In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (12 page)

      "Ask her."

      "I have a feeling she was sent over there."

      "She was checking out the Teamsters' involvement with Goldman and Julie Balboni."

      "What does that have to do with our investigation?"

      "I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. What did this guy Twinky Lemoyne call about?"

      "He owns half of a security service with a guy named Murphy Doucet. Lemoyne said Rosie came out to his bottling plant, asked him questions that were none of her business, and told him that he should give second thought to doing business with the mob. Do you know who Twinky Lemoyne is?"

      "Not really."

      "He's a wealthy and respected man in Lafayette. In fact, he's a decent guy. What are y'all trying to do, Dave?"

      "You sent me to invite Julie Balboni out of town. But now we find that Julie has made himself a big part of the local economy. I think that's the problem, sheriff, not me and Rosie."

      He rubbed his whiskers with the backs of his fingers.

      "Maybe it is," he said finally, "but there's more than one way to do things."

      "What would you suggest that we do differently?"

      His eyes studied a turkey buzzard that floated on the hot-air currents above the marsh.

      "Concentrate on nailing this psychopath. For the time being forget about Balboni," he said. His eyes didn't come back to meet mine when he spoke.

      "Maybe Julie's involved."

      "He's not. Julie doesn't do anything unless it's for money."

      "I'm getting the strong feeling that the Spanish Lake area is becoming off limits."

      "No, I didn't say that. It's a matter of priorities. That brings up another subject, too—the remains of that black man you found out in the Atchafalaya Basin."

      "Yes?"

      "That's St. Mary Parish's jurisdiction. Let them work the case. We've got enough on our own plate."

      "They're not going to work it."

      "Then that's their choice."

      I didn't speak for a moment. The twilight was almost gone. The air was heavy and moist and full of insects, and out in the cypress I could hear wood ducks fluttering across the surface of the water.

      "Would you like another cold drink?" I asked.

      "No, this is fine," he answered.

      "I'd better help Batist lock up, then. We'll see you, sheriff," I said, and went inside the bait shop. I didn't come back out until I heard his car start and head down the dirt road.

SAM "HOGMAN" PATIN WAS WRONG. Cherry LeBlanc's killer would not merely find another victim in the future. He already had.

Chapter 7

I
got the call at eleven o'clock that night. A fisherman running a trotline by the levee, way down in the bottom of Vermilion Parish, almost to the salt water, had seen a lidless oil drum half submerged on its side in the cattails. He would have paid little attention to it, except for the fact that he saw the backs of alligator gars arching out of the water in the moonlight as they tore at something inside the barrel.

      I drove down the narrow dirt track on top of the levee through the miles of flooded sawgrass that eventually bled into the Gulf. Strips of black cloud floated across the moon, and up ahead I could see an ambulance and a collection of sheriff's cars parked on the levee in a white and red glow of floodlamps, burning flares, and revolving emergency lights.

      The girl was already in a body bag inside the ambulance. The coroner was a tired, overweight Jewish man with emphysema and a terrible cigarette odor whom I had known for years. There were deep circles under his eyes, and he kept rubbing mosquito repellent onto his face and fat arms.

      Down the bank a Vermilion Parish plainclothes was interviewing the fisherman, whose unshaven face looked bloodless and gray in the glare of the floodlamps.

      "You want to see her, Dave?" the coroner asked.

      "Should I?"

      "Probably."

      We climbed into the back of the ambulance. Even with the air conditioner running, it was hot and stale-smelling inside.

      "I figure she was in the water only a couple of days, but she's probably been dead several weeks," he said. "The barrel was probably on the side of the levee, then it rolled into the water. Otherwise, the crabs and the gars would have torn her up a lot worse."

      He pulled the zipper from the girl's head all the way down to her ankles.

      I took a breath and swallowed.

      "I'd say she was in her early twenties, but I'm guessing," he said. "As you can see, we won't get much in the way of prints. I don't think an artist will be able to recreate what her face looked like, either. Cause of death doesn't appear to be a mystery—asphyxiation with a plastic bag taped around her neck. The same electrician's tape he used to bind her hands and ankles. Rape, sodomy, sexual degradation, that kind of stuff? When their clothes are gone, you can put it in the bank."

      "No rings, bracelets, tattoos?"

      He shook his head.

      "Have they found anything out there?"

      "Nothing."

      "Tire tracks?"

      "Not after all the rain we've had."

      "Do y'all have any missing-persons reports that come with—"

      "Nope."

      A long strand of her blond hair hung outside the bag. For some reason it bothered me. I picked it up and placed it on her forehead. The coroner looked at me strangely.

      "Why would he stuff her in a barrel?" I said.

      "Dave, the day you can put yourself inside the head of a cocksucker like that, that's the day you eat your gun."

      I stepped back outside into the humid brilliance of the floodlamps, then walked along the slope of the levee and down by the water's edge. The darkness throbbed with the croaking of frogs, and fireflies were lighting in the tops of the sawgrass. The weeds along the levee had been trampled by cops' feet; fresh cigarette butts floated in the water; a sheriff's deputy was telling two others a racial joke.

      The Vermilion Parish plainclothes finished interviewing the fisherman, put his notebook in his shirt pocket, and walked up the slope to his car. The fisherman continued to stand by his pirogue, scratching at the mosquito bites on his arms, evidently unsure of what he was supposed to do next. Sweat leaked out of the band of his cloth cap and glistened on his jawbones. When I introduced myself, his handshake, like most Cajun men's, was effeminate.

      "I ain't never seen nothing like that, me," he said. "I don't want to never see nothing like that again, neither."

      The bottom of his pirogue was piled with mudcat. They quivered on top of each other, their whiskers pasted back against their yellow sides and bloated white bellies. On the seat of his pirogue was a headlamp with an elastic strap on it.

      "When'd you first see that metal barrel?" I said.

      "Tonight."

      "Do you come down here often?" I asked.

      "Not too often, no, suh."

      "You've got a nice bunch of fish there."

      "Yeah, they feed good when the moon's up."

      I gazed into the bottom of his pirogue, at the wet shine of moonlight on the fish's sides, the tangles of trotlines and corks, and a long object wrapped in a canvas tarp under the seat.

      I caught the pirogue by the gunwale and slid it partly up on the mudbank.

      "Do you mind if I look at this?" I said, and flipped back the folds of the canvas tarp.

      He didn't answer. I took a pen flashlight out of my shirt pocket and shone it on the lever-action .30-.30 rifle. The bluing was worn off and the stock was wrapped with copper wire.

      "Walk down here a little ways with me," I said.

      He followed me out to the edge of the lighted area, out of earshot of the Vermilion Parish deputies.

      "We want to catch the guy who did this," I said. "I think you'd like to help us do that, wouldn't you?"

      "Yes, suh, I sho' would."

      "But there's a problem here, isn't there? Something that's preventing you from telling me everything you want to?"

      "I ain't real sho' what you—"

      "Are you selling fish to restaurants?"

      "No, suh, that ain't true."

      "Did you bring that .30-30 along to shoot frogs?"

      He grinned and shook his head. I grinned back at him.

      "But you might just poach a 'gator or two?" I said.

      "No, suh, I ain't got no 'gator. You can look."

      I let my expression go flat.

      "That's right. So you don't have to be afraid," I said. "I just want you to tell me the truth. Nobody's going to bother you about that gun, or your headlamp, or what you might be doing with your fish. Do we have a deal?"

      "Yes, suh."

      "When'd you first notice that barrel?"

      "Maybe t'ree, fo' weeks ago. It was setting up on dry ground. I didn't have no reason to pay it no mind, no, but then I started to smell somet'ing. I t’ought it was a dead nutria, or maybe a big gar rotting up on the bank. It was real strong one night, then t'ree nights later you couldn't smell it 'less the wind blow it right across the water. Then it rained and the next night they wasn't no smell at all. I just never t'ought they might be a dead girl up there."

      "Did you see anyone up there?"

      "Maybe about a mont' ago, at evening, I seen a car. I 'member t’inking it was new and why would anybody bring his new car down that dirt road full of holes."

      "What kind of car?"

      "I don't remember, suh."

      "You remember the color?"

      "No, sun, I'm sorry."

      His face looked fatigued and empty. "I just wish I ain't been the one to find her," he said. "I ain't never gonna forget looking inside that barrel."

      I put my business card in his shirt pocket.

      "Call me if you think of anything else. You did just fine, podna," I said, and patted him on the arm.

      I turned my truck around in the middle of the levee and headed back toward New Iberia. Up ahead the glow of the red and blue emergency lights on the ambulance sped across the tops of the sawgrass, cattails, and bleached sandspits where the husks of dead gars boiled with fire ants.

WHAT HAD I LEARNED FROM IT ALL?

      Not much.

      But maybe in his cynical way my friend the sleepless coroner had cut right to the heart of the problem: How do you go inside the head of a homicidal sadist who prowls the countryside like a tiger turned loose in a schoolyard?

      I've seen films that portray detectives who try to absorb the moral insanity of their adversaries in order to trap them inside their own maniacal design. It makes an interesting story. Maybe it's even possible.

      But four years ago I had to go to Huntsville, Texas, to interview a man on death row who had confessed to almost three hundred murders throughout the United States. Suddenly, from all over the country, cops with unsolved homicide cases flocked to Huntsville like flies on pig flop. We were no exception. A black woman in New Iberia had been abducted out of her house, strangled to death, and thrown in the Vermilion River. We had no suspects, and the man in Huntsville, Jack Hatfield, had been through Louisiana many times in his red tracings across the map.

      He turned out to be neither shrewd nor cunning; there was no malevolent light in his eyes, nothing hostile or driven about his behavior. His accent was peckerwood, his demeanor finally that of a simpleton. He told me about his religious conversion and glowing presences that appeared to him in his cell; it was quickly apparent that he wanted me to like him, that he would tell me anything I wanted to hear. All I had to do was provide him the details of a murder, and he would make the crime his own.

       (Later, an unemployed oil-field roughneck would confess to murdering the black woman after being given title to a ten-year-old car by her husband.)

      I asked Jack Hatfield if he was trying to trade off his cooperation for a commutation of his sentence. He answered, "Naw, I got no kick comin' about that, long as it's legal."

      With a benign expression on his face, he chronicled his long list of roadside murders from Maine to southern California. He could have been talking about a set of embossed ceramic plates that he had collected from each state that he had visited. If he had indeed done what he told me, he was completely without remorse.

      "My victims didn't suffer none," he said.

      Then he began to talk about his mother and an incredible transformation took place in him. Tears streaked down his homely face, he trembled all over, his fingers left white marks on his arms. Evidently she had been not only a prostitute but perverse as well. When he was a little boy she had made him stand by the bed and watch her copulate with her johns. When he had tried to hide in the woods, she beat him with a quirt, brought him back to the house, and made him watch some more.

      He spent fifteen years in the Wisconsin penitentiary for her murder.

      Then he paused in his story, wiped his face with his hand, pulled his T-shirt from his chest with his finger, and smelled himself.

      "I killed three more people the day I come out of prison. I told them I was gonna do it, and I done it," he said, and began cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick as though I were not there.

      When I walked back out into the autumn sunshine that afternoon, back into the smell of east Texas piney woods and white-uniformed convicts burning piles of tree stumps on the edge of a cottonfield, I was convinced that Jack Hatfield's story about his mother was true but that almost everything else he had told me would remain as demonstrably elusive as a psychotic dream. Perhaps the answer to Jack Hatfield lay with others, I thought. Perhaps we should ask those who would eventually strap him to the gurney in the execution room, poke the IV needle into the vein, tape it lovingly to the skin, and watch him through the viewing glass as the injection dulled his eyes then hit his heart like a hammer. Would his life, his secret and dark knowledge, be passed on to them?