Dixie City Jam

chapter twenty-three

'Tough day when they take the scales from your eyes?' she said. Her hand reached out to touch my hair. I pushed it away.

'Where are Bootsie and Alafair?' I said.

'The wifey's passed out. Doesn't she send your daughter off with the black man when she decides to go on the grog?'

I walked into the hall and opened the bedroom door. Bootsie was asleep, half undressed, on top of the sheets, her face twisted into the pillow. The curtains popped in the silence.

The woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux stood in the center of the kitchen, putting lipstick on in front of her compact mirror. She wore sun-faded jeans, sandals, a beige terry-cloth pullover with a dipping neckline, and a gold chain with a pearl around her throat.

'Did you know the little wife has something of a pill problem?' she said, her eyes still fastened on the mirror.

'Who are you?'

She crimped her lips together in the mirror and clicked the compact closed.

'Want to find out?' she said. She smiled. Her eyes seemed to darken, like charcoal-colored smoke gathering inside green glass. She unsnapped the top of her jeans, exposing the pink edge of her panties, then reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. 'Sit down in the chair, Dave. It's time someone does something nice for you.'

I dumped her purse on the breakfast table. In it were car keys, an empty aspirin tin, a roll of breath mints, a perfume spray bottle, and a doeskin wallet. In the wallet was over six hundred dollars, and a Social Security card and driver's license with the name Marie Guilbeaux on them. The address on the license was in uptown New Orleans, back toward the levee. There were no credit cards.

'Do you like everything to be so hard?' she said, and moved her tongue in a circle inside her lips.

She worked her bra out from under her pullover and laid it over the chair top, then clasped her hands around the back of my neck and pressed her stomach against me. 'I have a feeling the wifey hasn't been treating you right,' she said.

'Where's your automobile?'

'Down by the dock.'

'Is anyone with you?'

'No.' She flexed her loins against me.

'I'll tell the wrecker service not to scratch it up,' I said, turning her in a half circle.

'What?'

'The guy we contract to haul cars into the pound is careless sometimes.' I pulled her forearms behind her. Her wrists were narrow and pale, and the undersides were lined with thin green veins. I snipped the handcuffs on each wrist, then stuffed her bra in the back pocket of her jeans.

'The offer's still open. With handcuffs. Think about it, Dave. Ouu,' she said, and made a pout with her mouth. 'You might even like it better than climbing on top of a drunk sow.'

'Try it on our jailer, Marie,' I said. 'He's a three-hundred-pound black homosexual. Maybe you can turn him around.'

The next morning at the department I picked up a cup of coffee and a doughnut by the dispatcher's cage and called Clete at his office in the Quarter. The sun was shining, and there was dew on the grass and trees outside my window. I had called him twice the day before and hadn't gotten an answer.

'The tape on my machine's screwed up. What's happening?' he said.

I told him about my conversation in the restaurant with Tommy Lonighan.

'You sound mad,' he said.

'I am.'

'What's the big deal?'

'I warned you about provoking these guys.'

'Look, Dave, what's "open hit" actually mean? Nothing. It's something these greasebags like to mouth off about while they're stuffing linguine in their faces. A real whack is when they bring in a mechanic, a mainline button man, a full-time sociopath, from Miami or Houston, and this guy knows he either leaves meat on the sidewalk or he's the next guy for the cooling board.'

'Clete-'

'Drop it, mon. Max and Bobo are always blowing gas. It's time they both get their snouts stuck in the commode.'

'I just don't believe you. Why don't you go stand in the middle of the streetcar tracks?'

'Okay, big mon, you've warned me. Listen, has Motley called you yet?'

'No.'

'Dig this. Ole Mots stopped thinking about food and cooze and being black long enough to do some real detective work.'

'I think Motley's turned out to be a good guy.'

'That's what I was saying. Is there static on the line or something? Yesterday afternoon he got some chest waders from the fire department, and he and I splashed out into that swamp in Lafourche Parish. It took a while, but we found it.'

'Found what?'

'The armored vest. The guy who cut open the two lowlifes with the chain saw, we found where he got out of the water on a levee not far from Larose. There were depressions in the mud that Sasquatch could have left. Anyway, about two hundred yards back into the swamp he'd dumped the vest by a sandbar. There were a half-dozen pieces of buckshot in the plates.'

'Why would he be wearing a vest?'

He laughed, then took the receiver away from his mouth and laughed again.

'You want to let me in on it?' I asked.

'You're beautiful, Streak. There's a secret that everybody seems to know except my old podjo from the First. You're one of the most violent people I've ever known. Why do you think Buchalter would wear a vest? You've probably got him spotting his Jockeys.'

'Thanks for going out there, Clete.'

'Hold on a minute. There's something else. Maybe it's important, maybe not. There was some stenciling on the cloth. The vest was Toronto PD issue.'

'It's Canadian?'

'Maybe he got it at a surplus store. But it's a thread, right? Anyway, talk with Motley.'

'You remember the nun we saw at the hospital?'

'Yes, she need somebody to pound erasers for her?'

'Not unless you want to visit her in the parish jail.'

Then I told him about all the events involving the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux.

'Definitely a weird scam, mon,' he said.

'I'll bet she and Buchalter have their umbilical cords tied together.'

'What are you holding her on?'

'Not much.'

'Don't let them kick her. Give me the address that's on her driver's license.'

I read it to him off the arrest report.

'Salt the shaft if you have to. You know why everybody loves straight shooters? Because they usually lose,' he said.

'See you later, Cletus,' I said, and hung up the phone just as the sheriff tapped on my glass and motioned me toward his office at the other end of the hallway.

He drank from his bottle of ulcer medicine, then leaned back in his swivel chair, bouncing the heels of his hands on the padded arms, and gazed at the potted plants and hand-painted flowered tea-pot on his windowsill. His stomach wedged over his hand-tooled gunbelt like a partly deflated football. He poked at it with his stiffened fingers.

'You never had ulcers, did you?' he said.

'No.'

'I think I'm getting another one. I eat grits and baby food and get up in the morning with barbed wire in my stomach. Why's that?'

'You got me.'

'What are we supposed to do with that gal you locked up last night?'

'We try to keep her there till we find out who she is.'

'She's got no arrest record. Also the charge you've got against her is a joke.'

'Not to me it isn't.'

'At arraignment, what do we tell the judge?'

'The truth.'

'How's this sound? "Your Honor, this lady represented herself as a Catholic nun in order to get the wife of Detective Robicheaux drunk. Because everybody knows that's what nuns do in their spare time."'

I opened and closed my right hand on my thigh. I fixed my gaze on a place about three inches to the side of his face.

'I apologize, I shouldn't have said that,' he said. 'But at best all we've got is a misdemeanor.'

'I think she murdered Charles Sitwell in the hospital.'

'Put her there, in the hospital, in the room, in her nun's veil, around the time of death and we have something. Look, the driver's license and Social Security card are real. She says she never told you or your wife or anybody else she was a nun.'

'You talked to her?'

'I went to the jail early this morning. The jailer's got her in isolation. A couple of the dykes were getting stoked up.'

'They like her?'

'Are you kidding? They were scared shitless. One of them claims your gal threatened to put out a cigarette in her eye.'

'Look, Sheriff, there's no easier ID to get than a driver's license and Social Security. But she had no credit cards. That's because credit bureaus run a check on the applicants. She's dirty, I think she's mixed up with Buchalter, and if we let her walk, we lose the only thread we have.'

'I admit, she puts on quite a performance. If I didn't know better, I'd probably let her baby-sit my grandchildren.'

'What explanation did she give you for being in my house?'

'She says she used to be a part-time librarian and now she's trying to become a freelance magazine writer. According to her, she met Bootsie in a lounge and befriended her because she thought she was a sad lady. She's pretty eloquent, Dave.'

He looked at my face and glanced away.

'Librarian where?' I said.

'She got a little vague.'

'I bet.'

He propped his elbow on the desk blotter and scratched at the hollow of his cheek with a pink fingernail.

'She's got a lawyer from Lafayette. He's already raising hell down at the prosecutor's office,' he said.

'You want to talk to Clete Purcel? He saw her outside Sitwell's hospital room.'

'Great witness, Dave. Purcel's got a rap sheet that few mainline cons have. It looks like something a computer virus printed by mistake.'

'I think he was right.'

'About what?'

'He told me to salt the shaft. He knew how it was going to go down.'

The sheriff stuck his pipe in his leather tobacco pouch and began filling the bowl. He didn't look up.

'I didn't hear you say that,' he said.

'It's one man's point of view.'

He didn't answer. I got up to leave the room.

'The Americans won the Revolution because they learned to fight from the Indians,' he said. 'They shot from behind the trees. I guess it sure beat marching across a field in white bandoliers and silver breastplates.'

'I was never fond of allegory.'

'All I said was I didn't hear Purcel's remark. The woman's purse is in Possessions. Who knows what the lab might find?' He raised his eyebrows.

'We've got to hold her as a murder suspect, Sheriff.'

'It's not going to happen, Dave. You going to the arraignment?'

'You'd better believe it.'

He nodded silently, lit his pipe, and looked out the window.

Back inside my office, I looked again at all the paperwork concerning Will Buchalter. What were the common denominators? What had I missed?

Buchalter was perverse and sadistic and possibly an addict.

He was obviously a psychopath.

His followers were recidivists.

He appeared to be con-wise, talked about 'riding the beef,' but had no criminal record that we could find.

Was he a sodomist, was he depraved, were his followers all addicts? Were they men whom he had turned out (raped) and reduced to a form of psychological slavery? Why not? It went on in every prison in the country.

Except Buchalter had never been up the road.

Maybe Clete had come up with the answer. Maybe we had been looking for Buchalter on the wrong side of the equation. Maybe he was a fireman who set fires. Maybe he was one of us.

I talked with Ben Motley at NOPD. The prints lifted from the armored vest that he and Clete had found in the marsh matched those that Buchalter had left all over my house. But there was no serial number on the fabric.

'I wouldn't spend too much time on it,' he said. 'These paramilitary groups come up with shitloads of this stuff. You know what's still the best way to nail this guy? Find one of his lowlifes, then plug his pud into a light socket.'

Thanks, Mots, I thought.

Then I put in a call to the robbery division of the Toronto Police Department and talked with a lieutenant named Rankin. No, he knew nothing about a stolen armored vest. No, he had no knowledge whether or not the department might have sold off some of its vests; no, he had never heard of a Will Buchalter and, after leaving me on hold for five minutes, he said their computer had no record of a Will Buchalter.

'This man's a Nazi?' he said.

'Among other things.'

'What do you mean?'

'He likes to torture people.'

He cleared his throat.

'About eight or nine years ago I remember a case… no, it wasn't a case, really, it was a bad series of events that happened with a detective named Mervain. We had a recruit who bothered Mervain for some reason. He couldn't get this fellow out of his mind. It seems like the fellow was suspected of stealing some guns from us, who knows, maybe it was some vests, too.'

'What was the recruit's name?'

'I'm sorry, I don't remember everything that happened and I don't want to say the wrong thing and mislead you. Let me check with a couple of other people here and call you back.'

'I'd appreciate it very much, sir.'

Arraignment for the nun impersonator was at 11:00 A.M., and my best throw of the dice kept coming back boxcars, deuces, and treys. Clete called collect from a pay phone in Metairie.

'Dead end,' he said. 'Her address is in an apartment building that a wrecking ball went through six months ago.'

'Did you ask around the neighborhood about her?'

'I'm in a phone booth in front of a liquor store that has bullet holes in the windows. There's garbage all over the sidewalk. As I speak I'm looking at a collection of pukes who are looking back at me like I'm an albino ape. Guess what color these pukes are? Guess what color the whole neighborhood is.'

Judge Robert Dautrieve presided over morning court, that strange, ritualistic theater that features morose and repentant drunks who reek of jailhouse funk, welfare cheats, deranged drifters, game poachers, and wife abusers whose frightened wives, with blackened eyes, dragging strings of children, plead for their husbands' release. Almost all of them are on a first-name basis with the bailiffs, jail escorts, bondsmen, prosecutors, and court-assigned attorneys and social workers, who will remain the most important people they'll ever meet. And no matter what occurs on a particular day in morning court, almost all of them will be back.

Judge Dautrieve had silver hair and the profile of a Roman legionnaire. During World War II he had been a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor at Sword Beach, and he had also been a Democratic candidate for governor who had lost miserably, largely due to the fact that he was an honorable man.

The woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux filed into court on the long wrist chain with the other defendants from the parish jail. Her clothes were rumpled and her face white and puffy from lack of sleep. On the back of her beige pullover was a damp, brown stain, as though she had leaned against a wall where someone had spit tobacco juice. When the jail escort unlocked her wrist from the chain, she straightened her shoulders, tilted her chin up, and brushed her reddish gold hair back over her forehead with her fingers. Her face became a study in composure and serenity, as if it had been transformed inside a movie camera's lens.

I sat three feet behind her, staring at the back of her neck. She turned slowly, as though she could feel my eyes on her skin.

'Tell Buchalter we've got his vest,' I said.

But she looked past me toward the rear of the courtroom, as though she had never visited one before, her gaze innocuous, bemused, perhaps a bit fearful of her plight. To any outside observer, it was obvious that this lady did not belong on a wrist chain, or in a jail, or in a morning court that processed miscreants whose ongoing culpability and failure were as visible on their persons as sackcloth and ashes.

Her lawyer had once been with the U.S. Justice Department. He now represented drug dealers and a PCB incinerator group. His bald head was razor-shaved and waxed, and he had humps of muscle in his shoulders and upper arms like a professional wrestler. His collar and tie always rode high up on his thick neck, which gave him a Humpty-Dumpty appearance.

'Tell Buchalter his prints were all over the vest,' I said to the nun impersonator's back. 'That means he's going down on premeditated double homicide. Nasty stuff, Marie. Lethal injection, the big sleep, that kind of thing.'

She looked straight ahead, her face cool, almost regal, but her lawyer, who was talking to another man at the defense table, glanced up, then walked over to where I sat, his eyes locked on mine.

'What is it that makes you think legal procedure has no application to you?' he said. His body seemed to exude physical power and the clean athletic-club smells of deodorant and aftershave lotion.

'I was just asking your client to pass on a message to one of her associates,' I said. 'He cut open two guys with a chain saw. These were his friends. He's quite a guy.'

'You're harassing this woman, Detective. You're not going to get away with it, either.'

'It's always reassuring to know you're on the other side, Counselor.'

'You, sir, belong in a cage,' he said.

For thirty minutes I watched the judge go through the process of trying to heal cancer with Mercurochrome, his face sometimes paling, his eyes glazing over when a stressed-out defendant would launch into an incoherent soliloquy intended to turn his role into that of victim.

I went out for a drink of water, then took a seat not far from the prosecutor's table. Five minutes before the nun impersonator had to enter her plea, the prosecutor looked at me impatiently, then gathered up a file folder and walked back to where I sat. He was a rail of a man, with a tic in his gray face, who made his daily nest in the high-tension wires. He kept tapping the file folder on my knee.

'This isn't shit. What the hell have y'all been doing?' he said.

'Her address is phony. Does that help?'

'It's shit and you know it. You guys spend your time fucking your fist, then blame us when they walk.'

'How about kicking it down a couple of notches, Newt?'

'You want my job? You tell us we've got the bride of Dracula in the parish jail, but I'm supposed to walk in here with nothing but my dork in my hand. Dautrieve's not in the mood for it, believe me.'

'She had an empty aspirin tin in her purse. I sent it to the lab this morning. Maybe there's a residue that indicates she was in possession.'

'An empty aspirin container? That's the kind of evidence I'm supposed to work with here? Do you live in a plastic bubble?'

'She's hooked up with Nazis. I'd bet my butt on it, Newt.'

'I've got news for you. You are. She's talking about suit. She said you tried to get in her bread when you busted her. That was a smart touch, sticking her bra in her back pocket, Dave. She's also talking about deprivation of civil rights, slander, and sexual assault while in the bag. How's that sound? And in two minutes I get to stand up in front of the court and get buggered by that greasy shit hog she hired. Y'all really fill out my day.'

'Don't let her get out of here, partner.'

'Break my chops.'

Judge Dautrieve was fixing his glasses on his nose and trying to keep the ennui out of his face by the time the woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux stood before him, her lawyer by her side. He listened attentively to the prosecutor, one finger propped against a silver eyebrow. Then his eyes went from the prosecutor to me and back to the woman.

'This isn't April Fools' Day, is it, gentlemen?' he said.

'Your Honor, we believe this lady to be a serious flight risk,' the prosecutor said. 'She has no ties to the community, we believe she's using an alias, and the address on her driver's license has proved to be a fraudulent one. She's also a potential suspect in a homicide case. We request maximum bail.'

'Your Honor, my client claims she was sexually molested by Detective Robicheaux,' the woman's lawyer said. 'She was humiliated, put in a holding unit with lesbians who tried to assault her, then verbally harassed by Detective Robicheaux in this very courtroom. There's nothing to substantiate the charge against her, except the word of Detective Robicheaux, who himself may face criminal charges.'

The judge suppressed a sigh, took off his glasses, and beckoned with both hands. When no one moved, he said, 'Approach, approach, approach. It's late, gentlemen. The Three Penny Opera here needs to conclude. That means you too, Detective Robicheaux.'

The two attorneys and I stood close to the bench. Judge Dautrieve leaned forward on his forearms and let his eyes rove over our faces.

'Would any of y'all care to explain what we're doing?' he said. 'Is this part of a Hollywood movie? Do I need a membership in the Screen Actors Guild? What homicide are you talking about, sir?'

'The ex-convict who was murdered at Iberia General, Your Honor,' the prosecutor said. 'He was part of a neo-Nazi group of some kind. The woman was seen at the hospital in a nun's veil, close by the man's room.'

'Seen by whom? When?' the judge said.

'Detective Robicheaux and others.'

'I don't see the others. You didn't answer all my questions, either. Seen when? At the time of death?'

'We're not sure.'

'Not sure? Wonderful,' the judge said.

'That has nothing to do with the charge against her now, anyway,' the defense attorney said.

'It means she has every reason not to come back here,' the prosecutor said.

Then the judge looked me evenly in the eyes.

'What motive would this lady have in coming to your house and telling you she's a nun, when, in fact, she's not?' he said.

'I believe she wanted to do my wife injury, Your Honor,' I said.

'In what fashion?'

I cleared my throat, then pulled at my collar.

'Sir?' he said.

'She's tried to encourage my wife to drink excessively, Your Honor.'

'That's a rather unique statement,' he said. 'To be honest, I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like it. You're telling me the presence of a nun somehow has led your wife into problems with alcohol?'

'I think humor at the expense of others is beneath the court's dignity, Your Honor,' I said.

I saw the prosecutor's eyes light with anger.

'You're badly mistaken if you think I see humor in any of this, Detective. Step back, all of you,' the judge said. When he folded his hands, his knuckles looked like white dimes. 'I don't like my courtroom used as a theater. I don't like sloppy presentations, I don't like sloppy investigative work, I don't like police officers and prosecutors trying to obtain a special consideration or privilege from the court at the defendant's expense. I hope my meaning is clear. Bail is set at three hundred dollars.'

He flicked his gavel down on a small oak block.

On the way out of the courtroom the prosecutor caught my arm.

'Don't give it a second thought, Dave. I always enjoy calling a witness who makes me look like I've got my ass on upside down. Why didn't you flip Dautrieve's tie in his face while you were at it?' he said.

I followed the woman and her attorney out to the attorney's maroon Lincoln. The day was bright and clear, and leaves were bouncing across the freshly mowed lawn.

'Don't talk to him,' the attorney said, opening his door.

'It's all right. We're old pals, really. He and I share a lot of family secrets. About the wifey and that sort of thing,' she said. She put on a pair of black sunglasses and began tying a flowered bandanna around her hair.

'You share a big common denominator with most scam artists, Marie. You're cunning but you're not smart,' I said.

'Oh, hurt me deep inside, Dave,' she said, and pursed her lips at me.

'You didn't understand what I told you in there. Buchalter is going to be charged with murdering two of his own people. Bad PR when you're leading a cause. Even his lamebrain followers read newspapers.'

She hooked her purse on her wrist, then placed her hand on her hip.

'I've got a problem. My tractor don't get no traction. Can you give me a few minutes, baby-pie?' she said.

'Marie, don't spend any more time on this man,' her attorney said.

'How about it, Dave?' she said. 'It won't hurt your relationship with the sow. I think I remember somebody cranking a whole bunch of electricity into your batteries. Wouldn't you like a little sport fuck on the side?'

I opened her car door and fitted my hand tightly around her upper arm. Her skin whitened around the edges of my fingers. Pieces of torn color floated behind my eyes, like the tongues of orange flame you see inside the smoke of an oil fire, and I heard whirring sounds in my ears, like wind blowing hard inside a conch shell. I saw the top of the attorney's body across the car's rooftop, saw his Humpty-Dumpty head and wide tie and high collar, saw his mouth opening and a fearful light breaking in his eyes.

'There's no problem, Counselor. I just want to make sure y'all don't accuse us of a lack of courtesy in Iberia Parish,' I said, and sat the woman down hard in the passenger seat. Her sunglasses fell off her nose into her lap. 'Happy motoring, Marie. It's a grand day. Stay the fuck away from my house. Next time down, it's under a black flag.'