Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'He come back from Vietnam with needle scars on his arm. Wasn't no he'p for hit, either. Federal hospitals, jails, drug programs, he could always get all the dope he needed from them kind yonder. Till he killed hisself with hit.'

The music on the jukebox end

ed. Clete looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Oswald Flat slipped the purple rose out of the dimestore vase in the center of the table and sliced off the green stem with his thumbnail.

'Hey, hold on, Brother. Where you going?' Clete said.

Oswald Flat walked toward the rear of the restaurant. He moved like a crab, his shoulders slanted to one side, the rose hanging from his right hand. The Caluccis were finishing their coffee and dessert and at first did not pay attention to the man with the clip-on bow tie standing above them.

Then Max stopped talking to a woman with lacquered blond hair next to him and flicked his eyes up at Oswald Flat.

'What?' he said. When Flat made no reply, Max said it again. 'What?'

Then Bobo was looking at the preacher, too.

'Hey, he's talking to you. You got a problem?' he said.

The people at nearby tables had stopped talking now.

'Hey, what's with you? You can't find the men's room or something?' Max said.

The blond woman next to him started to laugh, then looked at Oswald Flat's face and dropped her eyes.

'Y'all think you're different from them colored dope dealers? Y'all think hit cain't happen to you?' the preacher said.

'What? What can happen?' Max said.

'Your skin's white but your heart's black, just like them that's had hit cut out of their chests.'

The restaurant was almost completely silent now. In the kitchen someone stopped scraping a dish into a garbage can.

'Listen, you four-eyed fuck, if Purcel and that cop sent you over here—' Max began.

Oswald flipped the purple rose into Max Calucci's face.

'You're a lost, stupid man,' he said. 'If I was you, I'd drink all the ice water I could while I had opportunity. Hell's hot and it's got damn little shade.'

The Reverend Oswald Flat picked up his guitar case, fitted his cork sun helmet on his head, and walked out the front door into a vortex of rain.

As I crossed the wide, brown sweep of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and headed across the Atchafalaya Basin toward home, I thought about Oswald Flat's speculation on the elusiveness of Will Buchalter.

It seemed the stuff of an Appalachian tent revival where the reborn dipped their arms into boxes filled with poisonous snakes.

But the preacher's conclusion that we were dealing with a demonic incarnation was neither eccentric nor very original and, as with some other cases I've worked, was as good an explanation about aberrant human behavior as any.

Ten years ago, when Clete and I worked Homicide at NOPD, we investigated a case that even today no one can satisfactorily explain.

A thirty-five-year-old small contractor was hired to build a sun-porch on a home in an old residential neighborhood off Canal. He was well thought of, nice-looking, married only once, attended church weekly with his wife and son, and had never been in trouble of any kind. At least that we knew of.

The family who had contracted him to build the addition on their house were Rumanian gypsies who had grown wealthy as slum-lords in the black districts off Magazine. Their late-Victorian home had polished oak floors, ceiling-high windows, small balconies dripping with orange passion vine, a pool, and a game room with a sunken hot tub.

They thought well enough of the contractor to leave him alone with their fifteen- and twelve-year-old daughters.

The father should have been gone for the day, checking out his rental property miles away. Instead, he came home unexpectedly for lunch. Someone waited for him behind the living room door, then fired a .22 Magnum round into his ear. The bullet exited his opposite cheek and embedded in the far wall.

No one heard the shot. Around one in the afternoon neighbors saw the contractor drive away in the father's Buick. Three hours later the mother returned from shopping and found both her daughters drowned in the hot tub. They were bound ankle and wrist with electrician's tape; both had been raped.

The contractor pawned his tools, his watch, and his wedding ring at three different stops between New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, where he was arrested after a call he made to his wife was traced to a motel there. Clete Purcel and I transported him back to New Orleans from the Pensacola city jail.