DR07 - Dixie City Jam (6 page)

Then she walked into the house and let the screen slam behind
her.

I hosed down some boats at the dock,
cleaned off the
telephone-spool tables after the lunch crowd had left, then finally
gave in and used the phone in the bait shop to return Lucinda
Bergeron's call. I was told she had gone home sick for the day, and I
didn't bother to leave my name. Then I called three criminal attorneys
in Lafayette and two in New Orleans. Their fees ran from eighty to one
hundred and fifty dollars an hour, with no guarantees of anything.

'You all right, Dave?' Alafair said. She sat on a tall stool
behind the cash register, her Houston Astros cap on sideways, her red
tennis shoes swinging above the floor. Her skin was dark brown, her
Indian black hair filled with lights like a raven's wing.

'Everything's copacetic, little guy,' I said. Through the
screened windows the sun looked like a wobbling yellow flame on the
bayou. I wiped the perspiration off my face with a damp counter towel
and threw the towel in a corner.

'You worried about money or something?'

'It's just a temporary thing. Let's have a fried pie, Alf.'

'Batist is in some kind of trouble, Dave?'

'A little bit. But we'll get him out of it.' I winked at her,
but the cloud didn't go out of her face. It had been seven years since
I had pulled her from the submerged wreck of an airplane carrying
illegal refugees from El Salvador. She had forgotten her own language
(although she could understand most words in Cajun French without
having been taught them), and she no longer had nightmares about the
day the soldiers came to her village and created an object lesson with
machetes and a pregnant woman in front of the medical clinic; but when
she sensed difficulty or discord of any kind in our home, her brown
eyes would immediately become troubled and focus on some dark concern
inside herself, as though she were about to witness the re-creation of
a terrible image that had been waiting patiently to come aborning again.

'You have to trust me when I tell you not to worry about
things, Squanto,' I said.

Then she surprised me.

'Dave, do you think you should be calling me all those baby
names? I'm twelve years old.'

'I'm sorry, Alf.'

'It's all right. Some people just might not understand. They
might think it's dumb or that you're treating me like a little kid or
something.'

'Well, I won't do it anymore. How's that?'

'Don't worry about it. I just thought I ought to tell you.'

'Okay, Alf. Thanks for letting me know.'

She punched around on the keys of the cash register while
blowing her breath up into her bangs. Then I saw her eyes go past me
and focus somewhere out on the dock.

'Dave, there's a black woman out there with a gas can. Dave,
she's got a pistol in her back pocket.'

I turned and looked out into the shade of the canvas awning
that covered the dock. It was Lucinda Bergeron, in a pair of faded
Levi's that barely clung to her thin hips, Adidas tennis shoes, and a
white, sweat-streaked T-shirt with the purple-and-gold head of Mike the
Tiger on it. She wore her badge clipped on her beltless waistband; a
chrome snub-nosed revolver in an abbreviated leather holster protruded
from her back pocket.

Her face was filmed and gray, and she wiped at her eyes with
one sleeve before she came through the screen door.

'Are you okay?' I said.

'May I use your rest room?' she said.

'Sure, it's right behind the coolers,' I said, and pointed
toward the rear of the shop.

A moment later I heard the toilet flush and water running,
then she came back out, breathing through her mouth, a crumpled wet
paper towel in one hand.

'Do you sell mouthwash or mints?' she said.

I put a roll of Life Savers on top of the counter. Then I
opened up a can of Coca-Cola and set it in front of her.

'It settles the stomach,' I said.

'I've got to get something straight with you.'

'How's that?'

She drank out of the Coke can. Her face looked dusty and wan,
her eyes barely able to concentrate.

'You think I'm chickenshit,' she said.

'You were in a tough spot.'

'But you still think I'm chickenshit, don't you?'

'I know you're not feeling well, but I'd appreciate it if you
didn't use profanity in front of my daughter.'

'Excuse me. Did you have a reason for not returning my phone
calls?'

'When I called back, you were already gone. Look, Sergeant, I
appreciate your coming down here, particularly when you're sick. But
you don't owe me anything.'

'You've decided that?'

I let out my breath. 'What can I say? It's not my intention to
have an argument with you.'

'You sell gas? I ran out down the road. My gauge is broken.'
She clanked the gasoline can on the counter.

'Yeah, I've got a pump for the boats at the end of the dock.'

'Your friend, the black man, Batist Perry, they're sticking it
to him. Nate Baxter held some information back from you.'

'Alafair, how about telling Bootsie we'll go to Mulate's for
supper tonight?'

She made an exasperated face, climbed down from the stool,
unhitched Tripod, her three-legged pet raccoon, from his chain by the
door, and went up the dock toward the house with Tripod looking back at
me over her shoulder.

'The murdered man had his heart cut out,' Lucinda Bergeron
said. 'But so did three other homicide victims in the last four months.
Even one who was pitched off a roof. He didn't tell you that, did he?'

'No, he didn't.'

'The press doesn't know about it, either. The city's trying to
sit on it so they don't scare all the tourists out of town. Baxter
thinks it's Satanists. Your friend just happened to stumble into the
middle of the investigation.'

'Satanists?'

'You don't buy it?'

'It seems they always turn out to be meltdowns who end up on
right-wing religious shows. Maybe it's just coincidence.'

'If I were you, I'd start proving my friend was nowhere near
New Orleans when those other homicides were committed. I've got to sit
down. I think I'm going to be sick again.'

I came around from behind the counter and walked her to a
chair and table. Her back felt like iron under my hands. She took her
revolver out of her back pocket, clunked it on the table, and leaned
forward with her forearms propped on her thighs. Her hair was thick and
white on the ends, her neck oily with sweat. Two white fishermen whom I
didn't know started through the door, then turned and went back outside.

'I'll be right with y'all,' I called through the screen.

'Like hell you will,' I heard one of them say as they walked
back toward their cars.

'I'll drive you back to New Orleans. I think maybe you've got
a bad case of stomach flu,' I said to Lucinda.

'Just fill my gas can for me. I'll be all right in a little
bit.' She took a crumpled five-dollar bill from her Levi's and put it
on the tabletop.

'I have to go back for my truck, anyway. It's at a dock down
by Barataria Bay. Let's don't argue about it.'

But she wasn't capable of arguing about anything. Her breath
was rife with bile, her elongated turquoise eyes rheumy and listless,
the back of her white T-shirt glued against her black skin. When I
patted her on the shoulder, I could feel the bone like coat hanger wire
against the cloth. I could only guess at what it had been like for her
at the NOPD training academy when a peckerwood drill instructor decided
to turn up the butane.

I carried the gas can down to her Toyota, got it started,
filled the tank up at the dock, and drove her to New Orleans. She lived
right off Magazine in a one-story white frame house with a green roof,
a small yard, and a gallery that was hung with potted plants and
overgrown with purple trumpet vine. Around the corner, on Magazine, was
a two-story bar with a colonnade and neon Dixie beer signs in the
windows; you could hear the jukebox roaring through the open front door.

'I should drive you out to the boatyard,' she said.

'I can take a cab.'

She saw my eyes look up and down her street and linger on the
intersection.

'You know this neighborhood?'

'Sure. I worked it when I was a patrolman. Years ago that bar
on the corner was a hot-pillow joint.'

'I know. My auntie used to hook there. It's a shooting gallery
now,' she said, and walked inside to call me a cab.

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

It was late evening after I picked up
my truck down in
Barataria and drove back into the city. I called Clete at his apartment
in the Quarter.

'Hey, noble mon,' he said. 'I called you at your house this
afternoon.'

'What's up?'

'Oh, it probably doesn't amount to much. What are you doing
back in the Big Sleazy, mon?'

'I need some help on these vigilante killings. I'm not going
to get it from NOPD.'

'Lose this vigilante stuff, Dave. It's a shuck, believe me.'

'Have you heard about some guys having their hearts cut out?'

He laughed. 'That's a new one. Where'd you get that?' he said.

'Lucinda Bergeron.'

'You've been out of Homicide too long, Streak. When they
cancel them out, it's for money, sex, or power. This vampire or ghoul
bullshit is out of comic books. Hey, I got another revelation for you.
I think that Bergeron broad has got a few frayed wires in her head. Did
she tell you she went up to Angola to watch a guy fry?'

'No.'

'It probably just slipped her mind. Most of your normals like
to watch a guy ride the bolt once in a while.'

'Why'd you call the house?'

'I'm hearing this weird story about you and a Nazi submarine.'

'From where?'

'Look, Martina's over here. I promised to take her to this
blues joint up on Napoleon. Join us, then we'll get some
étouffée at
Monroe's. You've got to do it, mon, it's not up for discussion. Then
I'll fill you in on how you've become a subject of conversation with
Tommy Blue Eyes.'

'Tommy Lonighan?'

'You got it, Tommy Bobalouba himself, the only mick I ever met
who says his own kind are niggers turned inside out.'

'The Tommy Lonighan I remember drowned a guy with a fire hose,
Clete.'

'So who's perfect? Let me give you directions up on Napoleon.
By the way, Bootsie seemed a little remote when I called. Did I spit in
the soup or something?'

The nightclub up on Napoleon was
crowded, the noise deafening,
and I couldn't see Clete at any of the tables. Then I realized that an
exceptional event had just taken place up on the bandstand. The Fat
Man, the most famous rhythm and blues musician ever produced by New
Orleans, had pulled up in front in his pink Cadillac limo, and like a
messiah returning to his followers, his sequined white coat and coal
black skin almost glowing with an electric purple sheen, had walked
straight through the parting crowd to the piano, grinning and nodding,
his walrus face beaming with goodwill and an innocent
self-satisfaction, and had started hammering out 'When the Saints Go
Marching In.'

The place went wild.

Then I realized that another event was taking place
simultaneously on the dance floor, one that probably not even New
Orleans was prepared for—Clete Purcel and his girlfriend
doing the
dirty boogie.

While the Fat Man's ringed, sausage fingers danced up and down
on the piano keys and the saxophones and trumpets blared behind him,
Clete was bopping in the middle of the hardwood floor, his porkpie hat
slanted forward on his head, his face pointed between his girlfriend's
breasts, his buttocks swinging like an elephant's; then a moment later
his shoulders were erect while he bumped and ground his loins, his
belly jiggling, his balled fists churning the air, his face turned
sideways as though he were in the midst of orgasm.

His girlfriend was over six feet tall and wore a flowered
sundress that fit her tanned body like sealskin. She waved bandannas in
each hand as though she were on a runway, kicking her waxed calves at
an angle behind her, lifting her chin into the air while her eyelids
drifted shut and she rotated her tongue slowly around her lips. Then
she let her mouth hang open in a feigned pout, pushed her reddish brown
hair over the top of her head with both hands, flipped it back into
place with an erotic challenge in her eyes, and rubbed a stretched
bandanna back and forth across her rump while she oscillated her hips.

At first the other dancers pulled back in awe or shock or
perhaps even in respect; then they began to leave the dance floor two
at a time and finally in large numbers after Clete backed with his full
weight into another dancer and sent him careening into a drink waiter.

The Fat Man finished, wiped his sweating face at the
microphone with an immaculate white handkerchief, and thanked the crowd
for their ongoing roar of applause. I followed Clete and his girl to
their table, which was covered with newspaper, beer bottles, and dirty
paper plates that had contained potatoes French-fried in chicken fat.
Clete's face was bright and happy with alcohol, and the seams of his
Hawaiian shirt were split at both shoulders.

'Martina, this is the guy I've been telling you about,' he
said. 'My ole bust-'em or smoke-'em podjo.'

'How about giving that stuff a break, Clete?' I said.

'I'm very pleased to meet you,' she said.

Her face was pretty in a rough way, her skin coarse and
grained under the makeup as though she had worked outdoors in sun and
wind rather than on a burlesque stage.

'Clete's told me about how highly educated you are and so well
read and all,' she said.

'He exaggerates sometimes.'

'No, he doesn't,' she said. 'He's very genuine and sincere and
he feels very deeply for you.'