DR07 - Dixie City Jam (11 page)

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 in 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.

'Ain't you gonna he'p out?'

'I'm afraid I don't have a lot to work with here.'

'Mr. Robicheaux, my mama's gonna lose her job.'

I sat back down. 'Where's your dad?'