Dixie City Jam

chapter three

There are those who, for political reasons, enjoy talking about country club jails. But any jail anywhere is a bad place to be. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been in one.

Imagine an environment where the lights never go off and you defecate in full view of others on a toilet seat streaked with other people's urine, where you never quite fall asleep, where you are surrounded by the sounds of clanging iron, irrational voices resonating down stone corridors, a count-man or irritated turnkey whanging his baton off steel bars, or the muffled and tormented cries of an eighteen-year-old fish being gang-raped behind a shower wall.

Perhaps even a worse characteristic of jail is the denial of any identity you might have had before you stepped inside a piece of geography where time can sometimes be measured in five-minute increments that seem borne right out of Dante's ninth ring. Here you quickly learn that the personal violation of your self is considered as insignificant and ongoing an occurrence as routine body cavity searches, as the spraying of your genitals for crab lice, or as a wolf telling the server in the chow line to spit in your food, until you no longer think of yourself as an exception to the rules of jailhouse romance'.

Batist spent the night in the tank and wasn't booked until the next morning. I sat on a wood chair in a waiting area next to a squad room and a row of glassed-in offices, one of which was Nate Baxter's. Through a doorway at the back of the squad room I could see the holding tank where Batist was still being held, though he had already been fingerprinted and photographed.

I had been waiting an hour and a half to see Nate Baxter. Then Sergeant Lucinda Bergeron walked past me, in navy blue slacks, a starched white short-sleeve shirt, and a lacquered black gunbelt with a leather pouch for handcuffs. She carried a clipboard in her hand, and if she noticed me, her face didn't show it.

'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said.

She stopped and looked at me but said nothing. Her eyes were turquoise and elongated, like an Oriental's, and her cheekbones were rouged high up on her face.

'Could I talk with you a minute?' I asked.

'What is it?'

'I'm Dave Robicheaux. You left a message for me with Cletus Purcel.'

'Yes?'

'I came in and filed a report with Sergeant Motley yesterday.'

She looked at me, her face as still and expressionless as a picture painted upon the air.

'I was at Calucci's Bar,' I said. 'You asked me to come in and file a statement.'

'I understood you. What can I help you with?' she said.

'I have a friend back there in the tank. The black man, Batist Perry. He's already been booked.'

'What do you want from me?'

'How about getting him moved into a holding cell?'

'You'll have to talk to the officer in charge.'

'That's what I've been trying to do. For an hour and a half.'

'I can't help you. I'm sorry.'

She walked away to her desk, which was located in the squad room, among the uniformed officers, rather than in an enclosed office. Ten minutes later Baxter stepped out of his office door, studying some papers in his hand, then glanced in my direction and beckoned to me with one finger.

While I sat down across from him, he tipped his cigarette ashes in an ashtray and continued to concentrate on the papers on his desk blotter. He looked rested and fresh, in a sky blue sports coat and a crinkling shirt that was the color of tin.

'You're really charging Batist with murder?' I said.

'That decision comes down from the prosecutor's office, Robicheaux. You know that.'

'The man's never been in trouble. Not in his whole life. Not even for a misdemeanor. What's the matter with you?'

'Well, he's in trouble now. In a big way.' He leaned forward and tipped his ashes into his ashtray, cocking his eyebrows at me.

'I don't think you have a case, Nate. I think this is all smoke.'

'His prints are on the door at the crime scene.'

'That's impossible.'

'Tell that to our fingerprint man. Does this look like smoke to you?' He removed a half dozen eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs from his desk drawer and dropped them in front of me. 'You ever see that much blood at a crime scene? Check out the chest wound. Has your friend ever been into voodoo?'

'You're using a homicide investigation to settle an old score, Nate. Don't tell me you're not.'

'Is the light in here bad? That must be the problem. The killer sawed the guy's heart out. That wasn't enough for him, either. He stuffed purple roses into the heart cavity.'

'What's your point?'

'Your friend wears a dime on a string around his ankle,' Baxter said. 'He carries a shriveled alligator's foot in his pocket. He had bones in his suitcase. The murder has all the characteristics of a ritual killing. If you were in my place, who would be your first suspect? Is there any chance it might be a superstitious backwater black guy who had already assaulted and threatened the victim the same day of the homicide and then left his prints at the crime scene? No, don't tell me. Just go think about it somewhere and drop me a card sometime.'

'I want to see him.'

'Be my guest. Please. By the way, I saw the black broad blow you off. In case you want to get more involved with her, I hear she's starting up a charm school. Take it easy, Robicheaux. You never surprise me,' he said.

But while I had been talking with Nate Baxter, Batist had already been locked to a wrist chain and taken to morning arraignment. By the time I got to the courtroom the public defender, who did not look to be over twenty-five, was trying to prevail upon the judge to set a reasonable bail. He was methodical, even eloquent, in his argument and obviously sincere. He pointed out that Batist had no arrest record and had been employed for years at a boat-rental dock run by a law officer in Iberia Parish, that he had lived his entire life in one small community and was not apt to leave it.

But Judge James T. Flowers was a choleric white-knuckle alcoholic who stayed dry without a program by channeling his inner misery into the lives of others. His procedures and sentences kept a half dozen ACLU attorneys occupied year round.

He looked at the clock and waited for the public defender to finish, then said, 'Hell's hot, my young friend. Perhaps it's time some of your clients learned that. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars. Next case.'

An hour later Sergeant Motley arranged for me to see Batist in an interrogation room. The walls were a smudged white and windowless, and the air smelled like refrigerated cigarette smoke and cigar butts. Batist sat across from me at the wood table and kept rubbing his hands on top of each other. The scars on them looked like tiny pink worms. His face was unshaved and puffy with fatigue, his eyes arterial red in the corners with broken blood veins.

'What's gonna happen, Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman first, then we'll see about a lawyer. We just have to do it a step at a time.'

'Dave, that judge said fifty t'ousand dollars.'

'I'm going to get you out, partner. You just have to trust me.'

'What for they doin' this? What they get out of it? I never had no truck with the law. I ain't even seen these people befo'.'

'A bad cop out there is carrying a grudge over some things that happened a long time ago. Eventually somebody in the prosecutor's office will probably figure that out. But in the meantime we have a problem, Batist. They say your fingerprints were on the door of that cottage across the street.'

I looked into his face. He dropped his eyes to the table and opened and closed his hands. His knuckles looked as round and hard against the skin as ball bearings.

'Tell me,' I said.

'After you was gone, after I bust that man's lip, I seen them kids t'rew the window, hangin' round his cottage do' again. When I call the po-lice, they ax me what he done. I say he sellin' dope to children, that's what he done. They ax me I seen it, I seen him take money from somebody, I seen somebody lighting up a crack pipe or somet'ing. I say no I ain't seen it, you got to see a coon climb in a tree to know coons climb in trees?

'So I kept watchin' out the window at that nigger's do'. After a while he come out with two womens, I'm talkin' about the kind been workin' somebody's crib, and they got in the car with them kids and drove round the block. When they come back them kids was fallin' down in the grass. I call the po-lice again, and they ax what crime I seen. I say I ain't seen no crime, long as it's all right in New Orleans for a pimp and his whores to get children high on dope.

'This was a white po-liceman I was talkin' to. So he put a black man on the phone, like nobody but another black man could make sense out of what I was sayin'. This black po-liceman tole me to come down and make a repote, he gonna check it out. I tole him check out that nigger after I put my boot up his skinny ass.'

'You went over there?'

'For just a minute, that's all. He wasn't home. I never gone inside. Maybe he went out the back do'. Why you look like that, Dave?'

I rested my chin on my fist and tried not to let him read my face.

'Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman now. In the meantime, don't talk about this stuff with anyone. Not with the cops, not with any of those guys in the lockup. There're guys in here who'll trade off their own time and lie about you on the witness stand.'

'What you mean?'

'They'll try to learn something about you, enough to give evidence against you. They cut deals with the prosecutor.'

'They can do that?' he said 'Get out of jail by sendin' somebody else to Angola?'

'I'm afraid it's a way of life, podna.'

The turnkey opened the door and touched Batist on the shoulder. Batist stared silently at me a moment, then rose from his chair and walked out of the room toward a yellow elevator, with a wiremesh and barred door, which would take him upstairs into a lockdown area. The palms of his hands left tiny horsetails of perspiration on the tabletop.

It was going to cost a lot, far beyond anything I could afford right now. I had thirty-two hundred dollars in a money market account, most of which was set aside for the quarterly tax payments on my boat-rental and bait business, four hundred thirty-eight dollars in an account that I used for operating expenses at the dock, and one hundred thirteen dollars in my personal checking account.

I went back to the guesthouse and called every bondsman I knew in New Orleans. The best deal I could get was a one-week deferment on the payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar bail fee. I told the bondsman I would meet him at the jail in a half hour.

I couldn't even begin to think about the cost of hiring a decent defense attorney for a murder trial.

Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American criminal justice system.

Our room was still in disarray after being tossed by Nate Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up, refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.

I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must have weighed thirty-five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets clean, and now when you held up the skull vertically, it looked like a crucified man from the front. When you reversed it, it resembled an ecclesiastical, robed figure giving his benediction to the devout. If you shook it in your hand, you could hear pieces of bone clattering inside. Batist said those were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had taken to betray Christ.

It had nothing to do with voodoo. It had everything to do with Acadian Catholicism.

Before I left the guesthouse for the jail, I called up Hippo Bimstine at one of his drugstores.

'How bad you want that Nazi sub, Hippo?' I asked.

'It's not the highest priority on my list.'

'How about twenty-five grand finder's fee?'

'Jesus Christ, Dave, you were yawning in my face the other day.'

'What do you say, partner.'

'There's something wrong here.'

'Oh?'

'You found it, didn't you?'

I didn't answer.

'You found it but it's not in the same place now?' he said.

'You're a wealthy man, Hippo. You want the sub or not?'

'Hey, you think that's right?' he asked. 'I tell you where it's at, you find it and up the fee on me? That's like you?'

'Maybe you can get somebody cheaper. You know some guys who want to go down in the dark on a lot of iron and twisted cables?'

'Put my schlong in a vise, why don't you?'

'I've got to run. What do you say?'

'Fifteen.'

'Nope.'

'Hey, New Orleans is recessed. I'm bleeding here. You know what it cost me to get rid of-when he was about to be our next governor? Now my friends are running a Roto-Rooter up my hole.'

(Hippo had spent a fortune destroying the political career of an ex-Klansman who had run for both the governor's office and the U.S. Senate. My favorite quote of Hippo's had appeared in Time magazine, during the gubernatorial campaign; he said of the ex-Klansman, '-doesn't like us Jews now. Check out how he feels after I get finished with him.')

'I won't charge expenses,' I said.

'I'm dying here. Hemorrhaging on the floor. I'm serious. Nobody believes me. Dave, you take food stamps?'

Hippo, you're a jewel, I thought.

Batist and I picked up my boat and left the dock at three the next morning. The breeze was up, peppered with light rain, and you could smell the salt spray breaking over the bow. The water was as dark as burgundy, the chop on the edge of the swells electric with moonlight, the wetlands to the north green and gray and metamorphic with mist. To the southeast I could see gas flares burning on some offshore rigs; then the wind dropped and the sky turned the color of bone and I could see a red glow spreading out of the water into the clouds.

It was completely light when I cut the engine and drifted above the spot where I had dove down into darkness and the sounds of grinding metal three days earlier. Batist stood on the bow, feeding the anchor rope out through his palms, until it hit bottom and went slack; then he tied it off on a cleat.

The water was smoky green, the swells full of skittering bait fish, the air hazy with humidity. I had fashioned a viewer box from reinforced window glass inset in a waterproofed wood crate, and I lowered it over the side by the handles and pressed it beneath the surface. Pockets of air swam across the glass, then flattened and disappeared, and suddenly in the yellow-green light I could see schools of small speckled trout, like darting silver ribbons, drumfish, as round and flat as skillets, a half dozen stingrays, their wings undulating as smoothly as if they were gliding on currents of warm air, and down below, where the light seemed to be gathered into a vortex of silt, the torpedo shapes of sand sharks, who bolted and twisted in erratic circles for no apparent reason.

Batist peered downward through the viewer box over my shoulder. Then I felt his eyes studying me while I strapped on my tanks and weight belt.

'This don't make me feel good, Dave,' he said.

'Don't worry about it, partner.'

'I don't want to see you lunch for them sharks, no.'

'Those are sand sharks, Batist. They're harmless.'

'Tell me that out yonder's harmless.' He pointed past the cabin to the southwest.

It was a water spout that had dropped out of a thunderhead and was moving like an enormous spinning cone of light and water toward the coast. If it made landfall, which it probably would not, it would fill suddenly with mud, rotted vegetation, and uprooted trees, and become as black as a midwestern tornado coursing through a freshly plowed field.

'Keep your eye on it and kick the engine over if it turns,' I said.

'Just look up from down there, you see gasoline and life jackets and a bunch of bo'rds floatin' round, see me swimmin' toward Grand Isle, that means it ain't bothered to tell me it was fixin' to turn.'

I went over the side, swam to the anchor rope, and began pulling myself downward hand over hand. I felt myself sliding through three different layers of temperature, each one cooler than the last; then just as a school of sea perch swept past me, almost clattering against my mask, I could feel a uniform level of coldness penetrate my body from the crown of my head down to the soles of my feet. Clouds of gray silt seemed to be blowing along the gulf's floor as they would in a windstorm. The pressure against my eardrums began to grow in intensity; it made a faint tremolo sound, like wire stretching before it breaks. Then I heard iron ring against iron, and a groan like a great weight shifting against impacted sand.

I held the anchor rope with one hand and floated motionlessly in the current. Then I saw it. For just a moment.

It was pointed at an upward angle on a slope, buried in a sand-bar almost to its decks, molded softly with silt. But there was no mistaking the long, rounded, sharklike shape. It was a submarine, and I could make out the battered steel flanges that protruded above the captain's bridge on the conning tower, and I knew that if I scraped the moss and layers of mud and shellfish from the tower's plates I would see the vestiges of the swastika that I had seen on the same conning tower over three decades ago.

Then I saw it tilt slightly to one side, saw dirty strings of oil or silt or engine fuel rise near the forward torpedo tubes, and I realized that years ago air must have been trapped somewhere in a compartment, perhaps where a group of terrified sailors spun a wheel on a hatch and pretended to themselves that their friends outside, whose skulls were being snapped like eggshell, would have chosen the same alternative.

I felt a heavy surge in the current from out in the dark, beyond the continental shelf. The water clouded and the submarine disappeared. I thought I heard thunder booming, then the anchor rope vibrated in my palm, and when I looked up I could see the exhaust pipes on my boat boiling the waterline at the stern.

When I came to the surface the chop smacked hard against my mask, and the swells were dented with rain circles. Batist came outside the cabin and pointed toward the southeast. I pushed my mask up on my head and looked behind me; three more water spouts had dropped out of the sky and were churning across the surface of the water, and farther to the south you could see thunderclouds as thick as oil smoke on the horizon.

I climbed up the ladder, pulled off my gear, tied the end of a spool of clothesline through a chunk of pig iron that had once been a window sash, and fed the line over the gunwale until the weight bit into the bottom. Then I sawed off the line at the spool and strung it through the handles of three sealed Clorox bottles that I used as float markers. The rain was cold and dancing in a green haze on the swells now, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and nests of dead bait fish in the waves. Just as I started to fling the Clorox bottles overboard, I heard the blades of a helicopter thropping low over the water behind me.

It passed us, flattening and wrinkling the water below the downdraft, and I saw the solitary passenger, a blond man in pilot's sunglasses, turn in his seat and stare back at me. Then the helicopter circled and hovered no more than forty yards to the south of us.

'What they doin'?' Batist said.

'I don't know.'

'Let's get goin', Dave. We don't need to be stayin' out here no longer with them spouts.'

'You got it, partner,' I said.

Then the helicopter gained altitude, perhaps to five hundred feet directly above us, high enough for them to see the coastline and to take a good fix on our position.

I left the Clorox marker bottles on the deck and pulled the sash weight back up from the bottom. We could return to this same area and probably find the sub again with my sonar, or 'fish finder,' which was an electronic marvel that could outline any protrusion on the gulfs floor. But the sky in the south was completely black now, with veins of lightning trembling on the horizon, and I had a feeling that the Nazi silent service down below was about to set sail again.