Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'You know this guy?'

'No, sir.' His jawbone flexed against his skin.

'But you know something about him?'

He cleared his throat slightly. 'One of the black drivers said he'd quit before he'd go back to the guy's store.'

The sender's name on the envelope was William K. Guilbeaux.

Before driving into Biloxi, I called Hippo's house again. This time he answered. There was static on the line, and the rain was blowing in sheets against the windows of the phone booth.

'I can't understand you,' I said.

'I'm saying he had a priest with him. You're a Catholic, I thought you'd appreciate that.'

'Tommy's—'

'He had a priest there, maybe he'll get in a side door up in heaven. The spaghetti head didn't have that kind of luck, though.'

'What?'

* * *

chapter thirty

On Saturdays Max and Bobo Calucci usually had supper, with their girlfriends and gumballs, at a blue-collar Italian restaurant off Canal near the New Orleans Country Club. It was a place with checker-cloth-covered tables, wood-bladed ceiling fans, Chianti served in wicker-basket bottles, a brass-railed mahogany bar, a TV sports screen high overhead, and a good-natured bartender who had once played for the Saints.

An off-duty uniformed police officer stood guard at the front door. The patrons were family people, and white; they celebrated birthdays and anniversaries at the restaurant; the mood was always loud and happy, almost raucous. It was like going through a door into a festive and carefree New Orleans of forty years ago.

Tommy Lonighan was by himself when he arrived in a rental stretch limo. Tommy Bobalouba, the stomp-ass kid from Magazine who could knock his opponent's mouthpiece into the fourth row, stepped out on the curb with the perfumed and powdered grace of castle Irish. He looked like an elegant resurrection of the 1940s, in a tailored white suit with purple pinstripes, a wide scarlet polka-dot tie, oxblood loafers, his face ruddy with a whiskey flush, his blue eyes as merry as an elf's. His lavender shirt seemed molded to his powerful physique.

Outside his shirt and under his tie, he wore a gold chain with what looked like two mismatched metal objects attached to it.

The cop at the door, who was nearing retirement, grinned and feigned a prizefighter's stance with him. When he walked through the tables, people shook his hand, pointed him out to each other as a celebrity; the bartender shouted out, 'Hey, Tommy, Riddick Bowe was just in here looking for you! He needs some pointers!'

Tommy sipped a whiskey sour at the bar, with one polished loafer on the rail, his smile always in place, his face turned toward the crowd, as though the collective din that rose from it was an extension of the adulation that had rolled over him in a validating crescendo many years ago, when thousands in a sweaty auditorium chanted, 'Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im, Bobalouba! Hook 'im, Bobalouba!'

He gazed at the Caluccis' table with goodwill, bought a round for the bar, dotted a shrimp cocktail with Tabasco sauce, and ate it with a spoon like ice cream.

Then one of Max's people, a pale, lithe Neapolitan hood named Sal Palacio, walked up to him, his palms open, a question mark in the center of his face.

'We got a problem, Tommy?' he said.

'Not with me you don't,' Tommy answered, his dentures showing stiffly with his smile.

'Because Max and Bobo are wondering what you're doing here, since it ain't your regular place, you hear what I'm saying?'

Tommy looked at a spot on the wall, his eyelids fluttering. 'I need a passport in New Orleans these days?' he said.

'They said to tell you they got no hard feelings. They're sorry things ain't worked out, they're sorry you're sick, they don't want people holding no grudges.'

Tommy cocked his fists playfully; Sal's face popped like a rubber band.

'Man, don't do that,' he said.

'Take it easy, kid,' Tommy said, brushing Sal's stomach with his knuckles. 'You want a drink?'

'I got to ask you to walk into the washroom with me.'