James Burke - Dixie City Jam

He hung up the receiver as gently as a man completing a yawn.

My heart was racing inside my chest. My pistol was still clipped to my belt. I unsnapped the holster, slipped the.45 out of the leather, which I had rubbed with saddle soap, and ran my fingers along the coolness of the metal. The balls of my fingers left delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil. I released the magazine from the butt, rubbed my thumb over the brass casing of the top round, pulled the slide back and forth, then shoved the magazine back into the butt. The grips felt hard and stiff inside my hand.

I looked through the window into the dark. I wanted Buchalter to be out there, perhaps parking his car behind a grove of trees, working his way across the fields, confident that this time he could pull it off, could invade my house and life with impunity. And this time-

I put the.45 on the nightstand in our bedroom and undressed in the dark. My own skin felt as dry and hot as a heated lamp shade. Bootsie was still asleep when I moved on top of her, between her legs, without invitation or consent, a rough beast who could have been hewn out of desert stone.

I made love to her as a starving man might. I put my tongue deep in her mouth and tasted the whiskey and candied cherries and sliced oranges deep in her wet recesses. I plummeted into her fecund warmth, I inhaled the alcohol out of her breath, I robbed her of the golden and liquid heat that had been aged in oak and presented mistakenly as a gift to her heart's blood rather than to mine.

The early sun looked like a sliver of pink ice, just above the horizon's misty rim, when I stopped my truck at the locked entrance to Tommy Lonighan's driveway. I got out of the truck and pushed the button on the speaker box.

'Who is it?' the voice of the man named Art said.

'Detective Dave Robicheaux. I'm here to see Tommy.'

'He's busy.'

'No, he's not.'

'The last time you were here you were busting up people with a shovel.'

'Yesterday's box score, Art.'

'It's seven o'clock in the fucking morning. How about some slack?'

'Are you going to open up or not? If not, I can come back with a warrant that has your name on it.'

'Is Purcel with you?'

'No.'

'You sure?'

'Last chance, Art.'

'Okay, take it easy, I'm buzzing you in. Tommy's out back. I'll tell him you're here. Hey, can you do me a favor?'

'What?'

'It's a nice day. The Indian and me are serving breakfast for Tommy and his guests out on the terrace. Let's keep it a nice day. Okay, man? Shit don't go good with grits and eggs.'

A minute later I parked my truck at the end of Lonighan's drive. The interior of the compound was the architectural and landscaped antithesis of everything in the Irish Channel neighborhood where Tommy had grown up. His imitation Tudor house was surrounded by citrus and pine and oak trees; steam rose from the turquoise surface of his screened-in pool and his coral goldfish ponds; the Saint Augustine grass was thick and wet from soak hoses, shining with dew in the hazy light. Beyond his protective brick walls, I could hear canvas sails flapping and swelling with wind on the lake.

He was behind the house, in an orange bikini swimsuit and a pair of black high-top ring shoes, thudding his taped fists into what looked like a six-foot stack of sandbags. His pale body, which rippled with sweat, Was the color and texture of gristle. A tubular, red scar, with tiny pink stitch holes on each side, wound in a serpentine line from his right kidney up to his shoulder blade.

He stopped hitting the bags when he saw me, and wiped his meringue hair and armpits with a towel. His flushed face smiled broadly.

'You're just in time to eat,' he said, pulling the adhesive tape off his hands. 'How about this weather? I think we got ourselves an early fall.' He flipped his towel on top of an azalea bush. His knuckles were round and hard and protruded from his skin as though he were holding a roll of quarters in each hand.

'You work out on sandbags, Tommy?'

'Cement. If you don't bust your hand or jam your wrist on a cement bag, you sure ain't gonna do it on a guy's face. What's up, Dave?'

'I've got a big problem with this guy Buchalter. He can't seem to stay out of my life.'

'If I can help, let me know.' He worked a blue jumper over his head as we walked down a gravel path toward a glass-topped table on his patio, where an ash blond woman in a terry-cloth robe was drinking coffee and reading the paper. 'I don't want a guy like this around, either. He gives the city a bad reputation.'

'I didn't say he was from New Orleans, Tommy.'

'You wouldn't be here unless you thought he was. Sit down and eat. You're too serious. Charlotte, this is Dave Robicheaux.'

She lowered her paper and looked at me with eyes that had the bright, blue tint of colored contact lenses, that were neither rude nor friendly, curious or wary. I suspected that she read news accounts of airline disasters with the same level of interest as the weather report. Her freckled, sun-browned skin had the smooth folds in it of soft tallow.

Her mouth was red and wet when she took it away from the coffee cup and acknowledged me.

'The gentleman who performs so well with a shovel,' she said.

'Sometimes it's better to use visual aids when you're talking to the Calucci brothers,' I said.

'Fucking A,' Tommy said. 'Neither one of those dagos could give himself a hand job without a diagram. But when you got to do business with the oilcans, you got to do business with the oilcans, right?'

'What kind of deals do you have with the Caluccis, Tommy?' I said.

'Are you kidding? Restaurant linen, valet parking, food delivery, carpenters and electricians working on my casino, you deal with the greaseballs or you get a picket line in front of everything you own.'

His house servant came out the back door with a huge, rope-handled wood tray between his hands and began setting silver-topped containers of scrambled eggs, grits, sausage links, bacon, and peeled oranges and grapefruit in front of us. The servant was the same enormous man I had seen on my earlier visit. His Indian face was as expressionless and flat as a cake pan, his brown, skillet-sized hands veined with scar tissue like tiny bits of white string.

'You're staring, Mr. Robicheaux,' Charlotte said.

'Excuse me?'

'At Manuel. It's rude to stare at people,' she said.

'He didn't mean anything,' Tommy said. 'Dave's a gentleman. He's got a college degree. In English literature, right, Dave? We're talking fucking class guy here.'

He winked at me as he spread his napkin.

The house servant named Manuel brushed against me when he poured my coffee. I could smell chemical fertilizer and garden dirt in his clothes. He never spoke, but after he went back inside the house, I saw his face look back at me from a kitchen window.

'Dig this,' Tommy said. 'Manny looks like he just got up out of a grave in Night of the Living Dead , but actually he's a fruit. He's gonna be in a music video called 'She's a Swinging Stud.' Hey, y'all quit looking at me like that. You think I could make up something like that? They show these kinds of videos in those homo joints on Dauphine.'

'Your mother was in the American-German Bund, Tommy,' I said.

'What?' His face looked as though ice water had been poured on it.

'I guess it's common knowledge in the Channel. That's why you know what's in that sub, isn't it, partner?' I smiled at him.

'You're sitting at my breakfast table…' He cleared his throat and tried to regain his words. 'Right here at my table, at my own house, you're making insults about my mother?'

'That's not my intention.'

'Then clean the fucking mashed potatoes out of your mouth.'