DR07 - Dixie City Jam (4 page)

That evening Batist and I walked over
to St. Charles and took
the streetcar up to Canal, then walked into the Quarter and ate at the
Acme on Iberville. It was crowded and warm inside and smelled of flat
beer and the piles of empty oyster shells in the drain bins. We heard
thunder out over the river, then it started to rain and we walked in
the lee of the buildings back to Canal and caught the streetcar out on
the neutral ground.

As we clattered down the tracks around Lee Circle, past the
equestrian statue of Robert Lee, St. Charles Avenue opened up into a
long green-black corridor of moss-hung oak trees, swirling with mist,
touched with the red afterglow of the sun. The inside of the streetcar
was cool and dry and brightly lit, the windows flecked with rain, and
the world felt like a grand and beautiful place to be.

Back at the guesthouse we watched a movie on television while
the rain and wind shook the mulberry tree outside the French doors. I
paid no attention to the sirens that I heard on the avenue, nor to the
emergency lights that beat angrily against the darkness on the far side
of the parking lot. We were picking up my boat in the morning, and with
luck we would be somewhere south of Terrebonne Bay by noon, on our way
back to New Iberia, our baited jigs bouncing in the trough behind us.

Sheets of lightning were trembling against the sky, and I lay
down on the pillow with my arm across my eyes. Batist began undressing
for bed, then walked to the French doors to close the curtain.

'Hey, Dave, they's a ambulance and a bunch of policemens over
at that cottage where that nigger run to,' he said.

'I'm hitting the sack, partner. Clete's right. Leave New
Orleans to its own problems.'

'They carryin' somebody out of there.'

'Tell me about it in the morning. Good night.'

He didn't answer, and I felt myself drifting on the edges of
sleep and the sound of the rain blowing against the windows; then I
heard him click off the lamp switch.

It must have been an hour later that we were awakened by the
knock on the door. No, that's wrong; it wasn't a knock; it was an
incessant beating, with the base of the fist, the kind of ugly,
penetrating sound sent by someone whose violation of your sleep and
privacy is only a minimal indicator of his larger purpose.

I walked to the door in my skivvies, turned the dead bolt, and
opened the door two inches.

'Take off the night chain, Robicheaux.'

'What do you want, Nate?'

'What's this look like?' He held a warrant up in front of me.
His chrome-plated .357 Magnum hung from his right hand. The skin of his
face was tight with fatigue and muted anger, beaded with rainwater.
Three uniformed white cops stood behind him.

'For what? That beef at Calucci's Bar?' I said.

'You never disappoint me. Tell me stink and shit don't go hand
in hand.'

'Why don't you try making sense, Nate?'

'We just hauled away a carved-up boon from across the street.
Guess who knocked him around in front of a half dozen witnesses today?
It's great having you back in town, Robicheaux. It's just like old
times.'

He pulled his handcuffs from his belt and let them swing
loosely from his index finger like a watch fob. Behind me, Batist sat
on the edge of his bed, his big hands splayed on his naked thighs, his
eyes focused on a sad and ancient racial knowledge that only he seemed
able to see.

There are those who, for political
reasons, enjoy talking
about country club jails. But any jail anywhere is a bad place to be.
Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been in one.

Imagine an environment where the lights never go off and you
defecate in full view of others on a toilet seat streaked with other
people's urine, where you never quite fall asleep, where you are
surrounded by the sounds of clanging iron, irrational voices resonating
down stone corridors, a count-man or irritated turnkey whanging his
baton off steel bars, or the muffled and tormented cries of an
eighteen-year-old fish being gang-raped behind a shower wall.

Perhaps even a worse characteristic of jail is the denial of
any identity you might have had before you stepped inside a piece of
geography where time can sometimes be measured in five-minute
increments that seem borne right out of Dante's ninth ring. Here you
quickly learn that the personal violation of your
self
is considered as insignificant and ongoing an occurrence as routine
body cavity searches, as the spraying of your genitals for crab lice,
or as a wolf telling the server in the chow line to spit in your food,
until you no longer think of yourself as an exception to the rules of
jailhouse romance'.

Batist spent the night in the tank and wasn't booked until the
next morning. I sat on a wood chair in a waiting area next to a squad
room and a row of glassed-in offices, one of which was Nate Baxter's.
Through a doorway at the back of the squad room I could see the holding
tank where Batist was still being held, though he had already been
fingerprinted and photographed.

I had been waiting an hour and a half to see Nate Baxter. Then
Sergeant Lucinda Bergeron walked past me, in navy blue slacks, a
starched white short-sleeve shirt, and a lacquered black gunbelt with a
leather pouch for handcuffs. She carried a clipboard in her hand, and
if she noticed me, her face didn't show it.

'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said.

She stopped and looked at me but said nothing. Her eyes were
turquoise and elongated, like an Oriental's, and her cheekbones were
rouged high up on her face.

'Could I talk with you a minute?' I asked.

'What is it?'

'I'm Dave Robicheaux. You left a message for me with Cletus
Purcel.'

'Yes?'

'I came in and filed a report with Sergeant Motley yesterday.'

She looked at me, her face as still and expressionless as a
picture painted upon the air.

'I was at Calucci's Bar,' I said. 'You asked me to come in and
file a statement.'

'I understood you. What can I help you with?' she said.

'I have a friend back there in the tank. The black man, Batist
Perry. He's already been booked.'

'What do you want from me?'

'How about getting him moved into a holding cell?'

'You'll have to talk to the officer in charge.'

'That's what I've been trying to do. For an hour and a half.'

'I can't help you. I'm sorry.'

She walked away to her desk, which was located in the squad
room, among the uniformed officers, rather than in an enclosed office.
Ten minutes later Baxter stepped out of his office door, studying some
papers in his hand, then glanced in my direction and beckoned to me
with one finger.

While I sat down across from him, he tipped his cigarette
ashes in an ashtray and continued to concentrate on the papers on his
desk blotter. He looked rested and fresh, in a sky blue sports coat and
a crinkling shirt that was the color of tin.

'You're really charging Batist with murder?' I said.

'That decision comes down from the prosecutor's office,
Robicheaux. You know that.'

'The man's never been in trouble. Not in his whole life. Not
even for a misdemeanor. What's the matter with you?'

'Well, he's in trouble now. In a big way.' He leaned forward
and tipped his ashes into his ashtray, cocking his eyebrows at me.

'I don't think you have a case, Nate. I think this is all
smoke.'

'His prints are on the door at the crime scene.'

'That's impossible.'

'Tell that to our fingerprint man. Does this look like smoke
to you?' He removed a half dozen eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white
photographs from his desk drawer and dropped them in front of me. 'You
ever see that much blood at a crime scene? Check out the chest wound.
Has your friend ever been into voodoo?'

'You're using a homicide investigation to settle an old score,
Nate. Don't tell me you're not.'

'Is the light in here bad? That must be the problem. The
killer sawed the guy's heart out. That wasn't enough for him, either.
He stuffed purple roses into the heart cavity.'

'What's your point?'

'Your friend wears a dime on a string around his ankle,'
Baxter said. 'He carries a shriveled alligator's foot in his pocket. He
had bones in his suitcase. The murder has all the characteristics of a
ritual killing. If you were in my place, who would be your first
suspect? Is there any chance it might be a superstitious backwater
black guy who had already assaulted and threatened the victim the same
day of the homicide and then left his prints at the crime scene? No,
don't tell me. Just go think about it somewhere and drop me a card
sometime.'

'I want to see him.'

'Be my guest. Please. By the way, I saw the black broad blow
you off. In case you want to get more involved with her, I hear she's
starting up a charm school. Take it easy, Robicheaux. You never
surprise me,' he said.

But while I had been talking with Nate
Baxter, Batist had
already been locked to a wrist chain and taken to morning arraignment.
By the time I got to the courtroom the public defender, who did not
look to be over twenty-five, was trying to prevail upon the judge to
set a reasonable bail. He was methodical, even eloquent, in his
argument and obviously sincere. He pointed out that Batist had no
arrest record and had been employed for years at a boat-rental dock run
by a law officer in Iberia Parish, that he had lived his entire life in
one small community and was not apt to leave it.

But Judge James T. Flowers was a choleric white-knuckle
alcoholic who stayed dry without a program by channeling his inner
misery into the lives of others. His procedures and sentences kept a
half dozen ACLU attorneys occupied year round.

He looked at the clock and waited for the public defender to
finish, then said, 'Hell's hot, my young friend. Perhaps it's time some
of your clients learned that. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars.
Next case.'

An hour later Sergeant Motley arranged for me to see Batist in
an interrogation room. The walls were a smudged white and windowless,
and the air smelled like refrigerated cigarette smoke and cigar butts.
Batist sat across from me at the wood table and kept rubbing his hands
on top of each other. The scars on them looked like tiny pink worms.
His face was unshaved and puffy with fatigue, his eyes arterial red in
the corners with broken blood veins.

'What's gonna happen, Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman first, then we'll see about a
lawyer. We just have to do it a step at a time.'

'Dave, that judge said fifty t'ousand dollars.'

'I'm going to get you out, partner. You just have to trust me.'

'What for they doin' this? What they get out of it? I never
had no truck with the law. I ain't even seen these people befo'.'

'A bad cop out there is carrying a grudge over some things
that happened a long time ago. Eventually somebody in the prosecutor's
office will probably figure that out. But in the meantime we have a
problem, Batist. They say your fingerprints were on the door of that
cottage across the street.'

I looked into his face. He dropped his eyes to the table and
opened and closed his hands. His knuckles looked as round and hard
against the skin as ball bearings.

'Tell me,' I said.

'After you was gone, after I bust that man's lip, I seen them
kids t'rew the window, hangin' round his cottage do' again. When I call
the po-lice, they ax me what he done. I say he sellin' dope to
children, that's what he done. They ax me I seen it, I seen him take
money from somebody, I seen somebody lighting up a crack pipe
or
somet'ing. I say no I ain't seen it, you got to see a coon climb in a
tree to know coons climb in trees?

'So I kept watchin' out the window at that nigger's do'. After
a while he come out with two womens, I'm talkin' about the kind been
workin' somebody's crib, and they got in the car with them kids and
drove round the block. When they come back them kids was fallin' down
in the grass. I call the po-lice again, and they ax what crime I seen.
I say I ain't seen no crime, long as it's all right in New Orleans for
a pimp and his whores to get children high on dope.

'This was a white po-liceman I was talkin' to. So he put a
black man on the phone, like nobody but another black man could make
sense out of what I was sayin'. This black po-liceman tole me to come
down and make a repote, he gonna check it out. I tole him check out
that nigger after I put my boot up his skinny ass.'

'You went over there?'

'For just a minute, that's all. He wasn't home. I never gone
inside. Maybe he went out the back do'. Why you look like that, Dave?'

I rested my chin on my fist and tried not to let him read my
face.

'Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman now. In the meantime, don't talk
about this stuff with anyone. Not with the cops, not with any of those
guys in the lockup. There're guys in here who'll trade off their own
time and lie about you on the witness stand.'

'What you mean?'

'They'll try to learn something about you, enough to give
evidence against you. They cut deals with the prosecutor.'

'They can do that?' he said 'Get out of jail by sendin'
somebody else to Angola?'

'I'm afraid it's a way of life, podna.'

The turnkey opened the door and touched Batist on the
shoulder. Batist stared silently at me a moment, then rose from his
chair and walked out of the room toward a yellow elevator, with a
wiremesh and barred door, which would take him upstairs into a lockdown
area. The palms of his hands left tiny horsetails of perspiration on
the tabletop.

It was going to cost a lot, far beyond
anything I could afford
right now. I had thirty-two hundred dollars in a money market account,
most of which was set aside for the quarterly tax payments on my
boat-rental and bait business, four hundred thirty-eight dollars in an
account that I used for operating expenses at the dock, and one hundred
thirteen dollars in my personal checking account.