James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Later that afternoon I parked in front of Lucinda Bergeron's house off Magazine. Just as I was turning off the engine, an open Jeep with oversized tires and four black kids inside pulled to the curb in front of me. The rap music playing on the stereo was deafening, like an electronic assault on the sensibilities. Zoot got out of the Jeep and went inside his house, his eyes straight ahead, as though I were not there. The three other boys did leg stretches on the lawn while they waited for him. All three were dressed in an almost paramilitary fashion-baggy black trousers like paratroopers might wear, gold neck chains, Air Jordan tennis shoes, black T-shirts with scrolled white death's-heads on them. Their hair was shaved to the scalp on the sides, with only a coarse, squared pad on the crown of the skull. Zoot came back out the front door and gave each of them a can of Pepsi-Cola.

When they drove away, the rap music from their stereo echoed off housefronts all the way down the street.

'You get an eyeful?' Zoot said.

'You run the PX for these characters?'

'The what?'

'Sergeant Motley's worried about you.'

He looked at me, waiting to see what new kind of trap was being constructed around him.

'He thinks you're going to get cooled out one of these days,' I said.

'Cooled… what?'

'He thinks you're cruising for a big fall.'

'Why y'all on my case? I ain't done nothing.'

'Did you tell your mother about what happened this morning?'

His eyes flicked sideways toward the house. He sucked in his cheeks and tried not to swallow.

'I remember something a guy told me once,' I said. 'He said it's as dishonorable to let yourself be used as it is to use someone else.'

'What you mean?'

'Your friends impress me as shitheads.'

'I don't care what you say. We stand by each ot'er. They're my friends in all kinds of ways.'

'Zoot, I didn't see one of those guys say thank you when you handed him a soft drink. Who's kidding who, podna?'

I found his mother on her knees in the backyard, spading out a hole for a pot of chrysanthemums. The Saint Augustine grass was thick and spongy underfoot, and the beds along her weathered wood fences were bursting with azaleas, banana trees, elephant ears, flaming hibiscus, and pink and blue hydrangeas. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a purple blouse with green flowers on it. Her hair was on her shoulders, and her face was hot with her work. For the first time I saw a prettiness in her. I sat on a wood box next to her and turned on the garden hose and let it sluice into the fresh hole while she fitted the plant in and troweled dirt over the roots.

'How'd you know I was home?' she said.

'Your office told me you're working nights now.'

'What were you talking to Zoot about out there?' she said, without looking up.

'Not too much… His friends.'

'You don't approve of them?'

'People sure know when they're around.'

'Well, I guess you're glad you don't have to be around them very long, aren't you?'

'A boy can gravitate to certain kids for a reason.'

'Oh?' she said, and rested her rump on her heels. As she looked at me she tilted her head in feigned deference.

'I don't know why you think it's funny. He's a good boy,' I said. 'Why don't you stop treating him like a douche bag?'

She made a sound like she had swallowed bile. 'I can't believe you just said that,' she said.

'Why don't you give the kid some credit? He's got a lot of courage. Did he tell you he went three rounds against a professional fighter who could have turned his brains into mush?'

'Where do you get off telling me how to raise my child?'

' That's it, Lucinda. He's not a child.'

Then she made the same sound again, as though she couldn't remove a vile taste from her throat. 'Please spare me this, would you?' she said. 'Go away somewhere, find a nice white neighborhood, find a white lady digging in her garden, and please give her your advice about the correct way to raise children. Can you do that for me, please?'

'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down on Terpsichore and Baronne.'

The heat went out of her eyes.

'Did you know him?' I said.

She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.

'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at the flower bed in front of her.

'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.

'Motley.'

'He'll do his best with it.'

'Somebody else won't?'

'The department has its problems.'

'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.

She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum plant with her garden trowel.

'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes being canceled out?'

'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the outrageousness of the idea.

'Some funny people keep showing up on it. Tommy Blue Eyes, Hippo Bimstine… you as the liaison person for NOPD. That's a peculiar combo, don't you think?'

'Lots of people want New Orleans to be like it was thirty years ago. For different reasons, maybe.'

'What's your own feeling? You think maybe the times are such that we should just whack out a few of the bad guys? Create our own free-fire zone and make up the rules later?'

'I don't think I like what you're saying.'

'I heard you went up to Angola to watch a man electrocuted.'

'That bothers you?'

'I had to witness an execution once. I had dreams about it for a long time.'

'Let me clarify something for you. I didn't go once . I do it in every capital conviction I'm involved with. The people who can't be there, the ones these guys sodomize and mutilate and murder, have worse problems than bad dreams.'

'You're a tough-minded lady.'

'Save the hand job for somebody else.'

I stood up and turned off the hose. The iron handle squeaked in my hand.

'The bad thing about vigilantes is that eventually they're not selective,' I said.

'Is that supposed to mean something to me?'

'I'm going to violate a confidence. If Zoot had walked into that crack house a little earlier this morning, he might have had his head opened up with that E-tool like some of the others. He's not a good listener, either, Lucinda.'

Her lips parted silently. I could not look at the recognition of loss spreading through her face.

It was hot that night, with an angry whalebone moon high above the marsh. The rumble of dry thunder woke me at three in the morning. I found Bootsie in the kitchen, sitting in the dark at the breakfast table, her bare feet in a square of moonlight. Her shoulders were rounded; her breasts sagged inside her nightgown.

'It's the lightning,' she said. 'It was popping out in the marsh. I saw a tree burning.'

I walked her back to the bed and lay beside her. In a little while the rain began ticking in the trees; then it fell harder, drumming on the eaves and the tin roof of the gallery. She fell asleep with her head on my arm and slept through a thunderstorm that broke across the marsh at daybreak and flooded the yard and blew a fine, cool mist through the screens.

At eight o'clock the sheriff called and told me to go directly to Iberia General rather than to the office. Charles Sitwell, our only link to Will Buchalter, would never be accused of ratting out on his friends.