James Burke: Dixie City Jam

The bar was empty. Rain was blowing through the broken front window and dripping off the Venetian blinds.

'What's happenin', Streak?' he said.

'Are you losing your mind?'

'Harsh words, noble mon. Lighten up.'

'That's Nate Baxter out there. He'd like to paint the woodwork with both of us.'

'That's why I didn't go out there. Some of those other guys don't like PI's, either.' He looked at his watch and tapped on the crystal with his fingernail. 'You want a Dr Pepper?'

'I want us both to walk out of here. We're going to throw your piece in front of us, too.'

'What's the hurry? Have a Dr Pepper. I'll put some cherries and ice in it.'

'Clete-'

'I told you, everything's copacetic. Now, disengage, noble mon. Nobody rattles the old Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.' He took a hit from the shot glass, sucked on his sliced lime, and smiled at me.

'It's time to boogie, partner,' I said.

He looked again at his watch.

'Give it five more minutes,' he said, and smiled again.

He started to refill his glass from a large, square, brown bottle that he held in his hand. I placed my palm lightly on his arm.

'Look, let me give you the big picture, noble mon,' he said. 'I'm involved with a lady friend these days. She's a nice person, she never hurt anybody, she's intelligent, she goes part-time to the Ju-Co, she also strips in a T and A joint on Bourbon owned by the Calucci brothers. We're talking about Max and Bobo here, Dave, you remember them, the two guys we ran in once for pulling a fingernail off a girl's hand with a pair of pliers? Before I met Martina, my lady friend, she borrowed two grand off the Caluccis to pay for her grandmother's hospitalization. So when she didn't make the vig yesterday, Max, the bucket of shit I put through the window glass, called her in this morning and said it was time for her to start working out of the back of a taxicab.'

He took off his porkpie hat, combed his sandy hair straight back on his head, clipped the comb in his shirt pocket, and put his hat back on.

'The Caluccis aren't going to make a beef, Dave, at least not a legal one. They get along in police stations like shit does in an ice cream parlor,' he said. He filled his shot glass, knocked it back, and winked at me.

'Where's the other one-Bobo?'

He glanced at his watch again, then looked across the counter, past a small kitchen, toward the massive wood door of a walk-in meat locker.

'He's probably wrapping himself in freezer foil right now,' he said. 'At least that's what I'd do.'

'Are you kidding?'

'I didn't put him in there. He locked himself in. What am I supposed to do about it? He's got an iron bar or something set behind the door. I say live and let live.'

I went to the locker and tried to open it. The handle was chrome and cold in my hand. The door moved an inch, then clanked against something metal and wouldn't move farther.

'Bobo?' I said.

'What?' a voice said through the crack.

'This is Dave Robicheaux. I'm a sheriff's detective. It's over. Come on out. Nobody's going to hurt you.'

'I never heard of you.'

'I used to be in Homicide in the First District.'

'Oh yeah, you were dick-brain's partner out there. What are you doing here? He call you up for some laughs?'

'Here's the agenda, Bobo. Let me run it by you and get your reactions. I'm holding a forty-five automatic in my hand. If you refuse to open the door, I'll probably have to shoot a few holes through the lock and the hinges. Do you feel comfortable with that?'

It was silent a moment.

'Where is he?' the voice said.

'He's not a player anymore. Take my word for it.'

'You keep that animal away from me. He's a fucking menace. They ought to put his brain in a jar out at the medical school.'

'You got my word, Bobo.'

I heard an iron bar rattle to the floor, then Bobo pushed the door open with one foot from where he sat huddled in the corner, a rug wrapped around his shoulders, his hair and nostrils white with frost, clouds of freezer steam rising from his body into the sides of beef that were suspended from hooks over his head. His small, close-set black eyes went up and down my body.

'You ain't got a gun. You sonofabitch. You lied,' He said.

'Let's take a walk,' I said, lifting him up by one arm. 'Don't worry about Clete. He's just going to finish his drink and follow us outside. Believe it or not, there're cops out there who were willing to drop one of their own kind, just to protect you. Makes you proud to be a taxpayer, I bet.'

'Get your hand off my arm,' he said when we reached the door.

Batist and I stayed overnight in a guesthouse on Prytania, one block from St. Charles. The sky was red at sunrise, the air thick with the angry cries of blue jays in the hot shade outside the French doors. Nate Baxter had held Clete for disturbing the peace, but the Caluccis never showed up in the morning to file assault charges, and Clete was kicked loose without even going to arraignment.

Batist and I had beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde across from Jackson Square. The wind was warm off the river behind us, the sun bright on the banana and myrtle trees inside the square, and water sprinklers ticked along the black piked fences that bordered the grass and separated it from the sidewalk artists and the rows of shops under the old iron colonnades. I left Batist in the café and walked through the square, past St. Louis Cathedral, where street musicians were already setting up in the shade, and up St. Ann toward Clete's private investigator's office.

Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter. The streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous night's rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odor of wild spearmint and old brick in the passageways. Every scrolled-iron balcony along the street seemed overgrown with a tangle of potted roses, bougainvillea, azaleas, and flaming hibiscus, and the moment could be so perfect that you felt you had stepped inside an Utrillo painting.

But it wasn't all a poem. There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats' teeth.

The biscuit-colored stucco walls inside Clete's office were decorated with bullfight posters, leather wine bags, banderillas that he had brought back from his vacation in Mexico City. Through the back window I could see the small flagstone patio where he kept his dumbbells and the exercise bench that he used unsuccessfully every day to keep his weight and blood pressure down. Next to it was a dry stone well impacted with dirt and untrimmed banana trees.

He sat behind his desk in his Budweiser shorts, a yellow tank top, and porkpie hat. His blue-black.38 police special hung in a nylon holster from a coatrack in the corner. He pried the cap off a bottle of Dixie beer with his pocketknife, let the foam boil over the neck onto the rug, kicked off his flip-flops, and put his bare feet on top of the desk.

'You trying to leave the dock early today?' I said.

'Hey, I was in the tank all night. You ought to check that scene out, mon. Two-thirds of the people in there are honest-to-God crazoids. I'm talking about guys eating their grits with their hands. It's fucking pitiful.'

He pushed at a scrap of memo paper by his telephone.

'I was a little bothered by something Nate Baxter said last night,' I said.

'Oh yeah?'

'This vigilante stuff. He thinks you might be the man.'

He drank out of his beer and smiled at me, his eyes filled with a merry light.