DR07 - Dixie City Jam

  The family was celebrating the birthday of a little boy and eating lunch on redwood picnic tables in the backyard. Balloons were tied to the trees and lawn furniture, and the tables were covered with platters of pasta and cream pastry, bowls of red sausage, beaded pitchers of lemonade and iced tea. Max Calucci sat in the midst of it all, in undershirt and slacks, the pads of hair on his brown shoulders as fine as a monkey's.

  I had to hand it to him. His expression never changed when he saw me at the garden gate. He cut pieces of cake and handed them to the children, continued to tell a story in Italian to a fat woman in black and an elderly man on a thin walking cane, then excused himself, rubbed a little boy on the head, and walked toward me with a glass of lemonade in his hand.

  'You got business with me?' he asked.

  'If you've got business with Clete Purcel, I do.'

  'He can't talk for himself?'

  'You better hope he doesn't, Max.'

  'Is this more hard guy stuff? You got your shovel with you?'

  'Nope.'

  His eyes were as black and liquid as wet paint.

  'You got some kind of deal you want to cut? That why you're here?' he said.

  'Maybe.'

  He drank from his lemonade, his eyes never leaving mine. Then he pushed opened the short iron gate with his foot.

  'It's a nice day, a special occasion. I got no bad feelings on a nice day like this. Eat a piece of cake,' he said.

  'We can talk out here.'

  'What, you too good to sit down at my nephew's birthday party?' he said.

  I ate a custard-filled eclair in a sunny spot by the garden wall. The air was dry and warm, and the breeze blew through the banana trees along the wall and ruffled the water in an aboveground swimming pool. The guests around the tables were his relatives and family friends—working-class people who owned small grocery stores and cafés, carried hod, belonged to the plumbers' union, made the stations of the cross each Friday in Lent, ate and drank at every meal as though it were a pagan celebration, married once, and wore widow black with the commitment of nuns.

  Max combed his hair back over his bald pate at the table, cleaned the comb with his fingers, then stuck the stub of a filter-tipped cigar in his mouth and motioned me toward a gazebo on the far side of the yard. The latticework was covered with purple trumpet vine; inside, the glass-topped table and white-painted iron chairs were deep in shadow, cold to the touch.

  Max lit his cigar and let the smoke trail out of his mouth. His shoulders were brown and oily-looking against the white straps of his undershirt.

  'Say it,' he said.

  'I hear you and Bobo put out an open contract on Clete.'

  'You get that from Lonighan?'

  'Who cares where it came from?'

  'Lonighan's a welsher and a bum.'

  I leaned forward and rubbed my hands together.

  'I'm worried about my friend, Max.'

  'You should. He's got a radioactive brain or something.'

  'I'm not here to defend what he does. I just want you guys to take the hit off him.'

  'He's the victim? Have you seen my fucking car? It ain't a car no more. It's a block of concrete.'

  'Come on, Max. You guys started it when you leaned on his girlfriend.'

  'That's all past history. She paid the loan, she paid the back vig. All sins forgiven.'

  'Here's the deal. You and Bobo tried to take out Nate Baxter. I think you probably did this without consent of the Commission. What if some reliable information ends up in their hands about a couple of guys in New Orleans trying to cowboy a police administrator?'

  'That's what you got to work my crank with?' he said.

  'Yeah, I guess so.'

  'Then you got jack shit.'

  'What's going to make you happy, Max?'

  He smiled. I felt my pulse swelling in my throat; I rubbed the top of my knuckles with my palm. I kept my eyes flat and looked at the curtain of trumpet vine that puffed in the breeze.

  'I want the two hundred large Tommy Lonighan owes me and Bobo,' he said. 'That fucking mick is gonna die and take the debt to the grave. You twist him right, we get our money, then I don't have no memory about troubles with Clete Purcel.'

  'Big order, Max.'

  'You know anything easy? Like they say, life's a bitch, then you get to be dead for a long time.'

  The ash from his cigar blew on my slacks. I brushed it off, then put on my sunglasses and looked out into the sunlight.

  'What, you sentimental about Lonighan or something?' he said.

  'No.'

  'That's good. Because he's been jobbing you. Him and Hippo Bimstine, both.'

  'Oh?'

  'That's a surprise? People like you rip me up, Robicheaux. You think Jews are martyrs, the Irish are fun guys singing "Rosie O'Grady" on the corner, and Italians are colostomy bags. Tell me I'm wrong.'

  'You were going to say something about Tommy Blue Eyes?'

  'Yeah, he got his fat mick mush full of booze and was laughing about how you trust Hippo Bimstine and think he's big shit because he's got all these liberal causes.'

  'I see.'

  'You see? I don't think you see shit. Lonighan says Hippo stole some stuff out of the public library about that Nazi sub so you wouldn't find out what's inside it.'

  'No kidding?'

  'Yeah, no fucking kidding.'

  I leaned forward and picked at the calluses on my palm. The breeze was drowsy with the smell of chrysanthemums and dead birthday candles.

  'You and I have something in common,' I said.

  'I don't think so.'

  'I went down on a murder beef once. Did you know that?'

  'I'm supposed to be impressed?'

  'Here's the trade, Max. Take the contract off Clete and I stay out of your life.'

  'You ain't in my life.'

  'Here's the rest of it.'

  'I ain't interested,' he said. 'I tell you what. It's my nephew's birthday, you came out to my mother's house and showed respect, you didn't act like the drunk fuck everybody says you are. That means I'm letting all this stuff slide, and that includes what you done to me out at Lonighan's place. So you can tell dick-brain the score's even, he's getting a free pass he don't deserve, I got businesses to run and I don't have time for this shit. Are we clear on this now?'

  'I hope you're a man of your word, Max.'

  'Fuck you and get outta here.'

  When I opened the gate and let myself out, I noticed a tangle of ornamental iron roses tack-welded in the center of the pikes. The cluster was uneven where one rose had been snapped loose from its base. I rubbed the ball of my thumb over the sharp edges of the broken stem and looked back at Max. His eyes had never left me. He rotated an unlit cigar in the center of his mouth.

  The AA meeting is held on the second floor of a brick church that was used as a field hospital for Confederate wounded in 1863, then later as a horse stable by General Banks's Union cavalry. Outside, the streets are wet and cool and empty, the storefronts shuttered under the wood colonnades, the trees still dripping with rain against a sky that looks like a red-tinged ink wash.

  It's a fifth step meeting, one in which people talk about stepping across a line and admitting to God, themselves, and another person the exact nature of their wrongs. For many, it's not an easy moment.

  Some of them are still zoned out, their eyes glazed with residual fear; those sent by the court try to hide the resentment and boredom in their faces; others seem to have the exuberance and confidence of airplane wing walkers.

  Bootsie sits next to me, her hands folded tightly in her lap. She showered after supper and put on makeup and a new yellow dress, but in her cheeks are pale discolorations, like slivers of ice, and there's a thin sheen of perspiration at her temples.

  'You don't have to say anything. Just listen,' I whisper to her.

  They start to unload. Some of it seems silly—overdue library books, cavalier attitudes toward bills—then it turns serious and you feel embarrassed
and voyeuristic; you find your eyes dropping to the floor, and you try not to be affected by the level of pain in the speaker's voice.

  The details sometimes make the soul wince; then you remember some of the things you did, or tried to do, or could have done, while drunk and you realize that what you hear in this room differs only in degree from the moral and psychological insanity that characterized your own life.

  Only one speaker makes use of euphemism. That's because he's told his story before and he knows that not everyone in the room will be able to handle it. He was eighteen years old, ripped on reefer and pills, when he pushed a blindfolded VC suspect out the door of a Huey at five hundred feet; he so impressed the ARVN and American officer onboard that they had him do it twice more the same afternoon.

  Bootsie's eyes are filled with hidden thoughts. I slide my hand down her forearm and take her palm in mine. Her eyes move to the doorway and the darkened stairway at the front of the room. Her breath catches in her throat.

  'What is it?' I ask.

  Her eyes close, then open, like a doll's.

  'A man at the door. Dave, I think—'

  'What?'

  'It was him.'

  I get up from the folding chair and walk across the oak floor to the front of the room. I step through the open door, walk down the darkened stairway. The door to the street is open, and rain is blowing out of the trees onto the lawn. The violet air smells of wet stone and burning leaves.

  I go back upstairs, and Bootsie looks at me anxiously. I shake my head.

  Before the meeting ends, it's obvious she wants to speak. She raises her chin, her lips part. But the moment passes, and she lowers her eyes to her lap.

  Later the room is empty. I turn out the lights and prepare to lock up. In the hallway downstairs she puts her arms around me and presses her face into my chest. I can feel her back shaking under my hands. A loose garbage can lid is bouncing down the street in the darkness.

  'I feel so ashamed,' she says. Her face is wet against my shirt.

  I went in to work early and looked at the notes I had taken during my conversation with the lieutenant at the Toronto Police Department.

  It was time to try something different. On my yellow legal pad I made a list of aliases that Will Buchalter might have used. As a rule, the aliases used by a particular individual retain similarities in terms of initials or sound and phonetic value, or perhaps even cultural or ethnic identification, in all probability because most career criminals have a libidinal fascination with themselves.

  I tried W. B. Kuhn, William Coon, Will Kuntz, Bill Koontz, then a dozen other combinations, making use of the same first and last names, in the same way that you would wheel pari-mutuel numbers in trying to hit a quiniela or a perfecta at the racetrack.

  But more than a name it was a literary allusion written by the dead Canadian detective on the barroom napkin that gave me a brooding sense I almost did not want to confirm.

  I began writing out the word Schwert with the combinations of first names and initials that I had already listed. The sheriff walked into my office with a cup of coffee in his hand and looked over my shoulder.

  'That looks like alphabet soup,' he said. 'You going to run that through the NCIC?'

  'Yeah, I want to go through the feds in New Orleans, too.'

  'It can't hurt.' He gazed through the window at a black trusty in jailhouse issue sawing a yellowed palm frond from the tree trunk.

  'You don't sound enthusiastic,' I said.

  'I've got bad news. The tail we put on your girlfriend… She went through the front door of a supermarket in Lafayette, then out the back and poof… Gone.'

  'Who was the tail?'

  'Expidee Chatlin.'

  I pressed my fingers into my temples.

  'I didn't have anybody else available,' the sheriff said. 'I don't think it would have come out any different, anyway, Dave. Your gal's mighty slick.'

  'I'd really appreciate your not calling her my gal or girlfriend.'

  'Any way you cut it, she's one smart broad and she took us over the hurdles. That's just the way it plays out sometimes.'

  'Too often.'

  'Sir?'

  I tried to concentrate on my legal pad.

  'You and Bootsie have had a bad time. I don't think you should blame others for it, though,' he said.

  'That wasn't my intention, Sheriff.' I could hear his leather gunbelt creak. I wrote the words William B. Schwert on the pad. He started to walk out of the room, then stopped.

  'What've you got there, exactly?' he said.

  'A Toronto cop wrote something on a napkin before he was found hanging by his ankles with a nine-millimeter round through his eye.' I glanced back at my notes. '"I know he's out there now, flying in the howling storm."'

  'So?'

  'It's from a poem by William Blake. It's about evil. As I remember it, it goes "O Rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm.

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy."'

  'No, you misunderstood me, Dave. I was looking at the name you just wrote down there… Schwert. You never took any German at school?'

  'No.'

  'It means "sword," podna.'

  He drank from his coffee cup and tapped me lightly on the shoulder with the flat of his fist.

  But before I would get anything back from the FBI or the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., Clete Purcel would write history of the New Orleans mob Purcel.

  a new chapter in the and outdo even Clete Purcel.

  * * *

  chapter twenty-five

  Clete had been eating breakfast in Igor's on St. Charles, his porkpie hat tipped down over one eye, when two of Max Calucci's bodyguards came in and sat at the table next to him. They were in a good mood, expansive, joking with the waitress, relaxed in Clete's presence. One of them accidentally knocked his chair into Clete's.

  '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.