Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'You mean the brothers? Like me?'

I shrugged.

'Last hired, first fired,' he said. 'That's the way it is, my man. It doesn't change because you wear tampons. And let's be clear, the only reason you're involved in this is because of your buddy Purcel. So go pull on your own pud, Robicheaux.'

That evening Batist and I walked over to St. Charles and took the streetcar up to Canal, then walked into the Quarter and ate at the Acme on Iberville. It was crowded and warm inside and smelled of flat beer and the piles of empty oyster shells in the drain bins. We heard thunder out over the river, then it started to rain and we walked in the lee of the buildings back to Canal and caught the streetcar out on the neutral ground.

As we clattered down the tracks around Lee Circle, past the equestrian statue of Robert Lee, St. Charles Avenue opened up into a long green-black corridor of moss-hung oak trees, swirling with mist, touched with the red afterglow of the sun. The inside of the streetcar was cool and dry and brightly lit, the windows flecked with rain, and the world felt like a grand and beautiful place to be.

Back at the guesthouse we watched a movie on television while the rain and wind shook the mulberry tree outside the French doors. I paid no attention to the sirens that I heard on the avenue, nor to the emergency lights that beat angrily against the darkness on the far side of the parking lot. We were picking up my boat in the morning, and with luck we would be somewhere south of Terrebonne Bay by noon, on our way back to New Iberia, our baited jigs bouncing in the trough behind us.

Sheets of lightning were trembling against the sky, and I lay down on the pillow with my arm across my eyes. Batist began undressing for bed, then walked to the French doors to close the curtain.

'Hey, Dave, they's a ambulance and a bunch of policemens over at that cottage where that nigger run to,' he said.

'I'm hitting the sack, partner. Clete's right. Leave New Orleans to its own problems.'

'They carryin' somebody out of there.'

'Tell me about it in the morning. Good night.'

He didn't answer, and I felt myself drifting on the edges of sleep and the sound of the rain blowing against the windows; then I heard him click off the lamp switch.

It must have been an hour later that we were awakened by the knock on the door. No, that's wrong; it wasn't a knock; it was an incessant beating, with the base of the fist, the kind of ugly, penetrating sound sent by someone whose violation of your sleep and privacy is only a minimal indicator of his larger purpose.

I walked to the door in my skivvies, turned the dead bolt, and opened the door two inches.

'Take off the night chain, Robicheaux.'

'What do you want, Nate?'

'What's this look like?' He held a warrant up in front of me. His chrome-plated .357 Magnum hung from his right hand. The skin of his face was tight with fatigue and muted anger, beaded with rainwater. Three uniformed white cops stood behind him.

'For what? That beef at Calucci's Bar?' I said.

'You never disappoint me. Tell me stink and shit don't go hand in hand.'

'Why don't you try making sense, Nate?'

'We just hauled away a carved-up boon from across the street. Guess who knocked him around in front of a half dozen witnesses today? It's great having you back in town, Robicheaux. It's just like old times.'

He pulled his handcuffs from his belt and let them swing loosely from his index finger like a watch fob. Behind me, Batist sat on the edge of his bed, his big hands splayed on his naked thighs, his eyes focused on a sad and ancient racial knowledge that only he seemed able to see.

* * *

chapter three

There are those who, for political reasons, enjoy talking about country club jails. But any jail anywhere is a bad place to be. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been in one.

Imagine an environment where the lights never go off and you defecate in full view of others on a toilet seat streaked with other people's urine, where you never quite fall asleep, where you are surrounded by the sounds of clanging iron, irrational voices resonating down stone corridors, a count-man or irritated turnkey whanging his baton off steel bars, or the muffled and tormented cries of an eighteen-year-old fish being gang-raped behind a shower wall.

Perhaps even a worse characteristic of jail is the denial of any identity you might have had before you stepped inside a piece of geography where time can sometimes be measured in five-minute increments that seem borne right out of Dante's ninth ring. Here you quickly learn that the personal violation of your self is considered as insignificant and ongoing an occurrence as routine body cavity searches, as the spraying of your genitals for crab lice, or as a wolf telling the server in the chow line to spit in your food, until you no longer think of yourself as an exception to the rules of jailhouse romance'.

Batist spent the night in the tank and wasn't booked until the next morning. I sat on a wood chair in a waiting area next to a squad room and a row of glassed-in offices, one of which was Nate Baxter's. Through a doorway at the back of the squad room I could see the holding tank where Batist was still being held, though he had already been fingerprinted and photographed.

I had been waiting an hour and a half to see Nate Baxter. Then Sergeant Lucinda Bergeron walked past me, in navy blue slacks, a starched white short-sleeve shirt, and a lacquered black gunbelt with a leather pouch for handcuffs. She carried a clipboard in her hand, and if she noticed me, her face didn't show it.

'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said.