James Burke: Dixie City Jam

'What are you going to do with a World War II U-boat, Hippo?' I said.

'Are you kidding? You ever see this Geraldo guy on TV? He had millions of people watching him dig into a basement wall under a Chicago hotel where Al Capone used to live. He had everybody believing there was a car, dead bodies, gold bars, machine guns, all kinds of bullshit, buried in this underground vault. The show went on for three hours. It was so boring you had to keep slapping yourself awake. You know what he found? A big pile of wet sand and some old bottles. He also almost punched a hole in the retaining wall that keeps Lake Michigan out of the city of Chicago.

'You know what I could do with a sub full of drowned Nazis? Use your imagination, Dave.'

But I had struck out. And it was just as well. Hippo's projects were usually as grandiose and thespian as his epicurean consumption of seafood in the Pearl, and if you became involved with him for very long, you began to realize that perhaps you had not successfully avoided the role of court jester in this life after all.

Batist and I caught and gutted over a dozen gafftop, ripped out the stingers and peeled the skin with pliers, fileted the meat in long, pink strips, and laid them out in rows on the crushed ice in the cooler. Then we ate the po'-boy sandwiches we'd made with fried oysters, mayonnaise, sauce piquant , sliced tomatoes, and onions and wrapped in waxed paper that morning; then we headed back toward the coast as the afternoon cooled and the wind began to blow out of the west, smelling of distant rain and speckled trout spawning and beached shellfish and lines of seaweed drying where the tide had receded from the sand.

As the late red sun seemed to collapse and melt into a single burning ember on the horizon, you could see the neon glow of New Orleans gradually replace the daylight and spread across the darkening sky. The clouds were black-green and low over the city, dancing with veins of lightning, roiling from Barataria all the way out to Lake Pontchartrain, and you knew that in a short while torrents of rain would blow through the streets, thrash the palm trees on the esplanades, overrun the gutters in the Quarter, fill the tunnel of oak trees on St. Charles with a gray mist through which the old iron, green-painted streetcars would make their way along the tracks like emissaries from the year 1910.

New Orleans was a wonderful place to be on a late evening in August.

That's what I thought, anyway, until I called Hippo Bimstine to tell him that he'd have to hire somebody else to dive the wrecks of Nazi submarines.

'Where are you?' he said.

'We're having supper at Mandina's, out on Canal.'

'You still tight with Clete Purcel?'

'Sure.'

'You know where Calucci's Bar is by St. Charles and Carrollton?'

'Yeah, it's across from your house, isn't it?'

'That's right. So right now I'm looking out my window at a shitstorm in the making. I'm talking about they got a SWAT team out there. Can you believe that? A fucking SWAT team in the middle of my neighborhood. I think they could use a diplomat out there, before the meat loaf ends up on the wallpaper, you get my meaning?'

'No.'

'The salt water still in your ears, Dave?'

'Look, Hippo-'

'It's Clete Purcel. He went apeshit in Calucci's and ran one guy all the way through the glass window. The guy's still lying in the flower bed. They say Purcel's got two or three others in there on their knees. If he don't come out, there's a supervising plainclothes in front says they're gonna smoke him. I got fucking Beirut, Lebanon, in my front yard.'

'Who's the supervising officer?'

'A guy named Baxter. Yeah, Nate Baxter. He used to be in Vice in the First District. You remember a plainclothes by that name?… Hey, Dave, you there?'

Calucci's Bar had been fashioned out of an old white frame house, with tin awnings on the windows, in an old residential neighborhood at the end of St. Charles by the Mississippi levee. The rain looked like purple and green and pink sleet in the neon glow from the bar, and on the far side of the levee you could see mist rising off the river and hear horns blowing on a tug-boat.

The street in front of the bar was filled with a half dozen emergency vehicles, their revolving lights reflecting off the shrubs and wet cement and the palm trees on the esplanade. When Batist and I parked my pickup truck by the curb I saw Nate Baxter in the midst of it all, rainwater sluicing off his hat, his two-tone shoes and gray golf slacks splattered from passing cars. His neatly trimmed reddish beard was glazed with wet light, his badge and chrome-plated revolver clipped on his belt, his body hard and muscular with middle age and his daily workouts at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

A flat-chested black woman plainclothes, with skinny arms and a mouthful of gold teeth, was arguing with him. She wore a rumpled brown blouse that hung out of her dark blue slacks, makeup that had streaked in the rain, and loafers without socks. Nate Baxter tried to turn away from her, but she moved with him, her hands on her thin hips, her mouth opening and closing in the rain.

'I'm talking to you, Lieutenant,' she said. 'It's my opinion we have a situation that's gotten out of hand here. The response is not proportionate to the situation. Not in my opinion, sir. If you persist, I plan to file my own report. Are you hearing me, sir?'

'Do whatever you feel like, Sergeant. But please go do it somewhere else,' Baxter said.

'I'm responding to the call. I resent your talking to me like that, too,' she said.

'All right, I'll put it a little more clearly. You're a nuisance and a pain in the ass. You want to make a civil rights case out of that, be my guest. In the meantime, get out of here. That's an order.'

A uniformed white cop laughed in the background.

Baxter's eyes narrowed under the brim of his hat when he saw me.

'What are you doing, Nate?' I said.

He ignored me and began talking to a cop in a bulletproof vest and a bill cap turned backwards on his head.

'What are you trying to do to Clete Purcel?' I said.

'Stay behind the tape, Robicheaux,' he said.

'I can talk him out of there.'

'You're out of your jurisdiction.'

Even in the rain his breath was heated and stale.

'Nobody needs to get hurt here, Nate,' I said.

'Purcel dealt the play, not me. You know what? I think he's been looking for this moment all his life.'

'Have you called him on the phone?'

'That's a good idea, isn't it? I'd really like to do that. Except he tore it out of the wall and wrapped it around a guy's throat. Then he rammed the guy through the front window.'

'The Calucci brothers are mobbed up. It's some kind of personal beef between them and Clete, you know it is. You don't call out a SWAT team on barroom bullshit.'

'We've got a vigilante loose in New Orleans, too. I think Purcel's a perfect suspect.'

I could feel my palms open and close at my sides.

Baxter was talking again to the cop in the vest, pointing at a high area on the levee.

'You're not going to get away with this,' I said.

'End of conversation, Robicheaux.'

'Clete stuck your head in a toilet bowl in a bar on Decatur,' I said. 'You didn't report it because he knew you were taking freebies from street hookers in the Quarter. That's what all this is about, Nate.'

Four white cops, as well as the black woman, were staring at us now. The skin around Nate Baxter's right eye was pinched like a marksman's when he sights along a rifle barrel. He started to speak, but I didn't give him the chance.

I held my Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department badge high above my head and walked toward the front door of the bar.

Clete had dropped the Venetian blinds over all the windows and was leaning on the bar counter, one foot on the rail, drinking Mexican rum from a shot glass and sucking on a salted lime. He wore his powder blue porkpie hat slanted on the front of his head, his pants hanging two inches below his navel. His round, pink face was smiling and happy, his green eyes lighted with an alcoholic shine. Through one eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose was a scar, as thick as a bicycle patch, perforated with stitch holes, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel. As always, his tropical print shirt looked like it was about to split on his massive shoulders.