Dixie City Jam Read online

  'I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. We don't know for sure. We think he's inside the wall: Anyway, there's blood seeping through the mortar. You know any mice that are big enough to bleed through a brick wall?'

  The two-story building had been the home of a Creole slave trader and cotton dealer in the 1850s. But now the twin brick chimneys were partially collapsed, the iron grillwork on the balconies was torn loose from its fastenings, and the ventilated wood shutters hung at odd angles on the windows. An air compressor for a jackhammer was wheezing and pumping in front of the entrance. I held up my badge for a uniformed patrolman to look at as I threaded my way between two police cars and an ambulance into the entrance of the building.

  At the back of a dark corridor covered with spray-can graffiti, a workman in gloves and a hard hat was thudding the jackhammer into the wall while Motley and two white plainclothes watched. Motley was eating an ice cream cone. The floor was powdered with mortar and brick dust. I tried to talk above the noise and gave it up. Motley motioned me into a side room and closed the door behind us. The room was strewn with burnt newspaper, beer cans, wine bottles, ten-dollar coke vials, and discarded rubbers.

  'We should have already been through the wall, but it looks like somebody poured cement inside it when the foundation settled,' he said. He brushed a smear of ice cream out of his thick mustache.

  'What was this about a flagstaff?'

  'A couple of noddies say there was an American flag on a staff in the corner with a bunch of trash. The wild man grabbed it and ran Camel Benoit upstairs with it, then stuffed him through a hole in the wall. For all we know, he's still alive in there.' He took a bite of his ice cream and leaned forward so it wouldn't drip on his tie.

  'What have you got on the wild man?'

  'Not much. He had on a Halloween mask and wore brown leather gloves.'

  'Was he white or black?'

  'Nobody seems to remember. It was five in the morning. These guys were on the downside of smoking rock and bazooka and hyping all night.' He used his shoe to nudge a rubber that was curled on top of a piece of burnt newspaper like a flattened gray slug. 'You think these cocksuckers worry about safe sex? They get free rubbers from the family planning clinic and use them to carry brown scag in.'

  'Motley, I think you might be a closet Republican.'

  'I'm not big on humor this morning, Robicheaux.'

  'Why did you want me down here?'

  'Because I want to take this guy off the board. Because I'm not feeling a lot of support from Nate Baxter, or from anybody else, for that matter. If it hasn't occurred to you, nobody's exactly on the rag because a few black dealers are getting taken out.'

  'Maybe Camel's operation is being hit on by another dealer.'

  'You mean by another black dealer, don't you?' He bit into the cone of his ice cream, then flipped it away into a pile of trash. 'Come on, they've quit out there. Let's go see the show.'

  'I didn't mean to offend you, partner.'

  'Get off of it, Robicheaux. As far as the department is concerned, this is still nigger town. On a scale of priority of one to ten, it rates a minus eight.'

  The air in the hallway was now gray with stone dust. Two workmen used crowbars to rake the bricks from the wall and the chunks of concrete inside onto the hallway floor. The gash in the wall looked like a torn mouth that they kept elongating and deepening until it almost reached the floor. One of the workmen paused, pushed his goggles up on his forehead, and leaned into the dark interior.

  He brought his head back out and scratched his cheek.

  'I can see a guy about three feet to the left. I'm not sure about what else I see, though,' he said.

  'Look out,' Motley said, pushed the workman aside, and shined a flashlight into the hole. He pointed the light back into the recess for what seemed a long time. Then he clicked off the light and stood erect. 'Well, he always told everybody he was a war veteran. Maybe Camel'd appreciate a patriotic touch.'

  I took the flashlight from Motley's hand and leaned inside the hole. The air was cool and smelled of damp earth and rats and old brick.

  The flashlight beam danced over Camel's body, his copper-bright skin, his hair shaved into dagger points and corn-rolled ridges, his dead eye that looked like a frosted blue-white marble. He was wedged in a reclining position between the bricks and a pile of broken cinder blocks. The workmen had entered the wall at the wrong location because Camel's blood had drained down a cement mound into a bowllike depression at the bottom of the wall.

  The wound was like none I had ever seen in my years as a homicide detective. Someone had driven the winged, brass-sheathed end of a broken flagstaff through Camel's back, all the way through the heart cavity, until the staff had emerged below the nipple. The remnant of an American flag, long since faded almost colorless and partially burned by vandals, was streaked bright red and glued tightly against the staff by the pressure of the wound.

  'Get the rest of the wall down,' Motley said to the workmen. Then he motioned me to follow him up the stairwell to the second floor. We stood on a landing outside a closed door. The building shook with the thudding of the jackhammer. 'What do you think?'

  'I don't know,' I said. 'I thought the vigilante specialized in heart removal.'

  'So he modified his technique.'

  'I thought he usually left flowers behind.'

  'Maybe he didn't have time.'

  'Did the killer take anything? Money or drugs?'

  'He seemed to be too busy breaking heads. At least according to our witnesses.'

  'Where are they?'

  'Either in the hospital or in a holding cell at the district… Except one.'

  'Oh?'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'You want to check him out?'

  He opened the door on a room that was stacked with school desks. Sitting on the floor, under a portable blackboard with holes the size of bowling balls knocked in the slate, was Zoot Bergeron, his knees drawn up before him, his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. There was a puddle of what looked like urine in the corner.

  'He walked in the back door about five minutes after two patrolmen got here,' Motley said. 'Bad luck for Lucinda's boy.'

  Zoot looked at me, then dropped his eyes to his tennis shoes. He had made fists of both his hands, with his thumbs tucked inside his palms. Motley kicked him in the sole of the shoe.

  'Look at me,' he said.

  'Yes, suh,' Zoot said.

  'Tell Detective Robicheaux what you told me.'

  'I was picking up a friend. That's all. I don't know nothing about what goes on here.'

  'Do you think all big people are dumb, Zoot? Do I look like a big, dumb, fat man to you?' Motley asked.

  'I ain't said that, Sergeant Motley. My friend ax me to pick him up here and carry him to work.'

  'Maybe we ought to take you down to the detox and get you UA-ed,' Motley said. 'You ever been there? You got to watch out for some of those old-time hypes in the shower, though. They'll try to take your cherry.'

  'I don't care you UA me or not. I don't care you try to scare me with that kind of talk, either. I ain't used no dope, Sergeant Motley.'

  'What do you know about Camel Benoit?' I said.

  'Everybody up Magazine know Camel. He's a pimp.'

  'He was a drug dealer, too, Zoot,' I said.

  He fastened his eyes on his shoes again.

  'Do you know who killed him?' I said.

  'Sergeant Motley just said it. I wasn't here.'

  He locked his hands on his knees, then rested his forehead on the back of his wrist. His eyelashes were as long as a girl's.

  'You trying to fuck your mother?' Motley said.

  'Suh?' Zoot said, raising his head. His face was the color of dead ash.

  'You heard me, fuck your mother. Because that's what you're doing, you stupid little shit.'

  Zoot tried to return Motley's stare, but his left eye began to tremble and water.

  'Get out of here,' Motley said.

  'Suh?'
/>   'You got earplugs on? Get out of here. If I catch you around a crack house again, I'm going to kick your skinny ass all up and down Martin Luther King Drive.'

  Zoot got to his feet uncertainly. He flinched when he straightened his back. Motley opened the door and leaned over the stair railing.

  'There's a kid coming out. Let him go. He doesn't know anything,' he called to the detectives below. Then he walked back to Zoot and punched him in the breastbone with his forefinger.

  'Don't ever give me reason to get mad at you. Do you understand me?' he,said.

  'Yes, suh. I ain't.'

  'You tell anybody I cut you loose, I'll kick your ass anyway.'

  'Yes, suh.'

  'Get out!'

  After Zoot was gone, I looked at Motley. He was lighting a cigar. His whiskers were jet black inside the grain of his cheeks.

  'You're all right, Motley.'

  'Tell me that five years from now. That kid's going to end up facedown on a sidewalk.'

  'Why?'

  'Because he's like half the black kids in New Orleans. Every day he's got to prove he doesn't have his mama's pink finger up his butt. Come on, I'll buy you a beignet. This place is depressing me.'

  I spent the next two hours in the library, or morgue, as it's called, of The Times-Picayune. I could find almost nothing on German U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico that had been printed during the war years, since all military news was censored from late 1941 until after V-J Day. There was one exception, however: a headline story which ran for three days concerning four Nazi saboteurs who had been apprehended by the FBI south of Baton Rouge in a truck loaded with explosives.

  A page one photograph showed them in fedoras and baggy suits, locked to a wrist chain, staring out at the camera with pale, rectangular faces and buckshot eyes. The cutline below said they had planned to blow up the Standard Oil refinery on the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. The last article in the series dealt with the arrest of an American accomplice, a retired oil man in Grand Isle by the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter, who had been a founder of the American Silver Shirts.

  I jumped the microfilm ahead to the year 1956 and found the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter once again. It was in a twenty-inch feature story in the regional section, written with the detached tone one might use in examining an anthropological curiosity, about the oil man who had betrayed his country, flashed a signal one night through the mist at a U-boat south of Grand Isle, and helped bring ashore four men who, had they succeeded in their mission, would have dried up the flow of fuel to American and English forces for at least two weeks.

  At the bottom of the page was a 1935 wire-service photograph of Buchalter with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Buchalter was a barrel-chested, vigorous-looking man, resplendent in white riding breeches, silver shirt, polished Sam Browne belt, black tie, and red-and-black armband. His right hand clasped Hitler's; he was smiling with the confidence of a man who knew that he had stepped into history.

  After he was arrested in Grand Isle, a drunken mob of shrimpers tried to break him out of jail. They fled when sheriff's deputies began firing shotguns in the air. They left behind a thirty-foot spool of chain and a five-gallon can of gasoline.

  He did his fourteen years of federal time in isolation, despised by both his warders and his fellow prisoners, eating food delivered through a slit by a trusty who in all probability spat in it first.

  His wife and children had long ago moved out of state; his property had been confiscated for taxes. He weighed eighty pounds when his liver finally failed and he died in a public ward at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There was no marker placed on his grave in potter's field other than a stamped tin number pressed into the sod.

  I wondered what importance he would give the fact that the old potter's field in Orleans Parish was not segregated, like other cemeteries during that historical period, and that he would sow his teeth and bones among those of Negroes and perhaps even Jews.

  Later that afternoon I parked in front of Lucinda Bergeron's house off Magazine. Just as I was turning off the engine, an open Jeep with oversized tires and four black kids inside pulled to the curb in front of me. The rap music playing on the stereo was deafening, like an electronic assault on the sensibilities. Zoot got out of the Jeep and went inside his house, his eyes straight ahead, as though I were not there. The three other boys did leg stretches on the lawn while they waited for him. All three were dressed in an almost paramilitary fashion-baggy black trousers like paratroopers might wear, gold neck chains, Air Jordan tennis shoes, black T-shirts with scrolled white death's-heads on them. Their hair was shaved to the scalp on the sides, with only a coarse, squared pad on the crown of the skull. Zoot came back out the front door and gave each of them a can of Pepsi-Cola.

  When they drove away, the rap music from their stereo echoed off housefronts all the way down the street.

  'You get an eyeful?' Zoot said.

  'You run the PX for these characters?'

  'The what?'

  'Sergeant Motley's worried about you.'

  He looked at me, waiting to see what new kind of trap was being constructed around him.

  'He thinks you're going to get cooled out one of these days,' I said.

  'Cooled… what?'

  'He thinks you're cruising for a big fall.'

  'Why y'all on my case? I ain't done nothing.'

  'Did you tell your mother about what happened this morning?'

  His eyes flicked sideways toward the house. He sucked in his cheeks and tried not to swallow.

  'I remember something a guy told me once,' I said. 'He said it's as dishonorable to let yourself be used as it is to use someone else.'

  'What you mean?'

  'Your friends impress me as shitheads.'

  'I don't care what you say. We stand by each ot'er. They're my friends in all kinds of ways.'

  'Zoot, I didn't see one of those guys say thank you when you handed him a soft drink. Who's kidding who, podna?'

  I found his mother on her knees in the backyard, spading out a hole for a pot of chrysanthemums. The Saint Augustine grass was thick and spongy underfoot, and the beds along her weathered wood fences were bursting with azaleas, banana trees, elephant ears, flaming hibiscus, and pink and blue hydrangeas. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a purple blouse with green flowers on it. Her hair was on her shoulders, and her face was hot with her work. For the first time I saw a prettiness in her. I sat on a wood box next to her and turned on the garden hose and let it sluice into the fresh hole while she fitted the plant in and troweled dirt over the roots.

  'How'd you know I was home?' she said.

  'Your office told me you're working nights now.'

  'What were you talking to Zoot about out there?' she said, without looking up.

  'Not too much… His friends.'

  'You don't approve of them?'

  'People sure know when they're around.'

  'Well, I guess you're glad you don't have to be around them very long, aren't you?'

  'A boy can gravitate to certain kids for a reason.'

  'Oh?' she said, and rested her rump on her heels. As she looked at me she tilted her head in feigned deference.

  'I don't know why you think it's funny. He's a good boy,' I said. 'Why don't you stop treating him like a douche bag?'

  She made a sound like she had swallowed bile. 'I can't believe you just said that,' she said.

  'Why don't you give the kid some credit? He's got a lot of courage. Did he tell you he went three rounds against a professional fighter who could have turned his brains into mush?'

  'Where do you get off telling me how to raise my child?'

  'That's it, Lucinda. He's not a child.'

  Then she made the same sound again, as though she couldn't remove a vile taste from her throat. 'Please spare me this, would you?' she said. 'Go away somewhere, find a nice white neighborhood, find a white lady digging in her garden, and please give her your advice about
the correct way to raise children. Can you do that for me, please?'

  'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down on Terpsichore and Baronne.'

  The heat went out of her eyes.

  'Did you know him?' I said.

  She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.

  'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at the flower bed in front of her.

  'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.

  'Motley.'

  'He'll do his best with it.'

  'Somebody else won't?'

  'The department has its problems.'

  'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.

  She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum plant with her garden trowel.

  'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes being canceled out?'

  'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the outrageousness of the idea.

  'Some funny people keep showing up on it. Tommy Blue Eyes, Hippo Bimstine… you as the liaison person for NOPD. That's a peculiar combo, don't you think?'

  'Lots of people want New Orleans to be like it was thirty years ago. For different reasons, maybe.'

  'What's your own feeling? You think maybe the times are such that we should just whack out a few of the bad guys? Create our own free-fire zone and make up the rules later?'

  'I don't think I like what you're saying.'

  'I heard you went up to Angola to watch a man electrocuted.'

  'That bothers you?'

  'I had to witness an execution once. I had dreams about it for a long time.'

  'Let me clarify something for you. I didn't go once. I do it in every capital conviction I'm involved with. The people who can't be there, the ones these guys sodomize and mutilate and murder, have worse problems than bad dreams.'