Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

Answer: It's usually easier than working.

Question: Why rape and brutalize? Why rob people of their identity by terrorizing and degrading them at gunpoint, by reducing them to pitiful creatures who will never respect themselves again?

Answer: You don't have to admit that you're a born loser and in all probability were despised inside your mother's womb.

Batist's perception, like Clete's, was not obscured by self-manufactured complexities. He had grown up in Louisiana during the pre-Civil Rights era, and he knew that no one systematically killed people of color for reasons of justice. The vigilante's victims were people whom no one cared about, nickel-and-dime dealers whose presence or absence would never have any appreciable influence on the immense volume of the New Orleans drug trade.

The vigilante, like the plainclothes detective in the motel who was determined to emotionally twist and break Albert on the rack, was selective about his sacrificial offerings, and his purpose had nothing to do with ending the problem they were associated with.

But the preacher had said something on the dirt road by my house that would not go away, that hung on the edge of my consciousness like an impacted tooth that throbs dully in your sleep.

What if, instead of a particular crime, we were dealing with people, or forces, who wished to engineer a situation that would allow political criminality, despotism masked as law and order, to become a way of life?

Was it that hard to envision? The elements to pull it off seemed readily at hand.

Financial insecurity. Lack of faith in traditional government and institutions. Fear and suspicion of minorities, irritability and guilt at the visibility of the homeless and the mentally ill who wandered the streets of every city in the nation, the brooding, angry sense that things were pulling apart at the center, that armed and sadistic gangs could hunt down, rape, brutally beat, and kill the innocent at will. Or, more easily put, the general feeling that it was time to create examples, to wink at the Constitution, and perhaps once again to decorate the streetlamps and trees with strange fruit.

Hitler had to set fire to the Reichstag and place the blame on a Communist student in order to gain power.

The sight of Los Angeles burning, of motorists being torn apart with tire irons on live television, might serve just as well.

I was out of the office three hours that afternoon on a shooting in a black juke joint south of town. The wounded man, who was shot in the thumb, refused to identify the shooter, walked out of the emergency room at Iberia General without being treated, then drove out in the parish with a kerosene-soaked rag wrapped around his hand and tried to run down his common-law wife's brother in the middle of a sugarcane field. The brother refused to press charges. Bottom line: big waste of time.

It rained that afternoon, then the sun came out again and the air was bright and cool and the palm and oak trees along the street had a green-gold cast to them. Just as I was signing out of the office at five, Wally, the dispatcher, whose great bulk made his breath wheeze even when he was seated, looked up from a message that he was writing on a piece of memo paper.

'Oh hi, Dave. I didn't know you were still here,' he said. 'The monsignor called from the bishop's office in Lafayette. His message was—' He squinted at his own handwriting. 'Yes, he knows Sister Guilbeaux and he wants to know is she in any kind of trouble.'

'Did he say anything else?'

'No, not really. He seemed to wonder why the sheriffs office is interested in a nun. What's going on? A big bingo raid coming down?' His round face beamed at his own humor.

'You're up at the hospital sometimes. Did you ever see a nun there with reddish gold hair, about thirty or thirty-five years old?'

'I don't place her. What's the deal, the nuns been rapping the patients on the knuckles?' He smiled again.

'How about giving it a break, Wally?'

Then Wally raised himself from his chair, just far enough to stick his head out the dispatcher's window and look both ways down the hall. His face was ruddy from hypertension, and his shirt pocket bulged with fat, cellophane-wrapped cigars.

'Can I tell you something serious, Dave?' he said. 'All that stuff going on over in New Orleans, leave it alone. It's blacks killing blacks. Ain't we got enough problems here? Let them people clean up their own shit.'

'Thanks for taking the message, Wally.'

'Hey, don't walk out of here mad. People round here care about you, Dave. This Nazi guy been causing all this grief, he gets caught in the right situation, it's gonna get squared, you'd better believe it, yeah. You ain't got no doubt

about what I mean, either, podna.'

He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, rolled it wetly in the center of his mouth, and scratched a kitchen match across the bottom of his desk drawer.

That night I couldn't sleep. At one-thirty in the morning I heard the tink of a tin can on the baling wire I had strung around the house. I took the AR-15 with the thirty-round magazine from the top of the closet, slid a shell into the chamber, and walked outside with it. It was windy in the trees, and the sky was full of moonlight. There was nobody in the yard or down by the bait shop. Tripod had gotten out of his hutch and was digging in an armadillo's hole by the tractor shed. I picked him up in my arms, refilled his food and water bowls, and put him back inside his hutch. Then I sat down on an upended bucket, under the darkness of an oak tree, the AR-15 propped against the trunk, and waited ten minutes to make sure that the noise I had heard earlier had been caused by Tripod.

The moonlight was the color of pewter on the dead cypress in the marsh. My neighbor had been burning the sugarcane stubble in the field behind my house, and the air was hazy with smoke and dense with a smell like burnt cinnamon. In the quietness of the moment, in the wind that blew through the leaves overhead, in the ruffling of the moonlight on the bayou's surface, and in the perfect black silhouette of my cypress and oak house against the handkerchiefs of flame that twisted and flickered out of the scorched dirt in my neighbor's field, I felt almost as if I had stepped into a discarded film negative from my childhood, in another time, another era.

In the wind I thought I could hear the fiddle and accordion music and the words to 'La Jolie Blonde.' For some reason I remembered a scene clipped out of the year 1945. It was V-J Day, and my parents had taken me with them to a blue-collar bar with a colonnade and a high sidewalk in front and big, green-painted, collapsible shutters that folded flush with the walls. My mother wore a plum-colored pillbox hat with a white veil pinned up on top, and a purple sundress printed with green and red flowers. My father, Aldous, had just been paid, and he was buying beers for the bar and dancing with my mother, while the jukebox played:

Jolie blonde, gardez donc c'est t'as fait.

Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,