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

"We can talk down at the sheriff's office if you wish," Rosie said.

He stared at her as though she had stepped through a hole in the dimension.

"Do you have any idea of what it costs to keep one hundred and fifty people standing around while I'm playing pocket pool with somebody's criminal investigation?" he said.

"You heard what she said. What's it going to be, partner?" I asked.

"Partner? " he said, looking out at the lake with a kind of melancholy disbelief on his face. "I think I screwed up in an earlier incarnation. I probably had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. That's gotta be it."

Then he rose and faced me with the flat glare of a boxer waiting for the referee to finish with the ring instructions.

"You want to take a walk or go in my trailer?" he said. "The air conditioner in my trailer is broken. You could fry eggs on the toilet seat. What d'you want to do?"

"This is fine," I said.

"Fine, huh?" he said, as though he were addressing some cynical store of private knowledge within himself. "What is it you want to say, Mr. Robicheaux?"

He walked along the bank of the lake, his hair curling out of his polo shirt like bronze wire. His white tennis shorts seemed about to rip at the seams on his muscular buttocks and thighs.

"I understand that you've cautioned some of your people to stay away from me. Is that correct?" I said.

"What people? What are you talking about?"

"I believe you know what I'm talking about."

"Elrod and his voice out in the fog? Elrod and skeletons buried in a sandbar? You think I care about stuff like that? You think that's what's on my mind when I'm making a picture?" He stopped and jabbed a thick finger at me. "Hey, try to understand something here. I live with my balls in a skillet. It's a way of life. I got no interest, I got no involvement, in people's problems in a certain locale. Is that supposed to be bad? Is it all right for me to tell my actors what I think? Are we all still working on a First Amendment basis here?"

A group of actors in sweat-streaked gray and blue uniforms, eating hamburgers out of foam containers, walked past us. I turned and suddenly realized that Rosie was no longer with us.

"She probably stepped in a hole," Goldman said.

"I think you are worried about something, Mr. Goldman. I think we both know what it is, too."

He took a deep breath. The sunlight shone through the oak branches over his head and made shifting patterns of shadow on his face.

"Let me try to explain something to you," he said. "Most everything in the film world is an illusion. An actor is somebody who never liked what he was. So he makes up a person and that's what he becomes. You think John Wayne came out of the womb John Wayne? He and a screenwriter created a character that was a cross between Captain Bligh and Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Duke played it till he dropped.

"Elrod's convinced himself he has magic powers. Why? Because he melted his head five years ago and he has days when he can't tie his shoestrings without a diagram. So instead of admitting that maybe he's got baked mush between his ears, he's a mystic, a persecuted clairvoyant."

"Let's cut the dog shit, Mr. Goldman. You're in business with Baby Feet Balboni. That's your problem, not Elrod Sykes."

"Wrong."

"You know what a 'fall partner' is?"

"No."

"A guy who goes down on the same bust with you."

"So?"

"Julie doesn't have fall partners. His hookers do parish time for him, his dealers do it for him in Angola, his accountants do it in Atlanta and Lewisburg. I don't think Julie has ever spent a whole day in the bag."

"Neither have I. Because I don't break the law."

"I think he'll cannibalize you."

He looked away from me, and I saw his hands clench and unclench and the veins pulse in his neck.