Dixie City Jam Page 8

  'I keep smelling his odor and feeling his tongue in my mouth,' she said. 'I feel somehow that I allowed him to do it.'

  'It's what all victims feel. We open our doors to the wrong person, then we think that somehow our expression of trust means we're weak and complicit. You didn't do anything wrong, Boots. You mustn't think that way anymore.'

  But that kind of advice, under those kinds of circumstances, is similar to telling a person who has been stricken with a cerebral disease to rise from his sickbed and walk.

  I turned off the grits on the stove, washed and put away our coffee cups and saucers, and took Bootsie to a restaurant on the Vermilion River in Lafayette for brunch. When I went to the men's room, she called the waiter back to the table and ordered a vodka collins. After we had eaten, we walked out on the deck that overlooked the water and watched some kids waterskiing. The sun was white and straight up in the sky, the air laced with the smell of diesel smoke from the trucks passing over the concrete bridge. Down below in the muddy current, a dead snow egret floated among an island of twigs and torn camellia leaves. The egret's wing had been broken, and above one eye was the coppery glint of an embedded BB in the feathers.

  'Oh,' Bootsie said, and let out her breath. Then she turned away from the deck railing and said, 'Maybe we should go now, Dave. I'm going to listen to you and stay out of the sun. I've been terribly careless about it, I know. It's wrong to make other people worry about you, isn't it? I am not going to allow myself to be a careless person anymore, I promise.'

  Her eyes were as bright and intent as if she were putting together a syllogism that in one way or another would solve a particular problem for all time. She walked back through the restaurant and out the front without waiting for me.

  When we got home the phone was ringing in the kitchen. Bootsie went into the bedroom, turned on the window fan, and lay down on the bed with her arm across her eyes.

  'Hello,' I said into the telephone receiver.

  'This Mr. Robicheaux?'

  'Yes.'

  'How come you ain't he'ped my mama?'

  'Excuse me?'

  'She he'ped you, ain't she? How come you ain't he'ped her?'

  'Who is this?'

  'Zoot Bergeron.' But the tone of voice had become less aggressive and certain. 'My mama said Mr. Baxter's gonna get her fired if he can.'

  'You're Lucinda's son?'

  'Yes, suh.' Then he tried to deepen his voice. 'Yeah, that's right.'

  'How old are you, podna?'

  'Seventeen. I'm seventeen years old.' In the background I could hear echoes, like people shouting at each other in a public hall, and slapping sounds like leather hitting against leather.

  'Does your mother know you're making this call?' I said.

  'She tole you some stuff and you tole it back to Mr. Baxter. That ain't right she got to be in trouble 'cause you went and tole what you wasn't supposed to.'

  Oh boy, I thought, the business about the other homicide victims being mutilated.

  'I'll talk to your mother about it,' I said.

  I could almost hear his breath click in his throat.

  'That won't do no good. I can tell you who them vigilantes are. Then you and my mama can arrest them.'

  'Oh? Why don't you just tell her?'

  'Cause she don't believe me.'

  'I see.'

  'You coming down here?' he said.

  'Where would that be?'

  'The gym. Mr. Lonighan's Sport Center. You know where that's at?'

  'What are you doing around Tommy Lonighan, partner?'

  'I box here and I sweep up in the evening. You coming?'

  'I'll think about it.'

  I heard somebody begin to do a rat-a-tat-tat on a timing bag.

  'You gonna tell her I called?'

  'What's your name again?'

  'Zoot.'

  'That's a nifty name, Zoot. No, I'm not going to tell your mama that you called. But you listen to what I tell you, now. Don't be telling other people you know anything about vigilantes. Particularly around that gym. Okay?'

  'Yes, suh. I mean, I got it. I'll be expecting you though. A deal's a deal, right? We got us a deal, ain't that right?'

  'Wait a minute…'

  'My mama said you was a nice man, said for me not to be blaming her trouble with Mr. Baxter on you. She's right, ain't she? I be here this evening, I be here early in the morning.'

  He hung up before I could answer.

  At three that same afternoon I received a call from the lawyer I had retained to represent Batist. He was the most successful criminal attorney in Lafayette. My five-minute conversation with him was another lesson in how the laws of finance apply to our legal system. The lawyer had confronted the prosecutor's office in New Orleans with the information given me by Lucinda Bergeron about the other murders; he also told them he could present a half dozen depositions to the effect that Batist was nowhere around New Orleans when they were committed. He also mentioned the possibility of civil suit against the city of New Orleans.

  The homicide charge against Batist was to be dropped by tomorrow morning. 'That's it?' I said. 'That's it.'

  'Did they bother to explain why he was ever charged in the first place?'

  'They make mistakes like anybody else.'

  'It sounds like they're pretty good at self-absolution.'

  'I think we've done pretty well today.'

  'How much do I owe you, Mr. Guidry?'

  'There're no fees beyond what we originally agreed upon,' he said.

  'You're telling me six thousand dollars for making some phone calls?'

  'There was some investigative work involved as well.'

  'Six thousand dollars without even going to trial?'

  'I thought you'd be pleased to hear your friend was out of trouble.'

  I was. I was also down eleven thousand dollars in attorney and bondsman's fees, which I would have to pay in monthly installments or with borrowed money.

  That evening I took Bootsie and Alafair to a movie in New Iberia. It was raining when we got home, and the air smelled like fish left on the warm planks of a dock and wet trees and moldy pecan husks. Then, just when we were going to bed, Clete called from New Orleans and told me a strange story that had been passed on to him by a friend of his in the Coast Guard.

  Two days ago, at sunset, out on the salt south of Cocodrie, a Coast Guard cutter had spotted a twenty-two-foot cabin cruiser anchored in the swells, the bow bouncing against the incoming tide. All week the cutter had been looking for a mother ship, perhaps a Panamanian tanker, that had been dumping air-sealed bales of reefer, with floating marker bottles, overboard for smaller, high-powered boats to fish out of the water and run through the bayous and canals to overland transporters who waited on high ground up in the wetlands.

  There were two men in wet suits on board the cabin cruiser. They were lowering a cluster of underwater lights on a cable over the side when they saw the cutter approaching them. The Coast Guard skipper was sure he had found a pickup boat.

  He lost any doubt when the men on the cabin cruiser pulled the cluster of lights clattering back over the rail, sawed loose the anchor rope with a bowie knife, and hit it full-bore for the coastline and shallower water, where there was a chance the cutter would go aground on a sandbar.

  But when they made their turn the late sun must have been directly in their eyes. Or perhaps in their attempt at flight they simply did not care that they had left a diver overboard, a man in a wet suit, with air tanks, whose head was shaved as bald as a skinned onion. He popped through a swell at exactly the spot his friends had cut the anchor rope. He probably had no explanation for the fact that the rope had suddenly gone slack in his hands and the gulf's placid surface had churned to life with the cabin cruiser's screws and the dirty roar of exhaust pipes at the waterline.

  Then through the humidity inside his mask, through the green chop against the glass, he must have realized that his worst fears as a diver-losing his electric light deep i
n the bowels of a sunken ship or perhaps being pulled down into a bottomless canyon by a mouthful of hooked teeth that snapped his bones as easily as sticks-were never legitimate fears at all, that the most terrible moment of his life was now being precipitated by his companions, for no reason that he could understand, in a way that made his screams, his waving arms, his last-second attempt to dive deep below the surface the impotent and futile gestures of a nightmare.

  The cabin cruiser must have been hitting thirty-five knots when it plowed over him and the screws razored his body and left him floating like a rubber-wrapped tangle of mismatched parts in the boat's wake.

  'Why were the guys on the boat running?' I said to Clete.

  'They'd stolen it. Well, not exactly. It's owned by some millionaire yachtsman in Baltimore, but this alcoholic skipper keeps it for him in Biloxi. So the drunk thought he'd make a few bucks by renting it to these three guys. But at the last minute the three guys decided they didn't need to pay him the money after all, so instead they just stomped the shit out of him. They told him if he made a beef about it they'd catch him later and kick one of his own whiskey bottles up his ass.'

  'Who were the guys?'

  'The two in custody are just a couple of Biloxi beach farts who've been in and out of Parchman on nickel-and-dime B and E's. But dig this, the guy who got run through the propeller had some beautiful Nazi artwork on both arms-swastikas and SS lightning bolts.'

  'So do most cons in the Aryan Brotherhood,' I said.

  'But here's the kicker, mon. This guy was not homegrown. The Coast Guard found his passport on the cabin cruiser. He was from Berlin.'

  'Do the guys in custody say what they were after?'

  'They were hired by the German guy, but they claim the German guy wouldn't tell them what was down there. They thought maybe it was a scuttled boat with a lot of dope on it. Here's the real laugh, though. The Coast Guard says there's no boat down at that spot. What the beach farts and the skinhead probably saw on their sonar was an oil rig that sank there in a hurricane about twenty years ago.'

  'Thanks for the information, Clete.'

  'You want to talk to the guys in custody?'

  'Maybe.'

  'I'd do it soon. The rummy in Biloxi isn't filing charges, and the kraut's death is going down as accidental. I don't guess anybody's going to lose sleep over a skinhead getting turned into potted meat out on the salt.'

  'Thanks again, Clete.'

  'You think they were after that sub?'

  'Who knows?'

  'Hippo Bimstine does. I want in on this, mon. When Streak operates in the Big Sleazy, he needs his old podjo to cover his back. Am I right?'

  'Right. Good night, Cletus.'

  I heard him pop the cap on a bottle and pour it into a glass.

  'Bless my soul, I love that old-time rock 'n' roll, when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide made their puds shrivel up and hide,' he said.

  My palms felt stiff with fatigue, hard to fold closed, and my eyes burned as though there were sand behind the lids. Clete was still talking, rattling fresh ice into his glass, when I said good night a final time and eased the receiver down into the telephone cradle.

  Tommy Lonighan's Sport Center was located on the edge of downtown New Orleans, in a late-nineteenth-century two-story brick building that had originally been a firehouse, then an automotive dealership in the 1920s, and finally a training gym for club boxers who fought for five dollars a fight during the Depression.

  The interior smelled of sweat and leather and moldy towels; the canary yellow paint on the walls was blistered and peeling above the old iron radiators; the buckled and broken spaces in the original oak flooring had been patched over with plywood and linoleum. The bodybuilding equipment was all out of another era-dumbbells and weight-lifting benches, curling bars, even a washtub of bricks hung on a cable for pull downs. The canvas on the four rings had been turned almost black from scuff marks, body and hair grease, and kicked-over spit buckets.

  But it was still the most famous boxing gym in New Orleans, and probably more Golden Gloves champions had come out of it than out of any other boxing center in the South. In the sunlight that poured down through the high windows, black, Latin, Vietnamese kids and a few whites sparred in headgear and kidney guards, clanked barbells up and down on a wide rubber pad, skipped rope with the grace of tap dancers, and turned timing bags into flying, leathery blurs.

  A small, elderly white man, with a thick ear and a flat, toylike face, who was pulling the laces out of a box full of old gloves, pointed out Zoot to me.

  'That tall kid about to break his nose on the timing bag,' he said. 'While you're over there, tell him he ain't carried the trash out to the Dumpster yet.'

  The boy had his mother's elongated turquoise eyes and clear, light-brown skin. But he was unnaturally tall for his age, over six feet, and as slim and narrow-shouldered as if his skin had been stretched on wire. The elastic top of his trunks was sopping with the sweat that streamed in rivulets down his hairless chest. Each time his fist missed the timing bag, he would glance nervously a few feet away at another kid who had turned his timing bag into an explosion of sound and movement. Then Zoot would smash the bag with a right cross, snapping it back on the chain, try to connect with a left, miss, swing again with his right, and miss again.

  'Try not to hit harder with one hand than the other,' I said. 'You have to create a kind of circular momentum.'

  'A what?'

  Great choice of words, I told myself.

  'You called my house yesterday,' I said.

  'You Mr. Robicheaux?'

  'Yes.'

  'Oh, yeah, well-I be with you in a minute, okay? They waiting for me over at the ring. I'm gonna go three with that white boy putting on his kidney guard.'

  'You said you had some pretty important things to tell me, Zoot.'

  His eyes flicked sideways, then came back on my face again.

  'I gotta go my three. This ain't an easy place to talk, you know what I mean?'

  'Yeah, I guess so.' I looked at the white kid who was climbing up in the corner of one of the rings. His skin had the alabaster iridescence of someone who seldom went out in the sunlight, but his stomach, which was tattooed with a red-and-green dragon, was a washboard, and the muscles in his arms looked like pieces of pig iron. 'Who is he?' I asked.

  'Ummm, he fights in Miami and Houston a lot.'

  'He's a pro?'

  'Yes, suh.'

  'You sure you want to do this, partner?'

  He licked his lips and tried to hide the shine of fear in his eyes.

  'He's a good guy. He's been up against some big names. He don't do this for just anybody,' Zoot said. 'I'll be right back. You ain't got to watch if you don't want. There's a Coca-Cola machine back in the dressing room.'

  'I'll just take a seat over here.'

  'Yes, suh. I'll be right back.'

  I don't think I ever saw anyone box quite as badly as Zoot. Either he would hold both gloves in front of his face so that he was unable to see his opponent or he would drop his guard suddenly and float his face up like a balloon, right into a rain of blows. His stance was wrong-footed, he led with his right hand, he used his left like a flipper, he took shot after shot in the mouth and eyes because he didn't know how to tuck in his chin and raise his shoulder against a right cross.

  Fortunately the white kid went easy on him, except in the third round when Zoot swung at the white kid's head coming out of a clench. The white kid stepped inside Zoot's long reach and hooked a hard chop into his nose. Zoot went down on his butt in the middle of the canvas, his long legs splayed out in front of him, his mouth-piece lying wet in his lap, his eyes glazed as though someone had popped a flashbulb in his face.

  Twenty minutes later he came out of the dressing room in his street clothes, combing his wet hair along the sides of his head. His nose had stopped bleeding, but his left eye had started to discolor and puff shut at the corner. We walked across the street to a café that sold pizza by the
slice and sat at a table in back under a rotating electric fan.

  'Have you been boxing long?' I said.

  'Since school let out.'

  'You trying for the Golden Gloves?'

  'I just do it for fun. I don't think about the Gloves or any of that stuff.'

  'Let me make a suggestion, Zoot. Keep your left shoulder up and don't lead with your right unless you go in for a body attack. Then get under the other guy's guard and hook him hard in the rib cage, right under the heart.'

  He fed a long slice of pizza into his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.

  'You been a fighter?' he said.

  'A little bit, in high school.'

  'You think maybe I could try for the Gloves?'

  'I guess that'd be up to you.'

  He smiled and lowered his eyes.

  'You don't think' I'm too good, do you?' he said.

  'You just went three rounds against a pro. That's not bad.'

  'I know what you're really thinking, though. You ain't got to make me feel good. Like I say, I do it for fun.' He touched at the corner of his puffed eye with one fingernail.

  'You said you were going to tell me something about the vigilante murders,' I said.

  'It's gang bangers. They fighting over who's gonna deal tar in the projects. Tar's real big again, Mr. Robicheaux. Lot of people don't want to mess with crack anymore.'

  'How do you know it's the gangs, Zoot?'

  'I get around. I got friends in the projects-the St. Thomas, the Iberville, the Desire. They all say there ain't no vigilante.'

  'Is there a particular murder you have information about?'

  He thought for a moment. 'Yeah, last spring,' he said. 'A dealer got thrown off the roof acrost from our school. The gang bangers said he was working the wrong neighborhood.'

  He watched my face expectantly.

  'Are there any names you want to give me?' I said.

  'I'm just telling you what my friends say. I ain't got no names.'

  'You come from a good home, Zoot. You think you should be hanging around gang bangers?'

  'I got the friends I want. People don't tell me who I hang with.'

  'I see. Well, thanks for the information.' I stood up to leave.