James Burke: Dixie City Jam

Batist pointed bis finger into the man's face and walked toward him silently, as though he were leveling a lance at him. The man broke and ran through the parking lot toward a cottage on the opposite side of the street. Batist ground a tiny glass vial into the cement with the heel of his boot, then walked past a group of stunned tourists who had just emerged from the guesthouse dining room; his perspiring face was turned away in embarrassment.

I called my wife, Bootsie, in New Iberia and told her that I would be at least another day in New Orleans, then I tried calling Lucinda Bergeron again at Garden District headquarters. She was still out, so I decided to drive over there, file a statement, and be done with the matter. I didn't know that I would end up talking to Sergeant Benjamin Motley, who used to be in Vice when I was a homicide lieutenant in the First District.

He was a rotund, powerful black man, whose clothes always smelled of cigar smoke, with a thick black mustache and glistening fire-hydrant neck, who had little sympathy for the plight of his own people. One time a black wino in a holding cell had ridiculed Motley, calling him the white man's hired 'knee-grow,' and Motley had sprayed the man from head to foot with a can of Mace. Earlier in his law-enforcement career he had been the subject of a wrongful death investigation, when, as a bailiff, he had escorted seven prisoners from the drunk tank on a wrist chain to morning arraignment and a fire in the courthouse basement had blown the circuits and stalled the elevator between floors. Motley had gotten out through the trap-door in the top of the elevator; the seven men on the chain had died of asphyxiation.

His office was glassed in and spacious, and several merit and civic citations were framed on the walls. Outside was a squad room filled with uniformed cops doing their paperwork at their desks. Motley leaned back in his swivel chair, one shoe propped on his waste-basket, and ate a half-peeled candy bar while I finished writing out in longhand what little I could report about the exchange between Nate Baxter and Lucinda Bergeron.

I signed my name at the bottom of the form and handed it to him. His eyes went up and down the page while he brushed at his chin with one knuckle.

'What are you doing in New Orleans, anyway, Robicheaux? I thought you were a plainclothes in Iberia Parish,' he said.

'I'm on leave for a while.'

'You couldn't stay out of New Orleans?'

'You need anything else, Motley?'

'Not a thing. Use your time any way you want to.'

'What's that mean?'

'You think this is going to bail that broad out?' He shook the page between his fingers.

'I don't know. But she didn't cuss out Nate Baxter while I was there. In fact, in my opinion, it was Baxter who was out of line.'

'Baxter got you suspended without pay when he was in Internal Affairs. You even punched him out in a squad room at First District. You should have written this on toilet paper and put it in the John.'

'You haven't lost your touch, Motley.'

He chewed on the corner of his lip and rolled his eyes sideways.

'Look through the glass,' he said. 'Count the white officers in the squad room, then count the black officers. When you get done doing that, count the female officers in the room. Then count the black female officers. Is the picture coming clear for you?'

'Do they give her a lot of heat?'

'You didn't hear it from me.'

I looked at his face and didn't speak. He wiped the chocolate off his fingers with the candy wrapper and threw the wrapper into the wastebasket.

'Dog shit in her desk drawer, a dildo Scotch-taped to a jar of Vaseline in her mailbox, phony phone messages from David Duke's campaign headquarters, that kind of stuff,' he said. 'She seems like a stand-up broad, but they'll probably run her off eventually.'

'It sounds like she could use some friends,' I said, and got up to go.

'You mean the brothers? Like me?'

I shrugged.

'Last hired, first fired,' he said. 'That's the way it is, my man. It doesn't change because you wear tampons. And let's be clear, the only reason you're involved in this is because of your buddy Purcel. So go pull on your own pud, Robicheaux.'

That evening Batist and I walked over to St. Charles and took the streetcar up to Canal, then walked into the Quarter and ate at the Acme on Iberville. It was crowded and warm inside and smelled of flat beer and the piles of empty oyster shells in the drain bins. We heard thunder out over the river, then it started to rain and we walked in the lee of the buildings back to Canal and caught the streetcar out on the neutral ground.

As we clattered down the tracks around Lee Circle, past the equestrian statue of Robert Lee, St. Charles Avenue opened up into a long green-black corridor of moss-hung oak trees, swirling with mist, touched with the red afterglow of the sun. The inside of the streetcar was cool and dry and brightly lit, the windows flecked with rain, and the world felt like a grand and beautiful place to be.

Back at the guesthouse we watched a movie on television while the rain and wind shook the mulberry tree outside the French doors. I paid no attention to the sirens that I heard on the avenue, nor to the emergency lights that beat angrily against the darkness on the far side of the parking lot. We were picking up my boat in the morning, and with luck we would be somewhere south of Terrebonne Bay by noon, on our way back to New Iberia, our baited jigs bouncing in the trough behind us.

Sheets of lightning were trembling against the sky, and I lay down on the pillow with my arm across my eyes. Batist began undressing for bed, then walked to the French doors to close the curtain.

'Hey, Dave, they's a ambulance and a bunch of policemens over at that cottage where that nigger run to,' he said.

'I'm hitting the sack, partner. Clete's right. Leave New Orleans to its own problems.'

'They carryin' somebody out of there.'

'Tell me about it in the morning. Good night.'

He didn't answer, and I felt myself drifting on the edges of sleep and the sound of the rain blowing against the windows; then I heard him click off the lamp switch.

It must have been an hour later that we were awakened by the knock on the door. No, that's wrong; it wasn't a knock; it was an incessant beating, with the base of the fist, the kind of ugly, penetrating sound sent by someone whose violation of your sleep and privacy is only a minimal indicator of his larger purpose.

I walked to the door in my skivvies, turned the dead bolt, and opened the door two inches.

'Take off the night chain, Robicheaux.'

'What do you want, Nate?'

'What's this look like?' He held a warrant up in front of me. His chrome-plated.357 Magnum hung from his right hand. The skin of his face was tight with fatigue and muted anger, beaded with rainwater. Three uniformed white cops stood behind him.

'For what? That beef at Calucci's Bar?' I said.

'You never disappoint me. Tell me stink and shit don't go hand in hand.'

'Why don't you try making sense, Nate?'

'We just hauled away a carved-up boon from across the street. Guess who knocked him around in front of a half dozen witnesses today? It's great having you back in town, Robicheaux. It's just like old times.'

He pulled his handcuffs from his belt and let them swing loosely from his index finger like a watch fob. Behind me, Batist sat on the edge of his bed, his big hands splayed on his naked thighs, his eyes focused on a sad and ancient racial knowledge that only he seemed able to see.

There are those who, for political reasons, enjoy talking about country club jails. But any jail anywhere is a bad place to be. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been in one.