DR07 - Dixie City Jam (26 page)

'What's the game, Tommy?'

'No game. I got to do certain things to survive. You hold that
against me? But that doesn't mean I wasn't on the square about Hippo.
He was once my friend. I ain't trying to job you on that one.'

I watched him walk up the dock toward his car, his head turned
sideways into the breeze, the red scab on his nose like an angry flag,
his blue eyes hard as a carrion bird's, as though hidden adversaries
waited for him on the wind.

I decided that it would take a cryptographer to understand the
nuances of Tommy Lonighan.

I walked around the side of the house
to the backyard and
turned on the soak hose in my vegetable garden. The bamboo and
periwinkles along the coulee ruffled in the breeze. Beyond my duck
pond, the sugarcane in my neighbor's field flickered with a cool purple
and gold light.

Bootsie had gone shopping in New Iberia, and Alafair was
fixing sandwiches at the drain board when I walked into the kitchen.
From the front of the house I heard the flat, tinny tones of a 1920s
jazz orchestra, then the unmistakable bell-like sound of Bunk Johnson's
coronet rising out of the mire of C-melody saxophones.

'What's going on, Alf?' I said.

She turned from the counter and looked at me quizzically. I
could see the outlines of her training bra under her yellow T-shirt.

'Who put one of my old seventy-eights on the machine?' I said.

'I thought you did,' she said.

The record ended, then the mechanical arm swung back
automatically and started again. I walked quickly into the living room.
The front door was open, and the curtains were swelling with wind. I
opened the screen door and went out on the gallery. The yard and drive
were empty and blown with dead leaves. Out on the dirt road black kids
on bicycles, with fishing gear propped across their handlebars, were
pedaling past the dock. I went back inside, lifted the arm off the
record, and turned off the machine. The paper jacket for the record lay
on the couch. The record itself was free from any finger smudges; it
had been placed on the spindle with professional care.

'Alf, it's all right if you wanted to play the record,' I said
in the kitchen. 'But it's important you tell me whether or not you did
it.'

'I already told you, Dave.'

'You're sure?'

'You think I'm lying?'

'No, I didn't mean that. How long has it been playing?'

'I don't know. I was outside.'

'Did Bootsie put it on before she left?'

'Bootsie doesn't play your old records, Dave. Nobody does.'

'Bootsie hasn't been herself, Alf.'

She turned back to the counter and began spreading mustard on
her sandwich bread, her face empty, the way it always became when she
knew something was wrong in the house. Her pink tennis shoes were
untied, and her elastic-waisted jeans were stained with grass at the
knees from weeding in the garden.

I saw her hand with the butter knife slow, then stop, as a
thought worked its way into her face.

'Dave, I heard the front screen slam about fifteen minutes
ago. Was that you?'

'I was at the dock, Alf. Maybe it was Bootsie.'

'Bootsie left an hour ago.'

'Maybe she came back for something.'

'She would have said something. Was it that bad man, Dave?'

I picked her up and sat her on top of the drain board, like
she was still a small child, and began tying her tennis shoes.

'Was it that bad man?' she said again.

'I don't know, Alf. I truly don't.' My fingers were like a
tangle of sticks when I tried to tie the bow on her shoe.

That evening, at dusk, the clouds in
the western sky were
marbled with orange light, and fireflies spun their wispy red circles
in the darkening trees. Bootsie had taken Alafair to the video-rental
store in town, and the house was empty and creaking with the cooling of
the day. I called Clete at his apartment in the French Quarter.

'Buchalter was here,' I repeated. 'No one else would have put
that record on. The guy went in and out of my house in broad daylight
and nobody saw him.'

'I don't like what I'm hearing you say, Streak.'

'I don't either.'

'I don't mean that. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide don't
rattle.'

'The guy seems to float on the air, like smoke or something.
What am I supposed to say?'

'That's what he wants you to think.'

'Then tell me how he got in and out of my house today?'

'That's part of how he operates. He wants you to feel like
you've been molested, like he can reach out and touch you anytime he
wants. It's like you don't own your life anymore.'

I could hear my own breath echoing off the receiver.

'My ex's first husband tried to do a mind fuck on her the same
way,' he said. 'He hired a PI to take zoom-lens pictures of her on the
toilet and mail them to her boss, then he got in her bedroom while she
was asleep and slashed up all her underwear with a razor…
Hey, lighten up, Dave. Buchalter is flesh and blood. He just hasn't
moved across the right pair of iron sights yet.'

'Clete, I've got every cop in Iberia Parish looking for this
guy. How—'

'You
think
he was there today. You
didn't see him. Listen, big mon, we're going to turn it around on this
guy. They all go down, it's just a matter of time… Are you
listening?'

'Yes.'

'Your problem is you think too much.'

'Okay, Clete, I've got your drift.'

'I thought you were calling me about Nate Baxter.'

'Why would I call you about
him
,'

'Nate almost got deep-fried in his own grease early this
morning. Evidently he gets it on in Algiers sometimes with this biker
broad who used to be his snitch in the First District. But he wakes up
this morning, the broad is gone, and the dump she lives in is burning
down. Except she's got French doors that are locked across both handles
with Nate's handcuffs. He wrapped his head in a wet sheet and curled up
in the bathtub or he wouldn't have made it.'

'Where's he now?'

'At Southern Baptist, up on Napoleon. Why?'

'Is he pressing any charges?'

'Not according to the cop who told me about it. I guess
getting set on fire just goes with the territory when Nate tries to get
laid.'

'Who's the woman?'

'Pearly Blue Ridel, you remember her, she used to work in a
couple of the Giacanos' massage parlors, then she got off the spike and
hooked up with some born-again bikers or something. Too bad Baxter's
still got her by the umbilical cord.'

'Pearly Blue's no killer, Clete. She starts every day with a
nervous breakdown.'

'Tell that to Nate.'

'I think it's a hit. A heroin mule in Baton Rouge sheriff's
custody told me and Lucinda Bergeron that the Calucci brothers were
going to take somebody out, somebody they weren't supposed to touch.
Then this morning Tommy Lonighan showed up at my dock and made a point
of establishing his whereabouts from six to noon or so.'

'Let them whack each other out. Who cares? If Baxter had
caught the bus, half of NOPD would be plastered right now.'

'Would you like Lonighan setting you up for his alibi?'

'Keep it simple, Streak. Buchalter's the target. These other
guys are predictable. Your man is not.'

Your
man? I thought, after he had hung
up. For some reason the possessive pronoun brought back the same sense
of visceral revulsion and personal shame and violation that I had felt
when Mack, on that raw, late-fall afternoon in the barn, had extended
the backs of his fingers to my face and made me an accomplice in the
sexual degradation of my mother.

Why?

Because as, the object of someone else's perverse sexual
obsession, you feel not only that you are alone, and I mean absolutely
alone, but that there is something defective in you that either
attracts or warrants the bent attentions of your persecutor.

Ask anybody who has ever been there. Even a cop.

I knew Pearly Blue Ridel on another
level besides the one that
Clete had mentioned over the telephone, but the principles of
Alcoholics Anonymous prevented me from acknowledging to an outsider
that she was a member of our fellowship.

Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to an early Mass at St. Peter's
in New Iberia the next morning, then I dropped them off at my cousin
Tutta's in town and headed back for New Orleans.

Pearly Blue's AA group was not a conventional one. It was made
up of low-bottom drunks and outlaw bikers across the river in Algiers,
and it was called the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group.
Because most of the members rode chopped-down Harleys, often had shaved
heads, were covered with outrageous tattoos, and were generally
ferocious in their appearance, they couldn't rent a meeting hall
anywhere except in a warehouse that adjoined a biker bar where many of
them used to get drunk. I parked in the alley behind the warehouse and
used the rest room in the back of the bar before I went into the noon
meeting.

On the condom machine someone had written in felt pen,
Gee,
this gum tastes funny
. Written in the same hand on the
dispenser for toilet-seat covers were the words
Puerto Rican
Place Mats
.

The AA meeting area in the warehouse was gray with cigarette
smoke, dense with the smell of sweaty leather, engine grease rubbed
into denim, expectorated snuff, and unwashed hair. I stood against the
wall by the doorway until Pearly Blue would look at me. She wore Levi's
that were too large for her narrow hips, no bra, and a tie-dyed shirt
that showed the small bumps she had for breasts. Her hair was
colorless, stuck together on the ends, and the circles under her eyes
seemed to indicate as much about the hopelessness of her life as about
her emotional and physical fatigue. You did not have to be around
Pearly Blue long to realize that she was one of those haunted souls who
waited with certainty at each dawn for an invisible hand to wrap a
cobweb of fear and anxiety around her heart.

My stare was unrelenting, and finally she got up from the
table and walked with me out into the alley. She leaned against my
truck fender, put a cigarette in her mouth, and lit it with both hands,
although there was no wind between the buildings. She huffed the smoke
out at an upward angle, her chin pointed away from me.

As with most of her kind, Pearly Blue's toughness was a sad
illusion, and her breaking point was always right beneath the skin.

'You want to tell me what happened with Nate Baxter?' I said.

She looked down at the end of the alley, where a clump of
untrimmed banana trees grew by a rack of garbage cans and traffic was
passing on the street. She took another hit on her cigarette.

'Pearly Blue, as far as I'm concerned, we're still inside the
meeting. Which means anything you tell me doesn't go any farther.'

'I went down to the store to buy some eggs to make his
breakfast,' she said. She had a peckerwood accent and a peculiar way of
moving her lips silently before she spoke. 'He always wants an omelette
when he gets up in the morning. When I came back, fire was popping the
glass out of all the windows.'

'Who handcuffed the doors together?'

'I don't know. I didn't.' She looked up at the telephone
wires, an attempted pout on her mouth, like a put-upon adolescent girl.

'Why are you still hanging around with a guy like Baxter,
Pearly Blue?'

'I wrote a couple of bad checks. He said he'll tell my P.O.'

'I see.'

'I wasn't hanging paper. It was just an overdraft. But with
the jacket I already got—'

She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tried to look
self-possessed and cool, but the color had risen in her throat, and her
pulse was fluttering like an injured moth.

'Who torched the place?' I said.

'I don't know, Streak. Everything I owned was burned up. What
am I supposed to tell you?' Her eyes were wet now. She opened and
closed them and looked emptily at the graffiti-scrolled wall of a
garage apartment.

'Were the Calucci brothers behind it?'

'Don't be telling people that. Don't be using my name when you
go talking about them kind of people,'

'I won't let you get hurt, Pearly Blue. Just tell me what
happened.'

'Some guy called, it was like he knew everything about me,
about my kid getting taken away from me, about where I work, about some
stuff, you know, not very good stuff, I did at the massage parlour, he
said, "Get out of your place by six, have yourself a nice walk, when
you come back you won't have to be this guy's fuck no more."'

'You don't know who it was?'

'You think I want to know something like that? You remember
what happened to my roommate in the Quarter when she told a vice cop
she'd testify against one of the Giacano family? They soaked her in
gasoline. They—'

'You're out of it, Pearly Blue. Forget about Baxter, forget
about the Calucci brothers. Where are you living now?'

'At my sister's. I just want to go to meetings, work at my
job, and get my little boy back. My P.O.' s a hard ass, he hears about
the checks, calls from the wise guys, stuff like that, I'm going down
again. It's full of bull dykes in there, Streak. I just can't do no
more time.'

'You won't, not if I have anything to do with it.'

'Baxter's gonna find me. He's gonna make me ball him again.
It's sickening.'

I took a business card out of my wallet, pressed it into her
palm, and closed her fingers on it. Her hand was small and moist in
mine.

'Believe me when I tell you this,' I said. 'If Nate Baxter
ever bothers you again, call me, and he'll wish his parents had taken
up celibacy.'

Her face became confused.

'He'll wish his father'd had his equipment sawed off,' I said.