DR07 - Dixie City Jam Read online

  '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.'

  'You're a tough-minded lady.'

  'Save the hand job for somebody else.'

  I stood up and turned off the hose. The iron handle squeaked in my hand.

  'The bad thing about vigilantes is that eventually they're not selective,' I said.

  'Is that supposed to mean something to me?'

  'I'm going to violate a confidence. If Zoot had walked into that crack house a little earlier this morning, he might have had his head opened up with that E-tool like some of the others. He's not a good listener, either, Lucinda.'

  Her lips parted silently. I could not look at the recognition of loss spreading through her face.

  It was hot that night, with an angry whalebone moon high above the marsh. The rumble of dry thunder woke me at three in the morning. I found Bootsie in the kitchen, sitting in the dark at the breakfast table, her bare feet in a square of moonlight. Her shoulders were rounded; her breasts sagged inside her nightgown.

  'It's the lightning,' she said. 'It was popping out in the marsh. I saw a tree burning.'

  I walked her back to the bed and lay beside her. In a little while the rain began ticking in the trees; then it fell harder, drumming on the eaves and the tin roof of the gallery. She fell asleep with her head on my arm and slept through a thunderstorm that broke across the marsh at daybreak and flooded the yard and blew a fine, cool mist through the screens.

  At eight o'clock the sheriff called and told me to go directly to Iberia General rather than to the office. Charles Sitwell, our only link to Will Buchalter, would never be accused of ratting out on his friends.

  * * *

  chapter thirteen

  The window blinds in Sitwell's hospital room were up, and the walls and the sheets on his bed were bright with sunlight. A nurse was emptying Sitwell's bedpan in the toilet, and the deputy who had stood guard on the door was chewing on a toothpick and staring up at a talk show on a television set whose sound was turned off.

  'I can't tell you with any certainty when he died,' the doctor said. 'I'd say it was in the last two or three hours, but that's a guess. Actually, I thought he was going to make it.'

  Sitwell's head was tilted back on the pillow. His mouth and eyes were open. A yellow liquid had drained out of the plaster and bandages on his face into the whiskers on his throat.

  'You want to guess at what caused his death?' I said.

  The doctor was a powerfully built, sandy-haired man, a tanned, habitual golf player, who wore greens and protective plastic bags over his feet.

  'Look at his right hand,' he said. 'It's clutching the sheet like he was either afraid of something or he was experiencing a painful spasm of some kind.'

  'Yes?'

  'That's not unusual in itself, so maybe I'm just too imaginative.'

  'You're going to have to be a little more exact for me, Doctor.'

  He flipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them on his nose, then bent over Sitwell's body.

  'Take at look at this,' he said, rotating Sitwell's chin sideways with his thumb. 'You see that red spot in his whiskers, like a big mosquito bite? Come around in the light. Here, right by the jugular.'

  'What about it?'

  'Look closely.' He used his thumb to brush back the whiskers. 'The skin's torn above the original puncture. You want to know what I think, or had you rather I stay out of your business?'

  'Go ahead, Doc, you're doing just fine.'

  'I think maybe somebody shoved a hypodermic needle in his throat.'

  I rubbed back Sitwell's whiskers with the tips of my fingers. His blood had already drained to the lowest parts of his body, and his skin was cold and rubbery to the touch. The area right above the puncture looked like it had been ripped with an upward motion, like a wood splinter being torn loose from the grain of the skin.

  'If someone did put a needle in him, what do you think it might have been loaded with?' I said.

  'Air would do it. A bubble can stop up an artery like a cork in a pipe.'

  I turned toward the deputy, who was sitting in a chair now, still staring up at the silent talk show on television. His name was Expidee Chatlin, and he had spent most of his years with the department either as a crossing guard at parish elementary schools or escorting prisoners from the drunk tank to guilty court.

  'Were you here all night, Expidee?' I asked.

  'Sure, what you t'ink, Dave?' He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a thin mustache, and stiff, black hair that no amount of grease seemed capable of flattening on his skull.

  'Who came in the room during the night?' I asked.

  'Hospital people. They's some ot'er kind working here?'

  'What kind of hospital people, Expidee?'

  'Nurses, doctors, all the reg'lar people they got working here.' He took a fresh toothpick from his shirt pocket and inserted it in the corner of his mouth. His eyes drifted back up to the television set. The doctor went out into the hall. The nurse began untaping the IV needle from Sitwell's arm. I reached up and punched off the television set.

  'Did you leave the door at all, Expidee?' I said.

  'I got to go to the bat'room sometimes.'

  'Why didn't you want to use the one in the room?'

  'I didn't want to wake the guy up.'

  'Did you go anyplace else?'

  He took the toothpick out of his mouth and put it back in his pocket. His hands were cupped on the arms of the chair.

  'Being stuck out there on a wooden chair for twelve hours isn't the best kind of assignment, partner,' I said.

  'Come on, Dave…' His eyes cut sideways at the nurse.

  'Ma'am, could you leave us alone a minute?' I said.

  She walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  'What about it, podna?' I said.

  He was quiet a moment, then he said, 'About six o'clock I went to the cafeteria and had me some eggs. I ax the nurse up at the counter not to let nobody in the room.'

  'How long were you gone?'

  'Fifteen minutes, maybe. I just didn't t'ink it was gonna be no big deal.'

  'Who was the nurse, Expidee?'

  'That one just went out… Dave, you gonna put this in my jacket?'

  I didn't answer.

  'My wife ain't working,' he said. 'I can't get no ot'er job, neither.'

  'We've got a dead man on our hands, Expidee.'

  'I'm sorry I messed up. What else I'm gonna say?'

  There was nothing for it. And I wasn't sure of the cause of death, anyway, or if the deputy's temporary negligence was even a factor.

  'If
you weren't at the door when you should have been, it was because you went down the hall to use the men's room,' I said.

  'Tanks, Dave. I ain't gonna forget it.'

  'Don't do something like this again, Expidee.'

  'I ain't. I promise. Hey, Dave, you called up the church for that guy?'

  'Why do you ask?'

  'A man like that try to hurt your family and you call the church for him, that's all right. Yes, suh, that's all right.'

  I asked the nurse to come back in. She was in her fifties and had bluish gray hair and a figure like a pigeon's. I asked her if anyone had entered Sitwell's room while Expidee was away from the door.

  'I wouldn't know,' she said.

  'Did you see anyone?'

  'You gentlemen have such an interesting attitude about accountability,' she said. 'Let me see, what exact moment did you have in mind? Do you mean while Expidee was asleep in his chair or wandering the halls?'

  'I see. Thank you for your time,' I said.

  She flipped the sheet over Chuck Sitwell's face as though she were closing a fly trap, released the blinds, and dropped the room into darkness.

  I went to the office and began opening my mail behind my desk. Through the window I could see the fronds on the palm trees by the sidewalk lifting and clattering in the breeze; across the street a black man who sold barbecue lunches was building a fire in an open pit, and the smoke from the green wood spun in the cones of sunlight shining through the oak branches overhead. It wasn't quite yet fall, but the grass was already turning a paler green, the sky a harder, deeper blue, like porcelain, with only a few white clouds on the horizon.

  But I couldn't concentrate on either my mail or the beautiful day outside. Regardless whether the autopsy showed that Charles Sitwell had died of complications from gunshot wounds or a hypodermic needle thrust into his throat, Will Buchalter was out there somewhere, with no conduit to him, outside the computer, running free, full-bore, supercharged by his own sexual cruelty.

  What was there to go on, I asked myself.

  Virtually nothing.

  No, music.

  He knew something about historical jazz. He even knew how to hold rare seventy-eights and to place them in the record rack with the opening in their dustcovers turned toward the wall.

  Could a sadist love music that had its origins in Island hymns and the three-hundred-year spiritual struggle of a race to survive legal and economic servitude?

  I doubted it. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

  Buchalter was one of those whose life was invested in the imposition of control and power over others. Like the self-serving academic who enjoys the possession of an esoteric knowledge for the feeling of superiority it gives him over others, or the pseudojournalist who is drawn to the profession because it allows him access to a world of power and wealth that he secretly envies and fears, the collector such as Buchalter reduces the beauty of butterflies to pinned insects on a mounting board, a daily reminder that creation is always subject to his murderous hand.

  The phone on my desk rang.

  'Detective Robicheaux?' a woman said.

  'Yes?'

  'This is Marie Guilbeaux. I hope I'm not bothering you.'

  'I'm sorry, who?'

  'The nun you met at the hospital. Outside Mr. Sitwell's room.'

  'Oh yes, how are you, Sister?'

  'I wanted to apologize.'

  'What for?'

  'I heard about Mr. Sitwell's death this morning, and I remembered how judgmental I must have sounded the other day. That wasn't my intention, but I wanted to apologize to you anyway.'

  'There's no need to. It's good of you to call, though.'

  I could hear a hum in the telephone, as though the call was long-distance.

  'You've been very nice,' she said.

  'Not at all… Is there something else on your mind, Sister?'

  'No, not really. I think I take myself too seriously sometimes.'

  'Well, thanks for calling.'

  'I hope to see you again sometime.'

  'Me too. Good-bye, Sister.'

  'Good-bye.'

  The musical community in southern Louisiana is a large and old one. Where do you begin if you want to find a person who's interested in or collects historical jazz?

  There was certainly nothing picturesque about the geographic origins of the form. If it was born in one spot, it was Storyville at the turn of the century, a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New Orleans, named for an alderman who wanted to contain all the city's prostitution inside a single neighborhood. Jazz meant to fornicate; songs like 'Easy Rider' and 'House of the Rising Sun' were literal dirges about the morphine addiction and suicidal despair of the prostitutes who lived out their lives in the brothels of Perdido Street.

  When I walked down Bourbon that evening, not far from Basin, one of the old borders of Storyville, the air was filled with a purple haze, lit with neon, warmly redolent of the smell of beer and whiskey in paper cups, the sky overhead intersected by a solitary pink cloud of Lake Pontchartrain. The street, which was closed to automobile traffic, was congested with people, their faces happy and flushed in the din of rockabilly and Dixieland bands. Spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were working the trade in front of the strip joints; black kids danced and clattered their clip-on steel taps on the concrete for the tourists; an all-black street band, with tambourines ringing and horns blaring, belted out 'Millersburg' on the corner at Conti; and a half block farther up, in a less hedonistic mood, a group of religious fanatics, with signs containing apocalyptical warnings, tried to buttonhole anyone who would listen to their desperate message.

  I talked to an elderly black clarinetist at Preservation Hall, a sax man at the Famous Door who used to work for Marcia Ball, a three-hundred-pound white woman with flaming hair and a sequined dress that sparkled like ice water, who played blues piano in a hole-in-the-wall on Dumaine. None of them knew of a Will Buchalter or a jazz enthusiast or collector who fit his description.

  I walked over on Ursulines to a dilapidated book and record store run by two men named Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, who was also known sometimes as Baron Belladonna. Jimmie was a florid, rotund man with a red mustache who looked like a nineteenth-century bartender. But the insides of both his forearms were laced with the flattened veins and gray scar tissue of an old-time addict. Before he had gotten off the needle, he had been known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you with any kind of illegal activity in New Orleans.

  His business partner, the Count, was another matter. He had blitzed his brain years ago with purple acid, wore a black vampire's cape and slouch hat, and maintained that the soul of Olivia Newton-John lived under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. His angular body could have been fashioned from wire; his long, narrow head and pinched face looked like they had been slammed in a door. Periodically he shaved off his eyebrows so his brain could absorb more oxygen.

  'How do you like being out of the life, Jimmie?' I asked.

  As always, my conversation with Jim would prove to be a rare linguistic experience.

  'The book business ain't bad stuff to be in these days,' he said. He wore suspenders and a purple-striped long-sleeve shirt with sweat rings under the arms. 'There's a lot of special kinds of readers out there, if you understand what I'm saying, Streak. New Orleans is being overrun by crazoids and people who was probably cloned from dog turds, and the government won't do anything about it. But it's a crazy world out there, and am I my brother's keeper, that's what I'm asking, a buck's a buck, and who am I to judge? So I've got a bin here for your vampire literature, I got your books on ectoplasm, your books on ufology and teleportation, I got your studies on tarot cards and Eckankar, you want to read about your Venusian cannibals living among us, I got your book on that, too.'

  'I'm looking for a guy named Will Buchalter, Jimmie. He might be a collector of old jazz records.' br />
  His mustache tilted and the corners of his eyes wrinkled quizzically.

  'What's this guy look like?' he asked.

  I told him while he rolled a matchstick in his mouth. The Count was cleaning bookshelves with a feather duster, his eyes as intense as obsidian chips in his white face.

  'He's got blackheads fanning back from his eyes like cat's whiskers?' Jimmie said.

  'Something like that,' I said.

  'Maybe I can give him a job here. Hey, is this guy mixed up with this Nazi submarine stuff?'

  'How do you know about the sub, Jimmie?'

  'The whole fucking town knows about it. I tell you, though, Streak, I wouldn't mess with nobody that was connected with these tin shirts or whatever they used to call these World War II commonists.'

  'Wait a minute, Jim. Not everybody knows about the Silver Shirts.'

  'I'm Irish, right, so I don't talk about my own people, there's enough others to do that, like you ever hear this one, you put four Irish Catholics together and you always got a fifth, but I got to say you cross a mick with a squarehead, you come up with a pretty unnatural combo, if you're getting my drift, mainly that wearing a star-spangled jockstrap outside your slacks ain't proof you're one-hunnerd-percent American.'

  'You've truly lost me, Jimmie.'

  'I lived right down the street from his family.'

  'Who?'

  'Tommy Bobalouba. Sometimes you're hard to get things across to, Streak. I mean, like, we got jet planes going by overhead or something?'

  'Tommy Lonighan's family was mixed up with Nazis?'

  'His mother was from Germany. She was in the, what-do-you-call-'em, the metal shirts. That's why Tommy was always fighting with people. Nobody in the Channel wanted anything to do with his family… Hey, Count, we got a customer named Will Buchalter?'

  Count Carbonna began humming to himself in a loud, flat, nasal drone.

  'Hey, Count, I'm talking here,' Jimmie said. 'Hey, you got stock in the Excedrin company… Count, knock off the noise!'

  But it was no use. The Count was on a roll, suddenly dusting the records with a manic energy, filling the store with his incessant, grinding drone.