James Burke - Dixie City Jam

He leaned on his arms and bit down on his matchstick so that it arched upward into his mustache.

But my conversation with Jimmie was not quite over. A half hour later he called Clete Purcel's apartment, just before I was about to head back to New Iberia.

'I'm glad I got you,' he said. 'Something's wrong here.'

'What's happened?'

'It's the Count. After we close the shop, he always goes upstairs to his room and eats a can of potted meat and watches Pat Robertson on TV. Except tonight he kept droning and humming and walking in circles and cleaning the shelves till the place looked like a dust storm, then for no reason he goes crashing up the stairs and throws everything in a suitcase and flies out the back door with his cape flapping in the breeze.'

'You're saying Buchalter was in your store? Maybe when the Count was by himself?'

'You tell me. Hey, when a guy who talks to Olivia Newton-John through the hole in the lavatory is scared out of town by sickos, I'm wondering maybe I should move to Iraq or one of them places where all you got to worry about is your nose falling off from the BO.'

In the morning I got the autopsy report on Charles Sitwell. He didn't die of an air bubble being injected into his bloodstream. The syringe had been loaded with a mixture of water and roach paste.

It was time to talk to Tommy Lonighan about his knowledge of German U-boats and Silver Shirts, preferably in an official situation, in custody, outside of his own environment. I called Ben Motley and asked about the chances of rousting him from his house or gym and bringing him down to an interrogation room.

'On what basis?' he said.

'He's lying about the reasons for his interest in this U-boat.'

'So he didn't want to tell you his mother was a Nazi. It's not the kind of stuff anybody likes to hang on the family tree.'

'It's too much for coincidence, Motley. He's connected with Buchalter. He's got to be.'

'You want me to get a warrant on a guy, in a homicide investigation, because of something his mother did fifty years ago?'

'We just bring him in for questioning. Tommy likes to think of himself as respectable these days. So we step on his cookie bag.'

'I wonder why the words civil suit keep floating in front of my eyes. It probably has something to do with my lens prescription.'

'Don't give this guy a free pass. He's dirty, Motley. You know it.'

'Give me a call if you come up with something more. Until then, I don't think it helps to be flogging our rods over the wastebasket.'

'Listen to me, Ben-'

'Get real, Robicheaux. NOPD doesn't roust people, not even Tommy Blue Eyes, when they live on lakefront property. Keep it in your pants, my man.'

I worked late that evening on two other cases, one involving a stabbing in a black nightclub, the other, the possible suffocation of an infant by his foster parents.

The sky was the color of scorched pewter when I drove along the dirt road by the bayou toward my house. The wind was dry blowing across the marsh, and the willows were coated with dust and filled with the red tracings of fireflies. The deputy on guard at the house started his car engine, waved at me as he passed, and disappeared down the long corridor of oak trees.

Bootsie was washing dishes at the sink when I came in. She wore a pair of grass-stained white dungarees and a rumpled yellow blouse that was too small for her and exposed her midsection.

'Where's Alafair?' I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I could smell cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair.

'In the living room. Doing her homework,' she said. She kept her face turned toward the open window when she spoke.

'Where'd you go today?' I said.

'What does it matter?'

'Beg your pardon?'

'What does it matter where we go?'

'I don't understand, Boots.'

'It doesn't matter where we go. He's going to be there.'

'You mean Buchalter?'

'He called.'

'Here? When?'

'This afternoon.'

'Why didn't you call me at the office?'

'And tell you what?'

I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and turned her toward me. She breathed through her nose and kept her face at an angle to me.

'What did he say, Boots?'

'Nothing. I could hear music, like the kind you hear in a supermarket or an elevator. And then a man breathing. His breath going in and out, like he was waiting for something.'

'Maybe it was somebody else, maybe just a crank.'

'He did something else. He scratched a fingernail back and forth on the receiver. The way a cat paws at the door.'

Her mouth parted, and she looked up into my face. Her breath smelled like bourbon-scented orange slices.

'We'll get an unlisted number in the morning,' I said.

'It was Buchalter, wasn't it?'

'Maybe. But what we have to remember, Boots, is that when these guys try to scare people with telephone calls, they're running on the rims. They don't have anything else going.'

Her eyes went back and forth, searching inside mine.

'We've got a computer sketch of the guy all over town,' I said, 'I don't think he'll come back.'

'Then who killed the man in the hospital?'

'I don't know.'

'He's out there, Dave. I know he is.'

Her experience with Buchalter had been even worse than mine, and I knew that my words could not take the unrelieved sense of vulnerability out of her face. I held her against me, then walked her into the bedroom, turned on the shower, waited while she got inside the stall, locked the house, then said Alafair's prayers with her. The moon was down, the pecan and oak trees were motionless and black outside the screens, and the only sound I could hear besides the suck of the attic fan was Tripod running up and down on his chain and wire clothesline.

I poured a glass of milk, fixed a ham and onion sandwich, and ate it at the kitchen table. When the phone on the wall rang, I knew who I would be talking to.

His voice sounded as though he were waking from sleep, or as, though he had been disturbed during copulation. It was in slow motion, with a click to it, deep in his throat, that was both phlegmy and dry at the same time.

'It doesn't have to be bad between us.'

'What doesn't?'

'You, me, your wife. Y'all could be part of us.'

'Buchalter, you've got to understand this. I can't wave a wand over the gulf and bring up a depth-charged sub. I think you're a sick man. But if I get you in my sights, I'm going to take you off at the neck.'

Again, I heard a wet, clicking sound, like his tongue sticking to the insides of his cheeks.

'I like you,' he said.

'You like me?'

'Yes. A great deal.'

I waited before I spoke again.

'What do you think is going to happen the next time I see you?' I said.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'You'll come around to our way. It's a matter of time.'

My palm was squeezed damply on the receiver.

'Listen, every cop in Iberia Parish knows what you look like. They know what you've done, they're not big on procedure. Don't make the mistake of coming back here. I'm telling you this as a favor.'

'We can give you power.'

You're learning nothing. Change the subject.

'I know where you've been in New Orleans,' I said. 'You talked too much about music. You left a trail, Buchalter.'

'I could have hurt you the other night, in ways you can't dream about, but I didn't,' he said. 'Do you want to hear how they reach a point where they beg, what they sound like when they beg?'

'Will you meet with me?'

I heard him drinking from a glass, deeply, swallowing like a man who had walked out of a great, dry heat.

'Because I'm different, you shouldn't treat me as though I'm psychotic. I'm not. Good night,' he said. 'Tell your wife I remember our moment with fondness. She's a beautiful specimen of her gender.'