DR07 - Dixie City Jam (16 page)

They must have gotten all the way to the wooded knoll, almost
to the pecan orchard and the four corners down the bayou road, I
thought. I stepped back outside the sugarcane and began running toward
the far side of the field, toward the elevated grove of oak trees whose
leaves were flickering with a silver light in the wind off the marsh.

Long ago Clete Purcel had made his separate peace with the
system of rules that govern the justifiable taking of human life. I
never questioned the validity of Clete's moral vision, no more than I
would have questioned his loyalty and courage and his selfless devotion
to me during the worst periods in my life. In truth, I often envied the
clarity of line that he used to distinguish between right and wrong. I
had also harbored fears since I first became a street patrolman in New
Orleans that I would one day wrongly exercise the power of life and
death over an individual, through accident or perhaps fearful
impetuosity or maybe even by self-righteous design.

But Buchalter was not an ordinary player. Most of the
psychological mutants with whom a police officer comes in contact daily
are bumbling, ineffectual losers who sneak through life on side streets
and who often seek out authority and self-validation through their
adversarial relationship with police and parole officers, since in
normal society they possess about the same worth as discarded banana
peels.

Psychopaths like Ted Bundy and Gary Gilmore have a way of
committing their crimes in states which practice capital punishment.
Then they turn their trials and executions into televised theater of
world-class proportions.

The Will Buchalters have no such plan for themselves. They
don't leave paperwork behind; they stay out of the computer. When they
do get nailed, they make bond and terrify witnesses into perjuring
themselves; they convince psychologists that they have multiple
personalities that cannot be simultaneously put on trial; their fall
partners either do their time or are murdered in custody. No one is
ever sure of how many people they actually kill.

Will Buchalter belonged to that special group of people who
live in our nightmares.

I could still smell his odor; it was like animal musk, like
lotions that were at war with his glands, like someone who has just had
sex. I could still feel the grain and oil of his skin on mine.

I pressed my hand tighter around the butt of the .38. The
hand-worn walnut grips felt smooth and hard against my palm.

As I neared the end of the cane field I heard a strand of
fence wire twang against a post, heard someone curse, as though he were
in pain or had fallen to the ground. I swung wide of the field to
broaden my angle of vision; then I saw two silhouettes against the
veiled moon—one man on his buttocks, holding his ankle, the
other man
bent over him, trying to lift him up, and I remembered the old fence
that my neighbor had crushed flat with his tractor so his livestock
could drink at the coulee.

They saw me, too. Before I could squat into a shooting
position and yell at them to put their hands on their heads, a
small-caliber pistol popped in the darkness, then popped again, just
like a firecracker. I ran for the lee of the sugarcane, out of their
line of vision, and squatted close into the stalks away from the moon's
glow, which streaked the rain with a light like quicksilver.

I heard someone burrow into the cane, thrash through several
rows, then stop.

Were there one or two men inside the field now? I couldn't
tell. There was no sound except the rain hitting on the leaves over my
head.

I worked my way down a furrow, deeper into the cane. I could
smell something dead in the trapped air, a coon or possum, an odor like
that of a rat that has crawled inside a wall and died. My eyes stung
with salt, and the dirt cut into my knuckles and knees like pieces of
flint. I saw a wood rabbit bolt across the rows, stop and look at me,
his ears flattened on his head, then begin running again in a zigzag
pattern. He crashed loudly through the edge of the cane and was gone.

Not twenty feet from me a man rose from his knees in the midst
of the cane, his body almost totally obscured by the thickly spaced
stalks and long festoons of leaves around him. He tried to ease quietly
through the rows to the far side of the field, which opened onto a flat
space and the wooded knoll and the pecan orchard.

I pulled my shirt up and wiped my face on it, then aimed as
best I could at the man's slowly moving silhouette. I cocked the hammer
on the .38 and brought the sight just below an imaginary line that
traversed his shoulder blades.

Now!
I thought.

'Throw your weapon away! Down on your face with your hands out
in front of you!' I yelled.

But he wanted another season to run.

He tore through the sugarcane, flailing his arms at the
stalks, stumbling across the rows. I was crouched on one knee when I
began shooting. I believe the first shot went high, because I heard a
distant sound in a tree, like a rock skipping off of bark and falling
through limbs. And he kept plowing forward through the cane, trying to
hack an opening with his left hand, shielding a weapon with his right.

But the second shot went home. I know it did; I heard the
impact, like a cleated shoe connecting with a football, heard the wind
go out of his lungs as he was driven forward through the cane.

But he was still standing, with a metallic object in his right
hand, its flat surfaces blue with moonlight, and he was turning on one
foot toward me, just as a scarecrow might if it had been spun in a
violent-wind.

Clete had loaded only five rounds in the cylinder and had set
the hammer on an empty chamber. I let off all three remaining rounds as
fast as I could pull the trigger. Sparks and fine splinters of lead
flew from the sides of the cylinder into the darkness.

His left arm flipped sideways, as if jerked by a wire, his
stomach buckled, then his chin snapped back on his shoulder as if he
had been struck by an invisible club.

The hammer snapped dryly on the empty sixth chamber. Then
something happened that I didn't understand. As he crumpled sideways to
the earth, breaking the stalks of cane down around him, he yelled out
in pain for the first time.

I walked across the rows to where he lay on his back, his
crossed eyes opening and closing with shock. He kept trying to expel a
bloody clot from his mouth with the tip of his tongue. My last round
had hit him in the chin and exited just above the jawbone. His left arm
was twisted in the sleeve like a piece of discarded rope. He had taken
another round in the side, with no exit wound that I could see, and
blood was leaking out of his shirt into the dirt. Then I saw his right
hand quivering uncontrollably above the feathered shaft of the aluminum
arrow that had discharged from his crossbow when he fell. The flanged
point had sliced down into the thigh and emerged gleaming and red
through the kneecap.

I knelt beside him, loosened his belt, and brushed the dirt
out of his eyes with my fingers.

'Where's Buchalter?' I said.

He swallowed with a clicking sound and tried to speak, but his
tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. I turned his head with my hands
so his mouth could drain.

'Where did Buchalter go, Chuck?' I said. 'Don't try to protect
this guy. He deserted you.'

'I don't know,' he said. His voice was weak and devoid of all
defense. 'Get the arrow out.'

'I can't do it. You might hemorrhage. I'm going to call an
ambulance.'

His crossed eyes tried to focus on mine. They were luminous
and black with pain and fear. His tongue came out of his mouth and went
back in again.

'What is it?' I said.

'I need a priest. I ain't gonna make it.'

'We'll get you one.'

'You gotta listen, man…'

'Say it.'

'I didn't have nothing against y'all. I done it for the money.'

'For the money?' I said as much to myself as to him.

'Tell your old lady I'm sorry. It wasn't personal. Oh God, I
ain't gonna make it.'

'Give me Buchalter, Chuck.'

But his eyes had already focused inward on a vision whose
intensity and dimension probably only he could appreciate. In the
distance I heard someone start a high-powered automobile engine and
roar southward, away from the drawbridge, down the bayou road in the
rain.

The next morning I went down to the
sheriffs office and got my
badge back.

Chuck, whose full name was Charles Arthur Sitwell, made it
through the night and was in the intensive care unit at Iberia General,
his body wired to machines, an oxygen tube taped to his nose, an IV
needle inserted in a swollen vein inside his right forearm. The lower
half of his face was swathed in bandages and plaster, with only a small
hole, the size of a quarter, for his mouth. I pulled a chair close to
his bed while Clete stood behind me.

'Did Father Melancon visit you, Chuck?' I said.

He didn't answer. His eyelids were blue and had a metallic
shine to them.

'Didn't a priest come see you?' I asked.

He blinked his eyes.

'Look, partner, if you got on the square with the Man
Upstairs, why not get on the square with us?' I said.

Still, he didn't answer.

'You've been down four times, Chuck,' I said. 'Your jacket
shows you were always a solid con. But Buchalter's not stand-up,
Chuck. He's letting you take his fall.'

'You're standing on third base,' Clete said behind me.

I turned in the chair and looked into Clete's face. But Clete
only stepped closer to the bed.

'Chuck was in max at Leavenworth, he was a big stripe at
Angola. He wants it straight,' he said to me. 'Right, Chuck?
Buchalter'll piss on your grave. Don't take the bounce
for a guy like that.'

Chuck's defective eyes looked as small as a bird's. They
seemed to focus on Clete; then they looked past him at the swinging
door to the intensive care unit, which had opened briefly and was now
flapping back and forth.

His mouth began moving inside the hole in the bandages. I
leaned my ear close to his face. His breath was sour with bile.

'I already told the priest everything. I ain't saying no
more,' he whispered. 'Tell everybody that. I ain't saying no more.'

'I don't want to be hard on you, partner, but why not do some
good while you have the chance?' I said.

He turned his face away from me on the pillow.

'If that's the way you want it,' I said, and stood up to go.
'If you change your mind, ask for the cop at the door.'

Out in the corridor, Clete put an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

'I never get used to the way these fuckers think. The
sonofabitch is on the edge of eternity and he's scared he'll be made
for a snitch,' he said, then noticed a Catholic nun with a basket of
fruit two feet from him. 'Excuse me, Sister,' he said.

She was dressed in a white skirt and lavender blouse, but she
wore a black veil with white edging on her head. Her hair was a reddish
gold and was tapered on her neck.

'How is he doing?' she said.

'Who?' I said.

'That poor man who was shot last night,' she said.

'Not very well,' I said.

'Will he live?' she said.

'You never know, I guess,' I said.

'Were you one of the officers who—'

'Yes?'

'I was going to ask if you were one of the officers who
arrested him.'

'I'm the officer who shot him, Sister,' I said. But my attempt
at directness was short-lived, and involuntarily my eyes broke contact
with hers.

'Is he going to die?' she said. Her eyes became clouded in a
peculiar way, like dark smoke infused in green glass.

'You should probably ask the doctor that,' I said.

'I see,' she said. Then she smiled politely. 'I'm sorry. I
didn't mean to sound rude. I'm Marie Guilbeaux. It's nice meeting you.'

'I'm Dave Robicheaux. This is Clete Purcel. It's nice meeting
you, too, Sister,' I said. 'You're not from New Iberia, are you?'

'No, I live in Lafayette.'

'Well, see you around,' I said.

'Yes, good-bye,' she said, and smiled again.

Clete and I walked out into the sunlight and drove back toward
my house. It was the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, and the
convenience stores were filled with people buying beer and ice and
charcoal for barbecues.

'Why didn't the nuns look like that when I was in grade
school?' Clete said. 'The ones I remember had faces like boiled
hams… What are you brooding about?'

'Something you said. Why's Chuck Sitwell stonewalling us?'

'He wants to go out a mainline, stand-up con.'

'No, you said it earlier. He's scared. But if he's scared
Buchalter will be back to pull his plug, why doesn't he just give him
up?'

Clete looked out into the hot glare of the day from under the
brim of his porkpie hat and puffed on his cigarette. His face was pink
in the heat.

'You're a good guy, Streak, but you don't always think
straight about yourself,' he said.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'You parked four-rounds in the guy.'

I looked at him.

'Come on, Dave, be honest,' he said. 'You only stopped popping
caps when you ran out of bullets. You were trying to blow him all over
that cane field. You don't think the guy knows that? What if he or
Buchalter tell you what they had planned for you and Bootsie, Bootsie
in particular, maybe even Alafair if she walked in on it? I'd be scared
of you, too, mon.'

He glanced sideways at me, then sucked once on his cigarette
and flipped it in a spray of sparks against the side of a red stop sign.

The weekend was hot and dry and
uneventful. A guard remained
on duty twenty-four hours at the door of Charles Arthur Sitwell's
hospital room. Sitwell kept his promise; he refused to answer questions
about anything.