Dixie City Jam Page 2

  'I want us both to walk out of here. We're going to throw your piece in front of us, too.'

  'What's the hurry? Have a Dr Pepper. I'll put some cherries and ice in it.'

  'Clete-'

  'I told you, everything's copacetic. Now, disengage, noble mon. Nobody rattles the old Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.' He took a hit from the shot glass, sucked on his sliced lime, and smiled at me.

  'It's time to boogie, partner,' I said.

  He looked again at his watch.

  'Give it five more minutes,' he said, and smiled again.

  He started to refill his glass from a large, square, brown bottle that he held in his hand. I placed my palm lightly on his arm.

  'Look, let me give you the big picture, noble mon,' he said. 'I'm involved with a lady friend these days. She's a nice person, she never hurt anybody, she's intelligent, she goes part-time to the Ju-Co, she also strips in a T and A joint on Bourbon owned by the Calucci brothers. We're talking about Max and Bobo here, Dave, you remember them, the two guys we ran in once for pulling a fingernail off a girl's hand with a pair of pliers? Before I met Martina, my lady friend, she borrowed two grand off the Caluccis to pay for her grandmother's hospitalization. So when she didn't make the vig yesterday, Max, the bucket of shit I put through the window glass, called her in this morning and said it was time for her to start working out of the back of a taxicab.'

  He took off his porkpie hat, combed his sandy hair straight back on his head, clipped the comb in his shirt pocket, and put his hat back on.

  'The Caluccis aren't going to make a beef, Dave, at least not a legal one. They get along in police stations like shit does in an ice cream parlor,' he said. He filled his shot glass, knocked it back, and winked at me.

  'Where's the other one-Bobo?'

  He glanced at his watch again, then looked across the counter, past a small kitchen, toward the massive wood door of a walk-in meat locker.

  'He's probably wrapping himself in freezer foil right now,' he said. 'At least that's what I'd do.'

  'Are you kidding?'

  'I didn't put him in there. He locked himself in. What am I supposed to do about it? He's got an iron bar or something set behind the door. I say live and let live.'

  I went to the locker and tried to open it. The handle was chrome and cold in my hand. The door moved an inch, then clanked against something metal and wouldn't move farther.

  'Bobo?' I said.

  'What?' a voice said through the crack.

  'This is Dave Robicheaux. I'm a sheriff's detective. It's over. Come on out. Nobody's going to hurt you.'

  'I never heard of you.'

  'I used to be in Homicide in the First District.'

  'Oh yeah, you were dick-brain's partner out there. What are you doing here? He call you up for some laughs?'

  'Here's the agenda, Bobo. Let me run it by you and get your reactions. I'm holding a forty-five automatic in my hand. If you refuse to open the door, I'll probably have to shoot a few holes through the lock and the hinges. Do you feel comfortable with that?'

  It was silent a moment.

  'Where is he?' the voice said.

  'He's not a player anymore. Take my word for it.'

  'You keep that animal away from me. He's a fucking menace. They ought to put his brain in a jar out at the medical school.'

  'You got my word, Bobo.'

  I heard an iron bar rattle to the floor, then Bobo pushed the door open with one foot from where he sat huddled in the corner, a rug wrapped around his shoulders, his hair and nostrils white with frost, clouds of freezer steam rising from his body into the sides of beef that were suspended from hooks over his head. His small, close-set black eyes went up and down my body.

  'You ain't got a gun. You sonofabitch. You lied,' He said.

  'Let's take a walk,' I said, lifting him up by one arm. 'Don't worry about Clete. He's just going to finish his drink and follow us outside. Believe it or not, there're cops out there who were willing to drop one of their own kind, just to protect you. Makes you proud to be a taxpayer, I bet.'

  'Get your hand off my arm,' he said when we reached the door.

  Batist and I stayed overnight in a guesthouse on Prytania, one block from St. Charles. The sky was red at sunrise, the air thick with the angry cries of blue jays in the hot shade outside the French doors. Nate Baxter had held Clete for disturbing the peace, but the Caluccis never showed up in the morning to file assault charges, and Clete was kicked loose without even going to arraignment.

  Batist and I had beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde across from Jackson Square. The wind was warm off the river behind us, the sun bright on the banana and myrtle trees inside the square, and water sprinklers ticked along the black piked fences that bordered the grass and separated it from the sidewalk artists and the rows of shops under the old iron colonnades. I left Batist in the café and walked through the square, past St. Louis Cathedral, where street musicians were already setting up in the shade, and up St. Ann toward Clete's private investigator's office.

  Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of wild spearmint and old brick in the passageways. Every scrolled-iron balcony along the street seemed overgrown with a tangle of potted roses, bougainvillea, azaleas, and flaming hibiscus, and the moment could be so perfect that you felt you had stepped inside an Utrillo painting.

  But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.

  The biscuit-colored stucco walls inside Clete's office were decorated with bullfight posters, leather wine bags, banderillas that he had brought back from his vacation in Mexico City. Through the back window I could see the small flagstone patio where he kept his dumbbells and the exercise bench that he used unsuccessfully every day to keep his weight and blood pressure down. Next to it was a dry stone well impacted with dirt and untrimmed banana trees.

  He sat behind his desk in his Budweiser shorts, a yellow tank top, and porkpie hat. His blue-black.38 police special hung in a nylon holster from a coatrack in the corner. He pried the cap off a bottle of Dixie beer with his pocketknife, let the foam boil over the neck onto the rug, kicked off his flip-flops, and put his bare feet on top of the desk.

  'You trying to leave the dock early today?' I said.

  'Hey, I was in the tank all night. You ought to check that scene out, mon. Two-thirds of the people in there are honest-to-God crazoids. I'm talking about guys eating their grits with their hands. It's fucking pitiful.'

  He pushed at a scrap of memo paper by his telephone.

  'I was a little bothered by something Nate Baxter said last night,' I said.

  'Oh yeah?'

  'This vigilante stuff. He thinks you might be the man.'

  He drank out of his beer and smiled at me, his eyes filled with a merry light.

  'You think I might actually have that kind of potential?' he said.

  'People have said worse things about both of us.'

  'The Lone Ranger was a radio show, mon. I don't believe there's any vigilante. I think we're talking about massive wishful thinking. These hits are just business as usual in the city. We've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.' s now.'

  'Five or six of them have been blacks in the projects.'

  'They were all dealers.'

  'That's the point,' I said.

  'Dave, I've run down bond jumpers in both the Iberville and Desire projects. Life in there is about as important as water breaking out the bottom of a paper bag. The city's going to hell, mon. That's the way it is. If somebody's out there taking names in a serious way, I say more power to them. But I don't t
hink that's the case, and anyway it's not me.'

  He took a long drink from the beer. The inside of the bottle was filled with amber light. Moisture slid down the neck over the green-and-gold label.

  'I'm sorry. You want me to send out for a Dr Pepper or some coffee?' he asked.

  'No, I've got to be going. I had to bring my boat up from New Iberia for some work. It'll be ready about noon.'

  He picked up the slip of memo paper by his phone and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.

  'I ought to save you a headache and throw this away,' he said. But he flipped it across the desk blotter at me.

  'What is it?'

  'That black broad, the sergeant who was in front of Calucci's, called this morning. She didn't know how else to get ahold of you. My advice is that you pitch that telephone number in the trash and go back to New Iberia. Forget New Orleans. The whole place is just waiting for a hydrogen bomb.'

  'What's the deal?'

  'She's a hard-nosed black broad named Lucinda Bergeron from the projects who doesn't take dog shit from white male cops. That's the deal.'

  'So?'

  'Last night she evidently got in Nate Baxter's face. So today he's trying to kick a two-by-four up her ass. He wrote her up for insubordination. He says she cussed him out. She says she's innocent and you can back her up.'

  'She didn't cuss him out while I was there. In fact, she really kept her Kool-Aid.'

  'Don't get sucked in, mon. Messing with Baxter is like putting your hand in a spittoon.'

  I picked,up the slip of paper and put it in my pocket.

  'What do I know?' he said.

  I called the dock from the guesthouse and was told that the mechanic had gone home sick and my boat would not be ready until the next day. Then I called the number on the slip of paper, which turned out to be Garden District police headquarters, and was told that Lucinda Bergeron was not in. I left my name and the telephone number of the guesthouse.

  Batist was sitting on the side of his bed, his big, callused, scar-flecked hands in his lap, staring out the French doors, his face full of thought.

  'What's troubling you, partner?' I asked.

  'That nigger out yonder in the lot.'

  'That what?'

  'You heard me.'

  'What'd he do?'

  'While you was still sleepin', I got up early and went down to the dining room for coffee. He was eatin' in there, talkin' loud with his mout' full of food, puttin' his hand on that young white girl's back each time she po'ed his coffee. Pretendin' like it's innocent, like he just a nice man don't have no bad t'oughts on his mind, no.'

  'Maybe it's their business, Batist.'

  'That kind of trashy nigger make it hard on the rest of us, Dave.'

  He walked to the French doors, continued to stare out at the parking lot, peeled the cellophane off a cigar, and wadded the cellophane up slowly in his palm.

  'He leanin' up against your truck,' he said.

  'Let it go.'

  'He need somebody to go upside his head.'

  I knew better than to argue with Batist, and I didn't say anything more. He took off his short-sleeve blue denim shirt, hung it on the bedpost, and lathered his face with soap in front of the bathroom mirror. The muscles in his shoulders and back looked like rocks inside a leather bag. He began shaving with a pearl-handled straight-edge razor, drawing the blade cleanly down each of his jaws and under his chin.

  I had known him since I was a child, when he used to fur-trap with my father on Marsh Island. He couldn't read or write, not even his own name, and had difficulty recognizing numbers and dialing a telephone. He had never been outside the state of Louisiana, had voted for the first time in 1968, and knew nothing of national or world events… But he was one of the most honest and decent men I've known, and absolutely fearless and unflinching in an adversarial situation (my adopted daughter, Alafair, never quite got over the time she saw him reach into a flooded pirogue, pinch a three-foot moccasin behind the head, and fling it indifferently across the bayou).

  He walked back to the French doors, blotting a cut on his chin with a towel, the razor still in his hand. Then he folded the razor, dropped it in the back pocket of his denims, and began buttoning on his shirt.

  'What are you doing, Batist?'

  'Take a look out yonder.'

  A tall, thin mulatto with skin the color of a new penny was talking to a half dozen black kids by my truck. He wore striped brown pants, with a braided black belt, and a lavender short-sleeve shirt with a white tie. He grinned and jiggled, and his hands moved in the air while he talked, as though a song were working inside him.

  'A man like that just like a movie star to them raggedy kids, Dave.'

  'At some point they'll learn he isn't.'

  'It won't be no he'p then. He's a dope dealer or a pimp, don't be tellin' me he ain't. He'll use up them young boys' lives just so he can have money for a nice car, take womens out to the racetrack, put dope up his nose… Hey, you t'ink I'm wrong? Come see.'

  The mulatto man rubbed one kid on his head, the way a baseball coach might, then hooked two fingers inside the kid's belt, drew the kid close to him, and stuffed something small inside his pants. Then he cupped his hand around the nape of another kid's neck, his face beaming with goodwill and play, and shoved something down inside his pants, too.

  'I be right back,' Batist said.

  'Leave this guy alone, Batist. I'll call the locals and they'll send somebody out.'

  'Yeah, in t'ree hours they will.'

  'This isn't our pond, partner.'

  'Yeah? How come you run across town last night to get mixed up with Purcel and them dagos?'

  He picked up his dry cigar from the ashtray, put it deep in his jaw, and went out the door.

  Oh boy, I thought.

  Batist walked from the guesthouse through the shade of the mulberry tree to the edge of the parking lot. The mulatto man was leaning against the headlight of my truck, entertaining his audience by one-handedly rolling a half-dollar across the backs of his fingers. He propped one shined shoe behind him on the truck bumper and gingerly squeezed his scrotum. I don't know what he said to Batist. It may have been a patronizing remark or perhaps even a pleasant greeting; he was smiling when he said it. But I don't think he expected the response he got.

  The flat of Batist's right hand, which could curve around a brick and shale the corners off it, seemed to explode against the side of the man's head. His face went out of round with the blow, and the blood drained from his cheeks; his jaw hung open, and his eyes were suddenly small and round, shrunken in his head like a pig's. Then Batist hit him with his open hand again, harder, this time on the side of the mouth, so that the bottom lip broke against the teeth.

  Batist waved his hands in the midst of the black kids like someone shooing chickens out of a brooder house. They ran in all directions while the mulatto man held the back of his wrist against his mouth, one palm turned outward in a placating gesture.

  Batist pointed bis finger into the man's face and walked toward him silently, as though he were leveling a lance at him. The man broke and ran through the parking lot toward a cottage on the opposite side of the street. Batist ground a tiny glass vial into the cement with the heel of his boot, then walked past a group of stunned tourists who had just emerged from the guesthouse dining room; his perspiring face was turned away in embarrassment.

  I called my wife, Bootsie, in New Iberia and told her that I would be at least another day in New Orleans, then I tried calling Lucinda Bergeron again at Garden District headquarters. She was still out, so I decided to drive over there, file a statement, and be done with the matter. I didn't know that I would end up talking to Sergeant Benjamin Motley, who used to be in Vice when I was a homicide lieutenant in the First District.

  He was a rotund, powerful black man, whose clothes always smelled of cigar smoke, with a thick black mustache and glistening fire-hydrant neck, who had little sympathy for the plight of his own people. One time
a black wino in a holding cell had ridiculed Motley, calling him the white man's hired 'knee-grow,' and Motley had sprayed the man from head to foot with a can of Mace. Earlier in his law-enforcement career he had been the subject of a wrongful death investigation, when, as a bailiff, he had escorted seven prisoners from the drunk tank on a wrist chain to morning arraignment and a fire in the courthouse basement had blown the circuits and stalled the elevator between floors. Motley had gotten out through the trap-door in the top of the elevator; the seven men on the chain had died of asphyxiation.

  His office was glassed in and spacious, and several merit and civic citations were framed on the walls. Outside was a squad room filled with uniformed cops doing their paperwork at their desks. Motley leaned back in his swivel chair, one shoe propped on his waste-basket, and ate a half-peeled candy bar while I finished writing out in longhand what little I could report about the exchange between Nate Baxter and Lucinda Bergeron.

  I signed my name at the bottom of the form and handed it to him. His eyes went up and down the page while he brushed at his chin with one knuckle.

  'What are you doing in New Orleans, anyway, Robicheaux? I thought you were a plainclothes in Iberia Parish,' he said.

  'I'm on leave for a while.'

  'You couldn't stay out of New Orleans?'

  'You need anything else, Motley?'

  'Not a thing. Use your time any way you want to.'

  'What's that mean?'

  'You think this is going to bail that broad out?' He shook the page between his fingers.

  'I don't know. But she didn't cuss out Nate Baxter while I was there. In fact, in my opinion, it was Baxter who was out of line.'

  'Baxter got you suspended without pay when he was in Internal Affairs. You even punched him out in a squad room at First District. You should have written this on toilet paper and put it in the John.'

  'You haven't lost your touch, Motley.'

  He chewed on the corner of his lip and rolled his eyes sideways.

  'Look through the glass,' he said. 'Count the white officers in the squad room, then count the black officers. When you get done doing that, count the female officers in the room. Then count the black female officers. Is the picture coming clear for you?'