DR07 - Dixie City Jam (23 page)

It was a working man's place that served rib-eye steaks,
deep-fried catfish, and biscuits with sausage gravy that you could
stoke boilers with. It was also the café where the Calucci
brothers ate
lunch every day.

I parked my truck around the corner, then ran back in the rain
under the dripping overhang of the oak trees on St. Charles. The inside
of the restaurant was warm and crowded and loud. Clete and the preacher
were at a checker-cloth-covered table in front. In the center of the
table was a solitary, green-stemmed purple rose set in a dime-store
glass vase. Between the preacher's feet I could see a worn-edged, black
guitar case with the words
The Great Speckled Bird
hand-lettered on the side.

I let my eyes rove over the people at the tables; then I saw
Max and Bobo Calucci and a half dozen of their entourage eating at a
long table against the back wall, three feet from an old jukebox, whose
maroon and orange plastic casing rippled with light.

I sat down with Clete and the preacher.

'You ought to get you an umbrella, son. You look like a
hedgehog somebody drowned in a rain barrel,' Oswald Flat said.

'Thank you, Reverend,' I said.

'Sorry to get you down here for no reason, Streak,' Clete
said. 'I tried to catch you after Brother Oswald here got me out of the
bag, but you were already down the road.' He grinned while he chewed on
a bread stick.

'What are you doing beating up on a guy like No Duh Dolowitz?'
I said.

'Yeah, I always dug ole No Duh myself,' Clete said, then
turned to the preacher. 'You see, this guy No Duh—sometimes
they call
him Dogshit because that's what he put in some sandwiches once at a
Teamsters convention in Miami—he used to be a second-story
creep till
a night watchman bonged a big dent in his forehead with a ball peen
hammer. But instead of turning into a mush brain, he developed a genius
for playing pranks. The mob knows talent when it sees it.

'If they want to take over an apartment building or a bunch of
duplexes at fire-sale prices, they send in Dolowitz. He pours cement
mix down all the drains, puts Limburger cheese in the air vents, tapes
bait fish under the furniture, maybe has a landscape service pour a
dump truck load of cow manure in the swimming pool. This contractor
built some real class condos in Jefferson Parish, then he finds out too
late that he doesn't have clear title to the land and that part of it
is owned by the Giacano family. So while he's trying to hold off the
Giacanos in court, they send in No Duh, who makes keys to all the
doors, stops up the toilets, stocks the cabinets with Thunderbird and
Boone's Farm, then buses in about twenty winos from skid row and tells
them to have a good time. I heard the cleaning crews had to scrape the
carpets up with shovels.'

He laughed, pushed his porkpie hat up on his head, and put a
cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His hand looked huge on his Zippo
lighter. I noticed that his eyes never looked in the Caluccis'
direction.

'Why the beef with a guy like that, Clete?' I said.

The humor drained out of his face, and his eyes drifted toward
the rear of the restaurant.

'I gave Martina the two grand to pay off the Caluccis. Guess
what? They told her that's just the back payment on the vig. She still
owes another two large. Last night we came back from the show and
there's Dolowitz hiding in the shrubs by the side of Martina's garage.
So I ask him what the hell he thinks he's doing there.

'He tells me he lives two blocks away, up by Audubon Park, and
he's been walking his dog. I say, "That's funny, I don't see any dog."
He says, "No duh, Purcel. Because my dog run away." "Oh, I see. That's
why you're in the shrubs," I say. "No duh, my fast-thinking man," he
says.

'I say, "I got another problem here, No Duh. People like you
don't live by Audubon Park. Not unless the neighborhood has recently
been rezoned for meltdowns and toxic waste. If I remember right, you
live in a shithole by the Industrial Canal. So why are you hiding here
by Martina's garage, and if you give me one more wiseass answer, I'm
going to stuff your dented head up the tailpipe of my car."

'So he puts his fingers in the corners of his mouth and
stretches out his lips like a jack-o'-lantern. Can you believe this
guy? I say, "No Duh, your mother must have defecated you into the
world," and I shake him down against the wall, and what do we find, our
man's got a bottle of muriatic acid in his pants pocket.'

'I don't get it. Dolowitz isn't an enforcer,' I said.

'I didn't get it, either. Also, dispensation time for dimwits
was starting to run out. I go, "What do you think you're doing with
this, fuckhead?" Suddenly he's like a guy who just sobered up. He goes,
"It's just a prank, Purcel. I don't hurt people." That's when I screwed
the trash can down on his head and got a ball bat out of my car and
bounced him around the alley. Finally he's yelling inside the can, "I
was going to put it in her gas tank! I wasn't going to have nothing to
do with the rest of it!"

'You want to know what "the rest of it" was?' Clete mashed out
his cigarette in the ashtray. His eyes cut sideways toward the rear of
the café, 'Martina goes, on shift cocktail-waitressing at a
club in
Gretna at ten P.M. Dolowitz was going to mess up her car so it'd kill
somewhere between her house and work. A guy was going to be following
her. You want to hear how No Duh put it? "Max and Bobo Calucci got some
kind of geek working for them, not no ordinary button guy, either,
Purcel, a guy who can fuck up people real bad, in ways nobody ever
thought about."'

Clete propped his elbow on the table and inserted a thumbnail
in his teeth.

'You think I was too hard on ole Dogshit?' he said.

'Sir, could you watch your language?' the manager, who had
come out from behind the cash register, said quietly.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Clete said, flipping his hand at the air.

'You think it could be Buchalter?' I said.

'Maybe. But I don't know how he'd tie in with the greaseballs
back there in the booth.'

'Maybe he's connected with Tommy Lonighan's interest in the
Nazi sub, and now Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis. Anyway, he was
in my house last night,' I said.

'He was
what?'

'Standing in our closet, watching us while we slept.'

'Jesus Christ, Dave.'

'He cut the back screen, prized out the deadbolt, walked
around in the house, and I never heard him.'

Clete sat back in his chair.

'This guy's a new combo, mon,' he said. 'I thought if he ever
came back, it'd be to cool you out.'

'You think the real problem is y'all don't have no idea of
what you're dealing with?' Oswald Flat said.

We both looked at him. His clip-on bow tie was askew on his
denim shirt. His pale eyes looked as big as an owl's behind his glasses.

'You cain't find that fellow 'cause maybe he ain't human,' he
said. 'Maybe y'all been dealing with a demon. You ever consider that?'

'I can't say that I have,' I said.

'It's the end of the millennium,' he said.

'Yes?' I said.

'Son, I don't want to be unkind to you. But when the brains
was passed out, did you grab a handful of pig flop by mistake?'

He paused to let his statement sink in.

'The prophesy is in Nostradamus. The Beast and his followers
are going to be loosed on the earth,' he said. 'Call me a fool. But
you're a policeman, and the best you got ain't worth horse pucky on a
rock, is hit?'

I looked back at him silently. His short, dun-colored hair was
combed neatly and parted almost in the center of his scalp. His
washed-out eyes never blinked and seemed wide with a knowledge that was
lost on others.

The waiter set plates of deep-fried pork chops, greens, and
dirty rice in front of him and Clete.

'You're not going to eat?' Oswald Flat said.

'No, thanks.'

'I offended you?'

'Not at all,' I said.

Clete lowered his fork onto his plate and looked toward the
rear of the restaurant again.

'It looks like the Vitalis twins are about to finish their
lunch. I don't know if they should slide out of here that easily,' he
said.

'Let it go,' I said.

'Trust me.'

'I mean it, Clete. Baxter's got you in his bombsights. Don't
play his game.'

'You worry too much, big mon. It's time to check out the
jukebox and the ole hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mr. Jimmy
Reed. I'll be right back.'

Clete strolled to the rear of the restaurant, past the
Caluccis' table, his eyes never registering their presence. He dropped
a quarter into the jukebox and punched off 'Big Boss Man,' then began
snapping his fingers and slapping his right palm on top of his left
fist while he scanned the other titles. The back of his neck looked as
thick as a fire hydrant.

The preacher's gaze moved back and forth from Clete to the
Caluccis. His false teeth were stiff and white in his mouth.

'He'll be all right, Reverend. Clete just likes to let people
know he's in the neighborhood,' I said.

But Oswald Flat didn't answer. There were pools of color in
his cheeks, nests of wrinkles at the edges of his eyes.

'You play guitar?' I said.

'I played with Reno and Smiley, I played with Jimmy Martin and
the Sunny Mountain Boys. Hit don't get no better than that,' he said.
But his eyes were riveted on the Caluccis when he spoke.

Clete sat back down, his green eyes dancing with light, while
Jimmy Reed sang in the background.

The Caluccis were watching him now. Clete made a frame of his
hands, with his thumbs joined together, tilting the frame back and
forth, sighting through it at Max and Bobo, the way a movie director
might if he were envisioning a dramatic scene. Then he began pointing
his finger at them, grinning, tapping it in time to 'Big Boss Man's'
driving rhythm.

'Knock it off, Clete,' I said.

'They need to know they've been ratted out, mon. You never let
a shit bag forget he's a shit bag. You got to keep them buttoned down
under the sewer grates, big mon.'

'You're both good fellows, but one is as wrongheaded as the
other,' Oswald Flat said.

'Excuse me?' Clete said.

'You don't outwit evil. You don't outthink hit, you don't joke
with hit, no more than you tease or control fire by sticking your hand
in hit.'

'You all right, Reverend?' I said.

'No, I ain't.'

His sun-browned, liver-spotted hands were flat on the
table-cloth. His nails looked like hooked tortoiseshell.

'What's the trouble, partner?' I said.

'They took my boy.'

'Who?' Clete said.

'He come back from Vietnam with needle scars on his arm.
Wasn't no he'p for hit, either. Federal hospitals, jails, drug
programs, he could always get all the dope he needed from them kind
yonder. Till he killed hisself with hit.'

The music on the jukebox ended. Clete looked at me and raised
his eyebrows. Oswald Flat slipped the purple rose out of the dimestore
vase in the center of the table and sliced off the green stem with his
thumbnail.

'Hey, hold on, Brother. Where you going?' Clete said.

Oswald Flat walked toward the rear of the restaurant. He
moved like a crab, his shoulders slanted to one side, the rose hanging
from his right hand. The Caluccis were finishing their coffee and
dessert and at first did not pay attention to the man with the clip-on
bow tie standing above them.

Then Max stopped talking to a woman with lacquered blond hair
next to him and flicked his eyes up at Oswald Flat.

'What?' he said. When Flat made no reply, Max said it again.
'What?'

Then Bobo was looking at the preacher, too.

'Hey, he's talking to you. You got a problem?' he said.

The people at nearby tables had stopped talking now.

'Hey, what's with you? You can't find the men's room or
something?' Max said.

The blond woman next to him started to laugh, then looked at
Oswald Flat's face and dropped her eyes.

'Y'all think you're different from them colored dope dealers?
Y'all think hit cain't happen to you?' the preacher said.

'What? What can happen?' Max said.

'Your skin's white but your heart's black, just like them
that's had hit cut out of their chests.'

The restaurant was almost completely silent now. In the
kitchen someone stopped scraping a dish into a garbage can.

'Listen, you four-eyed fuck, if Purcel and that cop sent you
over here—' Max began.

Oswald flipped the purple rose into Max Calucci's face.

'You're a lost, stupid man,' he said. 'If I was you, I'd drink
all the ice water I could while I had opportunity. Hell's hot and it's
got damn little shade.'

The Reverend Oswald Flat picked up his guitar case, fitted his
cork sun helmet on his head, and walked out the front door into a
vortex of rain.

As I crossed the wide, brown sweep of
the Mississippi at Baton
Rouge and headed across the Atchafalaya Basin toward home, I thought
about Oswald Flat's speculation on the elusiveness of Will Buchalter.

It seemed the stuff of an Appalachian tent revival where the
reborn dipped their arms into boxes filled with poisonous snakes.

But the preacher's conclusion that we were dealing with a
demonic incarnation was neither eccentric nor very original and, as
with some other cases I've worked, was as good an explanation about
aberrant human behavior as any.

Ten years ago, when Clete and I worked Homicide at NOPD, we
investigated a case that even today no one can satisfactorily explain.

A thirty-five-year-old small contractor was hired to build a
sun-porch on a home in an old residential neighborhood off Canal. He
was well thought of, nice-looking, married only once, attended church
weekly with his wife and son, and had never been in trouble of any
kind. At least that we knew of.