Dixie City Jam Page 20

  As with most of her kind, Pearly Blue's toughness was a sad illusion, and her breaking point was always right beneath the skin.

  'You want to tell me what happened with Nate Baxter?' I said.

  She looked down at the end of the alley, where a clump of untrimmed banana trees grew by a rack of garbage cans and traffic was passing on the street. She took another hit on her cigarette.

  'Pearly Blue, as far as I'm concerned, we're still inside the meeting. Which means anything you tell me doesn't go any farther.'

  'I went down to the store to buy some eggs to make his breakfast,' she said. She had a peckerwood accent and a peculiar way of moving her lips silently before she spoke. 'He always wants an omelette when he gets up in the morning. When I came back, fire was popping the glass out of all the windows.'

  'Who handcuffed the doors together?'

  'I don't know. I didn't.' She looked up at the telephone wires, an attempted pout on her mouth, like a put-upon adolescent girl.

  'Why are you still hanging around with a guy like Baxter, Pearly Blue?'

  'I wrote a couple of bad checks. He said he'll tell my P.O.'

  'I see.'

  'I wasn't hanging paper. It was just an overdraft. But with the jacket I already got-'

  She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tried to look self-possessed and cool, but the color had risen in her throat, and her pulse was fluttering like an injured moth.

  'Who torched the place?' I said.

  'I don't know, Streak. Everything I owned was burned up. What am I supposed to tell you?' Her eyes were wet now. She opened and closed them and looked emptily at the graffiti-scrolled wall of a garage apartment.

  'Were the Calucci brothers behind it?'

  'Don't be telling people that. Don't be using my name when you go talking about them kind of people,'

  'I won't let you get hurt, Pearly Blue. Just tell me what happened.'

  'Some guy called, it was like he knew everything about me, about my kid getting taken away from me, about where I work, about some stuff, you know, not very good stuff, I did at the massage parlour, he said, "Get out of your place by six, have yourself a nice walk, when you come back you won't have to be this guy's fuck no more."'

  'You don't know who it was?'

  'You think I want to know something like that? You remember what happened to my roommate in the Quarter when she told a vice cop she'd testify against one of the Giacano family? They soaked her in gasoline. They-'

  'You're out of it, Pearly Blue. Forget about Baxter, forget about the Calucci brothers. Where are you living now?'

  'At my sister's. I just want to go to meetings, work at my job, and get my little boy back. My P.O.' s a hard ass, he hears about the checks, calls from the wise guys, stuff like that, I'm going down again. It's full of bull dykes in there, Streak. I just can't do no more time.'

  'You won't, not if I have anything to do with it.'

  'Baxter's gonna find me. He's gonna make me ball him again. It's sickening.'

  I took a business card out of my wallet, pressed it into her palm, and closed her fingers on it. Her hand was small and moist in mine.

  'Believe me when I tell you this,' I said. 'If Nate Baxter ever bothers you again, call me, and he'll wish his parents had taken up celibacy.'

  Her face became confused.

  'He'll wish his father'd had his equipment sawed off,' I said.

  The corner of her mouth wrinkled with a smile, exposing a line of tiny, silver-capped teeth.

  Nate Baxter's room was as utilitarian and plain and devoid of cheer as his life. It contained no flowers, greeting cards, clusters of balloons, and certainly no visitors, unless you counted the uniformed cop on duty at the door.

  'You don't look too bad, Nate,' I said. Which wasn't true. His face was wan, the reddish gold beard along his jawline was matted with some kind of salve, and stubble had grown out on his cheeks.

  He didn't speak; his eyes regarded me carefully.

  'I talked with an arson inspector. He said somebody put a fire-bomb under your bed, probably gasoline and paraffin,' I said.

  'You're making that your business, along with everything else in Orleans Parish?'

  'I've got a special interest in Max and Bobo Calucci. I think you do, too, Nate.'

  'What's that mean?'

  'You're on a pad.'

  'I remember once when you smelled like an unflushed toilet with whiskey poured in it. Maybe that's why IA busted you out of the department. Maybe that's why you can't ever get that hard out of your pants. But I'm not up to trading insults with you. Do me a favor today, go back home.'

  He turned his head on the pillow to reach a drinking glass filled with Coca-Cola. I could see a tubular, raw-edged lump behind his right ear.

  'I think you tried to up the juice on the Caluccis, Nate. Then they decided to factor you out of the overhead.'

  'It's always the same problem with you, Robicheaux. It's not what you don't know, it's what you think you know that makes you a fuckup. No matter where you go, you leave shit prints on the walls.'

  'You were asleep, maybe you still had a half a bag on, Pearly Blue went to the store, somebody sapped you across the head, then he really lit up your morning.'

  'I was in her apartment because she's still my snitch. You want to give it some other interpretation, nobody's going to be listening. Why? Because you don't work here anymore. For some reason, you can't seem to accept that simple fact.' His hand moved toward the cord and call button that would bring a nurse or the guard at the door.

  'You know what denial is, Nate?'

  'I breathed a lot of smoke yesterday. I'm not interested in wetbrain vocabulary right now. Every one of you AA guys thinks you deserve the Audie Murphy award because you got sober. Here's the news flash on that. The rest of us have been sober all along. It's not a big deal in the normal world.'

  'A heroin mule in Baton Rouge custody knew about the hit. So did some greaseballs in Mobile. So did Tommy Lonighan. They're talking about you like you're already off the board.'

  'Get out of here before I place you under arrest.' His hand went toward the call button again. I moved it out of his reach.

  'You're a bad cop, Nate. Somebody should have clicked off your switch a long time ago.'

  I pushed back my seersucker coat and removed my.45 from my belt holster. His eyes were riveted on mine now.

  'You're bad not because you're on a pad; you're bad because you don't understand that we're supposed to protect the weak,' I said. 'Instead, when you sense weakness in people, you exploit it, you bully and humiliate them, you've even sodomized and raped them.'

  'You've got a terminal case of assholeitis, Robicheaux, but you're not crazy. So get off it.' He tried to keep the conviction in his voice, his eyes from dropping to the pistol in my hand.

  'I know an AA bunch called the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group. Some of them are bad dudes, guys who've been on Camp J up at Angola. They say you've been hitting on Pearly Blue for a long time. They wanted to do something about it.' I pulled back the slide on the.45 and eased a round from the magazine into the chamber. 'But I told them I'd take care of it.'

  'That gun-threat bullshit is an old ruse of yours. You're firing in the well. Get out of my room.'

  I sat on the edge of his bed.

  'You're right, it is,' I said. 'That's why I was going to shove it down your mouth and let you work toward that conclusion while you swallowed some of your own blood, Nate… But there's no need.'

  'What are you-'

  I released the magazine, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped it clinking into his drinking glass.

  'She found out this week she's HIV positive,' I said. 'I'd get some tests as long as I was already in the hospital. But no matter how you cut it, Nate, Pearly Blue is out of your life. We're clear on that, aren't we?'

  His lips looked gray and cracked, the texture of snakeskin that has dried in the sun, and the whites of his eyes were laced with pink b
lood vessels. The light through the blinds seemed to reflect like a liquid yellow presence in his incredulous glare. I heard his drinking glass crash to the floor and the call button clicking rapidly in his fist as I walked toward the door.

  That evening I had to go far down the bayou in a boat to tow back a rental whose engine one of our customers had plowed across a sandbar. It was dark before I finally locked up the bait shop and walked to the house. Boptsie was asleep, but as soon as I entered the bedroom I knew how she had spent the last three hours. Her breathing had filled the room with a thick, sweet odor like flowers soaked overnight in cream sherry.

  I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the smooth white curve of her hip in the moonlight. I rubbed my hand along her rump and thigh; her skin felt heated, flushed, as though she were experiencing an erotic dream, but it was also insensitive to my touch.

  I put my fingers in the thick curls of her hair, kissed her back, and felt like a fifty-five-year-old adolescent impotently contending with his own throbbing erection.

  I had been saved from my alcoholism by A A. Why did it have to befall her?

  But I already knew the answer. The best way to become a drunk is to live with one.

  What are we going to do, Boots? I thought. Bring the dirty boogie full tilt into our lives, then do a pit stop five years down the road and see if the trade-off was worth it?

  But somebody else was already working on an answer for me. At 2:00 a.m. I heard the door on my father's old tractor shed, which was always padlocked, knocking against the jamb in the wind, then I heard music, a song that was a generation out-of-date, that seemed to float across wine-dark seas crowded with ships in a time when the lights almost went out all over the world.

  I slipped on my khakis and loafers, took my.45 from under the bed, and walked with a flashlight along the edge of the coulee to the shed. I bounced the beam ahead of me on the willows and the weathered gray sides of the shed, the open door that drifted back and forth on two rusty hinges, the hasp and padlock that had been splintered loose from the wood.

  Then I clearly heard the words to 'Harbor Lights.'

  I clicked off the safety on the.45, flipped back the door with my foot, and shined the light inside the shed.

  In front of my father's old tractor was a butcher block where we used to dress game. Someone had covered it with white linen that was almost iridescent in the moonlight burning through the spaces in the slats. On the tablecloth was a cassette player, a clean china plate with a blue, long-stemmed rose laid across it, a freshly uncorked bottle of Jack Daniel's, a glass tumbler filled with four inches of bourbon, and a sweat-beaded uncapped bottle of Dixie beer on the side. A crystal goblet of burgundy that was half empty stood in a shaft of moonlight on the far side of the butcher block. On the rim of the glass was the perfect lipsticked impression of a woman's mouth.

  chapter eighteen

  Before he had been elected to office, the sheriff had owned a dry-cleaning business and had been president of the local Rotary Club, or perhaps it was the Lions, I don't recall which, but it was one of those businessmen's groups which manage to do a fair amount of civic good in spite of their unprofessed and real objective.

  He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted flowered teapot while I told him of my 2:00 a.m. visitor. He had a round, cleft chin, soft cheeks veined with tiny blue and red lines, and a stomach that pouched over his gunbelt, but his posture was always so erect, his shirt tucked in so tightly, that he gave you the impression of a man who was both younger and in better physical condition than he actually was.

  But even though the Rotary or Lions Club still held strong claim on the sheriff's soul, he often surprised me with a hard-edged viewpoint that I suspected had its origins in his experience at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, which he refused, under any circumstances, to discuss with anyone.

  'Well, you didn't drink any of it. That's what seems most important, if you ask me.'

  'Some people might call that a pretty cavalier attitude,' I said.

  'It's your call. Write it up, Dave. Bring our fingerprint man in on it. I don't know what else to say.'

  He sat down in his swivel chair behind his desk. He pushed at his stomach with his stiffened fingers. Then he had another running start at it.

  'Dave, what's it going to sound like when you tell people that somebody, maybe a woman, did a B and E on you so she could cover your butcher block with a tablecloth and set it with burgundy, cold beer, and expensive whiskey?'

  'It's Buchalter, Sheriff. Or somebody working with him.'

  'What was the motive for his house call last night?'

  'He doesn't need one. He's a psychopath.'

  'That's no help.' He began picking a series of bent paper clips out of a glass container and throwing them at the waste can. 'Before you came to the department, we had a particularly nasty homicide case.' Ping. 'Maybe you remember it. A lowlife degenerate named Jerry Dipple raped and then hanged a four-year-old child.' Ping. 'We thought we had him dead bang. His prints were all over the murder scene, there was a torn theater ticket in his shirt pocket from the show where he'd abducted the child, the rope he used was in the bottom of his closet.' Ping. 'Guess what? The lamebrain handling the investigation went into Dipple's house and seized the evidence without a warrant. Then when he realized he'd screwed up, he put the evidence back and let his partner find it later.' Ping.

  'Guess what again? I learned about it and didn't say a thing. But Dipple's lawyer was a smart greasebag from Lafayette, you know him, the same guy who was fronting points for a PCB-incinerator outfit last year, and he found out what the lamebrain and his partner had done.' Ping. 'Our case was down the drain and we were about to turn loose a child killer who had done it before and would do it again. Bad day for the good guys, Dave.

  'Except six months earlier we had raided a trick pad on the St. Martin line. One of the girls had some photographs of our lawyer-friend from Lafayette, I'm talking about real Tijuana specials, you know what I mean? So I invited our friend in and let him have a look. If he wanted to investigate our practices, we'd let some people in the state bar association have a peek at his.' Ping, ping, ping.

  'Dipple fried. I thought it might bother me. But the night he rode the bolt I took my grandchildren to the movies and then went home and slept like a stone.'

  'I don't know if I get your point.'

  'I'll be honest with you, I don't know what we're dealing with here. Whatever it is, it's not part of the normal ebb and flow.' He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair, and kneaded the back of his neck. 'Look, I think Buchalter is trying to hit you where you're weakest.'

  'Where's that?'

  'Booze.'

  'A guy like that can't make me drink, Sheriff.'

  'I'm not talking about you.' He rubbed one hand on top of the other, then folded them on the desk blotter and looked me in the face. 'This guy's trying to mess up your family and I think he's doing a good job of it.'

  'That's not a very cool thing to say, Sheriff.'

  'Bootsie almost had a DWI yesterday afternoon.'

  I felt something sink in my chest.

  'Fortunately the right deputy stopped her and let the other lady drive,' the sheriff said.

  The room seemed filled with white sound. I took my sunglasses out of their leather case, then slipped them back in again. I opened my mouth behind my fist to clear my ears and looked out the window. Then I said, 'What other lady?'

  'I don't know. Whoever she was with.'

  'I'll finish my report now and put it in your box.'

  'Don't. The newspaper'll get ahold of it for sure. It's just what this character wants. Walk outside with me.'

  It was warm in the parking lot, and the wind was flattening the leaves in the oak grove across the street. The sheriff unlocked the trunk of his car, took out a stiff, blanket-wrapped object, and walked to my truck with it. He laid the object across the seat of my truck and flipped the blanket open.

&nb
sp; 'Some people might tell you to wire up a shotgun to your back door,' he said. 'The problem is, you'd probably kill an innocent person first or only wound the sonofabitch breaking into your house, then he'd sue you and take your property. You know what this is, don't you?'

  'An AR-15, the semiauto model of the M-16.'

  'It's got a thirty-round magazine in it. Jerry Dipple's in a prison cemetery and children around here are a lot safer because of it. Nobody cares how the box score gets written, just as long as the right numbers are in it.' He tapped down the lock button on the door with the flat of his fist, closed the door, and looked at his watch. 'Time for coffee and a doughnut, podna,' he said, and laid his arm across my shoulders.

  Back in my office I tore my unfinished report in half and dropped it in the wastebasket. There were two ways to think about the sheriffs behavior, neither of which was consoling:

  1. Semper fi, Mac, you're on your own.

  Which was too severe an indictment of the sheriff. But-

  2. No application of force or firepower has so far been successful. Since we've concluded that we don't understand what we're dealing with, use more force and firepower.

  Yes, that was more like it. It was old and familiar logic. If you feel like a reviled and excoriated white sojourner in, a slum area, break the bones of a drunk black motorist with steel batons. If you cannot deal with the indigenous population of a Third World country, turn their rain forests into smoking gray wasteland with napalm and Agent Orange.

  But my cynicism was cheap, born out of the same impotence in trying to deal with evil that had caused the sheriff to make me a present of his Colt Industries urban-Americana meatcutter.

  My desk was covered with fax sheets from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and photocopied files from NOPD that had been sent to me by Ben Motley. The people in those combined pages could have been players in almost any city in the United States. They were uniquely American, ingrained in our economy, constantly threading their way in and out of lives, always floating about on the periphery of our vision. But nothing that we've attempted so far has been successful in dealing with them. In fact, I'm not even sure how to define them.