DR07 - Dixie City Jam

  The first address was a half block from the beach. The owners were elderly people who had moved recently from Omaha and had opened a specialty store that featured Christian books and records. They had bought the building two years ago from a man who had operated a recording studio at that address, but he had gone into bankruptcy and had since died.

  I had a telephone number for the next address, which was in Pass Christian. I called before getting back on the highway; a recorded voice told me the number was no longer in service.

  Thanks, Hippo.

  I called his house to ask about the source of his information. His wife said he had left and she didn't know when he would be back. Did she know where he was?

  'Why do you want to know?' she asked.

  'It's a police matter, Mrs. Bimstine.'

  'Do you get paid for solving your own problems? Or do you hire consultants?'

  'Did I do something to offend you?'

  She paused before she spoke again. 'Somebody called from the hospital. Tommy Lonighan's in the emergency room. He wanted to see Hippo.'

  'The emergency room? I saw Lonighan just a few hours ago.'

  'Before or after he was shot?'

  She hung up.

  It was starting to rain when I drove into Gulfport to check the next address. The sky was gray now, and the beach was almost empty. The tide was out, and the water was green and calm and dented with the rain, but in the distance you could see a rim of cobalt along the horizon and, in the swells, the triangular, leathery backs of stingrays that had been kicked in by a storm.

  I was running out of time. It was almost five o'clock, and many of the stores were closing for the weekend. At an outdoor pay phone on the beach, I called the 800 number for Federal Express and asked for the location of the largest Fed Ex station in the area.

  There was only one, and it was in Gulfport. The clerk at the station was young and nervous and kept telling me that I should talk to his supervisor, who would be back soon..

  'It's an easy question. Which of your customers sends the greatest volume of express packages overseas?' I said.

  'I don't feel comfortable with this, Officer. I'm sorry,' he said, a pained light in his eyes.

  'I respect your integrity. But would you feel comfortable if somebody dies because we have to wait on your supervisor?'

  He went into the back and returned with a flat, cardboard envelope in his hand. He set it on the counter.

  'The guy owns a music business in Biloxi,' he said. 'He sends a lot of stuff to Germany and France.'

  '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.'

  'Hey, get this kid,' Tommy said to the people standing around him. 'Sal, you don't got a girlfriend?'

  'It ain't funny, Tommy.'

  Tommy pulled back his coat lapels, lifted his coattails, slapped his pockets, turned in a circle.

  'Sal, you want to put your hand in my crotch?' he asked.

  'You're a fucking lunatic,' he answered, and walked away.

  But the Caluccis were becoming more and more nervous, self-conscious, convinced that each time Lonighan spoke into a cluster of people at the bar and they laughed uproariously, the Caluccis were the butt of the joke.

  Max stood up from his chair, a bread stick in one hand, a pitcher of sangria in the other, working his neck against the starch in his collar.

  'Hey, Tommy,' he said, over the heads of people at the other tables. 'You don't want to have a drink with your friends, you crazy guy?'

  Tommy walked toward the Calucci table, still smiling, a dream-like luster in his eyes, his cheeks glowing from a fresh shave. He patted Max on the shoulders, pressed him into his chair, bent down and whispered in his ear, as though he were confiding in an old friend.

  Few people noticed Tommy's left hand biting into the back of Max's neck or the charged and fearful light in Max's eyes, or Tommy raising his right knee and slipping a .38 one inch from the cloth holster strapped to his calf.

  Then the conversation at the other tables died; people stopped
eating and became immobile in their chairs, as though they were part of a film winding down on a reel; waiters set down their trays and remained motionless in the aisles. Tommy pushed Max's face into his plate as though he were bending the tension out of a spring.

  The cop at the door had stepped inside out of the rain. He stared dumbfounded at Lonighan.

  'Walk back outside, Pat. Or I pop him right now. I swear to God I will,' Tommy said.

  'You're having some kind of breakdown, Tommy. This ain't your way,' Sal Palacio said.

  'Put your piece in the pitcher, Sal. You other two fucks do the same,' Tommy said.

  Sal and the other two bodyguards dropped their pistols into the sangria. Tommy twisted the barrel of the .38 into the soft place behind Max's ear and clicked back the hammer.

  'This guy here, the one with the linguine in his face, him and his brother been killing the colored dealers in the projects,' he said. 'You think the city's shit now, wait till you see what it's like when the Caluccis got the whole dope trade to themselves.'

  'Tommy, you're taking us all over the edge here,' the cop at the door said, his mouth parting dryly after his words had stopped.

  'Hey, Pat, tell Nate Baxter I just fucked his meal ticket,' Tommy said, and pulled the trigger.

  Max's mouth opened sideways on his plate, like that of a fish that had been thrown hard upon the bank. Tommy pulled the trigger again, with people screaming now, this time the barrel a half inch from the crown of Max's skull. A tuft of Max's hair jumped as though it had been touched by a puff of wind.

  Then, with Bobo under the table and the cop drawing his weapon, Tommy went through the curtained hallway behind him, stepped inside the men's room, and bolted the door.

  For some reason he did it in a toilet stall, seated on top of the stool, with his trousers still on, the revolver pointed awkwardly toward his throat. The impact of the round wedged his head into the corner of the stall; the recoil sent the .38 skittering in a red trail across the tiles; the hemorrhage from the wound covered his chest like a scarlet bib. Later the coroner lifted the gold chain from his neck with a fountain pen. Attached to it were a lead-colored army dog tag and a small gold boxing glove from the Golden Gloves of 1951.

  I wondered if Tommy heard the roar of the crowd just as his thumb tightened inside the trigger housing, or the echo of Chinese bugles and small arms through a frozen arroyo, or perhaps the squeal of an ice truck's brakes on a street full of children in the Channel; or if he stared into the shadows, seeking the epiphany that had always eluded him, and saw only more shadows and motes of spinning dust and the graffiti scratched into the paint on the door, until he realized, just as the hammer snapped down on the brass cartridge, that the eruption of pain and fear and blood in his chest was simply the terminus of an ongoing war that he had waged for a lifetime against his own heart.

  Later I mentioned my thoughts to Hippo.

  'Don't complicate that dumb mick, Dave. He even screwed up his own suicide,' he answered. Then, with his face turned so I couldn't see his eyes, 'He apologized before he checked out. Just him and me in the room. Just like when we were boys.'

  And he walked away.

  * * *

  chapter thirty-one

  The music store was located between an auto garage and a boarded-up café on a nondescript street north of Biloxi. It was still raining; only two cars were parked on the street, and the sidewalks were empty. A block farther north, there was a string of gray clapboard and Montgomery Ward brick houses, their lawns choked with weeds. A neon beer sign burned in the gloom above a pool hall that had virtually no patrons. The street reminded me of a painting I had once seen by Adolf Hitler; it contained buildings but no people. It was the kind of neighborhood where one's inadequacies would never find harsh comparisons.

  Was this music store, with cracked and taped windows, moldy cardboard cartons piled by the front door, the headquarters of Will Buchalter, a mail who moved like a political disease through a dozen countries?

  I remembered a story about the Israeli agents who captured Adolf Eichmann as he was returning from his job in an automobile plant somewhere in South America. One of the agents was young and could not quite accept the fact that he was now face-to-face with the man who had murdered his parents.

  'What job do you perform at the auto plant?' he asked.

  'I'm one of the chrome polishers. We polish all the chrome surfaces on the new automobiles,' Eichmann answered.

  According to the story, the agent began to weep.

  The door to the store was locked, but I could see a man moving around behind a counter. The wind was blowing a wet, acrid stench through the space between the buildings. I tapped on the glass.

  The man inside waved his hand negatively. I tapped again. He walked toward me, saying the word Closed so I could read his lips. He wore a sleeveless flannel shirt and black jeans that sculpted his sex. His blond hair was coated and waved with gel, his white arms wrapped with tattoos of green and red dragons.

  I shook the doorknob when he tried to walk away.

  'I'm a friend of Will's,' I said.

  'He's gone,' the man said through the glass.

  'Open up. I've got to leave him a message.'

  'Sorry, we're closed. I don't know how else to say it.'

  'Where's Marie?'

  'Come back Monday,' he said, and dropped the Venetian blinds down the glass.

  I got back in my truck and drove three blocks up the street. Then I circled back, parked at the end of the alley, and walked toward the rear of the store under the eaves of the buildings. A rusted-out trash barrel was smoldering in the rain, and again I smelled a moist, acrid odor that was like the smell of a dead bat in an incinerator.

  Just as I reached inside my raincoat for my .45, he stepped out the back door with a sack of trash in his hands. I slipped my hand back out of my coat and fixed a button with it.

  'What's with you?' he said.

  'I got to be back at the halfway house by dark, you hear what I'm saying?'

  'No.'

  'Maybe you think you're doing your job, but you're starting to piss me off,' I said.

  'Excuse me.'

  'Look, I was supposed to connect with him when I got out. I just had six fucking years of putting up with smart-ass watermelon pickers. I'm begging you, buddy, don't fuck up my day any worse than it already has been.'

  'All right, I'm sorry, but it don't change anything. I got to lock up. Will ain't here. Okay? See the man Monday.'

  He dropped the paper bag into the trash barrel and turned to go back inside. I shoved him hard between the shoulder blades, followed him inside, and laid the muzzle of the .45 against the back of his neck.

  'Get down on your knees,' I said.

  'I don't know who you are but—'

  'You've got a serious hearing problem,' I said, kicked him behind the knee, and pushed him into the counter. His eyes widened with pain when his knees hit the floor.

  'Where is he?' I said.

  'He don't tell me that kind of stuff. I work for him, he don't work for me. Who are you, man?'

  'What do you care, as long as you get to live?'

  'I just finished a bit myself. Why you twisting me? Take your shit to Will.'

  'But you're the only guy around,' I said. 'Which means you're all out of luck.'

  I pulled my cuffs off my belt and hooked up his wrists. He was facedown now, his eyelids fluttering against the dust and oil on the floor. The rain and the smoke from the trash barrel blew through the back door.

  'What's that smell?' I said.

  He bit down on his bottom lip.

  I glanced around the store. The interior was cluttered with boxes of old seventy-eight records. In one corner was a glassed-in sound booth with an instrument panel and an elevated microphone inside. A mop inside a pail of dirty water was propped against a closed side door. I pulled back the slide on the .45 and eased a round into the chamber.

  'I bought this in Bring Cash Alley in Saigon for twenty-
five dollars,' I said. 'No registration, completely cold, you get my drift?'

  His eyes squeezed shut, then opened again. 'Don't do this to me, man. Please,' he said.

  My hand was tight and sweating on the knurled grips of the .45. I looked through the front window at the rain falling in the street. In the distance a stuck car horn was blaring, a stabbing, unrelieved sound in the inner ear like fingernails on a blackboard.

  I eased the hammer back into place, clicked on the safety, and slipped the .45 back into my belt holster.

  'I'm a police officer,' I said. 'Do you believe me when I say that?'

  'Bust me. I ain't arguing.'

  'But I'm beyond my parameters here. Do you know what that means?'

  His eyes were filled with confusion.

  'Will Buchalter and his sister have hurt my family,' I said. 'So we're not working on conventional rules anymore. Do you believe me when I say that?'

  'Yes, sir. You got no trouble from me.'

  'So what's that smell?'

  'I was just trying to clean up… The guy gets crazy sometimes… He started hitting her with his fists for no reason, then he went in there with some scissors. I didn't have anything to do with it, man.'

  'Hit who?'

  'The broad… I thought that's why you were here. The broad he's been holding.' He stared at the look on my face. 'Oh shit, man, this ain't my doing. You got to believe that.'

  I scraped the pail and mop out of the way with my foot and opened the side door.

  She was tied to a chair with clothesline, her mouth and eyes wrapped with silver tape, her reddish hair shorn and hacked to the scalp. One nostril was caked with dried blood, her neck and shoulders marbled with bruises the color of pomegranates. She turned her head toward my sound, like a blind person, her nostrils dilating with fear.

  'Martina?' I said, my heart dropping.

  She tried to talk through the tape.

  I removed it first from her eyes, then her mouth. Her right eye was swollen shut, the inside of her lips gashed, her teeth pink, as though they had been painted with Mercurochrome. I opened my Puma knife and sliced the rope from the arms and back of the chair. She held me around the waist while I stroked her shorn head.