James Burke - Dixie City Jam

The flashlight beam danced over Camel's body, his copper-bright skin, his hair shaved into dagger points and corn-rolled ridges, his dead eye that looked like a frosted blue-white marble. He was wedged in a reclining position between the bricks and a pile of broken cinder blocks. The workmen had entered the wall at the wrong location because Camel's blood had drained down a cement mound into a bowllike depression at the bottom of the wall.

The wound was like none I had ever seen in my years as a homicide detective. Someone had driven the winged, brass-sheathed end of a broken flagstaff through Camel's back, all the way through the heart cavity, until the staff had emerged below the nipple. The remnant of an American flag, long since faded almost colorless and partially burned by vandals, was streaked bright red and glued tightly against the staff by the pressure of the wound.

'Get the rest of the wall down,' Motley said to the workmen. Then he motioned me to follow him up the stairwell to the second floor. We stood on a landing outside a closed door. The building shook with the thudding of the jackhammer. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I thought the vigilante specialized in heart removal.'

'So he modified his technique.'

'I thought he usually left flowers behind.'

'Maybe he didn't have time.'

'Did the killer take anything? Money or drugs?'

'He seemed to be too busy breaking heads. At least according to our witnesses.'

'Where are they?'

'Either in the hospital or in a holding cell at the district… Except one.'

'Oh?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'You want to check him out?'

He opened the door on a room that was stacked with school desks. Sitting on the floor, under a portable blackboard with holes the size of bowling balls knocked in the slate, was Zoot Bergeron, his knees drawn up before him, his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. There was a puddle of what looked like urine in the corner.

'He walked in the back door about five minutes after two patrolmen got here,' Motley said. 'Bad luck for Lucinda's boy.'

Zoot looked at me, then dropped his eyes to his tennis shoes. He had made fists of both his hands, with his thumbs tucked inside his palms. Motley kicked him in the sole of the shoe.

'Look at me,' he said.

'Yes, suh,' Zoot said.

'Tell Detective Robicheaux what you told me.'

'I was picking up a friend. That's all. I don't know nothing about what goes on here.'

'Do you think all big people are dumb, Zoot? Do I look like a big, dumb, fat man to you?' Motley asked.

'I ain't said that, Sergeant Motley. My friend ax me to pick him up here and carry him to work.'

'Maybe we ought to take you down to the detox and get you UA-ed,' Motley said. 'You ever been there? You got to watch out for some of those old-time hypes in the shower, though. They'll try to take your cherry.'

'I don't care you UA me or not. I don't care you try to scare me with that kind of talk, either. I ain't used no dope, Sergeant Motley.'

'What do you know about Camel Benoit?' I said.

'Everybody up Magazine know Camel. He's a pimp.'

'He was a drug dealer, too, Zoot,' I said.

He fastened his eyes on his shoes again.

'Do you know who killed him?' I said.

'Sergeant Motley just said it. I wasn't here.'

He locked his hands on his knees, then rested his forehead on the back of his wrist. His eyelashes were as long as a girl's.

'You trying to fuck your mother?' Motley said.

'Suh?' Zoot said, raising his head. His face was the color of dead ash.

'You heard me, fuck your mother. Because that's what you're doing, you stupid little shit.'

Zoot tried to return Motley's stare, but his left eye began to tremble and water.

'Get out of here,' Motley said.

'Suh?'

'You got earplugs on? Get out of here. If I catch you around a crack house again, I'm going to kick your skinny ass all up and down Martin Luther King Drive.'

Zoot got to his feet uncertainly. He flinched when he straightened his back. Motley opened the door and leaned over the stair railing.

'There's a kid coming out. Let him go. He doesn't know anything,' he called to the detectives below. Then he walked back to Zoot and punched him in the breastbone with his forefinger.

'Don't ever give me reason to get mad at you. Do you understand me?' he,said.

'Yes, suh. I ain't.'

'You tell anybody I cut you loose, I'll kick your ass anyway.'

'Yes, suh.'

'Get out!'

After Zoot was gone, I looked at Motley. He was lighting a cigar. His whiskers were jet black inside the grain of his cheeks.

'You're all right, Motley.'

'Tell me that five years from now. That kid's going to end up facedown on a sidewalk.'

'Why?'

'Because he's like half the black kids in New Orleans. Every day he's got to prove he doesn't have his mama's pink finger up his butt. Come on, I'll buy you a beignet. This place is depressing me.'

I spent the next two hours in the library, or morgue, as it's called, of The Times-Picayune . I could find almost nothing on German U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico that had been printed during the war years, since all military news was censored from late 1941 until after V-J Day. There was one exception, however: a headline story which ran for three days concerning four Nazi saboteurs who had been apprehended by the FBI south of Baton Rouge in a truck loaded with explosives.

A page one photograph showed them in fedoras and baggy suits, locked to a wrist chain, staring out at the camera with pale, rectangular faces and buckshot eyes. The cutline below said they had planned to blow up the Standard Oil refinery on the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. The last article in the series dealt with the arrest of an American accomplice, a retired oil man in Grand Isle by the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter, who had been a founder of the American Silver Shirts.

I jumped the microfilm ahead to the year 1956 and found the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter once again. It was in a twenty-inch feature story in the regional section, written with the detached tone one might use in examining an anthropological curiosity, about the oil man who had betrayed his country, flashed a signal one night through the mist at a U-boat south of Grand Isle, and helped bring ashore four men who, had they succeeded in their mission, would have dried up the flow of fuel to American and English forces for at least two weeks.

At the bottom of the page was a 1935 wire-service photograph of Buchalter with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Buchalter was a barrel-chested, vigorous-looking man, resplendent in white riding breeches, silver shirt, polished Sam Browne belt, black tie, and red-and-black armband. His right hand clasped Hitler's; he was smiling with the confidence of a man who knew that he had stepped into history.

After he was arrested in Grand Isle, a drunken mob of shrimpers tried to break him out of jail. They fled when sheriff's deputies began firing shotguns in the air. They left behind a thirty-foot spool of chain and a five-gallon can of gasoline.

He did his fourteen years of federal time in isolation, despised by both his warders and his fellow prisoners, eating food delivered through a slit by a trusty who in all probability spat in it first.

His wife and children had long ago moved out of state; his property had been confiscated for taxes. He weighed eighty pounds when his liver finally failed and he died in a public ward at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There was no marker placed on his grave in potter's field other than a stamped tin number pressed into the sod.

I wondered what importance he would give the fact that the old potter's field in Orleans Parish was not segregated, like other cemeteries during that historical period, and that he would sow his teeth and bones among those of Negroes and perhaps even Jews.