In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (39 page)

      "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.

Chapter 18

T
he connection had been there all along. I just hadn't looked in the right place. As soon as I went into the office at 8 A.M. the next morning I called the probation and parole officer in Lafayette and asked the supervising P.O. to pull the file on Cherry LeBlanc.

      "Who busted her on the prostitution charge?" I said.

      I heard him leafing back and forth through the pages in the file.

      "It wasn't one officer. There was a state-police raid on a bar and some trailers out on the Breaux Bridge highway."

     
S.P. Yes, the state police. Thanks, Lou, old friend.

      "Who signed the arrest report?" I asked.

      "Let's see. It's pretty hard to read. Somebody set a coffee cup down on the signature."

      "It's real important, partner."

      "It could be Doucet. Wasn't there a state policeman around here by that name? Yeah, I'd say initial M., then Doucet."

      "Can you make copies of her file and lock them in separate places?"

      "What's going on?"

      "It may become evidence."

      "No, I mean Lou Girard was looking at her file last week. What's the deal?"

      "Do this for me, will you? If anybody else tries to get his hands on that file, you call me, okay?"

      "There's an implication here that I think you should clarify."

      Outside, the skies were gray, and dust and pieces of paper were blowing in the street.

      "Maybe we have a fireman setting fires," I said.

      He was quiet a moment, then he said, "I'll lock up the file for you, detective, and I'll keep your call confidential. But since this may involve a reflection on our office, I expect a little more in the way of detailed information from you in the next few days."

      After I hung up, I opened my desk drawer and took out the black-and-white photograph that Cholo Manelli had given me of Cherry LeBlanc and Julie Balboni at the beach in Biloxi. I looked again at the man who was reading a newspaper at another table. His face was beyond the field of focus in the picture, but the light had struck his glasses in such a way that it looked as if there were chips of crystal where his eyes should have been, and my guess was that he was wearing bifocals.

      As with most police investigations, the problem had now become one of the time lag between the approaching conclusion of an investigation and the actual arrest of a suspect. It's a peculiar two-way street that both cops and criminals live on. As a cop grows in certainty about the guilt of a suspect and begins to put enough evidence together to make his case, the suspect usually becomes equally aware of the impending denouement and concludes that midsummer isn't a bad time to visit Phoenix after all.

      The supervising P.O. in Lafayette now knew my suspicions about Doucet, so did Twinky Hebert Lemoyne, and it wouldn't be long before Doucet did, too.

      The other problem was that so far all the evidence was circumstantial.

      When Rosie came in I told her everything I had.

      "Do you think Lemoyne will make a confession?" she said.

      "He might eventually. It's obvious he's a tormented man."

      "Because I don't think you'll ever get an indictment on the lynching unless he does."

      "I want to get a search warrant and toss everything Doucet owns, starting with the security building out at Spanish Lake."

      "Okay, Dave, but let me be honest with you. So far I think what we've got is pretty thin."

      "I didn't tell you something else. I already checked Doucet's name through motor vehicle registration in Baton Rouge. He owns a blue 1989 Mercury. I'll bet that's the car that's been showing up through the whole investigation."

      "We still don't have enough to start talking to a prosecutor, though, do we?"

      "That's what a search warrant is for."

      "What I'm trying to say is we don't have witnesses, Dave. We're going to need some hard forensic evidence, a murder weapon, clothing from one of the victims, something that will leave no doubt in a jury's mind that this guy is a creature out of their worst nightmares. I just hope Doucet hasn't already talked to Lemoyne and gotten rid of everything we could use against him, provided there is anything."