DR07 - Dixie City Jam (10 page)

'All the guy needs are electrodes inset in his temples,' Clete
said.

'I don't think this is going anywhere,' I said. 'I probably
should head back to New Iberia.'

His green eyes roamed over my face. 'You don't think Bootsie
can handle it?' he asked.

'How do I know, Clete? He humiliated her, he put his tongue in
her mouth, he left bruises on her kidney like he'd taken a pair of
pliers to her.'

He nodded and didn't speak for a moment. Then he said, 'That
blonde doing the aerobics is Tommy's regular punch when his old lady's
out of town. No, she's more than that, he got a real Jones for her.
Believe me, Tommy and that clunk of radiator hose he's got for a
schlong aren't far away. Dave, look at me. You got my word, I'm going
to dig this guy Buchalter out of the woodwork. If you're not around,
I'll give you a Polaroid, then you can burn it.'

He continued to stare into my face, then he said, 'You're
troubling me, noble mon.'

'What's the problem?'

'You look wired to the eyes, that's the problem.'

'So what?'

'You have a way of throwing major monkey shit through the
window fan, that's what.'

'
I
do?'

'Go down to the corner and call Bootsie. Then we'll give it
another hour. If Tommy's not back by then, we'll hang it up.'

We waited in the truck for another hour, but Tommy Lonighan
didn't return. The metal of my dashboard burned my hands when I touched
it, and the air smelled of salt and dead water beetles in the rain
gutters. I started the engine.

'Wait a minute. They're coming out. Let's not waste an
opportunity, mon,' Clete said.

The electronic piked gate opened automatically, and the
Calucci brothers, in a light blue Cadillac convertible, with the two
younger women in the backseat, drove out of the shade into the
sunlight. I started-to block their exit with the truck, but it was
unnecessary. Max Calucci, the driver, and one of the women in back were
arguing furiously. Max stepped hard on the brakes, jolting everyone in
the car forward, turned in his leather seat, and began jabbing his
finger at the woman. The woman, the one who had been doing lines
through a soda straw earlier, climbed out of the backseat in her shorts
and spiked heels, raking a long, paint-curling scratch down the side of
the Cadillac.

Max got out of the car and struck the woman full across the
mouth with the flat of his hand. He hit her so hard that a barrette
flew from her lacquered red hair. Then he slapped her across the ear.
She pressed her palms into her face and began to weep.

None of them saw us until we had walked to within five feet of
their car.

'Better ease up, Max. People might start to think you abuse
women,' Clete said.

'What are
you
doing here?' Max said. He
was bald down through the center of his head, and drops of sweat the
size of BB's glistened in his thick, dark eyebrows. Up close, the scabs
on his face and neck looked like curlicues of reddish brown,
fine-linked chain.

'Art didn't let you know we were out here?' Clete said.
'That's why you didn't invite us in?'

'You blindsided me the other night, Purcel. It's not over
between us. You better haul your fat ass out of here,' Max said.

'Y'all know a dude by the name of Will Buchalter? Streak
here'd really like to talk to him,' Clete said.

'No, I don't know him. Now get out of here—' He
stopped and raised his finger in the face of the woman with the dyed
red hair. 'And
you
, get back in the car. You're
gonna polish that scratch out if you have to do it with your twat. Did
you hear me, move! You don't open that mouth again, either, unless I
want to put something in it.'

He clamped his hand on the back of her neck, squeezed, and
twisted her toward the car while tears ran from her eyes.

The shovel lay propped among some rosebushes against the brick
wall. It had a long, work-worn wood handle with a wide, round-backed
blade. Max Calucci did not see me pick it up. Nor did he see me swing
it with both hands, from deep behind me, as I would a baseball bat,
until he heard the blade ripping through the air. By then it was too
late. The metal whanged off his elbow and thudded into his rib cage,
bending him double, and I saw his mouth drop open and a level of pain
leap into his eyes that he could not quite find words to express.

Then I reversed the shovel in my hands and swung the blade up
into his face, as you would butt-stroke an adversary with a pugil
stick. I saw him tumble backwards on the grass, his knees drawn up in
front of him, his face bloodless with shock, his mouth a scarlet circle
of disbelief. I heard feet running down the drive, Bobo Calucci blowing
the car horn with both hands in desperation, then Clete was standing in
front of me, pressing me back with his palms, his armpits drenched with
perspiration, the strap of his nylon shoulder holster biting into one
nipple.

'For Christ's sakes, back off, Dave, you're gonna kill the
guy,' he was saying. 'You hear me? Let it slide, Streak. He's not the
guy we care about.'

Then his big hands dropped to the handle of the shovel and
twisted it from my grasp, his Irish pie-plate face two inches from
mine, his eyes filled with pity and an undisguised and fearful love.

That night, as I lay next to Bootsie
in our bed, I did not
tell her about the incident with the Calucci brothers. Even though I
had been in Alcoholics Anonymous a number of years, and to one degree
or another had been through the twelve steps of recovery and had tried
to incorporate them into my life, I had never achieved a great degree
of self-knowledge, other than the fact that I was a drunk; nor had I
ever been able to explain my behavior and the way I thought, or didn't
think, to normal people.

I always wanted to believe that those moments of rage, which
affected me almost like an alcoholic blackout, were due to a legitimate
cause, that I or someone close to me had been seriously wronged, that
the object of my anger and adrenaline had not swum coincidentally into
my ken.

But I had known too many cops who thought the same way.
Somehow there was always an available justification for the Taser dart,
the jet of Mace straight into the eyes, the steel baton whipped across
the shinbones or the backs of the thighs.

The temptation is to blame the job, the stressed-out
adversarial daily routine that can begin like a rupturing peptic ulcer,
the judges and parole boards who recycle psychopaths back on the street
faster than you can shut their files. But sometimes in an honest moment
an unpleasant conclusion works its way through all the rhetoric of the
self-apologist, namely, that you are drawn to this world in the same
way that some people are fascinated by the protean shape and texture of
fire, to the extent that they need to slide their hands through its
caress.

I remember an old-time gunbull at Angola who had spent
forty-seven years of his life shepherding convicts under a
double-barreled twelve-gauge out on the Mississippi levee. During that
time he had killed four men and wounded a half dozen others. His liver
had been eaten away with cirrhosis; the right side of his chest was
caved in from the surgical removal of a cancerous lung. To my
knowledge, he had no relatives with whom he kept contact, no women in
his life except a prostitute in Opelousas. I asked him how he had come
to be a career gunbull.

He thought about it a moment, then dipped the end of his cigar
in his whiskey glass and put it in his mouth.

'It was me or them, I reckon,' he said.

'Beg your pardon?'

'I figured the kind of man I was, one way or another I was
gonna be jailing. Better to do it up there on the horse than down there
with a bunch of niggers chopping in the cane.'

I didn't tell Bootsie about the Caluccis, nor did I say
anything to her about the smell of bourbon that she brought to bed with
her that night. I fell asleep with my hand on her back. At about one in
the morning I felt her weight leave the mattress. I heard her walk
barefooted into the kitchen, open a cabinet without turning on the
light, then clink a bottle against a glass. A moment later she was in
the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

She seldom drank and had little physical tolerance for
alcohol. The following morning she stayed in the shower for almost
fifteen minutes, then ate an aspirin with her coffee and talked
brightly at the breakfast table for a long time, until finally her face
became wan and she put her forehead down on her palm.

I walked around behind her chair and rubbed her neck and
shoulders.

'Sometimes it's hard to accept this, Boots, but there's no
reason to feel shame when we're overcome by superior physical force,' I
said. 'No more than a person should be ashamed of contracting the flu
or being undone by the attack of a wild animal.'

'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.