DR07 - Dixie City Jam (45 page)

'No, I just haven't been thinking clearly about something,
Tommy. See you around.'

I went by Clete's office on St. Ann in
the Quarter. It was
locked, the blinds drawn, the mailbox inside the brick archway stuffed
with letters. I used a pay phone in Jackson Square to call Ben Motley
at his home.

'Why didn't you tell me Lonighan made a statement yesterday?'
I said.

'It happened late. I don't know how it's going to go down,
anyway… Look, the bottom line is Lonighan implicated himself
and the Indian. Lonighan's already a dead man, and the Indian's a
retard. The interpreter says he'll testify he works for Spiderman if
you want him to. The prosecutor's office isn't calling news
conferences.'

'What's the status on the Caluccis?'

'That's what I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. There isn't
any. We'll see what happens Monday. But we got an old problem, too. The
Caluccis go down, Nate Baxter goes down. He's going to screw up the
investigation any way he can.'

I felt my hand squeeze tightly around the receiver. The
sunlight through the restaurant window was like a splinter of glass in
the eye.

'Cheer up,' he said. 'We're getting there.'

'Purcel's completely off the screen.'

'Cover your own ass for a change. You know how Purcel'll buy
it? He'll catch some kind of incurable clap when he's a hundred and
fifty. Call me Monday.'

I drove up St. Charles to Hippo's
drugstore. He was sitting in
the shade on a collapsible metal chair by the entrance, eating a
spearmint snowball. Two streetcars were stopped at a sunny spot on the
neutral ground, loading and unloading passengers. At first he ignored
me and continued to eat the ice out of the paper cone; then he smiled
and aimed his index finger and thumb at me like a cocked pistol.

'A weird place to sit, Hippo,' I said.

'Not for me. I love New Orleans. Look up and down this
street—the
trees, the old homes, the moss in the wind. There's not another
street like it in the world.' He reached next to him and popped open a
second metal chair. 'Sit down. What can I do for you?'

'You're okay, Hippo.'

'Why not?' His eyes squinted into slits with his smile.

'You know about almost every enterprise on the Gulf Coast,
don't you?'

'Business is like spaghetti… pull on one piece, you
move the whole plate.'

'Let me try a riddle on you. Mobbed-up guys don't torture
cops, do they?'

'Not unless they're planning careers as crab bait.'

'Buchalter's not mobbed-up.'

'That's a breakthrough for you?'

'But what if Buchalter was selling duplicated recordings of
historical jazz, or making blues tapes and screwing the musician on the
copyright?'

'Dubs are in. Some lowlifes tried to get me to retail them in
my drugstores. I don't think there's any big market for historical
jazz, though.'

'Stay with me, Hippo. A guy selling dubs would have to piece
off the action or be connected, right?'

'If he wants to stay in business.'

'So Buchalter's not part of the local action. Where's the
biggest market for old blues and jazz?'

His eyes became thoughtful. 'He's selling it in Europe?'

'I think I've got a shot at him.'

He took another bite out of his cone and sucked his cheeks in.

'You want some backup? From guys with no last names?' he asked.

'Buchalter probably has a recording studio of some kind over
on the Mississippi coast. I can go over there and spend several days
looking through phone books and knocking on doors.'

He nodded without replying.

'Or I can get some help from a friend who has a lot of
connections on the coast.'

'I provide information, then me and my friends get lost,
that's what you're saying?'

'So far we don't have open season on people we don't like,
Hippo.'

He crumpled up the paper cone in his hand, walked to a trash
receptacle, and dropped it in.

'We'll use the phone at my place,' he said.

It didn't take long. He made four phone calls, then a half
hour later a fax came through his machine with a list of addresses on
it. He handed it to me, his sleek, football-shaped head framed by the
corkboard filled with death camp photos behind him.

'There're seven of them, strung out between Bay St. Louis and
Pascagoula,' he said. 'It looks like you get to knock on lots of doors,
anyway.'

I folded the fax and put it in my coat pocket.

'Did you hear about Tommy Bobalouba?' I said.

'He knew he had cancer two years ago. He shouldn't have fooled
around with it.'

'That's kind of rough, Hippo.'

'I'm supposed to weep over mortality? Do you know what's going
on in that mick's head? I win, he loses. But he wants me to know I win
only because he got reamed by the Big C.'

'I saw him just a little while ago. He said you're not a bad
guy. He wanted you to know he said that.'

He snipped off the tip of a cigar with a small, sharp tool,
and didn't raise his eyes. He kept sucking his lips as though he had
just eaten a slice of raw lemon rind.

It was three o'clock when I stopped at
Bay St. Louis. The bay
was flat and calm, the long pier off old ninety dotted with fishermen
casting two-handed rods and weighted throw nets into the glaze of
sunlight on the surface; but in the south the sky was stained a
chemical green along the horizon, the clouds low and humped, like torn
black cotton.

The first address was a half block from the beach. The owners
were elderly people who had moved recently from Omaha and had opened a
specialty store that featured Christian books and records. They had
bought the building two years ago from a man who had operated a
recording studio at that address, but he had gone into bankruptcy and
had since died.

I had a telephone number for the next address, which was in
Pass Christian. I called before getting back on the highway; a recorded
voice told me the number was no longer in service.

Thanks, Hippo.

I called his house to ask about the source of his information.
His wife said he had left and she didn't know when he would be back.
Did she know where he was?

'Why do you want to know?' she asked.

'It's a police matter, Mrs. Bimstine.'

'Do you get paid for solving your own problems? Or do you hire
consultants?'

'Did I do something to offend you?'

She paused before she spoke again. 'Somebody called from the
hospital. Tommy Lonighan's in the emergency room. He wanted to see
Hippo.'

'The emergency room? I saw Lonighan just a few hours ago.'

'Before or after he was shot?'

She hung up.

It was starting to rain when I drove into Gulfport to check
the next address. The sky was gray now, and the beach was almost empty.
The tide was out, and the water was green and calm and dented with the
rain, but in the distance you could see a rim of cobalt along the
horizon and, in the swells, the triangular, leathery backs of stingrays
that had been kicked in by a storm.

I was running out of time. It was almost five o'clock, and
many of the stores were closing for the weekend. At an outdoor pay
phone on the beach, I called the 800 number for Federal Express and
asked for the location of the largest Fed Ex station in the area.

There was only one, and it was in Gulfport. The clerk at the
station was young and nervous and kept telling me that I should talk to
his supervisor, who would be back soon..

'It's an easy question. Which of your customers sends the
greatest volume of express packages overseas?' I said.

'I don't feel comfortable with this, Officer. I'm sorry,' he
said, a pained light in his eyes.

'I respect your integrity. But would you feel comfortable if
somebody dies because we have to wait on your supervisor?'

He went into the back and returned with a flat, cardboard
envelope in his hand. He set it on the counter.

'The guy owns a music business in Biloxi,' he said. 'He sends
a lot of stuff to Germany and France.'

'You know this guy?'

'No, sir.' His jawbone flexed against his skin.

'But you know something about him?'

He cleared his throat slightly. 'One of the black drivers said
he'd quit before he'd go back to the guy's store.'

The sender's name on the envelope was William K. Guilbeaux.

Before driving into Biloxi, I called Hippo's house again. This
time
he
answered. There was static on the line,
and the rain was blowing in sheets against the windows of the phone
booth.

'I can't understand you,' I said.

'I'm saying he had a priest with him. You're a Catholic, I
thought you'd appreciate that.'

'Tommy's—'

'He had a priest there, maybe he'll get in a side door up in
heaven. The spaghetti head didn't have that kind of luck, though.'

'What?'

On Saturdays Max and Bobo Calucci
usually had supper, with
their girlfriends and gumballs, at a blue-collar Italian restaurant off
Canal near the New Orleans Country Club. It was a place with
checker-cloth-covered tables, wood-bladed ceiling fans, Chianti served
in wicker-basket bottles, a brass-railed mahogany bar, a TV sports
screen high overhead, and a good-natured bartender who had once played
for the Saints.

An off-duty uniformed police officer stood guard at the front
door. The patrons were family people, and white; they celebrated
birthdays and anniversaries at the restaurant; the mood was always loud
and happy, almost raucous. It was like going through a door into a
festive and carefree New Orleans of forty years ago.

Tommy Lonighan was by himself when he arrived in a rental
stretch limo. Tommy Bobalouba, the stomp-ass kid from Magazine who
could knock his opponent's mouthpiece into the fourth row, stepped out
on the curb with the perfumed and powdered grace of castle Irish. He
looked like an elegant resurrection of the 1940s, in a tailored white
suit with purple pinstripes, a wide scarlet polka-dot tie, oxblood
loafers, his face ruddy with a whiskey flush, his blue eyes as merry as
an elf's. His lavender shirt seemed molded to his powerful physique.

Outside his shirt and under his tie, he wore a gold chain with
what looked like two mismatched metal objects attached to it.

The cop at the door, who was nearing retirement, grinned and
feigned a prizefighter's stance with him. When he walked through the
tables, people shook his hand, pointed him out to each other as a
celebrity; the bartender shouted out, 'Hey, Tommy, Riddick Bowe was
just in here looking for you! He needs some pointers!'

Tommy sipped a whiskey sour at the bar, with one polished
loafer on the rail, his smile always in place, his face turned toward
the crowd, as though the collective din that rose from it was an
extension of the adulation that had rolled over him in a validating
crescendo many years ago, when thousands in a sweaty auditorium
chanted, 'Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im,
Bobalouba!'

He gazed at the Caluccis' table with goodwill, bought a round
for the bar, dotted a shrimp cocktail with Tabasco sauce, and ate it
with a spoon like ice cream.

Then one of Max's people, a pale, lithe Neapolitan hood named
Sal Palacio, walked up to him, his palms open, a question mark in the
center of his face.

'We got a problem, Tommy?' he said.

'Not with me you don't,' Tommy answered, his dentures showing
stiffly with his smile.

'Because Max and Bobo are wondering what you're doing here,
since it ain't your regular place, you hear what I'm saying?'

Tommy looked at a spot on the wall, his eyelids fluttering. 'I
need a passport in New Orleans these days?' he said.

'They said to tell you they got no hard feelings. They're
sorry things ain't worked out, they're sorry you're sick, they don't
want people holding no grudges.'

Tommy cocked his fists playfully; Sal's face popped like a
rubber band.

'Man, don't do that,' he said.

'Take it easy, kid,' Tommy said, brushing Sal's stomach with
his knuckles. 'You want a drink?'

'I got to ask you to walk into the washroom with me.'

'Hey, get this kid,' Tommy said to the people standing around
him. 'Sal, you don't got a girlfriend?'

'It ain't funny, Tommy.'

Tommy pulled back his coat lapels, lifted his coattails,
slapped his pockets, turned in a circle.

'Sal, you want to put your hand in my crotch?' he asked.

'You're a fucking lunatic,' he answered, and walked away.

But the Caluccis were becoming more and more nervous,
self-conscious, convinced that each time Lonighan spoke into a cluster
of people at the bar and they laughed uproariously, the Caluccis were
the butt of the joke.

Max stood up from his chair, a bread stick in one hand, a
pitcher of sangria in the other, working his neck against the starch in
his collar.

'Hey, Tommy,' he said, over the heads of people at the other
tables. 'You don't want to have a drink with your friends, you crazy
guy?'

Tommy walked toward the Calucci table, still smiling, a
dream-like luster in his eyes, his cheeks glowing from a fresh shave.
He patted Max on the shoulders, pressed him into his chair, bent down
and whispered in his ear, as though he were confiding in an old friend.

Few people noticed Tommy's left hand biting into the back of
Max's neck or the charged and fearful light in Max's eyes, or Tommy
raising his right knee and slipping a .38 one inch from the cloth
holster strapped to his calf.

Then the conversation at the other tables died; people stopped
eating and became immobile in their chairs, as though they were part of
a film winding down on a reel; waiters set down their trays and
remained motionless in the aisles. Tommy pushed Max's face into his
plate as though he were bending the tension out of a spring.