In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (42 page)

      After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."

      "To
what?"
I said.

     
"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."

      Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.

      "Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.

      "Yeah, sure," he said.

      "We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."

      "That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"

      "Probably."

      "That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."

      The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.

      I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.

      "Don't touch me with that," she said.

      I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.

      "I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.

      "Don't worry bout it."

      "Those children, that smell in the trunk of the car."

      She made her eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears, but it didn't work. They welled up in her brown eyes, then rolled in rivulets down her cheeks.

      "It's okay, Rosie," I said, and slipped my arms around her. Her head was buried under my chin. I could feel the length of her body against mine, her back rising and falling under my palms. I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, a heated fragrance like soap in her skin.

      The window was open, and the wind blew the curtain into the room. Across the street on a putting green, a red flag snapped straight out on a pole that vibrated stiffly in the cup. In the first drops of rain, which slanted almost parallel to the ground, I saw a figure standing by a stagnant reed-choked pond, a roiling myrtle bush at his back. He held himself erect in the wind with his single crutch, his beard flying about his face, his mouth an O, his words lost in distant thunder. The stump of his amputated right leg was wrapped with fresh white bandages that had already turned scarlet with new bleeding.

     
"What are you trying to warn me of, general? Why has so much pain come back to you, sir?"

      I felt Rosie twist her face against my chest, then step away from me and walk quickly out the door, picking up her handbag from a chair in one smooth motion so I could not see her face. The screen door slammed behind her.

      I put everything from Doucet's trunk into evidence bags, locked the house, and got into the pickup just as a storm of hailstones burst from the sky, clattered on the cab, and bounced in tiny white geysers on the slopes of the golf course as far as the eye could see.

THAT NIGHT THE WEATHERMAN ON THE TEN O'CLOCK NEWS said that the hurricane was moving again in a northwesterly direction and would probably make landfall sometime late tomorrow around Atchafalaya Bay, just to the east of us. Every offshore drilling rig in the Gulf had shut down, and the low-lying coastal areas from Grand Isle to Sabine Pass were being evacuated.

      At eleven the sheriff called.

      "Somebody just torched Mikey Goldman's trailer out at Spanish Lake. A gallon milk bottle of gasoline through the window with a truck flare right on top of it," he said. "You want to go out there and have a look?"

      "Not really. Who's that yelling in the background?"

      "Guess. I can't convince him he's lucky he wasn't in the trailer."

      "Let me guess again. He wants Julie Balboni in custody."

      "You must be psychic," the sheriff said. He paused. "I've got some bad news. The lab report came in late this evening. That utility knife's clean."

      "Are they sure?"

      "They're on the same side as we are, Dave."

      "We can use testimony from the pathologist about the nature of the wounds. We can get an exhumation order if we have to."

      "You're tired. I shouldn't have called tonight."

      "Doucet's a monster, sheriff."

      "Let's talk about it in the morning."

      A sheet of gray rain was moving across my neighbor's sugarcane field toward the house, and lightning was popping in the woods behind it.

      "Are you there?" he said through the static.

      "We've got to pull this guy's plug in a major way."

      "We'll talk with the prosecutor in the morning. Now go to bed, Dave."

      After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I sat for a long time in the chair and stared out the open back door at the rain falling on the duck pond and cattails at the foot of my property. The sky seemed filled with electric lights, the wind resonant with the voices of children.

Chapter 19

T
he rain was deafening on the gallery in the morning. When I opened the front door, islands of pecan leaves floated in muddy pools in the yard, and a fine, sweet-smelling, cool mist blew inside the room. I could barely make out the marsh beyond the curtain of rain dancing in a wet yellow light on the bayou's surface. I put on my raincoat and hat and ran splashing through the puddles for the bait shop. Batist and I stacked all the tables, chairs, and umbrellas on the dock in the lee of the building, roped them down, hauled our boats out of the water, and bolted the shutters on the windows. Then we drank a cup of coffee and ate a fried pie together at the counter inside while the wind tried to peel the tin roof off the joists.

     
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."