DR07 - Dixie City Jam (22 page)

'By the way, congratulations on getting Lonighan's attention.
Somebody should have mopped up the floor with that guy a long time
ago… Why the silence?'

'I shouldn't have hit him.'

'Why not?'

'He's a tormented man. The guy's got a furnace in his head.'

'I'm weeping on my desk, Dave. Oh, that's great, mon. Tommy
Lonighan, the tormented man…' He was laughing loudly now.
'Did you see the body of the guy Tommy drowned with the fire hose? It
looked like the Michelin Man. Tommy shoved the nozzle down the guy's
mouth. Tommy, the tormented man, oh Dave, that's beautiful…'

I went home early that evening, with
plans to take Bootsie and
Alafair to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for crawfish. When the deputy who
was on guard by the drive saw my truck approaching, he started his
engine and headed back toward New Iberia. At the head of the drive,
close by the house, was a two-door white Toyota that I didn't recognize.

I walked down to the end of the dock, where Alafair was
skipping stones across the water into a cypress stump.

'Want to go eat some crawfish, Alf?' I said.

'I don't care,' she said. Her face was sullen. She whipped
another stone across the bayou.

'What's wrong, little guy?'

'I told you I don't like 'little guy' anymore, Dave.'

'All right. Now, what's wrong, Alf?'

'Nothing. Bootsie says she's sick. That's all.'

'"Says" she's sick?'

'She's been in her room all afternoon. With the door shut. She
says she's sick. I told you.' She propped one hand against a post and
brushed dried fish scales off the planks into the water with her tennis
shoe.

'Tell me the rest of it, Alf.'

Her eyes followed a cottonmouth moccasin that was swimming
across the bayou into a flooded cane brake.

'She put an empty whiskey bottle in the garbage can out back,'
she said. 'She wrapped it up in a paper bag so nobody would see it.
Then the sister went and got her some beer.'

'What?'

'There's a sister up there. She went down to the four corners
and bought Bootsie a six-pack of beer. Why didn't Bootsie just get it
out of the bait shop if she wanted some beer?'

'Let's go find out.'

'I don't want to.'

'You want to go to Mulate's later?'

'No. I don't like the way Bootsie is. I don't like that
sister, either. What's she doing here, Dave?'

I rubbed the top of her head and walked up the slope through
the deep shade of the trees and the drone of the cicadas. There was no
sound or movement in the front of the house, and the door to Bootsie's
and my bedroom was closed. I went on through the hallway into the
kitchen. Sister Marie Guilbeaux was rinsing glasses and two plates in
the sink.

'Oh!' she said, her shoulders twitching suddenly when she
heard me behind her. She turned, and her face colored. 'Oh, my heavens,
you gave me a start.'

I continued to stare at her.

'Oh, this is embarrassing,' she said. 'I hope you understand
what's, why I—'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'Of course… you couldn't. I called earlier, but you
weren't here.'

'I
was
at my office.'

'I tried there. You had already left.'

'No, I was there until a half hour ago.' I could see a half
dozen empty beer cans in the yellow trash basket. 'No one called.'

'
I
did. A man, a dispatcher, took a
message.'

'I see. Where's Bootsie, Sister?'

'Asleep. She's not feeling well.' Her face was filled with
perplexity. 'I know this looks peculiar.'

'A little.'

'I teach part-time at an elementary school in Lafayette. We're
having a program on safety. You were so courteous at the hospital and
over the phone I thought you might be willing to visit our class.'

'I'm a little tied up right now.'

'Yes, Bootsie told me.'

'Can you tell me why you bought beer for my wife, Sister?'

Her face was pink. 'Mr. Robicheaux, I wandered into somebody's
personal situation and I've obviously mishandled it.'

'Just tell me what's happened here, please.'

'Your wife was going to drive to the store for some beer. I
didn't think she should be driving. I told her I'd go for her.'

'Why didn't you just get it from the bait shop? We own it.'

'She didn't want me to.'

'I see. Is there anything else I can help you with?'

'No… I apologize. I don't know what else to say.
I'll go now. Please excuse my coming here.'

Then she was out the back door, walking fast toward her car,
her green eyes shiny with embarrassment. I caught up with her just as
she was opening her car door.

'Sister, there's something going on here you don't
understand,' I said. 'My wife has a problem because of some events that
occurred at our house. But when a person is drunk or has had too much
to drink and wants you to give him more, you don't do it.'

'Then I guess I've learned a lesson today.'

'Come see us again.'

'That's kind of you.' My hand was resting on the windowsill.
She placed hers lightly on top of mine and looked directly into my
eyes. A shaft of sunlight fell through the tree on her reddish gold
hair. I removed my hand from under hers and walked back into the house.

I opened the bedroom door and looked in on Bootsie. The blinds
were drawn, and she was sleeping with her clothes on and her head under
the pillow. While I fixed supper I tried to concentrate on Alafair's
conversation from the table about something that Tripod had done, but
my thoughts were like birds clattering about in a cage, and I found
myself absently touching the top of my right hand.

You're imagining it
, I thought.
It
was an innocent gesture. Some of them are just socially inept
.

But my energies were too dissipated to worry about Sister
Marie Guilbeaux. I knew that beyond our closed bedroom door, my wife
had taken up residence in that special piece of geography where the
snakes hang in fat loops from the trees and a tiger with electrified
stripes lights your way to his lair.

It rained that night, and through the
screen window I could
smell the trees and an odor from the marsh like fish spawning. As I
fell asleep, I wondered again about the Nazi submarine and Buchalter's
obsession with it. When I was a child in Catholic school, we were
taught that evil eventually consumes itself, like fire that must
destroy its own source. Was the submarine an underwater mausoleum or
historical shrine from which Buchalter and his kind believed they could
renew and empower their demented and misanthropic vision? Did they hate
the present-day world so much that they would seek the company of
drowned men who had reveled in setting afire the seas, in
machine-gunning clusters of oil-streaked merchant sailors who had
bobbed like helpless corks in the swell?

It rained all night. The air in the bedroom was cool and damp,
and in my sleep I thought I could smell salt in the wind. I dreamed of
black-clad submariners, their white skin layered with deodorant, their
unkempt beards like charcoal smeared on their faces. They guided a
long, gleaming torpedo into a waiting tube, touching its hard sides
like a farewell caress. The torpedo burst from beneath the bow, its
propeller spinning, its steel skin rippling with moonlight just below
the surface. The men in black dungarees stood motionless in the
battery-lighted interior of their ship, their eyes lifted expectantly,
their breasts aching with an unspoken and collective wish that made
them wet their lips and nudge their groins against the cool,
cylindrical side of another torpedo.

The explosion against the hull of the freighter on the
horizon, the screech of girders and rent metal, the avalanche of salt
water into the hold, the secondary explosion of boilers that blew the
bridge into sticks and heated the hatches into searing iron rectangles
that would scorch a human hand into a stump, even the final geysering
descent beneath the waves and the grinding of the keel against the
sand—it all filtered through the darkness outside the sub
with the
softness of an old Vienna waltz swelling and dissipating in the mist.

It must have been two or three in the morning when I felt the
coldness in the room. In my sleep I reached for the bedspread at the
foot of the bed and pulled it up over Bootsie and me. I thought wind
was blowing through the house, when there should have been none, then I
realized that my pillow was damp from the mist that was blowing through
the window fan, which was turned off.

I sat up in bed. The doors to both the closet and the bathroom
were open, and the night-light in the bathroom had either burned out or
been turned off. From the back porch I could hear the screen door
puffing open and falling back upon the jamb in the wind. I reached
under the bed and picked up the .45.

I didn't have far to go before I knew he had been there. As I
walked past the closet I felt water under my bare feet. I turned on
every light in the house. The screen was slit on the back porch door,
the deadbolt prized out of the jamb on the door to the kitchen.

'What is it, Dave?' Bootsie said, blinking her eyes against
the light.

I stared at the floor area in front of the closet. There
were two stenciled shoe prints on the boards, surrounded by a ring of
water that had dripped off his coat. Then she saw what I was looking at.

'Oh God, I can't take this, Dave,' she said.

'Take it easy. He's gone now.'

'He was here. Watching us sleep.' She sat up and pressed her
hands to her stomach. 'I think I'm going to be sick.'

'Use the other bathroom.'

'What?'

'Don't go in our bathroom.'

'Why? Wh—'

'He might have left evidence in there, Boots, that's all.'

When she was gone, I clicked off the light in our bathroom,
closed the door, and turned the lock, but not before having to look
again at the words that he had lipsticked brightly across the wall:
DAVE,
YOU MUST BECOME ONE WITH THE SWORD. I'LL LOVE YOU IN A WAY THAT NO
WOMAN CAN, W.B
.

The next morning I tried to
concentrate on the daily routine
at the office. But it was no use. I stared out the window at the rain.

What drove the engines of a man like Will Buchalter?

The conclusion I came to wasn't a pleasant one. He was a
sadist, pure and simple, and, like all sadists, he developed erotic
fixations about the people and animals he planned to hurt in a
methodical way. The pain he imposed upon his victim was intended to
humiliate and degrade and was always administered personally, by his
hand, only a breath away from the victim's face. As with all of his
kind he had found an ideological purpose that justified his perversity,
but in reality the cries with which he could fill a room made his back
teeth grind softly together while his loins tingled like a swarm of
bees.

The phone on my desk rang. It was Lucinda Bergeron.

'Your friend over here is becoming a pain in the ass to a lot
of people,' she said.

'Who?'

'Cletus Purcel.'

'What's wrong with Clete?'

'What's right with him?'

'Give it a break, Lucinda.'

'He tried to turn somebody into a human bell clapper. Do you
know a character by the name of Dogshit Dolowitz?'

'No Duh Dolowitz, the merry prankster?'

'Yeah, I guess he's called that, too. Your friend crammed a
garbage can over his head, then pounded the can all over an alley with
a baseball bat.'

'What for?'

'Ask him… Wait a minute.' She set the phone down and
closed a door. 'Listen, Detective, Nate Baxter would like to put your
buddy's ham hocks in a skillet. I'd have a serious talk with him.'

'Is Zoot back home yet?'

'I don't
believe
you. I think you must
come from outer space.'

'You're telling me he should be living over at Tommy
Lonighan's?'

'I thought I was doing a favor for your friend.'

'I appreciate it.'

I heard her make a sound like she was digesting a thumbtack.

'Take it easy,' I said.

'God, I hate talking to you!' Then she caught her breath and
started again. 'Listen, your buddy hasn't been arraigned yet, but my
guess is his bond will be around two thousand dollars. You want me to
give him a message?'

'No Duh pressed charges?'

'No, Nate Baxter did. Disturbing the peace and resisting
arrest. Good-bye, Detective Robicheaux. In all honesty I don't think
I'm up to many more conversations with you.'

She hung up the phone.

I called her back.

'Look, I can't take off work just to bail a friend out of the
slam. Why'd Clete knock Dolowitz around?'

'It has something to do with the Calucci brothers.'

'What about them?'

'I don't know,' she said, the exasperation rising in her
voice. 'Nate Baxter's handling it. What's that tell you, Robicheaux,
besides the fact he's got a major hard-on for
Purcel?'

'I'm not sure.'

'He's on a pad.'

'For the Calucci brothers?'

'Who else?'

'You can prove that?'

'Who to? Who cares? The city's broke.
That's
what's on people's minds.'

'I'll try to get over there. It's a bad day, though.'

'What's wrong?'

I told her about Buchalter's visit of the night before.

'Why didn't you tell me that?' she said.

'You've got your own problems.'

She paused a moment. 'You saw Zoot over at Tommy Lonighan's?'
she said.

'Yeah, for just a few minutes.'

'Did he say—' She let out her breath in the receiver
and didn't finish.

'I think you mean a lot to him, Lucinda. I'd bring him back
home. I'm sorry if I sound intrusive sometimes.'

I called Bootsie at the house, then signed out of the office.
It was still raining when I got to NOPD headquarters in the Garden
District. Lucinda Bergeron was out of the office, but Benjamin Motley
told me that the Reverend Oswald Flat had gotten Clete released in his
custody without having to post bail and they were waiting for me at a
café up on St. Charles by the Pontchartrain Hotel.