In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

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