DR07 - Dixie City Jam (8 page)

Flat's eyes went up and down my body. His wife began eating a
Moon Pie, chewing with her mouth or open while she stared idly out the
window at the bayou.

'Looks like you're a hard man to grab holt of,' he said.

'Not really. I was up at the house.'

'Don't like to bother a man in his home.'

'What could I do for you, sir?'

'I belong to the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans.

I make no apology for hit. The town's a commode. But I don't
like what got done to your colored boy.'

'Boy?'

His southern mountain accent grated like piano wire drawn
through a hole punched in a tin can. He took a toothpick from his shirt
pocket, worked it into a back tooth, and measured me again with his
bemused, pale eyes.

'You one of them kind gets his nose up in the air about words
he don't like?' he said.

'Batist is older than I am, Reverend. People hereabouts don't
call him a boy.'

'He probably ain't gonna get much older if you don't take the
beeswax out of your ears. There's something bad going on out yonder. I
don't like hit.' He waved his hand vaguely at the eastern horizon.

'You mean the vigilante?'

'Maybe. Maybe something a whole lot bigger than that.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Things falling apart at the center. I think it's got to do
with the Antichrist.'

'The Antichrist?'

'You got woodpecker holes in your head or something?'

'I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'There's signs and such, the way birds fly around in a dead
sky right before a storm. You had a president with the numbers in his
name.' He puffed out both his cheeks. 'I can tell you're thinking, son.
I can smell the wood
burning.'

'What numbers?'

'Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six-six-six. The Book of Revelation
says hit, you'll know him by the numbers in his name. I think that
time's on us.'

'Could I get y'all anything else?'

'Does somebody have to hit you upside the head with a
two-by-four to get your attention?' he said.

'Stop talking to the man like that, Os,' his wife said,
opening another Moon Pie, her gaze fixed indolently on the willows
bending in the breeze.

'That colored fellow out yonder's innocent,' he said to me.
'These murders, I don't care if hit's dope dealers being killed or not,
they ain't done by somebody on the side of justice. People can pretend
that's the case, but hit ain't so. And that bothers me profoundly.
God's honest truth, son. That's all I come here to tell you.'

'Do you know something about the murders, Reverend?'

'You'll be the first to hear about hit when I do.' His face
was dilated and discolored in the heat, as though it had been slowly
poached in warm water.

After he and his wife drove away in
their flatbed truck, the
exact nature of their mission still a mystery to me, I called up to the
house.

'Hey, Boots, I'm going to Lafayette to talk to a lawyer, then
I have to pick up some ice for the coolers,' I said. 'By the way, that
man in the blue shirt you saw… I think he was just in the
shop. He's a fundamentalist radio preacher. I guess he's trying to do a
good deed of some kind.'

'Why was he staring up at the house?'

'You've got me. He's probably just one of those guys who left
his grits on the stove too long. Anyway, he seems harmless enough.'

If I had only mentioned his name or the fact that he was with
his wife, or that he was elderly, or that he was a southern mountain
transplant. Any one of those things would have made all the difference.

She had just changed into a pair of
shorts and sandals to work
in the garden when he knocked on the front screen door. He wore a blue
cotton short-sleeve shirt and a Panama hat with a flowered band around
the crown. His physique was massive, without a teaspoon of fat on it,
his neck like a tree stump with thick roots at the base that wedged
into his wide shoulders. His neatly creased slacks hung loosely on his
tapered waist and flat stomach.

But his green eyes were shy, and they crinkled when he smiled.
He carried a paper sack under his right arm.

'I wasn't able to give this to your husband, but perhaps I can
give it to you,' he said.

'He'll be home a little later, if you want to come back.'

'I'm sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name's Will
Buchalter. Actually this is for you and the little girl.'

'I'm not quite sure I understand.'

'It's a gift. Some candy.' He slipped the box, which was
wrapped in ribbon and satin paper, partially out of the sack.

'That's very nice of you, I'm sure, but it might be better if
you drop back by when Dave's here.'

'I didn't mean to cause an inconvenience. I'm a little bit
inept sometimes.'

'No, I didn't mean that you were—'

'Could I have a glass of water, please?' He took off his hat.
His fine blond hair was damp in the heat.

Her eyes went past his shoulder to the dock, where she could
see Batist washing fish fillets in a bloody pan.

'Or I can just walk down to the bait shop,' he said.

'No, no, come in. I'll get you one,' she said, and opened the
screen for him. 'Dave said he was talking to you earlier about
something?'

He nodded, his eyes crinkling again, filling with light,
focusing on nothing. When she returned from the kitchen, he was sitting
on the couch, examining two seventy-eight rpm records that he had
removed from the metal racks where I kept my historical jazz collection.

'Oh,' she said. 'Those are quite rare. They have to be handled
very carefully.'

'Yes, I know,' he said. 'This is Benny Goodman's nineteen
thirty-three band. But there's dust along the rim. You see, the open
end of the jacket should always be turned toward the back of the
shelf.' He slipped his large hand inside one of the paper jackets and
slid out the record.

'Please, you shouldn't do that.'

'Don't worry. I have a big collection of my own,' he said.
'Watch my hands. See, I don't touch the grooves. Fingerprints can mar a
record in the same way they cause rust on gun blueing.'

He rubbed the record's rim softly with a piece of Kleenex,
then carefully inserted it back in the paper jacket. He looked up into
Bootsie's face.

'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have handled them,' he said, twisting
sideways and replacing both records on the rack. 'But a shudder goes
through me when I see dust on a beautiful old record. You have some
wonderful ones in your collection. I'd give anything to have those Bix
Beiderbeckes and Bunk Johnsons in mine.'

'Dave's collected them since he was in high school. That's why
I'm a little nervous if somebody picks them up.' She handed him the
glass of water and remained standing.

'Well, I won't take any more of your time. I just wanted to
leave this little gift and introduce myself.' He took a small sip from
the water glass and placed the box of candy on the arm of the couch.
'Before I go, could I show you something? It'd mean a lot to me.'

The hair on his forearms looked golden and soft, like down, in
the shaft of sunlight that fell through the side window. He removed a
silver leather-bound scrapbook from the paper bag and rested it in his
lap.

'It'll only take a minute,' he said.

'I'm a little behind in my work today.'

'Please. Then I won't bother y'all any more.'

'Well, for just a minute,' she said.

She sat down next to him, her legs crossed, her hands folded
on her knee.

'I know that Mr. Bimstine has talked to Dave, but
unfortunately he's sometimes not a truthful man,' he said.

'Bimstine?'

'Yes, Hippo Bimstine. Sometimes he has a way of concealing
what he's really up to. I'm afraid it might just be another racial
characteristic with him and some of his friends.'

'I'm not making the connection. I'm not sure of what you're
doing here, either.'

He patted his palms lightly on the silver leather of the
scrapbook.

'I don't want to say something that's offensive to anyone,' he
said. 'But Mr. Bimstine lies about the causes he serves. I doubt that
he's told your husband he raises money for Israel.'

'You had better come back later and talk to Dave about this.'

'You're misunderstanding me. I didn't come here to criticize
Mr. Bimstine. I just wanted to show you how a hoax can be created.' His
thumb peeled back several stiff pages of the scrapbook to one that
contained two clipped-out newspaper photographs of men in striped
prison uniforms and caps, staring out at the camera from behind barbed
wire. Their faces were gaunt and unshaved, their eyes luminous with
hunger and fear. 'These are supposed to be Jews in a German
extermination camp in nineteen forty-four. But look, Mrs. Robicheaux.'
He flipped to the next page. 'Here are the same photographs as they
appeared in a Polish newspaper in nineteen thirty-one. These were
Polish convicts, not German political prisoners. This is all part of a
hoax that was perpetrated by British Intelligence… I'm sorry.
Have I upset you about something?'

'I mistook you for someone else,' she said rising to her feet.
'I have to go somewhere now.'

'Where?'

'That's not your… Please go now.'

He rose to his feet. His face looked down into hers, only
inches away. For the first time she noticed that there were blackheads,
like a spray of pepper,- at the corners of his eyes.

'I only wanted to help,' he said. 'To bring you and your
husband some information that you didn't have before. You invited me
in.'

'I thought you were someone else,' she repeated. 'It's not
your fault. But I want you to leave.'

'I'd like to help you, if you'd let me.'

'I'm going out the door now. If you don't leave, I'll
call—'

'Who? That black man washing fish? I think you're very tense.
You don't need to stay that way, Mrs. Robicheaux. Believe me.'

'Please get out of my way.'

He rested both of his hands on her shoulders and searched in
her eyes as a lover might. 'How does this feel?' he asked, then
tightened his fingers on her muscles and inched them down her back and
sides, widening his knees slightly, flexing his loins.

'You get away from me. You disgusting—' she said,
his breath, the astringent reek of his deodorant washing over her.

'I wouldn't hurt you in any way. You're a lovely woman, but
your husband is working for Jews. Hush, hush, now, I just want to give
you something to remember our little moment by.'

His arms encircled her waist, locking hand-on-wrist in the
small of her back, tightening until she thought her rib cage would
snap. He bent her backwards, smothering her body with his, then pushed
his tongue deep inside her mouth. He held her a long moment, and as he
did, he clenched her left kidney with one hand, like a machinist's vise
fastening on a green walnut, and squeezed until yellow and red patterns
danced behind her eyes and she felt urine running from her shorts.

She sat cross-legged and weeping against the wall, her face
buried in her hands as he started his red convertible in the drive,
tuned his radio, and backed out into the dirt road, the dappled
sunlight spangling on the waxed finish of his car.

There was no record of a Will
Buchalter with the New Iberia
city police or the sheriffs department or with the state police in
Baton Rouge. No parish or city agency in New Orleans had a record of
him, either, nor did the National Crime Information Center in
Washington, D.C. Nor could Bootsie identify him from any of the mug
shots at the Iberia Parish sheriff's office.

Our fingerprint man lifted almost perfect sets of prints from
the water glass used by the man who called himself Will Buchalter, from
the record jackets he'd touched, and from the box of candy he'd left
behind. But without a suspect in custody or corresponding prints on
file, they were virtually worthless.

There was another problem, too, one that many victims of a
sexual assault discover. Sexual crimes, as they are defined by our
legal system, often fall into arbitrary categories that have nothing to
do with the actual degree of physical pain, humiliation, and emotional
injury perpetrated on the victim. At best we would probably only be
able to charge the man who called himself Will Buchalter with
misdemeanor battery, committed under circumstances that would probably
make a venal defense lawyer lick his teeth.

I called Hippo Bimstine early the next morning, then drove to
New Orleans and met him at his house in the Carrollton district by the
levee. He sat in a stuffed red velvet chair by the front window, which
reached from the floor to the ceiling, and kept fooling with a
cellophane-wrapped cigar that was the diameter of a twenty-five-cent
piece. His hair was wet and freshly combed, parted as neatly as a ruled
line down the center of his head. His lower stomach bulged like a
pillow under his slacks. Hanging on the wall above the mantel was a
gilt-framed photograph of Hippo and his wife and their nine children,
all of whom resembled him.

'How about sitting down, Dave?' he said. 'I don't feel too
comfortable with a guy who acts like he was shot out of a cannon five
minutes ago.'

'He knew you.'

'So do a lot of people. That doesn't mean I know them.'

'Who is he, Hippo?'

'A guy who obviously doesn't like Jews. What else can I tell
you?'

'You'd better stop jerking me around.'

'How about a Dr Pepper or something to eat? Look, you think I
rat-fuck my friends? That's what you're telling me, I set you up for
some lowlife to come in your house and molest your wife?'

'He said you were raising money for Israel.'

'Then he's full of shit. I'm an American businessman. The big
word there is
American
. I care about this city, I
care about this nation. You bring me that Nazi fuck and I'll clip him
for you.'