In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (4 page)

      "I'd like to explain something to you. I don't want you to take offense at it, either."

      "Yes, sir?"

      "Yesterday somebody raped and murdered a nineteen-year-old girl on the south side of the parish. He cut her breasts off, he pulled her entrails out of her stomach, he pushed twigs up her vagina. I don't like waiting in my office for you to show up when it's convenient, I'm not interested in your film company's production problems, and on this particular morning I'd appreciate it if you'd leave your stories about your family history to your publicity people."

      His eyes tried to hold on mine, then they watered and glanced away.

      "I'd like to use your bathroom, please," he said. "I'm afraid I got up with a case of the purple butterflies."

      "I'll be out front. I'll see you there in two minutes, Mr. Sykes."

      The sky was bright and hazy, the wind hot as a flame as we drove toward the Atchafalaya River. I had to stop the truck twice to let Elrod Sykes vomit by the side of the road.

IT FELT STRANGE TO GO BACK INTO THAT PART OF THE Atchafalaya Basin after so many years. In July of 1957, after the hurricane had passed through and the rains had finally stopped, the flooded woods and willow islands, the canals whose canopies were so thick that sunlight seldom struck the water, the stretches of beach along the bays had smelled of death for weeks. The odor, which was like the heavy, gray, salty stench from a decaying rat, hung in the heat all day, and at night it blew through the screen windows on the quarter-boat and awaited you in the morning when you walked through the galley into the dining room.

      Many of the animals that did not drown starved to death. Coons used to climb up the mooring ropes and scratch on the galley screen for food, and often we'd take rabbits out of the tops of trees that barely extended above the current and carry them on the jugboat to the levee at Charenton. Sometimes at night huge trees with root systems as broad as barn roofs floated by in the dark and scraped the hull with their branches from the bow to the stern. One night when the moon was full and yellow and low over the willow islands, I heard something hit the side of the boat hard, like a big wood fist rolling its knuckles along the planks. I stood on my bunk and looked through the screen window and saw a houseboat, upside down, spinning in the current, a tangle of fishing nets strung out of one window like flotsam from an eye socket.

      I thought about the hundreds of people who had either been crushed under a tidal wave or drowned in Cameron Parish, their bodies washed deep into the marshes along the Calcasieu River, and again I smelled that thick, fetid odor on the wind. I could not sleep again until the sun rose like a red molten ball through the mists across the bay.

      It didn't take us long to find the willow island where Elrod Sykes said he had seen the skeletal remains of either an Indian or a black person. We crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya in a sheriff's department boat with two outboard engines mounted on the stern, took a channel between a row of sandbars whose sun-dried crests looked like the backs of dolphin jumping in a school, crossed a long bay, and slid the boat onto a narrow strip of beach that bled back into a thick stand of willow trees and chains of flooded sinkholes and sand bogs.

      Elrod Sykes stepped off the bow onto the sand and stared into the trees. He had taken off his shirt and he used it to wipe the sweat off his tanned chest and shoulders.

      "It's back in yonder," he said, and pointed. "You can see my footprints where I went in to take a whiz."

      The St. Mary Parish deputy fitted a cloth cap on his head and sprayed his face, neck, and arms with mosquito dope, then handed the can to me.

      "If I was you, I'd put my shirt on, Mr. Sykes," he said. "We used to have a lot of bats down here. Till the mosquitoes ate them all."

      Sykes smiled good-naturedly and waited for his turn to use the can of repellent.

      "I bet you won't believe this," the deputy said, "but it's been so dry here on occasion that I seen a catfish walking down the levee carrying his own canteen."

      Sykes's eyes crinkled at the corners, then he walked ahead of us into the gloom, his loafers sinking deep into the wet sand.

      "That boy's a long way from his Hollywood poontang, ain't he?" the deputy said behind me.

      "How about putting the cork in the humor for a while?" I said.

      "What?"

      'The man grew up down South. You're patronizing him."

      "I'm wha—"

      I walked ahead of him and caught up with Sykes just as he stepped out of the willows into a shallow, water-filled depression between the woods and a sandbar. The water was stagnant and hot and smelled of dead garfish.

      "There," he said. "Right under the roots of that dead tree. I told y'all."

      A barkless, sun-bleached cypress tree lay crossways in a sandbar, the water-smooth trunk eaten by worms, and gathered inside the root system, as though held by a gnarled hand, was a skeleton crimped in an embryonic position, wrapped in a web of dried algae and river trash.

      The exposed bone was polished and weathered almost black, but sections of the skin had dried to the color and texture of desiccated leather. Just as Sykes had said, a thick chain encased with rust was wrapped around the arms and rib cage. The end links were fastened with a padlock as wide as my hand.

      I tore a willow branch off a tree, shucked off the leaves with my Puma knife, and knelt down in front of the skeleton.

      "How do you reckon it got up under those roots?" Sykes said.

      "A bad hurricane came through here in '57," I said. "Trees like this were torn out of the ground like carrots. My bet is this man's body got caught under some floating trees and was covered up later in this sandbar."

      Sykes knelt beside me.

      "I don't understand," he said. "How do you know it happened in '57? Hurricanes tear up this part of the country all the time, don't they?"

      "Good question, podna," I said, and I used the willow branch to peel away the dried web of algae from around one shinbone, then the other.

      "That left one's clipped in half," Sykes said.

      "Yep. That's where he was shot when he tried to run away from two white men."

      "You clairvoyant or something?" Sykes said.

      "No, I saw it happen. About a mile from here."

      "You saw it happen?" Sykes said.

      "Yep."

      "What's going on here?" the deputy said behind us. "You saying some white people lynched somebody or something?"

      "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. When we get back we'll need to talk to your sheriff and get your medical examiner out here."

      "I don't know about y'all over in Iberia Parish, but nobody around here's going to be real interested in nigger trouble that's thirty-five years old," the deputy said.

      I worked the willow branch around the base of the bones and peeled back a skein of algae over the legs, the pelvic bones, and the crown of the skull, which still had a section of grizzled black hair attached to the pate. I poked at the corrugated, blackened work boots and the strips of rag that hung off the pelvis.

      I put down the branch and chewed on the corner of my thumbnail.

      "What are you looking for, Mr. Robicheaux?" Sykes said.

      "It's not what's there, it's what isn't," I said. "He wasn't wearing a belt on his trousers, and his boots have no laces."

      "Sonofabitch probably did his shopping at the Goodwill. Big fucking deal," the deputy said, slapped a mosquito on his neck, and looked at the red and black paste on his palm.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON I WENT BACK TO WORK ON THE CASE of the murdered girl, whose full name was Cherry LeBlanc. No one knew the whereabouts of her father, who had disappeared from Mamou after he was accused of molesting a black child in his neighborhood, but I interviewed her grandparents again, the owner of the bar in St. Martinville where she had last worked, the girls she had been with in the clapboard jukejoint the night she died, and a police captain in Lafayette who had recommended probation for her after she had been busted on the prostitution charge. I learned little about her except that she seemed to have been an uneducated, unskilled, hapless, and fatally beautiful girl who thought she could be a viable player in a crap game where the dice for her kind were always shaved.

      I learned that about her and the fact that she had loved zydeco music and had gone to the jukejoint to hear Sam "Hogman" Patin play his harmonica and bottleneck blues twelve-string guitar.

      My desk was covered with scribbled notes from my note pad, morgue and crime-scene photos, interview cassettes, and Xeroxes from the LeBlanc family's welfare case history when the sheriff walked into my office. The sky outside was lavender and pink now, and the fronds on the palm trees out by the sidewalk were limp in the heat and silhouetted darkly against the late sun.

      "The sheriff over in St. Mary Parish just called," he said.

      "Yes?"

      "He said thanks a lot. They really appreciate the extra work." He sat on the corner of my desk.

      "Tell him to find another line of work."

      "He said you're welcome to come over on your days off and run the investigation."

      "What's he doing with it?"

      "Their coroner's got the bones now. But I'll tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think it's going anywhere."

      I leaned back in my swivel chair and drummed my fingers on my desk. My eyes burned and my back hurt.

      "It seems to me you've been vindicated," the sheriff said. "Let it go for now."

      "We'll see."

      "Look, I know you've got a big workload piled on you right now, but I've got a problem I need you to look into when you have a chance. Like maybe first thing tomorrow morning."

I looked back at him without speaking.

      "Baby Feet Balboni," he said.

      "What about him?"

      "He's in New Iberia. At the Holiday Inn, with about six of his fellow greaseballs and their whores. The manager called me from a phone booth down the street he was so afraid one of them would hear him."

      "I don't know what I can do about it," I said.

      "We need to know what he's doing in town."

      "He grew up here."

      "Look, Dave, they can't even handle this guy in New Orleans. He cannibalized half the Giacano and Cardo families to get where he is. He's not coming back here. That's not going to happen."

      I rubbed my face. My whiskers felt stiff against my palm.

      "You want me to send somebody else?" the sheriff asked.

      "No, that's all right."

      "Y'all were friends in high school for a while, weren't you?"

      "We played ball together, that's all."

      I gazed out the window at the lengthening shadows. He studied my face.

      "What's the matter, Dave?"

      "It's nothing."

      "You bothered because we want to bounce a baseball buddy out of town?"

      "No, not really."

      "Did you ever hear that story about what he did to Didi Giacano's cousin? Supposedly he hung him from his colon by a meat hook."

      "I've heard that same story about a half-dozen wiseguys in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. It's an old N.O.P.D. heirloom."

      "Probably just bad press, huh?"

      "I always tried to think of Julie as nine-tenths thespian," I said.

      "Yeah, and gorilla shit tastes like chocolate ice cream. Dave, you're a laugh a minute."

Chapter 3

J
ulie Balboni looked just like his father, who had owned most of the slot and racehorse machines in Iberia Parish during the 1940s and, with an Assyrian family, had run the gambling and prostitution in the Underpass area of Lafayette. Julie was already huge, six and a half feet tall, when he was in the eleventh grade, thick across the hips and tapered at both ends like a fat banana, with tiny ankles and size-seven feet and a head as big as a buffalo's. A year later he filled out in serious proportions. That was also the year he was arrested for burglarizing a liquor store. His father walked him out into the woods at gunpoint and whipped the skin off his back with the nozzle end of a garden hose.

      His hair grew on his head like black snakes, and because a physician had injured a nerve in his face when he was delivered, the corner of his mouth would sometimes droop involuntarily and give him a lewd or leering expression that repelled most girls. He farted in class, belched during the pledge of allegiance, combed his dandruff out on top of the desk, and addressed anyone he didn't like by gathering up his scrotum and telling them to bite. We walked around him in the halls and the locker room. His teachers were secretly relieved when his mother and father did not show up on parents' night.

      His other nickname was Julie the Bone, although it wasn't used to his face, because he went regularly to Mabel White's Negro brothel in Crowley and the Negro cribs on Hopkins Avenue in New Iberia.

      But Julie had two uncontested talents. He was both a great kick boxer and a great baseball catcher. His ankles twisted too easily for him to play football; he was too fat to run track; but with one flick of a thick thigh he could leave a kick-box opponent heaving blood, and behind the plate he could steal the ball out of the batter's swing or vacuum a wild pitch out of the dust and zip the ball to third base like a BB.

      In my last time out as a high school pitcher, I was going into the bottom of the ninth against Abbeville with a shutout almost in my pocket. It was a soft, pink evening, with the smell of flowers and freshly cut grass in the air. Graduation was only three weeks away, and we all felt that we were painted with magic and that the spring season had been created as a song especially for us. Innocence, a lock on the future, the surge of victory in the loins, the confirmation of a girl's kiss among the dusky oak trees, like a strawberry bursting against the roof of the mouth, were all most assuredly our due.