DR07 - Dixie City Jam

  It seemed the stuff of an Appalachian tent revival where the reborn dipped their arms into boxes filled with poisonous snakes.

  But the preacher's conclusion that we were dealing with a demonic incarnation was neither eccentric nor very original and, as with some other cases I've worked, was as good an explanation about aberrant human behavior as any.

  Ten years ago, when Clete and I worked Homicide at NOPD, we investigated a case that even today no one can satisfactorily explain.

  A thirty-five-year-old small contractor was hired to build a sun-porch on a home in an old residential neighborhood off Canal. He was well thought of, nice-looking, married only once, attended church weekly with his wife and son, and had never been in trouble of any kind. At least that we knew of.

  The family who had contracted him to build the addition on their house were Rumanian gypsies who had grown wealthy as slum-lords in the black districts off Magazine. Their late-Victorian home had polished oak floors, ceiling-high windows, small balconies dripping with orange passion vine, a pool, and a game room with a sunken hot tub.

  They thought well enough of the contractor to leave him alone with their fifteen- and twelve-year-old daughters.

  The father should have been gone for the day, checking out his rental property miles away. Instead, he came home unexpectedly for lunch. Someone waited for him behind the living room door, then fired a .22 Magnum round into his ear. The bullet exited his opposite cheek and embedded in the far wall.

  No one heard the shot. Around one in the afternoon neighbors saw the contractor drive away in the father's Buick. Three hours later the mother returned from shopping and found both her daughters drowned in the hot tub. They were bound ankle and wrist with electrician's tape; both had been raped.

  The contractor pawned his tools, his watch, and his wedding ring at three different stops between New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, where he was arrested after a call he made to his wife was traced to a motel there. Clete Purcel and I transported him back to New Orleans from the Pensacola city jail.

  He was likable; there was nothing of the con artist about him; he was well-mannered and didn't use profanity; he never complained about riding handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat.

  At his trial he maintained that he'd had a blackout, that he had no memory of the events that took place in the house off Canal, but a sense of terror, with no apparent source, had caused him to flee across I-10 to the Florida panhandle.

  Prosecution lawyers, state psychologists, and news reporters came up with every script possible to explain the contractor's behavior: He was a clandestine user of LSD; he had been a marine door gunner in Vietnam; he was badly in debt and teetering on a nervous breakdown. Or, more disturbingly, he had once been seen at a shopping mall with a high school girl from his neighborhood whose strangled and decomposed body was found nude in a swamp north of Lake Pontchartrain. On her ankle was a tattoo of a pentagram.

  All the evidence against him was circumstantial. None of his fingerprints were in the game room where the girls died, nor on the electrician's tape that was used to bind them. Also the tape was not the same brand that he always bought from a wholesale outlet. There were no skin particles under the dead girls' fingernails.

  He probably would have walked if he could have afforded a better lawyer. But the jury convicted him of second-degree murder, perhaps less out of certainty of his guilt than fear that he was guilty and would kill or rape again if set free.

  His friends and family were numb with disbelief. The pastor from his church raised money to begin an appeal of the verdict. His parishioners put together twenty thousand dollars for the conviction of the real killer. Two attorneys from the ACLU took over the contractor's case.

  Clete and I went back over the crime scene a dozen times. We must have interviewed a hundred people. We decided that if we couldn't prove this man conclusively guilty, then we would prove him innocent.

  We did neither. All we ever determined was that there was a two-year gap in the contractor's younger life during which he had left behind no paperwork or record of any kind, as though he had eased sideways into another dimension. We also concluded, with a reasonable degree of certainty, at least to ourselves, that no else entered or left that house, besides the father, from the time the contractor showed up to work and the time he fled the crime scene in the Buick.

  It became the kind of case that eventually you close the file on and hope the right man is in jail. Clete and I were both glad when we heard that the lower court's decision had been overturned and that a new trial date was to be set soon. Maybe someone else could prove or disprove what we could not.

  Three days later, a psychotic inmate at Angola, a big stripe, attacked the contractor with a cane knife and severed his spinal cord with one blow across the back of the neck. The body was lying in state at a funeral home in Metairie when the mother and aunts of the murdered girls burst into the room, screaming hysterically like Shakespearean hags, and flung bags of urine on the corpse.

  For a long time I had a recurrent dream about the contractor. He awoke in the blackness of his coffin, then realized that tons of earth had been bulldozed and packed down on top of him. He couldn't move his shoulders or twist his body against the hard, sculpted silk contours of the coffin; his screams went no farther than the coffin's lid, which hovered an inch from his mouth.

  As time passed and his nails and eyebrows and hair grew long and filled the air cavity around him, and he realized that his death was to be prolonged in ways that no mortal thought imaginable, he began to plan ways that he could burn himself even more deeply, more painfully, into our memory.

  He would reveal to the rest of us a secret about his soul that would forever make us think differently about our common origins. With nails that were yellow and sharp as talons he cut his confession into the silk liner above him, his mouth red with gloat as he wounded us once more with a dark knowledge about ourselves.

  But those are simply images born of my dreams. Maybe the contractor was innocent. Or maybe in the murder house he began to enact a fantasy, tried to lure one of the girls into a seduction, and found himself involved in a kaleidoscopic nightmare whose consequences filled him with terror and from which he couldn't extricate himself.

  I don't know. Ten months on the firing line in Vietnam, twenty years in law enforcement, and a long excursion into a nocturnal world of neon-streaked rain and whiskey-soaked roses have made me no wiser about human nature than I had been at age eighteen.

  But Brother Oswald had made another remark that forced me to reexamine a basic syllogism that I had been operating on: 'You think the real problem is y'all don't have no idea of what you're dealing with?'

  I had not been able to find any record anywhere on a man named Will Buchalter.

  Why? Perhaps because that was not his name.

  I had assumed from the beginning that Buchalter was not an alias, that the man who had violated my wife and home was a relative of Jon Matthew Buchalter, a founder of the Silver Shirts. It was a natural assumption to make. Would someone choose the name of Hitler or Mussolini as an alias if he wished to avoid drawing attention to himself?

  Maybe the man who called himself Will Buchalter had thrown me a real slider and I had swung on it.

  It was time to have a talk with Hippo Bimstine again.

  But I didn't get the chance. At seven the next morning I went to an Al-Anon meeting to get some help for Bootsie that I wasn't capable of providing myself, then two minutes after I walked into my office Lucinda Bergeron called from New Orleans.

  'Hey, Lucinda. What's up?' I said.

  'The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Department just nailed a mule with a suitcase full of Mexican tar in his trunk. This'll be his fourth time down. He says he'll do anybody he can for some slack.'

  'So?'

  'The dope drop's in New Orleans. That's why Baton Rouge called us. This guy says the tar's going into the projects.'

  'I'm still not with you.'


  'He says the Calucci brothers are dealing the tar. It looks like they're making a move on the projects. Anyway, the guy says he can do them.'

  'I doubt it.'

  'Why?'

  'Max and Bobo always have three or four intermediaries between themselves and whatever they're in.'

  'I had the impression you thought they were connected with Lonighan and that Lonighan was mixed up with this psychopath who keeps coming around your house.'

  'That's right.'

  'So do you have a better lead?'

  'Not really.'

  'Good. I'll meet you at the jail in two hours. Also, I'm a little pissed, with you this morning, Mr. Robicheaux.'

  'Oh?'

  'You can't seem to stay out of other people's business.'

  'What is it now?'

  'I'll tell you when I see you,' she said, and hung up.

  Lucinda really knew how to set the hook. All the way across the Atchafalaya Basin, on a beautiful, wind-kissed fall day when I should have been looking at the bays and canals and flooded cypress and willow trees along I-10, I kept wondering what new bagful of spiders she would like to fit over my head.

  She met me in the parking lot at the lockup. She wore a pair of white slacks and a purple-flowered blouse, and her hair was brushed out full on her shoulders. She had one hand on her hip and a pout on her face. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist.

  'Did you stop for a late breakfast?' she said.

  'No, I didn't. I came straight from the office. Get off it, Lucinda.'

  'Get off it?'

  'Yeah, I'm not up to being somebody's pincushion today.'

  'My son is back home. He told me you made some inquiries about the company I keep.'

  'No, I didn't.'

  'He said you seemed to take an interest in the fact that I had a white man at my house.'

  'Kids get things turned around. He volunteered that information on his own.'

  'Do you think it should be of some concern to you, sir?'

  'No. But one troubling thought did occur to me.'

  'Yes?'

  'Was it Nate Baxter?'

  She looked like a wave of nausea had just swept through her system.

  'Do you stay up all night thinking of things like this to say to people?' she said.

  'I've known him for twenty years. He'll try to coerce a woman in any way he can. If he hasn't done it to you yet, he will later. He's a sonofabitch and you know it.'

  'That doesn't mean I'd allow him in my house.'

  'Okay, Lucinda, I apologize. But I know what he did to some women in the First District.'

  'I'll buy you a cup of coffee later and tell you about Nate Baxter. In the meantime, our man is waiting on us.'

  His name was Waylon Rhodes, from Mount Olive, Alabama; he had skin the color of putty, hands dotted with jailhouse art, a narrow, misshapen head, and a wide slit of a mouth, whose lips on one side looked like they had been pressed flat by a hot iron. His premature gray hair was grizzled and brushed back into faint ducktails; his eyes jittered like a speed addict's. Inside his left arm was a long, blue tattoo of a bayonet or perhaps a sword.

  Lucinda and I sat across the wood table from him in the interrogation room. He smoked one cigarette after another, crumpling up an empty pack, ripping the cellophane off a fresh one. The backs of his fingers were yellow with nicotine; his breath was like an ashtray.

  'There's no reason to be nervous, partner,' I said.

  'Y'all want me to do the Caluccis. That ain't reason to be nervous?' he said.

  'You don't have to do anybody. Not for us, anyway. Your beef's with the locals,' I said.

  'Don't tell me that, man. Y'all got a two-by-four up my ass.'

  'Watch your language, please,' I said.

  He smoked with his elbow propped on the table, taking one puff after another, like he was hitting on a reefer, sometimes pressing a yellow thumb anxiously against his bottom lip and teeth.

  'They're dangerous people, man,' he said. 'They tied a guy down on a table once and cut thirty pounds of meat out of him while he was still alive.'

  'Here's the only deal you're getting today,' Lucinda said. 'We can pull the plug on this interview any time you want. You say the word and we're gone. Then you can have visitors from two to four every Sunday afternoon.'

  'What she means, Waylon, is we made a special effort to see you. If this is all a waste of time, tell us now.'

  He mashed out his cigarette and began clenching one hand on top of the other. Make him talk about something else, I thought.

  'Where'd you get the tattoo of the sword?' I said.

  'It's a bayonet. I was in the Airborne. Hunnerd and first.'

  'Your jacket says you were in the Navy and did time at Portsmouth brig.'

  'Then it's wrong.'

  'What can you give us on Max and Bobo?' Lucinda said.

  'They're dealing.'

  'They're going to be at the drop?' I said.

  'Are you kidding?' he said.

  'Then how are you going to do them, Waylon?' I said.

  He began to chew on the flattened corner of his mouth. His eyes jittered as if they were being fed by an electrical current.

  'A whack's going down. A big one,' he said.

  'Yeah?' I said.

  'Yeah.'

  'Who's getting clipped, Waylon?'

  'A couple of guineas were talking in Mobile when I picked up the dope.'

  'You're not being helpful, Waylon,' Lucinda said.

  'There's nig… There's black people mixed up in it. New Orleans is a weird fucking town. What do I know?'

  'You'd better know something, partner, or your next jolt's going to be in the decades,' I said.

  'They're going to clip some guy that ain't supposed to be clipped. That's what these dagos were saying. That's all I know, man.'

  'When you think of something else, give us a call,' I said.

  He ran his hand through his grizzled hair. His palm was shiny with sweat.

  'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.

  'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.

  He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'

  'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.

  'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'

  'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your memory clears up.'

  A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the sunlight.

  'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.

  'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or Aryan supremacists of some kind.'

  'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'

  'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'

  'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'

  'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'

  'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not vague.'

  I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.

  'Why the silence?' she asked.

  'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'

  'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'

  I nodded.

  'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.

  'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter, Lucinda.'

&nb
sp; 'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon seeds and giving whitey a lot of "yas-suhs." He said I'd never have to do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that for charm?'

  'Nate's a special kind of guy.'

  'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'

  'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from Internal Affairs could talk to her.'

  She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her fingers.

  'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to death. What do you think about that?'

  'Did she go up the road for it?'

  'Yes.'

  'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'

  She stood up and walked cooly to a trash can, dropped her paper cup and unfinished pastry in it, and sat back down on the stone bench. Her flowered blouse puffed with air in the breeze.

  'Don't try to stonewall me about this contract stuff,' she said. 'Who is it the greaseballs don't clip?'

  'Politicians.'

  'Who else?'

  'Ordinary people who are on the square. Particularly influential ones.'

  'Come on, Robicheaux.'

  'Would you not call me by my last name, please? It reminds me of the army.'

  'Who else?'

  'They don't do made guys without the commission's consent.'

  'That's it?'

  'Cops,' I said.

  She looked me evenly in the eyes, biting down softly on the corner of her lip.

  That night I dreamed of a desolate coastline that looked like layered white clay. On it was a solitary tree whose curled, dead leaves were frozen against an electrical blue sky. The ocean should have been teeming with fish, but it, like the land, had been stricken, its chemical green depths empty of all life except the crew of a German submarine, who burst to the surface with emergency air tanks on their backs, their bone-hard, white faces bright with oil. They gathered under the tree on the beach, looking over their new estate, and I realised then that they had the jowls and mucus-clotted snouts of animals.