James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Batist cut the engine on his boat and floated on the swell into the dock and bumped against the strips of rubber tire we had nailed to the pilings. His shirt was piled on the board seat beside him, and his black shoulders and chest were beaded with sweat. His head looked like a cannon-ball. He grinned with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

I was glad for the distraction.

"I was up at the fo'-corners," he said. "A man there said you mopped up the restaurant flo' with one of them dagos."

Thanks, Batist, I thought.

I SHOWERED IN WATER THAT WAS SO COLD IT LEFT ME breathless, changed clothes, and drove to the bottling works down by the Vermilion River in Lafayette. The two-story building was an old one, made of yellow brick, and surrounded by huge live-oak trees. In back was a parking lot, which was filled with delivery trucks, and a loading dock, where a dozen black men were rattling crates of soda pop out of the building's dark interior and stacking them inside the waiting trucks. Their physical strength was incredible. Some of them would pick up a half-dozen full cases at a time and lift them easily to eye level. Their muscles looked like water-streaked black stone.

I asked one of them where I could find Twinky Hebert Lemoyne.

"Mr. Twinky in yonder, in the office. Better catch him quick, though. He fixin' to go out on the route," he said.

"He goes out on the route?"

"Mr. Twinky do everyt'ing, suh."

I walked inside the warehouse to a cluttered, windowed office whose door was already open. The walls and cork boards were papered with invoices, old church calendars, unframed photographs of employees and fishermen with thick-bellied large-mouth bass draped across their hands. Lemoyne's face was pink and well-shaped, his eyebrows sandy, his gray hair still streaked in places with gold. He sat erect in his chair, his eyes behind his rimless glasses concentrated on the papers in his hands. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a loose burnt-orange tie (a seersucker coat hung on the back of the chair) and a plastic pen holder in his pocket; his brown shoes were shined; his fingernails were trimmed and clean. But he had the large shoulders and hands of a workingman, and he radiated the kind of quiet, hard-earned physical power that in some men neither age nor extra weight seems to diminish.

There was no air conditioning in his office, and he had weighted all the papers on his desk to keep them from blowing away in the breeze from the oscillating fan.

After I had introduced myself, he gazed out at the loading dock a moment, then lifted his hands from the desk blotter and put them down again as though somehow we had already reached a point in our conversation where there was nothing left to be said.

"Can I sit down?" I said.

"Go ahead. But I think you're wasting your time here."

"It's been a slow day." I smiled at him.

"Mr. Robicheaux, I don't have any idea in the world why either you or that Mexican woman is interested in me. Could you be a little bit more forthcoming?"

"Actually, until yesterday I don't believe I ever heard your name."

"What should I make of that?"

"The problem is you and a few others tried to stick a couple of thumbtacks in my boss's head." I smiled again.

"Listen, that woman came into my office yesterday and accused me of working with the Mafia."

"Why would she do that?"

"You tell me, please."

"You own half of a security service with Murphy Doucet?"

"That's right, I surely do. Can you tell me what y'all are looking for, why y'all are in my place of business?"

"When you do business with a man like Julie Balboni, you create a certain degree of curiosity about yourself."

"I don't do business with this man, and I don't know anything about him. I bought stock in this motion picture they're making. A lot of business people around here have. I've never met Julie Balboni and I don't plan to. Are we clear on this, sir?"

"My boss says you're a respected man. It looks like you have a good business, too. I'd be careful who I messed with, Mr. Lemoyne."

"I'm not interested in pursuing the subject." He fixed his glasses, squared his shoulders slightly, and picked up several sheets of paper in his hands.

I drummed my fingers on the arms of my chair. Outside I could hear truck doors slamming and gears grinding.

"I guess I didn't explain myself very well," I said.

"You don't need to," he said, and looked up at the clock on the wall.

"You're a solid businessman. There's nothing wrong with buying stock in a movie company. There's nothing wrong with providing a security service for it, either. But a lady who's not much taller than a fireplug asks you a couple of questions and you try to drop the dime on her. That doesn't seem to fit, Mr. Lemoyne."

"There're people out there committing rapes, armed robberies, selling crack to children, God only knows what else, but you and that woman have the nerve to come in here and question me because I have a vague business relationship with a movie production. You don't think that's reason to make someone angry? What's wrong with you people?"

"Are your employees union?"

"No, they're not."

"But your partner in your security service is a Teamster steward. I think you're involved in some strange contradictions, Mr. Lemoyne."

He rose from his chair and lifted a set of keys out of his desk drawer.

"I'm taking a new boy out on his route today. I have to lock up now. Do you want to stay around and talk to anybody else?" he said.

"No, I'll be on my way. Here's my business card in case you might like to contact me later."

He ignored it when I extended it to him. I placed it on his desk.

"Thank you for your time, sir," I said, and walked back out onto the loading dock, into the heated liquid air, the blinding glare of light, the chalky smell of crushed oyster shells in the unsurfaced parking lot.

When I was walking out to my pickup truck, I recognized an elderly black man who used to work in the old icehouse in New Iberia years ago. He was picking up litter out by the street with a stick that had a nail in the end of it. He had a rag tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, and the rotted wet undershirt he wore looked like strips of cheesecloth on his body.

"How do you like working here, Dallas?" I said.

"I like it pretty good."

"How does Mr. Twinky treat y'all?"

His eyes glanced back toward the building, then he grinned.

"He know how to make the eagle scream, you know what I mean?"

"He's tight with a dollar?"

"Mr. Twinky so tight he got to eat a whole box of Ex-Lax so he don't squeak when he walk."

"He's that bad?"

He tapped some dried leaves off the nail of his stick against the trunk of an oak tree.

"That's just my little joke," he said. "Mr. Twinky pay what he say he gonna pay, and he always pay it on time. He good to black folks, Mr. Dave. They ain't no way 'round that."

When I got back to New Iberia I didn't go to the office. Instead, I called from the house. The sheriff wasn't in.

"Where is he?" I said.

"He's probably out looking for you," the dispatcher said. "What's going on, Dave?"

"Nothing much."

"Tell that to the greaseball you bounced off the furniture this morning."

"Did he file a complaint?"

"No, but I heard the restaurant owner dug the guy's tooth out of the counter with a screwdriver. You sure know how to do it, Dave."

"Tell the sheriff I'm going to check out some stuff in New Orleans. I'll call him this evening or I'll see him in the office early in the morning."

"I got the impression it might be good if you came by this afternoon."

"Is Agent Gomez there?"

"Yeah, hang on."

A few seconds later Rosie picked up the extension.