Dixie City Jam

chapter fourteen

The early sun looked like a sliver of pink ice, just above the horizon's misty rim, when I stopped my truck at the locked entrance to Tommy Lonighan's driveway. I got out of the truck and pushed the button on the speaker box.

'Who is it?' the voice of the man named Art said.

'Detective Dave Robicheaux. I'm here to see Tommy.'

'He's busy.'

'No, he's not.'

'The last time you were here you were busting up people with a shovel.'

'Yesterday's box score, Art.'

'It's seven o'clock in the fucking morning. How about some slack?'

'Are you going to open up or not? If not, I can come back with a warrant that has your name on it.'

'Is Purcel with you?'

'No.'

'You sure?'

'Last chance, Art.'

'Okay, take it easy, I'm buzzing you in. Tommy's out back. I'll tell him you're here. Hey, can you do me a favor?'

'What?'

'It's a nice day. The Indian and me are serving breakfast for Tommy and his guests out on the terrace. Let's keep it a nice day. Okay, man? Shit don't go good with grits and eggs.'

A minute later I parked my truck at the end of Lonighan's drive. The interior of the compound was the architectural and landscaped antithesis of everything in the Irish Channel neighborhood where Tommy had grown up. His imitation Tudor house was surrounded by citrus and pine and oak trees; steam rose from the turquoise surface of his screened-in pool and his coral goldfish ponds; the Saint Augustine grass was thick and wet from soak hoses, shining with dew in the hazy light. Beyond his protective brick walls, I could hear canvas sails flapping and swelling with wind on the lake.

He was behind the house, in an orange bikini swimsuit and a pair of black high-top ring shoes, thudding his taped fists into what looked like a six-foot stack of sandbags. His pale body, which rippled with sweat, Was the color and texture of gristle. A tubular, red scar, with tiny pink stitch holes on each side, wound in a serpentine line from his right kidney up to his shoulder blade.

He stopped hitting the bags when he saw me, and wiped his meringue hair and armpits with a towel. His flushed face smiled broadly.

'You're just in time to eat,' he said, pulling the adhesive tape off his hands. 'How about this weather? I think we got ourselves an early fall.' He flipped his towel on top of an azalea bush. His knuckles were round and hard and protruded from his skin as though he were holding a roll of quarters in each hand.

'You work out on sandbags, Tommy?'

'Cement. If you don't bust your hand or jam your wrist on a cement bag, you sure ain't gonna do it on a guy's face. What's up, Dave?'

'I've got a big problem with this guy Buchalter. He can't seem to stay out of my life.'

'If I can help, let me know.' He worked a blue jumper over his head as we walked down a gravel path toward a glass-topped table on his patio, where an ash blond woman in a terry-cloth robe was drinking coffee and reading the paper. 'I don't want a guy like this around, either. He gives the city a bad reputation.'

'I didn't say he was from New Orleans, Tommy.'

'You wouldn't be here unless you thought he was. Sit down and eat. You're too serious. Charlotte, this is Dave Robicheaux.'

She lowered her paper and looked at me with eyes that had the bright, blue tint of colored contact lenses, that were neither rude nor friendly, curious or wary. I suspected that she read news accounts of airline disasters with the same level of interest as the weather report. Her freckled, sun-browned skin had the smooth folds in it of soft tallow.

Her mouth was red and wet when she took it away from the coffee cup and acknowledged me.

'The gentleman who performs so well with a shovel,' she said.

'Sometimes it's better to use visual aids when you're talking to the Calucci brothers,' I said.

'Fucking A,' Tommy said. 'Neither one of those dagos could give himself a hand job without a diagram. But when you got to do business with the oilcans, you got to do business with the oilcans, right?'

'What kind of deals do you have with the Caluccis, Tommy?' I said.

'Are you kidding? Restaurant linen, valet parking, food delivery, carpenters and electricians working on my casino, you deal with the greaseballs or you get a picket line in front of everything you own.'

His house servant came out the back door with a huge, rope-handled wood tray between his hands and began setting silver-topped containers of scrambled eggs, grits, sausage links, bacon, and peeled oranges and grapefruit in front of us. The servant was the same enormous man I had seen on my earlier visit. His Indian face was as expressionless and flat as a cake pan, his brown, skillet-sized hands veined with scar tissue like tiny bits of white string.

'You're staring, Mr. Robicheaux,' Charlotte said.

'Excuse me?'

'At Manuel. It's rude to stare at people,' she said.

'He didn't mean anything,' Tommy said. 'Dave's a gentleman. He's got a college degree. In English literature, right, Dave? We're talking fucking class guy here.'

He winked at me as he spread his napkin.

The house servant named Manuel brushed against me when he poured my coffee. I could smell chemical fertilizer and garden dirt in his clothes. He never spoke, but after he went back inside the house, I saw his face look back at me from a kitchen window.

'Dig this,' Tommy said. 'Manny looks like he just got up out of a grave in Night of the Living Dead, but actually he's a fruit. He's gonna be in a music video called 'She's a Swinging Stud.' Hey, y'all quit looking at me like that. You think I could make up something like that? They show these kinds of videos in those homo joints on Dauphine.'

'Your mother was in the American-German Bund, Tommy,' I said.

'What?' His face looked as though ice water had been poured on it.

'I guess it's common knowledge in the Channel. That's why you know what's in that sub, isn't it, partner?' I smiled at him.

'You're sitting at my breakfast table…' He cleared his throat and tried to regain his words. 'Right here at my table, at my own house, you're making insults about my mother?'

'That's not my intention.'

'Then clean the fucking mashed potatoes out of your mouth.'

The woman named Charlotte put her hand in his lap.

'It's one way or the other, Tommy,' I said.

'What is?'

'You either know something about the sub through your mother, or you've got a serious personal problem with Hippo Bimstine that you're not talking about.'

His tangled, white eyebrows were damp with perspiration against his red face. I saw the woman named Charlotte biting her lip, kneading her hand in his lap.

'What problem you talking about?' he said.

'You want it right down the pipe?'

'Yeah, I do.' But his face looked like stretched rubber, like that of a man about to receive a spear through the breastbone.

'He says you killed his little brother.'

His breath went in and out of his mouth. His eyes looked unfocused, impaired, as though he had been staring at a welder's electric arc. He pinched his nose and breathed hard through his nostrils, rolled his head on his neck.

But it was the woman who spoke.

'You filthy bastard,' she said.

'You want a free shot, Tommy?' I said.

'If I want to take a shot, you won't know what hit you,' he said. But his voice was suddenly hoarse and somehow separate from himself.

'Maybe it was a rough thing to say. But Will Buchalter is doing a number on my wife,' I said. 'It has to stop, Tommy. You understand what I'm saying to you? When you create a free-fire zone, it works both ways. We're not operating on the old rules here.'

'Where you get off talking free-fire zone? I had a Chinese bayonet unzip my insides when you were still fucking your fist.'

'You want one of my Purple Hearts?'

'You're a sonofabitch, Robicheaux,' he said.

'You don't make a convincing victim, Tommy.'

'We were all kids. It was an accident. What's the matter with you, what kind of guy you think I am? Why you doing this?'

'Are you going to help me out?'

'Get off my property.'

'All right,' I said, and stood up to go. Then I saw Zoot Bergeron jogging up the drive in black gym shorts, a red bandanna tied around his forehead. I looked down at Tommy Lonighan.

'I've got a deal for you,' I said. 'You put Buchalter in my custody, you'll probably never see me again. But if he comes back around my house, I'm going to punch your ticket.'

'Yeah?' he said, the rims of his nostrils whitening. 'That's what you're gonna do? You can't bust the right people, you can't protect your own wife, you need somebody to wipe your ass for you, you come around making threats, telling me I killed a child, I'm about to take your fucking head off, Dave, you got that?'

'We'll see who walks out of the smoke, Tommy,' I said, and walked across the sun-spangled, blue-green lawn toward my truck. I didn't look back.

Zoot slowed from his jog, his sleek chest rising and falling, his sweat-soaked gym shorts twisted around his loins.

'What are you doing here, partner?' I asked.

'Mr. Tommy give me a job around his yard, let me work out wit' him.'

'You're staying here?'

'I did last night.'

'Why?' He didn't answer, and I said it again, 'Why's that, Zoot?'

'She got a man at the house.' His eyes avoided mine. 'A white man she goes out wit' sometimes. I come over here and Mr. Tommy let me stay.'

'I don't want to tell you what to do, Zoot, but I think Tommy Lonighan is a gangster and a racist prick who you ought to avoid like anthrax.'

Then, too late, I saw the alarm in Zoot's eyes as they focused on something behind me.

Tommy Lonighan was moving fast when he hit me between the shoulder blades and drove me into the side of my truck. Before I could turn, he had ripped my.45 loose from my belt holster. He clenched it at an upward angle in front of me, his neck corded with veins, his nostrils flaring, and pulled back the slide, feeding a hollow-point round into the chamber. I could hear the gravel crunch under the soles of his shoes.

'Don't be a dumb guy, Tommy,' I said.

'You think you can punch my buttons, make me ashamed of myself in front of people?'

'Give me the piece, Tommy.'

'You want it? Then you got it, cocksucker.'

He jammed the butt into my palm, but he didn't let go. He wrapped both his hands around mine, tightening his fingers until they were white with bone, and pointed the.45's barrel into his sternum. His blue eyes were round and threaded with light; his breath stank of the pieces of meat wedged in his teeth.

'You talk war record, you talk Purple Hearts, you got the balls for this?' he said.

The hammer was cocked, the safety off, but I was able to keep my fingers frozen outside the trigger housing.

'Step back, Tommy.'

His breath labored in his chest; there was a knot of color like a red rose in his throat.

'I didn't kill no kid back there in the Channel,' he said. 'It was an accident. Everybody knows it but that mockie. He won't let go of it.'

For just a moment the focus in his eyes seemed to turn inward, and his words seemed directed almost at himself rather than at me. I felt the power go out of his grip.

I flipped up the safety on the slide, jerked the.45 loose from his grasp, and whipped the barrel across his nose. He stood flat-footed, his fists balled at his sides, his eyes the same color as the sky, a solitary string of blood dripping from his right nostril. I started to hit him again.

But his face broke, just like a lamp shade being burned in the center by a heat source from within. One eye seemed to knot, as though someone had put a finger in it; his mouth became a crimped, tight line, downturned at the corners, and the flesh in one cheek suddenly filled with wrinkles and began to tremble. He turned and walked into his house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden from view.

I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from my hand like an object of shame.