Dixie City Jam

by James Lee Burke

  I read every document on my desk twice. The more I read, the more ill-defined and confusing the case became.

  Clete Purcel had always been a good cop because he kept the lines simple. I took a yellow legal pad and a felt pen from my desk drawer and tried to do the same. It wasn't easy.

  The owner of the car repair shop where Zoot and I had been taken by Buchalter had turned out to be an alcoholic right-wing simpleton who had already fled the state on a bigamy charge. It seemed that anyone who might lead us to Buchalter had a way of disappearing or going off-planet.

  Tommy Bobalouba's mother had emigrated from Germany and perhaps-had been a member of the Silver Shirts. Tommy wanted to salvage the Nazi U-boat before Hippo Bimstine got to it, and his rhetoric was often anti-Semitic. But in reality Tommy had never had any ideology except making money. He prided himself on his military record and blue-collar patriotism, and didn't seem to have any physical connection with Buchalter.

  Why did Buchalter (if indeed it was Buchalter) attempt to ascribe the murder of his followers, the men called Freddy and Hatch, to the vigilante?

  Was he involved with the ritualistic killings of black dope dealers in the projects? If not, how many psychological mutants of his potential did New Orleans contain?

  Why had Lonighan crossed an old New Orleans ethnic line and gotten mixed up with the Calucci brothers, and did it have anything to do with the vigilante killings?

  If you have ever been in psychoanalysis or analytically oriented therapy, you're aware that the exploration of one's own unconscious can be an intriguing pursuit. It is also self-inflating, grandiose, and endless, and often has the same practical value as meditating upon one's genitalia.

  The inductive and deductive processes of police work offer the same temptation. You can drown in it. The truth is that most people, with the exception of the psychotic, commit crimes for predictable reasons.

  Question: Why steal?

  Answer: It's usually easier than working.

  Question: Why rape and brutalize? Why rob people of their identity by terrorizing and degrading them at gunpoint, by reducing them to pitiful creatures who will never respect themselves again?

  Answer: You don't have to admit that you're a born loser and in all probability were despised inside your mother's womb.

  Batist's perception, like Clete's, was not obscured by self-manufactured complexities. He had grown up in Louisiana during the pre-Civil Rights era, and he knew that no one systematically killed people of color for reasons of justice. The vigilante's victims were people whom no one cared about, nickel-and-dime dealers whose presence or absence would never have any appreciable influence on the immense volume of the New Orleans drug trade.

  The vigilante, like the plainclothes detective in the motel who was determined to emotionally twist and break Albert on the rack, was selective about his sacrificial offerings, and his purpose had nothing to do with ending the problem they were associated with.

  But the preacher had said something on the dirt road by my house that would not go away, that hung on the edge of my consciousness like an impacted tooth that throbs dully in your sleep.

  What if, instead of a particular crime, we were dealing with people, or forces, who wished to engineer a situation that would allow political criminality, despotism masked as law and order, to become a way of life?

  Was it that hard to envision? The elements to pull it off seemed readily at hand.

  Financial insecurity. Lack of faith in traditional government and institutions. Fear and suspicion of minorities, irritability and guilt at the visibility of the homeless and the mentally ill who wandered the streets of every city in the nation, the brooding, angry sense that things were pulling apart at the center, that armed and sadistic gangs could hunt down, rape, brutally beat, and kill the innocent at will. Or, more easily put, the general feeling that it was time to create examples, to wink at the Constitution, and perhaps once again to decorate the streetlamps and trees with strange fruit.

  Hitler had to set fire to the Reichstag and place the blame on a Communist student in order to gain power.

  The sight of Los Angeles burning, of motorists being torn apart with tire irons on live television, might serve just as well.

  I was out of the office three hours that afternoon on a shooting in a black juke joint south of town. The wounded man, who was shot in the thumb, refused to identify the shooter, walked out of the emergency room at Iberia General without being treated, then drove out in the parish with a kerosene-soaked rag wrapped around his hand and tried to run down his common-law wife's brother in the middle of a sugarcane field. The brother refused to press charges. Bottom line: big waste of time.

  It rained that afternoon, then the sun came out again and the air was bright and cool and the palm and oak trees along the street had a green-gold cast to them. Just as I was signing out of the office at five, Wally, the dispatcher, whose great bulk made his breath wheeze even when he was seated, looked up from a message that he was writing on a piece of memo paper.

  'Oh hi, Dave. I didn't know you were still here,' he said. 'The monsignor called from the bishop's office in Lafayette. His message was-' He squinted at his own handwriting. 'Yes, he knows Sister Guilbeaux and he wants to know is she in any kind of trouble.'

  'Did he say anything else?'

  'No, not really. He seemed to wonder why the sheriffs office is interested in a nun. What's going on? A big bingo raid coming down?' His round face beamed at his own humor.

  'You're up at the hospital sometimes. Did you ever see a nun there with reddish gold hair, about thirty or thirty-five years old?'

  'I don't place her. What's the deal, the nuns been rapping the patients on the knuckles?' He smiled again.

  'How about giving it a break, Wally?'

  Then Wally raised himself from his chair, just far enough to stick his head out the dispatcher's window and look both ways down the hall. His face was ruddy from hypertension, and his shirt pocket bulged with fat, cellophane-wrapped cigars.

  'Can I tell you something serious, Dave?' he said. 'All that stuff going on over in New Orleans, leave it alone. It's blacks killing blacks. Ain't we got enough problems here? Let them people clean up their own shit.'

  'Thanks for taking the message, Wally.'

  'Hey, don't walk out of here mad. People round here care about you, Dave. This Nazi guy been causing all this grief, he gets caught in the right situation, it's gonna get squared, you'd better believe it, yeah. You ain't got no doubt about what I mean, either, podna.'

  He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, rolled it wetly in the center of his mouth, and scratched a kitchen match across the bottom of his desk drawer.

  That night I couldn't sleep. At one-thirty in the morning I heard the tink of a tin can on the baling wire I had strung around the house. I took the AR-15 with the thirty-round magazine from the top of the closet, slid a shell into the chamber, and walked outside with it. It was windy in the trees, and the sky was full of moonlight. There was nobody in the yard or down by the bait shop. Tripod had gotten out of his hutch and was digging in an armadillo's hole by the tractor shed. I picked him up in my arms, refilled his food and water bowls, and put him back inside his hutch. Then I sat down on an upended bucket, under the darkness of an oak tree, the AR-15 propped against the trunk, and waited ten minutes to make sure that the noise I had heard earlier had been caused by Tripod.

  The moonlight was the color of pewter on the dead cypress in the marsh. My neighbor had been burning the sugarcane stubble in the field behind my house, and the air was hazy with smoke and dense with a smell like burnt cinnamon. In the quietness of the moment, in the wind that blew through the leaves overhead, in the ruffling of the moonlight on the bayou's surface, and in the perfect black silhouette of my cypress and oak house against the handkerchiefs of flame that twisted and flickered out of the scorched dirt in my neighbor's field, I felt almost as if I had stepped into a discarded film negative from my childhood, in another time,
another era.

  In the wind I thought I could hear the fiddle and accordion music and the words to ' La Jolie Blonde. ' For some reason I remembered a scene clipped out of the year 1945. It was V-J Day, and my parents had taken me with them to a blue-collar bar with a colonnade and a high sidewalk in front and big, green-painted, collapsible shutters that folded flush with the walls. My mother wore a plum-colored pillbox hat with a white veil pinned up on top, and a purple sundress printed with green and red flowers. My father, Aldous, had just been paid, and he was buying beers for the bar and dancing with my mother, while the jukebox played:

  Jolie blonde, gardez donc c'est t'as fait.

  Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,

  Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.

  The doors on the bar were all open to let in the cool air after the rain, and the evening shadows and the sun's afterglow had the soft purple-and-gold tone of sugarcane right before the harvest. The streets were filled with people, some of them in uniform, some of them a little drunk, all of them happy because the lights were about to go on again all over the world.

  Then my mother picked me up and balanced me on her hip while my father grinned and set his battered fedora on my head. My mother smelled like milk and bath powder, like the mint leaves and bourbon-scented cherries from the bottom of her whiskey glass. It was a happy time, one that I was sure would never end.

  But both my parents were dead and so was the world in which I had grown up.

  Then another image floated behind my eyes, a fearful and perhaps solipsistic projection of what it might be like if the Will Buchalters of the world were ever allowed to have their way. In my mind's eye I saw a city like New Orleans at nighttime, an avenue like St. Charles, except, as in the paintings of Bavarian villages by Adolf Hitler, there were no people. The sky was a black ink wash, the mosshung oaks along the sidewalks as motionless as stone; the houses had become prisons that radiated fear, and the empty streets were lighted with the obscene hues of sodium lamps that allowed no shadows or places to hide. It was a place where the glands had replaced the heart and the booted and head-shaved lout had been made caretaker of the sun.

  The next morning I called the bishop's office again. This time I was told the bishop had gone to Washington and the monsignor was in Opelousas and would not be back until that afternoon. I left my number.

  At noon I got a phone call from Tommy Bobalouba.

  'I'll treat you to some étouffée,' he said.

  'I'm working right now.'

  'I drove all the way over here to talk. How about getting your nose out of the air for a little while?'

  'The last time you were over here, you set me up as your alibi while somebody tried to clip Nate Baxter.'

  'So you lost money? It don't mean I don't respect you.'

  'What do you want?'

  'I want to talk. I got a heavy fucking problem, man. It's something I can't talk to nobody else about. You don't got thirty minutes, then fuck you, Dave.'

  'Where are you?' I said.

  I drove up to the seafood restaurant on the back road to St. Martinville and found him inside, seated on a tall stool at the bar, eating raw oysters from a tray. He had covered each oyster with Tabasco sauce,.and sweat was trickling out of his meringue hair. I recognized three of his crew at one of the tables, dour-faced Irish hoods with the mental capabilities of curb buttons, who had always run saloons or upstairs crap games for Tommy or shut down the competition when it tried to establish itself in areas Tommy had staked out for himself.

  But Tommy had never used bodyguards and, always desirous of social acceptance by New Orleans's upper classes, did not associate openly with his employees.

  'What are you looking at?' he said.

  'Your crew seem to be enjoying their meal,' I said.

  'I can't bring my boys to your town for a lunch?'

  'What's up, partner?'

  'I got some personal trouble.' He wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at it.

  I waited.

  He looked around, closed and opened his eyes, his face flexing like rubber, then stared disjointedly out into space. Then he tried to smile, all in seconds.

  'Hey, Dave, you went to Catholic school, you boxed in Golden Gloves,' he said. 'You ever have a mick priest for a coach, guy who'd have all the fighters say a Hail Mary in the dressing room, then tell them to get out there and nail the other guys in the mush?'

  'It sounds familiar, Tommy.'

  'It was good coming up like that, wasn't it? Them was good days back then.'

  'They weren't bad. Are you going to tell me what's on your mind?'

  'I tried to get out of this prostate operation. The doc said it might leave me wearing a diaper. So we tried other stuff. Three days ago the doc tells me it's spread. Like a big worm eating its way through my insides. I ain't got to worry about an operation anymore. You understand what I'm saying? It's a funny feeling. It's like you're looking at a clock somebody just snapped the hands off.'

  Then I saw it in his face, the grayness and the pinched quality around the mouth, the remoteness in the eyes, the knowledge that he had entered a piece of psychological moonscape on which there was no traveling companion.

  'I'm sorry, Tommy,' I said.

  He used a folded paper napkin to blot the perspiration around his hairline. He glanced through the big plate glass window at the back of the restaurant. Outside was a small, dark lake, and dead leaves were falling into the water.

  'You still go to Mass?' he said.

  'Yes.'

  'I mean, for real, not just to make your old lady happy or something like that?'

  'What can I do for you?'

  'Look, if a guy maybe knows about something, maybe about even some people being clipped, people maybe even that's got it coming, but he don't do it himself, like it's out of his hands, you know what I mean, then it ain't on his soul, right?'

  I tried to assimilate what he had said, but that was like trying to make ethical or theological sense out of Sanskrit read backwards.

  'You want to float that one by me again?' I said.

  'Look, I took out one guy in my life, I mean besides Korea. That was the guy I did with the fire hose. This guy was such a bum even the judge said he ought to be dug up again and electrocuted. I don't go around killing people, Dave. But what if I knew what was going on, maybe like there was other people doing it, and I figure it's their choice, I don't make people do what they got to do, I just hold on to my ass and walk through the smoke, it's a rough fucking town to keep a piece of, the hair ends up on the wallpaper, that's the way it shakes out sometimes, right?'

  'I'm a police officer, Tommy. Maybe you'd better give some thought to what you're telling me.'

  'I'm standing on third base here. You gonna come to the bone yard to arrest me? What if I made a contribution to the church? Maybe you know a priest don't go through everything with a garden rake. It ain't easy for me to figure all this stuff out, talk about it with people I don't know. I get a headache.'

  His knuckles and eyebrows were half-mooned with scar tissue; his blue eyes had a bright sheen like silk. What do you say to an uneducated, confused, superstitious, angry man, with a frightened child inside him, as he tries to plea-bargain his sins and cop to a fine before he catches the bus?

  'I can introduce you to a priest, a friend of mine,' I said. 'Just tell him what you told me. I wouldn't get into the area of contributions at that point, though.'

  'What? It sound like bribery?'

  'You might say that.'

  'Oh.'

  'Tommy, do you know something about the vigilante killings? Is that what we're talking about here?'

  He wiped at the tip of his nose with one knuckle.

  'If that's the case, why not come clean on it, get it out of the way?' I said.

  His eyes bulged, and he poked me in the chest with his stiffened finger.

  'Hey, I don't dime, I don't rat-fuck, you saying I do, Dave, you and me are about to remodel this place.'
r />   'Adios,' I said.

  'Hey, don't be like that,' he said, and grabbed my coat. Then he released it and smoothed the cloth with his hand. 'I'm sorry, I got a Coke bottle up my butt. I don't know how to act sometimes. Look, me and the Calucci brothers are quits. They welsh, they lie, they got no class, they'll blindside you and take you off at the neck. You do business with shit bags and greaseballs, you invite a load of grief into your life.

  'I can't change what's already happened, I mean, maybe some stuff I'm part responsible for, but maybe I can make up for it a little bit. Your buddy Purcel… Hey, I got your attention.'

  'What about him?'

  'He filled up Max and Bobo's Caddy with cement while about a hundred people were laughing and clapping and grabbing themselves. Even the cops were making jokes about it over their radios.'

  'What are you saying, partner?'

  'You know how many guys in New Orleans would like to take Purcel down? How many guys he's sent up the road or run through glass windows or stuck their heads in toilet bowls? It's an open contract, fifteen large, Dave, he's anybody's fuck. That ain't all, either. There's a ten large bonus if it's in pieces. You know, with Polaroids or a videocassette.'

  He squeezed a lemon slice on an oyster, then lifted the shell and sucked the muscle into his mouth. But instead of swallowing it, he lowered his head, emptied his mouth into a napkin.

  'I can't eat no more. I feel sick,' he said. His eyes wandered to the table where the three men from his crew were eating.

  'Maybe in New Orleans you're lucky if you get to die from cancer these days,' he said.

  'Is there a contract on you, too, Tommy?'

  'You're a lot like Purcel. You think the Caluccis are clowns because you busted them up with a shovel and they didn't try to do anything about it. I got news for you, Dave. These guys eat their pain and wait. One time a button guy from the Cardo family was porking Bobo's broad. They waited three years, till everything was forgotten, till the broad had disappeared, till Bobo had a half dozen other bimbos hanging around him, then they asked the button guy out on their boat. They wined and dined him, made fun about the broad, like they were all great buddies and she was just some pork chops they passed around, then they held a gun to the guy's head and made him cut off his own cock.'