DR07 - Dixie City Jam (19 page)

I turned toward the deputy, who was sitting in a chair now,
still staring up at the silent talk show on television. His name was
Expidee Chatlin, and he had spent most of his years with the department
either as a crossing guard at parish elementary schools or escorting
prisoners from the drunk tank to guilty court.

'Were you here all night, Expidee?' I asked.

'Sure, what you t'ink, Dave?' He had narrow shoulders and wide
hips, a thin mustache, and stiff, black hair that no amount of grease
seemed capable of flattening on his skull.

'Who came in the room during the night?' I asked.

'Hospital people. They's some ot'er kind working here?'

'What kind of hospital people, Expidee?'

'Nurses, doctors, all the reg'lar people they got working
here.' He took a fresh toothpick from his shirt pocket and inserted it
in the corner of his mouth. His eyes drifted back up to the television
set. The doctor went out into the hall. The nurse began untaping the IV
needle from Sitwell's arm. I reached up and punched off the television
set.

'Did you leave the door at all, Expidee?' I said.

'I got to go to the bat'room sometimes.'

'Why didn't you want to use the one in the room?'

'I didn't want to wake the guy up.'

'Did you go anyplace else?'

He took the toothpick out of his mouth and put it back in his
pocket. His hands were cupped on the arms of the chair.

'Being stuck out there on a wooden chair for twelve hours
isn't the best kind of assignment, partner,' I said.

'Come on, Dave…' His eyes cut sideways at the nurse.

'Ma'am, could you leave us alone a minute?' I said.

She walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.

'What about it, podna?' I said.

He was quiet a moment, then he said, 'About six o'clock I went
to the cafeteria and had me some eggs. I ax the nurse up at the counter
not to let nobody in the room.'

'How long were you gone?'

'Fifteen minutes, maybe. I just didn't t'ink it was gonna be
no big deal.'

'Who was the nurse, Expidee?'

'That one just went out… Dave, you gonna put this in
my jacket?'

I didn't answer.

'My wife ain't working,' he said. 'I can't get no ot'er job,
neither.'

'We've got a dead man on our hands, Expidee.'

'I'm sorry I messed up. What else I'm gonna say?'

There was nothing for it. And I wasn't sure of the cause of
death, anyway, or if the deputy's temporary negligence was even a
factor.

'If you weren't at the door when you should have been, it was
because you went down the hall to use the men's room,' I said.

'Tanks, Dave. I ain't gonna forget it.'

'Don't do something like this again, Expidee.'

'I ain't. I promise. Hey, Dave, you called up the church for
that guy?'

'Why do you ask?'

'A man like that try to hurt your family and you call the
church for him, that's all right. Yes, suh, that's all right.'

I asked the nurse to come back in. She was in her fifties and
had bluish gray hair and a figure like a pigeon's. I asked her if
anyone had entered Sitwell's room while Expidee was away from the door.

'I wouldn't know,' she said.

'Did you see anyone?'

'You gentlemen have such an interesting attitude about
accountability,' she said. 'Let me see, what exact moment did you have
in mind? Do you mean while Expidee was asleep in his chair or wandering
the halls?'

'I see. Thank you for your time,' I said.

She flipped the sheet over Chuck Sitwell's face as though she
were closing a fly trap, released the blinds, and dropped the room into
darkness.

I went to the office and began opening
my mail behind my desk.
Through the window I could see the fronds on the palm trees by the
sidewalk lifting and clattering in the breeze; across the street a
black man who sold barbecue lunches was building a fire in an open pit,
and the smoke from the green wood spun in the cones of sunlight shining
through the oak branches overhead. It wasn't quite yet fall, but the
grass was already turning a paler green, the sky a harder, deeper blue,
like porcelain, with only a few white clouds on the horizon.

But I couldn't concentrate on either my mail or the beautiful
day outside. Regardless whether the autopsy showed that Charles Sitwell
had died of complications from gunshot wounds or a hypodermic needle
thrust into his throat, Will Buchalter was out there somewhere, with no
conduit to him, outside the computer, running free, full-bore,
supercharged by his own sexual cruelty.

What was there to go on, I asked myself.

Virtually nothing.

No, music.

He knew something about historical jazz. He even knew how to
hold rare seventy-eights and to place them in the record rack with the
opening in their dustcovers turned toward the wall.

Could a sadist love music that had its origins in Island hymns
and the three-hundred-year spiritual struggle of a race to survive
legal and economic servitude?

I doubted it. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always
companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

Buchalter was one of those whose life was invested in the
imposition of control and power over others. Like the self-serving
academic who enjoys the possession of an esoteric knowledge for the
feeling of superiority it gives him over others, or the
pseudojournalist who is drawn to the profession because it allows him
access to a world of power and wealth that he secretly envies and
fears, the collector such as Buchalter reduces the beauty of
butterflies to pinned insects on a mounting board, a daily reminder
that creation is always subject to his murderous hand.

The phone on my desk rang.

'Detective Robicheaux?' a woman said.

'Yes?'

'This is Marie Guilbeaux. I hope I'm not bothering you.'

'I'm sorry, who?'

'The nun you met at the hospital. Outside Mr. Sitwell's room.'

'Oh yes, how are you, Sister?'

'I wanted to apologize.'

'What for?'

'I heard about Mr. Sitwell's death this morning, and I
remembered how judgmental I must have sounded the other day. That
wasn't my intention, but I wanted to apologize to you anyway.'

'There's no need to. It's good of you to call, though.'

I could hear a hum in the telephone, as though the call was
long-distance.

'You've been very nice,' she said.

'Not at all… Is there something else on your mind,
Sister?'

'No, not really. I think I take myself too seriously
sometimes.'

'Well, thanks for calling.'

'I hope to see you again sometime.'

'Me too. Good-bye, Sister.'

'Good-bye.'

The musical community in southern
Louisiana is a large and old
one. Where do you begin if you want to find a person who's interested
in or collects historical jazz?

There was certainly nothing picturesque about the geographic
origins of the form. If it was born in one spot, it was Storyville at
the turn of the century, a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New
Orleans, named for an alderman who wanted to contain all the city's
prostitution inside a single neighborhood.
Jazz
meant to fornicate; songs like 'Easy Rider' and 'House of the Rising
Sun' were literal dirges about the morphine addiction and suicidal
despair of the prostitutes who lived out their lives in the brothels of
Perdido Street.

When I walked down Bourbon that evening, not far from Basin,
one of the old borders of Storyville, the air was filled with a purple
haze, lit with neon, warmly redolent of the smell of beer and whiskey
in paper cups, the sky overhead intersected by a solitary pink cloud
of Lake Pontchartrain. The street, which was closed to automobile
traffic, was congested with people, their faces happy and flushed in
the din of rockabilly and Dixieland bands. Spielers in straw boaters
and candy-striped vests were working the trade in front of the strip
joints; black kids danced and clattered their clip-on steel taps on the
concrete for the tourists; an all-black street band, with tambourines
ringing and horns blaring, belted out 'Millersburg' on the corner at
Conti; and a half block farther up, in a less hedonistic mood, a group
of religious fanatics, with signs containing apocalyptical warnings,
tried to buttonhole anyone who would listen to their desperate message.

I talked to an elderly black clarinetist at Preservation Hall,
a sax man at the Famous Door who used to work for Marcia Ball, a
three-hundred-pound white woman with flaming hair and a sequined dress
that sparkled like ice water, who played blues piano in a
hole-in-the-wall on Dumaine. None of them knew of a Will Buchalter or a
jazz enthusiast or collector who fit his description.

I walked over on Ursulines to a dilapidated book and record
store run by two men named Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, who was also
known sometimes as Baron Belladonna. Jimmie was a florid, rotund man
with a red mustache who looked like a nineteenth-century bartender. But
the insides of both his forearms were laced with the flattened veins
and gray scar tissue of an old-time addict. Before he had gotten off
the needle, he had been known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone
call he could connect you with any kind of illegal activity in New
Orleans.

His business partner, the Count, was another matter. He had
blitzed his brain years ago with purple acid, wore a black vampire's
cape and slouch hat, and maintained that the soul of Olivia Newton-John
lived under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. His angular body could
have been fashioned from wire; his long, narrow head and pinched face
looked like they had been slammed in a door. Periodically he shaved off
his eyebrows so his brain could absorb more oxygen.

'How do you like being out of the life, Jimmie?' I asked.

As always, my conversation with Jim would prove to be a rare
linguistic experience.

'The book business ain't bad stuff to be in these days,' he
said. He wore suspenders and a purple-striped long-sleeve shirt with
sweat rings under the arms. 'There's a lot of special kinds of readers
out there, if you understand what I'm saying, Streak. New Orleans is
being overrun by crazoids and people who was probably cloned from dog
turds, and the government won't do anything about it. But it's a crazy
world out there, and am I my brother's keeper, that's what I'm asking,
a buck's a buck, and who am I to judge? So I've got a bin here for your
vampire literature, I got your books on ectoplasm, your books on
ufology and teleportation, I got your studies on tarot cards and
Eckankar, you want to read about your Venusian cannibals living among
us, I got your book on that, too.'

'I'm looking for a guy named Will Buchalter, Jimmie. He might
be a collector of old jazz records.'

His mustache tilted and the corners of his eyes wrinkled
quizzically.

'What's this guy look like?' he asked.

I told him while he rolled a matchstick in his mouth. The
Count was cleaning bookshelves with a feather duster, his eyes as
intense as obsidian chips in his white face.

'He's got blackheads fanning back from his eyes like cat's
whiskers?' Jimmie said.

'Something like that,' I said.

'Maybe I can give him a job here. Hey, is this guy mixed up
with this Nazi submarine stuff?'

'How do you know about the sub, Jimmie?'

'The whole fucking town knows about it. I tell you, though,
Streak, I wouldn't mess with nobody that was connected with these tin
shirts or whatever they used to call these World War II commonists.'

'Wait a minute, Jim. Not everybody knows about the Silver
Shirts.'

'I'm Irish, right, so I don't talk about my own people,
there's enough others to do that, like you ever hear this one, you put
four Irish Catholics together and you always got a fifth, but I got to
say you cross a mick with a squarehead, you come up with a pretty
unnatural combo, if you're getting my drift, mainly that wearing a
star-spangled jockstrap outside your slacks ain't proof you're
one-hunnerd-percent American.'

'You've truly lost me, Jimmie.'

'I lived right down the street from his family.'

'Who?'

'Tommy Bobalouba. Sometimes you're hard to get things across
to, Streak. I mean, like, we got jet planes going by overhead or
something?'

'Tommy Lonighan's family was mixed up with Nazis?'

'His mother was from Germany. She was in the,
what-do-you-call-'em, the metal shirts. That's why Tommy was always
fighting with people. Nobody in the Channel wanted anything to do with
his family… Hey, Count, we got a customer named Will
Buchalter?'

Count Carbonna began humming to himself in a loud, flat, nasal
drone.

'Hey, Count, I'm talking here,' Jimmie said. 'Hey, you got
stock in the Excedrin company… Count, knock off the noise!'

But it was no use. The Count was on a roll, suddenly dusting
the records with a manic energy, filling the store with his incessant,
grinding drone.

Jimmie looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

'Listen, Jim, this guy Buchalter is bad news,' I said. 'If he
should come in your store, don't let on that you know me, don't try to
detain him or drop the dime on him while he's here. Just get ahold of
me or Clete Purcel after he leaves.'

'What's this guy done?'

I told him.

'I'm not showing offense here,' he said, 'but I'm a little
shocked, you understand what I'm saying, you think a geek like that
would be coming into my store. We're talking about the kind of guy
hangs in skin shops, beats up on hookers, gets a bone-on hurting
people, this ain't Jimmie Ryan just blowing you a lot of gas, Streak,
this kind of guy don't like music, he likes to hear somebody scream.'

He leaned on his arms and bit down on his matchstick so that
it arched upward into his mustache.