In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

had last worked, the girls she had been with in the clapboard jukejoint the night she died, and a police captain in Lafayette who had recommended probation for her after she had been busted on the prostitution charge. I learned little about her except that she seemed to have been an uneducated, unskilled, hapless, and fatally beautiful girl who thought she could be a viable player in a crap game where the dice for her kind were always shaved.
          I learned that about her and the fact that she had loved zydeco music and had gone to the jukejoint to hear Sam "Hogman" Patin play his harmonica and bottleneck blues twelve-string guitar.
          My desk was covered with scribbled notes from my note pad, morgue and crime-scene photos, interview cassettes, and Xeroxes from the LeBlanc family's welfare case history when the sheriff walked into my office. The sky outside was lavender and pink now, and the fronds on the palm trees out by the sidewalk were limp in the heat and silhouetted darkly against the late sun.
          "The sheriff over in St. Mary Parish just called," he said.
          "Yes?"
          "He said thanks a lot. They really appreciate the extra work." He sat on the corner of my desk.
          "Tell him to find another line of work."
          "He said you're welcome to come over on your days off and run the investigation."
          "What's he doing with it?"
          "Their coroner's got the bones now. But I'll tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think it's going anywhere."
          I leaned back in my swivel chair and drummed my fingers on my desk. My eyes burned and my back hurt.
          "It seems to me you've been vindicated," the sheriff said. "Let it go for now."
          "We'll see."
          "Look, I know you've got a big workload piled on you right now, but I've got a problem I need you to look into when you have a chance. Like maybe first thing tomorrow morning."
    I looked back at him without speaking.
          "Baby Feet Balboni," he said.
          "What about him?"
          "He's in New Iberia. At the Holiday Inn, with about six of his fellow greaseballs and their whores. The manager called me from a phone booth down the street he was so afraid one of them would hear him."
          "I don't know what I can do about it," I said.
          "We need to know what he's doing in town."
          "He grew up here."
          "Look, Dave, they can't even handle this guy in New Orleans. He cannibalized half the Giacano and Cardo families to get where he is. He's not coming back here. That's not going to happen."
          I rubbed my face. My whiskers felt stiff against my palm.
          "You want me to send somebody else?" the sheriff asked.
          "No, that's all right."
          "Y'all were friends in high school for a while, weren't you?"
          "We played ball together, that's all."
          I gazed out the window at the lengthening shadows. He studied my face.
          "What's the matter, Dave?"
          "It's nothing."
          "You bothered because we want to bounce a baseball buddy out of town?"
          "No, not really."
          "Did you ever hear that story about what he did to Didi Giacano's cousin? Supposedly he hung him from his colon by a meat hook."
          "I've heard that same story about a half-dozen wiseguys in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. It's an old N.O.P.D. heirloom."
          "Probably just bad press, huh?"
          "I always tried to think of Julie as nine-tenths thespian," I said.
          "Yeah, and gorilla shit tastes like chocolate ice cream. Dave, you're a laugh a minute."
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 3
     
     
    J ulie Balboni looked just like his father, who had owned most of the slot and racehorse machines in Iberia Parish during the 1940s and, with an Assyrian family, had run the gambling and prostitution in the Underpass area of Lafayette. Julie was already huge, six and