DR07 - Dixie City Jam (7 page)

'I see,' I said.

'He has a gentle side to his nature that few people know
about. The people in my herbalist and nude therapy group think he's
wonderful.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Clete study the dancers out
on the floor as though he had never seen them before.

'He says you're trying to find the vigilante. I think it's
disgusting that somebody's out there murdering colored people in the
projects and nobody does anything about it.'

'Clete doesn't seem to give it much credence.'

'Look, mon, let me tell you where this vigilante stuff came
from. There's a citizens committee here, a bunch of right-wing douche
bags who haven't figured out what their genitalia is for, so they spend
all their time jacking up local politicians and judges about crime in
the streets, dope in the projects, on and on and on, except nobody
wants to pay more taxes to hire more cops or build more jails. So what
they're really saying is let's either give the blacks a lot more
rubbers or do a little less to stop the spread of sickle-cell.'

Martina had taken a pocket dictionary from her purse. She read
aloud from it: '"Credence—belief, mental acceptance or
credit."
That's an interesting word. It's related to "credibility," isn't it?'

Clete widened his eyes and looked at her as though he were
awakening from sleep. Then somebody on the opposite side of the dance
floor caught his attention.

'Dave, a guy's coming over to our table,' he said. 'He just
wants to talk a minute. Okay? I told him you wouldn't mind. He's not a
bad guy. Maybe you might even be interested in what he's got to say. It
doesn't hurt to listen to a guy, right?'

Through the layers of drifting cigarette smoke my eyes focused
on a man with two women at a table. His solid physique reminded me of
an upended hogshead; even at a distance his other
features—his
florid, potato face, his eyes that were as blue as ice, his meringue
hair—were unmistakable.

'You shouldn't have done this, partner,' I said to Clete.

'I provide security at two of his clubs. What am I supposed to
say to him, "Drop dead, Tommy. My buddy Dave thinks you're spit on the
sidewalk, get off the planet, sonofabitch"?'

'He's not just an eccentric local character. He was up on a
murder beef. What's the matter with you?'

'The guy he did with the fire hose was beating up old people
in the Irish Channel with an iron pipe. Yeah, big loss. Everybody was
real upset when they heard he'd finally caught the bus.'

'Fire hose?' Martina said, and made a puzzled face.

There was nothing for it, though. The man with the red face
and the eyes that were like flawless blue marbles was walking toward
our table.

Clete mashed out his cigarette in a paper plate.

'Play it like you want, Dave,' he said. 'You think Tommy
Bobalouba's any more a geek than Hippo Bimstine, tell him to ship out.'

'What about Hippo?' I said.

'Nothing. What do I know? I thought I might bring you a little
extra gelt. You're too much, Streak.'

Tommy Lonighan hooked two fingers under an empty chair at an
adjacent table without asking permission of the people sitting there,
swung it in front of him, and sat down. He wore a long-sleeve pink
shirt with French cuffs and red stone cuff links, but the lapels were
ironed back to expose the mat of white hair on his chest, and the hair
on his stubby, muscular forearms grew out on his wrists like wire. He
had the small mouth of the Irish, with downturned corners, and a hard,
round chin with a cleft in it.

'What d'you say, Lieutenant?' he said, and extended his hand.
When I took it, it was as square and rough-edged as a piece of lumber.

'Not much, Mr. Lonighan. How are you this evening?' I said.

'"Mr. Lonighan," he says. I look like a "mister" to you these
days?' he said. The accent was Irish Channel blue-collar, which is
often mistaken for a Brooklyn accent, primarily because large sections
of New Orleans were settled by Irish and Italian immigrants in the
1890s. He smiled, but the clear light in his eyes never changed, never
revealed what he might or might not be thinking.

'What's up?' I said.

'Boy, you fucking cut straight to it, don't you?'

'How about it on the language, Tommy?' Clete said.

'Sorry, I spend all day with prizefighters down at my gym,' he
said, glancing sideways at Martina. 'So how much is Blimp-stine
offering you to find this sub?'

'Who?' I said.

'Hippo Bimstine, the beached whale of south Louisiana. Who you
think I'm talking about?'

'How do you know Hippo's offering me anything?'

'It's a small town. Times are hard. Somebody's always willing
to pass on a little information,' he said, and put a long French fry
between his lips, sucking it deep into his mouth with a smile in his
eyes.

'You're right, there's a Nazi sub out there someplace. But I
don't know where. Not now, anyway. For all I know, it's drifted all the
way to the Yucatan. The alluvial fan of the Mississippi probably works
it in a wide circle.'

He set his palm on my forearm and looked me steadily in the
eyes. There were thin gray scars in his eyebrows, a nest of pulsating
veins in one temple that had not been there a moment ago.

'Why is it I don't believe you?' he said.

'What's your implication, Tommy?' I said.

'It's "Tommy" now. I like it, Dave. I don't "imply" anything.
That's not my way.' But his hand did not leave my forearm.

Martina read from her pocket dictionary: '"Alluvial
fan—the
deposit of a stream where it issues from a gorge upon an open plain."
The Mississippi isn't a stream, is it?'

Lonighan stared at her.

'I'm not sure why either you or Hippo are interested in some
World War II junk, but my interest is fading fast, Tommy,' I said.

'That's too bad. Because both Hippo and me are going into the
casino business. I'm talking about riverboats here, legalized gambling
that can make this city rich, and I'm not about to let that glutinous
sheeny set up a tourist exhibit on the river that takes maybe half my
business.'

'Then tell it to Hippo,' I said, and pulled my arm out from
under his hand.

'
What
?' he said. 'You got your nose up in
the air about something? I come to your table, you act like somebody's
flushing a crapper in your face? You don't like me touching your skin?'

'Take it easy, Tommy. Dave didn't mean anything,' Clete said.

'The fuck he didn't.' Then he said it again: 'The
fuck
he didn't.'

'I'd appreciate your leaving our table,' I said.

He started to speak, but Martina beat him to it.

'I happen to be part Jewish, Mr. Lonighan,' she said, her face
serene and cool, her gaze focused benignly on him as though she were
addressing an abstraction rather than an enraged man at her elbow.
'You're a dumb mick who's embarrassing everybody at the table. It's not
your fault, though. You probably come from a dysfunctional home full of
ignorant people like yourself. But you should join a therapy group so
you can understand the origin of your rude manners.'

The crow's-feet around Lonighan's eyes were white with anger
and disbelief. I looked at Martina in amazement and admiration.

I slept on Clete's couch that night,
and in the morning I
called Nate Baxter at his office and asked about the other homicides
that involved mutilation.

Nate had never been a good liar.

'Mutilation? How do you think most homicides are committed? By
beating the person to death with dandelions?'

'You know what I'm talking about.'

'Yeah, I do. You got to somebody under my supervision.'

'Your office is a sieve, Nate.'

'No, there's only one broad I smell in this. Nothing racial
meant. Stay out of the investigation, Robicheaux. You blew your career
in New Orleans because you were a lush. You won't change that by
sticking your nose up that broad's cheeks.'

He hung up.

I got back home just before lunch. The air was already hot and
breathless and dense with humidity, and I put on my tennis shoes and
running shorts, jogged three miles along the dirt road by the bayou,
then did three sets of arm curls, dead lifts, and military presses with
my barbells in the backyard. My chest was singing with blood when I
turned on the cold water in the shower.

I didn't hear Bootsie open the bathroom door.

'Do you have a second?'

'Sure,' I said, and twisted the shower handle off.

'I acted badly. I'm sorry,' she said.

'About what?'

'About Batist. About the money. I worry about it sometimes.
Too much, I guess.'

'What if I had a wife who didn't?'

I eased the water back on, then through the frosted glass I
saw her undressing in muted silhouette. She opened the door, stepped
inside with me, and slipped her arms around my neck, her face uplifted,
her eyes closed against the spray of the shower over my shoulders.

I held her against me and kissed her hair. Her body was
covered with tan, the tops of her breasts powdered with freckles. Her
skin was smooth and warm and seemed to radiate health and well-being
through my palms, the way a rose petal does to the tips of your
fingers, but the reality was otherwise. Lupus, the red wolf, lived in
her blood and waited only for a slip in her medication to resume
feeding on her organs and connective tissue. And if the wolf was not
loosed by an imbalance in the combinations of medicine that she took,
another even more insidious enemy was—temporary psychosis
that was
like an excursion onto an airless piece of moonscape where only she
lived.

She was supposed to avoid the sun, too. But I had long since
given up trying to take her out of the garden or force her back into
the shade of the cabin when we were out on the salt. I had come to
feel, as many people do when they live with a stricken wife or husband,
that the tyranny of love can be as destructive as that of disease.

We made love in the bedroom, our bodies still damp and cool
from the shower, while the window fan drew the breeze across the
sheets. She moved her stomach in a circular motion on top of me, her
arms propped against the mattress; then I saw her eyes close and her
face become soft and remote. Her thighs tensed, and she bent forward
suddenly, her mouth opening, and I felt her heat spread across my loins
just as something crested and burst inside me like water edging over a
dam and cascading in a white arc through a dark streambed.

She was one of those rare people for whom making love did not
end with a particular act. She lay beside me and touched the white
patch in my hair, my mustache, the rubbery scar high up on my chest
from a .38 round, the spray of lead gray welts along my right thigh
where a bouncing Betty had painted me with light on a night trail
outside a pitiful Third World village stinking of duck shit and
unburied water buffalo.

Then I felt her hand rest in the center of my chest.

'Dave, there was a man outside this morning,' she said.

'Which man?'

'He was out by the road, looking through the trees at the
gallery. When I opened the screen, he walked back down the road.'

'What did he look like?'

'I couldn't see his face. He had on a blue shirt and a hat.'

'Maybe he was just lost.'

'Our number and name are on the mailbox by the road. Why would
he be looking up at the gallery?'

'I'll ask Batist if he saw anyone unusual hanging around the
front.'

She got up from the bed and began dressing by the back window.
The curtains, which had the texture of gauze and were printed with tiny
pink flowers, ruffled across the arch of her back as she stepped into
her panties.

'Why are you looking at me like that?' she said.

'Because without exaggeration I can say that you're one of the
most beautiful women on earth.'

When she smiled her eyes closed and opened in a way that made
my heart drop.

Later, I went down to the dock to help
Batist clean up the
tables after the lunch crowd had left. Parked by the boat ramp, pinging
with heat, was a flatbed truck with huge cone-shaped loudspeakers
welded all over the cab's roof. On the doors, hand-painted in a flowing
calligraphy, were the words
Rev. Oswald Flat Ministries
.

I remembered the name from years ago when he had broadcast his
faith-healing show from Station XERF, one of the most powerful radio
transmitters in the Western Hemisphere, located across the Rio Grande
from Del Rio, in old Mexico so that the renters of its airtime were not
governed by FCC restrictions. Sandwiched between ads for tulip bulbs,
bat guano, baby chicks, aphrodisiacs, and memberships in every society
from the Invisible Empire to the Black Muslims, were sermons by Brother
Oswald, as he was called, that were ranting, breathless pieces of
Appalachian eloquence. Sometimes he would become virtually hysterical,
gasping as though he had emphysema, then he would snort air through his
nostrils and begin another fifteen-minute roller-coaster monologue that
would build with such roaring, unstoppable intensity that the
technicians would end his sermon for him by superimposing a prerecorded
ad.

He and his wife, a woman in a print cotton dress with rings of
fat under her chin, were eating barbecue at the only table in the bait
shop when I opened the screen door. It must have been ninety degrees in
the shop, even with the window fans on, but Oswald Flat wore a
long-sleeve denim work shirt buttoned at the wrists and a cork sun
helmet that leaked sweat out of the band down the sides of his head.
His eyes were pale behind his rimless glasses, the color of water
flowing over gravel, liquid-looking in the heat, the back of his neck
and hands burned the deep hue of chewing tobacco.

'That's Dave yonder,' Batist said to him from behind the
counter, seemingly relieved. He picked up a can of soda pop and went
outside to drink it at one of the telephone-spool tables under the
awning that shaded the dock.