Dixie City Jam Page 10

  '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.

  chapter ten

  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 t
han 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.

  After I dropped him at his office, I made one final stop in New Orleans-at Hippo Bimstine's house, down by the Mississippi levee. The rain had almost quit, and he was in his backyard, dipping leaves out of his swimming pool with a long pole. He wore wraparound black sunglasses, plaid Bermuda shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt printed with brown-skinned girls dancing in grass skirts. The fatty rings in his neck were bright with sweat.

  'Yeah, that colored cop Motley told me all about it,' he said. 'This tattooed guy sounds like some kind of zomboid, though. I don't think we're talking the first team here.'

  'I had to learn a hard lesson a long time ago, Hippo. The guy who blows out your candle is the one who's at your throat before you ever expect it.'

  'A guy with a sword tattooed on his head, shooting dope in his crotch with an eyedropper? Dave, give me a break. I got serious enemies. I don't lose sleep over guys who get arrested in filling station rest rooms.'

  'You have a very copacetic attitude, Hippo.'

  'You're trying to insult me? That's what we're doing here?'

  'I don't think you want me asking you hard questions.'

  He set down the pole on a stone bench, removed his sunglasses, and wiped his face on his sleeve. The air was hot and muggy, and raindrops dripped from the trees into the pool.

  'I got no secrets. Everybody in New Orleans knows my politics,' he said.

  'What's the Jewish Defense Organization?'

  'It's the network I belong to. There's no mystery here. We got a project called Operation Klan Kick. We find out who these cocksuckers are, where they work, and we make some phone calls. You got a problem with that, Dave?'

  'Do you know why this guy Pelley might talk about "a gift" or a group called The Sword?'

  'What are you talking about gift and sword? Listen, you know why Tommy Lonighan wants that sub? Because I bother him. Everything I do bothers him. You know why I bother him? Because he's got a guilty conscience, like a big, black tumor always eating on his brain.'

  'Over what?'

  'He killed my little brother.'

  'He did what?'

  'He didn't bother to tell you that, huh? We grew up across the street from each other in the Channel. We were all playing in a homemade cart, you know, made out of crates and planks with some roller skates nailed on the bottom. Tommy wheeled my little brother out from behind a car right into an ice truck. To this day, that sonofabitch has never said he was sorry.'

  'I didn't know that, Hippo.'

  'Maybe there's some other stuff you don't know, either, Dave. Come in my office.'

  'What for?'

  'Because you don't like the way me and my friends do business. Because you think these shitheads should have their day in court. Indulge me, blow five minutes of your day.'

  We went inside the stucco cottage he used as an office. He began clattering through a box of videocassette tapes. He took one out and read the taped label on it.

  'Some friends of mine got this off a bunch of guys who were watching it for entertainment,' he said. 'In a cinder-block house, up in a piney woods, just north of Pascagoula. When my friends got finished with them, they weren't interested in watching old newsreels anymore. So they really didn't mind giving up their cassette.'

  'Who are your friends?'

  'Some guys who could be great baseball players, you know what I mean? Terrific guys with a bat.'

  'You think it's a victory to become like the other side?'

  'Dave, you're a laugh a minute. That's why I like you. You already ate lunch, didn't you? Because this film seems to fuck up people's appetite for some reason.'

  He started the tape in the VCR under his television set. The video was composed of a series of newsreels, Nazi propaganda footage, and still photographs spliced together in a collage that was almost like watching distilled evil: the profiles of Jews being superimposed upon those of rats, Heinrich Himmler reviewing concentration camp inmates in striped uniforms behind barbed wire, columns of children with bundles, their faces distorted with terror, marching between rows of black-helmeted SS; and finally a scene that was the most cruel I had ever seen on film-nude Polish women, deep in a forest, their arms gathered over their breasts and pubic hair, lining up to be shot in the back of the neck and flung into an open trench.

  'On your worst day in Vietnam, you ever see anything like that, Dave?'

  'No.'

  'It's back. On an international level. You don't buy it, do you?'

  'Maybe. But it doesn't change anything with us, Hippo. I think my family and I are swimming into somebody else's field of fire. I think you're responsible, too.'

  He looked down at his hands, which were folded between his thighs. He looked at them a long time.

  'Hippo?'

  His sleek, football-shaped face was morose when he looked back up at me.

  'Who can plan how things turn out?' he said. 'What I do or don't do no longer matters. There're people, I'm talking about cretins like that pervert at your house, who believe you can find that sub. It's what they believe that counts, Dave.'

  'Why's it important to them?'

  'Why does a tumblebug like to roll in shit?'

  'Cut the Little Orphan Annie routine, Hippo. I'm getting tired of it.'

  'They like shrines.'

  'Not good enough.'

  'I don't want you killed. Forget about the sub. I'll find it on my own or I won't. Don't come around here anymore. I'm going to put out the word that you're a waste of time, you couldn't find your butt with both hands. Maybe they'll believe it.'

  'It's too late for contrition, Hippo. This guy Buchalter has left my wife a memory that she'll never quite get rid of.'

  'You can put out a hit in this town for five hundred bucks. Did you know that, Dave? For a hundred, you can have a guy remodeled with a ball peen hammer and Polaroids left for you in a bar on Claiborne. You want a phone number? Or you want to keep hanging your ass out in the breeze and blaming me for your troubles?'

  'I didn't know you and Tommy Bobalouba grew up together, Hippo. It explains a lot.'

  'No kidding?'

  'No kidding.'

  'Sounds real clever.'

  'Not really. You're both full of shit!'

  'I wish I had a wit like that,' he said, then held up the videocassette in his hand. 'Then I could explain how there're people can watch stuff like this for fun in my own country and nobody cares. Hey, Dave, if they ever fire up the ovens again, I'll probably be one of the first bars of soap off the conveyor belt. But you and your kind won't be far behind. You don't mind letting yourself out, do you?'

  I drove back toward New Iberia, through Baton Rouge, across the wide yellow sweep of the Mississippi into the western sun and the Atchafalaya marsh. I noticed a wallet stuck down in the crack of the passenger's seat. It was Clete's and must have slipped out of his back pocket before I dropped him off at his office. When I got off I-10 at Breaux Bridge I stopped at a convenience store and called him on a pay phone, then headed down the back road through St. Martinville, past the old French church and the spreading oaks on Ba
you Teche where Evangeline and her lover are buried, and through the cooling afternoon and waving fields of green sugarcane into New Iberia.

  I pulled into the dirt drive and parked under the oaks at the foot of my property. The house was deep in shadow, my neighbor's cane field and the woods that bordered it silhouetted against a blazing sunset. Bootsie's car was parked by the side of the house, the trunk open and sacked groceries still inside. The front rooms of the house were dark, the rose-print curtains fluttering in the windows, but the light was on in the kitchen. Batist was out on the dock, pushing pools of rainwater out of the folds in the awning with a broom handle.

  'You need any help closing up?' I called.

  'Ain't much bidness this afternoon. The rain brung in everybody early,' he said.

  'Is Alafair down there?'

  'She gone to the show wit' some ot'er children.'

  I waved at him and walked up the slope toward my house, lifted two sacks of groceries out of Bootsie's car trunk, and walked around to the back door. Fireflies had started to light in the trees, and the dome of lavender sky overhead reverberated with the drone of cicadas. The house was still; no sound came from the radio on the kitchen windowsill, which Bootsie almost always listened to while she fixed supper.

  I hefted the grocery sacks in my arms, opened the back screen with my shoe, and let it slam behind me. The wood planks of the back porch were littered with pet bowls and dry cat food. Through the doorway all the surfaces in the kitchen looked bright and clean, but I could smell okra burning and hear water hissing through a kettle top and scorching in the fire.

  'Bootsie?' I said.

  Out front, the tin roof on the gallery pinged in the cooling air.

  'Bootsie?' I said again, hitching the sacks up against my chest.

  I walked into the kitchen and started to set the sacks on the drain board; I saw her sitting at the breakfast table, motionless, her' posture rigid, her eyes straight ahead, one hand resting on top of the other.

  'Bootsie, what's wrong?' I said.

  Then I saw the film of perspiration on her brow and upper lip, the flutter in her throat, the rise and fall of her breasts. Her mouth opened stiffly, and her eyes broke and fastened on mine; they were charged with a light I had never seen in them before.