Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'Sorry, Purcel. Don't be getting the wrong signal. It ain't that kind of day,' he said.

Clete chewed his food and looked back at the men silently.

'I'm saying we got the word, okay?' the man said. He grinned.

Clete wiped his mouth with his napkin.

'There's some kind of comedy act here I don't know about?' he said.

'Cool your ovaries down. You want to join us? Your breakfast is on me.'

'I'll eat at that table after it gets scrubbed down with peroxide.'

'Suit yourself. It's a beautiful day. Why fuck a beautiful day?'

'Yeah, it was.'

The two men laughed and looked at their menus. Clete set his knife and fork down on his plate and put a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.

'Are we working on new rules here?' he said.

'Give it a break, Clete. You want some tickets to the LSU-Ole Miss game? Look, we're glad to hear it's over, that's all,' the second man said.

Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and studied it.

'Who gave you permission to call me by my first name, and what's this stuff about something being over?' he said.

'Sorry we bothered you, Purcel,' the first man said. 'Robicheaux don't want to tell you he did a sit-down, that's between you and him. Hey, somebody got my fat ass out of the skillet, I'd count my blessings.'

The following is my best re-creation of the events, as described by Ben Motley and Lucinda Bergeron, that happened later out by Lake Pontchartrain.

Clete parked his convertible two blocks from Max Calucci's home, then took a cab to a construction site one mile away, on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, where the Caluccis supplied all the heavy equipment to the builder. He leaned against the trunk of a palm tree across the street, sucking on a think stick of peppermint candy, enjoying the morning, inhaling the breeze off the lake.

Then he casually strolled across the boulevard, the peppermint stick

pointed upward like an erection, and hot-wired an enormous earthmover. It was outfitted with a steel blade that could strip baked hardpan down to bedrock, a great, saw-toothed bucket that could break and scoop up asphalt highway like peanut brittle, and huge balloon tires with studded welts for scouring trenches through piles of crushed stone and angle iron.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Clete had wheeled around the corner into the midday traffic and was hammering full throttle down the boulevard toward Max's house, diesel smoke flattening in a dirty plume from the stack.

The gateman at Max's was the first to see, or hear, the earthmover thundering down the quiet, oak-shaded residential street. Then, inside the steel-mesh protective cage, he recognized the powder blue porkpie hat, the round, pink face with the gray scar through one eyebrow like a strip of inner tube patch, and the massive shoulders that seemed about to split the seams on the Hawaiian shirt.

By this time the gateman was grabbing at the telephone box inset in the brick pillar by the edge of the driveway. But it was too late; Clete lowered the saw-toothed bucket, swung the earthmover into the drive, and blew the gates off their hinges.

No one at the house—the Vietnamese gardeners, three of Max's hired gumballs, a couple of coked-out dancers suntanning topless by the pool—could believe what was happening. Clete, bent low, like an ape, over the controls, headed across the lawn, grinding through flower beds, the patio furniture by the pool, crashing through a corner of the gazebo, splintering a birdbath into ceramic shards, raking off sprinkler heads, shredding garden hoses into chopped rubber bands.

He made a wide circle of lawn destruction and came to a halt twenty yards from the columned portico at the front of the house, the cap on the stack bubbling quietly. He lowered the bucket to clear his field of vision, sighted on the front entrance, raised the bucket into position again, shifted down, and gave it the gas.

The bucket exploded a hole the size of a garage door through the front wall. Then Clete backed off, gunning the engine, crunching over the crushed cinder blocks and plaster, got a good running start, and plunged into the house's interior.

He made U-turns, shifted from reverse to first, backed through walls and wet bars and bathrooms, ripped water pipes and drain lines out of the floors, and ground washing machines, television sets, and microwaves into sparking piles of electrical junk. He seemed to pause for a moment, perhaps to get his bearings, then he crashed through Max's mirror-walled bedroom, dropped the grader blade into position, and raked the eighteenth-century tester and oak floors through the French doors onto a domed sunporch, where he swung the bucket in a wide arc and sent cascades of glass onto the lawn.

By this time the gumballs and the topless suntanners were racing for the street. Clete bounced out onto the backyard, strips of fabric flying from the stack and the driver's cage like medieval streamers. He lit a cigarette with his Zippo, fitted his porkpie hat down on his brow, then demolished the garages and the garden shed, dropped the bucket squarely on top of a new Chrysler, ripped a long slice out of the greenhouse, and plowed trenches bristling with severed pink roots where hedges had been.

The Romans at Carthage couldn't have done a more thorough job.

Then he got down from the machine and strolled across the flattened fence at the back of the property toward his automobile, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the white chop out on the lake. Geysers of water from broken pipes in the yard were fountaining in the sunlight, glistening on the grass, blowing in the cool air like an unloosed rainbow.

After I heard from both Ben Motley and Lucinda Bergeron, I got an unexpected call.