DR07 - Dixie City Jam (40 page)

No one at the house—the Vietnamese gardeners, three
of Max's
hired gumballs, a couple of coked-out dancers suntanning topless by the
pool—could believe what was happening. Clete, bent low, like
an ape,
over the controls, headed across the lawn, grinding through flower
beds, the patio furniture by the pool, crashing through a corner of the
gazebo, splintering a birdbath into ceramic shards, raking off
sprinkler heads, shredding garden hoses into chopped rubber bands.

He made a wide circle of lawn destruction and came to a halt
twenty yards from the columned portico at the front of the house, the
cap on the stack bubbling quietly. He lowered the bucket to clear his
field of vision, sighted on the front entrance, raised the bucket into
position again, shifted down, and gave it the gas.

The bucket exploded a hole the size of a garage door through
the front wall. Then Clete backed off, gunning the engine, crunching
over the crushed cinder blocks and plaster, got a good running start,
and plunged into the house's interior.

He made U-turns, shifted from reverse to first, backed through
walls and wet bars and bathrooms, ripped water pipes and drain lines
out of the floors, and ground washing machines, television sets, and
microwaves into sparking piles of electrical junk. He seemed to pause
for a moment, perhaps to get his bearings, then he crashed through
Max's mirror-walled bedroom, dropped the grader blade into position,
and raked the eighteenth-century tester and oak floors through the
French doors onto a domed sunporch, where he swung the bucket in a wide
arc and sent cascades of glass onto the lawn.

By this time the gumballs and the topless suntanners were
racing for the street. Clete bounced out onto the backyard, strips of
fabric flying from the stack and the driver's cage like medieval
streamers. He lit a cigarette with his Zippo, fitted his porkpie hat
down on his brow, then demolished the garages and the garden shed,
dropped the bucket squarely on top of a new Chrysler, ripped a long
slice out of the greenhouse, and plowed trenches bristling with severed
pink roots where hedges had been.

The Romans at Carthage couldn't have done a more thorough job.

Then he got down from the machine and strolled across the
flattened fence at the back of the property toward his automobile, his
hands in his pockets, gazing at the white chop out on the lake. Geysers
of water from broken pipes in the yard were fountaining in the
sunlight, glistening on the grass, blowing in the cool air like an
unloosed rainbow.

After I heard from both Ben Motley and
Lucinda Bergeron, I got
an unexpected call.

'What do you want, Nate?' I said.

'Guess.'

'You got me.'

'You'd better tell that crazy sonofabitch to come in.'

'Tell him yourself.'

'Great suggestion. Except when we showed up at his apartment
with a warrant last night, he climbed out the window and went across
the rooftops. You're mixed up in this, Robicheaux. Don't pretend you're
not.'

'I'm not.'

'You know how I can always tell when a drunk is lying? His
lips are moving.'

'What else can I do for you this morning?'

'Tell that fat fuck you call a friend that he comes in or he
gets no guarantees out on the street. You got my drift?'

'This must bother you, Nate.'

'What?' he said.

'Turning on your own people, taking it on your knees from the
mob, doing grunt work for Max Calucci after he tried to have you
whacked out.'

I could hear him breathing in the receiver, could almost smell
the heat and nicotine coming through the perforations.

'Listen to me very carefully,' he said. 'The insurance
adjuster estimates that Fuckhead did around a half million dollars'
damage to that house. State Farm is not the Mafia, Robicheaux. They're
corporate citizens, and they get seriously pissed and make lots of
trouble when they have to pay out five hundred thousand large because a
lunatic thinks he can wipe his shit on the furniture.'

'I'll pass on your remarks. Thanks for calling.'

'You never listen, do you? If I learn you have contact with
Purcel and you don't report it, I'm charging you with aiding and
abetting and being an accomplice after the fact.'

'Your problem isn't with me or Clete, Nate. When you took
juice from the wise guys, you mortgaged your butt all the way to the
grave,' I said, and hung up.

I went to the rest room and rinsed my face. I let the water
run a long time. I even rinsed my ear where I had held the telephone
receiver. Then I cupped a handful of water on the back of my neck and
dried my skin with a handful of paper towels.

'You run the four-minute mile or something?' another detective
said.

'That's right,' I said, and looked at him in the mirror.

'Who kicked on
your
burner?' he said.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang again.

'The wrong kind of people are looking for you,' I said.
Through the receiver I could hear seagulls squeaking in the background.

'You heard about it?' Clete said.

'What do you think?'

'It'll cool down. It always does.'

'Baxter's got no bottom. He'll take you out, Clete.'

'You shouldn't try to cut deals with the greasebags on behalf
of your old podjo.'

'Do you have a death wish? Is that the problem?'

'You want to go fishing? If the wind drops, I'm going after
some specs in a couple of hours.'

'Fishing?'

'Yeah.'

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared into space.

'You need any money?' I said.

'Not right now.'

'Why'd you do it, Clete? Baxter says the insurance company
wants to hang you out to dry.'

'Who cares? They shouldn't do business with a bucket of shit
like Max Calucci. You've had your shield too long, Streak. You're
starting to think like an administrator.'

'What's that mean?'

'You think you or Motley or Lucinda Bergeron were ever going
to get a search warrant on Max and Bobo? With Nate Baxter on their pad?'

'You were tossing the place with an earthmover?'

'So it was a little heavy-handed. But dig this. Just before I
gutted Max's den, I emptied everything out of his desk into a garbage
bag. I also took his Rolodex and all the videocassettes off the
shelves. One of these videos is a documentary about this primitive
Indian tribe down in South America. Before the missionaries got to
them, these guys were known as the worst human beings on earth. They
shrank heads and sawed people into parts; sometimes they'd boil them
alive. They'd even kill their own children.'

'Go on.'

'They'd also cut the hearts out of their victims. What's Max
doing with a tape like that? The mob's into anthropology?'

'You've queered it as evidence.'

'Nobody else cares, Dave. Except for you and Motley and
Lucinda, everybody in New Orleans is happy these black pukes could find
new roles as organ donors. History lesson, big mon. When they talk law
and order, they mean Wyatt Earp leaving hair on the walls.'

Across the street, a black kid was flying a blood red kite
high against a shimmering blue sky.

The information requests that I had
made about a possible
suspect named Schwert were answered, at first, in a trickle, in
increments, unspecifically, as though we were pursuing a shadow that
had cast itself over other cases and files without ever becoming a
solid presence.

Then the computer printouts, the faxes, and the phone calls
began to increase in volume, from the FBI, the NCIC, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, and finally Interpol.

The sheriff looked down at the clutter of paper on my desk.

'Where'd you get your filing system? It looks like Fibber
McGee's closet,' he said. He glanced up at my face. 'Sorry, that's one
of those generational jokes, I guess.'

'The first time the name William Schwert shows up is in some
phone taps the FBI and ATF had on some neo-Nazis in Idaho during the
mideighties,' I said. 'Then ATF found it in the pocket of a guy who
blew his face off while he was building a bomb in his basement in
Portland.'

'Yeah, I think I remember that. He and some other guys were
going to dynamite a synagogue?'

'That's right.'

'Schwert was involved?'

'No one's sure.'

The sheriff tilted his head quizzically.

'In a half dozen cases it's like he's standing just on the
edge of the picture but he doesn't leave footprints,' I said.

The sheriff sniffed and blew his nose in a Kleenex.

'It doesn't sound like this is helping us a lot,' he said.

'It gets more interesting. The guy named Schwert seems to
spend a lot of time overseas. Interpol has been tracking him for
fifteen years. Berlin, London, Madrid, any place there're skinheads,
Nazis, or Falangists.'

The light in the sheriff's eyes sharpened. He began poking in
the papers on my desk.

'Where is it?' he said.

'What?'

'The Interpol jacket. The mug shots.'

'There aren't any. Nobody's nailed him.'

'This isn't taking us anywhere, Dave. It looks like what
you've got here is more smoke. We don't even know if Schwert is
Buchalter.'

'Interpol says a guy named Willie Schwert broke out of an
asylum for the criminally insane in Melbourne, Australia, seventeen
years ago. He tore the window bars out of a maximum security unit with
his bare hands.'

'Then where's the sheet?'

'The records on the guy are gone. A fire in their computer
system or something.'

'What is it, a computer virus wiping out all the information
on this character?'

'You're not impressed?' I said.

'I wish I could say I was.'

'It's the same guy.'

'You're probably right. And it does diddle-squat for us. He's
still out there, fucking up people in any way he can. I wish Purcel had
dropped the hammer on this guy when he had him at close
range… Pardon my sentiment. I'm becoming convinced I'm not
emotionally suited for this job.'

'The people who are shouldn't be cops, Sheriff,' I said.

That evening, as Bootsie and I washed
the dishes at the sink,
the breeze through the screen was dry and warm and the clouds above my
neighbor's tree line looked like torn plums in the sun's afterglow. Her
hands were chaffed, her knuckles white in the dishwater. For a second
time, she began to wash a saucer I had already dried. I took it from
her hand and placed it back on the drain rack.

'You want to go to a meeting?' I asked.

'Not tonight.'

'You tired?'

'A little.'

'Do you want to lie down?' I said. I rested my hand on the top
of her rump.

'Not really. Maybe I'll just read.' Her eyes focused on a
solitary mockingbird that stood in the middle of the picnic table.

I nodded.

'I don't seem to have any energy,' she said. 'I don't know
what it is.'

'Long day,' I said, and dried my hands and turned away from
her.

'Yes,' she said. 'I guess that's it.'

Later, after she and Alafair had gone to bed, I sat in the
living room by myself and stared at the television screen. A gelatinous
fat man, with the toothy smile of a chipmunk, was denigrating liberals
and making fun of feminists and the homeless. His round face was bright
with an electric jeer when he broached the subject of environmentalists
and animal rights activists. His live audience squealed with delight.

Eighteen million people listened to him daily.

I turned off the set and went into the kitchen. The moon was
down, and I could hear the tree limbs outside the window knocking
together in the wind. When the phone rang on the-counter, I knew who it
would be. I almost looked forward to the encounter, like a man who has
formed a comfortable intimacy with his bête noire.

His voice was indolent and ropy with saliva when he spoke. In
the background I could hear the flat, tinny sound of Bix Beiderbecke's
'In a Mist.'

'I never saw tracks on your arm, Will. Do you shoot up in the
thighs?'

'You never know.'

'How'd you get my number?' I said.

'People like to please. Not too much gets denied me, Dave.'

'It sounds like you might have done a good load of China
pearl. Not a good sign for a guy who likes control.'

'Why did you do it?'

'What?'

'You spit in my face. When I tried to create a tender moment
inside our pain.'

'I guess you're just that kind of guy. Besides that, you're
probably insane.'

The phonograph stopped and started over again. Beiderbecke's
trumpet rose off the record like sound ringing through crystal.
Buchalter swallowed wetly, his mouth close to the receiver.

'It's not too late for us,' he said.

'It is for you, partner. Your threads are unraveling. We've
got a make on you from Toronto and Interpol; we know about the asylum
you broke out of in Australia. You're about to slide down the big
ceramic bowl, Will.'

'You don't understand power. I can caress you in ways that'll
make you beg for death. The auto garage was nothing.'

'Get off it, Buchalter. You're a hype. You're one day away any
time your connection wants you.'

I heard his throat working again, words forming, then sticking
unintelligibly in his mouth. Someone pulled the receiver from his hand.

'The wifey plowed again, Dave?' she said. Her voice was sweaty
and hoarse, like a person high on her own glandular energies. 'You
should have taken me up on my invitation. It'd give you something to
fantasize about.'

'Your boyfriend's tracked shit over two continents, Marie,' I
said. 'It looks like you're going to take the bounce with him.'

'Can she have orgasms while she's on the grog?'