DR07 - Dixie City Jam (34 page)

The plainclothes's face looked like a large, round, white
clock that had run out of time.

'Put it down, Albert!' Lucinda shouted, pointing her
nickel-plated .357 Magnum straight out with both hands from the doorway.

The plainclothes's chest was heaving; he clutched at his left
breast, and his breath rose from his throat like bubbles bursting from
an underwater air hose. Lucinda's feet were spread, her midriff winking
above her Clorox-faded Levi's. Albert's eyes were half-dollars, his
clenched right hand trembling as though it were painted with
electricity.

'You don't want to do this, Albert,' she said, fitted her
thumb over the knurled spur of the hammer, and cocked it back. The
notched grooves and the cylinder locked into place with a sound like a
dry stick snapping. 'We can all walk out of this. You'll go downtown.
Nobody'll hurt you. I give you my word. Lower the gun,
Albert… Wait… Don't do it, don't let those thoughts
get in your head… Albert!'

But it was too late. A facsimile of a man, with the soft bones
of a child and muscles like jelly, with lint in his navel and a snake
feeding at his heart, was imploding inside and looking for his
executioner. He gripped the pistol with both hands, squeezed his eyes
shut, turned toward Lucinda, and lowered his head between his extended
arms as he tightened his finger inside the trigger housing.

She fired only once. The round caught him in the crown of the
skull and knocked him back against the wall as though he had been
struck by an automobile.

The air was bitter with the smell of gunpowder, dry heat, and
a hint of nicotine and copulation in the bed clothing. My ears were
ringing from the explosion, then I saw the plainclothes pointing at the
red horsetails on the wallpaper while he giggled and wheezed
uncontrollably, his left hand clawing at his collar as though it were a
garrote about his neck.

Three hours later, after the paperwork, the questions, the
suspension from active duty, the surrender of her weapon to Nate
Baxter, I drove her home. Or almost home.

'Stop at the corner,' she said.

'What for?'

'I want a drink.'

'Bad day to feed the dragon,' I said.

'Drop me off and I can walk.'

'Lucinda, this is what happens. Tonight, you'll finally fall
asleep. You'll have troubling dreams, but not exactly about the
shooting. It's like your soul has a headache and can't allow itself to
remember something. Then you'll wake up in the morning, and for a few
moments it'll all be gone. Then, boom, it'll wash over you like the sun
just died in the sky. But each day it gets better, and eventually you
come to understand there's no way it could have worked out differently.'

Her eyes had the unnatural sheen of an exhausted person who
just bit into some black speed.

'Are you coming in or not?' she said when I pulled to the curb
in front of an old wood-front bar with a colonnade on Magazine.

'I guess not.'

'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and
walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of
the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops
of her dusty tennis shoes.

Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought,
and followed her inside.

It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust
on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on
a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool
table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon
and gotten no answer. I left another message.

Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes
widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and
ordered another.

'Join me?' she asked.

'No thanks.'

She drank from the glass.

'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.

'Who cares?'

'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'

'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut
down their game.'

'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple
question?' she said.

'Five.'

'God.'

I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.

'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they
can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that
blimp in the motel room?'

She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who
refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She
flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her
fingers.

'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a
can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville
Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding
cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'

'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one
of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,'
I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and
turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was
gathering outside in the trees.

I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the
gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and
fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads
swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.

'Do you want me to call later?' I said.

'I'll be all right.'

'Is Zoot here?'

'He plays basketball tonight.'

'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'

Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath
was soft with the smell of bourbon.

'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.

Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus
inward on a memory that would hang in the unconscious like a sleeping
bat.

'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on
her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.

But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head
and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her
tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.

'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man
like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes
closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.

I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on
the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the
thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of
her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On
the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was
rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into
the grass.

I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard
in my hand.

'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we
get hold of Zoot?'

Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door
white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands
were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel.
In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt
in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her
life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from
one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.

Bootsie looked straight ahead as we
followed I-10 past the
sand flats and dead cypress on the northern tip of Lake Pontchartrain.
My mind was racing. None of the day's events seemed to have any
coherence.

'I left Motley's and Lucinda's extensions on the answering
machine, I left the address of the motel. I didn't imagine it,' I said.

'It wasn't there, Dave.'

'Was there a power failure?'

'How would I know if I wasn't home? It wouldn't have affected
the recording, anyway.'

'There's something wrong here, Boots.'

'You're right. Sometimes you worry about other people more
than you do your own family.'

'That's a rotten thing to say.'

'Goddamn it, he called while you were out of town looking
after this Bergeron woman.'

'Buchalter?'

'Who else?'

'How could he? We just changed the number.'

'It was Buchalter. Do you think I could forget that voice? He
even talked about what he did to me.'

I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were shiny in the green
glow from the dashboard. A semi passed, and the inside of the pickup
was
loud with the roar of the exhaust.

'What else did he say?'

'That he'd always be with us. Wherever we were. His voice
sounded like he had wet sand in his throat. It was obscene.'

'I think he's a hype. He calls when he's loaded.'

'Why does this woman have to drag you into her investigation?'

'It's my investigation, too, Bootsie. But you're right, I
shouldn't have gone. We were firing in the well.'

'I just don't understand this commitment you have to others
while a psychopath tries to destroy us.'

'Look, something's out of sync here. Don't you see it? How did
the nun, what's her name, get involved in this?'

'She dropped by, that's all.'

'Then what happened?'

'Nothing. What do you mean?'

'Come on, think about it. What
happened
after she came by?'

'She used the phone. To call somebody at the hospital, I
think.'

'When did Buchalter call?'

'A little later. I tried to get you at your office. That's
when the sheriff told me there'd been a shooting. I couldn't just stay
at home and wonder what happened to you and wait for Buchalter to call
again. Marie and I took Alafair to Batist's, then drove to New Orleans.
What else was I supposed to do?'

'Whose idea was it to go to New Orleans?'

'Mine… Both of us, I guess… She saw my
anxiety, she was trying to be a friend.'

'How many nuns do you know who gravitate toward trouble, who
are always around when it happens?' I said.

She was looking at me now.

'Did you check the machine when you first came in the house?'
I asked.

'No.'

'Our new number is written down by the side of the phone,
isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'It's time to check out Sister Guilbeaux, Boots.'

'You think she erased your message and called
Buc—That's
crazy, Dave. She's a good person.'

'Buchalter's flesh and blood. I think somebody close to us is
helping him. How many candidates are there?'

Her eyes became fixed on the tunnel of trees ahead. I could
see her chest rising and falling as she touched her fingers to her
mouth.

The next morning, in my office, I
sorted through all the case
notes, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, computer printouts,
voice cassettes, rap sheets, convict prison records, and Xeroxes and
faxes from other law-enforcement agencies that had anything to do with
the vigilante killings, Tommy Lonighan, the Calucci brothers, and Will
Buchalter and his followers.

I also called the office of the Catholic diocese in Lafayette.
Both the bishop and his assistant were out. The secretary said one of
them would return my call later. She was new to the job and was not
sure if she knew a Sister Marie Guilbeaux.

I read every document on my desk twice. The more I read, the
more ill-defined and confusing the case became.

Clete Purcel had always been a good cop because he kept the
lines simple. I took a yellow legal pad and a felt pen from my desk
drawer and tried to do the same. It wasn't easy.

The owner of the car repair shop where Zoot and I had been
taken by Buchalter had turned out to be an alcoholic right-wing
simpleton who had already fled the state on a bigamy charge. It seemed
that anyone who might lead us to Buchalter had a way of disappearing or
going off-planet.

Tommy Bobalouba's mother had emigrated from Germany and
perhaps-had been a member of the Silver Shirts. Tommy wanted to salvage
the Nazi U-boat before Hippo Bimstine got to it, and his rhetoric was
often anti-Semitic. But in reality Tommy had never had any ideology
except making money. He prided himself on his military record and
blue-collar patriotism, and didn't seem to have any physical connection
with Buchalter.

Why did Buchalter (if indeed it was Buchalter) attempt to
ascribe the murder of his followers, the men called Freddy and Hatch,
to the vigilante?

Was he involved with the ritualistic killings of black dope
dealers in the projects? If not, how many psychological mutants of his
potential did New Orleans contain?

Why had Lonighan crossed an old New Orleans ethnic line and
gotten mixed up with the Calucci brothers, and did it have anything to
do with the vigilante killings?

If you have ever been in psychoanalysis or analytically
oriented therapy, you're aware that the exploration of one's own
unconscious can be an intriguing pursuit. It is also self-inflating,
grandiose, and endless, and often has the same practical value as
meditating upon one's genitalia.

The inductive and deductive processes of police work offer the
same temptation. You can drown in it. The truth is that most people,
with the exception of the psychotic, commit crimes for predictable
reasons.

Question: Why steal?

Answer: It's usually easier than working.

Question: Why rape and brutalize? Why rob people of their
identity by terrorizing and degrading them at gunpoint, by reducing
them to pitiful creatures who will never respect themselves again?

Answer: You don't have to admit that you're a born loser and
in all probability were despised inside your mother's womb.

Batist's perception, like Clete's, was not obscured by
self-manufactured complexities. He had grown up in Louisiana during the
pre-Civil Rights era, and he knew that no one systematically killed
people of color for reasons of justice. The vigilante's victims were
people whom no one cared about, nickel-and-dime dealers whose presence
or absence would never have any appreciable influence on the immense
volume of the New Orleans drug trade.