James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Before he had been elected to office, the sheriff had owned a dry-cleaning business and had been president of the local Rotary Club, or perhaps it was the Lions, I don't recall which, but it was one of those businessmen's groups which manage to do a fair amount of civic good in spite of their unprofessed and real objective.

He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted flowered teapot while I told him of my 2:00 a.m. visitor. He had a round, cleft chin, soft cheeks veined with tiny blue and red lines, and a stomach that pouched over his gunbelt, but his posture was always so erect, his shirt tucked in so tightly, that he gave you the impression of a man who was both younger and in better physical condition than he actually was.

But even though the Rotary or Lions Club still held strong claim on the sheriff's soul, he often surprised me with a hard-edged viewpoint that I suspected had its origins in his experience at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, which he refused, under any circumstances, to discuss with anyone.

'Well, you didn't drink any of it. That's what seems most important, if you ask me.'

'Some people might call that a pretty cavalier attitude,' I said.

'It's your call. Write it up, Dave. Bring our fingerprint man in on it. I don't know what else to say.'

He sat down in his swivel chair behind his desk. He pushed at his stomach with his stiffened fingers. Then he had another running start at it.

'Dave, what's it going to sound like when you tell people that somebody, maybe a woman, did a B and E on you so she could cover your butcher block with a tablecloth and set it with burgundy, cold beer, and expensive whiskey?'

'It's Buchalter, Sheriff. Or somebody working with him.'

'What was the motive for his house call last night?'

'He doesn't need one. He's a psychopath.'

'That's no help.' He began picking a series of bent paper clips out of a glass container and throwing them at the waste can. 'Before you came to the department, we had a particularly nasty homicide case.' Ping . 'Maybe you remember it. A lowlife degenerate named Jerry Dipple raped and then hanged a four-year-old child.' Ping . 'We thought we had him dead bang. His prints were all over the murder scene, there was a torn theater ticket in his shirt pocket from the show where he'd abducted the child, the rope he used was in the bottom of his closet.' Ping . 'Guess what? The lamebrain handling the investigation went into Dipple's house and seized the evidence without a warrant. Then when he realized he'd screwed up, he put the evidence back and let his partner find it later.' Ping .

'Guess what again? I learned about it and didn't say a thing. But Dipple's lawyer was a smart greasebag from Lafayette, you know him, the same guy who was fronting points for a PCB-incinerator outfit last year, and he found out what the lamebrain and his partner had done.' Ping . 'Our case was down the drain and we were about to turn loose a child killer who had done it before and would do it again. Bad day for the good guys, Dave.

'Except six months earlier we had raided a trick pad on the St. Martin line. One of the girls had some photographs of our lawyer-friend from Lafayette, I'm talking about real Tijuana specials, you know what I mean? So I invited our friend in and let him have a look. If he wanted to investigate our practices, we'd let some people in the state bar association have a peek at his.' Ping, ping, ping .

'Dipple fried. I thought it might bother me. But the night he rode the bolt I took my grandchildren to the movies and then went home and slept like a stone.'

'I don't know if I get your point.'

'I'll be honest with you, I don't know what we're dealing with here. Whatever it is, it's not part of the normal ebb and flow.' He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair, and kneaded the back of his neck. 'Look, I think Buchalter is trying to hit you where you're weakest.'

'Where's that?'

'Booze.'

'A guy like that can't make me drink, Sheriff.'

'I'm not talking about you.' He rubbed one hand on top of the other, then folded them on the desk blotter and looked me in the face. 'This guy's trying to mess up your family and I think he's doing a good job of it.'

'That's not a very cool thing to say, Sheriff.'

'Bootsie almost had a DWI yesterday afternoon.'

I felt something sink in my chest.

'Fortunately the right deputy stopped her and let the other lady drive,' the sheriff said.

The room seemed filled with white sound. I took my sunglasses out of their leather case, then slipped them back in again. I opened my mouth behind my fist to clear my ears and looked out the window. Then I said, 'What other lady?'

'I don't know. Whoever she was with.'

'I'll finish my report now and put it in your box.'

'Don't. The newspaper'll get ahold of it for sure. It's just what this character wants. Walk outside with me.'

It was warm in the parking lot, and the wind was flattening the leaves in the oak grove across the street. The sheriff unlocked the trunk of his car, took out a stiff, blanket-wrapped object, and walked to my truck with it. He laid the object across the seat of my truck and flipped the blanket open.

'Some people might tell you to wire up a shotgun to your back door,' he said. 'The problem is, you'd probably kill an innocent person first or only wound the sonofabitch breaking into your house, then he'd sue you and take your property. You know what this is, don't you?'

'An AR-15, the semiauto model of the M-16.'

'It's got a thirty-round magazine in it. Jerry Dipple's in a prison cemetery and children around here are a lot safer because of it. Nobody cares how the box score gets written, just as long as the right numbers are in it.' He tapped down the lock button on the door with the flat of his fist, closed the door, and looked at his watch. 'Time for coffee and a doughnut, podna,' he said, and laid his arm across my shoulders.

Back in my office I tore my unfinished report in half and dropped it in the wastebasket. There were two ways to think about the sheriffs behavior, neither of which was consoling:

1. Semper fi , Mac, you're on your own.

Which was too severe an indictment of the sheriff. But-

2. No application of force or firepower has so far been successful. Since we've concluded that we don't understand what we're dealing with, use more force and firepower.

Yes, that was more like it. It was old and familiar logic. If you feel like a reviled and excoriated white sojourner in, a slum area, break the bones of a drunk black motorist with steel batons. If you cannot deal with the indigenous population of a Third World country, turn their rain forests into smoking gray wasteland with napalm and Agent Orange.

But my cynicism was cheap, born out of the same impotence in trying to deal with evil that had caused the sheriff to make me a present of his Colt Industries urban-Americana meatcutter.

My desk was covered with fax sheets from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and photocopied files from NOPD that had been sent to me by Ben Motley. The people in those combined pages could have been players in almost any city in the United States. They were uniquely American, ingrained in our economy, constantly threading their way in and out of lives, always floating about on the periphery of our vision. But nothing that we've attempted so far has been successful in dealing with them. In fact, I'm not even sure how to define them.

1. Max and Bobo Calucci: In popular literature their kind are portrayed as twentieth-century Chaucerian buffoons, venial and humorous con men whose greatest moral offense is their mismatched wardrobe, or charismatic representatives of wealthy New York crime families whose palatial compounds are always alive with wedding receptions and garden parties. The familial code of the last group is sawed out of medieval romance, their dalliance with evil of Faustian and tragic proportions.