DR07 - Dixie City Jam (17 page)

I got up Tuesday morning at dawn, helped Batist open the bait
shop, then walked up the slope through the trees to have breakfast with
Bootsie before going to the office. The house was still cool from the
attic and window fans that had run all night, and the grass in the
backyard was thick with mockingbirds who were feeding on bread crumbs
that Bootsie had thrown out the screen door.

'A deputy will be parked out front again today,' I said.

'How long do you plan to keep one here, Dave?' Bootsie said.
She sat across from me, her shoulders straight, her fingers resting on
the sides of her coffee cup. She had put aside her piece of toast after
having eaten only half of it.

'It gives the guy something to do,' I said.

'We can't live the rest of our lives with a deputy parked out
front.'

'We won't have to.'

She had just washed her face, but her eyes looked tired, still
not quite separated from the sleep that came to her with certainty only
at first light.

'I want to buy a gun,' she said.

'That's never been your way.'

'What kind of pistol is best for a woman? I mean size or
whatever you call it.'

'A thirty-two, or maybe a thirty-eight or nine millimeter. It
depends on what a person wants it for.'

'I want to do that this evening, Dave.'

'All right.'

'Will you show me how to use it?'

'Sure.' I watched her face. Her eyes were flat with unspoken
thoughts. 'We'll take the boat down the bayou and pop some tin cans.'

'I think we ought to teach Alafair how to shoot, too,' she
said.

I waited a moment before I spoke. 'You can teach kids how to
shoot a pistol, Boots, but you can't teach them when to leave it in a
drawer and when to take it out. I vote no on this one.'

She gazed out the back screen at the birds feeding in the
grass under the mimosa tree.

Then she said, 'Do you think he's coming back?'

'I don't know.'

Her eyes went deep into mine.

'If I get to him first, he'll never have the chance,' I said.

'I didn't mean that,' she said.

'I did.'

I felt her eyes follow me into the hallway. I changed into a
pair of seersucker slacks, loafers, a brown sports shirt, and a white
knit tie, then went back into the kitchen, leaned over Bootsie's chair,
hugged her across the chest, and kissed her hair.

'Boots, real courage is when you put away all thought about
your own welfare and worry about the fate of another,' I said. 'That
was my wife the other night. A fuckhead like Buchalter can't touch that
kind of courage.'

She stroked the side of my face with her fingers without
looking up.

The phone rang on the wall above the drain board.

'I hear you're back on the clock,' a voice with a black New
Orleans accent said.

'Motley?'

'Do you mind me calling you at your house?'

'No, not at all. How'd you know I was back on duty?'

'We're coordinating with your department on this guy Sitwell.
Did you know he and the space-o speed freak who electrocuted himself
were cell mates at Angola?'

'No.'

'They were both in a rock 'n' roll band in the Block. So if
they did everything else together, maybe they both muled dope for the
AB.'

'I already talked to the warden. Sitwell didn't have any
politics; there're no racial beefs in his jacket. He was always a
loner, a walk-in bank robber and a smash-and-grab jewel thief.'

'I think you should come to New Orleans this morning.'

'What for?'

'There's a shooting gallery up by Terpsichore and Baronne. The
main man there is a bucket of shit who goes by the name of Camel
Benoit. You know who I'm talking about?'

'He used to pimp down by Magazine sometimes?'

'That's the guy. We've been trying to shut down that place for
six months. We bust it, we nail a couple of sixteen-year-olds with
their brains running out their noses, a week later Camel's got Mexican
tar all up and down Martin Luther King Drive. Except at about five this
morning, when everybody was nodding out, some sonofabitch broke the
door out of the jamb and pasted people all over the wall with an
E-tool.'

'With an
entrenching tool?'

'You heard me. Sharpened on the edges with a file. After he
broke a few heads, he went after our man Camel. I would have bought
tickets for that one.'

'What happened?'

'I don't know, we're still finding out.'

'Come on, Motley, you're not making sense.'

'There used to be adult education classes in that building.
The guy who busted down the door evidently chased Camel through a bunch
of rooms upstairs with a flagstaff. At least that's what we think.'

'I don't understand what you're saying. Where's Camel Benoit?'

He made a whistling sound in exasperation.

'I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. We don't know for sure.
We think he's inside the wall: Anyway, there's blood seeping through
the mortar. You know any mice that are big enough to bleed through a
brick wall?'

The two-story building had been the
home of a Creole slave
trader and cotton dealer in the 1850s. But now the twin brick chimneys
were partially collapsed, the iron grillwork on the balconies was torn
loose from its fastenings, and the ventilated wood shutters hung at odd
angles on the windows. An air compressor for a jackhammer was wheezing
and pumping in front of the entrance. I held up my badge for a
uniformed patrolman to look at as I threaded my way between two police
cars and an ambulance into the entrance of the building.

At the back of a dark corridor covered with spray-can
graffiti, a workman in gloves and a hard hat was thudding the
jackhammer into the wall while Motley and two white plainclothes
watched. Motley was eating an ice cream cone. The floor was powdered
with mortar and brick dust. I tried to talk above the noise and gave it
up. Motley motioned me into a side room and closed the door behind us.
The room was strewn with burnt newspaper, beer cans, wine bottles,
ten-dollar coke vials, and discarded rubbers.

'We should have already been through the wall, but it looks
like somebody poured cement inside it when the foundation settled,' he
said. He brushed a smear of ice cream out of his thick mustache.

'What was this about a flagstaff?'

'A couple of noddies say there was an American flag on a staff
in the corner with a bunch of trash. The wild man grabbed it and ran
Camel Benoit upstairs with it, then stuffed him through a hole in the
wall. For all we know, he's still alive in there.' He took a bite of
his ice cream and leaned forward so it wouldn't drip on his tie.

'What have you got on the wild man?'

'Not much. He had on a Halloween mask and wore brown leather
gloves.'

'Was he white or black?'

'Nobody seems to remember. It was five in the morning. These
guys were on the downside of smoking rock and bazooka and hyping all
night.' He used his shoe to nudge a rubber that was curled on top of a
piece of burnt newspaper like a flattened gray slug. 'You think these
cocksuckers worry about safe sex? They get free rubbers from the family
planning clinic and use them to carry brown scag in.'

'Motley, I think you might be a closet Republican.'

'I'm not big on humor this morning, Robicheaux.'

'Why did you want me down here?'

'Because I want to take this guy off the board. Because I'm
not feeling a lot of support from Nate Baxter, or from anybody else,
for that matter. If it hasn't occurred to you, nobody's exactly on the
rag because a few black dealers are getting taken out.'

'Maybe Camel's operation is being hit on by another dealer.'

'You mean by another
black
dealer, don't
you?' He bit into the cone of his ice cream, then flipped it away into
a pile of trash. 'Come on, they've quit out there. Let's go see the
show.'

'I didn't mean to offend you, partner.'

'Get off of it, Robicheaux. As far as the department is
concerned, this is still nigger town. On a scale of priority of one to
ten, it rates a minus eight.'

The air in the hallway was now gray with stone dust. Two
workmen used crowbars to rake the bricks from the wall and the chunks
of concrete inside onto the hallway floor. The gash in the wall looked
like a torn mouth that they kept elongating and deepening until it
almost reached the floor. One of the workmen paused, pushed his goggles
up on his forehead, and leaned into the dark interior.

He brought his head back out and scratched his cheek.

'I can see a guy about three feet to the left. I'm not sure
about what else I see, though,' he said.

'Look out,' Motley said, pushed the workman aside, and shined
a flashlight into the hole. He pointed the light back into the recess
for what seemed a long time. Then he clicked off the light and stood
erect. 'Well, he always told everybody he was a war veteran. Maybe
Camel'd appreciate a patriotic touch.'

I took the flashlight from Motley's hand and leaned inside the
hole. The air was cool and smelled of damp earth and rats and old brick.

The flashlight beam danced over Camel's body, his
copper-bright skin, his hair shaved into dagger points and corn-rolled
ridges, his dead eye that looked like a frosted blue-white marble. He
was wedged in a reclining position between the bricks and a pile of
broken cinder blocks. The workmen had entered the wall at the wrong
location because Camel's blood had drained down a cement mound into a
bowllike depression at the bottom of the wall.

The wound was like none I had ever seen in my years as a
homicide detective. Someone had driven the winged, brass-sheathed end
of a broken flagstaff through Camel's back, all the way through the
heart cavity, until the staff had emerged below the nipple. The remnant
of an American flag, long since faded almost colorless and partially
burned by vandals, was streaked bright red and glued tightly against
the staff by the pressure of the wound.

'Get the rest of the wall down,' Motley said to the workmen.
Then he motioned me to follow him up the stairwell to the second floor.
We stood on a landing outside a closed door. The building shook with
the thudding of the jackhammer. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I thought the vigilante specialized
in heart removal.'

'So he modified his technique.'

'I thought he usually left flowers behind.'

'Maybe he didn't have time.'

'Did the killer take anything? Money or drugs?'

'He seemed to be too busy breaking heads. At least according
to our witnesses.'

'Where are they?'

'Either in the hospital or in a holding cell at the
district… Except one.'

'Oh?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'You want to check him out?'

He opened the door on a room that was stacked with school
desks. Sitting on the floor, under a portable blackboard with holes the
size of bowling balls knocked in the slate, was Zoot Bergeron, his
knees drawn up before him, his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. There was
a puddle of what looked like urine in the corner.

'He walked in the back door about five minutes after two
patrolmen got here,' Motley said. 'Bad luck for Lucinda's boy.'

Zoot looked at me, then dropped his eyes to his tennis shoes.
He had made fists of both his hands, with his thumbs tucked inside his
palms. Motley kicked him in the sole of the shoe.

'Look at me,' he said.

'Yes, suh,' Zoot said.

'Tell Detective Robicheaux what you told me.'

'I was picking up a friend. That's all. I don't know nothing
about what goes on here.'

'Do you think all big people are dumb, Zoot? Do I look like a
big, dumb, fat man to you?' Motley asked.

'I ain't said that, Sergeant Motley. My friend ax me to pick
him up here and carry him to work.'

'Maybe we ought to take you down to the detox and get you
UA-ed,' Motley said. 'You ever been there? You got to watch out for
some of those old-time hypes in the shower, though. They'll try to take
your cherry.'

'I don't care you UA me or not. I don't care you try to scare
me with that kind of talk, either. I ain't used no dope, Sergeant
Motley.'

'What do you know about Camel Benoit?' I said.

'Everybody up Magazine know Camel. He's a pimp.'

'He was a drug dealer, too, Zoot,' I said.

He fastened his eyes on his shoes again.

'Do you know who killed him?' I said.

'Sergeant Motley just said it. I wasn't here.'

He locked his hands on his knees, then rested his forehead on
the back of his wrist. His eyelashes were as long as a girl's.

'You trying to fuck your mother?' Motley said.

'Suh?' Zoot said, raising his head. His face was the color of
dead ash.

'You heard me, fuck your mother. Because that's what you're
doing, you stupid little shit.'

Zoot tried to return Motley's stare, but his left eye began to
tremble and water.

'Get out of here,' Motley said.

'Suh?'

'You got earplugs on? Get out of here. If I catch you around a
crack house again, I'm going to kick your skinny ass all up and down
Martin Luther King Drive.'

Zoot got to his feet uncertainly. He flinched when he
straightened his back. Motley opened the door and leaned over the stair
railing.

'There's a kid coming out. Let him go. He doesn't know
anything,' he called to the detectives below. Then he walked back to
Zoot and punched him in the breastbone with his forefinger.

'Don't ever give me reason to get mad at you. Do you
understand me?' he,said.

'Yes, suh. I ain't.'

'You tell anybody I cut you loose, I'll kick your ass anyway.'

'Yes, suh.'

'Get out!'

After Zoot was gone, I looked at Motley. He was lighting a
cigar. His whiskers were jet black inside the grain of his cheeks.