Dixie City Jam

chapter thirteen

The window blinds in Sitwell's hospital room were up, and the walls and the sheets on his bed were bright with sunlight. A nurse was emptying Sitwell's bedpan in the toilet, and the deputy who had stood guard on the door was chewing on a toothpick and staring up at a talk show on a television set whose sound was turned off.

'I can't tell you with any certainty when he died,' the doctor said. 'I'd say it was in the last two or three hours, but that's a guess. Actually, I thought he was going to make it.'

Sitwell's head was tilted back on the pillow. His mouth and eyes were open. A yellow liquid had drained out of the plaster and bandages on his face into the whiskers on his throat.

'You want to guess at what caused his death?' I said.

The doctor was a powerfully built, sandy-haired man, a tanned, habitual golf player, who wore greens and protective plastic bags over his feet.

'Look at his right hand,' he said. 'It's clutching the sheet like he was either afraid of something or he was experiencing a painful spasm of some kind.'

'Yes?'

'That's not unusual in itself, so maybe I'm just too imaginative.'

'You're going to have to be a little more exact for me, Doctor.'

He flipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them on his nose, then bent over Sitwell's body.

'Take at look at this,' he said, rotating Sitwell's chin sideways with his thumb. 'You see that red spot in his whiskers, like a big mosquito bite? Come around in the light. Here, right by the jugular.'

'What about it?'

'Look closely.' He used his thumb to brush back the whiskers. 'The skin's torn above the original puncture. You want to know what I think, or had you rather I stay out of your business?'

'Go ahead, Doc, you're doing just fine.'

'I think maybe somebody shoved a hypodermic needle in his throat.'

I rubbed back Sitwell's whiskers with the tips of my fingers. His blood had already drained to the lowest parts of his body, and his skin was cold and rubbery to the touch. The area right above the puncture looked like it had been ripped with an upward motion, like a wood splinter being torn loose from the grain of the skin.

'If someone did put a needle in him, what do you think it might have been loaded with?' I said.

'Air would do it. A bubble can stop up an artery like a cork in a pipe.'

I turned toward the deputy, who was sitting in a chair now, still staring up at the silent talk show on television. His name was Expidee Chatlin, and he had spent most of his years with the department either as a crossing guard at parish elementary schools or escorting prisoners from the drunk tank to guilty court.

'Were you here all night, Expidee?' I asked.

'Sure, what you t'ink, Dave?' He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a thin mustache, and stiff, black hair that no amount of grease seemed capable of flattening on his skull.

'Who came in the room during the night?' I asked.

'Hospital people. They's some ot'er kind working here?'

'What kind of hospital people, Expidee?'

'Nurses, doctors, all the reg'lar people they got working here.' He took a fresh toothpick from his shirt pocket and inserted it in the corner of his mouth. His eyes drifted back up to the television set. The doctor went out into the hall. The nurse began untaping the IV needle from Sitwell's arm. I reached up and punched off the television set.

'Did you leave the door at all, Expidee?' I said.

'I got to go to the bat'room sometimes.'

'Why didn't you want to use the one in the room?'

'I didn't want to wake the guy up.'

'Did you go anyplace else?'

He took the toothpick out of his mouth and put it back in his pocket. His hands were cupped on the arms of the chair.

'Being stuck out there on a wooden chair for twelve hours isn't the best kind of assignment, partner,' I said.

'Come on, Dave…' His eyes cut sideways at the nurse.

'Ma'am, could you leave us alone a minute?' I said.

She walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.

'What about it, podna?' I said.

He was quiet a moment, then he said, 'About six o'clock I went to the cafeteria and had me some eggs. I ax the nurse up at the counter not to let nobody in the room.'

'How long were you gone?'

'Fifteen minutes, maybe. I just didn't t'ink it was gonna be no big deal.'

'Who was the nurse, Expidee?'

'That one just went out… Dave, you gonna put this in my jacket?'

I didn't answer.

'My wife ain't working,' he said. 'I can't get no ot'er job, neither.'

'We've got a dead man on our hands, Expidee.'

'I'm sorry I messed up. What else I'm gonna say?'

There was nothing for it. And I wasn't sure of the cause of death, anyway, or if the deputy's temporary negligence was even a factor.

'If you weren't at the door when you should have been, it was because you went down the hall to use the men's room,' I said.

'Tanks, Dave. I ain't gonna forget it.'

'Don't do something like this again, Expidee.'

'I ain't. I promise. Hey, Dave, you called up the church for that guy?'

'Why do you ask?'

'A man like that try to hurt your family and you call the church for him, that's all right. Yes, suh, that's all right.'

I asked the nurse to come back in. She was in her fifties and had bluish gray hair and a figure like a pigeon's. I asked her if anyone had entered Sitwell's room while Expidee was away from the door.

'I wouldn't know,' she said.

'Did you see anyone?'

'You gentlemen have such an interesting attitude about accountability,' she said. 'Let me see, what exact moment did you have in mind? Do you mean while Expidee was asleep in his chair or wandering the halls?'

'I see. Thank you for your time,' I said.

She flipped the sheet over Chuck Sitwell's face as though she were closing a fly trap, released the blinds, and dropped the room into darkness.

I went to the office and began opening my mail behind my desk. Through the window I could see the fronds on the palm trees by the sidewalk lifting and clattering in the breeze; across the street a black man who sold barbecue lunches was building a fire in an open pit, and the smoke from the green wood spun in the cones of sunlight shining through the oak branches overhead. It wasn't quite yet fall, but the grass was already turning a paler green, the sky a harder, deeper blue, like porcelain, with only a few white clouds on the horizon.

But I couldn't concentrate on either my mail or the beautiful day outside. Regardless whether the autopsy showed that Charles Sitwell had died of complications from gunshot wounds or a hypodermic needle thrust into his throat, Will Buchalter was out there somewhere, with no conduit to him, outside the computer, running free, full-bore, supercharged by his own sexual cruelty.

What was there to go on, I asked myself.

Virtually nothing.

No, music.

He knew something about historical jazz. He even knew how to hold rare seventy-eights and to place them in the record rack with the opening in their dustcovers turned toward the wall.

Could a sadist love music that had its origins in Island hymns and the three-hundred-year spiritual struggle of a race to survive legal and economic servitude?

I doubted it. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

Buchalter was one of those whose life was invested in the imposition of control and power over others. Like the self-serving academic who enjoys the possession of an esoteric knowledge for the feeling of superiority it gives him over others, or the pseudojournalist who is drawn to the profession because it allows him access to a world of power and wealth that he secretly envies and fears, the collector such as Buchalter reduces the beauty of butterflies to pinned insects on a mounting board, a daily reminder that creation is always subject to his murderous hand.

The phone on my desk rang.

'Detective Robicheaux?' a woman said.

'Yes?'

'This is Marie Guilbeaux. I hope I'm not bothering you.'

'I'm sorry, who?'

'The nun you met at the hospital. Outside Mr. Sitwell's room.'

'Oh yes, how are you, Sister?'

'I wanted to apologize.'

'What for?'

'I heard about Mr. Sitwell's death this morning, and I remembered how judgmental I must have sounded the other day. That wasn't my intention, but I wanted to apologize to you anyway.'

'There's no need to. It's good of you to call, though.'

I could hear a hum in the telephone, as though the call was long-distance.

'You've been very nice,' she said.

'Not at all… Is there something else on your mind, Sister?'

'No, not really. I think I take myself too seriously sometimes.'

'Well, thanks for calling.'

'I hope to see you again sometime.'

'Me too. Good-bye, Sister.'

'Good-bye.'

The musical community in southern Louisiana is a large and old one. Where do you begin if you want to find a person who's interested in or collects historical jazz?

There was certainly nothing picturesque about the geographic origins of the form. If it was born in one spot, it was Storyville at the turn of the century, a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New Orleans, named for an alderman who wanted to contain all the city's prostitution inside a single neighborhood. Jazz meant to fornicate; songs like 'Easy Rider' and 'House of the Rising Sun' were literal dirges about the morphine addiction and suicidal despair of the prostitutes who lived out their lives in the brothels of Perdido Street.

When I walked down Bourbon that evening, not far from Basin, one of the old borders of Storyville, the air was filled with a purple haze, lit with neon, warmly redolent of the smell of beer and whiskey in paper cups, the sky overhead intersected by a solitary pink cloud of Lake Pontchartrain. The street, which was closed to automobile traffic, was congested with people, their faces happy and flushed in the din of rockabilly and Dixieland bands. Spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were working the trade in front of the strip joints; black kids danced and clattered their clip-on steel taps on the concrete for the tourists; an all-black street band, with tambourines ringing and horns blaring, belted out 'Millersburg' on the corner at Conti; and a half block farther up, in a less hedonistic mood, a group of religious fanatics, with signs containing apocalyptical warnings, tried to buttonhole anyone who would listen to their desperate message.

I talked to an elderly black clarinetist at Preservation Hall, a sax man at the Famous Door who used to work for Marcia Ball, a three-hundred-pound white woman with flaming hair and a sequined dress that sparkled like ice water, who played blues piano in a hole-in-the-wall on Dumaine. None of them knew of a Will Buchalter or a jazz enthusiast or collector who fit his description.

I walked over on Ursulines to a dilapidated book and record store run by two men named Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, who was also known sometimes as Baron Belladonna. Jimmie was a florid, rotund man with a red mustache who looked like a nineteenth-century bartender. But the insides of both his forearms were laced with the flattened veins and gray scar tissue of an old-time addict. Before he had gotten off the needle, he had been known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you with any kind of illegal activity in New Orleans.

His business partner, the Count, was another matter. He had blitzed his brain years ago with purple acid, wore a black vampire's cape and slouch hat, and maintained that the soul of Olivia Newton-John lived under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. His angular body could have been fashioned from wire; his long, narrow head and pinched face looked like they had been slammed in a door. Periodically he shaved off his eyebrows so his brain could absorb more oxygen.

'How do you like being out of the life, Jimmie?' I asked.

As always, my conversation with Jim would prove to be a rare linguistic experience.

'The book business ain't bad stuff to be in these days,' he said. He wore suspenders and a purple-striped long-sleeve shirt with sweat rings under the arms. 'There's a lot of special kinds of readers out there, if you understand what I'm saying, Streak. New Orleans is being overrun by crazoids and people who was probably cloned from dog turds, and the government won't do anything about it. But it's a crazy world out there, and am I my brother's keeper, that's what I'm asking, a buck's a buck, and who am I to judge? So I've got a bin here for your vampire literature, I got your books on ectoplasm, your books on ufology and teleportation, I got your studies on tarot cards and Eckankar, you want to read about your Venusian cannibals living among us, I got your book on that, too.'

'I'm looking for a guy named Will Buchalter, Jimmie. He might be a collector of old jazz records.'

His mustache tilted and the corners of his eyes wrinkled quizzically.

'What's this guy look like?' he asked.

I told him while he rolled a matchstick in his mouth. The Count was cleaning bookshelves with a feather duster, his eyes as intense as obsidian chips in his white face.

'He's got blackheads fanning back from his eyes like cat's whiskers?' Jimmie said.

'Something like that,' I said.

'Maybe I can give him a job here. Hey, is this guy mixed up with this Nazi submarine stuff?'

'How do you know about the sub, Jimmie?'

'The whole fucking town knows about it. I tell you, though, Streak, I wouldn't mess with nobody that was connected with these tin shirts or whatever they used to call these World War II commonists.'

'Wait a minute, Jim. Not everybody knows about the Silver Shirts.'

'I'm Irish, right, so I don't talk about my own people, there's enough others to do that, like you ever hear this one, you put four Irish Catholics together and you always got a fifth, but I got to say you cross a mick with a squarehead, you come up with a pretty unnatural combo, if you're getting my drift, mainly that wearing a star-spangled jockstrap outside your slacks ain't proof you're one-hunnerd-percent American.'

'You've truly lost me, Jimmie.'

'I lived right down the street from his family.'

'Who?'

'Tommy Bobalouba. Sometimes you're hard to get things across to, Streak. I mean, like, we got jet planes going by overhead or something?'

'Tommy Lonighan's family was mixed up with Nazis?'

'His mother was from Germany. She was in the, what-do-you-call-'em, the metal shirts. That's why Tommy was always fighting with people. Nobody in the Channel wanted anything to do with his family… Hey, Count, we got a customer named Will Buchalter?'

Count Carbonna began humming to himself in a loud, flat, nasal drone.

'Hey, Count, I'm talking here,' Jimmie said. 'Hey, you got stock in the Excedrin company… Count, knock off the noise!'

But it was no use. The Count was on a roll, suddenly dusting the records with a manic energy, filling the store with his incessant, grinding drone.

Jimmie looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

'Listen, Jim, this guy Buchalter is bad news,' I said. 'If he should come in your store, don't let on that you know me, don't try to detain him or drop the dime on him while he's here. Just get ahold of me or Clete Purcel after he leaves.'

'What's this guy done?'

I told him.

'I'm not showing offense here,' he said, 'but I'm a little shocked, you understand what I'm saying, you think a geek like that would be coming into my store. We're talking about the kind of guy hangs in skin shops, beats up on hookers, gets a bone-on hurting people, this ain't Jimmie Ryan just blowing you a lot of gas, Streak, this kind of guy don't like music, he likes to hear somebody scream.'

He leaned on his arms and bit down on his matchstick so that it arched upward into his mustache.

But my conversation with Jimmie was not quite over. A half hour later he called Clete Purcel's apartment, just before I was about to head back to New Iberia.

'I'm glad I got you,' he said. 'Something's wrong here.'

'What's happened?'

'It's the Count. After we close the shop, he always goes upstairs to his room and eats a can of potted meat and watches Pat Robertson on TV. Except tonight he kept droning and humming and walking in circles and cleaning the shelves till the place looked like a dust storm, then for no reason he goes crashing up the stairs and throws everything in a suitcase and flies out the back door with his cape flapping in the breeze.'

'You're saying Buchalter was in your store? Maybe when the Count was by himself?'

'You tell me. Hey, when a guy who talks to Olivia Newton-John through the hole in the lavatory is scared out of town by sickos, I'm wondering maybe I should move to Iraq or one of them places where all you got to worry about is your nose falling off from the BO.'

In the morning I got the autopsy report on Charles Sitwell. He didn't die of an air bubble being injected into his bloodstream. The syringe had been loaded with a mixture of water and roach paste.

It was time to talk to Tommy Lonighan about his knowledge of German U-boats and Silver Shirts, preferably in an official situation, in custody, outside of his own environment. I called Ben Motley and asked about the chances of rousting him from his house or gym and bringing him down to an interrogation room.

'On what basis?' he said.

'He's lying about the reasons for his interest in this U-boat.'

'So he didn't want to tell you his mother was a Nazi. It's not the kind of stuff anybody likes to hang on the family tree.'

'It's too much for coincidence, Motley. He's connected with Buchalter. He's got to be.'

'You want me to get a warrant on a guy, in a homicide investigation, because of something his mother did fifty years ago?'

'We just bring him in for questioning. Tommy likes to think of himself as respectable these days. So we step on his cookie bag.'

'I wonder why the words civil suit keep floating in front of my eyes. It probably has something to do with my lens prescription.'

'Don't give this guy a free pass. He's dirty, Motley. You know it.'

'Give me a call if you come up with something more. Until then, I don't think it helps to be flogging our rods over the wastebasket.'

'Listen to me, Ben-'

'Get real, Robicheaux. NOPD doesn't roust people, not even Tommy Blue Eyes, when they live on lakefront property. Keep it in your pants, my man.'

I worked late that evening on two other cases, one involving a stabbing in a black nightclub, the other, the possible suffocation of an infant by his foster parents.

The sky was the color of scorched pewter when I drove along the dirt road by the bayou toward my house. The wind was dry blowing across the marsh, and the willows were coated with dust and filled with the red tracings of fireflies. The deputy on guard at the house started his car engine, waved at me as he passed, and disappeared down the long corridor of oak trees.

Bootsie was washing dishes at the sink when I came in. She wore a pair of grass-stained white dungarees and a rumpled yellow blouse that was too small for her and exposed her midsection.

'Where's Alafair?' I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I could smell cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair.

'In the living room. Doing her homework,' she said. She kept her face turned toward the open window when she spoke.

'Where'd you go today?' I said.

'What does it matter?'

'Beg your pardon?'

'What does it matter where we go?'

'I don't understand, Boots.'

'It doesn't matter where we go. He's going to be there.'

'You mean Buchalter?'

'He called.'

'Here? When?'

'This afternoon.'

'Why didn't you call me at the office?'

'And tell you what?'

I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and turned her toward me. She breathed through her nose and kept her face at an angle to me.

'What did he say, Boots?'

'Nothing. I could hear music, like the kind you hear in a supermarket or an elevator. And then a man breathing. His breath going in and out, like he was waiting for something.'

'Maybe it was somebody else, maybe just a crank.'

'He did something else. He scratched a fingernail back and forth on the receiver. The way a cat paws at the door.'

Her mouth parted, and she looked up into my face. Her breath smelled like bourbon-scented orange slices.

'We'll get an unlisted number in the morning,' I said.

'It was Buchalter, wasn't it?'

'Maybe. But what we have to remember, Boots, is that when these guys try to scare people with telephone calls, they're running on the rims. They don't have anything else going.'

Her eyes went back and forth, searching inside mine.

'We've got a computer sketch of the guy all over town,' I said, 'I don't think he'll come back.'

'Then who killed the man in the hospital?'

'I don't know.'

'He's out there, Dave. I know he is.'

Her experience with Buchalter had been even worse than mine, and I knew that my words could not take the unrelieved sense of vulnerability out of her face. I held her against me, then walked her into the bedroom, turned on the shower, waited while she got inside the stall, locked the house, then said Alafair's prayers with her. The moon was down, the pecan and oak trees were motionless and black outside the screens, and the only sound I could hear besides the suck of the attic fan was Tripod running up and down on his chain and wire clothesline.

I poured a glass of milk, fixed a ham and onion sandwich, and ate it at the kitchen table. When the phone on the wall rang, I knew who I would be talking to.

His voice sounded as though he were waking from sleep, or as, though he had been disturbed during copulation. It was in slow motion, with a click to it, deep in his throat, that was both phlegmy and dry at the same time.

'It doesn't have to be bad between us.'

'What doesn't?'

'You, me, your wife. Y'all could be part of us.'

'Buchalter, you've got to understand this. I can't wave a wand over the gulf and bring up a depth-charged sub. I think you're a sick man. But if I get you in my sights, I'm going to take you off at the neck.'

Again, I heard a wet, clicking sound, like his tongue sticking to the insides of his cheeks.

'I like you,' he said.

'You like me?'

'Yes. A great deal.'

I waited before I spoke again.

'What do you think is going to happen the next time I see you?' I said.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'You'll come around to our way. It's a matter of time.'

My palm was squeezed damply on the receiver.

'Listen, every cop in Iberia Parish knows what you look like. They know what you've done, they're not big on procedure. Don't make the mistake of coming back here. I'm telling you this as a favor.'

'We can give you power.'

You're learning nothing. Change the subject.

'I know where you've been in New Orleans,' I said. 'You talked too much about music. You left a trail, Buchalter.'

'I could have hurt you the other night, in ways you can't dream about, but I didn't,' he said. 'Do you want to hear how they reach a point where they beg, what they sound like when they beg?'

'Will you meet with me?'

I heard him drinking from a glass, deeply, swallowing like a man who had walked out of a great, dry heat.

'Because I'm different, you shouldn't treat me as though I'm psychotic. I'm not. Good night,' he said. 'Tell your wife I remember our moment with fondness. She's a beautiful specimen of her gender.'

He hung up the receiver as gently as a man completing a yawn.

My heart was racing inside my chest. My pistol was still clipped to my belt. I unsnapped the holster, slipped the.45 out of the leather, which I had rubbed with saddle soap, and ran my fingers along the coolness of the metal. The balls of my fingers left delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil. I released the magazine from the butt, rubbed my thumb over the brass casing of the top round, pulled the slide back and forth, then shoved the magazine back into the butt. The grips felt hard and stiff inside my hand.

I looked through the window into the dark. I wanted Buchalter to be out there, perhaps parking his car behind a grove of trees, working his way across the fields, confident that this time he could pull it off, could invade my house and life with impunity. And this time-

I put the.45 on the nightstand in our bedroom and undressed in the dark. My own skin felt as dry and hot as a heated lamp shade. Bootsie was still asleep when I moved on top of her, between her legs, without invitation or consent, a rough beast who could have been hewn out of desert stone.

I made love to her as a starving man might. I put my tongue deep in her mouth and tasted the whiskey and candied cherries and sliced oranges deep in her wet recesses. I plummeted into her fecund warmth, I inhaled the alcohol out of her breath, I robbed her of the golden and liquid heat that had been aged in oak and presented mistakenly as a gift to her heart's blood rather than to mine.