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

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.
          "You look here," he said. "I worked nine years on a mini-series about the murder of six million people. I went to Auschwitz and set up cameras on the same spots the S.S. used to photograph the people being pulled out of the boxcars and herded with dogs to the ovens. I've had survivors tell me I'm the only person who ever described on film what they actually went through. I don't give a fuck what any critic says, that series will last a thousand years. You get something straight, Mr. Robicheaux. People might fuck me over as an individual, but they'll never fuck me over as a director. You can take that to the bank."
          His pale eyes protruded from his head like marbles.
          I looked back at him silently.
          "There's something else?" he said.
          "No, not really."
          "So why the stare? What's going on?"
          "Nothing. I think you're probably a sincere man. But as someone once told me, hubris is a character defect better left to the writers of tragedy."
          He pressed his fingers on his chest.
          "I got a problem with pride, you're saying?"
          "I think Jimmy Hoffa was probably the toughest guy the labor movement ever produced," I said. "Then evidently he decided that he and the mob could have a fling at the dirty boogie together. I used to know a button man in New Orleans who told me they cut Hoffa into hundreds of pieces and used him for fish chum. I believe what he said, too."
          "Sounds like your friend ought to take it to a grand jury."
          "He can't. Three years ago one of Julie's hired lowlifes put a crack in his skull with a cold chisel. Just for kicks. He sells snowballs out of a cart in front of the K & B drugstore on St. Charles now. We'll see you around, Mr. Goldman."
          I walked away through the dead leaves and over a series of rubber-coated power cables that looked like a tangle of black snakes. When I looked back at Mikey Goldman, his eyes were staring disjointedly into space.
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 6
     
     
    R osie was waiting for me by the side of the pickup truck under the live-oak tree. The young sugarcane in the fields was green and bending in the wind. She fanned herself with a manila folder she had picked up off the