DR07 - Dixie City Jam (27 page)

The corner of her mouth wrinkled with a smile, exposing a line
of tiny, silver-capped teeth.

Nate Baxter's room was as utilitarian
and plain and devoid of
cheer as his life. It contained no flowers, greeting cards, clusters of
balloons, and certainly no visitors, unless you counted the uniformed
cop on duty at the door.

'You don't look too bad, Nate,' I said. Which wasn't true. His
face was wan, the reddish gold beard along his jawline was matted with
some kind of salve, and stubble had grown out on his cheeks.

He didn't speak; his eyes regarded me carefully.

'I talked with an arson inspector. He said somebody put a
fire-bomb under your bed, probably gasoline and paraffin,' I said.

'You're making that your business, along with everything else
in Orleans Parish?'

'I've got a special interest in Max and Bobo Calucci. I think
you do, too, Nate.'

'What's that mean?'

'You're on a pad.'

'I remember once when you smelled like an unflushed toilet
with whiskey poured in it. Maybe that's why IA busted you out of the
department. Maybe that's why you can't ever get that hard out of your
pants. But I'm not up to trading insults with you. Do me a favor today,
go back home.'

He turned his head on the pillow to reach a drinking glass
filled with Coca-Cola. I could see a tubular, raw-edged lump behind his
right ear.

'I think you tried to up the juice on the Caluccis, Nate. Then
they decided to factor you out of the overhead.'

'It's always the same problem with you, Robicheaux. It's not
what you don't know, it's what you think you know that makes you a
fuckup. No matter where you go, you leave shit prints on the walls.'

'You were asleep, maybe you still had a half a bag on, Pearly
Blue went to the store, somebody sapped you across the head, then he
really lit up your morning.'

'I was in her apartment because she's still my snitch. You
want to give it some other interpretation, nobody's going to be
listening. Why? Because you don't work here anymore. For some reason,
you can't seem to accept that simple fact.' His hand moved toward the
cord and call button that would bring a nurse or the guard at the door.

'You know what denial is, Nate?'

'I breathed a lot of smoke yesterday. I'm not interested in
wetbrain vocabulary right now. Every one of you AA guys thinks you
deserve the Audie Murphy award because you got sober. Here's the news
flash on that. The rest of us have been sober all along. It's not a big
deal in the normal world.'

'A heroin mule in Baton Rouge custody knew about the hit. So
did some greaseballs in Mobile. So did Tommy Lonighan. They're talking
about you like you're already off the board.'

'Get out of here before I place you under arrest.' His hand
went toward the call button again. I moved it out of his reach.

'You're a bad cop, Nate. Somebody should have clicked off your
switch a long time ago.'

I pushed back my seersucker coat and removed my .45 from my
belt holster. His eyes were riveted on mine now.

'You're bad not because you're on a pad; you're bad because
you don't understand that we're supposed to protect the weak,' I said.
'Instead, when you sense weakness in people, you exploit it, you bully
and humiliate them, you've even sodomized and raped them.'

'You've got a terminal case of assholeitis, Robicheaux, but
you're not crazy. So get off it.' He tried to keep the conviction in
his voice, his eyes from dropping to the pistol in my hand.

'I know an AA bunch called the Work the Steps or Die,
Motherfucker group. Some of them are bad dudes, guys who've been on
Camp J up at Angola. They say you've been hitting on Pearly Blue for a
long time. They wanted to do something about it.' I pulled back the
slide on the .45 and eased a round from the magazine into the chamber.
'But I told them I'd take care of it.'

'That gun-threat bullshit is an old ruse of yours. You're
firing in the well. Get out of my room.'

I sat on the edge of his bed.

'You're right, it is,' I said. 'That's why I was going to
shove it down your mouth and let you work toward that conclusion while
you swallowed some of your own blood, Nate… But there's no
need.'

'What are you—'

I released the magazine, ejected the round from the chamber,
and dropped it clinking into his drinking glass.

'She found out this week she's HIV positive,' I said. 'I'd get
some tests as long as I was already in the hospital. But no matter how
you cut it, Nate, Pearly Blue is out of your life. We're clear on that,
aren't we?'

His lips looked gray and cracked, the texture of snakeskin
that has dried in the sun, and the whites of his eyes were laced with
pink blood vessels. The light through the blinds seemed to reflect like
a liquid yellow presence in his incredulous glare. I heard his drinking
glass crash to the floor and the call button clicking rapidly in his
fist as I walked toward the door.

That evening I had to go far down the
bayou in a boat to tow
back a rental whose engine one of our customers had plowed across a
sandbar. It was dark before I finally locked up the bait shop and
walked to the house. Boptsie was asleep, but as soon as I entered the
bedroom I knew how she had spent the last three hours. Her breathing
had filled the room with a thick, sweet odor like flowers soaked
overnight in cream sherry.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the
smooth white curve of her hip in the moonlight. I rubbed my hand along
her rump and thigh; her skin felt heated, flushed, as though she were
experiencing an erotic dream, but it was also insensitive to my touch.

I put my fingers in the thick curls of her hair, kissed her
back, and felt like a fifty-five-year-old adolescent impotently
contending with his own throbbing erection.

I had been saved from my alcoholism by A A. Why did it have to
befall her?

But I already knew the answer. The best way to become a drunk
is to live with one.

What are we going to do, Boots? I thought. Bring the dirty
boogie full tilt into our lives, then do a pit stop five years down the
road and see if the trade-off was worth it?

But somebody else was already working on an answer for me. At
2:00 a.m. I heard the door on my father's old tractor shed, which was
always padlocked, knocking against the jamb in the wind, then I heard
music, a song that was a generation out-of-date, that seemed to float
across wine-dark seas crowded with ships in a time when the lights
almost went out all over the world.

I slipped on my khakis and loafers, took my .45 from under the
bed, and walked with a flashlight along the edge of the coulee to the
shed. I bounced the beam ahead of me on the willows and the weathered
gray sides of the shed, the open door that drifted back and forth on
two rusty hinges, the hasp and padlock that had been splintered loose
from the wood.

Then I clearly heard the words to 'Harbor Lights.'

I clicked off the safety on the .45, flipped back the door
with my foot, and shined the light inside the shed.

In front of my father's old tractor was a butcher block where
we used to dress game. Someone had covered it with white linen that was
almost iridescent in the moonlight burning through the spaces in the
slats. On the tablecloth was a cassette player, a clean china plate
with a blue, long-stemmed rose laid across it, a freshly uncorked
bottle of Jack Daniel's, a glass tumbler filled with four inches of
bourbon, and a sweat-beaded uncapped bottle of Dixie beer on the side.
A crystal goblet of burgundy that was half empty stood in a shaft of
moonlight on the far side of the butcher block. On the rim of the glass
was the perfect lipsticked impression of a woman's mouth.

Before he had been elected to office,
the sheriff had owned a
dry-cleaning business and had been president of the local Rotary Club,
or perhaps it was the Lions, I don't recall which, but it was one of
those businessmen's groups which manage to do a fair amount of civic
good in spite of their unprofessed and real objective.

He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted flowered
teapot while I told him of my 2:00 a.m. visitor. He had a round, cleft
chin, soft cheeks veined with tiny blue and red lines, and a stomach
that pouched over his gunbelt, but his posture was always so erect, his
shirt tucked in so tightly, that he gave you the impression of a man
who was both younger and in better physical condition than he actually
was.

But even though the Rotary or Lions Club still held strong
claim on the sheriff's soul, he often surprised me with a hard-edged
viewpoint that I suspected had its origins in his experience at the
Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, which he refused, under any
circumstances, to discuss with anyone.

'Well, you didn't drink any of it. That's what seems most
important, if you ask me.'

'Some people might call that a pretty cavalier attitude,' I
said.

'It's your call. Write it up, Dave. Bring our fingerprint man
in on it. I don't know what else to say.'

He sat down in his swivel chair behind his desk. He pushed at
his stomach with his stiffened fingers. Then he had another running
start at it.

'Dave, what's it going to sound like when you tell people that
somebody, maybe a woman, did a B and E on you so she could cover your
butcher block with a tablecloth and set it with burgundy, cold beer,
and expensive whiskey?'

'It's Buchalter, Sheriff. Or somebody working with him.'

'What was the motive for his house call last night?'

'He doesn't need one. He's a psychopath.'

'That's no help.' He began picking a series of bent paper
clips out of a glass container and throwing them at the waste can.
'Before you came to the department, we had a particularly nasty
homicide case.'
Ping
. 'Maybe you remember it. A
lowlife degenerate named Jerry Dipple raped and then hanged a
four-year-old child.'
Ping
. 'We thought we had
him dead bang. His prints were all over the murder scene, there was a
torn theater ticket in his shirt pocket from the show where he'd
abducted the child, the rope he used was in the bottom of his closet.'
Ping
.
'Guess what? The lamebrain handling the investigation went into
Dipple's house and seized the evidence without a
warrant. Then when he realized he'd screwed up, he put the evidence
back and let his partner find it later.'
Ping
.

'Guess what again? I learned about it and didn't say a thing.
But Dipple's lawyer was a smart greasebag from Lafayette, you know him,
the same guy who was fronting points for a PCB-incinerator outfit last
year, and he found out what the lamebrain and his partner had done.'
Ping
.
'Our case was down the drain and we were about to turn loose a child
killer who had done it before and would do it again. Bad day for the
good guys, Dave.

'Except six months earlier we had raided a trick pad on the
St. Martin line. One of the girls had some photographs of our
lawyer-friend from Lafayette, I'm talking about real Tijuana specials,
you know what I mean? So I invited our friend in and let him have a
look. If he wanted to investigate our practices, we'd let some people
in the state bar association have a peek at his.'
Ping,
ping, ping
.

'Dipple fried. I thought it might bother me. But the night he
rode the bolt I took my grandchildren to the movies and then went home
and slept like a stone.'

'I don't know if I get your point.'

'I'll be honest with you, I don't know what we're dealing with
here. Whatever it is, it's not part of the normal ebb and flow.' He
stopped, ran his fingers through his hair, and kneaded the back of his
neck. 'Look, I think Buchalter is trying to hit you where you're
weakest.'

'Where's that?'

'Booze.'

'A guy like that can't make me drink, Sheriff.'

'I'm not talking about you.' He rubbed one hand on top of the
other, then folded them on the desk blotter and looked me in the face.
'This guy's trying to mess up your family and I think he's doing a good
job of it.'

'That's not a very cool thing to say, Sheriff.'

'Bootsie almost had a DWI yesterday afternoon.'

I felt something sink in my chest.

'Fortunately the right deputy stopped her and let the other
lady drive,' the sheriff said.

The room seemed filled with white sound. I took my sunglasses
out of their leather case, then slipped them back in again. I opened my
mouth behind my fist to clear my ears and looked out the window. Then I
said, 'What other lady?'

'I don't know. Whoever she was with.'

'I'll finish my report now and put it in your box.'

'Don't. The newspaper'll get ahold of it for sure. It's just
what this character wants. Walk outside with me.'

It was warm in the parking lot, and the wind was flattening
the leaves in the oak grove across the street. The sheriff unlocked the
trunk of his car, took out a stiff, blanket-wrapped object, and walked
to my truck with it. He laid the object across the seat of my truck and
flipped the blanket open.

'Some people might tell you to wire up a shotgun to your back
door,' he said. 'The problem is, you'd probably kill an innocent person
first or only wound the sonofabitch breaking into your house, then he'd
sue you and take your property. You know what this is, don't you?'

'An AR-15, the semiauto model of the M-16.'

'It's got a thirty-round magazine in it. Jerry Dipple's in a
prison cemetery and children around here are a lot safer because of it.
Nobody cares how the box score gets written, just as long as the right
numbers are in it.' He tapped down the lock button on the door with the
flat of his fist, closed the door, and looked at his watch. 'Time for
coffee and a doughnut, podna,' he said, and laid his arm across my
shoulders.