DR07 - Dixie City Jam (18 page)

'You're all right, Motley.'

'Tell me that five years from now. That kid's going to end up
facedown on a sidewalk.'

'Why?'

'Because he's like half the black kids in New Orleans. Every
day he's got to prove he doesn't have his mama's pink finger up his
butt. Come on, I'll buy you a beignet. This place is depressing me.'

I spent the next two hours in the
library, or morgue, as it's
called, of
The Times-Picayune
. I could find
almost nothing on German U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico that had
been printed during the war years, since all military news was censored
from late 1941 until after V-J Day. There was one exception, however: a
headline story which ran for three days concerning four Nazi saboteurs
who had been apprehended by the FBI south of Baton Rouge in a truck
loaded with explosives.

A page one photograph showed them in fedoras and baggy suits,
locked to a wrist chain, staring out at the camera with pale,
rectangular faces and buckshot eyes. The cutline below said they had
planned to blow up the Standard Oil refinery on the banks of the
Mississippi at Baton Rouge. The last article in the series dealt with
the arrest of an American accomplice, a retired oil man in Grand Isle
by the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter, who had been a founder of the
American Silver Shirts.

I jumped the microfilm ahead to the year 1956 and found the
name of Jon Matthew Buchalter once again. It was in a twenty-inch
feature story in the regional section, written with the detached tone
one might use in examining an anthropological curiosity, about the oil
man who had betrayed his country, flashed a signal one night through
the mist at a U-boat south of Grand Isle, and helped bring ashore four
men who, had they succeeded in their mission, would have dried up the
flow of fuel to American and English forces for at least two weeks.

At the bottom of the page was a 1935 wire-service photograph
of Buchalter with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Buchalter was a
barrel-chested, vigorous-looking man, resplendent in white riding
breeches, silver shirt, polished Sam Browne belt, black tie, and
red-and-black armband. His right hand clasped Hitler's; he was smiling
with the confidence of a man who knew that he had stepped into history.

After he was arrested in Grand Isle, a drunken mob of
shrimpers tried to break him out of jail. They fled when sheriff's
deputies began firing shotguns in the air. They left behind a
thirty-foot spool of chain and a five-gallon can of gasoline.

He did his fourteen years of federal time in isolation,
despised by both his warders and his fellow prisoners, eating food
delivered through a slit by a trusty who in all probability spat in it
first.

His wife and children had long ago moved out of state; his
property had been confiscated for taxes. He weighed eighty pounds when
his liver finally failed and he died in a public ward at Charity
Hospital in New Orleans. There was no marker placed on his grave in
potter's field other than a stamped tin number pressed into the sod.

I wondered what importance he would give the fact that the old
potter's field in Orleans Parish was not segregated, like other
cemeteries during that historical period, and that he would sow his
teeth and bones among those of Negroes and perhaps even Jews.

Later that afternoon I parked in front
of Lucinda Bergeron's
house off Magazine. Just as I was turning off the engine, an open Jeep
with oversized tires and four black kids inside pulled to the curb in
front of me. The rap music playing on the stereo was deafening, like an
electronic assault on the sensibilities. Zoot got out of the Jeep and
went inside his house, his eyes straight ahead, as though I were not
there. The three other boys did leg stretches on the lawn while they
waited for him. All three were dressed in an almost paramilitary
fashion—baggy black trousers like paratroopers might wear,
gold neck
chains, Air Jordan tennis shoes, black T-shirts with scrolled white
death's-heads on them. Their hair was shaved to the scalp on the sides,
with only a coarse, squared pad on the crown of the skull. Zoot came
back out the front door and gave each of them a can of Pepsi-Cola.

When they drove away, the rap music from their stereo echoed
off housefronts all the way down the street.

'You get an eyeful?' Zoot said.

'You run the PX for these characters?'

'The what?'

'Sergeant Motley's worried about you.'

He looked at me, waiting to see what new kind of trap was
being constructed around him.

'He thinks you're going to get cooled out one of these days,'
I said.

'Cooled… what?'

'He thinks you're cruising for a big fall.'

'Why y'all on my case? I ain't done nothing.'

'Did you tell your mother about what happened this morning?'

His eyes flicked sideways toward the house. He sucked in his
cheeks and tried not to swallow.

'I remember something a guy told me once,' I said. 'He said
it's as dishonorable to let yourself be used as it is to use someone
else.'

'What you mean?'

'Your friends impress me as shitheads.'

'I don't care what you say. We stand by each ot'er. They're my
friends in all kinds of ways.'

'Zoot, I didn't see one of those guys say thank you when you
handed him a soft drink. Who's kidding who, podna?'

I found his mother on her knees in the backyard, spading out a
hole for a pot of chrysanthemums. The Saint Augustine grass was thick
and spongy underfoot, and the beds along her weathered wood fences were
bursting with azaleas, banana trees, elephant ears, flaming hibiscus,
and pink and blue hydrangeas. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white
shorts and a purple blouse with green flowers on it. Her hair was on
her shoulders, and her face was hot with her work. For the first time I
saw a prettiness in her. I sat on a wood box next to her and turned on
the garden hose and let it sluice into the fresh hole while she fitted
the plant in and troweled dirt over the roots.

'How'd you know I was home?' she said.

'Your office told me you're working nights now.'

'What were you talking to Zoot about out there?' she said,
without looking up.

'Not too much… His friends.'

'You don't approve of them?'

'People sure know when they're around.'

'Well, I guess you're glad you don't have to be around them
very long, aren't you?'

'A boy can gravitate to certain kids for a reason.'

'Oh?' she said, and rested her rump on her heels. As she
looked at me she tilted her head in feigned deference.

'I don't know why you think it's funny. He's a good boy,' I
said. 'Why don't you stop treating him like a douche bag?'

She made a sound like she had swallowed bile. 'I can't believe
you just said that,' she said.

'Why don't you give the kid some credit? He's got a lot of
courage. Did he tell you he went three rounds against a professional
fighter who could have turned his brains into mush?'

'Where do you get off telling me how to raise my child?'

'
That's
it, Lucinda. He's not a child.'

Then she made the same sound again, as though she couldn't
remove a vile taste from her throat. 'Please spare me this, would you?'
she said. 'Go away somewhere, find a nice white neighborhood, find a
white lady digging in her garden, and please give her your advice about
the correct way to raise children. Can you do that for me, please?'

'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down
on Terpsichore and Baronne.'

The heat went out of her eyes.

'Did you know him?' I said.

She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some
girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.

'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the
question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a
Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in
the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the
brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she
continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at
the flower bed in front of her.

'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.

'Motley.'

'He'll do his best with it.'

'Somebody else won't?'

'The department has its problems.'

'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.

She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum
plant with her garden trowel.

'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens
committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes
being canceled out?'

'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is
involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the
outrageousness of the idea.

'Some funny people keep showing up on it. Tommy Blue Eyes,
Hippo Bimstine… you as the liaison person for NOPD. That's a
peculiar combo, don't you think?'

'Lots of people want New Orleans to be like it was thirty
years ago. For different reasons, maybe.'

'What's your own feeling? You think maybe the times are such
that we should just whack out a few of the bad guys? Create our own
free-fire zone and make up the rules later?'

'I don't think I like what you're saying.'

'I heard you went up to Angola to watch a man electrocuted.'

'That bothers you?'

'I had to witness an execution once. I had dreams about it for
a long time.'

'Let me clarify something for you. I didn't go
once
.
I do it in every capital conviction I'm involved with. The people who
can't be there, the ones these guys sodomize and mutilate and murder,
have worse problems than bad dreams.'

'You're a tough-minded lady.'

'Save the hand job for somebody else.'

I stood up and turned off the hose. The iron handle squeaked
in my hand.

'The bad thing about vigilantes is that eventually they're not
selective,' I said.

'Is that supposed to mean something to me?'

'I'm going to violate a confidence. If Zoot had walked into
that crack house a little earlier this morning, he might have had his
head opened up with that E-tool like some of the others. He's not a
good listener, either, Lucinda.'

Her lips parted silently. I could not look at the recognition
of loss spreading through her face.

It was hot that night, with an angry
whalebone moon high above
the marsh. The rumble of dry thunder woke me at three in the morning. I
found Bootsie in the kitchen, sitting in the dark at the breakfast
table, her bare feet in a square of moonlight. Her shoulders were
rounded; her breasts sagged inside her nightgown.

'It's the lightning,' she said. 'It was popping out in the
marsh. I saw a tree burning.'

I walked her back to the bed and lay beside her. In a little
while the rain began ticking in the trees; then it fell harder,
drumming on the eaves and the tin roof of the gallery. She fell asleep
with her head on my arm and slept through a thunderstorm that broke
across the marsh at daybreak and flooded the yard and blew a fine, cool
mist through the screens.

At eight o'clock the sheriff called and told me to go directly
to Iberia General rather than to the office. Charles Sitwell, our only
link to Will Buchalter, would never be accused of ratting out on his
friends.

The window blinds in Sitwell's
hospital room were up, and the
walls and the sheets on his bed were bright with sunlight. A nurse was
emptying Sitwell's bedpan in the toilet, and the deputy who had stood
guard on the door was chewing on a toothpick and staring up at a talk
show on a television set whose sound was turned off.

'I can't tell you with any certainty when he died,' the doctor
said. 'I'd say it was in the last two or three hours, but that's a
guess. Actually, I thought he was going to make it.'

Sitwell's head was tilted back on the pillow. His mouth and
eyes were open. A yellow liquid had drained out of the plaster and
bandages on his face into the whiskers on his throat.

'You want to guess at what caused his death?' I said.

The doctor was a powerfully built, sandy-haired man, a tanned,
habitual golf player, who wore greens and protective plastic bags over
his feet.

'Look at his right hand,' he said. 'It's clutching the sheet
like he was either afraid of something or he was experiencing a painful
spasm of some kind.'

'Yes?'

'That's not unusual in itself, so maybe I'm just too
imaginative.'

'You're going to have to be a little more exact for me,
Doctor.'

He flipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them on his nose,
then bent over Sitwell's body.

'Take at look at this,' he said, rotating Sitwell's chin
sideways with his thumb. 'You see that red spot in his whiskers, like a
big mosquito bite? Come around in the light. Here, right by the
jugular.'

'What about it?'

'Look closely.' He used his thumb to brush back the whiskers.
'The skin's torn above the original puncture. You want to know what I
think, or had you rather I stay out of your business?'

'Go ahead, Doc, you're doing just fine.'

'I think maybe somebody shoved a hypodermic needle in his
throat.'

I rubbed back Sitwell's whiskers with the tips of my fingers.
His blood had already drained to the lowest parts of his body, and his
skin was cold and rubbery to the touch. The area right above the
puncture looked like it had been ripped with an upward motion, like a
wood splinter being torn loose from the grain of the skin.

'If someone did put a needle in him, what do you think it
might have been loaded with?' I said.

'Air would do it. A bubble can stop up an artery like a cork
in a pipe.'