James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"You're telling me you're in the movie business?"

"Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"

I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.

"I'm sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."

"I'm going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.

"I don't think I'd be up to it."

"Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine a.m. on weed or whites, and Mikey's got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain't shitting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."

I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken's foot on his throat, approached my window.

"We'll see you, Feet," I said.

"You don't want to look around?"

"Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds and drove back through the pecan trees to the highway, the sun's reflection bouncing on my hood like a yellow balloon.

It happened my second year on the New Orleans police force, when I was a patrolman in the French Quarter and somebody called in a prowler report at an address on Dumaine. The lock on the iron gate was rusted and had been bent out of the jamb with a bar and sprung back on the hinges. Down the narrow brick walkway I could see bits of broken glass, like tiny rat's teeth, where someone had broken out the overhead light bulb. But the courtyard ahead was lighted, filled with the waving shadows of banana trees and palm fronds, and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio or television set.

I slipped my revolver out of its holster and moved along the coolness of the bricks, through a ticking pool of water, to the entrance of the courtyard, where a second scrolled-iron gate yawned back on its hinges. I could smell the damp earth in the flower beds, spearmint growing against a stucco wall, the thick clumps of purple wisteria that hung from a tile roof.

Then I smelled him, even before I saw him, an odor that was at once like snuff, synthetic wine, rotting teeth, and stomach bile. He was a huge black man, dressed in a Donald Duck T-shirt, filthy tennis shoes, and a pair of purple slacks that were bursting on his thighs. In his left hand was a drawstring bag filled with goods from the apartment he'd just creeped. He swung the gate with all his weight into my hand, snapped something in it like a Popsicle stick breaking, and sent my revolver skidding across the flagstones.

I tried to get my baton loose, but it was his show now. He came out of his back pocket with a worn one-inch.38, the grips wrapped with black electrician's tape, and screwed the barrel into my ear. There was a dark clot of blood in his right eye, and his breath slid across the side of my face like an unwashed hand.

"Get back in the walkway, motherfucker," he whispered.

We stumbled backward into the gloom. I could hear revelers out on the street, a beer can tinkling along the cement.

"Don't be a dumb guy," I said.

"Shut up," he said. Then, almost as an angry afterthought, he drove my head into the bricks. I fell to my knees in the water, my baton twisted uselessly in my belt.

His eyes were dilated, his hair haloed with sweat, his pulse leaping in his neck. He was a cop's worst possible adversary in that situation-strung-out, frightened, and stupid enough to carry a weapon on a simple B amp; E.

"Why'd you have to come along, man? Why'd you have to do that?" he said.

His thumb curled around the spur of the pistol's hammer and I heard the cylinder rotate and the chamber lock into place.

"There're cops on both ends of the street," I said. "You won't get out of the Quarter."

"Don't say no more, man. It won't do no good. You messed everything up."

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blew out his breath, and pointed the pistol downward at my chest.

Baby Feet had on only a bathrobe, his jockey underwear, and a pair of loafers without socks when he appeared in the brick walkway behind the black man.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing here?" he said.

The black man stepped back, the revolver drifting to his thigh.

"Mr. Julie?" he said.

"Yeah. What the fuck you doing? You creeping an apartment in my building?"

"I didn't know you was living here, Mr. Julie."

Baby Feet took the revolver out of the black man's hand and eased down the hammer.

"Walter, if I want to, I can make you piss blood for six months," he said.

"Yes, suh, I knows that."

"I'm glad you've taken that attitude. Now, you get your sorry ass out of here." He pushed the black man toward the entrance. "Go on." He kept nudging the black man along the bricks, then he kicked him hard, as fast as a snake striking, between the buttocks. "I said go on, now." He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man's crotch. Tears welled up in the man's eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. "Move it, Walter, unless you want balls the size of coconuts."

The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the shells from the.38 on the sidewalk, and flung the.38 into the darkness after the black man.

"Come on upstairs and I'll put your hand in some ice," he said.

I had found my hat and revolver.

"I'm going after that guy," I said.

"Pick him up in the morning. He shines shoes in a barbershop on Calliope and St. Charles. You sure you want to stay in this line of work, Dave?"

He laughed, lit a purple-and-gold cigarette, and put his round, thick arm over my shoulders.

The sheriff was right: Baby Feet might be a movie producer, but he could never be dismissed as a thespian.

My brief visit with Julie Balboni should have been a forgettable and minor interlude in my morning. Instead, my conversation with him in the truck had added a disturbing question mark in the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. He said he had heard nothing about it, nor had he read about it in the local newspaper. This was ten minutes after Cholo Manelli had told me that he and Baby Feet had been talking about the girl's death earlier.

Was Baby Feet lying or was he simply not interested in talking about something that wasn't connected with his well-being? Or had the electroshock therapists in Mandeville overheated Cholo's brain pan?

My experience with members of the Mafia and sociopaths in general has been that they lie as a matter of course. They are convincing because they often lie when there is no need to. To apply some form of forensic psychology in attempting to understand how they think is as productive as placing your head inside a microwave oven in order to study the nature of electricity.

I spent the rest of the day retracing the geography of Cherry LeBlanc's last hours and trying to recreate the marginal world in which she had lived. At three that afternoon I parked my truck in the shade by the old wood-frame church in St. Martinville and looked at a color photograph of her that had been given to me by the grandparents. Her hair was black, with a mahogany tint in it, her mouth bright red with too much lipstick, her face soft, slightly plump with baby fat; her dark eyes were bright and masked no hidden thought; she was smiling.

Busted at sixteen for prostitution, dead at nineteen, I thought. And that's what we knew about. God only knew what else had befallen her in her life. But she wasn't born a prostitute or the kind of girl who would be passed from hand to hand until someone opened a car door for her and drove her deep into a woods, where he revealed to her the instruments of her denouement, perhaps even convinced her that this moment was one she had elected for herself.