In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead Part 9

Rosie was waiting for me by the side of the pickup truck under the live-oak tree. The young sugarcane in the fields was green and bending in the wind. She fanned herself with a manila folder she had picked up off the truck seat.

"Where did you go?" I asked.

"To talk to Hogman Patin."

"Where is he?"

"Over there, with those other black people, under the trees. He's playing a street musician in the film."

"How'd you know to talk to him?"

"You put his name in the case file, and I recognized him from his picture on one of his alb.u.ms."

"You're quite a cop, Rosie."

"Oh, I see. You didn't expect that from an agent who's short, Chicana, and a woman?"

"It was meant as a compliment. How about saving that stuff for the right people? What did Hogman have to say?"

Her eyes blinked at the abruptness of my tone.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to sound like that. I still have my mind on Goldman. I think he's hiding some serious problems, and I think they're with Julie Balboni. I also think there might be a tie-in between Julie and Cherry LeBlanc."

She looked off at the group of black people under the trees.

"You didn't bother to tell me that earlier," she said.

"I wasn't sure about it. I'm still not."

"Dave, I'll be frank with you. Before I came here I read some of your history. You seem to have a way of doing things on your own. Maybe you've been in situations where you had no other choice. But I can't have a partner who holds out information on me."

"It's a speculation, Rosie, and I just told you about it."

"Where do you think there might be a tie-in?" she said, and her face became clear again.

"I'm not sure. But one of his hoods, a character named Cholo Manelli, told me that he and Julie had been talking about the girl's death. Then ten minutes later Julie told me he hadn't heard or read anything about it. So one of them is lying, and I think it's Julie."

"Why not the hood, what's his name, Cholo?"

"When a guy like Cholo lies or tries to jerk somebody around, he doesn't involve his boss's name. He has no doubt about how dangerous that can be. Anyway, what did you get from Hogman?"

"Not much. He just pointed at you and said, 'Tell that other one yonder ain't every person innocent, ain't every person listen when they ought to, either.' What do you make of that?"

"Hogman likes to be an enigma."

"Those scars on his arms-"

"He had a bunch of knife beefs in Angola. Back in the 1940s he murdered a white burial-insurance collector who was sleeping with his wife. Hogman's a piece of work, believe me. The hacks didn't know how to deal with him. They put him in the sweat box on Camp A for eighteen days one time."

"How'd he kill the white man?"

"With a cane knife on the white man's front gallery. In broad daylight. People around here talked about that one for a long time."

I could see a thought working in her eyes.

"He's not a viable suspect, Rosie," I said.

"Why not?"

"Hogman's not a bad guy. He doesn't trust white people much, and he's a little prideful, but he wouldn't hurt a nineteen-year-old girl."

"That's it? He's not a bad guy? Although he seems to have a lifetime history of violence with knives? Good G.o.d."

"Also the nightclub owner says Hogman never left the club that night."

She got in the truck and closed the door. Her shoulders were almost below the level of the window. I got in on the driver's side and started the engine.

"Well, that clears all that up, then," she said. "I guess the owner kept his eyes on our man all night. You all certainly have an interesting way of conducting an investigation."

"I'll make you a deal. I'll talk with Hogman again if you'll check out this fellow Murphy Doucet."

"Because he's with the Teamsters?"

"That's right. Let's find out how these guys developed an interest in the War Between the States."

"You know what 'transfer' is in psychology?"

"What's the point?"

"Earlier you suggested that maybe I had a private agenda about Julie Balboni. Do you think that perhaps it's you who's taking the investigation into a secondary area?"

"Could be. But you can't ever tell what'll fly out of the tree until you throw a rock into it."

It was a flippant thing to say. But at the time it seemed innocent and of little more consequence than the warm breeze blowing across the cane and the plum-colored thunderclouds that were building out over the Gulf.

SAM "HOGMAN" PATIN LIVED ON THE BAYOU SOUTH OF TOWN in a paintless wood-frame house overgrown with banana trees and with leaf-clogged rain gutters and screens thatwere orange with rust. The roof was patched with R.C. Cola signs, the yard a tangle of weeds, automobile and was.h.i.+ng-machine parts, morning-glory vines, and pig bones; the gallery and one corner of the house sagged to one side like a broken smile.

I had waited until later in the day to talk to him at his house. I knew that he wouldn't have talked to me in front of other people at the movie set, and actually I wasn't even sure that he would tell me anything of importance now. He had served seventeen years in Angola, the first four of which he had spent on the Red Hat gang. These were the murderers, the psychotics, and the uncontrollable. They wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats that had been dipped in red paint, always ran double-time under the mounted gunbulls, and were punished on anthills, in cast-iron sweatboxes, or with the Black Betty, a leather whip that could flay a man's back to marmalade.

Hogman would probably still be in there, except he got religion and a Baptist preacher in Baton Rouge worked a pardon for him through the state legislature. His backyard was dirt, deep in shadow from the live-oak trees, and sloped away to the bayou, where a rotted-out pirogue webbed with green algae lay half-submerged in the shallows. He sat in a straight-backed wood chair under a tree that was strung with blue Milk of Magnesia bottles and crucifixes fas.h.i.+oned out of sticks and aluminum foil. When the breeze lifted out of the south, the whole tree sang with silver and blue light.

Hogman tightened the key on a new string he had just strung on his guitar. His skin was so black it had a purple sheen to it; and his hair was grizzled, the curls ironed flat against his head. His shoulders were an ax handle wide, the muscles in his upper arms the size of grapefruit. There wasn't a tablespoon of fat on his body. I wondered what it must have been like to face down Hogman Patin back in the days when he carried a barber's razor on a leather cord around his neck.

"What did you want to tell me, Sam?" I asked.

"One or two t'ings that been botherin' me. Get a chair off the po'ch. You want some tea?"

"No, that's fine, thank you."

I lifted a wicker chair off the back porch and walked back to the oak tree with it. He had slipped three metal picks onto his fingers and was running a blues progression up the neck of the guitar. He mashed the strings into the frets so that the sound continued to reverberate through the dark wood after he had struck the notes with his steel picks. Then he tightened the key again and rested the big curved belly of the twelve-string on his thigh.

"I don't like to have no truck with white folks' bidness," he said. "But it bother me, what somebody done to that girl. It been botherin' me a whole lot."

He picked up from the dirt a jelly gla.s.s filled with iced tea and drank out of it.

"She was messin' in somet'ing bad, wouldn't listen to me or pay me no mind about it, neither. When they that age, they know what they wanta do."

"Messing in what?"

"I talked to her maybe two hours befo' she left the juke. I been knowing that girl a long time. She love zydeco and blues music. She tell me, 'Hogman, in the next life me and you is gonna get married.' That's what she say. I tole her, 'Darlin', don't let them mens use you for no chicken.'

"She say, 'I ain't no chicken, Hogman. I going to New Orleans. I gonna have my own coop. Them others gonna be the chickens. I gonna have me a townhouse on Lake Pontchartrain.'"

"Wait a minute, Sam. She told you she was going to have other girls working for her?"

"That's what I just tole you, ain't I?"

"Yes, you did."

"I say, 'Don't be talkin' like that. You get away from them pimps, Cherry. Them white trash ain't gonna give you notownhouse. They'll use you up, t'row you away, then find some other girl just like you, I mean in five minutes, that quick.'

"She say, 'No, they ain't, 'cause I got the mojo on the Man, Hogman. He know it, too.'

"You know, when she say that, she smile up at me and her face look heart shape, like she just a little girl doin' some innocent t'ing 'stead of about to get herself killed."

"What man did she mean?"

"Probably some pimp tole her she special, she pretty, she just like a daughter to him. I seen the same t'ing in Angola. It ain't no different. A bunch take a young boy down on the flo', then when they get finish with him, he ready, he glad to put on a dress, makeup, be the punk for some wolf gonna take care of him, tell him he ain't just somebody's poke chops in the shower stall."

"Why'd you wait to tell me this?"

" 'Cause ain't nothin' like this ever happen 'round here befo'. I don't like it, me. No, suh."

"I see."

He splayed his long fingers on the belly of the guitar. The nails were pink against his black skin. His eyes looked off reflectively at the bayou, where fireflies were lighting in the gloom above the flooded cattails.

Finally he said, "I need to tell you somet'ing else."

"Go ahead, Sam."

"You mixed up with that skeleton they found over in the Atchafalaya, ain't you?"

"How'd you know about that?"

"When somebody find a dead black man, black people know about it. That man didn't have on no belt, didn't have no strings in his boots, did he?"

"That wasn't in the newspaper, podna."

"The preacher they call up to do the burial is my first cousin. He brought a suit of clothes to the mo'tuary to dress the bones in. They was a black man workin' there, and mycousin say, 'That fella was lynched, wasn't he?' The black man say, 'Yeah, they probably drug him out of bed to do it, too. Didn't even have time to put strings in his boots or run a belt through his britches.' "

"What are you telling me, Sam?"

"I remember somet'ing, a long time ago, maybe thirty, thirty-five years back." He patted one hand on top of the other and his eyes became muddy.

"Just say it, Sam."

"A bluejay don't set on a mockin'bird's nest. I ain't got no use for that stuff in people, neither. The Lord made people a different color for a reason."

He shook his head back and forth, as though he were dispelling a troubling thought.

"You're not talking about a rape, are you?"

"White folk call it rape when it fit what they want," he said. "They see what they need to see. Black folk cain't be choicy. They see what they gots to see. They was a black man, no, that ain't right, this is a n.i.g.g.e.r I'm talkin' about, and he was carryin' on with a white woman whose husband he worked for. Black folk knowed it, too. They tole him he better stop what he doin' befo' the cars start comin' down in the quarters and some innocent black man end up on a tree. I t'ink them was the bones you drug up in that sandbar."

"What was his name?"

"Who care what his name? Maybe he got what he ax for. But them people who done that still out there. I say past is past. I say don't be messin' in it."

"Are you cautioning me?"

"When I was in the pen, yo' daddy, Mr. Aldous, brought my mother food. He care for her when she sick, he pay for her medicine up at the sto'. I ain't forgot that, me."

"Sam, if you have information about a murder, the law requires that you come forward with it."

"Whose law? The law that run that pen up there? You want to find bodies, go dig in that levee for some of themboys the gunbulls shot down just for pure meanness. I seen it." He touched the corner of his eye with one long finger. "The hack get drunk on corn liquor, single out some boy on the wheelbarrow, holler out, 'Yow! You! n.i.g.g.e.r! Run!' Then he'd pop him with his .45, just like bustin' a clay duck."

"What was the white woman's name?"

"I got to be startin' my supper now."

"Was the dead man in a jail?"

"Ain't n.o.body interested back then, ain't n.o.body interested now. You give it a few mo' years, we all gonna be dead. You ain't goin' change nothin' for a n.i.g.g.e.r been in the river thirty years. You want to do some good, catch the pimp tore up that young girl. 'Cause sho' as G.o.d made little green apples, he gonna do it again."

He squinted one eye in a shaft of sunlight that fell through the tree branches and lighted one half of his face like an ebony stage mask that was sewn together from mismatched parts.

IT WAS ALMOST DUSK WHEN I GOT HOME THAT EVENING, BUT the sky was still as blue as a robin's egg in the west and the glow of the late sun looked like pools of pink fire in the clouds. After I ate supper, I walked down to the bait shop to help Batist close up. I was pulling back the canvas awning on the guy wires over the spool tables when I saw the sheriff's car drive down the dirt road and park under the trees.

He walked down the dock toward me. His face looked flushed from the heat, puffy with fatigue.

"I guarantee you, it's been one scorcher of a day," he said, went inside the shop, and came back with a sweating bottle of orange pop in his hand. He sat down at a table and wiped the sweat off his neck with his handkerchief. Grains of ice slid down the neck of the pop bottle.

"What's up, sheriff?" I said.