In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (31 page)

      "That sounds like our man, all right."

      "Can I give you some advice?"

      "Go ahead."

      "If Balboni is behind this, don't waste your time trying to make a case against him. It doesn't work. The guy's been oiling jurors and judges and scaring the shit out of witnesses for twenty years. You wait for the right moment, the right situation, and you smoke him."

      "I'll see you, Lou. Thanks for your help."

      "All right, excuse me. Who wants to talk about popping a cap on a guy like Balboni? Amber Martinez probably did herself. Take it easy, Dave."

      At six the next morning I took a cup of coffee and the newspaper out on the gallery and sat down on the steps. The air was cool and blue with shadow under the trees and the air smelled of blooming four o'clocks and the pecan husks that had moldered into the damp earth.

      While I read the paper I could hear boats leaving my dock and fishermen's voices out on the water. Then I heard someone walking up the incline through the leaves, and I lowered the newspaper and saw Mikey Goldman striding toward me like a man in pursuit of an argument.

      He wore shined black loafers with tassels on them, a pink polo shirt that hung out of his gray slacks, and a thick gold watch that gleamed like soft butter on his wrist. His mouth was a tight seam, down-turned at the corners, his jaw hooked forward, his strange, pale, bulging eyes flicking back and forth across the front of my house.

      "I want a word with you," he said.

      "How are you today, Mr. Goldman," I said.

      "It's 6 A.M., I'm at your house instead of at work; I got four hours' sleep last night. Guess."

      "Do I have something to do with your problem?"

      "Yeah, you do. You keep showing up in the middle of my problem. Why is that, Mr. Robicheaux?"

      "I don't have any idea."

      "I do. It's because Elrod had got some kind of hard-on for you and it's about to fuck my picture in a major way."

      "I'd appreciate it if you didn't use that kind of language around my home."

      "You got a problem with language? That's the kind of stuff that's on your mind? What's wrong with you people down here? The mosquitoes pass around clap of the brain or something?"

      "What is it you want, sir?"

      "He asks me what
I
want?" he said, looking around in the shadows as though there were other listeners there. "Elrod doesn't like to see you get taken over the hurdles. Frankly I don't either. Maybe for other reasons. Namely nobody carries my load, nobody takes heat for me, you understand what I'm saying?"

     
"No."

      He cleared something from a nostril with his thumb and forefinger.

      "What is it with you, you put your head in a bucket of wet cement every morning?" he asked.

      "Can I be frank, too, Mr. Goldman?"

      "Be my guest."

      "A conversation with you is a head-numbing experience. I don't think any ordinary person is ready for it."

      "Let me try to put it in simple words that you can understand," he said. "You may not know it, but I try to be a fair man. That means I don't like somebody else getting a board kicked up his ass on my account. I'm talking about you. Your own people are dumping on you because they think you're going to chase some big money out of town. I leave places or I stay in places because I want to. Somebody gets in my face, I deal with it, personal. You ask anybody in the industry. I don't rat-fuck people behind their back."

      I set down my coffee cup, folded the newspaper on the step, and walked out into the trees toward his parked automobile. I waited for him to follow me.

      "Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?" I said.

      "No, of course not. I'm just out here to give you my personal profile. Listen to me, I'm going to finish this picture, then I'm never coming back to this state. In fact, I'm not even going to fly over it. But in the meantime no more of my people are going to the hospital."

      "What?"

      "Good, the flashbulb went off."

      "What happened?" I said.

      "Last night we'd wrapped it up and everybody had headed home. Except Elrod and this kid who does some stunt work got loaded and Elrod decides he's going to 'front Julie Balboni. He picks up a Coke bottle and starts banging on Julie's trailer with it. Julie opens the door in his jockey undershorts, and there's a twenty-year-old local broad trying to put on her clothes behind him. So Elrod calls him a coward and a dago bucket of shit and tells him he can fix him up in L.A. with Charlie Manson's chippies, like they got hair under their arms and none on their heads and they're more Julie's speed. Then El tells him that Julie had better not cause his buddy Robicheaux any more grief or El's going to punch his ticket for him, and if he finds out Julie murdered Kelly he's going to do it anyway, big time, with a shotgun right up Balboni's cheeks.

      "I don't know what Balboni was doing with the broad, but he had some handcuffs. He walked outside, clamped one on El's wrist, the other on a light pole, and said, 'You're a lucky man, Elrod. You're a valuable piece of fruit. But your friend there, he don't have any luck at all.' Then he stomped the shit out of the stunt kid. 'Stomped' is the word, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean with his feet. He busted that kid's nose, stove in his ribs, and ripped his ear loose from his head."

      "Why didn't you stop it?"

      "I wasn't there. I got all this from the kid at the hospital. That's why I didn't get any sleep last night."

      "Is the kid pressing charges?"

      "Get real. He was on a flight back to Los Angeles this morning with enough dope in him to tranquilize a rhinoceros."

      "What do you want with me?"

      "I want you to take care of Elrod. I don't want him hurt."

      "Tell me the truth. Do you have any concerns at all except making your pictures?"

      "Yeah, human beings. If you don't accept that, I say fuck you."

      His tense, protruding eyes reminded me of hard-boiled eggs. I looked away from him, felt my palm close and unclose against my trousers. The sunlight on the bayou was like a yellow flare burning under the water.

      "I'm not in the baby-sitting business, Mr. Goldman," I said. "My advice is that you tell all this to the sheriff's department. Right now I'm still suspended. I'm going back and finish my coffee now. We'll see you around."

      "It's Dogpatch. I'm in a cartoon. I talk, nobody hears me." He tapped himself on the cheek. "Maybe I'm dead and this is hell."

      "What else do you want to say?" I heard the heat rising in my own voice.

      "You accuse me of not having any humanity. Then I tell you Elrod's striking matches on Balboni's balls on your account and you blow me off. You want Balboni to put his foot through El's face?"

      "He's your business partner. You brought him here. You didn't worry about the origins of his money till you—"

      "That's all true. The question is what do we do now?"

      
"We?"

      "Right. I'm getting through. Everybody around here doesn't have meatloaf for brains after all."

      "There's no
we
in this. I'll talk to Elrod, I'll take him to AA meetings, but he's not my charge."

      "Good. Tell him that. I'm on my way to work. Dump him in a cab."

      "What?"

      "He's down there in your bait shop. Drunk. I think you have a serious hearing problem. Get some help."

      He stuck a peppermint candy cane in the corner of his mouth and walked back down the slope to his automobile, his shoulders rolling under his polo shirt, his jaws cracking the candy between his teeth, his profile turned into the freshening breeze like a gladiator's.

Chapter 14

"
Y
ou did what?" Bootsie said. She stared at me open-mouthed across the kitchen table.

     
I told her again.

      "You
threw
him in the bayou? I don't believe it," she said.

      "He's used to it. Don't worry about him."

      "Mr. Sykes started fighting with Dave on the dock, Bootsie," Alafair said. "He was drunk and making a lot of noise in front of the customers. He wouldn't come up to the house like Dave told him."

      Way to go, Alf, I thought.

      "Where is he now?" Bootsie said, wiping her mouth with her napkin and starting to rise from her chair.

      "Throwing up on the rose bushes, the last I saw him."

      "Dave, that's disgusting," she said, and sat back down.

      "Tell Elrod."

      "Batist said he drank five beers without paying for them," Alafair said.

      "What are you going to do about him?" Bootsie said. Then she turned her head and looked out the back screen. "Dave, he just went across the backyard."

      "I think El has pulled his suction cups loose for a while, Boots."

      "Suction cups?" Alafair said, her cereal spoon poised in front of her mouth.

      "He's crawling around on his hands and knees. Do something," Bootsie said.

      "That brings up a question I was going to ask you."

      I saw the recognition grow in her eyes.

      "The guy went up against Julie Balboni because of me," I said. "Or at least partly because of me."

      "You want him to stay
here?
Dave, this is our home," she said.

      "The guy's in bad shape."

      "It's still our home. We can't open it up to every person who has a problem."

      "The guy needs an AA friend or he's not going to make it. Look at him. He's pitiful. Should I take him down to the jail?"

      Bootsie rested her fingers on her temples and stared at the sugar container.

      "I'll make him a deal," I said. "The first time he takes a drink, he gets eighty-sixed back to Spanish Lake. He pays his share of the food, he doesn't tie up the telephone, he doesn't come in late."

      "Why's he squirting the hose in his mouth?" Alafair said.

      "All right, we can try it for a couple of days," Bootsie said. "But, Dave, I don't want this man talking anymore about his visions or whatever it is he thinks he sees out on the lake."

      "You think that's where I got it from, huh?" I smiled.

      "In a word, yes."

      "He's a pretty good guy when he's not wired. He just sees the world a little differently than some."

      "Oh, wonderful."

      Alafair got up from her chair and peered at an angle through the screen into the backyard.

      "Oooops," she said, and put her hand over her mouth.

      "What is it?" Bootsie said.

      "Mr. Sykes just did the rainbow yawn."

      "What?" I said.

      "He vomited on the picnic table," Alafair said.

      I waited until Bootsie and Alafair had driven off to the grocery store in town, then I went out into the backyard. Elrod's slacks and shirt were pasted to his skin with water from the bayou and grimed with mud and grass stains. He had washed down the top of the picnic table with the garden hose, and he now sat slack-jawed on the bench with his knees splayed, his shoulders stooped, his hands hanging between his thighs. His unshaved face had the gray color of spoiled pork.

      I handed him a cup of coffee.

      "Thanks," he said.

      I winced at his breath.

      "If you stay on at our house, do you think you can keep the cork in the jug?" I said.

      "I can't promise it. No, sir, I surely can't promise it."

      "Can you try?"

      He lifted his eyes up to mine. The iris of his right eye had a clot of blood in it as big as my fingernail.

      "Nothing I ever tried did any good," he said. "Antabuse, psychiatrists, a dry-out at the navy hospital, two weeks hoeing vegetables on a county P-farm. Sooner or later I always went back to it, Mr. Robicheaux."

      "Well, here's the house rules, partner," I said, and I went through them one at a time with him. He kept rubbing his whiskers with the flat of his hand and spitting between his knees.

      "I guess I look downright pathetic to you, don't I?" he said.

      "Forget what other people think. Don't drink, don't think, and go to meetings. If you do that, and you do it for yourself, you'll get out of all this bullshit."

      "I got that kid beat up real bad. It was awful. Balboni kept jumping up in the air, spinning around, and cracking the sole of his foot across the kid's head. You could hear the skin split against the bone."

      He placed his palms over his ears, then removed them.

      "You stay away from Balboni," I said. "He's not your problem. Let the law deal with him."

      "Are you kidding? The guy does whatever he wants. He's even getting his porno dirt bag into the film."

      "What porno dirt bag?"

      "He brought up some guy of his from New Orleans, some character who thinks he's the new Johnny Wadd. He's worked the guy into a half dozen scenes in the picture. Look, Mr. Robicheaux, I'm getting the shakes. How about cutting me a little slack? Two raw eggs in a beer with a shot on the side. That's all I'll need. Then I won't touch it."

      "I'm afraid not, partner."

      "Oh man, I'm really sick. I've never been this sick. I'm going into the D.T.s."

      I put my hand on his shoulder. His muscles were as tight and hard as cable wire and quivering with anxiety. Then he covered his eyes and began weeping, his wet hair matted with dirt, his body trembling like that of a man whose soul was being consumed by its own special flame.

I DROVE OUT TO SPANISH LAKE TO FIND JULIE BALBONI. No one was in the security building by the dirt road that led into the movie location, and I dropped the chain into the dirt and parked in the shade, close by the lake, next to a catering truck. The sky was darkening with rain clouds, and the wind off the water blew leaves across the ground under the oak trees. I walked through a group of actors dressed as Confederate infantry. They were smoking cigarettes and lounging around a freshly dug rifle pit and ramparts made out of huge stick-woven baskets filled with dirt. Close by, a wheeled canon faced out at the empty lake. I could smell the drowsy, warm odor of reefer on the breeze.