James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"I'll always love you, Dave," she said. "I don't care if you're a cop or a commercial fisherman or if you hunt down this bastard and kill him, I'll always love you for the man you are."

How do you respond to a statement like that?

The phone call came at 9:30 that night. I answered it in the kitchen.

"You're a hard man to catch," she said.

"Who's this?"

"The lady who's been trying to catch you, sugar."

"How about giving me a name?"

"It's Amber. Who else, darlin'?" Her voice sounded sleepy, indolent, in slow motion.

"Ah, the lady of the mysterious phone messages."

"You don't remember me? Don't hurt my feelings."

"No, I'm sorry, I don't recall who you are. What can I do for you?"

"It's me that's going to do you a big favor, darlin'. It's because I like you. It's because I remember you from New Orleans a long time ago."

"I appreciate all this, but how about we cut to it?"

"I'm gonna give you the guy you want, sweetheart."

"Which guy are we talking about?"

"He's a nasty ole pimp and he's been doin' some nasty things to his little girls."

Through the back window I could see my neighbor burning field stumps in the dark. The sparks spun upward against the black sky.

"What's his name, Amber?"

"I've got a temporary problem, though. I want to go back to Florida for a little while, you know what I mean?"

"What do you need?"

"Just the air ticket and a little pin money. Three or four hundred dollars. That's not a lot to ask, is it?"

"We might be able to arrange that. Would you like to come into my office?"

"Oh, I don't know if I should do that. All those handsome men make me self-conscious. Do you know where Red's Bar is in Lafayette?"

"On the north side?"

"You got it, sugar. How about in an hour? I'll be at the bar, right by the door."

"You wouldn't try to take me over the hurdles, would you, Amber?"

"Tell me you don't recognize me and break my heart. Ooou, ooou," she said, and hung up.

Who was she? The rhetoric, the flippant cynicism, the pout in the voice, the feigned little-girlishness, all spelled hooker. And the messages she had left at my office were obviously meant to indicate to others that there was a personal relationship between us. It sounded like the beginning of a good scam. But she had also sounded stoned. Or maybe she was simply crazy, I thought. Or maybe she was both stoned and crazy and simply running a hustle. Why not?

There are always lots of possibilities when you deal with that vast army of psychological mutants for whom police and correctional and parole officers are supposed to be lifetime stewards. I once knew a young psychiatrist from Tulane who wanted to do volunteer counseling in the women's prison at St. Gabriel. He lasted a month. The inkblot tests he gave his first subjects not only drove him into clinical depression but eventually caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle Association.

I made a call to the home of an AA friend named Lou Girard who was a detective sergeant in Vice at the Lafayette Police Department. He was one of those who drifted in and out of AA and never quite let go of the old way of life, but he was still a good cop and he would have made lieutenant had he not punched out an obnoxious local politician at Democratic headquarters.

"What's her name again?" he said.

I told him.

"Yeah, there's one broad around calls herself Amber, but she's a Mexican," he said. "You said this one sounds like she's from around here?"

"Yep."

"Look, Dave, these broads got about two dozen names they trade around-Ginger, Consuela, Candy, Pepper, there's even a mulatto dancer named Brown Sugar. Anyway, there're three or four hookers that float in and out of Red's. They're low-rent, though. Their Johns are oil-field workers and college boys, mostly."

"I'm going to drive over there in a few minutes. Can you give me some backup?"

"To check out a snitch?"

"Maybe she's not just a snitch."

"What about your own guys?"

"I'm supposed to be on sick leave right now."

"Is something wrong over there, Dave?"

"Things could be better."

"All right, I'll meet you behind the bar. I'll stay in my car, though. For some reason my face tends to empty out a place. Or maybe I need a better mouth wash."

"Thanks for doing this."

"It beats sitting at home listening to my liver rot."

Red's Bar was located in a dilapidated, racially mixed neighborhood of unsurfaced streets, stagnant rain ditches coated with mosquitoes, and vacant lots strewn with lawn trash and automobile parts. Railway tracks intersected people's dirt yards at crazy angles, and Southern Pacific freight cars often lumbered by a few feet from clotheslines and privies and bedroom windows.

I parked my truck in the shadows behind the bar. The shell parking lot was covered with hundreds of flattened beer cans, and the bushes that bordered the neighbor's property stank from all the people who urinated into them nightly. The owner of Red's had built his bar by knocking out the front wall of a frame house and attaching a neon-lit house trailer to it perpendicularly. Originally he had probably intended it to be the place it looked like-a low-bottom bar where you didn't have to make comparisons or where you could get laid and not worry about your own inadequacies.

But the bar became a success in ways that the owner didn't anticipate. He hired black musicians because they were cheap, and through no fault of his own he ended up with one of the best new zydeco bands in southwestern Louisiana. And on Saturday nights he french-fried potatoes in chicken fat and served them free on newspaper to enormous crowds that spilled out into the parking lots.

But tonight wasn't Saturday, there was no band; little sound except the jukebox's came from the bar, and the dust from my truck tires floated in a cloud across the bushes that were sour with urinated beer.

Lou Girard got out of his car and walked over to my window. He was a huge man, his head as big as a basketball, who wore cowboy boots with his suits and a chrome-plated.357 magnum in a hand-tooled belt holster. He also carried a braided slapjack in his back pocket and handcuffs that he slipped through the back of his belt.

"It's good to see you, Streak," he said.

"You too, Lou. How's everything at home?"

"My wife finally took off with her beautician. A woman, I'm talking about. I guess I finally figured out why she seemed a little remote in the sack. What are we doing tonight?"

"I'll go inside and look around. I'd like you to be out here to cover my back. It's not a big deal."

He looked at the clapboard back of the bar, at the broken windows and the overflow of the garbage cans, and hooked his thumb in his belt.

"When'd you start needing backup for bullshit like this?"

"Maybe I'm getting over the hill for it."

"Be serious, my friend."

"You know about Kelly Drummond being killed?"

"That actress? Yeah, sure."

"I think maybe the shooter was after me. I don't want to walk into a setup."

"This is a weird fucking place for a setup, Dave. Why would a guy want to bring a cop to a public place in Lafayette for a whack?"

"Why do these guys do anything?"

"You have any idea who the shooter might be?"

"Maybe a guy who was in on a lynching thirty-five years ago."

He nodded and his eyes became veiled.

"That doesn't sound plausible to you?" I asked.

"What's plausible? I try to get off the booze and my liver swells up like a football, my wife turns out to be a dyke, and for kicks I'm standing by a bunch of bushes that stink like somebody with a kidney disease pissed on them."

I pulled my tropical shirt out of my khakis, stuck my.45 inside the back of my belt, and walked through the rear entrance of the building.