d'you want to do?"

"This is fine," I said.

"Fine, huh?" he said, as though he were addressing some cynical store of private knowledge within himself. "What is it you want to say, Mr. Robicheaux?"

He walked along the bank of the lake, his hair curling out of his polo shirt like bronze wire. His white tennis shorts seemed about to rip at the seams on his muscular buttocks and thighs.

"I understand that you've cautioned some of your people to stay away from me. Is that correct?" I said.

"What people? What are you talking about?"

"I believe you know what I'm talking about."

"Elrod and his voice out in the fog? Elrod and skeletons buried in a sandbar? You think I care about stuff like that? You think that's what's on my mind when I'm making a picture?" He stopped and jabbed a thick finger at me. "Hey, try to understand something here. I live with my balls in a skillet. It's a way of life. I got no interest, I got no involvement, in people's problems in a certain locale. Is that supposed to be bad? Is it all right for me to tell my actors what I think? Are we all still working on a First Amendment basis here?"

A group of actors in sweat-streaked gray and blue uniforms, eating hamburgers out of foam containers, walked past us. I turned and suddenly realized that Rosie was no longer with us.

"She probably stepped in a hole," Goldman said.

"I think you are worried about something, Mr. Goldman. I think we both know what it is, too."

He took a deep breath. The sunlight shone through the oak branches over his head and made shifting patterns of shadow on his face.

"Let me try to explain something to you," he said. "Most everything in the film world is an illusion. An actor is somebody who never liked what he was. So he makes up a person and that's what he becomes. You think John Wayne came out of the womb John Wayne? He and a screenwriter created a character that was a cross between Captain Bligh and Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Duke played it till he dropped.

"Elrod's convinced himself he has magic powers. Why? Because he melted his head five years ago and he has days when he can't tie his shoestrings without a diagram. So instead of admitting that maybe he's got baked mush between his ears, he's a mystic, a persecuted clairvoyant."

"Let's cut the dog shit, Mr. Goldman. You're in business with Baby Feet Balboni. That's your problem, not Elrod Sykes."

"Wrong."

"You know what a 'fall partner' is?"

"No."

"A guy who goes down on the same bust with you."

"So?"

"Julie doesn't have fall partners. His hookers do parish time for him, his dealers do it for him in Angola, his accountants do it in Atlanta and Lewisburg. I don't think Julie has ever spent a whole day in the bag."

"Neither have I. Because I don't break the law."

"I think he'll cannibalize you."

He looked away from me, and I saw his hands clench and unclench and the veins pulse in his neck.

"You look here," he said. "I worked nine years on a mini-series about the murder of six million people. I went to Auschwitz and set up cameras on the same spots the S.S. used to photograph the people being pulled out of the boxcars and herded with dogs to the ovens. I've had survivors tell me I'm the only person who ever described on film what they actually went through. I don't give a fuck what any critic says, that series will last a thousand years. You get something straight, Mr. Robicheaux. People might fuck me over as an individual, but they'll never fuck me over as a director. You can take that to the bank."

His pale eyes protruded from his head like marbles.

I looked back at him silently.

"There's something else?" he said.

"No, not really."

"So why the stare? What's going on?"

"Nothing. I think you're probably a sincere man. But as someone once told me, hubris is a character defect better left to the writers of tragedy."

He pressed his fingers on his chest.

"I got a problem with pride, you're saying?"

"I think Jimmy Hoffa was probably the toughest guy the labor movement ever produced," I said. "Then evidently he decided that he and the mob could have a fling at the dirty boogie together. I used to know a button man in New Orleans who told me they cut Hoffa into hundreds of pieces and used him for fish chum. I believe what he said, too."

"Sounds like your friend ought to take it to a grand jury."

"He can't. Three years ago one of Julie's hired lowlifes put a crack in his skull with a cold chisel. Just for kicks. He sells snowballs out of a cart in front of the K amp; B drugstore on St. Charles now. We'll see you around, Mr. Goldman."

I walked away through the dead leaves and over a series of rubber-coated power cables that looked like a tangle of black snakes. When I looked back at Mikey Goldman, his eyes were staring disjointedly into space.