DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  "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."

  "We'll soon find out."

  She measured me carefully with her eyes.

  "You seem a little more confident than you should be," she said.

  "It all fits, Rosie. A black pimp in the New Orleans bus depot told me about a white man selling dirty pictures. I thought he was talking about photographs or postcards. Don't you see it? Doucet's probably been delivering girls to Balboni's pornographic film operation."

  "The only direct tie that we have is the fact that Doucet arrested Cherry LeBlanc."

  "Right. And even though he knew I was investigating her murder, he never mentioned it, did he? He wasn't even curious about how the investigation was going. Does that seem reasonable to you?"

  "Well, let's get the warrant and see what Mr. Doucet has to say to us this morning."

  We had it in thirty minutes and were on our way out of the office when my extension rang. It was Bootsie. She said she was going to town to buy candles and tape for the windows in case the hurricane turned in to the coast and I would find lunch for me and Alafair in the oven.

  Then she said, "Dave, did you leave the house last night?"

  "Just a second," I said, and took the receiver away from my ear. "Rosie, I'll be along in just a minute."

  Rosie went out the door and bent over the water cooler.

  "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

  "I thought I heard your truck start up in the middle of the night. Then I thought I just dreamed it. Did I just dream it?"

  "I had to take care of something. I left a note on the lamp for you in case you woke up, but you were sound asleep when I came back."

  "What are you doing, Dave?"

  "Nothing. I'll tell you about it later."

  "Is it those apparitions in the marsh again?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Dave?"

  "It's nothing to worry about. Believe me."

  "I am worried if you have to conceal something from me."

  "Let's go out to eat tonight."

  "I think we'd better have a talk first."

  "A very bad guy is about to go off the board. That's what it amounts to. I'll explain it later."

  "Does the sheriff know what you're doing?"

  "He didn't ask. Come on, Boots. Let's don't be this way."

  "Whatever you say. I'm sorry I asked. Everybody's husband goes in and out of the house in the middle of the night. I'll see you this afternoon."

  She hung up before I could speak again; but in truth I didn't know how to explain to her the feelings I had that morning. If Murphy Doucet was our serial killer, and I believed he was, then with a little luck we were about to throw a steel net over one of those pathological and malformed individuals who ferret their way among us, occasionally for a lifetime, and leave behind a trail of suffering whose severity can only be appreciated by the survivors who futilely seek explanations for their loss the rest of their lives.

  I lost my wife Annie to two such men. A therapist told me that I would never have any peace until I learned to forgive not only myself for her death but the human race as well for producing the men who killed her. I didn't know what he meant until several months later when I remembered an event that occurred on a winter afternoon when I was seven years old and I had returned home early, unexpectedly, from school.

  My mother was not at work at the Tabasco bottling plant, where she should have been. Instead, I looked from the hallway through the bedroom door and saw a man's candy-striped shirt, suspenders, and sharkskin zoot slacks and panama hat hung on the bedpost, his socks sticking out of his two-tone shoes on the floor. My mother was naked, on all fours, on top of the bedspread, and the man, whose name was Mack, was about to mount her. A cypress plank creaked under my foot, and Mack twisted his head and looked at me, his pencil mustache like a bird's wings above his lip. Then he entered my mother.

  For months I had dreams about a white wolf who lived in a skeletal black tree on an infinite white landscape. At the base of the tree was a nest of pups. In the dream the wolf would drop to the ground, her teats sagging with milk, and eat her young one by one.

  I would deliberately miss the school bus in the afternoon and hang around the playground until the last kids took their footballs or kites and walked off through the dusk and dead leaves toward lighted houses and the sound of Jack Armstrong or Terry and the Pirates through a screen door. When my father returned home from trapping on Marsh Island, I never told him what I had seen take place in their bedroom. When th
ey fought at night, I sat on the back steps and watched the sugarcane stubble burning in the fields. The fires looked like thousands of red handkerchiefs twisting in the smoke.

  I knew the wolf waited for me in my dreams. Then one afternoon, when I started walking home late from school, I passed an open door in the back of the convent. It was the music room, and it had a piano in it, a record player, and a polished oak floor. But the two young nuns who were supposed to be waxing the floor had set aside their mops and rags, turned on a radio, and were jitterbugging with each other in their bare feet, their veils flying, their wooden rosary beads swirling on their waists.

  They didn't see me, and I must have watched them for almost five minutes, fascinated with their flushed faces inside their wimples and the laughter that they tried to hide behind their hands when it got too loud.

  I could not explain it to myself, but I knew each night thereafter that if I thought of the dancing nuns before I fell asleep, I would not dream about the white wolf in the tree.

  I wondered what kind of dreams Murphy Doucet had. Maybe at one time they were the same as mine. Or maybe it was better not to know.

  I had no doubt, though, that he was ready for us when we arrived at the security building at Spanish Lake. He stood with his legs slightly spread, as though at parade rest, in front of the door, his hands propped on his gunbelt, his stomach flat as a plank, his eyes glinting with a cynical light.

  I unfolded the search warrant in front of him.

  "You want to look it over?" I said.

  "What for? I don't give a good fuck what y'all do here," he replied.

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd watch your language," I said.

  "She can't handle it?" he said.

  "Stand over by my truck until we're finished," I said.

  "What do you think y'all gonna find?" he said.

  "You never know, Murph. You were a cop. People get careless sometimes, mess up in a serious way, maybe even forget they had their picture taken with one of their victims."

  Tiny webs of brown lines spread from the corners of his eyes.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "If I'd been you, I wouldn't have let Cholo take my picture with Baby Feet and Cherry LeBlanc over in Biloxi."

  His blue eyes shuttered back and forth; the pupils looked like black pinheads. The point of his tongue licked across his bottom lip.

  "I don't want her in my stuff," he said.

  "Would you like to prevent me from getting in your 'stuff,' Mr. Doucet?" Rosie said. "Would you like to be charged this morning with interfering with a federal officer in the performance of her duty?"

  Without ever removing his eyes from her face, he lifted a Lucky Strike with two fingers from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. Then he leaned back against my truck, shook open his Zippo lighter, cupped the flame in his hands, sucked in on the smoke, and looked away at the pecan trees bending and straightening in the wind and an apple basket bouncing crazily across a field.

  On his work table were a set of Exacto knives, tubes of glue, small bottles of paint, tiny brushes, pieces of used sandpaper, and the delicate balsa-wood wing struts of a model airplane pinned to a blueprint. Outside, Doucet smoked his cigarette and watched us through the door and showed no expression or interest when I dropped his Exacto knives into a Ziploc bag.

  His desk drawers contained Playboy magazines, candy wrappers, a carton of Lucky Strikes, a thermos of split pea soup, two ham sandwiches, paper clips, eraser filings, a brochure advertising a Teamster convention in Atlantic City, a package of condoms.

  I opened the drawer of his work table. In it were more sheets of sandpaper, an unopened model airplane kit, and the black-handled switchblade knife he had lent me to trim back the insulation on an electrical wire in my truck. I put it in another Ziploc bag.

  Doucet yawned.

  "Rosie, would you kick over that trash basket behind his desk, please?" I said.

  "There's nothing in it," she said, leaning over the corner of the desk.

  My back was turned to both her and Doucet when I closed the drawer to the work table and turned around with an aluminum-handled utility knife in my fingers. I dropped it into a third plastic bag.

  "Well, I guess this covers it," I said.

  Through the door I saw his hand with the cigarette stop in midair and his eyes lock on the utility knife.

  He stepped toward us as we came out of the building.

  "What do you think you're doing?" he said.

  "You have a problem with something that happened here?" I said.

  "You planted that," he said, pointing at the bag with the utility knife in it. "You sonofabitch, you planted it, you know you did."

  "How could I plant something that belongs to you?" I said. "This is one of the tools you use on your airplane models, isn't it?"

  Rosie was looking at me strangely.

  "This woman's a witness," he said. "You're salting the shaft. That knife wasn't there."

  "I say it was. I say your fingerprints are all over it, too. It's probably going to be hard to prove it's not yours, Murph."

  "This pepper-belly bitch is in on it, isn't she?" he said.

  I tapped him on the cheek with the flat of my hand. "You say anything else, your day is going to deteriorate in a serious way," I said.

  Mistake.

  He leaped into my face, his left hand like a claw in my eyes, his right fist flailing at my head, his knees jerking at my groin. I lost my balance, tried to turn away from him and raise my arm in front of my face; his fists rained down on the crown of my skull.

  Rosie pulled her .357 from her purse, extended it straight out with both hands, and pointed the barrel into his ear.

  "Down on the ground, you understand me?" she shouted. "Do it! Now! Don't look at me! Get your face on the ground! Did you hear me? Don't look at me! Put your hands behind your head!"

  He went to his knees, then lay prone with the side of his face in the grass, his lined, deeply tanned neck oozing sweat, his eyes filled with the mindless light that an animal's might have if it were pinned under an automobile tire.

  I slipped my handcuffs from the back of my belt and snipped them onto his wrists. I pulled his revolver and can of Mace from his gunbelt, then raised him to his feet. His arm felt like bone in my hand.

  "You're under arrest for assaulting an officer of the law, Murph," I said.

  He turned toward me. The top button of his shirt was torn and I could see white lumps of scar tissue on his chest like fingers on a broken hand.

  "It won't stick. You've got a bum warrant," he said.

  "That knife is the one you used on Cherry LeBlanc, isn't it?" I said.

  Rosie walked behind me into his office and used his phone to call for a sheriff's car. His eyes watched her, then came back onto me. He blew pieces of grass out of his mouth.

  "She let you muff her?" he said.

  We brought him in through the back door of the sheriff's department, fingerprinted and booked him, let him make a phone call to an attorney in Lafayette, then took him down to our interrogation room. Personnel from all over the building were finding ways to get a look at Murphy Doucet.

  "You people get back to work," the sheriff said in the hallway. "This man is in for assaulting an officer. That's all he's charged with. Have y'all got that?"

  "There's three news guys outside your office, sheriff," a deputy said.

  "I'd like to know who called them down here, please," he said.

  "Search me," the deputy said.

  "Will you people get out of here?" he said again to the crowd in the hall. Then he pushed his fingers through his hair and turned to me and Rosie. "I've got to talk to these reporters before they break a Jack the Ripper story on us. Get what you can from this guy and I'll be right back. Who's his lawyer?"

  "Jeb Bonin," I said.

  "We'll still have Doucet till his arraignment in the morning. When are y'all going to search his place?"

  "This
afternoon," Rosie said. "We already sent a deputy over there to sit on it for us."

  "Was the blue Merc out at Spanish Lake?" the sheriff said.

  "No, he drives a pickup to work. The Merc must be at his house," I said.

  "All right, get on it. Do it by the numbers, too. We don't want to blow this one."

  The sheriff walked back toward his office. Rosie touched me lightly on the arm.

  "Dave, talk with me a second before we go inside," she said.

  "What is it?"

  She didn't reply. She went inside our office and waited for me.

  "That utility knife you took out of his drawer," she said. "He was completely surprised when you found it. That presents a troubling thought for me."

  "It's his knife, Rosie. There's no question abut it."

  "Why was he so confident up until that moment?"

  "Maybe he just forgot he'd left it there."

  "You got into that security building during the night, removed the knife, then replaced it this morning, didn't you?"

  "Time's always on the perp's side, Rosie. While we wait on warrants, they deep-six the evidence."

  "I don't like what I'm hearing you say, Dave."

  "This is our guy. You want him to walk? Because without that knife, he's sure going to do it."

  "I see it differently. You break the rules, you arm the other side."

  "Wait till you meet his lawyer. He's the best in southwest Louisiana. He also peddles his ass to the Teamsters, the mob, and incinerator outfits that burn PCBs. Before he's finished, he'll turn Doucet into a victim and have the jury slobbering on their sleeves."

  Her eyes went back and forth thoughtfully, as though she were asking herself questions and answering them. Then she raised her chin.

  "Don't ever do anything like this again, Dave. Not while we're partners," she said, and walked past me and into the interrogation room, where Murphy Doucet sat in a straight-backed chair at a small table, surrounded by white walls, wreathed in cigarette smoke, scratching at whiskers that grew along the edges of the white chicken's foot embossed on his throat.

  I stepped inside the room with Rosie and closed the door.

  "Where's my lawyer at?" he asked.

  I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out on the floor.