James Burke: In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"He threw his brother-in-law off the roof of the Jax's brewery on top of a Mardi Gras float. That was a first even for New Orleans."

"Hey, lieutenant, there was a lot of other things involved there. The guy beat up my sister. He was a fucking animal."

"Look, Dave, you been gone from New Orleans for a long time," Baby Feet said. "The city ain't anything like it used to be. Black kids with shit for brains are provoking everybody in the fucking town. People get killed in Audubon Park, for God's sake. You try to get on the St. Charles streetcar and there's either niggers or Japs hanging out the doors and windows. We used to have understandings with the city. Everybody knew the rules, nobody got hurt. Take a walk past the Desire or St. Thomas project and see what happens."

"What's the point, Julie?"

"The point is who the fuck needs it? I own a recording studio, the same place Jimmy Clanton cut his first record. I'm in the entertainment business. I talk on the phone every day to people in California you read about in People magazine. I come home to this shithole, they ought to have 'Welcome Back Balboni Day.' Instead, I get told maybe I'm like a bad smell in the air. You understand what I'm saying, that hurts me."

I rubbed one palm against the other.

"I'm just a messenger," I said.

"That laundry man you work for send you?"

"He has his concerns."

He waved the woman away and sat up in his chair.

"Give me five minutes to get dressed. Then I want you to drive me somewhere," he said.

"I'm a little tied up on time right now."

"I'm asking fifteen minutes of you, max. You think you can give me that much of your day, Dave?" He got up and started past me to his room. There were tufts of black hair like pig bristles on his love handles. He cocked his index finger at me. "Be here when I get back. You won't regret it."

The woman with the bleached hair sat back down at the table. She took off her glasses, parted her legs a moment, and looked into my face, her eyes neither flirtatious nor hostile, simply dead. Cholo invited me to play gin rummy with them.

"Thanks, I never took it up," I said.

"You sure took it up with horses, lieutenant," he said.

"Yep, horses and Beam. They always made an interesting combination at the Fairgrounds."

"Hey, you remember that time you lent me twenty bucks to get home from Jefferson Downs? I always remember that, Loot. That was all right."

Cholo Manelli had been born of a Mexican washerwoman, who probably wished she had given birth to a bowling ball instead, and fathered by a brain-damaged Sicilian numbers runner, whose head had been caved in by a cop's baton in the Irish Channel. He was raised in the Iberville welfare project across from the old St. Louis cemeteries, and at age eleven was busted with his brothers for rolling and beating the winos who slept in the empty crypts. Their weapons of choice had been sand-filled socks.

He had the coarse, square hands of a bricklayer, the facial depth of a pie plate. I always suspected that if he was lobotomized you wouldn't know the difference. The psychiatrists at Mandeville diagnosed him as a sociopath and shot his head full of electricity. Evidently the treatment had as much effect as charging a car battery with three dead cells. On his first jolt at Angola he was put in with the big stripes, the violent and the incorrigible, back in the days when the state used trusty guards, mounted on horses and armed with double-barrel twelve-gauge shotguns, who had to serve the time of any inmate who escaped while under their supervision. Cholo went to the bushes and didn't come back fast enough for the trusty gunbull. The gunbull put four pieces of buckshot in Cholo's back. Two weeks later a Mason jar of prune-o was found in the gunbull's cell. A month after that, when he was back in the main population, somebody dropped the loaded bed of a dump truck on his head.

"Julie told me about the time that boon almost popped you with a.38," he said.

"What time was that?"

"When you were a patrolman. In the Quarter. Julie said he saved your life."

"He did, huh?"

Cholo shrugged his shoulders.

"That's what the man said, lieutenant. What do I know?"

"Take the hint, Cholo. Our detective isn't a conversationalist," the woman said, without removing her eyes from her cards. She clacked her lacquered nails on the glass tabletop, and her lips made a dry, sucking sound when she puffed on her cigarette.

"You working on that murder case? The one about that girl?" he said.

"How'd you know about that?"

His eyes clicked sideways.

"It was in the newspaper," he said. "Julie and me was talking about it this morning. Something like that's disgusting. You got a fucking maniac on the loose around here. Somebody ought to take him to a hospital and kill him."

Baby Feet emerged resplendent from the sliding glass door of his room. He wore a white suit with gray pin stripes, a purple shirt scrolled with gray flowers, a half-dozen gold chains and medallions around his talcumed neck, tasseled loafers that seemed as small on his feet as ballet slippers.

"You look beautiful, Julie," Cholo said.

"Fucking A," Baby Feet said, lighting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth with a tiny gold lighter.

"Can I go with y'all?" Cholo asked.

"Keep an eye on things here for me."

"Hey, you told me last night I could go."

"I need you to take my calls."

"Margot don't know how to pick up a phone anymore?" Cholo said.

"My meter's running, Julie," I said.

"We're going out to dinner tonight with some interesting people," Baby Feet said to Cholo. "You'll enjoy it. Be patient."

"They're quite excited about the possibility of meeting you. They called and said that, Cholo," the woman said.

"Margot, why is it you got calluses on your back? Somebody been putting starch in your sheets or something?" Cholo said.

I started walking toward my truck. The sunlight off the cement by the poolside was blinding. Baby Feet caught up with me. One of his other women dove off the board and splashed water and the smell of chlorine and suntan oil across my back.

"Hey, I live in a fucking menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don't go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"

I got in the truck.

"Where we going, Feet?" I said.

"Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I'm not the source of any problems you got around here. The coke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it's baby powder. If it was coming from some people I've been associated with in New Orleans, and I'm talking about past associations, you understand, it'd go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."

I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.

"I don't work narcotics, Julie, and I'm not good at passing on bullshit, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."

"Oh, yeah? What girl's that?"

"The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."

"I don't guess I heard about it."

I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the passing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.

"You don't read the local papers?" I said.

"I been busy. You saying I talk bullshit, Dave?"

"Put it this way, Feet. If you've got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."

He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.

"We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I'm going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town's flat-ass broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake-" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat from imaginary federal troops. "We're going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don't like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole fucking operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those coonass jackoffs in the Chamber of Commerce."