DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  In town, Bayou Teche had risen high up on the pilings of the drawbridges and overflowed its banks into the rows of camellia bushes in the city park, and passing cars sent curling brown waves of water and street debris sliding across curbs and lawns all the way to the front steps of the houses along East Main. The air smelled of fish and dead vegetation from storm drains and was almost cold in the lungs, and in front of the courthouse the rain spun in vortexes that whipped at the neck and eyes and seemed to soak your clothes no matter how tightly your raincoat was buttoned. Murphy Doucet arrived at the courthouse in a jail van on a wrist chain with seven other inmates, bare-headed, a cigarette in the center of his mouth, his eyes squinted against the rain, his gray hair pasted down on his head, his voice loud with complaint about the manacle that cut into his wrist.

  A black man was locked to the next manacle on the chain. He was epileptic and retarded and was in court every three or four weeks for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. Inside the foyer, when the bailiff was about to walk the men on the chain to the front of the courtroom, the black man froze and jerked at the manacle, made a gurgling sound with his mouth while spittle drooled over his bottom lip.

  "What the hell's wrong with you?" the bailiff said.

  "Want to be on the end of the chain. Want to set on the end of the row," the black man said.

  "He's saying he ain't used to being in the front of the bus," Doucet said.

  "This man been bothering you, Ciro?" the bailiff said.

  "No, suh. I just want to set on the end this time. Ain't no white peoples bothered me. I been treated just fine."

  "Hurry up and get this bullshit over with," Doucet said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

  "We aim to please. We certainly do," the bailiff said, unlocked the black man, walked him to the end of the chain, and snapped the last manacle on his wrist.

  A young photographer from the Daily Iberian raised his camera and began focusing through his lens at Doucet.

  "You like your camera, son? . . . I thought so. Then you just keep it poked somewhere else," Doucet said.

  It took fifteen minutes. The prosecutor, a high-strung rail of a man, used every argument possible in asking for high bail on Doucet. Over the constant interruptions and objections of Doucet's lawyer, he called him a pedophile, a psychopath, a menace to the community, and a ghoul.

  The judge had silver hair and a profile like a Roman Soldier. During World War II he had received the Congressional Medal of Honor and at one time had been a Democratic candidate for governor. He listened patiently with one hand on top of another, his eyes oblique, his head tilted at an angle like a priest feigning attentiveness to an obsessed penitent's ramblings.

  Finally the prosecutor pointed at Doucet, his finger trembling, and said, "Your honor, you turn this man loose, he kills somebody else, goddamn it, the blood's going to be on our hands."

  "Would counsel approach the bench, please? You, too, Detective Robicheaux," the judge said. Then he said, "Can you gentlemen tell me what the hell is going on here?"

  "It's an ongoing investigation, your honor. We need more time," I said.

  "That's not my point," the judge said.

  "I object to the treatment of my client, your honor. He's been bullied, degraded in public, slandered by these two men here. He's been—" Doucet's lawyer said.

  "I've heard enough from you today, sir. You be quiet a minute," the judge said. "Is the prosecutor's office in the process of filing new charges against the defendant?"

  "Your honor, we think this man may have been committing rape and homicide for over three decades. Maybe he killed a policeman in Lafayette. We don't even know where to begin," the prosecutor said.

  "Your sincerity is obvious, sir. So is your lack of personal control," the judge said. "And neither is solving our problem here. We have to deal with the charge at hand, and you and Detective Robicheaux both know it. Excuse my impatience, but I don't want y'all dragging 'what should be' in here rather than 'what is.' Now all of you step back."

  Then he said, "Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Next case," and brought his gavel down.

  A few minutes later I stood on the portico of the courthouse and watched Murphy Doucet and his lawyer walk past me, without interrupting their conversation or registering my presence with more than a glance, get into the lawyer's new Chrysler, and drive away in the rain.

  I WENT HOME FOR LUNCH BUT COULDN'T FINISH MY PLATE. THE back door was opened to the small screened-in porch, and the lawn, the mimosa tree, and the willows along the coulee were dark green in the relentless downpour, the air heavy and cold-smelling and swirling with mist.

  Alafair was looking at me from across the table, a lump of unchewed sandwich in her jaw. Bootsie had just trimmed her bangs, and she wore a yellow T-shirt with a huge red and green Tabasco bottle on the front. Bootsie reached over and removed my fingers from my temple.

  "You've done everything you could do," she said. "Let other people worry about it for a while."

  "He's going to walk. With some time we can round up a few of his girls from the Airline Highway and get him on a procuring beef, along with the resisting arrest and assault charge. But he'll trade it all off for testimony against Julie Balboni. I bet the wheels are already turning."

  "Then that's their decision and their grief to live with, Dave," Bootsie said.

  "I don't read it that way."

  "What's wrong?" Alafair said.

  "Nothing, little guy," I said.

  "Is the hurricane going to hit here?" she said.

  "It might. But we don't worry about that kind of stuff. Didn't you know coonasses are part duck?"

  "My teacher said 'coonass' isn't a good word."

  "Sometimes people are ashamed of what they are, Alf," I said.

  "Give it a break, Dave," Bootsie said.

  The front door opened suddenly and a gust of cool air swelled through the house. Elrod came through the hallway folding an umbrella and wiping the water off his face with his hand.

  "Wow!" he said. "I thought I saw Noah's ark out there on the bayou. It could be significant."

  "Ark? What's an ark?" Alafair said.

  "El, there's a plate for you in the icebox," Bootsie said.

  "Thanks," he said, and opened the icebox door, his face fixed with a smile, his eyes studiously carefree.

  "What's an ark?" Alafair said.

  "It's part of a story in the Bible, Alf," I said, and watched Elrod as he sat down with a plate of tuna-fish sandwiches and potato salad in his hand. "What's happening out at the lake, El?"

  "Everything's shut down till this storm blows over," he said. He bit into his sandwich and didn't look up from his plate.

  "That'd made sense, wouldn't it?" I said.

  He raised his eyes.

  "I think it's going to stay shut down," he said. "There're only a couple of scenes left to shoot. I think Mikey wants to do them back in California."

  "I see."

  Now it was Alafair who was watching Elrod's face. His eyes focused on his sandwich.

  "You leaving, Elrod?" she asked.

  "In a couple of days maybe," he answered. "But I'm sure I'll be back this way. I'd really like to have y'all come visit, too."

  She continued to stare at him, her face round and empty.

  "You could bring Tripod," he said. "I've got a four-acre place up Topanga Canyon. It's right up from the ocean."

  "You said you were going to be here all summer," she said.

  "I guess it just hasn't worked out that way. I wish it had," he said. Then he looked at me. "Dave, maybe I'm saying the wrong thing here, but y'all come out to L.A., I'll get Alafair cast in five minutes. That's a fact."

  "We'll talk it over," Bootsie said, and smiled across the table at him.

  "I could be in the movies where you live?" Alafair said.

  "You bet," Elrod said, then saw the expression on my face. "I mean, if that's what you and your family wanted."

  "Dave?" She looked up at me.<
br />
  "Let's see what happens," I said, and brushed at her bangs with my fingers. Elrod was about to say something else, but I interrupted him. "Where's Balboni?"

  "He doesn't seem to get the message. He keeps hanging around his trailer with his greaseballs. I think he'll still be sitting there when the set's torn down," Elrod said.

  "His trailer might get blown in the lake," I said.

  "I think he has more than one reason for being out there," Elrod said.

  I waited for him to finish, but he didn't. A few minutes later we went out on the gallery. The cypress planks of the steps and floor were dark with rain that had blown back under the eaves. Across the bayou the marsh looked smudged and indistinct in the gray air. Down at the dock Batist was deliberately sinking his pirogue in the shallows so it wouldn't be whipped into a piling by the wind.

  "What were you trying to tell me about Balboni?" I said.

  "He picks up young girls in town and tells them he's going to put them in a movie. I've heard he's had two or three in there in the last couple of days."

  "That sounds like Julie."

  "How's that?"

  "When we were kids he never knew who he was unless he was taking his equipment out of his pants."

  He stared at the rain.

  "Maybe there's something I ought to tell you, Dave, not that maybe you don't already know it," he said. "When people like us, I'm talking about actors and such, come into a community, everybody gets excited and thinks somehow we're going to change their lives. I'm talking about romantic expectations, glamorous relationships with celebrities, that kind of stuff. Then one day we're gone and they're left with some problems they didn't have before. What I'm saying is they become ashamed when they realize how little they always thought of themselves. It's like turning on the lights inside the theater when the matinee is over."

  "Our problems are our own, El. Don't give yourself too much credit."

  "You cut me loose on a DWI and got me sober, Dave. Or at least I got a good running start at it. What'd you get for it? A mess of trouble you didn't deserve."

  "Extend a hand to somebody else. That way you pass on the favor," I said.

  I put my hand on the back of his neck. I could feel the stiff taper of his hair under my palm.

  "I think about Kelly most when it rains. It's like she was just washed away, like everything that was her was dissolved right into the earth, like she wasn't ever here," he said. "How can a person be a part of your life twenty-four hours a day and then just be gone? I cain't get used to it."

  "Maybe people live on inside of us, El, and then one day we get to see them again."

  He leaned one hand against a wood post and stared at the rain. His face was wet with mist.

  "It's coming to an end," he said. "Everything we've been doing, all the things that have happened, it's fixing to end," he said.

  "You're not communicating too well, partner."

  "I saw them back yonder in that sugarcane field last night. But this time it was different. They were furling their colors and loading their wagons. They're leaving us."

  "Why now?" I heard my voice say inside myself.

  He dropped his arm from the post and looked at me. In the shadows his brown skin was shiny with water.

  "Something bad's fixing to happen, Dave," he said. "I can feel it like a hand squeezing my heart."

  He tapped the flat of his fist against the wood post as though he were trying to reassure himself of its physical presence.

  Late that afternoon the sheriff called me on my extension.

  "Dave, could you come down to my office and help me with something?" he said.

  When I walked through his door he was leaned back in his swivel chair, watching the treetops flatten in the wind outside the window, pushing against his protruding stomach with stiffened fingers as though he were discovering his weight problem for the first time.

  "Oh, there you are," he said.

  "What's up?"

  "Sit down."

  "Do we have a problem?"

  He brushed at his round, cleft chin with the backs of his fingers.

  "I want to get your reaction to what some people might call a developing situation," he said.

  "Developing situation?"

  "I went two years to USL, Dave. I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I just try to deal with realities as they are."

  "I get the feeling we're about to sell the ranch."

  "It's not a perfect world."

  "Where's the heat coming from?" I said.

  "There're a lot of people who want Balboni out of town."

  "Which people?"

  "Business people."

  "They used to get along with him just fine."

  "People loved Mussolini until it came time to hang him upside down in a filling station."

  "Come on, cut to it, sheriff. Who are the other players?"

  "The feds. They want Balboni bad. Doucet's lawyer says his client can put Julie so far down under the penal system they'll have to dig him up to bury him."

  "What's Doucet get?"

  "He cops to resisting arrest and procuring, one-year max on an honor farm. Then maybe the federal witness protection program, psychological counseling, ongoing supervision, all that jazz."

  "Tell them to go fuck themselves."

  "Why is it I thought you might say that?"

  "Call the press in. Tell them what kind of bullshit's going on here. Give them the morgue photos of Cherry LeBlanc."

  "Be serious. They're not going to run pictures like that. Look, we can't indict with what we have. This way we get the guy into custody and permanent supervision."

  "He's going to kill again. It's a matter of time."

  "So what do you suggest?"

  "Don't give an inch. Make them sweat ball bearings."

  "With what? I'm surprised his lawyer even wants to accept the procuring charge."

  "They think I've got a photo of Doucet with Balboni and Cherry LeBlanc in Biloxi."

  "Think?"

  "Doucet's face is out of focus. The man in the picture looks like bread dough."

  "Great."

  "I still say we should exhume the body and match the utility knife to the slash wounds."

  "All an expert witness can do is testify that the wounds are consistent with those that might have been made with a utility knife. At least that's what the prosecutor's office says. Doucet will walk and so will Balboni. I say we take the bird in hand."

  "It's a mistake."

  "You don't have to answer to people, Dave. I do. They want Julie out of this parish and they don't care how we do it."

  "Maybe you should give some thought about having to answer to the family of Doucet's next victim, sheriff."

  He picked up a chain of paper clips and trailed them around his blotter.

  "I don't guess there's much point in continuing this conversation, is there?" he said.

  "I'm right about this guy. Don't let him fly."

  "Wake up, Dave. He flew this morning." He dropped the paper clips into a clean ashtray and walked past me with his coffee cup. "You'd better take off a little early this afternoon. This hurricane looks to be a real frog stringer."

  It hit late that evening, pushing waves ahead of it that curled over houseboats and stilt cabins at West Cote Blanche Bay and flattened them like a huge fist. In the south the sky was the color of burnt pewter, then rain-streaked, flumed with thunderheads. You could see tornadoes dropping like suspended snakes from the clouds, filling with water and splintered trees from the marshes, and suddenly breaking apart like whips snapping themselves into nothingness.

  I heard canvas popping loose on the dock, billowing against the ropes Batist and I had tried to secure it with, then bursting free and flapping end over end among the cattails. The windows swam with water, lightning exploded out of the gray-green haze of swamp, and in the distance, in the roar of wind and thunder that seemed to clamp down on us like an enormous black glass bell, I thought I could
hear the terrified moaning of my neighbor's cattle as they fought to find cover in a woods where mature trees were whipped out of the soft ground like seedlings.

  By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.

  I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she were searching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pass: conch shells and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.

  "Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning," she said. "I can hear animals in the thunder."

  "It's Mr. Broussard's cattle. They'll be all right, though. They'll bunch up in the coulee."

  "Are you scared?"

  "Not really. But it's all right to be scared a little bit if you want to."

  "If you're scared, you can't be standup."

  "Sure you can. Standup people don't mind admitting they're scared sometimes."

  Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.

  "Alf?"

  "What?" Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.