James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"Look, little guy," I said, "drinking isn't part of my life anymore. I gave it to my Higher Power." I stroked her hair and saw a smile begin to grow at the edge of her mouth and eyes.

"Dave?"

"What?"

"What's it mean when you say somebody's got to be standup?"

"No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy."

She was grinning broadly now, her wide-set teeth white in the shadows of the room.

"Where's Bootsie?" I asked.

"Fixing supper."

"What are we having?"

"Sac-a-lait and dirty rice."

"Did you know they run freight trains on that in Louisiana?"

She started bouncing on the edge of the bed, then my words sank in. "What? Freight… what?" she said.

"Let me get dressed, little guy, then we'll check out the food situation."

My explanation to Alafair was the best I could offer, but the truth was I needed to get to an AA meeting. Since the night I had seen the general and his soldiers in the mist, I had talked once over the phone to my AA sponsor but had not attended a meeting, which was the place I needed to be most. What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call non-alcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.

The popular notion exists that Catholic priests become privy to the darkest corners of man's soul in the confessional. The truth is otherwise. Any candid Catholic minister will tell you that most people's confessions cause eye-crossing boredom in the confessor, and the average weekly penitent usually owns up to a level of moral failure on par with unpaid parking violations and overdue library books.

But at AA meetings, I've heard it all at one time or another: extortion, theft, forgery, armed robbery, child molestation, sodomy with animals, arson, prostitution, vehicular homicide, and the murder of prisoners and civilians in Vietnam.

I went to an afternoon meeting on the second floor of an Episcopalian church. I knew almost everyone there: a few housewives, a black man who ran a tree nursery, a Catholic nun, an ex-con bartender named Tee Neg who was also my sponsor, a woman who used to hook in the Column Hotel Bar in Lafayette, a psychologist, a bakery owner, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific, and a man who was once a famous aerialist with Ringling Brothers.

I told them the whole story about my psycho-historical encounters and left nothing out. I told them about the electricity that snapped and flickered like serpents' tongues in the mist, my conversations with the general, even the unwashed odor that rose from his clothes, the wounds in his men that maggots had eaten as slick as spoons.

As is usual with one's dramatic or surreal revelations at an AA meeting, the response was somewhat humbling. They listened attentively, their eyes sympathetic and good-natured, but a number of the people there at one time or another had ripped out their own wiring, thought they had gone to hell without dying, tried to kill themselves, or been one step away from frontal lobotomies.

When I had finished, the leader of the meeting, a pipeline welder, said, "Damn, Dave, that's the best endorsement of Dr Pepper I ever heard. You ought to call up them sonsof-bitches and get that one on TV."

Then everyone laughed and the world didn't seem so bad after all.

When I left the meeting I bought a spearmint snowball in the city park on Bayou Teche and used the outdoor pay phone by the recreation building. Through the moss-hung oak trees I could see kids diving into the public pool, their tan bodies glistening with water in the hot sunlight.

It took a couple of minutes to get the Lafayette coroner on the line. He was a hard-nosed choleric pathologist named Sol lie Rothberg, whom cops quickly learned to treat diplomatically.

"I wondered what you had on the Amber Martinez shooting," I said.

I could hear the long-distance wires humming in the receiver.

"Robicheaux?" he said.

"That's right."

"Why are you calling me?"

"I just told you."

"It's my understanding you're suspended."

"So what? Your medical findings are a matter of public record, aren't they?"

"When they become public they are. Right now they aren't public."

"Come on, Sollie. Somebody's trying to deep-fry my cojones in a skillet."

In my mind's eye I could see him idly throwing paper clips at his wastebasket.

"What's the big mystery I can clear up for you?" he said.

"What caliber weapon killed her?"

"From the size of the wound and the impact of the round, I'd say a.45."

"What do you mean 'size'?"

"Just what I said."

"What about the round?"

"It passed through her. There wasn't much to recover. It was a clean exit wound."

"It was a copper-jacketed round?"

"That's my opinion. In fact, I know it was. The exit hole wasn't much larger in diameter than the entry."

I closed and opened my eyes. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

"You there?" he said.

"Yes."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Sollie. I use hollow-points."

I could hear birds singing in the trees, and the surface of the swimming pool seemed to be dancing with turquoise light.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Yeah, time of death."

"You're crowding me."

"Sollie, I keep seeing the back of her head. Her hair had stuck to the carpet. The blood had already dried, hadn't it?"

"I can't tell you about that because I wasn't there."

"Come on, you know what I'm asking you."

"Did she die earlier, you want to know?"

"Look, partner, you're my lifeline. Don't be jerking me around."

"How about I go you one better? Did she die in that car, you want to ask me?"

I had learned long ago not to interfere with or challenge Sollie's moods, intentions, or syntax.

"It's gravity," he said. "The earth's always pulling on us, trying to suck us into the ground."

"What?"

"It's what the shooter didn't think about," he said. "Blood's just like anything else. It goes straight down. You stop the heart, in this case the brain and then the heart, and the blood takes the shortest course to the ground. You with me?"

"Not quite."

"The blood settles out in the lowest areas of where the body is lying. The pictures show the woman curled up on her side on the floor of the Buick. Her head was higher than her knees. But the autopsy indicates that she was lying full length on her back at the time of death. She also had high levels of alcohol and cocaine in her blood. I suspect she may have been passed out when she died."

"She was shot somewhere else and moved?"

"Unless the dead are walking around on their own these days."

"You've really been a friend, Sollie."

"Do you ever carry anything but a.45? A nine-millimeter or a.357 sometimes?"

"No, I've always carried the same Colt.45 auto I brought back from Vietnam."

"How many people know that?"

"Not many. Mostly cops, I guess."

"That thought would trouble me. So long, Robicheaux."

But the moment was not one for brooding. I walked back to the hot-dog stand and bought snowballs for a half-dozen kids. When a baseball bounced my way from the diamond, I scooped it up in my palms, rubbed the roughness of the horse hide, fitted my fingers on the stitches, and whipped a side-arm slider into the catcher's glove like I was nineteen years old and could blow a hole through the backstop.

That night I called Lou Girard at his home in Lafayette, told him about my conversations with the coroner and the mulatto woman across from the bar, and asked him if anyone had vacuumed the inside of the Buick.

"Dave, I'm afraid this case isn't the first thing on everybody's mind around here," he said.