Dixie City Jam Read online

  'You had this guy made from the jump. You've got to help me, Jesse.'

  He wiped at his face as though insects were in his eyes.

  'Dude comes up to me on Royal, right after the gig, offers me a hundred bucks to play a half hour of my slide at his studio. I say, A hundred bucks don't cut making a tape. He says it's a demo, he's gonna offer it around, he's doing me a favor, usually a guy's got to pay for his own demo.

  'I'm looking into that cat's face, I'm thinking he ain't ever gonna use the word nigger, he ain't gonna call me boon or tree climber or spear chucker, that ain't his way. He got that lil smile playing around the corner of his mouth, just like them guys in the AB look at you up at the farm. They'll hoe next to you in the soybean row, won't say nothing to you, chopping all the time like their mind is full of cool thoughts. That night you go in the shower and that same dude waiting for you with a shank in his hand.'

  'You've got to give me something, Jesse.'

  'He say his studio was one hour away. One hour there, one hour back. He winked at me when he said it.'

  'I think you're holding back on me.' I kept my eyes locked on his.

  'I ain't. He called once, man, right here at the trailer. I tole him I still ain't interested. It sound like he was outdoors, pay phone maybe. I could hear waves flopping, like on a beach.'

  'He never mentioned a place? How about Grand Isle?'

  'Not unless they moved Grand Isle over to Miss'sippi.'

  'I'm not with you.'

  'That day on Royal. I didn't pay the car no mind, but the plates was from Miss'sippi. That good enough? 'Cause that's all there is.'

  I gave him my business card and picked up my coat from the chair. He looked out into space while his hand closed and opened on the card. Then he pressed it back into my palm.

  'My wife deserve a trip after all the sickness she been having. I think we going out to visit our children in California. Be gone quite a while. You understand what I'm saying?'

  The next afternoon, which was Friday afternoon, Ben Motley called me from New Orleans.

  'Max Calucci dropped the charges against Purcel for destroying his house,' he said.

  'Quite a change of heart.'

  'What's your take on it?'

  'He probably started sweating marbles when he heard Lonighan's Indian was in custody. That is, if he's mixed up in the vigilante killings. The last thing he needs now is legal involvement with the prosecutor's office. What's the insurance carrier, State Farm, going to do?'

  'They're out of luck if they want to put it on Purcel. The witnesses now say they don't remember what the guy on the grader looked like. But they're sure it wasn't Purcel. I left a message on his recorder, but he didn't call back.'

  'He's holed up in a fish camp someplace.'

  'I went by his office. A secretary, a temp, was in there. She said he retrieved the message off the machine. Why doesn't he answer his calls?'

  'I don't know, he's a little irresponsible sometimes. What's the status on Manuel Ruiz?'

  'No bond. We're holding him for the INS. By the way, tell Purcel it's all right he doesn't call me back. Since he's already got such good friends in the department. Like Nate Baxter.'

  I left a message for Clete at both his office and his apartment.

  That evening I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three sets of dead lifts, bench presses, and curls in the backyard. My neighbor was burning a pile of dried honeysuckle, and the air was hazy and sweet with the smoke.

  Tie it down, think, I told myself. What were the ongoing connections in the Buchalter case?

  Music, and now geography.

  Two of Buchalter's hired meltdowns, Jack Pelley and Charles Sitwell, had been in the rock 'n' roll band in the Block at Angola. Buchalter evidently prowled stores that handled old records, like Jimmie Ryan's, and had tried to make a studio recording of the slide guitarist Jesse Viator.

  He had been driving a car with Mississippi plates, had access to a studio an hour from New Orleans, and had made a telephone call within earshot of a beach.

  The German skinhead who had been run down by his friends out on the salt had been diving from a cabin cruiser he and his friends had stolen from a berth in Biloxi.

  Hippo Bimstine's friends had broken up a meeting of a hate group with baseball bats and expropriated their Nazi film footage in a cinder-block house north of Pascagoula.

  I lowered the bar to my thighs, then curled it into my chest, released it slowly again, pausing in midair as the muscles in my arms burned and filled with blood. The air felt as cool as a knife blade in my lungs.

  Maybe the circle was starting to tighten on Will Buchalter.

  Before we went to bed, Bootsie and I ate a piece of pie at the kitchen table.

  'Is something bothering you?' she said.

  'I thought Clete might call.'

  'Clete has his own way of doing things.'

  'You're right about that.'

  That night the wind blew hard out of the south, and I could hear our rental boats knocking against the pilings in the dock. Then it began to rain, and in my sleep I heard another sound, a distant one, metal striking methodically against metal, one pinging blow after another, muffled by the envelope of water it had to travel through.

  In my dream I saw a group of Nazi sailors huddled in a half-flooded compartment, salt water pinwheeling through the leaks above their heads, their faces white with terror in the dimming light while they breathed their own stink and the coldness crept above their loins and one man kept whanging a wrench against the bulkhead.

  I woke from the dream, my chest laboring for air. Through the clicking of the rain in the trees, I could still hear the rhythmic twang of metal hitting against metal. I slipped on my loafers and khakis, pulled a raincoat over my head, and, with a flashlight in my hand, ran from the back door to the collapsed barn by my duck pond. A sheet of corrugated tin roofing, purple with rust, was swinging from a broken beam against the remains of my father's old hay baler.

  I pulled the broken beam and sheet of tin loose from the pile and threw them out into the field.

  But I couldn't shake the dream. Why? What did I care about the fate of Nazis drowned fifty years ago?

  The dream was not about submariners. Someone close to me was in trouble, maybe because of information I had given him, and I was trying to deny that simple fact.

  Where was Clete Purcel?

  chapter twenty-nine

  Tommy Lonighan had turned up the heat inside his glassed-in sunporch, even though it was seventy-five degrees outside and he was wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. My face was moist with heat, but his skin looked dry and gray; almost flaccid, as though his glands had stopped secreting; he sat forward on his reclining chair, his eyes still trying to follow the action in a movie playing on his VCR, a furious conclusion working in his face.

  'This is a piece of crap,' he said, pulled the cassette from the VCR, and flung it clattering into a pile of other cassettes. 'You saw that movie Reservoir Dogs? It's sickening. A bunch of made guys are beating up and torturing a cop. No mobbed-up guys would do something like that. The guy who wrote this don't know dick about crime. You know what I think, it's the guy wrote this is sick, not the fucking criminals.'

  'Can you help me find Clete or not?'

  'Where do you find an elephant? You go to the circus. How should I know where he is? Ask his punch, the one getting in my face about Jews.'

  'I went by Martina's apartment this morning. No one's seen her in two or three days.'

  'Cause she's with Purcel. 'Cause he's got a warrant on him, he don't wake up with a boner?'

  'You're unbelievable, Tommy.'

  'If Max or Bobo did something to him, I'd a heard about it, and I ain't.' He freed something from a nostril and sniffed dryly. 'Can I tell you something? I don't give a shit, either. I wish the Caluccis would try to hit somebody now. Maybe they'd get taken down like they deserve.'

  'You're talking about my friend.'
>
  'I should worry about Purcel? I got maybe three, four months, then the doctor says he'll start me on morphine. Maybe it ain't gonna do the job, either. You know why I got all this grief in my life? It's punishment 'cause I got mixed up with those fucking greasebags. They're immoral, they got no honor, they-'

  'Then why not dime 'em and be done with it, Tommy?'

  'I thought you knew.' His eyes were close-set, like BB's. Blotches of color broke in his face. 'You guys don't use telephones, you don't talk to each other?'

  'What is it?' I said.

  'Late yesterday, I spilled my guts, everything,' he said. 'I haven't been charged yet, but they'll do that Monday.'

  I waited. The room was ablaze with sunlight and color-the deep blue tile floor, the cane deck furniture and canary yellow cushions-but in its midst Tommy looked stricken, like a man who had mistakenly thought the source of his abiding shame had at least become known and accepted if not forgiven.

  'Max and Bobo wanted to scare the coloreds out of the trade in the projects,' he said. 'They used Manny to do three guys. They told him these coloreds were evil spirits and had to be killed 'cause they were selling dope and corrupting little kids. He comes from a bunch of headhunters or cannibals that's got a flower and death cult or something. Or maybe Max made him think he did after he got ahold of this documentary on these prehistoric people that's running around in South America. I don't know about that stuff.'

  He scowled into space. White clouds were tumbling in the sky, leaves blowing across the freshly clipped lawn.

  'You think I'm toe jam, don't you?' he said.

  I kept my face empty and brushed at the crystal on my watch with my thumb.

  'A couple of button guys did the other hits, I heard Jamaicans out of Miami,' he said. 'It's been putting boards in my head. I feel miserable. It's like nothing's any good anymore. There's some kind of smell won't wash out of my clothes. Here, you smell it?'

  He extended his shirt cuff under my nose.

  'Where you going?' he said.

  'I've got to find Clete.'

  'Stay. I'll fix some chicken sandwiches.'

  'Sorry.'

  He blew his nose in a Kleenex and dropped the Kleenex in a paper bag full of crumpled tissue, many of them flecked with blood.

  'You seen Hippo?' he said.

  'We're not on good terms, I'm afraid.'

  'He ain't such a bad guy.' He stared disjointedly at the leaves blowing against the windows. 'You see him again, tell him I said that.'

  'Sure.'

  'You want to take some movie cassettes? I get them for two bucks from a guy sells dubs in Algiers.'

  'Dubs?'

  'What world you hang out in, Dave? Anything that's electronically recorded today gets dubbed and resold. Those music tapes you see in truck stops, you think Kenny Rogers sells his tapes for three-ninety-five? What, I'm saying the wrong thing again?'

  'No, I just haven't been thinking clearly about something, Tommy. See you around.'

  I went by Clete's office on St. Ann in the Quarter. It was locked, the blinds drawn, the mailbox inside the brick archway stuffed with letters. I used a pay phone in Jackson Square to call Ben Motley at his home.

  'Why didn't you tell me Lonighan made a statement yesterday?' I said.

  'It happened late. I don't know how it's going to go down, anyway… Look, the bottom line is Lonighan implicated himself and the Indian. Lonighan's already a dead man, and the Indian's a retard. The interpreter says he'll testify he works for Spiderman if you want him to. The prosecutor's office isn't calling news conferences.'

  'What's the status on the Caluccis?'

  'That's what I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. There isn't any. We'll see what happens Monday. But we got an old problem, too. The Caluccis go down, Nate Baxter goes down. He's going to screw up the investigation any way he can.'

  I felt my hand squeeze tightly around the receiver. The sunlight through the restaurant window was like a splinter of glass in the eye.

  'Cheer up,' he said. 'We're getting there.'

  'Purcel's completely off the screen.'

  'Cover your own ass for a change. You know how Purcel'll buy it? He'll catch some kind of incurable clap when he's a hundred and fifty. Call me Monday.'

  I drove up St. Charles to Hippo's drugstore. He was sitting in the shade on a collapsible metal chair by the entrance, eating a spearmint snowball. Two streetcars were stopped at a sunny spot on the neutral ground, loading and unloading passengers. At first he ignored me and continued to eat the ice out of the paper cone; then he smiled and aimed his index finger and thumb at me like a cocked pistol.

  'A weird place to sit, Hippo,' I said.

  'Not for me. I love New Orleans. Look up and down this street-the trees, the old homes, the moss in the wind. There's not another street like it in the world.' He reached next to him and popped open a second metal chair. 'Sit down. What can I do for you?'

  'You're okay, Hippo.'

  'Why not?' His eyes squinted into slits with his smile.

  'You know about almost every enterprise on the Gulf Coast, don't you?'

  'Business is like spaghetti… pull on one piece, you move the whole plate.'

  'Let me try a riddle on you. Mobbed-up guys don't torture cops, do they?'

  'Not unless they're planning careers as crab bait.'

  'Buchalter's not mobbed-up.'

  'That's a breakthrough for you?'

  'But what if Buchalter was selling duplicated recordings of historical jazz, or making blues tapes and screwing the musician on the copyright?'

  'Dubs are in. Some lowlifes tried to get me to retail them in my drugstores. I don't think there's any big market for historical jazz, though.'

  'Stay with me, Hippo. A guy selling dubs would have to piece off the action or be connected, right?'

  'If he wants to stay in business.'

  'So Buchalter's not part of the local action. Where's the biggest market for old blues and jazz?'

  His eyes became thoughtful. 'He's selling it in Europe?'

  'I think I've got a shot at him.'

  He took another bite out of his cone and sucked his cheeks in.

  'You want some backup? From guys with no last names?' he asked.

  'Buchalter probably has a recording studio of some kind over on the Mississippi coast. I can go over there and spend several days looking through phone books and knocking on doors.'

  He nodded without replying.

  'Or I can get some help from a friend who has a lot of connections on the coast.'

  'I provide information, then me and my friends get lost, that's what you're saying?'

  'So far we don't have open season on people we don't like, Hippo.'

  He crumpled up the paper cone in his hand, walked to a trash receptacle, and dropped it in.

  'We'll use the phone at my place,' he said.

  It didn't take long. He made four phone calls, then a half hour later a fax came through his machine with a list of addresses on it. He handed it to me, his sleek, football-shaped head framed by the corkboard filled with death camp photos behind him.

  'There're seven of them, strung out between Bay St. Louis and Pascagoula,' he said. 'It looks like you get to knock on lots of doors, anyway.'

  I folded the fax and put it in my coat pocket.

  'Did you hear about Tommy Bobalouba?' I said.

  'He knew he had cancer two years ago. He shouldn't have fooled around with it.'

  'That's kind of rough, Hippo.'

  'I'm supposed to weep over mortality? Do you know what's going on in that mick's head? I win, he loses. But he wants me to know I win only because he got reamed by the Big C.'

  'I saw him just a little while ago. He said you're not a bad guy. He wanted you to know he said that.'

  He snipped off the tip of a cigar with a small, sharp tool, and didn't raise his eyes. He kept sucking his lips as though he had just eaten a slice of raw lemon rind.

  It was three o'clock when I stoppe
d at Bay St. Louis. The bay was flat and calm, the long pier off old ninety dotted with fishermen casting two-handed rods and weighted throw nets into the glaze of sunlight on the surface; but in the south the sky was stained a chemical green along the horizon, the clouds low and humped, like torn black cotton.

  The first address was a half block from the beach. The owners were elderly people who had moved recently from Omaha and had opened a specialty store that featured Christian books and records. They had bought the building two years ago from a man who had operated a recording studio at that address, but he had gone into bankruptcy and had since died.

  I had a telephone number for the next address, which was in Pass Christian. I called before getting back on the highway; a recorded voice told me the number was no longer in service.

  Thanks, Hippo.

  I called his house to ask about the source of his information. His wife said he had left and she didn't know when he would be back. Did she know where he was?

  'Why do you want to know?' she asked.

  'It's a police matter, Mrs. Bimstine.'

  'Do you get paid for solving your own problems? Or do you hire consultants?'

  'Did I do something to offend you?'

  She paused before she spoke again. 'Somebody called from the hospital. Tommy Lonighan's in the emergency room. He wanted to see Hippo.'

  'The emergency room? I saw Lonighan just a few hours ago.'

  'Before or after he was shot?'

  She hung up.

  It was starting to rain when I drove into Gulfport to check the next address. The sky was gray now, and the beach was almost empty. The tide was out, and the water was green and calm and dented with the rain, but in the distance you could see a rim of cobalt along the horizon and, in the swells, the triangular, leathery backs of stingrays that had been kicked in by a storm.

  I was running out of time. It was almost five o'clock, and many of the stores were closing for the weekend. At an outdoor pay phone on the beach, I called the 800 number for Federal Express and asked for the location of the largest Fed Ex station in the area.

  There was only one, and it was in Gulfport. The clerk at the station was young and nervous and kept telling me that I should talk to his supervisor, who would be back soon…