DR07 - Dixie City Jam (13 page)

'Suit yourself. I remember now, you always did drink down.'

'Thanks, Motley.'

Then I called the Reverend Oswald Flat and asked what I could
do for him.

'Hit's about this man killed hisself in custody,' he said.

'Why would you call me?'

'Because you cain't seem to keep your tallywhacker out of the
hay baler.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'You disturb me. I think there's people fixing to do you some
harm, but you have a way of not hearing me. Is there a cinder block up
there between your ears?'

'Reverend, I'd appreciate it if you'd—'

'All right, son, I'll try not to offend you anymore. Now, get
your nose out of the air and listen to me a minute. I do counseling
with prisoners. I bring 'em my Faith Made Easy tapes. I tried to
counsel this crazy man they brought in there with tattoos on his head
and a stink you'd have to carry on the end of a dung fork—'
He stopped, as though his words had outpaced his thoughts.

'What is it?' I said.

'Hit wasn't a good moment. No, sir, hit surely wasn't. I
looked into his eyes, and if that man had a soul, I believe demons had
already claimed hit.'

'He was shooting up with speed and paint thinner, Reverend.'

'That may be. Your kind always got a scientific explanation.
Anyway, I taped what he said. I want you to hear hit.'

I asked him to meet Clete and me down at Motley's office. He
said he'd be there, but he didn't reply when I said good-bye and
started to hang up.

'Is there something else?' I said.

'No, not really. Maybe like you say, he was just a man who
filled his veins with chemicals. I just never had a fellow, not even
the worst of them, claw at my eyes and spit in my face before.'

Oswald Flat was wearing a rain-spotted
seersucker suit, a
clip-on bow tie, white athletic socks with black shoes, and his cork
sun helmet when he came through the squad room at district headquarters
and sat on a wood bench next to me and Clete. He carried a small black
plastic tape recorder in his hand. He blew out his breath and wiped his
rimless glasses on his coat sleeve.

At the other end of the room we could see Motley through the
glass of Nate Baxter's office. Motley was standing; he and Baxter were
arguing.

'You want to hear hit?' Oswald Flat said, resting the recorder
on his thigh. The side of his face wrinkled, as though he were
reluctant to go ahead with his own purpose.

'That'd be fine, Reverend,' I said.

When he pushed the Play button I could hear all the noises
that are endemic to jailhouses everywhere: steel doors clanging, radios
blaring, a water bucket being scraped along a concrete floor,
cacophonous and sometimes deranged voices echoing through long
corridors. Then I heard the man's voice—like words being
released
from an emotional knot, the syntax incoherent, the rage and hateful
obsession like a quivering, heated wire.

'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you
got—' he was saying when Motley came out of Baxter's office
and Oswald Flat clicked off the recorder.

'Movie time,' Motley said, scratching at the side of his
mustache.

'What's Nate Baxter on the rag about?' Clete said.

'What do you think, Purcel? He's just real glad to see you
guys down here again,' Motley said.

'Get him transferred back to Vice. At least he could get laid
once in a while,' Clete said. He looked at the expression on my face.
'You think I'm kidding? The transvestites in the Quarter really dug the
guy.'

The four of us went inside Motley's office. He closed the door
behind us and inserted a videocassette into a VCR unit.

'The guy's name was Jack Pelley,' Motley said. 'He had a
dishonorable discharge from the Crotch for rolling queers in San Diego,
priors in New Orleans for statutory rape and possession of child
pornography. One federal beef for possession of stolen explosives. From
what we can tell, he became an addict in the joint, muled tar for both
the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia while he was inside, then
jumped his parole about three years ago.'

'How'd he get picked up?' I said.

'He locked himself in a filling station rest room on
Carrollton and wouldn't let anybody else in. When the owner opened the
door, Pelley had his leathers down over his knees and was shooting into
his thigh with a spike made out of an eyedropper. The Ruger was sitting
on top of the toilet tank.'

'How far away was he from Hippo Bimstine's house?' I said.

'About two blocks,' Motley said. 'His pockets were full of
rainbows, blues, purple hearts, leapers, you name it. I think somebody
gave him the whole candy store to fuck up Bimstine's day.' He glanced
at Oswald Flat. 'Sorry, Reverend.'

'Get on with hit,' Flat said.

Motley dropped the blinds on his office glass, turned off the
overhead light, and started the VCR.

'The arresting officers put him in the tank,' Motley said. 'In
five minutes half the guys in there were yelling through the bars at
the booking room officer to move him to a holding cell. The guy had
five-alarm gorilla armpit odor. Anyway, we messed up. We should have
transferred him to a psychiatric unit.'

The film, made without sound by a security camera, was in
black and white and of low grade, the images stark in their contrast,
like those in booking room photography. But the tortured travail of a
driven man, flailing above a self-created abyss, was clearly obvious.
Like those of most speed addicts, his body was wasted, the skin of his
face drawn back tightly over the bone, the eyes sunken into skeletal
sockets. His head looked like it had been razor-shaved and the hair had
grown out in a thin gray patina, the color of rat's fur, below a wide
bald area. Beginning at the crown of his skull, right across the pate,
was a tattoo of a sword, flanged by lightning bolts.

He paced about maniacally, urinated all over the toilet stool,
banged with his fists on the bars, whipped at the walls with his
leather jacket, then began slamming the iron bunk up and down on its
suspension chains.

'This is where we blew it big-time,' Motley said. 'That cell
should have been shook down when the last guy went out of it.'

The man in custody, Jack Pelley, raised the bunk one final
time and crashed it down on its chains, then stared down at a piece of
electrical cord that had fallen out on the concrete floor. He picked it
up in both hands, stared at it, then began idly picking at the tape and
wire coil that were wrapped on the end of it.

'What do you call them things?' Flat said.

'A stinger,' Motley said. He paused the VCR. 'It's like a
home-made hot plate. Except our man here has got other plans for it.
You sure you want to watch this, Reverend?'

'You got something on that tape worse than Saipan?' Flat
answered.

Motley took a Baby Ruth out of his desk drawer, started the
film again, sat on the corner of his desk, and peeled the wrapper off
his candy bar while he watched the television screen.

Jack Pelley splashed water from the toilet bowl onto the
cement floor of the cell, peeled off his leather trousers, flattened
his skinny buttocks into the middle of the puddle, inserted the
stinger's coil into his mouth, sank one hand into the toilet, then
calmly fitted the other end of the stinger into a wall socket.

His head snapped back once, as though he had just mainlined a
hot shot; his eyes widened, one arm trembled slightly inside the toilet
bowl; his lips seemed to curl back momentarily from his clenched teeth,
then his jaw fell open like that of someone experiencing an unexpected
moment of ecstasy. Then he slumped against the stool, his head on his
chest, as though he had tired of a wearisome journey and had simply
gone to sleep.

'The ME said the shock shouldn't have killed him by itself,'
Motley said. 'But he'd probably hyped eight or nine times in the
twenty-four hours before he got busted. The ME said his heart looked
like a muskmelon.'

'Have you got any registration on the Ruger?' I asked.

'The serial numbers are burned off,' Motley said.

'Sounds like the greaseballs,' Clete said.

'The greaseballs don't send speed freaks on a hit,' Motley
said.

'How about ties to the AB?' I said.

'Maybe. But these guys don't have much organization outside
the joint. Most of them are more worried about their cock than
politics, anyway,' Motley said. 'Reverend, why don't you go ahead and
play your tape?'

Flat snapped the Play button down on his recorder, then set
the recorder on the desktop. Once again, I heard the heated voice of
Jack Pelley, like a disembodied hiss rising with gathering intensity
out of the din of jailhouse noise.

'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you got
'em eating dogs out of the city parks, fucking like minks in the
projects, queers spreading AIDS in the blood banks, you think I'm
kidding, you ever heard of Queer Nation, it ain't an accident half of
them got kike names, how about that mud person over there in New Iberia
thinks he's gonna deliver up the gift to a Jew, you think we come this
far to let that happen, the sword ain't gonna allow it, no way,
motherfucker, tell the screw to send down some toilet paper, they
didn't leave none when they fed me, hey, you put that on that tape,
what the fuck you think you doing, man—'

The recording ended with a brittle, clattering sound.

'That's when he knocked hit out of my hand,' Flat said. 'I
never saw a man in so much torment.'

'Run it again,' Clete said.

We listened once more. I saw Clete put a breath mint on his
tongue, then crack it between his molars and stare thoughtfully into
space. When the tape ended he smiled in order to hide whatever thought
had been in his eyes.

'How's it feel to be a mud person, Streak?' he said.

'We talked to the feds and a couple of snitches in the AB
about any group that might call itself "The Sword." They never heard of
it,' Motley said.

'Who's "we"?' I said.

'Me.'

'Baxter's blowing it off?' I said.

'What do I know?' Motley said.

Clete, Oswald Flat, and I walked out into the squad room.
Clete and Flat went ahead of me. I stepped back into Motley's office.

'I appreciate what you've done, Motley,' I said.

'Tell me straight, Robicheaux, what's "the gift" this guy was
talking about?'

'I don't have the slightest idea.'

'Somebody thinks you do.'

'Maybe he was talking about somebody else.'

'Yeah, probably the archbishop. A thought you might take with
you—if they're using meltdowns like Jack Pelley, you can bet
they've
got a shit pile of them in reserve. Purcel's a cracker, but sometimes
he's got his point of view, you know what I mean?'

'Not really.'

'People tend to fuck with him only once. There's never any
paperwork around later, either.'

'Bad advice from a cop, Motley.'

'I got a flash for you, Robicheaux. I made a copy of the
preacher's tape and gave it to Baxter. Ten minutes later I saw him
erase it and throw it in the trash.'

He bit down on his Baby Ruth and stared at me reflectively.

Outside, I shook hands with Oswald
Flat and thanked him for
his help, then I drove Clete back toward his office in the French
Quarter. It was raining, and the thick canopy of oaks over St. Charles
looked gray in the blowing mist. The streetcar rattled past us on the
neutral ground, its windows down to let in the cool air.

'You were a little quiet in there,' I said.

'Why argue with Motley? I think he pissed his brains out his
pecker on beer and hookers a long time ago.'

'What are you saying?'

'Come on, Dave. Have you ever seen a hit done with a silenced
twenty-two that wasn't a mob contract? It's their
trademark—one round
in the back of the head, one through the temples, one in the mouth.'

'They use pros, not guys like this Pelley character.'

'It's Pelley that convinces me even more that I'm right. Think
about it. Where's a brain-fried hype like that going to come up with a
silenced Ruger, one with burned serial numbers?'

'You're thinking about Lonighan?'

'Maybe. Or maybe Lonighan
and
the
greaseballs. Look, Dave, you stomped the shit out of Max Calucci in
front of his chippies. Max is a special kind of guy. When he was up at
Angola he found out his punk was getting it on with another con. The
kid begged all over the joint to go into lockdown. Nobody'd listen to
him. A couple of days later somebody broke off a shank made from window
glass in his throat.'

'They don't hit cops, Clete.'

'But what if it's not a regular contract? What if Max and Bobo
Calucci just pointed the meltdown in your direction and gave him the
Ruger, or had somebody give it to him? Nobody's going to make it for a
greaseball hit, right? Motley didn't.'

'You've got more reason to worry about the Caluccis than I do.'

We drove out of the tunnel of oaks on St. Charles into Lee
Circle. Clete took off his porkpie hat and readjusted it on his brow.

'You're wrong there, noble mon,' he said. 'I was never big on
rules. They know that.'

I looked at him.

'But you are. They know that, too,' he said. 'They feel a
whole
lot safer when they go up against guys who play by the rules.'

'Stay away from them, Clete.'

'You've been out of New Orleans too long, Dave. All the old
understandings are gone. It's an open city, like Miami, anybody's fuck.
There's only one way to operate in New Orleans today—you keep
reminding the other side they're one breath away from being grease
spots in the cement.'

It was raining much harder now, and people were turning on
their car lights. I looked at Clete's hulking profile in silhouette
against the rain. His face was cheerless, his green eyes staring
straight ahead, his mouth a tight seam.