DR07 - Dixie City Jam (39 page)

'That's what you got to work my crank with?' he said.

'Yeah, I guess so.'

'Then you got jack shit.'

'What's going to make you happy, Max?'

He smiled. I felt my pulse swelling in my throat; I rubbed the
top of my knuckles with my palm. I kept my eyes flat and looked at the
curtain of trumpet vine that puffed in the breeze.

'I want the two hundred large Tommy Lonighan owes me and
Bobo,' he said. 'That fucking mick is gonna die and take the debt to
the grave. You twist him right, we get our money, then I don't have no
memory about troubles with Clete Purcel.'

'Big order, Max.'

'You know anything easy? Like they say, life's a bitch, then
you get to be dead for a long time.'

The ash from his cigar blew on my slacks. I brushed it off,
then put on my sunglasses and looked out into the sunlight.

'What, you sentimental about Lonighan or something?' he said.

'No.'

'That's good. Because he's been jobbing you. Him and Hippo
Bimstine, both.'

'Oh?'

'That's a surprise? People like you rip me up, Robicheaux.
You think Jews are martyrs, the Irish are fun guys singing "Rosie
O'Grady" on the corner, and Italians are colostomy bags. Tell me I'm
wrong.'

'You were going to say something about Tommy Blue Eyes?'

'Yeah, he got his fat mick mush full of booze and was laughing
about how you trust Hippo Bimstine and think he's big shit because he's
got all these liberal causes.'

'I see.'

'You see? I don't think you see shit. Lonighan says Hippo
stole some stuff out of the public library about that Nazi sub so you
wouldn't find out what's inside it.'

'No kidding?'

'
Yeah
, no fucking kidding.'

I leaned forward and picked at the calluses on my palm. The
breeze was drowsy with the smell of chrysanthemums and dead birthday
candles.

'You and I have something in common,' I said.

'I don't think so.'

'I went down on a murder beef once. Did you know that?'

'I'm supposed to be impressed?'

'Here's the trade, Max. Take the contract off Clete and I stay
out of your life.'

'You ain't in my life.'

'Here's the rest of it.'

'I ain't interested,' he said. 'I tell you what. It's my
nephew's birthday, you came out to my mother's house and showed
respect, you didn't act like the drunk fuck everybody says you are.
That means I'm letting all this stuff slide, and that includes what you
done to me out at Lonighan's place. So you can tell dick-brain the
score's even, he's getting a free pass he don't deserve, I got
businesses to run and I don't have time for this shit. Are we clear on
this now?'

'I hope you're a man of your word, Max.'

'Fuck you and get outta here.'

When I opened the gate and let myself out, I noticed a tangle
of ornamental iron roses tack-welded in the center of the pikes. The
cluster was uneven where one rose had been snapped loose from its base.
I rubbed the ball of my thumb over the sharp edges of the broken stem
and looked back at Max. His eyes had never left me. He rotated an unlit
cigar in the center of his mouth.

The AA meeting is held on the second
floor of a brick church
that was used as a field hospital for Confederate wounded in 1863, then
later as a horse stable by General Banks's Union cavalry. Outside, the
streets are wet and cool and empty, the storefronts shuttered under the
wood colonnades, the trees still dripping with rain against a sky that
looks like a red-tinged ink wash.

It's a fifth step meeting, one in which people talk about
stepping across a line and admitting to God, themselves, and another
person the exact nature of their wrongs. For many, it's not an easy
moment.

Some of them are still zoned out, their eyes glazed with
residual fear; those sent by the court try to hide the resentment and
boredom in their faces; others seem to have the exuberance and
confidence of airplane wing walkers.

Bootsie sits next to me, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
She showered after supper and put on makeup and a new yellow dress, but
in her cheeks are pale discolorations, like slivers of ice, and
there's a thin sheen of perspiration at her temples.

'You don't have to say anything. Just listen,' I whisper to
her.

They start to unload. Some of it seems silly—overdue
library
books, cavalier attitudes toward bills—then it turns serious
and you
feel embarrassed and voyeuristic; you find your eyes dropping to the
floor, and you try not to be affected by the level of pain in the
speaker's voice.

The details sometimes make the soul wince; then you remember
some of the things you did, or tried to do, or could have done, while
drunk and you realize that what you hear in this room differs only in
degree from the moral and psychological insanity that characterized
your own life.

Only one speaker makes use of euphemism. That's because he's
told his story before and he knows that not everyone in the
room will be able to handle it. He was eighteen years old,
ripped on reefer and pills, when he pushed a blindfolded VC suspect out
the door of a Huey at five hundred feet; he so impressed the ARVN and
American officer onboard that they had him do it twice more the same
afternoon.

Bootsie's eyes are filled with hidden thoughts. I slide my
hand down her forearm and take her palm in mine. Her eyes move to the
doorway and the darkened stairway at the front of the room. Her breath
catches in her throat.

'What is it?' I ask.

Her eyes close, then open, like a doll's.

'A man at the door. Dave, I think—'

'What?'

'It was
him
.'

I get up from the folding chair and walk across the oak floor
to the front of the room. I step through the open door, walk down the
darkened stairway. The door to the street is open, and rain is blowing
out of the trees onto the lawn. The violet air smells of wet stone and
burning leaves.

I go back upstairs, and Bootsie looks at me anxiously. I shake
my head.

Before the meeting ends, it's obvious she wants to speak. She
raises her chin, her lips part. But the moment passes, and she lowers
her eyes to her lap.

Later the room is empty. I turn out the lights and prepare to
lock up. In the hallway downstairs she puts her arms around me and
presses her face into my chest. I can feel her back shaking under my
hands. A loose garbage can lid is bouncing down the street in the
darkness.

'I feel so ashamed,' she says. Her face is wet against my
shirt.

I went in to work early and looked at
the notes I had taken
during my conversation with the lieutenant at the Toronto Police
Department.

It was time to try something different. On my yellow legal pad
I made a list of aliases that Will Buchalter might have used. As a
rule, the aliases used by a particular individual retain similarities
in terms of initials or sound and phonetic value, or perhaps even
cultural or ethnic identification, in all probability because most
career criminals have a libidinal fascination with themselves.

I tried W. B. Kuhn, William Coon, Will Kuntz, Bill Koontz,
then a dozen other combinations, making use of the same first and last
names, in the same way that you would wheel pari-mutuel numbers in
trying to hit a quiniela or a perfecta at the racetrack.

But more than a name it was a literary allusion written by the
dead Canadian detective on the barroom napkin that gave me a brooding
sense I almost did not want to confirm.

I began writing out the word
Schwert
with the combinations of first names and initials that I had already
listed. The sheriff walked into my office with a cup of coffee in his
hand and looked over my shoulder.

'That looks like alphabet soup,' he said. 'You going to run
that through the NCIC?'

'Yeah, I want to go through the feds in New Orleans, too.'

'It can't hurt.' He gazed through the window at a black trusty
in jailhouse issue sawing a yellowed palm frond from the tree trunk.

'You don't sound enthusiastic,' I said.

'I've got bad news. The tail we put on your
girlfriend… She went through the front door of a supermarket
in Lafayette, then out the back and
poof
…
Gone.'

'Who was the tail?'

'Expidee Chatlin.'

I pressed my fingers into my temples.

'I didn't have anybody else available,' the sheriff said. 'I
don't think it would have come out any different, anyway, Dave. Your
gal's mighty slick.'

'I'd really appreciate your not calling her
my
gal or girlfriend.'

'Any way you cut it, she's one smart broad and she took us
over the hurdles. That's just the way it plays out sometimes.'

'Too often.'

'Sir?'

I tried to concentrate on my legal pad.

'You and Bootsie have had a bad time. I don't think you should
blame others for it, though,' he said.

'That wasn't my intention, Sheriff.' I could hear his leather
gunbelt creak. I wrote the words
William B. Schwert
on the pad. He started to walk out of the room, then stopped.

'What've you got there, exactly?' he said.

'A Toronto cop wrote something on a napkin before he was found
hanging by his ankles with a nine-millimeter round through his eye.' I
glanced back at my notes. '"I know he's out there now, flying in the
howling storm."'

'So?'

'It's from a poem by William Blake. It's about evil. As I
remember it, it goes "O Rose, thou art sick.

'No, you misunderstood me, Dave. I was looking at the name you
just wrote down there… Schwert. You never took any German at
school?'

'No.'

'It means "sword," podna.'

He drank from his coffee cup and tapped me lightly on the
shoulder with the flat of his fist.

But before I would get anything back from the FBI or the
National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., Clete Purcel
would write history of the New Orleans mob
Purcel.

a new chapter in the and outdo even Clete Purcel.

Clete had been eating breakfast in
Igor's on St. Charles, his
porkpie hat tipped down over one eye, when two of Max Calucci's
bodyguards came in and sat at the table next to him. They were in a
good mood, expansive, joking with the waitress, relaxed in Clete's
presence. One of them accidentally knocked his chair into Clete's.

'Sorry, Purcel. Don't be getting the wrong signal. It ain't
that kind of day,' he said.

Clete chewed his food and looked back at the men silently.

'I'm saying we got the word, okay?' the man said. He grinned.

Clete wiped his mouth with his napkin.

'There's some kind of comedy act here I don't know about?' he
said.

'Cool your ovaries down. You want to join us? Your breakfast
is on me.'

'I'll eat at that table after it gets scrubbed down with
peroxide.'

'Suit yourself. It's a beautiful day. Why fuck a beautiful
day?'

'Yeah, it was.'

The two men laughed and looked at their menus. Clete set his
knife and fork down on his plate and put a matchstick in the corner of
his mouth.

'Are we working on new rules here?' he said.

'Give it a break, Clete. You want some tickets to the LSU-Ole
Miss game? Look, we're glad to hear it's over, that's all,' the second
man said.

Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and studied it.

'Who gave you permission to call me by my first name, and
what's this stuff about something being over?' he said.

'Sorry we bothered you, Purcel,' the first man said.
'Robicheaux don't want to tell you he did a sit-down, that's between
you and him. Hey, somebody got my fat ass out of the skillet, I'd count
my blessings.'

The following is my best re-creation of the events, as
described by Ben Motley and Lucinda Bergeron, that happened later out
by Lake Pontchartrain.

Clete parked his convertible two blocks from Max Calucci's
home, then took a cab to a construction site one mile away, on Robert
E. Lee Boulevard, where the Caluccis supplied all the heavy equipment
to the builder. He leaned against the trunk of a palm tree across the
street, sucking on a think stick of peppermint candy, enjoying the
morning, inhaling the breeze off the lake.

Then he casually strolled across the boulevard, the peppermint
stick pointed upward like an erection, and hot-wired an enormous
earthmover. It was outfitted with a steel blade that could strip baked
hardpan down to bedrock, a great, saw-toothed bucket that could break
and scoop up asphalt highway like peanut brittle, and huge balloon
tires with studded welts for scouring trenches through piles of crushed
stone and angle iron.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Clete had wheeled
around the corner into the midday traffic and was hammering full
throttle down the boulevard toward Max's house, diesel smoke flattening
in a dirty plume from the stack.

The gateman at Max's was the first to see, or hear, the
earthmover thundering down the quiet, oak-shaded residential street.
Then, inside the steel-mesh protective cage, he recognized the powder
blue porkpie hat, the round, pink face with the gray scar through one
eyebrow like a strip of inner tube patch, and the massive shoulders
that seemed about to split the seams on the Hawaiian shirt.

By this time the gateman was grabbing at the telephone box
inset in the brick pillar by the edge of the driveway. But it was too
late; Clete lowered the saw-toothed bucket, swung the earthmover into
the drive, and blew the gates off their hinges.