Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'Me too. Good-bye, Sister.'

'Good-bye.'

The musical community in southern Louisiana is a large and old one. Where do you begin if you want to find a person who's interested in or collects historical jazz?

There was certainly nothing picturesque about the geographic origins of the form. If it was born in one spot, it was Storyville at the turn of the century, a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New Orleans, named for an alderman who wanted to contain all the city's prostitution inside a single neighborhood. Jazz meant to fornicate; songs like 'Easy Rider' and 'House of the Rising Sun' were literal dirges about the morphine addiction and suicidal despair of the prostitutes who lived out their lives in the brothels of Perdido Street.

When I walked down Bourbon that evening, not far from Basin, one of the old borders of Storyville, the air was filled with a purple haze, lit with neon, warmly redolent of the smell of beer and whiskey in paper cups, the sky overhead intersected by a solitary pink cloud of Lake Pontchartrain. The street, which was closed to automobile traffic, was congested with people, their faces happy and flushed in the din of rockabilly and Dixieland bands. Spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were working the trade in front of the strip joints; black kids danced and clattered their clip-on steel taps on the concrete for the tourists; an all-black street band, with tambourines ringing and horns blaring, belted out 'Millersburg' on the corner at Conti; and a half block farther up, in a less hedonistic mood, a group of religious fanatics, with signs containing apocalyptical warnings, tried to buttonhole anyone who would listen to their desperate message.

I talked to an elderly black clarinetist at Preservation Hall, a sax man at the Famous Door who used to work for Marcia Ball, a three-hundred-pound white woman with flaming hair and a sequined dress that sparkled like ice water, who played blues piano in a hole-in-the-wall on Dumaine. None of them knew of a Will Buchalter or a jazz enthusiast or collector who fit his description.

I walked over on Ursulines to a dilapidated book and record store run by two men named Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, who was also known sometimes as Baron Belladonna. Jimmie was a florid, rotund man with a red mustache who looked like a nineteenth-century bartender. But the insides of both his forearms were laced with the flattened veins and gray scar tissue of an old-time addict. Before he had gotten off the needle, he had been known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you with any kind of illegal activity in New Orleans.

His business partner, the Count, was another matter. He had blitzed his brain years ago with purple acid, wore a black vampire's cape and slouch hat, and maintained that the soul of Olivia Newton-John lived under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. His angular body could have been fashioned from wire; his long, narrow head and pinched face looked like they had been slammed in a door. Periodically he shaved off his eyebrows so his brain could absorb more oxygen.

'How do you like being out of the life, Jimmie?' I asked.

As always, my conversation with Jim would prove to be a rare linguistic experience.

'The book business ain't bad stuff to be in these days,' he said. He wore suspenders and a purple-striped long-sleeve shirt with sweat rings under the arms. 'There's a lot of special kinds of readers out there, if you understand what I'm saying, Streak. New Orleans is being overrun by crazoids and people who was probably cloned from dog turds, and the government won't do anything about it. But it's a crazy world out there, and am I my brother's keeper, that's what I'm asking, a buck's a buck, and who am I to judge? So I've got a bin here for your vampire literature, I got your books on ectoplasm, your books on ufology and teleportation, I got your studies on tarot cards and Eckankar, you want to read about your Venusian cannibals living among us, I got your book on that, too.'

'I'm looking for a guy named Will Buchalter, Jimmie. He might be a collector of old jazz records.'

His mustache tilted and the corners of his eyes wrinkled quizzically.

'What's this guy look like?' he asked.

I told him while he rolled a matchstick in his mouth. The Count was cleaning bookshelves with a feather duster, his eyes as intense as obsidian chips in his white face.

'He's got blackheads fanning back from his eyes like cat's whiskers?' Jimmie said.

'Something like that,' I said.

'Maybe I can give him a job here. Hey, is this guy mixed up with this Nazi submarine stuff?'

'How do you know about the sub, Jimmie?'

'The whole fucking town knows about it. I tell you, though, Streak, I wouldn't mess with nobody that was connected with these tin shirts or whatever they used to call these World War II commonists.'

'Wait a minute, Jim. Not everybody knows about the Silver Shirts.'

'I'm Irish, right, so I don't talk about my own people, there's enough others to do that, like you ever hear this one, you put four Irish Catholics together and you always got a fifth, but I got to say you cross a mick with a squarehead, you come up with a pretty unnatural combo, if you're getting my drift, mainly that wearing a star-spangled jockstrap outside your slacks ain't proof you're one-hunnerd-percent American.'

'You've truly lost me, Jimmie.'

'I lived right down the street from his family.'

'Who?'

'Tommy Bobalouba. Sometimes you're hard to get things across to, Streak. I mean, like, we got jet planes going by overhead or something?'

'Tommy Lonighan's family was mixed up with Nazis?'

'His mother was from Germany. She was in the, what-do-you-call-'em, the metal shirts. That's why Tommy was always fighting with people. Nobody in the Channel wanted anything to do with his family… Hey, Count, we got a customer named Will Buchalter?'

Count Carbonna began humming to himself in a loud, flat, nasal drone.