I carried everything that I had found back to the boat. My clothes were streaked with mud; I stunk of sweat and mosquito repellent. My palms rang with popped water blisters. I wanted to wake up Bootsie, call Elrod or perhaps even the sheriff, to tell anybody who would listen about what I had found.
But then I had to confront the foolishness of my thinking. How sane was any man, at least in the view of others, who would dig for Civil War artifacts in a swamp in the middle of the night in order to prove his sanity?
In fact, that kind of behavior was probably not unlike a self-professed extraterrestrial traveler showing you his validated seat reservations on a UFO as evidence of his rationality.
When I got back home I covered my boat with a tarp, took a shower, ate a ham-and-onion sandwich in the kitchen while night birds called to each other under the full moon, and decided that the general and I would not share our secrets with those whose lives and vision were defined by daylight and a rational point of view.
Chapter 12
I slept late the next morning, and when I awoke, I found a note from Bootsie on the icebox saying that she had taken Alafair shopping in town. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk, Grape-Nuts, and strawberries on a tray and carried it out to the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The morning was not hot yet, and blue jays flew in and out of the dappled shade and my neighbor's sprinkler drifted in an iridescent haze across my grass.
Then I saw Rosie Gomez's motor-pool government car slow by our mailbox and turn into our drive. Her face was pointed at an upward angle so she could see adequately over the steering wheel. I got up from the table and waved her around back.
She wore a white blouse and white skirt with black pumps, a wide black belt, and a black purse.
"How you feeling?" she asked.
"Pretty good. In fact, great."
"Yeah?"
"Sure."
"You look okay."
"I am okay, Rosie. Here, I'll get you some coffee."
When I came back outside with the pot and another cup and saucer, she was sitting on the redwood bench, looking out over my duck pond and my neighbor's sugarcane fields. Her face looked cool and composed.
"It's beautiful out here," she said.
"I'm sorry Bootsie and Alafair aren't here. I'd like you to meet them."
"Next time. I'm sorry I didn't come see you in the hospital. I'd left for New Orleans early that morning. I just got back."
"What's up?"
"About three weeks ago an old hooker in the Quarter called the Bureau and said she wanted to seriously mess up Julie Balboni for us. Except she was drunk or stoned and the agent who took the call didn't give it a lot of credence."
"What'd she have to offer?"
"Nothing, really. She just kept saying, 'He's hurting these girls. Somebody ought to fix that rotten dago. He's got to stop hurting these girls.' "
"So what happened?"
"Three days ago there was a power failure at the woman's apartment building on Ursulines. With the air conditioner off it didn't take long for the smell to leak through the windows to the courtyard. The M.E. says it was suicide."
I watched her face. "You don't think it was?" I said.
"How many women shoot themselves through the head with a.38 special?"
"Maybe she was drunk and didn't care how she bought it."
"Her refrigerator and cupboards were full of food. The apartment was neat, all her dishes were washed. There was a sack of delicatessen items on the table she hadn't put away yet. Does that suggest the behavior of a despondent person to you?"
"What do they say at N.O.P D.?"
"They don't. They yawn. They've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.'s. You think they want to turn the suicide of a hooker into another open homicide case?"
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I think you've been right about a tie with Balboni. The most common denominator that keeps surfacing in this case is prostitution in and around New Orleans. There isn't a pimp or chippy working in Jefferson or Orleans parishes who don't piece off their action to Julie Balboni."
"That doesn't mean Julie's involved with killing anyone, Rosie."
"Be honest with me. Do I continue to underwhelm you as a representative of Fart, Barf, and Itch?"
"I'm not quite sure I-"
"Yeah, I bet. What do pimps call the girls in the life? 'Cash on the hoof,' right?"
"That's right."
"Do you think anybody kills one of Balboni's hookers and gets away with it without his knowledge and consent?"
"Except there's a bump in the road here. The man who murdered Kelly Drummond probably thought he was shooting at me. The mob doesn't kill cops. Not intentionally, anyway."
"Maybe he's a cowboy, out of control. We've got rogue cops. The wiseguys have rogue shitheads."
I laughed. "You're something else," I said.
"Cut the patronizing attitude, Dave."
"Sorry," I said, still smiling.
Her eyes looked into mine and darkened.
"I'm worried about you. You don't know how to keep your butt down," she said.
"Everything's copacetic. Believe me."
"Sure it is."
"You know something I don't?"
"Yes, human beings and money make a very bad combination," she said.
"I'd appreciate it if you could stop speaking to me in hieroglyphics."
"Few people care about the origins of money, Dave. All they see is a president's picture on a bill, not Julie Balboni's."
"Let's spell it out, okay?"
"A few of the locals have talked to the sheriff about your taking an extended leave. At least that's what I've heard."
"He's not a professional cop, but he's a decent man. He won't give in to them."
"He's an elected official. He's president of the Lions Club. He eats lunch once a week with the Chamber of Commerce."
"He knows I wasn't drinking. The people in my AA group know it, too. So do the personnel at the hospital. Dr. Landry thinks somebody zapped me with LSD. What else can I say?"
Her face became melancholy, and she looked out at the sunlight on the field with a distant, unfocused expression in her eyes.
"What's the trouble?" I asked.
"You don't hear what you're saying. Your reputation, maybe your job, are hanging in the balance now, and you think it's acceptable to tell people that somebody loaded your head with acid."
"I never made strong claims on mental health, anyway." I tried to smile when I said it. But the skin around my mouth felt stiff and misshaped.
"It isn't funny," she said. She stood up to go, and the bottom of her purse, with the.357 magnum inside, sagged against her hip. "I'm not going to let them do this to you, Dave."
"Wait a minute, Rosie. I don't send other people out on the firing line."
She began walking through the sideyard toward her car, her back as square and straight as a small door.
"Rosie, did you hear me?" I said. "Rosie? Come back here and let's talk. I appreciate what you're trying to-"
She got into her automobile, gave me the thumbs-up sign over the steering wheel, and backed out onto the dirt road by the bayou. She dropped the transmission into low and drove down the long tunnel of oaks without glancing back.
Regardless of Rosie's intentions about my welfare, I still had not resolved the possibility that the racial murder I had witnessed in 1957 and the sack of skin and polished bones Elrod Sykes had discovered in the Atchafalaya Basin were not somehow involved in this case.
However, where do you start in investigating a thirty-five-year-old homicide that was never even reported as such?
Although southern Louisiana, which is largely French Catholic, has a long and depressing record of racial prejudice and injustice, it never compared in intensity and violence to the treatment of black people in the northern portion of the state or in Mississippi, where even the murder of a child, Emmett Till, by two Klansmen in 1955 not only went unpunished but was collectively endorsed after the fact by the town in which it took place. There was no doubt that financial exploitation of black people in general, and sexual exploitation of black women in particular, were historically commonplace in our area, but lynching was rare, and neither I nor anyone I spoke to remembered a violent incident, other than the one I witnessed, or a singularly bad racial situation from the summer of 1957.