Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'There used to be adult education classes in that building. The guy who busted down the door evidently chased Camel through a bunch of rooms upstairs with a flagstaff. At least that's what we think.'

'I don't understand what you're saying. Where's Camel Benoit?'

He made a whistling sound in exasperation.

'I'm trying to tell you, Robicheaux. We don't know for sure. We think he's inside the wall: Anyway, there's blood seeping through the mortar. You know any mice that are big enough to bleed through a brick wall?'

The two-story building had been the home of a Creole slave trader and cotton dealer in the 1850s. But now the twin brick chimneys were partially collapsed, the iron grillwork on the balconies was torn loose from its fastenings, and the ventilated wood shutters hung at odd angles on the windows. An air compressor for a jackhammer was wheezing and pumping in front of the entrance. I held up my badge for a uniformed patrolman to look at as I threaded my way between two police cars and an ambulance into the entrance of the building.

At the back of a dark corridor covered with spray-can graffiti, a workman in gloves and a hard hat was thudding the jackhammer into the wall while Motley and two white plainclothes watched. Motley was eating an ice cream cone. The floor was powdered with mortar and brick dust. I tried to talk above the noise and gave it up. Motley motioned me into a side room and closed the door behind us. The room was strewn with burnt newspaper, beer cans, wine bottles, ten-dollar coke vials, and discarded rubbers.

'We should have already been through the wall, but it looks like somebody poured cement inside it when the foundation settled,' he said. He brushed a smear of ice cream out of his thick mustache.

'What was this about a flagstaff?'

'A couple of noddies say there was an American flag on a staff in the corner with a bunch of trash. The wild man grabbed it and ran Camel Benoit upstairs with it, then stuffed him through a hole in the wall. For all we know, he's still alive in there.' He took a bite of his ice cream and leaned forward so it wouldn't drip on his tie.

'What have you got on the wild man?'

'Not much. He had on a Halloween mask and wore brown leather gloves.'

'Was he white or black?'

'Nobody seems to remember. It was five in the morning. These guys were on the downside of smoking rock and bazooka and hyping all night.' He used his shoe to nudge a rubber that was curled on top of a piece of burnt newspaper like a flattened gray slug. 'You think these cocksuckers worry about safe sex? They get free rubbers from the family planning clinic and use them to carry brown scag in.'

'Motley, I think you might be a closet Republican.'

'I'm not big on humor this morning, Robicheaux.'

'Why did you want me down here?'

'Because I want to take this guy off the board. Because I'm not feeling a lot of support from Nate Baxter, or from anybody else, for that matter. If it hasn't occurred to you, nobody's exactly on the rag because a few black dealers are getting taken out.'

'Maybe Camel's operation is being hit on by another dealer.'

'You mean by another black dealer, don't you?' He bit into the cone of his ice cream, then flipped it away into a pile of trash. 'Come on, they've quit out there. Let's go see the show.'

'I didn't mean to offend you, partner.'

'Get off of it, Robicheaux. As far as the department is concerned, this is still nigger town. On a scale of priority of one to ten, it rates a minus eight.'

The air in the hallway was now gray with stone dust. Two workmen used crowbars to rake the bricks from the wall and the chunks of concrete inside onto the hallway floor. The gash in the wall looked like a torn mouth that they kept elongating and deepening until it almost reached the floor. One of the workmen paused, pushed his goggles up on his forehead, and leaned into the dark interior.

He brought his head back out and scratched his cheek.

'I can see a guy about three feet to the left. I'm not sure about what else I see, though,' he said.

'Look out,' Motley said, pushed the workman aside, and shined a flashlight into the hole. He pointed the light back into the recess for what seemed a long time. Then he clicked off the light and stood erect. 'Well, he always told everybody he was a war veteran. Maybe Camel'd appreciate a patriotic touch.'

I took the flashlight from Motley's hand and leaned inside the hole. The air was cool and smelled of damp earth and rats and old brick.

The flashlight beam danced over Camel's body, his copper-bright skin, his hair shaved into dagger points and corn-rolled ridges, his dead eye that looked like a frosted blue-white marble. He was wedged in a reclining position between the bricks and a pile of broken cinder blocks. The workmen had entered the wall at the wrong location because Camel's blood had drained down a cement mound into a bowllike depression at the bottom of the wall.

The wound was like none I had ever seen in my years as a homicide detective. Someone had driven the winged, brass-sheathed end of a broken flagstaff through Camel's back, all the way through the heart cavity, until the staff had emerged below the nipple. The remnant of an American flag, long since faded almost colorless and partially burned by vandals, was streaked bright red and glued tightly against the staff by the pressure of the wound.

'Get the rest of the wall down,' Motley said to the workmen. Then he motioned me to follow him up the stairwell to the second floor. We stood on a landing outside a closed door. The building shook with the thudding of the jackhammer. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I thought the vigilante specialized in heart removal.'