'You know who Baby Feet Balboni is, don't you?' I said.
'Yes, Mr. Balboni is well known to us.'
'You know he's in New Iberia, too, don't you?'
She waited before she spoke again. Her small hands were clenched on her purse.
'What's your implication?' she said.
'I think the Bureau has more than one reason for being in town.'
'You think the girl's murder has secondary importance to me?'
'No, not to you.'
'But probably to the people I work under?'
'You'd know that better than I.'
'You don't think well of us, do you?'
'My experience with the Bureau was never too good. But maybe the problem was mine. As the Bible says, I used to look through a glass darkly. Primarily because there was Jim Beam in it most of the time.'
'The Bureau's changed.'
'Yeah, I guess it has.'
Yes, I thought, they hired racial minorities and women at gunpoint, and they stopped wire-tapping civil-rights leaders and smearing innocent people's reputations after their years of illegal surveillance and character assassination were finally exposed.
I parked the truck in the shade of a moss-hung live-oak tree, and we walked toward the shore of the lake, where a dozen people listened attentively to a man in a canvas chair who waved his arms while he talked, jabbed his finger in the air to make a point, and shrugged his powerful shoulders as though he were desperate in his desire to be understood. His voice, his manner, made me think of a hurricane stuffed inside a pair of white tennis shorts and a dark blue polo shirt.
'-the best fucking story editor in that fucking town,' he was saying. 'I don't care what those assholes say, they couldn't carry my fucking jock strap. When we come out of the cutting room with this, it's going to be solid fucking gold. Has everybody got that? This is a great picture. Believe it, they're going to spot their pants big time on this one.'
His strained face looked like a white balloon that was about to burst. But even while his histrionics grew to awesome levels and inspired mute reverence in his listeners, his eyes drifted to me and Rosie, and I had a feeling that Murphy Doucet, the security guard, had used his radio after all.
When we introduced ourselves and showed him our identification, he said, 'Do you have telephones where you work?'
'I beg your pardon?' I said.
'Do you have telephones where you work? Do you have people there who know how to make appointments for you?'
'Maybe you don't understand, Mr. Goldman. During a criminal investigation we don't make appointments to talk to people.'
His face flexed as though it were made of white rubber.
'You saying you're out here investigating some crime? What crime we talking about here?' he said. 'You see a crime around here?' He swiveled his head around. 'I don't see one.'
'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.
'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.
