James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'No Duh pressed charges?'

'No, Nate Baxter did. Disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. Good-bye, Detective Robicheaux. In all honesty I don't think I'm up to many more conversations with you.'

She hung up the phone.

I called her back.

'Look, I can't take off work just to bail a friend out of the slam. Why'd Clete knock Dolowitz around?'

'It has something to do with the Calucci brothers.'

'What about them?'

'I don't know,' she said, the exasperation rising in her voice. 'Nate Baxter's handling it. What's that tell you, Robicheaux, besides the fact he's got a major hard-on for Purcel?'

'I'm not sure.'

'He's on a pad.'

'For the Calucci brothers?'

'Who else?'

'You can prove that?'

'Who to? Who cares? The city's broke. That's what's on people's minds.'

'I'll try to get over there. It's a bad day, though.'

'What's wrong?'

I told her about Buchalter's visit of the night before.

'Why didn't you tell me that?' she said.

'You've got your own problems.'

She paused a moment. 'You saw Zoot over at Tommy Lonighan's?' she said.

'Yeah, for just a few minutes.'

'Did he say-' She let out her breath in the receiver and didn't finish.

'I think you mean a lot to him, Lucinda. I'd bring him back home. I'm sorry if I sound intrusive sometimes.'

I called Bootsie at the house, then signed out of the office. It was still raining when I got to NOPD headquarters in the Garden District. Lucinda Bergeron was out of the office, but Benjamin Motley told me that the Reverend Oswald Flat had gotten Clete released in his custody without having to post bail and they were waiting for me at a café up on St. Charles by the Pontchartrain Hotel.

It was a working man's place that served rib-eye steaks, deep-fried catfish, and biscuits with sausage gravy that you could stoke boilers with. It was also the café where the Calucci brothers ate lunch every day.

I parked my truck around the corner, then ran back in the rain under the dripping overhang of the oak trees on St. Charles. The inside of the restaurant was warm and crowded and loud. Clete and the preacher were at a checker-cloth-covered table in front. In the center of the table was a solitary, green-stemmed purple rose set in a dime-store glass vase. Between the preacher's feet I could see a worn-edged, black guitar case with the words The Great Speckled Bird hand-lettered on the side.

I let my eyes rove over the people at the tables; then I saw Max and Bobo Calucci and a half dozen of their entourage eating at a long table against the back wall, three feet from an old jukebox, whose maroon and orange plastic casing rippled with light.

I sat down with Clete and the preacher.

'You ought to get you an umbrella, son. You look like a hedgehog somebody drowned in a rain barrel,' Oswald Flat said.

'Thank you, Reverend,' I said.

'Sorry to get you down here for no reason, Streak,' Clete said. 'I tried to catch you after Brother Oswald here got me out of the bag, but you were already down the road.' He grinned while he chewed on a bread stick.

'What are you doing beating up on a guy like No Duh Dolowitz?' I said.

'Yeah, I always dug ole No Duh myself,' Clete said, then turned to the preacher. 'You see, this guy No Duh-sometimes they call him Dogshit because that's what he put in some sandwiches once at a Teamsters convention in Miami-he used to be a second-story creep till a night watchman bonged a big dent in his forehead with a ball peen hammer. But instead of turning into a mush brain, he developed a genius for playing pranks. The mob knows talent when it sees it.

'If they want to take over an apartment building or a bunch of duplexes at fire-sale prices, they send in Dolowitz. He pours cement mix down all the drains, puts Limburger cheese in the air vents, tapes bait fish under the furniture, maybe has a landscape service pour a dump truck load of cow manure in the swimming pool. This contractor built some real class condos in Jefferson Parish, then he finds out too late that he doesn't have clear title to the land and that part of it is owned by the Giacano family. So while he's trying to hold off the Giacanos in court, they send in No Duh, who makes keys to all the doors, stops up the toilets, stocks the cabinets with Thunderbird and Boone's Farm, then buses in about twenty winos from skid row and tells them to have a good time. I heard the cleaning crews had to scrape the carpets up with shovels.'

He laughed, pushed his porkpie hat up on his head, and put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His hand looked huge on his Zippo lighter. I noticed that his eyes never looked in the Caluccis' direction.

'Why the beef with a guy like that, Clete?' I said.

The humor drained out of his face, and his eyes drifted toward the rear of the restaurant.

'I gave Martina the two grand to pay off the Caluccis. Guess what? They told her that's just the back payment on the vig. She still owes another two large. Last night we came back from the show and there's Dolowitz hiding in the shrubs by the side of Martina's garage. So I ask him what the hell he thinks he's doing there.

'He tells me he lives two blocks away, up by Audubon Park, and he's been walking his dog. I say, "That's funny, I don't see any dog." He says, "No duh, Purcel. Because my dog run away." "Oh, I see. That's why you're in the shrubs," I say. "No duh, my fast-thinking man," he says.

'I say, "I got another problem here, No Duh. People like you don't live by Audubon Park. Not unless the neighborhood has recently been rezoned for meltdowns and toxic waste. If I remember right, you live in a shithole by the Industrial Canal. So why are you hiding here by Martina's garage, and if you give me one more wiseass answer, I'm going to stuff your dented head up the tailpipe of my car."

'So he puts his fingers in the corners of his mouth and stretches out his lips like a jack-o'-lantern. Can you believe this guy? I say, "No Duh, your mother must have defecated you into the world," and I shake him down against the wall, and what do we find, our man's got a bottle of muriatic acid in his pants pocket.'

'I don't get it. Dolowitz isn't an enforcer,' I said.

'I didn't get it, either. Also, dispensation time for dimwits was starting to run out. I go, "What do you think you're doing with this, fuckhead?" Suddenly he's like a guy who just sobered up. He goes, "It's just a prank, Purcel. I don't hurt people." That's when I screwed the trash can down on his head and got a ball bat out of my car and bounced him around the alley. Finally he's yelling inside the can, "I was going to put it in her gas tank! I wasn't going to have nothing to do with the rest of it!"

'You want to know what "the rest of it" was?' Clete mashed out his cigarette in the ashtray. His eyes cut sideways toward the rear of the café, 'Martina goes, on shift cocktail-waitressing at a club in Gretna at ten P.M. Dolowitz was going to mess up her car so it'd kill somewhere between her house and work. A guy was going to be following her. You want to hear how No Duh put it? "Max and Bobo Calucci got some kind of geek working for them, not no ordinary button guy, either, Purcel, a guy who can fuck up people real bad, in ways nobody ever thought about."'

Clete propped his elbow on the table and inserted a thumbnail in his teeth.

'You think I was too hard on ole Dogshit?' he said.

'Sir, could you watch your language?' the manager, who had come out from behind the cash register, said quietly.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Clete said, flipping his hand at the air.

'You think it could be Buchalter?' I said.

'Maybe. But I don't know how he'd tie in with the greaseballs back there in the booth.'

'Maybe he's connected with Tommy Lonighan's interest in the Nazi sub, and now Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis. Anyway, he was in my house last night,' I said.