Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'Oh, that's perfect. Your closest friends shouldn't worry about you or try to help you?'

I felt my lips crimp together. I looked away from her unrelenting stare.

I stood up and took my seersucker coat off the back of the chair.

'Give me a call if Buchalter shows up,' I said, and walked toward the front door.

She followed me. The sun made slats of light on her face, causing her to squint as she looked up at me.

'Don't leave like this,' she said.

I took a breath. Her hair was scintillated with silver threads and curved thickly on her cheeks.

'What am I supposed to say, Lucinda?'

'Nothing. You're a good man. Good men don't need to say anything.'

The door was wide open so that nothing she did was hidden from view. She put her arms around my neck and bent my face to hers, raising herself on the balls of her feet, her knees pinching together, her thighs flexing and pressing against me unavoidably; then she kissed me on the cheeks, the bridge of the nose, the eyes, and finally once, a light adieu, on the mouth, as her hands came loose from my neck and my face felt as though it were covered with hot red dimes.

* * *

chapter twenty-seven

The chorus that condemns violence is multitudinous and unrelenting. Who can disagree with the sentiment? I think we're after the wrong enemy, though. It's cruelty, particularly when it's mindless and visited upon the defenseless, that has always bothered me most about human failure. But my viewpoint isn't exceptional. Anyone in law enforcement, social work, or psychiatric rehab of any kind carries with him or her a mental notebook whose pages never dim with the years.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I remember cases, or simply incidents, of twenty years ago that come aborning again like sins which elude remission, except either the guilt is collective in nature or the deed such a pitiful and naked admission of our tribal ignorance and inhumanity that the mere recognition of it leads to self-loathing.

Stephen Crane once suggested that few people are nouns; instead, most of us are adverbs, modifying a long and weary sequence of events in which the clearly defined culprit, with black heart and demonic intent, seldom makes himself available for the headsman.

I remember: a cop in the Lafayette police station laughing about how a friend rubbed his penis all over a black woman's body; a black street gang who videotaped their beating of a retarded Pakistani so they could show their friends their handiwork; an infant burned all over his body, even between his toes, with lighted cigarettes; a prosperous middle-class couple who forced the husband's parents to eat dog food; high school kids who held a drunk against a barroom picture window, then punched him through the glass; women and children sodomized, a coed shot through the face in Audubon Park (after she had surrendered her money), animals set on fire, a wounded cop flipped over on his back by his assailant, who then put a pillow under his head and slit his throat with a string knife.

I sincerely believe that we're attracted to films about the Mafia because the violence and evil portrayed in them seems to have an explanation and a beginning and an end. It's confined to one group of people, who in their fictional portrayal even have tragic proportions, and we're made to believe the problem is not endemic to the species.

But I think the reality is otherwise.

A random act of cruelty opened a door in the case I probably would not have gone through by myself.

It had started to sprinkle when I stopped at Igor's on St. Charles for a po'-boy sandwich and to call Bootsie and tell her I was headed home.

'Call Ben Motley, Dave. He's left two messages,' she said.

'What's he want?'

'Something about Tommy Lonighan.'

'How you doing?'

'Fine.'

'You want to go out to eat tonight?'

'Sure. What's the occasion?' she said.

'Nothing special.'

'Is anything wrong?'

'No, why do you think that?'