DR07 - Dixie City Jam (43 page)

She came before I did, her breasts and nipples hard between
her stiffened arms, her mouth wide, her hair curled damply on her
cheeks. Then I felt it build and crest inside me, my loins dissolving
like a hot ember burning through parchment. A sound unlike my own voice
rose from my throat, and I pulled her close against me, my face buried
in her hair, my mouth pressed like a hungry child's against her ear,
while outside mockingbirds lifted clattering into the lavender sky.

I had believed that my will alone could solve the problem in
our lives. As I lay beside her on top of the sheets, I realized that,
as usual, I was wrong. But at a moment like that, who cares where gifts
come from?

At five the next morning Clete Purcel
knocked on my back
screen. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of baggy safari
shorts covered with snap-button pockets, his porkpie hat, and a
sleeveless purple and gold Mike the Tiger jersey wash-faded to the
thinness of cheesecloth. His face was unshaved and bright with fresh
sunburn.

'You're not going to dime me, are you, Streak?'

'What do I know about warrants in Orleans Parish?' I stepped
outside into the blue coolness of the morning and eased the screen shut
behind me. 'Bootsie and Alf are still asleep. Let's walk down to the
dock.'

We went down the slope through the deep shadow of the trees,
stepping over the trip wire I had strung for Buchalter. Clete kept
cracking his knuckles, as though they were big walnut shells. His eyes
were red and irritated along the rims, as though he were hungover, but
I could smell no alcohol on him.

'You look like you're getting a lot of sun,' I said.

'Why not? Life in the Quarter was turning me into a fat slug,
anyway.'

Inside the shop I poured coffee and hot milk for both of us,
and we took it out on one of the spool tables by the water. He
unsnapped a pocket on his shorts and unfolded a nautical chart on the
table.

'Can you show me where that sub is?' His eyes looked at the
chart and not at me.

'What are you up to?'

'What do you care?'

'You look wired, Clete. What's wrong?'

'I've got a warrant on me, my business is in the toilet, Nate
Baxter's trained shitheads'll probably try to smoke me on sight, and
you ask what's wrong?'

I smoothed the chart flat with my palm. The marsh was emerald
green after last night's rain, and the cypress knees along the bayous
were grained and dark and shining with water from a passing boat's wake.

'Don't get in any deeper,' I said.

'In for a penny, in for a pound. You going to show me where it
is or not?' He lit an unfiltered cigarette and flicked the match hard
into the air.

I took a mechanical pencil from my shirt pocket and made three
marks on the chart.

'These are the places where either I saw it or Hippo's friend
pinged it. You can see the pattern. There's probably a trench that
bleeds back off the continental shelf. A guy with a depth finder could
set up a zigzag pattern and probably locate it. Unless it drops off the
shelf and only gets blown back in by a storm.'

He stared down at the chart, his hat cocked over one eye.

'What are you going to do?' I asked.

'Maybe I should remodel it with some C-4.'

'Is the preacher mixed up in this?'

'Not yet. But he was sure beautiful on the radio last night,
you know, that call-in show where the geek in the street gets to
express his opinion. Brother Oswald is telling people the Beast is
about to rise from the sea.' He looked at me and tried to smile. 'Maybe
he's talking about my ex.'

'What are you hiding from me, partner?'

He arched his cigarette out on the bayou and watched it hiss
in the water and float downstream.

'I've got to quit this. My lungs feel like they've got battery
acid in them,' he said.

'What's the gig, Clete?'

'I got to boogie, noble mon,' he said.

'Eat some breakfast.'

'Got to make it happen, Streak. Like you used to say, miles
before I sleep and all that stuff. Hang loose.'

'How's Martina?'

He walked toward his convertible without answering, then
turned, winked, and gave me the thumbs-up sign.

Just before noon, Ben Motley called me
at the office.

'We got the trowel,' he said.

'Go on…'

'The blade was clean, but there was dried blood in a crack
between the handle and the shaft. The lab says it's human.'

'What else?'

'Two types. One match. With a guy who had his heart taken out
against the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery.'

'Why not two matches?'

'You're assuming we've found all the victims.'

'Where's Manuel?'

'In custody… This one doesn't make me feel too good,
Robicheaux. The guy's got strained carrots for brains. The interpreter
says he speaks some Indian dialect from down in the fucking Amazon.'

'You think it's too easy?'

'I think maybe we're talking patsy here. Hey, Lonighan's a
prick but he was genuinely upset, like in a personal way, when he found
out we were charging the kid with murder. Does that sound like Tommy
Bobalouba to you?'

Not bad, Mots, I thought.

'Have you had any contact with Clete Purcel?' I said.

'Who?'

'He found a videotape on South American Indians, a documentary
of some kind, in Max Calucci's house.'

'There's static on the line. I couldn't hear what you said.
You got me? I didn't fucking hear that, Robicheaux.'

'Lonighan borrowed two hundred thou for his casino from the
Calucci brothers. I have a feeling he was paying the debt by helping
them set up the brown scag trade in the projects.'

'You tell Purcel he tries to put turds in the punch bowl on
this one, he won't have to worry about Nate Baxter. I'll send his butt
to Angola myself.'

'Rough words, Mots.'

'What you don't understand is Purcel doesn't take a guy down
because the guy broke the law. He takes him down because he doesn't
like the guy. That's why he'll never carry a shield again.'

'How do you think the case against the Indian is going to
stand up?'

'Circumstantial evidence, a retard on the stand, a defense
attorney who lets the jury know the retard is a grunt for a rich
gangster who actually drowned somebody with a fire hose and got away
with it. Take a guess how the jury might vote.'

'Thanks for all the good news.'

'It's not all bad. The word on the street is Lonighan's dying.'

'For some reason that doesn't fill me with joy, partner.'

'Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis and the dope trade in
the projects. Those black kids we bust all the time, they weren't
addicts when they came out of their mamas' womb. Believe it or not,
even those dead dealers had families, Robicheaux.'

Why argue with charity? I eased the receiver down in the
cradle and stared out i the window at the palm trees rattling in the
wind. The bottom of the sky looked green over the gulf.

What was Clete Purcel doing?

I went home for lunch. When I came
back the sheriff stopped me
at the watercooler.

'The FBI just relayed some stuff to us from Interpol. They've
got a fix on the woman,' he said.

'What?'

'Read it. It's on your desk. I thought stuff like that only
went on in the Barker family.' He walked away and left me staring after
him.

The statement from Interpol consisted of four paragraphs.
There was nothing statistical or demonstrable about the information in
them. As with all the other documents in the case, it was as though the
writer were trying to describe an elusive presence that had been
mirrored only briefly in the eyes of others.

But the images he used weren't those of the ordinary technical
writer; they remained in the memory like splinters under the skin.

Two undercover antiterrorist agents in Berlin believed that
the man known as William Buchalter and Willie Schwert and other
variations operated inside a half dozen neo-Nazi groups with a half
sister named Marie. A skinhead in a beer garden told a story of an
initiation into a select inner group known in England and the United
States as the Sword. A kidnapped Turkish laborer had knelt trembling on
the dirt floor of a potato cellar, his wrists wired behind him, a
burlap sack pulled over his face, while the initiates pledged their
lives to the new movement. Then the woman named Marie had set the
kidnapped man on fire.

I opened and closed my mouth, as though my ears were popping
from cabin pressure in an airplane, and continued to read. The details
in the last paragraph gave another dimension to the sweaty, hoarse
voices that I had heard over the telephone.

The sheriff stood in my doorway with a coffee cup in his hand.

'You think that's our phony nun?' he said.

'Yeah, I do.'

'You believe that stuff at the end of the page?'

'They're perverse people. Why should anything they do be a
surprise?'

'Did you know Ma Barker and one of her sons were incestuous?
They committed suicide by machine-gunning each other. They were even
buried together in the same casket, to keep the tradition intact.
That's a fact.'

'Interesting stuff,' I said.

'You've got to have some fun with it or you go crazy. I got to
tell you that?'

'No, you're right.'

He walked over and squeezed me on the shoulder. I could smell
his leather gunbelt and pipe tobacco in his clothes.

'You sleeping all right at night?' he said.

'You bet.'

He grunted under his breath.

'That's funny, I don't. Well, maybe we'll drop that pair in
their own box. Who knows?' he said.

He walked his fingernails across my desk and went back out the
door.

The best lead on Buchalter, the only one, really, was still
music.

Brother Oswald Flat, I thought.

I got his telephone number from long-distance information.

'Didn't you say you played with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny
Mountain Boys?' I asked.

'What about hit?'

'Did you ever have any connection with jazz or blues
musicians?'

'Son, I like you. I really do. But a conversation with you is
like trying to teach someone the recipe for ice water.'

'I'm afraid I'm not following you.'

'That's the point. You never do.'

'I'll try to listen carefully, sir, if you can be patient with
me.'

'Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church. Hit
don't matter which room you're in, long as you're in the building. You
with me?'

'You know some jazz musicians?'

'I'll have a go at hit from a different angle,' he said. 'I
used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who
else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny
Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?'

'I think Will Buchalter has some kind of involvement with
historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is.'

The phone was silent.

'Reverend?'

'Why didn't you spit hit out?'

This time I didn't answer. His voice had changed when he spoke
again.

'I won't interrupt you or insult you again,' he said.

I recounted the most recent late-night phone call, with
Beiderbecke's 'In a Mist' playing in the background; Buchalter's
knowledge of early Benny Goodman and the proper way to handle old
seventy-eights; the Bunk Johnson record that someone had left playing
on my phonograph.

'You impress me, son. You
know
,' Oswald
Flat said.

Again, I was silent.

'An evil man cain't love music,' he said. 'He's interested in
hit for some other reason.'

'I think you're right.'

'There's a band plays on Royal Street. I mean, out in the
street, when the cops put the barricades up and close off the traffic.
They got a piano on a truck, a Chinese kid playing harmonica, some
horns, a colored, I mean a black, man on slide guitar. The black man
comes to my church sometimes. But he don't live in New Orleans. He's in
Morgan City.'

'Yes?'

'If I call and see if he's home, can you meet me there in a
couple of hours?'

'I think you'd better clarify yourself.'

'That's all you get. Holler till your face looks like an
eggplant.'

'This is part of a police investigation, Reverend. You don't
write the rules.'

'He's been in the penitentiary. He won't talk to you unless
I'm there. You want my he'p or not?'

The black man's name was Jesse Viator,
and he lived in a
dented green trailer set up on concrete blocks thirty feet from the
bayou's edge. He had only three teeth in his mouth, and they protruded
from his gums like the hooked teeth in the mouth of a barracuda. We sat
on old movie theater seats that he had propped up on railroad ties in
his small, tidy backyard. A shrimp boat passed with its lights on, and
near the far bank swallows were swooping above an oil barge that had
rusted into a flooded shell.

Jesse Viator was not comfortable in the presence of a police
officer.

'You remember that man you told me about, the one wanted you
to record, the fellow you said bothered you the way he looked at you?'
Brother Oswald said.

'Yeah, dude was up to no good,' he said.

'Why did you think that?' I asked. I smiled.

'Some people got their sign hanging out,' he answered. He
pulled at the soft flesh under his chin and looked out at the bayou.

'Why was he up to no good, Jesse?' I said.

'Dude didn't say nothing mean. He was polite. But it was like
there was heat in his face,' Viator said. 'Like a dry pan been setting
on the gas burner.'

I showed him the composite drawing of Buchalter. He held it in
the light from his trailer and studied it. His grizzled pate shone like
tan wax.