DR07 - Dixie City Jam (24 page)

The family who had contracted him to build the addition on
their house were Rumanian gypsies who had grown wealthy as slum-lords
in the black districts off Magazine. Their late-Victorian home had
polished oak floors, ceiling-high windows, small balconies dripping
with orange passion vine, a pool, and a game room with a sunken hot tub.

They thought well enough of the contractor to leave him alone
with their fifteen- and twelve-year-old daughters.

The father should have been gone for the day, checking out his
rental property miles away. Instead, he came home unexpectedly for
lunch. Someone waited for him behind the living room door, then fired a
.22 Magnum round into his ear. The bullet exited his opposite cheek and
embedded in the far wall.

No one heard the shot. Around one in the afternoon neighbors
saw the contractor drive away in the father's Buick. Three hours later
the mother returned from shopping and found both her daughters drowned
in the hot tub. They were bound ankle and wrist with electrician's
tape; both had been raped.

The contractor pawned his tools, his watch, and his wedding
ring at three different stops between New Orleans and Pensacola,
Florida, where he was arrested after a call he made to his wife was
traced to a motel there. Clete Purcel and I transported him back to New
Orleans from the Pensacola city jail.

He was likable; there was nothing of the con artist about him;
he was well-mannered and didn't use profanity; he never complained
about riding handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat.

At his trial he maintained that he'd had a blackout, that he
had no memory of the events that took place in the house off Canal, but
a sense of terror, with no apparent source, had caused him to flee
across I-10 to the Florida panhandle.

Prosecution lawyers, state psychologists, and news reporters
came up with every script possible to explain the contractor's
behavior: He was a clandestine user of LSD; he had been a marine door
gunner in Vietnam; he was badly in debt and teetering on a nervous
breakdown. Or, more disturbingly, he had once been seen at a shopping
mall with a high school girl from his neighborhood whose strangled and
decomposed body was found nude in a swamp north of Lake Pontchartrain.
On her ankle was a tattoo of a pentagram.

All the evidence against him was circumstantial. None of his
fingerprints were in the game room where the girls died, nor on the
electrician's tape that was used to bind them. Also the tape was not
the same brand that he always bought from a wholesale outlet. There
were no skin particles under the dead girls' fingernails.

He probably would have walked if he could have afforded a
better lawyer. But the jury convicted him of second-degree murder,
perhaps less out of certainty of his guilt than fear that he was guilty
and would kill or rape again if set free.

His friends and family were numb with disbelief. The pastor
from his church raised money to begin an appeal of the verdict. His
parishioners put together twenty thousand dollars for the conviction of
the real killer. Two attorneys from the ACLU took over the contractor's
case.

Clete and I went back over the crime scene a dozen times. We
must have interviewed a hundred people. We decided that if we couldn't
prove this man conclusively guilty, then we would prove him innocent.

We did neither. All we ever determined was that there was a
two-year gap in the contractor's younger life during which he had left
behind no paperwork or record of any kind, as though he had eased
sideways into another dimension. We also concluded, with a reasonable
degree of certainty, at least to ourselves, that no else entered or
left that house, besides the father, from the time the contractor
showed up to work and the time he fled the crime scene in the Buick.

It became the kind of case that eventually you close the file
on and hope the right man is in jail. Clete and I were both glad when
we heard that the lower court's decision had been overturned and that a
new trial date was to be set soon. Maybe someone else could prove or
disprove what we could not.

Three days later, a psychotic inmate at Angola, a big stripe,
attacked the contractor with a cane knife and severed his spinal cord
with one blow across the back of the neck. The body was lying in state
at a funeral home in Metairie when the mother and aunts of the murdered
girls burst into the room, screaming hysterically like Shakespearean
hags, and flung bags of urine on the corpse.

For a long time I had a recurrent dream about the contractor.
He awoke in the blackness of his coffin, then realized that tons of
earth had been bulldozed and packed down on top of him. He couldn't
move his shoulders or twist his body against the hard, sculpted silk
contours of the coffin; his screams went no farther than the coffin's
lid, which hovered an inch from his mouth.

As time passed and his nails and eyebrows and hair grew long
and filled the air cavity around him, and he realized that his death
was to be prolonged in ways that no mortal thought imaginable, he began
to plan ways that he could burn himself even more deeply, more
painfully, into our memory.

He would reveal to the rest of us a secret about his soul that
would forever make us think differently about our common origins. With
nails that were yellow and sharp as talons he cut his confession into
the silk liner above him, his mouth red with gloat as he wounded us
once more with a dark knowledge about ourselves.

But those are simply images born of my dreams. Maybe the
contractor was innocent. Or maybe in the murder house he began to enact
a fantasy, tried to lure one of the girls into a seduction, and found
himself involved in a kaleidoscopic nightmare whose consequences filled
him with terror and from which he couldn't extricate himself.

I don't know. Ten months on the firing line in Vietnam, twenty
years in law enforcement, and a long excursion into a nocturnal world
of neon-streaked rain and whiskey-soaked roses have made me no wiser
about human nature than I had been at age eighteen.

But Brother Oswald had made another remark that forced me to
reexamine a basic syllogism that I had been operating on: 'You think
the real problem is y'all don't have no idea of what you're dealing
with?'

I had not been able to find any record anywhere on a man named
Will Buchalter.

Why? Perhaps because that was not his name.

I had assumed from the beginning that Buchalter was not an
alias, that the man who had violated my wife and home was a relative of
Jon Matthew Buchalter, a founder of the Silver Shirts. It was a natural
assumption to make. Would someone choose the name of Hitler or
Mussolini as an alias if he wished to avoid drawing attention to
himself?

Maybe the man who called himself Will Buchalter had thrown me
a real slider and I had swung on it.

It was time to have a talk with Hippo Bimstine again.

But I didn't get the chance. At seven
the next morning I went
to an Al-Anon meeting to get some help for Bootsie that I wasn't
capable of providing myself, then two minutes after I walked into my
office Lucinda Bergeron called from New Orleans.

'Hey, Lucinda. What's up?' I said.

'The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Department just nailed
a mule with a suitcase full of Mexican tar in his trunk. This'll be his
fourth time down. He says he'll do anybody he can for some slack.'

'So?'

'The dope drop's in New Orleans. That's why Baton Rouge called
us. This guy says the tar's going into the projects.'

'I'm still not with you.'

'He says the Calucci brothers are dealing the tar. It looks
like they're making a move on the projects. Anyway, the guy says he can
do them.'

'I doubt it.'

'Why?'

'Max and Bobo always have three or four intermediaries between
themselves and whatever they're in.'

'I had the impression you thought they were connected with
Lonighan and that Lonighan was mixed up with this psychopath who keeps
coming around your house.'

'That's right.'

'So do you have a better lead?'

'Not really.'

'Good. I'll meet you at the jail in two hours. Also, I'm a
little pissed, with you this morning, Mr. Robicheaux.'

'Oh?'

'You can't seem to stay out of other people's business.'

'What is it now?'

'I'll tell you when I see you,' she said, and hung up.

Lucinda really knew how to set the hook. All the way across
the Atchafalaya Basin, on a beautiful, wind-kissed fall day when I
should have been looking at the bays and canals and flooded cypress and
willow trees along I-10, I kept wondering what new bagful of spiders
she
would like to fit over my head.

She met me in the parking lot at the lockup. She wore a pair
of white slacks and a purple-flowered blouse, and her hair was brushed
out full on her shoulders. She had one hand on her hip and a pout on
her face. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist.

'Did you stop for a late breakfast?' she said.

'No, I didn't. I came straight from the office. Get off it,
Lucinda.'

'Get
off
it?'

'Yeah, I'm not up to being somebody's pincushion today.'

'My son is back home. He told me you made some inquiries about
the company I keep.'

'No, I didn't.'

'He said you seemed to take an interest in the fact that I had
a white man at my house.'

'Kids get things turned around. He volunteered that
information on his own.'

'Do you think it should be of some concern to you, sir?'

'No. But one troubling thought did occur to me.'

'Yes?'

'Was it Nate Baxter?'

She looked like a wave of nausea had just swept through her
system.

'Do you stay up all night thinking of things like this to say
to people?' she said.

'I've known him for twenty years. He'll try to coerce a woman
in any way he can. If he hasn't done it to you yet, he will later. He's
a sonofabitch and you know it.'

'That doesn't mean I'd allow him in my house.'

'Okay, Lucinda, I apologize. But I know what he did to some
women in the First District.'

'I'll buy you a cup of coffee later and tell you about Nate
Baxter. In the meantime, our man is waiting on us.'

His name was Waylon Rhodes, from Mount Olive, Alabama; he had
skin the color of putty, hands dotted with jailhouse art, a narrow,
misshapen head, and a wide slit of a mouth, whose lips on one side
looked like they had been pressed flat by a hot iron. His premature
gray hair was grizzled and brushed back into faint ducktails; his eyes
jittered like a speed addict's. Inside his left arm was a long, blue
tattoo of a bayonet or perhaps a sword.

Lucinda and I sat across the wood table from him in the
interrogation room. He smoked one cigarette after another, crumpling up
an empty pack, ripping the cellophane off a fresh one. The backs of his
fingers were yellow with nicotine; his breath was like an ashtray.

'There's no reason to be nervous, partner,' I said.

'Y'all want me to do the Caluccis. That ain't reason to be
nervous?' he said.

'You don't have to do anybody. Not for us, anyway. Your beef's
with the locals,' I said.

'Don't tell me that, man. Y'all got a two-by-four up my ass.'

'Watch your language, please,' I said.

He smoked with his elbow propped on the table, taking one puff
after another, like he was hitting on a reefer, sometimes pressing a
yellow thumb anxiously against his bottom lip and teeth.

'They're dangerous people, man,' he said. 'They tied a guy
down on a table once and cut thirty pounds of meat out of him while he
was still alive.'

'Here's the only deal you're getting today,' Lucinda said. 'We
can pull the plug on this interview any time you want. You say the word
and we're gone. Then you can have visitors from two to four every
Sunday afternoon.'

'What she means, Waylon, is we made a special effort to see
you. If this is all a waste of time, tell us now.'

He mashed out his cigarette and began clenching one hand on
top of the other.
Make him talk about something else
,
I thought.

'Where'd you get the tattoo of the sword?' I said.

'It's a bayonet. I was in the Airborne. Hunnerd and first.'

'Your jacket says you were in the Navy and did time at
Portsmouth brig.'

'Then it's wrong.'

'What can you give us on Max and Bobo?' Lucinda said.

'They're dealing.'

'They're going to be at the drop?' I said.

'Are you kidding?' he said.

'Then how are you going to do them, Waylon?' I said.

He began to chew on the flattened corner of his mouth. His
eyes jittered as if they were being fed by an electrical current.

'A whack's going down. A big one,' he said.

'Yeah?' I said.

'Yeah.'

'Who's getting clipped, Waylon?'

'A couple of guineas were talking in Mobile when I picked up
the dope.'

'You're not being helpful, Waylon,' Lucinda said.

'There's nig… There's black people mixed up in it.
New Orleans is a weird fucking town. What do I know?'

'You'd better know something, partner, or your next jolt's
going to be in the decades,' I said.

'They're going to clip some guy that ain't supposed to be
clipped. That's what these dagos were saying. That's all I know, man.'

'When you think of something else, give us a call,' I said.

He ran his hand through his grizzled hair. His palm was shiny
with sweat.

'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.

'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.

He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he
said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'

'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.