James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Lucinda really knew how to set the hook. All the way across the Atchafalaya Basin, on a beautiful, wind-kissed fall day when I should have been looking at the bays and canals and flooded cypress and willow trees along I-10, I kept wondering what new bagful of spiders she would like to fit over my head.

She met me in the parking lot at the lockup. She wore a pair of white slacks and a purple-flowered blouse, and her hair was brushed out full on her shoulders. She had one hand on her hip and a pout on her face. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist.

'Did you stop for a late breakfast?' she said.

'No, I didn't. I came straight from the office. Get off it, Lucinda.'

'Get off it?'

'Yeah, I'm not up to being somebody's pincushion today.'

'My son is back home. He told me you made some inquiries about the company I keep.'

'No, I didn't.'

'He said you seemed to take an interest in the fact that I had a white man at my house.'

'Kids get things turned around. He volunteered that information on his own.'

'Do you think it should be of some concern to you, sir?'

'No. But one troubling thought did occur to me.'

'Yes?'

'Was it Nate Baxter?'

She looked like a wave of nausea had just swept through her system.

'Do you stay up all night thinking of things like this to say to people?' she said.

'I've known him for twenty years. He'll try to coerce a woman in any way he can. If he hasn't done it to you yet, he will later. He's a sonofabitch and you know it.'

'That doesn't mean I'd allow him in my house.'

'Okay, Lucinda, I apologize. But I know what he did to some women in the First District.'

'I'll buy you a cup of coffee later and tell you about Nate Baxter. In the meantime, our man is waiting on us.'

His name was Waylon Rhodes, from Mount Olive, Alabama; he had skin the color of putty, hands dotted with jailhouse art, a narrow, misshapen head, and a wide slit of a mouth, whose lips on one side looked like they had been pressed flat by a hot iron. His premature gray hair was grizzled and brushed back into faint ducktails; his eyes jittered like a speed addict's. Inside his left arm was a long, blue tattoo of a bayonet or perhaps a sword.

Lucinda and I sat across the wood table from him in the interrogation room. He smoked one cigarette after another, crumpling up an empty pack, ripping the cellophane off a fresh one. The backs of his fingers were yellow with nicotine; his breath was like an ashtray.

'There's no reason to be nervous, partner,' I said.

'Y'all want me to do the Caluccis. That ain't reason to be nervous?' he said.

'You don't have to do anybody. Not for us, anyway. Your beef's with the locals,' I said.

'Don't tell me that, man. Y'all got a two-by-four up my ass.'

'Watch your language, please,' I said.

He smoked with his elbow propped on the table, taking one puff after another, like he was hitting on a reefer, sometimes pressing a yellow thumb anxiously against his bottom lip and teeth.

'They're dangerous people, man,' he said. 'They tied a guy down on a table once and cut thirty pounds of meat out of him while he was still alive.'

'Here's the only deal you're getting today,' Lucinda said. 'We can pull the plug on this interview any time you want. You say the word and we're gone. Then you can have visitors from two to four every Sunday afternoon.'

'What she means, Waylon, is we made a special effort to see you. If this is all a waste of time, tell us now.'

He mashed out his cigarette and began clenching one hand on top of the other. Make him talk about something else , I thought.

'Where'd you get the tattoo of the sword?' I said.

'It's a bayonet. I was in the Airborne. Hunnerd and first.'

'Your jacket says you were in the Navy and did time at Portsmouth brig.'

'Then it's wrong.'

'What can you give us on Max and Bobo?' Lucinda said.

'They're dealing.'

'They're going to be at the drop?' I said.

'Are you kidding?' he said.

'Then how are you going to do them, Waylon?' I said.

He began to chew on the flattened corner of his mouth. His eyes jittered as if they were being fed by an electrical current.

'A whack's going down. A big one,' he said.

'Yeah?' I said.

'Yeah.'

'Who's getting clipped, Waylon?'

'A couple of guineas were talking in Mobile when I picked up the dope.'

'You're not being helpful, Waylon,' Lucinda said.

'There's nig… There's black people mixed up in it. New Orleans is a weird fucking town. What do I know?'

'You'd better know something, partner, or your next jolt's going to be in the decades,' I said.

'They're going to clip some guy that ain't supposed to be clipped. That's what these dagos were saying. That's all I know, man.'

'When you think of something else, give us a call,' I said.

He ran his hand through his grizzled hair. His palm was shiny with sweat.

'I'm sick. I got to go to a hospital,' he said.

'What's the sword on your arm mean?' I said.

He put his face in his hands. 'I ain't saying no more,' he said. 'I'm sick. I got to have some medication.'

'How many times a day do you fix, Waylon?' I said.

'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'

'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your memory clears up.'

A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the sunlight.

'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.

'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or Aryan supremacists of some kind.'

'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'

'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'

'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'

'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'

'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not vague.'

I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.

'Why the silence?' she asked.

'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'

'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'

I nodded.

'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.

'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter, Lucinda.'

'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon seeds and giving whitey a lot of "yas-suhs." He said I'd never have to do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that for charm?'

'Nate's a special kind of guy.'

'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'

'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from Internal Affairs could talk to her.'

She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her fingers.

'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to death. What do you think about that?'

'Did she go up the road for it?'

'Yes.'

'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'