DR07 - Dixie City Jam (36 page)

'Adios,' I said.

'Hey, don't be like that,' he said, and grabbed my coat. Then
he released it and smoothed the cloth with his hand. 'I'm sorry, I got
a Coke bottle up my butt. I don't know how to act sometimes. Look, me
and the Calucci brothers are quits. They welsh, they lie, they got no
class, they'll blindside you and take you off at the neck. You do
business with shit bags and greaseballs, you invite a load of grief
into your life.

'I can't change what's already happened, I mean, maybe some
stuff I'm part responsible for, but maybe I can make up for it a little
bit. Your buddy Purcel… Hey, I got your attention.'

'What about him?'

'He filled up Max and Bobo's Caddy with cement while about a
hundred people were laughing and clapping and grabbing themselves. Even
the cops were making jokes about it over their radios.'

'What are you saying, partner?'

'You know how many guys in New Orleans would like to take
Purcel down? How many guys he's sent up the road or run through glass
windows or stuck their heads in toilet bowls? It's an open contract,
fifteen large, Dave, he's anybody's fuck. That ain't all, either.
There's a ten large bonus if it's in pieces. You know, with Polaroids
or a videocassette.'

He squeezed a lemon slice on an oyster, then lifted the shell
and sucked the muscle into his mouth. But instead of swallowing it, he
lowered his head, emptied his mouth into a napkin.

'I can't eat no more. I feel sick,' he said. His eyes wandered
to the table where the three men from his crew were eating.

'Maybe in New Orleans you're lucky if you get to die from
cancer these days,' he said.

'Is there a contract on you, too, Tommy?'

'You're a lot like Purcel. You think the Caluccis are clowns
because you busted them up with a shovel and they didn't try to do
anything about it. I got news for you, Dave. These guys eat their pain
and wait. One time a button guy from the Cardo family was porking
Bobo's broad. They waited three years, till everything was forgotten,
till the broad had disappeared, till Bobo had a half dozen other bimbos
hanging around him, then they asked the button guy out on their boat.
They wined and dined him, made fun about the broad, like they were all
great buddies and she was just some pork chops they passed around, then
they held a gun to the guy's head and made him cut off his own cock.'

He ran his hand through his hair, wiped the perspiration on
his shirt, blew out his breath, and ordered a double Scotch straight
up. The corners of his mouth looked as gray as fish scale.

By five that afternoon I still had not heard back from the
monsignor in Lafayette. Before signing out of the office, I called
again.

'His mother's been quite ill. Can he call you at home,
Detective Robicheaux? I know he'll want to,' the secretary said.

'Yes, I'd appreciate it if he would,' I said, and gave her our
number.

Bootsie and I had planned to go to a
seven o'clock AA step
meeting in town, and I had told her not to prepare supper. On the way
home I picked up some po'-boy sandwiches and dirty rice at a take-out
place by City Park. As I drove down the dirt road along the bayou,
smoke was drifting across the sun from a scorched sugarcane field, and
the air smelled like burning leaves and late-blooming flowers. It was
raining in the south, and you could see a gray squall line, splintered
with lightning, moving inland from the gulf. The wind was already up,
straightening the moss in the cypress trees out in the marsh, and most
of the fishermen who had been out for saca-lait had turned their boats
toward the dock.

The deputy who still guarded the house during the day waved at
me and headed for town. I parked in the drive and went inside with the
paper sack of po'-boys and dirty rice. The windows were all open, and
the curtains were billowing with wind.

'Who's home?' I said.

But the house was quiet. I walked into the kitchen and set the
sack of sandwiches on the table. Then I saw the empty sherry bottle and
three beer cans half buried in a tangle of wet newspapers and coffee
grounds in the plastic trash container. I rubbed my hand in my face,
then opened the icebox to get a Dr Pepper, changed my mind for no
reason, and slammed the door, rattling everything inside.

The phone rang on the counter.

'Detective Robicheaux?'

'Yes.'

'This is Monsignor DeBlanc. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you
earlier. You called about Sister Marie?'

'Yes, Marie Guilbeaux.'

'Right. Is something wrong?'

'I'm not sure, really. I'm working a strange case
now… Sister Guilbeaux keeps showing up around here at odd
times.'

'I'm sorry, I'm confused. What do you mean "showing up"?'

'Just
that
. She seems to take an
inordinate interest in things that aren't her affair.'

'You mean she's been in New Iberia recently?'

'Yes.'

'I don't understand. Marie went back home to Napoleonville
three months ago. She's had some severe problems with her health.'

I paused a moment. 'What does this lady look like, Monsignor?'

'Good for her age, I guess, but, well, time has its way with
all of us.'

'Her age?'

'She's almost seventy years old. How old do you think she is?'

After I hung up I sat at the kitchen table and stared out the
back screen at the orange wafer of sun descending into the smoke from
the smoldering cane stubble. Why hadn't I seen it? She had been outside
the intensive care unit when Clete and I had interviewed Charles Arthur
Sitwell, who later was launched into the next world with an injection
of water and roach paste. Even Alafair had felt there was something
wrong about her, that she was a harbinger of trouble and discord.

I looked again at the empty sherry bottle and cans in the
trash. When the bedroom door opened in the hallway I didn't even bother
to turn around. There was no point in trying to go to a step meeting
tonight. Bootsie's fears and anxieties had obviously sent her into a
relapse; maybe tomorrow we'd give it another try. Or maybe I simply had
to let go of her for a while, turn her over to my Higher Power, and let
her bottom out. How could I demand more of her than had ever been
demanded of me? But regardless of what I chose to do, anger would serve
no purpose, and would only reinforce her determination to stay drunk.

I smelled the alcohol and the odor of cigarettes even before I
felt the warm breath against my cheek, the touch of fingernails in my
hair and on my scalp, the soft caress of a woman's breasts against the
back of my neck. Then I felt the mouth and tongue in my ear, the
tapered hand that slid down my chest toward my loins, and I turned and
looked up into the face of the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux.

'Tough day when they take the scales
from your eyes?' she
said. Her hand reached out to touch my hair. I pushed it away.

'Where are Bootsie and Alafair?' I said.

'The wifey's passed out. Doesn't she send your daughter off
with the black man when she decides to go on the grog?'

I walked into the hall and opened the bedroom door. Bootsie
was asleep, half undressed, on top of the sheets, her face twisted into
the pillow. The curtains popped in the silence.

The woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux stood in the
center of the kitchen, putting lipstick on in front of her compact
mirror. She wore sun-faded jeans, sandals, a beige terry-cloth pullover
with a dipping neckline, and a gold chain with a pearl around her
throat.

'Did you know the little wife has something of a pill
problem?' she said, her eyes still fastened on the mirror.

'Who are you?'

She crimped her lips together in the mirror and clicked the
compact closed.

'Want to find out?' she said. She smiled. Her eyes seemed to
darken, like charcoal-colored smoke gathering inside green glass. She
unsnapped the top of her jeans, exposing the pink edge of her panties,
then reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. 'Sit down in the
chair, Dave. It's time someone does something nice for you.'

I dumped her purse on the breakfast table. In it were car
keys, an empty aspirin tin, a roll of breath mints, a perfume spray
bottle, and a doeskin wallet. In the wallet was over six hundred
dollars, and a Social Security card and driver's license with the name
Marie Guilbeaux on them. The address on the license was in uptown New
Orleans, back toward the levee. There were no credit cards.

'Do you like everything to be so hard?' she said, and moved
her tongue in a circle inside her lips.

She worked her bra out from under her pullover and laid it
over the chair top, then clasped her hands around the back of my neck
and pressed her stomach against me. 'I have a feeling the wifey hasn't
been treating you right,' she said.

'Where's your automobile?'

'Down by the dock.'

'Is anyone with you?'

'No.' She flexed her loins against me.

'I'll tell the wrecker service not to scratch it up,' I said,
turning her in a half circle.

'What?'

'The guy we contract to haul cars into the pound is careless
sometimes.' I pulled her forearms behind her. Her wrists were narrow
and pale, and the undersides were lined with thin green veins. I
snipped the handcuffs on each wrist, then stuffed her bra in the back
pocket of her jeans.

'The offer's still open. With handcuffs. Think about it, Dave.
Ouu,' she said, and made a pout with her mouth. 'You might even like it
better than climbing on top of a drunk sow.'

'Try it on our jailer, Marie,' I said. 'He's a
three-hundred-pound black homosexual. Maybe you can turn him around.'

The next morning at the department I
picked up a cup of coffee
and a doughnut by the dispatcher's cage and called Clete at his office
in the Quarter. The sun was shining, and there was dew on the grass and
trees outside my window. I had called him twice the day before and
hadn't gotten an answer.

'The tape on my machine's screwed up. What's happening?' he
said.

I told him about my conversation in the restaurant with Tommy
Lonighan.

'You sound mad,' he said.

'I am.'

'What's the big deal?'

'I warned you about provoking these guys.'

'Look, Dave, what's "open hit" actually mean? Nothing. It's
something these greasebags like to mouth off about while they're
stuffing linguine in their faces. A real whack is when they bring in a
mechanic, a mainline button man, a full-time sociopath, from Miami or
Houston, and this guy
knows
he either leaves meat
on the sidewalk or he's the next guy for the cooling board.'

'Clete—'

'Drop it, mon. Max and Bobo are always blowing gas. It's time
they both get their snouts stuck in the commode.'

'I just don't believe you. Why don't you go stand in the
middle of the streetcar tracks?'

'Okay, big mon, you've warned me. Listen, has Motley called
you yet?'

'No.'

'Dig this. Ole Mots stopped thinking about food and cooze and
being black long enough to do some real detective work.'

'I think Motley's turned out to be a good guy.'

'That's what I was saying. Is there static on the line or
something? Yesterday afternoon he got some chest waders from the fire
department, and he and I splashed out into that swamp in Lafourche
Parish. It took a while, but we found it.'

'Found what?'

'The armored vest. The guy who cut open the two lowlifes with
the chain saw, we found where he got out of the water on a levee not
far from Larose. There were depressions in the mud that Sasquatch could
have left. Anyway, about two hundred yards back into the swamp he'd
dumped the vest by a sandbar. There were a half-dozen pieces of
buckshot in the plates.'

'Why would he be wearing a vest?'

He laughed, then took the receiver away from his mouth and
laughed again.

'You want to let me in on it?' I asked.

'You're beautiful, Streak. There's a secret that everybody
seems to know except my old podjo from the First. You're one of the
most violent people I've ever known. Why do you think Buchalter would
wear a vest? You've probably got him spotting his Jockeys.'

'Thanks for going out there, Clete.'

'Hold on a minute. There's something else. Maybe it's
important, maybe not. There was some stenciling on the cloth. The vest
was Toronto PD issue.'

'It's Canadian?'

'Maybe he got it at a surplus store. But it's a thread, right?
Anyway, talk with Motley.'

'You remember the nun we saw at the hospital?'

'Yes, she need somebody to pound erasers for her?'

'Not unless you want to visit her in the parish jail.'

Then I told him about all the events involving the woman who
called herself Marie Guilbeaux.

'Definitely a weird scam, mon,' he said.

'I'll bet she and Buchalter have their umbilical cords tied
together.'

'What are you holding her on?'

'Not much.'

'Don't let them kick her. Give me the address that's on her
driver's license.'

I read it to him off the arrest report.

'Salt the shaft if you have to. You know why everybody loves
straight shooters? Because they usually lose,' he said.

'See you later, Cletus,' I said, and hung up the phone just as
the sheriff tapped on my glass and motioned me toward his office at the
other end of the hallway.

He drank from his bottle of ulcer medicine, then leaned back
in his swivel chair, bouncing the heels of his hands on the padded
arms, and gazed at the potted plants and hand-painted flowered tea-pot
on his windowsill. His stomach wedged over his hand-tooled gunbelt like
a partly deflated football. He poked at it with his stiffened fingers.

'You never had ulcers, did you?' he said.