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

jukejoint.
          She had to know her killer. I was convinced of that.
          I walked to the bar, a ramshackle nineteenth-century wooden building with scaling paint and a sagging upstairs gallery. The inside was dark and cool and almost deserted. A fat black woman was scrubbing the front windows with a brush and a bucket of soap and water. I walked the length of the bar to the small office in back where I had found the owner before. Along the counter in front of the bar's mirror were rows upon rows of bottles—dark green and slender, stoppered with wet corks; obsidian black with arterial-red wax seals; frosted-white, like ice sawed out of a lake; whiskey-brown, singing with heat and light.
          The smell of the green sawdust on the floor, the wood-handled beer taps dripping through an aluminum grate, the Collins mix and the bowls of cherries and sliced limes and oranges, they were only the stuff of memory, I told myself, swallowing. They belong to your Higher Power now. Just like an old girlfriend who winks at you on the street one day, I thought. You already gave her up. You just walk on by. It's that easy.
          But you don't think about it, you don't think about it, you don't think about it.
          The owner was a preoccupied man who combed his black hair straight back on his narrow head and kept his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket. The receipts and whiskey invoices on his desk were a magnet for his eyes. My questions couldn't compete. He kept running his tongue behind his teeth while I talked.
          "So you didn't know anything about her friends?" I said.
          "No, sir. She was here three weeks. They come and they go. That's the way it is. I don't know what else to tell you."
          "Do you know anything about your bartenders?"
          His eyes focused on a spot inside his cigarette smoke.
          "I'm not understanding you," he said.
          "Do you hire a bartender who hangs around with ex-cons or who's in a lot of debt? I suspect you probably don't. Those are the kind of guys who set up their friends with free doubles or make change out of an open drawer without ringing up the sale, aren't they?"
          "What's your point?"
          "Did you know she had been arrested for prostitution?"
          "I didn't know that."
          "You hired her because you thought she was an honor student at USL?"
          The corner of his mouth wrinkled slightly with the beginnings of a smile. He stirred the ashes in the ashtray with the tip of his cigarette.
          "I'll leave you my card and a thought, Mr. Trajan. One way or another we're going to nail the guy who killed her. In the meantime, if he kills somebody else and I find out that you held back information on me, I'll be back with a warrant for your arrest."
          "I don't care for the way you're talking to me."
          I left his office without replying and walked back down the length of the bar. The black woman was now outside, washing the front window. She put down her scrub brush, flung the whole bucket of soapy water on the glass, then began rinsing it off with a hose. Her skin was the color of burnt brick, her eyes turquoise, her breasts sagging like water-filled balloons inside her cotton-print dress. I opened my badge in my palm.
          "Did you know the white girl Cherry LeBlanc?" I asked.
          "She worked here, ain't she?" She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the glass.
          "Do you know if she had a boyfriend, tante?”
          "If that's what you want to call it."
          "What do you mean?" I asked, already knowing the answer that I didn't want to hear.
          "She in the bidness."
          "Full time, in a serious way?"
          "What you call sellin' out of your pants?"
          "Was Mr. Trajan involved?"
          "Ax him."
          "I don't think he was, otherwise you wouldn't be telling me these