DR07 - Dixie City Jam (2 page)

'You know what I could do with a sub full of drowned Nazis?
Use your imagination, Dave.'

But I had struck out. And it was just as well. Hippo's
projects were usually as grandiose and thespian as his epicurean
consumption of seafood in the Pearl, and if you became involved with
him for very long, you began to realize that perhaps you had not
successfully avoided the role of court jester in this life after all.

Batist and I caught and gutted over a dozen gafftop, ripped
out the stingers and peeled the skin with pliers, fileted the meat in
long, pink strips, and laid them out in rows on the crushed ice in the
cooler. Then we ate the po'-boy sandwiches we'd made with fried
oysters, mayonnaise,
sauce piquant
, sliced
tomatoes, and onions and wrapped in waxed paper that morning; then we
headed back toward the coast as the afternoon cooled and the wind began
to blow out of the west, smelling of distant rain and speckled trout
spawning and beached shellfish and lines of seaweed drying where the
tide had receded from the sand.

As the late red sun seemed to collapse and melt into a single
burning ember on the horizon, you could see the neon glow of New
Orleans gradually replace the daylight and spread across the darkening
sky. The clouds were black-green and low over the city, dancing with
veins of lightning, roiling from Barataria all the way out to Lake
Pontchartrain, and you knew that in a short while torrents of rain
would blow through the streets, thrash the palm trees on the
esplanades, overrun the gutters in the Quarter, fill the tunnel of oak
trees on St. Charles with a gray mist through which the old iron,
green-painted streetcars would make their way along the tracks like
emissaries from the year 1910.

New Orleans was a wonderful place to be on a late evening in
August.

That's what I thought, anyway, until I called Hippo Bimstine
to tell him that he'd have to hire somebody else to dive the wrecks of
Nazi submarines.

'Where are you?' he said.

'We're having supper at Mandina's, out on Canal.'

'You still tight with Clete Purcel?'

'Sure.'

'You know where Calucci's Bar is by St. Charles and
Carrollton?'

'Yeah, it's across from your house, isn't it?'

'That's right. So right now I'm looking out my window at a
shitstorm in the making. I'm talking about they got a SWAT team out
there. Can you believe that? A fucking SWAT team in the middle of my
neighborhood. I think they could use a diplomat out there, before the
meat loaf ends up on the wallpaper, you get my meaning?'

'No.'

'The salt water still in your ears, Dave?'

'Look, Hippo—'

'It's Clete Purcel. He went apeshit in Calucci's and ran one
guy all the way through the glass window. The guy's still lying in the
flower bed. They say Purcel's got two or three others in there on their
knees. If he don't come out, there's a supervising plainclothes in
front says they're gonna smoke him. I got fucking Beirut, Lebanon, in
my front yard.'

'Who's the supervising officer?'

'A guy named Baxter. Yeah, Nate Baxter. He used to be in Vice
in the First District. You remember a plainclothes by that
name?… Hey, Dave, you there?'

Calucci's Bar had been fashioned out
of an old white frame
house, with tin awnings on the windows, in an old residential
neighborhood at the end of St. Charles by the Mississippi levee. The
rain looked like purple and green and pink sleet in the neon glow from
the bar, and on the far side of the levee you could see mist rising off
the river and hear horns blowing on a tug-boat.

The street in front of the bar was filled with a half dozen
emergency vehicles, their revolving lights reflecting off the shrubs
and wet cement and the palm trees on the esplanade. When Batist and I
parked my pickup truck by the curb I saw Nate Baxter in the midst of it
all, rainwater sluicing off his hat, his two-tone shoes and gray golf
slacks splattered from passing cars. His neatly trimmed reddish beard
was glazed with wet light, his badge and chrome-plated revolver clipped
on his belt, his body hard and muscular with middle age and his daily
workouts at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

A flat-chested black woman plainclothes, with skinny arms and
a mouthful of gold teeth, was arguing with him. She wore a rumpled
brown blouse that hung out of her dark blue slacks, makeup that had
streaked in the rain, and loafers without socks. Nate Baxter tried to
turn away from her, but she moved with him, her hands on her thin hips,
her mouth opening and closing in the rain.

'I'm talking to you, Lieutenant,' she said. 'It's my opinion
we have a situation that's gotten out of hand here. The response is not
proportionate to the situation. Not in my opinion, sir. If you persist,
I plan to file my own report. Are you hearing me, sir?'

'Do whatever you feel like, Sergeant. But please go do it
somewhere else,' Baxter said.

'I'm responding to the call. I resent your talking to me like
that, too,' she said.

'All right, I'll put it a little more clearly. You're a
nuisance and a pain in the ass. You want to make a civil rights case
out of that, be my guest. In the meantime, get out of here. That's an
order.'

A uniformed white cop laughed in the background.

Baxter's eyes narrowed under the brim of his hat when he saw
me.

'What are you doing, Nate?' I said.

He ignored me and began talking to a cop in a bulletproof vest
and a bill cap turned backwards on his head.

'What are you trying to do to Clete Purcel?' I said.

'Stay behind the tape, Robicheaux,' he said.

'I can talk him out of there.'

'You're out of your jurisdiction.'

Even in the rain his breath was heated and stale.

'Nobody needs to get hurt here, Nate,' I said.

'Purcel dealt the play, not me. You know what? I think he's
been looking for this moment all his life.'

'Have you called him on the phone?'

'That's a good idea, isn't it? I'd really like to do that.
Except he tore it out of the wall and wrapped it around a guy's throat.
Then he rammed the guy through the front window.'

'The Calucci brothers are mobbed up. It's some kind of
personal beef between them and Clete, you know it is. You don't call
out a SWAT team on barroom bullshit.'

'We've got a vigilante loose in New Orleans, too. I think
Purcel's a perfect suspect.'

I could feel my palms open and close at my sides.

Baxter was talking again to the cop in the vest, pointing at a
high area on the levee.

'You're not going to get away with this,' I said.

'End of conversation, Robicheaux.'

'Clete stuck your head in a toilet bowl in a bar on Decatur,'
I said. 'You didn't report it because he knew you were taking freebies
from street hookers in the Quarter. That's what all this is about,
Nate.'

Four white cops, as well as the black woman, were staring at
us now. The skin around Nate Baxter's right eye was pinched like a
marksman's when he sights along a rifle barrel. He started to speak,
but I didn't give him the chance.

I held my Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department badge high above
my head and walked toward the front door of the bar.

Clete had dropped the Venetian blinds
over all the windows and
was leaning on the bar counter, one foot on the rail, drinking Mexican
rum from a shot glass and sucking on a salted lime. He wore his powder
blue porkpie hat slanted on the front of his head, his pants hanging
two inches below his navel. His round, pink face was smiling and happy,
his green eyes lighted with an alcoholic shine. Through one eyebrow and
across the bridge of his nose was a scar, as thick as a bicycle patch,
perforated with stitch holes, where he had been bashed with a pipe when
he was a kid in the Irish Channel. As always, his tropical print shirt
looked like it was about to split on his massive shoulders.

The bar was empty. Rain was blowing through the broken front
window and dripping off the Venetian blinds.

'What's happenin', Streak?' he said.

'Are you losing your mind?'

'Harsh words, noble mon. Lighten up.'

'That's Nate Baxter out there. He'd like to paint the woodwork
with both of us.'

'That's why I didn't go out there. Some of those other guys
don't like PI's, either.' He looked at his watch and tapped on the
crystal with his fingernail. 'You want a Dr Pepper?'

'I want us both to walk out of here. We're going to throw your
piece in front of us, too.'

'What's the hurry? Have a Dr Pepper. I'll put some cherries
and ice in it.'

'Clete—'

'I told you, everything's copacetic. Now, disengage, noble
mon. Nobody rattles the old Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.' He took a hit
from the shot glass, sucked on his sliced lime, and smiled at me.

'It's time to boogie, partner,' I said.

He looked again at his watch.

'Give it five more minutes,' he said, and smiled again.

He started to refill his glass from a large, square, brown
bottle that he held in his hand. I placed my palm lightly on his arm.

'Look, let me give you the big picture, noble mon,' he said.
'I'm involved with a lady friend these days. She's a nice person, she
never hurt anybody, she's intelligent, she goes part-time to the Ju-Co,
she also strips in a T and A joint on Bourbon owned by the Calucci
brothers. We're talking about Max and Bobo here, Dave, you remember
them, the two guys we ran in once for pulling a fingernail off a girl's
hand with a pair of pliers? Before I met Martina, my lady friend, she
borrowed two grand off the Caluccis to pay for her grandmother's
hospitalization. So when she didn't make the vig yesterday, Max, the
bucket of shit I put through the window glass, called her in this
morning and said it was time for her to start working out of the back
of a taxicab.'

He took off his porkpie hat, combed his sandy hair straight
back on his head, clipped the comb in his shirt pocket, and put his hat
back on.

'The Caluccis aren't going to make a beef, Dave, at least not
a legal one. They get along in police stations like shit does in an ice
cream parlor,' he said. He filled his shot glass, knocked it back, and
winked at me.

'Where's the other one—Bobo?'

He glanced at his watch again, then looked across the counter,
past a small kitchen, toward the massive wood door of a walk-in meat
locker.

'He's probably wrapping himself in freezer foil right now,' he
said. 'At least that's what I'd do.'

'Are you kidding?'

'I didn't put him in there. He locked himself in. What am I
supposed to do about it? He's got an iron bar or something set behind
the door. I say live and let live.'

I went to the locker and tried to open it. The handle was
chrome and cold in my hand. The door moved an inch, then clanked
against something metal and wouldn't move farther.

'Bobo?' I said.

'What?' a voice said through the crack.

'This is Dave Robicheaux. I'm a sheriff's detective. It's
over. Come on out. Nobody's going to hurt you.'

'I never heard of you.'

'I used to be in Homicide in the First District.'

'Oh yeah, you were dick-brain's partner out there. What are
you doing here? He call you up for some laughs?'

'Here's the agenda, Bobo. Let me run it by you and get your
reactions. I'm holding a forty-five automatic in my hand. If you refuse
to open the door, I'll probably have to shoot a few holes through the
lock and the hinges. Do you feel comfortable with that?'

It was silent a moment.

'Where is he?' the voice said.

'He's not a player anymore. Take my word for it.'

'You keep that animal away from me. He's a fucking menace.
They ought to put his brain in a jar out at the medical school.'

'You got my word, Bobo.'

I heard an iron bar rattle to the floor, then Bobo pushed the
door open with one foot from where he sat huddled in the corner, a rug
wrapped around his shoulders, his hair and nostrils white with frost,
clouds of freezer steam rising from his body into the sides of beef
that were suspended from hooks over his head. His small, close-set
black eyes went up and down my body.

'You ain't got a gun. You sonofabitch. You lied,' He said.

'Let's take a walk,' I said, lifting him up by one arm. 'Don't
worry about Clete. He's just going to finish his drink and follow us
outside. Believe it or not, there're cops out there who were willing to
drop one of their own kind, just to protect you. Makes you proud to be
a taxpayer, I bet.'

'Get your hand off my arm,' he said when we reached the door.

Batist and I stayed overnight in a
guesthouse on Prytania, one
block from St. Charles. The sky was red at sunrise, the air thick with
the angry cries of blue jays in the hot shade outside the French doors.
Nate Baxter had held Clete for disturbing the peace, but the Caluccis
never showed up in the morning to file assault charges, and Clete was
kicked loose without even going to arraignment.

Batist and I had beignets and café au lait in the
Café du
Monde across from Jackson Square. The wind was warm off the river
behind us, the sun bright on the banana and myrtle trees inside the
square, and water sprinklers ticked along the black piked fences that
bordered the grass and separated it from the sidewalk artists and the
rows of shops under the old iron colonnades. I left Batist in the
café
and walked through the square, past St. Louis Cathedral, where street
musicians were already setting up in the shade, and up St. Ann toward
Clete's private investigator's office.

Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The
streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous
night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the
buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the
small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of wild spearmint and old
brick in the passageways. Every scrolled-iron balcony along the street
seemed overgrown with a tangle of potted roses, bougainvillea, azaleas,
and flaming hibiscus, and the moment could be so perfect that you felt
you had stepped inside an Utrillo painting.