DR07 - Dixie City Jam (3 page)

But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there,
too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and
the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine
vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.

The biscuit-colored stucco walls inside Clete's office were
decorated with bullfight posters, leather wine bags,
banderillas
that he had brought back from his vacation in Mexico City. Through the
back window I could see the small flagstone patio where he kept his
dumbbells and the exercise bench that he used unsuccessfully every day
to keep his weight and blood pressure down. Next to it was a dry stone
well impacted with dirt and untrimmed banana trees.

He sat behind his desk in his Budweiser shorts, a yellow tank
top, and porkpie hat. His blue-black .38 police special hung in a nylon
holster from a coatrack in the corner. He pried the cap off a bottle of
Dixie beer with his pocketknife, let the foam boil over the neck onto
the rug, kicked off his flip-flops, and put his bare feet on top of the
desk.

'You trying to leave the dock early today?' I said.

'Hey, I was in the tank all night. You ought to check that
scene out, mon. Two-thirds of the people in there are honest-to-God
crazoids. I'm talking about guys eating their grits with their hands.
It's fucking pitiful.'

He pushed at a scrap of memo paper by his telephone.

'I was a little bothered by something Nate Baxter said last
night,' I said.

'Oh yeah?'

'This vigilante stuff. He thinks you might be the man.'

He drank out of his beer and smiled at me, his eyes filled
with a merry light.

'You think I might actually have that kind of potential?' he
said.

'People have said worse things about both of us.'

'
The Lone Ranger
was a radio show, mon. I
don't believe there's any vigilante. I think we're talking about
massive wishful thinking. These hits are just business as usual in the
city. We've got a murder rate as high as Washington, D.C.' s now.'

'Five or six of them have been blacks in the projects.'

'They were all dealers.'

'That's the point,' I said.

'Dave, I've run down bond jumpers in both the Iberville and
Desire projects. Life in there is about as important as water breaking
out the bottom of a paper bag. The city's going to hell, mon. That's
the way it is. If somebody's out there taking names in a serious way, I
say more power to them. But I don't think that's the case, and anyway
it's not me.'

He took a long drink from the beer. The inside of the bottle
was filled with amber light. Moisture slid down the neck over the
green-and-gold label.

'I'm sorry. You want me to send out for a Dr Pepper or some
coffee?' he asked.

'No, I've got to be going. I had to bring my boat up from New
Iberia for some work. It'll be ready about noon.'

He picked up the slip of memo paper by his phone and rubbed it
between thumb and forefinger.

'I ought to save you a headache and throw this away,' he said.
But he flipped it across the desk blotter at me.

'What is it?'

'That black broad, the sergeant who was in front of Calucci's,
called this morning. She didn't know how else to get ahold of you. My
advice is that you pitch that telephone number in the trash and go back
to New Iberia. Forget New Orleans. The whole place is just waiting for
a hydrogen bomb.'

'What's the deal?'

'She's a hard-nosed black broad named Lucinda Bergeron from
the projects who doesn't take dog shit from white male cops. That's the
deal.'

'So?'

'Last night she evidently got in Nate Baxter's face. So today
he's trying to kick a two-by-four up her ass. He wrote her up for
insubordination. He says she cussed him out. She says she's innocent
and you can back her up.'

'She didn't cuss him out while I was there. In fact, she
really kept her Kool-Aid.'

'Don't get sucked in, mon. Messing with Baxter is like putting
your hand in a spittoon.'

I picked,up the slip of paper and put it in my pocket.

'What do I know?' he said.

I called the dock from the guesthouse
and was told that the
mechanic had gone home sick and my boat would not be ready until the
next day. Then I called the number on the slip of paper, which turned
out to be Garden District police headquarters, and was told that
Lucinda Bergeron was not in. I left my name and the telephone number of
the guesthouse.

Batist was sitting on the side of his bed, his big, callused,
scar-flecked hands in his lap, staring out the French doors, his face
full of thought.

'What's troubling you, partner?' I asked.

'That nigger out yonder in the lot.'

'That what?'

'You heard me.'

'What'd he do?'

'While you was still sleepin', I got up early and went down to
the dining room for coffee. He was eatin' in there, talkin' loud with
his mout' full of food, puttin' his hand on that young white girl's
back each time she po'ed his coffee. Pretendin' like it's innocent,
like he just a nice man don't have no bad t'oughts on his mind, no.'

'Maybe it's their business, Batist.'

'That kind of trashy nigger make it hard on the rest of us,
Dave.'

He walked to the French doors, continued to stare out at the
parking lot, peeled the cellophane off a cigar, and wadded the
cellophane up slowly in his palm.

'He leanin' up against your truck,' he said.

'Let it go.'

'He need somebody to go upside his head.'

I knew better than to argue with Batist, and I didn't say
anything more. He took off his short-sleeve blue denim shirt, hung it
on the bedpost, and lathered his face with soap in front of the
bathroom mirror. The muscles in his shoulders and back looked like
rocks inside a leather bag. He began shaving with a pearl-handled
straight-edge razor, drawing the blade cleanly down each of his jaws
and under his chin.

I had known him since I was a child, when he used to fur-trap
with my father on Marsh Island. He couldn't read or write, not even his
own name, and had difficulty recognizing numbers and dialing a
telephone. He had never been outside the state of Louisiana, had voted
for the first time in 1968, and knew nothing of national or world
events.. But he was one of the most honest and decent men I've known,
and absolutely fearless and unflinching in an adversarial situation (my
adopted daughter, Alafair, never quite got over the time she saw him
reach into a flooded pirogue, pinch a three-foot moccasin behind the
head, and fling it indifferently across the bayou).

He walked back to the French doors, blotting a cut on his chin
with a towel, the razor still in his hand. Then he folded the razor,
dropped it in the back pocket of his denims, and began buttoning on his
shirt.

'What are you doing, Batist?'

'Take a look out yonder.'

A tall, thin mulatto with skin the color of a new penny was
talking to a half dozen black kids by my truck. He wore striped brown
pants, with a braided black belt, and a lavender short-sleeve shirt
with a white tie. He grinned and jiggled, and his hands moved in the
air while he talked, as though a song were working inside him.

'A man like that just like a movie star to them raggedy kids,
Dave.'

'At some point they'll learn he isn't.'

'It won't be no he'p then. He's a dope dealer or a pimp, don't
be tellin' me he ain't. He'll use up them young boys' lives just so he
can have money for a nice car, take womens out to the racetrack, put
dope up his nose… Hey, you t'ink I'm wrong? Come see.'

The mulatto man rubbed one kid on his head, the way a baseball
coach might, then hooked two fingers inside the kid's belt, drew the
kid close to him, and stuffed something small inside his pants. Then he
cupped his hand around the nape of another kid's neck, his face beaming
with goodwill and play, and shoved something down inside his pants, too.

'I be right back,' Batist said.

'Leave this guy alone, Batist. I'll call the locals and
they'll send somebody out.'

'Yeah, in t'ree hours they will.'

'This isn't our pond, partner.'

'Yeah? How come you run across town last night to get mixed up
with Purcel and them dagos?'

He picked up his dry cigar from the ashtray, put it deep in
his jaw, and went out the door.

Oh boy
, I thought.

Batist walked from the guesthouse through the shade of the
mulberry tree to the edge of the parking lot. The mulatto man was
leaning against the headlight of my truck, entertaining his audience by
one-handedly rolling a half-dollar across the backs of his fingers. He
propped one shined shoe behind him on the truck bumper and gingerly
squeezed his scrotum. I don't know what he said to Batist. It may have
been a patronizing remark or perhaps even a pleasant greeting; he was
smiling when he said it. But I don't think he expected the response he
got.

The flat of Batist's right hand, which could curve around a
brick and shale the corners off it, seemed to explode against the side
of the man's head. His face went out of round with the blow, and the
blood drained from his cheeks; his jaw hung open, and his eyes were
suddenly small and round, shrunken in his head like a pig's. Then
Batist hit him with his open hand again, harder, this time on the side
of the mouth, so that the bottom lip broke against the teeth.

Batist waved his hands in the midst of the black kids like
someone shooing chickens out of a brooder house. They ran in all
directions while the mulatto man held the back of his wrist against his
mouth, one palm turned outward in a placating gesture.

Batist pointed bis finger into the man's face and walked
toward him silently, as though he were leveling a lance at him. The man
broke and ran through the parking lot toward a cottage on the opposite
side of the street. Batist ground a tiny glass vial into the cement
with the heel of his boot, then walked past a group of stunned tourists
who had just emerged from the guesthouse dining room; his perspiring
face was turned away in embarrassment.

I called my wife, Bootsie, in New
Iberia and told her that I
would be at least another day in New Orleans, then I tried calling
Lucinda Bergeron again at Garden District headquarters. She was still
out, so I decided to drive over there, file a statement, and be done
with the matter. I didn't know that I would end up talking to Sergeant
Benjamin Motley, who used to be in Vice when I was a homicide
lieutenant in the First District.

He was a rotund, powerful black man, whose clothes always
smelled of cigar smoke, with a thick black mustache and glistening
fire-hydrant neck, who had little sympathy for the plight of his own
people. One time a black wino in a holding cell had ridiculed Motley,
calling him the white man's hired 'knee-grow,' and Motley had sprayed
the man from head to foot with a can of Mace. Earlier in his
law-enforcement career he had been the subject of a wrongful death
investigation, when, as a bailiff, he had escorted seven prisoners from
the drunk tank on a wrist chain to morning arraignment and a fire in
the courthouse basement had blown the circuits and stalled the elevator
between floors. Motley had gotten out through the trap-door in the top
of the elevator; the seven men on the chain had died of asphyxiation.

His office was glassed in and spacious, and several merit and
civic citations were framed on the walls. Outside was a squad room
filled with uniformed cops doing their paperwork at their desks. Motley
leaned back in his swivel chair, one shoe propped on his waste-basket,
and ate a half-peeled candy bar while I finished writing out in
longhand what little I could report about the exchange between Nate
Baxter and Lucinda Bergeron.

I signed my name at the bottom of the form and handed it to
him. His eyes went up and down the page while he brushed at his chin
with one knuckle.

'What are you doing in New Orleans, anyway, Robicheaux? I
thought you were a plainclothes in Iberia Parish,' he said.

'I'm on leave for a while.'

'You couldn't stay out of New Orleans?'

'You need anything else, Motley?'

'Not a thing. Use your time any way you want to.'

'What's that mean?'

'You think this is going to bail that broad out?' He shook the
page between his fingers.

'I don't know. But she didn't cuss out Nate Baxter while I was
there. In fact, in my opinion, it was Baxter who was out of line.'

'Baxter got you suspended without pay when he was in Internal
Affairs. You even punched him out in a squad room at First District.
You should have written this on toilet paper and put it in the John.'

'You haven't lost your touch, Motley.'

He chewed on the corner of his lip and rolled his eyes
sideways.

'Look through the glass,' he said. 'Count the white officers
in the squad room, then count the black officers. When you get done
doing that, count the female officers in the room. Then count the black
female officers. Is the picture coming clear for you?'

'Do they give her a lot of heat?'

'You didn't hear it from me.'

I looked at his face and didn't speak. He wiped the chocolate
off his fingers with the candy wrapper and threw the wrapper into the
wastebasket.

'Dog shit in her desk drawer, a dildo Scotch-taped to a jar of
Vaseline in her mailbox, phony phone messages from David Duke's
campaign headquarters, that kind of stuff,' he said. 'She seems like a
stand-up broad, but they'll probably run her off eventually.'

'It sounds like she could use some friends,' I said, and got
up to go.

'You mean the brothers? Like me?'

I shrugged.

'Last hired, first fired,' he said. 'That's the way it is, my
man. It doesn't change because you wear tampons. And let's be clear,
the only reason you're involved in this is because of your buddy
Purcel. So go pull on your own pud, Robicheaux.'