DR07 - Dixie City Jam (46 page)

The cop at the door had stepped inside out of the rain. He
stared dumbfounded at Lonighan.

'Walk back outside, Pat. Or I pop him right now. I swear to
God I will,' Tommy said.

'You're having some kind of breakdown, Tommy. This ain't your
way,' Sal Palacio said.

'Put your piece in the pitcher, Sal. You other two fucks do
the same,' Tommy said.

Sal and the other two bodyguards dropped their pistols into
the sangria. Tommy twisted the barrel of the .38 into the soft place
behind Max's ear and clicked back the hammer.

'This guy here, the one with the linguine in his face, him and
his brother been killing the colored dealers in the projects,' he said.
'You think the city's shit now, wait till you see what it's like when
the Caluccis got the whole dope trade to themselves.'

'Tommy, you're taking us all over the edge here,' the cop at
the door said, his mouth parting dryly after his words had stopped.

'Hey, Pat, tell Nate Baxter I just fucked his meal ticket,'
Tommy said, and pulled the trigger.

Max's mouth opened sideways on his plate, like that of a fish
that had been thrown hard upon the bank. Tommy pulled the trigger
again, with people screaming now, this time the barrel a half inch from
the crown of Max's skull. A tuft of Max's hair jumped as though it had
been touched by a puff of wind.

Then, with Bobo under the table and the cop drawing his
weapon, Tommy went through the curtained hallway behind him, stepped
inside the men's room, and bolted the door.

For some reason he did it in a toilet stall, seated on top of
the stool, with his trousers still on, the revolver pointed awkwardly
toward his throat. The impact of the round wedged his head into the
corner of the stall; the recoil sent the .38 skittering in a red trail
across the tiles; the hemorrhage from the wound covered his chest like
a scarlet bib. Later the coroner lifted the gold chain from his neck
with a fountain pen. Attached to it were a lead-colored army dog tag
and a small gold boxing glove from the Golden Gloves of 1951.

I wondered if Tommy heard the roar of the crowd just as his
thumb tightened inside the trigger housing, or the echo of Chinese
bugles and small arms through a frozen arroyo, or perhaps the squeal of
an ice truck's brakes on a street full of children in the Channel; or
if he stared into the shadows, seeking the epiphany that had always
eluded him, and saw only more shadows and motes of spinning dust and
the graffiti scratched into the paint on the door, until he realized,
just as the hammer snapped down on the brass cartridge, that the
eruption of pain and fear and blood in his chest was simply the
terminus of an ongoing war that he had waged for a lifetime against his
own heart.

Later I mentioned my thoughts to Hippo.

'Don't complicate that dumb mick, Dave. He even screwed up his
own suicide,' he answered. Then, with his face turned so I couldn't see
his eyes, 'He apologized before he checked out. Just him and me in the
room. Just like when we were boys.'

And he walked away.

The music store was located between an
auto garage and a
boarded-up café on a nondescript street north of Biloxi. It
was still
raining; only two cars were parked on the street, and the sidewalks
were empty. A block farther north, there was a string of gray clapboard
and Montgomery Ward brick houses, their lawns choked with weeds. A neon
beer sign burned in the gloom above a pool hall that had virtually no
patrons. The street reminded me of a painting I had once seen by Adolf
Hitler; it contained buildings but no people. It was the kind of
neighborhood where one's inadequacies would never find harsh
comparisons.

Was this music store, with cracked and taped windows, moldy
cardboard cartons piled by the front door, the headquarters of Will
Buchalter, a mail who moved like a political disease through a dozen
countries?

I remembered a story about the Israeli agents who captured
Adolf Eichmann as he was returning from his job in an automobile plant
somewhere in South America. One of the agents was young and could not
quite accept the fact that he was now face-to-face with the man who had
murdered his parents.

'What job do you perform at the auto plant?' he asked.

'I'm one of the chrome polishers. We polish all the chrome
surfaces on the new automobiles,' Eichmann answered.

According to the story, the agent began to weep.

The door to the store was locked, but I could see a man moving
around behind a counter. The wind was blowing a wet, acrid stench
through the space between the buildings. I tapped on the glass.

The man inside waved his hand negatively. I tapped again. He
walked toward me, saying the word
Closed
so I
could read his lips. He wore a sleeveless flannel shirt and black jeans
that sculpted his sex. His blond hair was coated and waved with gel,
his white arms wrapped with tattoos of green and red dragons.

I shook the doorknob when he tried to walk away.

'I'm a friend of Will's,' I said.

'He's gone,' the man said through the glass.

'Open up. I've got to leave him a message.'

'Sorry, we're closed. I don't know how else to say it.'

'Where's Marie?'

'Come back Monday,' he said, and dropped the Venetian blinds
down the glass.

I got back in my truck and drove three blocks up the street.
Then I circled back, parked at the end of the alley, and walked toward
the rear of the store under the eaves of the buildings. A rusted-out
trash barrel was smoldering in the rain, and again I smelled a moist,
acrid odor that was like the smell of a dead bat in an incinerator.

Just as I reached inside my raincoat for my .45, he stepped
out the back door with a sack of trash in his hands. I slipped my hand
back out of my coat and fixed a button with it.

'What's with you?' he said.

'I got to be back at the halfway house by dark, you hear what
I'm saying?'

'No.'

'Maybe you think you're doing your job, but you're starting to
piss me off,' I said.

'
Excuse
me.'

'Look, I was supposed to connect with him when I got out. I
just had six fucking years of putting up with smart-ass watermelon
pickers. I'm begging you, buddy, don't fuck up my day any worse than it
already has been.'

'All right, I'm sorry, but it don't change anything. I got to
lock up. Will ain't here. Okay? See the man Monday.'

He dropped the paper bag into the trash barrel and turned to
go back inside. I shoved him hard between the shoulder blades, followed
him inside, and laid the muzzle of the .45 against the back of his neck.

'Get down on your knees,' I said.

'I don't know who you are but—'

'You've got a serious hearing problem,' I said, kicked him
behind the knee, and pushed him into the counter. His eyes widened with
pain when his knees hit the floor.

'Where is he?' I said.

'He don't tell me that kind of stuff. I work for
him
,
he don't work for me. Who are you, man?'

'What do you care, as long as you get to live?'

'I just finished a bit myself. Why you twisting me? Take your
shit to Will.'

'But you're the only guy around,' I said. 'Which means you're
all out of luck.'

I pulled my cuffs off my belt and hooked up his wrists. He was
facedown now, his eyelids fluttering against the dust and oil on the
floor. The rain and the smoke from the trash barrel blew through the
back door.

'What's that smell?' I said.

He bit down on his bottom lip.

I glanced around the store. The interior was cluttered with
boxes of old seventy-eight records. In one corner was a glassed-in
sound booth with an instrument panel and an elevated microphone inside.
A mop inside a pail of dirty water was propped against a closed side
door. I pulled back the slide on the .45 and eased a round into the
chamber.

'I bought this in Bring Cash Alley in Saigon for twenty-five
dollars,' I said. 'No registration, completely cold, you get my drift?'

His eyes squeezed shut, then opened again. 'Don't do this to
me, man. Please,' he said.

My hand was tight and sweating on the knurled grips of the
.45. I looked through the front window at the rain falling in the
street. In the distance a stuck car horn was blaring, a stabbing,
unrelieved sound in the inner ear like fingernails on a blackboard.

I eased the hammer back into place, clicked on the safety, and
slipped the .45 back into my belt holster.

'I'm a police officer,' I said. 'Do you believe me when I say
that?'

'Bust me. I ain't arguing.'

'But I'm beyond my parameters here. Do you know what that
means?'

His eyes were filled with confusion.

'Will Buchalter and his sister have hurt my family,' I said.
'So we're not working on conventional rules anymore. Do you believe me
when I say that?'

'Yes, sir. You got no trouble from me.'

'So what's that smell?'

'I was just trying to clean up… The guy gets crazy
sometimes… He started hitting her with his fists for no
reason, then he went in there with some scissors. I didn't have
anything to do with it, man.'

'Hit who?'

'The broad… I thought that's why you were here. The
broad he's been holding.' He stared at the look on my face. 'Oh shit,
man, this ain't my doing. You got to believe that.'

I scraped the pail and mop out of the way with my foot and
opened the side door.

She was tied to a chair with clothesline, her mouth and eyes
wrapped with silver tape, her reddish hair shorn and hacked to the
scalp. One nostril was caked with dried blood, her neck and shoulders
marbled with bruises the color of pomegranates. She turned her head
toward my sound, like a blind person, her nostrils dilating with fear.

'Martina?' I said, my heart dropping.

She tried to talk through the tape.

I removed it first from her eyes, then her mouth. Her right
eye was swollen shut, the inside of her lips gashed, her teeth pink, as
though they had been painted with Mercurochrome. I opened my Puma knife
and sliced the rope from the arms and back of the chair. She held me
around the waist while I stroked her shorn head.

'It's all right,' I said. 'We'll get you to a hospital. I'll
have somebody stay with you. You hear me? Buchalter's gone.
Everything's going to be okay.'

She turned her face up to me. Her left eyeball jittered, as
though a nerve in it were impaired. 'Where's Clete?' she said.

'I don't know. But we'll find him.'

'The man who beat me, he told me about the things he was going
to do to Clete. He has pictures of what he's done to people.'

She leaned forward with her face in her hands, sobbing. There
were white places the size of nickels with raw cuts inside them all
over her scalp.

'I'll be right back,' I said.

The man in cuffs on the floor was trembling.

'I took her to the bathroom, I give her food when I wasn't
supposed to,' he said.

'Where's your phone?'

'On the desk,' he said, exhaling the words like a man who
knows the fury and intensity of the world is about to move past him.

I called 911 and asked for an ambulance and a sheriffs car.

'Here's how it shakes out, partner,' I said to the man on the
floor. 'You're probably going down as an accessory to assault and
battery, kidnapping, and anything else the locals can dream up. But no
matter how you cut it, it's a serious bounce. You want to tell me where
he is, I'll see what I can do for you later.'

'He knows how to get to people. Anywhere. Lock-down,
isolation, Witness Protection Program. There's white guys even paid the
Black Guerrillas to protect them. It didn't work.'

'Last chance.'

'Him and Marie, this morning, they got excited about something
in a newspaper. Then they took off.'

'Where's the newspaper?'

'I burned it in the trash barrel. With her hair I swept up. I
was trying to keep the place clean, and I go down on a kidnapping beef.
You tell me that's fair, man.'

I heard sirens in the distance, outside the window, a black
man was looking up the street.

'I don't want to be rough on you, but I'd reconsider my
attitude about cooperating,' I said to the man in handcuffs. 'When we
nail Buchalter, he's going to find out we talked to you first. Who do
you think he's going to blame his problems on?'

His face turned ashen.

I rode in the ambulance with Martina
to the hospital, then
used the phone at the Harrison County Sheriff's Department to call home
and Clete's office. I recorded a long message on his machine, assured
him Martina was going to be all right, and left him the number of the
hospital.

But I would soon discover that I wasn't thinking clearly. I
called Ben Motley.

'It's Saturday afternoon. Believe it or not, Robicheaux, I'd
like forty-eight hours without thinking about pus bags.'

'Buchalter doesn't take weekends off,' I said.

'You got the woman back. You traced Buchalter to his nest.
Count your blessings. Ease up.'

'Now's the time to staple him to the wall, Ben. Call Fart,
Barf, and Itch in New Orleans for me.'

'What else?'

'Nothing.' Then I happened to glance at a deputy across the
room who was eating a sandwich with his feet on the desk and reading
the sports page in the newspaper.

'Wait a minute. Do you have this morning's
Times-Picayune?'

'What do you want?'

'Look in the personals for me.'

'That's what they do when they're bored over in Vice.'

'Come on, Ben.'

He put down the phone, then I heard newspaper pages rattling.

'Do you see anything in there that looks peculiar?' I said.

'That's like asking if there's any washroom graffiti that
shouldn't be on a Hallmark card,' he said. 'Hold on… Here's
one that's all numbers. No message, just numbers.'