In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (32 page)

      "Could y'all tell me where to find Julie Balboni?" I said.

      None of them answered. Their faces had turned dour. I asked again.

      "We're just the hired help," a man with sergeant's stripes said.

      "If you see him, would you tell him Dave Robicheaux is looking for him?"

      "You'd better tell him yourself," another actor said.

      "Do you know where Mr. Goldman is?"

      "He went into town with some lawyers. He'll be back in a few minutes," the sergeant said.

      "Thank you," I said.

      I walked back to my truck and had just opened the door when I heard someone's feet in the leaves behind me.

      "I need a moment of your time, please," Twinky Lemoyne said. He had been walking fast, holding his ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket with one hand; a strand of hair hung over his rimless glasses and his face was flushed.

      "What can I do for you?"

      "I'd like to know what your investigation has found out."

      "You would?"

      "Yes. What have you learned about these murders?"

      I shouldn't have been surprised at the presumption and intrusiveness of his question. Successful businessmen in any small town usually think of policemen as extensions of their mercantile fraternity, dedicated in some ill-defined way to the financial good of the community. But previously he had stonewalled me, had even been self-righteous, and it was hard to accept him now as an innocuous Rotarian.

      "Maybe you should call the sheriff's office or the FBI, Mr. Lemoyne. I'm suspended from the department right now."

      "Is this man Balboni connected with the deaths of these women?"

      "Did someone tell you he was?"

      "I'm asking you an honest question, sir."

      "And I'm asking you one, Mr. Lemoyne, and I advise you to take it quite seriously. Do you have some personal knowledge about Balboni's involvement with a murder?"

      "No, I don't."

      "You don't?"

      "No, of course not. How could I?"

      "Then why your sense of urgency, sir?"

      "You wouldn't keep coming out here unless you suspected him. Isn't that right?"

      "What difference should it make to you?"

      The skin of his face was grained and red, and his eyelashes fluttered with his frustration.

      "Mr. Robicheaux, I think . . . I feel . . ."

      "What?"

      "I believe you've been treated unfairly."

      "Oh?"

      "I believe I've contributed to it, too. I've complained to others about both you and the FBI woman."

      "I think there's another problem here, Mr. Lemoyne. Maybe it has to do with the price of dealing with a man like Julie Balboni."

      "I've tried to be honest with you."

      "That's fine. Get away from Balboni. Divest yourself of your stock or whatever it takes."

      "Then maybe he
was
involved with those dead girls?" His eyes were bright and riveted on mine.

      "You tell me, Mr. Lemoyne. Would you like Julie for your next-door neighbor? Would you like your daughter around him? Would you, sir?"

      "I find your remark very offensive."

     
"Offensive
is when a stunt man gets his nose and ribs broken and an ear torn loose from his head as an object lesson."

      I could see the insult and injury in his eyes. His lips parted and then closed.

      "Why are you out here, Mr. Lemoyne?"

      "To see Mr. Goldman. To find out what I can."

      "I think your concern is late in coming."

      "I have nothing else to say to you. Good day to you, sir." He walked to his automobile and got in.

      As I watched him turn onto the dirt road and head back toward the security building, I had to wonder at the self-serving naiveté that was characteristic of him and his kind. It was as much a part of their personae as the rows of credit and membership cards they carried in their billfolds, and when the proper occasion arose they used it with a collective disingenuousness worthy of a theatrical award.

      At least that was what I thought—perhaps in my own naiveté—about Twinky Hebert Lemoyne at the time.

      When I reached the security building Murphy Doucet, the guard, was back inside, and the chain was down in the road. He was bent over a table, working on something. He waved to me through the open window, then went back to his work. I parked my truck on the grass and walked inside.

      It was hot and close inside the building and smelled of airplane glue. Murphy Doucet looked up from a huge balsa-wood model of a B-17 Flying Fortress that he was sanding. His blue eyes jittered back and forth behind a pair of thick bifocals.

      "How you doing, Dave?" he said.

      "Pretty good, Murph. I was looking for Julie Balboni."

      "He's playing ball."

      "Ball?"

      "Yeah, sometimes he takes two or three guys into town with him for a pepper game."

      "Where?"

      "I think at his old high school. Say, did you get Twinky steamed up about something."

      "Why's that?"

      "I saw you talking to him, then he went barreling-ass down the road like his nose was out of joint."

      "Maybe he was late for lunch."

      "Yeah, probably. It don't take too much to get Twinky's nose out of joint, anyway. I've always suspected he could do with a little more pussy in his life."

      "He's not married?"

      "He used to be till his wife run off on him. Right after she emptied his bank account and all the money in his safe. I didn't think Twinky was going to survive that one. That was a long time ago, though."

      He used an Exacto knife to trim away a tiny piece of dried glue from one of the motors on his model airplane. He blew sawdust off the wings and held the plane aloft.

      "What do you think of it?" he asked.

      "It looks good."

      "I've got a whole collection of them. All the planes from World War II. I showed Mikey Goldman my B-17 and he said maybe he could use my collection in one of his films."

      "That sounds all right, Murph."

      "You kidding? He meant I should donate them. I figured out why that stingy Jew has such a big nose. The air's free."

      "He seems like an upfront guy to me," I said.

      "Try working for one of them."

      I looked at him. "You say Julie's at his old high school?" I said.

      "Yeah, him and some actor and that guy named Cholo."

      He set his bifocals on the work table and rubbed his hands on the smooth blond surface of his plane. His skin was wrinkled and brown as a cured tobacco leaf.

      "Thanks for your time," I said.

      "Stop by more often and have coffee. It's lonely sitting out here in this shack."

      "By the way, do you know why Goldman might be with a bunch of attorneys?"

      "Who knows why these Hollywood sonsofbitches do anything? You're lucky, Dave. I wish I was still a real cop. I do miss it."

      He brushed with the backs of his fingers at the starch-white scar on his throat.

A HALF HOUR LATER, AS RAIN CLOUDS CHURNED THICK AND black overhead, like curds of smoke from an oil fire, I parked my truck by the baseball diamond of my old high school, now deserted for the summer, where Baby Feet and I had played ball as boys. He stood at home plate, wearing only a pair of spikes and purple gym shorts, the black hair on his enormous body glistening with sweat, his muscles rippling each time he belted a ball deep into the outfield with a shiny blue aluminum bat.

      I walked past the oak trees that were carved with the games of high school lovers, past the sagging, paintless bleachers, across the worn infield grass toward the chicken-wire backstop and the powerful swing of his bat, which arched balls like tiny white dots high over the heads of Cholo and a handsome shirtless man whose rhythmic movements and smooth body tone reminded me of undulating water. A canvas bag filled with baseballs spilled out at Julie's feet. There were drops of moisture in his thick brows, and I could see the concentrated, hot lights in his eyes. He bent over effortlessly, in spite of his great weight, picked up a ball with his fingers, and tossed it in the air; then I saw his eyes flick at me, his left foot step forward in the batter's box, just as he swung the aluminum bat and ripped a grounder like a rocket past my ankles.

      I watched it bounce between the oak trees and roll into the street.

      "Pretty good shot for a foul ball," I said.

      "It looked right down the line to me."

      "You were never big on rules and boundaries, Feet."

      "What counts is the final score, my man."

      Another ball rang off his metal bat and arched high into the outfield. Cholo wandered around in a circle, trying to get his glove under it, his reddish-gray curls glued to his head, his glove outstretched like an amphibian's flipper. The ball dropped two feet behind him.

      "I hear you've been busy out at the movie set," I said.

      "How's that?"

      "Tearing up a young guy who didn't do anything to you."

      "There's two sides to every story."

      "This kid hurt you in some way, Julie?"

      "Maybe he keeps bad company."

      "Oh, I see. Elrod Sykes gave you a bad time? He's the bad company? You're bothered by a guy who's either drunk or hungover twenty-four hours a day?"

      "Read it like you want." He flipped a ball into the air and lined it over second base. "What's your stake in it, Dave?"

      "It seems Elrod felt he had to come to my defense with you. I wish he hadn't done that."

      "So everybody's sorry."

      "Except it bothers me that you seriously hurt a man, maybe because of me."

      "Maybe you flatter yourself." He balanced himself on one foot and began tapping the dirt out of his spikes with his bat.

      "I don't think so. You've got a big problem with pride, Julie. You always did."

      "Because of you? If my memory hasn't failed me, some years ago a colored shoe-shine man was about to pull real hard on your light chain. I don't remember you minding when I pulled your butt out of the fire that night."

      "Yesterday's box score, Feet."

      "So don't take everything so serious. There's another glove in the bag."

      "The stunt man left town. He's not going to file charges. I guess you already know that."

      He rubbed his palm up and down the tapered shank of the bat.

      "It was a chicken-shit thing to do," I said.

      "Maybe it was. Maybe I got my point of view, too. Maybe like I was with a broad when this fucking wild man starts beating on the side of my trailer."

      "He's staying at my house now, Julie. I want you to leave him alone. I don't care if he gets in your face or not."

      He flipped another ball in the air and
whanged
it to the shirtless man deep in left field. Then he took a hard breath through his nostrils.

      "All right, I got no plans to bother the guy," he said. "But not because you're out here, Dave. Why would I want to have trouble with the guy who's the star of my picture? You think I like headaches with these people, you think I like losing money? . . . We clear on this now? . . . Why you keep staring at me?"

      "A cop over in Lafayette thinks you set me up."

      "You mean that shooting in front of Red's Bar? Get serious, will you?" He splintered a shot all the way to the street, then leaned over and picked up another ball, his stomach creasing like elephant hide.

      "It's not your style, huh?" I said.

      "No, it's not."

      "Come on, Julie, fair and square—look back over your own record. Even when we were kids, you always had to get even, you could never let an insult or an injury pass. Remember the time you came down on that kid's ankle with your spikes?"

      "Yeah, I remember it. I remember him trying to take my eyes out with
his."

      The sky had turned almost black now, and the wind was blowing dust across the diamond.

      "You're a powerful and wealthy man. Why don't you give it up?"

      "Give what up? What the fuck are you talking about?"

      "Carrying around all that anger, trying to prove you're big shit, fighting with your old man, whatever it is that drives you."

      "Where do you think you get off talking to me like this?"

      "Come on, Julie. We grew up together. Save the hand job for somebody else."

      "That's right. That's why maybe I overlook things from you that I don't take from nobody else."

      "What's to take? Your father used to beat you with a garden hose. I didn't make that up. You burned down his nightclub."

      "It's starting to rain. I think it's time for you to go." He picked up another ball and bounced it in his palm.

      "I tried, partner."

      "Oh, yeah? What's that mean?"

      "Nothing."

      "No, you mean you came out here and gave me a warning."

      "Why do you think every pitch is a slider, Julie?"

      He looked away at the outfield, then back at me.

      "You've made remarks about my family. I don't like that," he said. "I'm proud to be Italian. I was even proud of my old man. The people who ran this town back then weren't worth the sweat off his balls. In New Iberia we were always 'wops,' 'dagos,' and 'guineas' because you coonasses were too fucking stupid to know what the Roman Empire was. So you get your nose out of the air when you talk about my family, or about my problems, or anything about my life, you understand what I'm saying, Dave?"

      "Somebody made you become a dope dealer? That's what you're telling me?"

      "I'm telling you to stay the fuck away from me."

      "You don't make a convincing victim, Julie. I'll see you around. Tell your man out there not to spit on the ball."