Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

I clicked off my recorder, said good-bye, and walked out of the room. Later, he told an FBI agent that he never wanted me, in his presence again.

2. Tommy Bobalouba: Like Max and Bobo, he operated on the edges of the respectable world and constantly tried to identify himself with an ethnic heritage that somehow was supposed to give his illegal enterprises the mantle of cultural and moral legitimacy. The reality was that Tommy and the Caluccis both represented a mind-numbing level of public vulgarity that sickened and embarrassed most other Irish and Italians in New Orleans.

Tommy had been kicked out of his yacht club for copulating in the swimming pool at 4:00 A.M. with a cocktail waitress. At the Rex Ball during Mardi Gras he told the mayor's wife that his radiation treatments for prostate cancer caused his phallus to glow in the dark. After wheedling an invitation to a dinner for the New Orleans Historical Association, he politely refused the asparagus by saying to the hostess, 'Thank you, anyway, ma'am, but it always makes my urine smell.'

3. We'll call the third player Malcolm, a composite of any number of black male kids raised in New Orleans's welfare projects. Caseworkers and sociologists have written reams on Malcolm. Racist demagogues love Malcolm because he's the means by which they inculcate fear into the electorate. Liberals are far more compassionate and ascribe his problems to his environment. They're probably correct in their assessment. The problem, however, is that Malcolm is dangerous. He's often immensely unlikable, too.

A full-blown crack addict has the future of a lighted candle affixed to the surface of a woodstove. Within a short period of time he will be consumed by the unbanked fires burning inside him or those that lick daily at his skin from the outside. In the meantime he drifts into a world of moral psychosis where shooting a British tourist in the face for her purse or accidentally killing a neighborhood child has the significance of biting off a hangnail.

I knew a kid from New Iberia whose name was Malcolm. He had an arm like a black whip and could field a ball in deep center and fire it on one hop into home plate with the mean, flat trajectory of a BB. At age seventeen he moved with Iris mother into the Desire Project in New Orleans, a complex of welfare apartments where the steady din is unrelieved, like the twenty-four-hour noise in a city prison—toilets flushing, plumbing pipes vibrating in walls, irrational people yelling at each other, radios and television sets blaring behind broken windows. The laws of ordinary society seem the stuff of comic books. Instead, what amounts to the failure of all charity, joy, and decency becomes the surrogate for normalcy: gang rape, child molestation, incest, terrorization of the elderly, beatings and knifings that turn the victims into bloody facsimiles of human beings, fourteen-year-old girls who'll wink at you and proudly say, 'I be sellin' out of my pants, baby,' or perhaps a high school sophomore who clicks his MAC-10 on up to heavy-metal rock 'n' roll and shreds his peers into dog food.

In a year's time Malcolm smoked, hyped, snorted, bonged, dropped, or huffed the whole street dealer's menu—bazooka, Afghan skunk, rock, crank, brown scag, and angel dust. His mother brought him back to New Iberia for a Christmas visit. Malcolm borrowed a car and went to a convenience store for some eggnog. Then he changed his mind and decided he didn't need any eggnog. Instead, he sodomized and executed the eighteen-year-old college girl who ran the night register. He maintained at his trial that he was loaded on speed and angel dust and had no memory of even entering the convenience store. I was a witness at his electrocution, and I'm convinced to this day that even while they strapped and buckled his arms and legs to the oak chair, fitted the leather gag across his mouth, and dropped the black cloth over his face, even up to the moment the electrician closed the circuits and arched a bolt of lightning through his body that cooked his brains and exploded his insides, Malcolm did not believe these people, whom he had never seen before or harmed in any way, would actually take his life for a crime which he believed himself incapable of committing.

&nbs

p; That evening I sat at the kitchen table with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast spread out before me.

Through the open bedroom door I heard Bootsie turn on the shower water. Recently she had made a regular habit of taking long showers in the afternoon, washing the cigarette smoke from a lounge out of her hair, holding her face in the spray until her skin was ruddy and the appearance of clarity came back into her eyes. I had not spoken to her yet about the DWI she had almost received the previous day.

I flattened and smoothed the nautical chart with my hand and penciled X's at the locations where I had sighted the German U-boat when I was in college and on my boat with Batist. Then I made a third X where Hippo Bimstine's friend, the charter-boat skipper, had pinged it with his sonar. The three X's were all within two miles of each other, on a rough southwest-northeastwardly drift line that could coincide with the influences of both the tide and the currents of the Mississippi's alluvial fan. If there was a trench along that line, tilting downward with the bevel of the continental shelf, then the movements of the sub had a certain degree of predictability.

But I couldn't concentrate on the chart. I stared out the back window at the tractor shed by the edge of the coulee. The door yawned open, and the late sun's red light shone like streaks of fire through the cracks in the far wall. I called Clete at his apartment in New Orleans and told him about the break-in of last night, the linen-covered butcher block, the offering of bourbon, the crystal goblet half-filled with burgundy and rimmed with lipstick and moonlight.

'So?' he said when I had finished.

'It's not your ordinary B and E, Clete.'

'It's Buchalter or his trained buttwipes, Streak.'

'Why the blue rose on a china plate?'

'To mess up your head.'

'You don't think it has anything to do with the vigilante?'

'Everybody in New Orleans knows the vigilante's MO now. Why should Buchalter be any different?'

'Why a woman's lipstick on the glass?'

'He's probably got a broad working with him. Sometimes they dig leather and swastikas.'

I blew out my breath and looked wanly through the screen at the fireflies lighting in the purple haze above the coulee.

'You got framed once on a murder beef, Dave. But you turned it around on them, with nobody to help you,' Clete said. 'I've got a feeling something else is bothering you besides some guy with rut for brains opening bottles in your tractor shed.'

I could still hear the shower water running in the bathroom.

'Dave?'

'Yes.'

'You want me to come over there?'

'No, that's all right. Thanks for your time, Clete. I'll call you in a couple of days.'

'Before you go, there's something I wanted to mention. It sounds a little zonk, though.'

'Zonk?'