In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"My experience has been that you let go of the past by addressing it, Mr. Lemoyne."

"For some reason I have the feeling that you want me to confirm what so far are only speculations on your part." There were tiny pieces of grit in his combed sandy hair and a film of perspiration and rose dust on his glasses.

"Read it like you want. But somehow my investigation keeps winding its way back to your front door."

He began snipping roses again and placing them stem down in a milk bottle full of green water. His two-story peaked white house in an old residential neighborhood off St. Mary Boulevard in Lafayette was surrounded by spectacular moss-hung oak trees and walls of bamboo and soft pink brick.

"Should I call my lawyer? Is that what you're suggesting?"

"You can if you want to. I don't think it'll solve your problem, though."

"I beg your pardon." His shears hung motionlessly over a rose.

"I think you committed a murder back in 1957, but in all probability you don't have the psychology of a killer. That means that you probably live with an awful guilt, Mr. Lemoyne. You go to bed with it and you wake with it. You drag it around all day long like a clanking chain."

"Why is it that you seem to have this fixation about me? At first you accused me of being involved with a New Orleans gangster. Now this business about the murdered Negro."

"I saw you do it."

His egg-shaped face was absolutely still. Blood pooled in his cheeks like pink flowers.

"I was only nineteen," I said. "I watched y'all from across the bay. The black man tried to run, and one of you shot him in the leg, then continued shooting him in the water. You didn't even think me worthy of notice, did you? You were right, too. No one ever paid much attention to my story. That was a hard lesson for a nineteen-year-old."

He closed the shears, locked the clasp on the handles, and set them down on a glass-topped patio table. He poured two inches of whiskey into a glass with no ice and squeezed a lemon into it. He seemed as solitary as a man might who had lived alone all his life.

"Would you care for one?" he said.

"No, thank you."

"I have high blood pressure and shouldn't drink, but I put lemon in it and convince myself that I'm drinking something healthy along with the alcohol. It's my little joke with myself." He took a deep breath.

"You want to tell me about it?"

"I don't think so. Am I under arrest?"

"Not right now. But I think that's the least of your problems."

"You bewilder me, sir."

"You're partners in a security service with Murphy Doucet. A fellow like that doesn't fit in the same shoe box with you."

"He's an ex-police officer. He has the background that I don't."

"He's a resentful and angry man. He's also anti-Semitic. One of your black employees told me you're good to people of color. Why would a man such as yourself go into business with a bigot?"

"He's uneducated. That doesn't mean he's a bad person."

"I believe he's been blackmailing you, Mr. Lemoyne. I believe he was the other white man I saw across the bay with DeWitt Prejean."

"You can believe whatever you wish."

"We still haven't gotten to what's really troubling you, though, have we? It's those young women, isn't it?"

His eyes closed and opened, and then he looked away at the south where lightning was forking into the Gulf and the sky looked like it was covered with the yellow-black smoke from a chemical fire.

"I don't . . . I don't . . ." he began, then finished his whiskey and set his glass down. He wiped at the wet ring with the flat of his hand as though he wanted to scrub it out of the tabletop.

"That day you stopped me out under the trees at the lake," I said, "you wanted assurance that it was somebody else, somebody you don't know, who mutilated and killed those girls, didn't you? You didn't want that sin on your conscience as well as Prejean's murder."