James Burke - Dixie City Jam

'You're right. Sometimes you worry about other people more than you do your own family.'

'That's a rotten thing to say.'

'Goddamn it, he called while you were out of town looking after this Bergeron woman.'

'Buchalter?'

'Who else?'

'How could he? We just changed the number.'

'It was Buchalter. Do you think I could forget that voice? He even talked about what he did to me.'

I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were shiny in the green glow from the dashboard. A semi passed, and the inside of the pickup was loud with the roar of the exhaust.

'What else did he say?'

'That he'd always be with us. Wherever we were. His voice sounded like he had wet sand in his throat. It was obscene.'

'I think he's a hype. He calls when he's loaded.'

'Why does this woman have to drag you into her investigation?'

'It's my investigation, too, Bootsie. But you're right, I shouldn't have gone. We were firing in the well.'

'I just don't understand this commitment you have to others while a psychopath tries to destroy us.'

'Look, something's out of sync here. Don't you see it? How did the nun, what's her name, get involved in this?'

'She dropped by, that's all.'

'Then what happened?'

'Nothing. What do you mean?'

'Come on, think about it. What happened after she came by?'

'She used the phone. To call somebody at the hospital, I think.'

'When did Buchalter call?'

'A little later. I tried to get you at your office. That's when the sheriff told me there'd been a shooting. I couldn't just stay at home and wonder what happened to you and wait for Buchalter to call again. Marie and I took Alafair to Batist's, then drove to New Orleans. What else was I supposed to do?'

'Whose idea was it to go to New Orleans?'

'Mine… Both of us, I guess… She saw my anxiety, she was trying to be a friend.'

'How many nuns do you know who gravitate toward trouble, who are always around when it happens?' I said.

She was looking at me now.

'Did you check the machine when you first came in the house?' I asked.

'No.'

'Our new number is written down by the side of the phone, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'It's time to check out Sister Guilbeaux, Boots.'

'You think she erased your message and called Buc-That's crazy, Dave. She's a good person.'

'Buchalter's flesh and blood. I think somebody close to us is helping him. How many candidates are there?'

Her eyes became fixed on the tunnel of trees ahead. I could see her chest rising and falling as she touched her fingers to her mouth.

The next morning, in my office, I sorted through all the case notes, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, computer printouts, voice cassettes, rap sheets, convict prison records, and Xeroxes and faxes from other law-enforcement agencies that had anything to do with the vigilante killings, Tommy Lonighan, the Calucci brothers, and Will Buchalter and his followers.

I also called the office of the Catholic diocese in Lafayette. Both the bishop and his assistant were out. The secretary said one of them would return my call later. She was new to the job and was not sure if she knew a Sister Marie Guilbeaux.

I read every document on my desk twice. The more I read, the more ill-defined and confusing the case became.

Clete Purcel had always been a good cop because he kept the lines simple. I took a yellow legal pad and a felt pen from my desk drawer and tried to do the same. It wasn't easy.

The owner of the car repair shop where Zoot and I had been taken by Buchalter had turned out to be an alcoholic right-wing simpleton who had already fled the state on a bigamy charge. It seemed that anyone who might lead us to Buchalter had a way of disappearing or going off-planet.

Tommy Bobalouba's mother had emigrated from Germany and perhaps-had been a member of the Silver Shirts. Tommy wanted to salvage the Nazi U-boat before Hippo Bimstine got to it, and his rhetoric was often anti-Semitic. But in reality Tommy had never had any ideology except making money. He prided himself on his military record and blue-collar patriotism, and didn't seem to have any physical connection with Buchalter.

Why did Buchalter (if indeed it was Buchalter) attempt to ascribe the murder of his followers, the men called Freddy and Hatch, to the vigilante?

Was he involved with the ritualistic killings of black dope dealers in the projects? If not, how many psychological mutants of his potential did New Orleans contain?

Why had Lonighan crossed an old New Orleans ethnic line and gotten mixed up with the Calucci brothers, and did it have anything to do with the vigilante killings?

If you have ever been in psychoanalysis or analytically oriented therapy, you're aware that the exploration of one's own unconscious can be an intriguing pursuit. It is also self-inflating, grandiose, and endless, and often has the same practical value as meditating upon one's genitalia.

The inductive and deductive processes of police work offer the same temptation. You can drown in it. The truth is that most people, with the exception of the psychotic, commit crimes for predictable reasons.

Question: Why steal?

Answer: It's usually easier than working.

Question: Why rape and brutalize? Why rob people of their identity by terrorizing and degrading them at gunpoint, by reducing them to pitiful creatures who will never respect themselves again?

Answer: You don't have to admit that you're a born loser and in all probability were despised inside your mother's womb.

Batist's perception, like Clete's, was not obscured by self-manufactured complexities. He had grown up in Louisiana during the pre-Civil Rights era, and he knew that no one systematically killed people of color for reasons of justice. The vigilante's victims were people whom no one cared about, nickel-and-dime dealers whose presence or absence would never have any appreciable influence on the immense volume of the New Orleans drug trade.

The vigilante, like the plainclothes detective in the motel who was determined to emotionally twist and break Albert on the rack, was selective about his sacrificial offerings, and his purpose had nothing to do with ending the problem they were associated with.

But the preacher had said something on the dirt road by my house that would not go away, that hung on the edge of my consciousness like an impacted tooth that throbs dully in your sleep.

What if, instead of a particular crime, we were dealing with people, or forces, who wished to engineer a situation that would allow political criminality, despotism masked as law and order, to become a way of life?

Was it that hard to envision? The elements to pull it off seemed readily at hand.

Financial insecurity. Lack of faith in traditional government and institutions. Fear and suspicion of minorities, irritability and guilt at the visibility of the homeless and the mentally ill who wandered the streets of every city in the nation, the brooding, angry sense that things were pulling apart at the center, that armed and sadistic gangs could hunt down, rape, brutally beat, and kill the innocent at will. Or, more easily put, the general feeling that it was time to create examples, to wink at the Constitution, and perhaps once again to decorate the streetlamps and trees with strange fruit.

Hitler had to set fire to the Reichstag and place the blame on a Communist student in order to gain power.

The sight of Los Angeles burning, of motorists being torn apart with tire irons on live television, might serve just as well.

I was out of the office three hours that afternoon on a shooting in a black juke joint south of town. The wounded man, who was shot in the thumb, refused to identify the shooter, walked out of the emergency room at Iberia General without being treated, then drove out in the parish with a kerosene-soaked rag wrapped around his hand and tried to run down his common-law wife's brother in the middle of a sugarcane field. The brother refused to press charges. Bottom line: big waste of time.