James Burke: Dixie City Jam

Imagine an environment where the lights never go off and you defecate in full view of others on a toilet seat streaked with other people's urine, where you never quite fall asleep, where you are surrounded by the sounds of clanging iron, irrational voices resonating down stone corridors, a count-man or irritated turnkey whanging his baton off steel bars, or the muffled and tormented cries of an eighteen-year-old fish being gang-raped behind a shower wall.

Perhaps even a worse characteristic of jail is the denial of any identity you might have had before you stepped inside a piece of geography where time can sometimes be measured in five-minute increments that seem borne right out of Dante's ninth ring. Here you quickly learn that the personal violation of your self is considered as insignificant and ongoing an occurrence as routine body cavity searches, as the spraying of your genitals for crab lice, or as a wolf telling the server in the chow line to spit in your food, until you no longer think of yourself as an exception to the rules of jailhouse romance'.

Batist spent the night in the tank and wasn't booked until the next morning. I sat on a wood chair in a waiting area next to a squad room and a row of glassed-in offices, one of which was Nate Baxter's. Through a doorway at the back of the squad room I could see the holding tank where Batist was still being held, though he had already been fingerprinted and photographed.

I had been waiting an hour and a half to see Nate Baxter. Then Sergeant Lucinda Bergeron walked past me, in navy blue slacks, a starched white short-sleeve shirt, and a lacquered black gunbelt with a leather pouch for handcuffs. She carried a clipboard in her hand, and if she noticed me, her face didn't show it.

'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said.

She stopped and looked at me but said nothing. Her eyes were turquoise and elongated, like an Oriental's, and her cheekbones were rouged high up on her face.

'Could I talk with you a minute?' I asked.

'What is it?'

'I'm Dave Robicheaux. You left a message for me with Cletus Purcel.'

'Yes?'

'I came in and filed a report with Sergeant Motley yesterday.'

She looked at me, her face as still and expressionless as a picture painted upon the air.

'I was at Calucci's Bar,' I said. 'You asked me to come in and file a statement.'

'I understood you. What can I help you with?' she said.

'I have a friend back there in the tank. The black man, Batist Perry. He's already been booked.'

'What do you want from me?'

'How about getting him moved into a holding cell?'

'You'll have to talk to the officer in charge.'

'That's what I've been trying to do. For an hour and a half.'

'I can't help you. I'm sorry.'

She walked away to her desk, which was located in the squad room, among the uniformed officers, rather than in an enclosed office. Ten minutes later Baxter stepped out of his office door, studying some papers in his hand, then glanced in my direction and beckoned to me with one finger.

While I sat down across from him, he tipped his cigarette ashes in an ashtray and continued to concentrate on the papers on his desk blotter. He looked rested and fresh, in a sky blue sports coat and a crinkling shirt that was the color of tin.

'You're really charging Batist with murder?' I said.

'That decision comes down from the prosecutor's office, Robicheaux. You know that.'

'The man's never been in trouble. Not in his whole life. Not even for a misdemeanor. What's the matter with you?'

'Well, he's in trouble now. In a big way.' He leaned forward and tipped his ashes into his ashtray, cocking his eyebrows at me.

'I don't think you have a case, Nate. I think this is all smoke.'

'His prints are on the door at the crime scene.'

'That's impossible.'

'Tell that to our fingerprint man. Does this look like smoke to you?' He removed a half dozen eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs from his desk drawer and dropped them in front of me. 'You ever see that much blood at a crime scene? Check out the chest wound. Has your friend ever been into voodoo?'

'You're using a homicide investigation to settle an old score, Nate. Don't tell me you're not.'

'Is the light in here bad? That must be the problem. The killer sawed the guy's heart out. That wasn't enough for him, either. He stuffed purple roses into the heart cavity.'

'What's your point?'

'Your friend wears a dime on a string around his ankle,' Baxter said. 'He carries a shriveled alligator's foot in his pocket. He had bones in his suitcase. The murder has all the characteristics of a ritual killing. If you were in my place, who would be your first suspect? Is there any chance it might be a superstitious backwater black guy who had already assaulted and threatened the victim the same day of the homicide and then left his prints at the crime scene? No, don't tell me. Just go think about it somewhere and drop me a card sometime.'

'I want to see him.'

'Be my guest. Please. By the way, I saw the black broad blow you off. In case you want to get more involved with her, I hear she's starting up a charm school. Take it easy, Robicheaux. You never surprise me,' he said.

But while I had been talking with Nate Baxter, Batist had already been locked to a wrist chain and taken to morning arraignment. By the time I got to the courtroom the public defender, who did not look to be over twenty-five, was trying to prevail upon the judge to set a reasonable bail. He was methodical, even eloquent, in his argument and obviously sincere. He pointed out that Batist had no arrest record and had been employed for years at a boat-rental dock run by a law officer in Iberia Parish, that he had lived his entire life in one small community and was not apt to leave it.

But Judge James T. Flowers was a choleric white-knuckle alcoholic who stayed dry without a program by channeling his inner misery into the lives of others. His procedures and sentences kept a half dozen ACLU attorneys occupied year round.

He looked at the clock and waited for the public defender to finish, then said, 'Hell's hot, my young friend. Perhaps it's time some of your clients learned that. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars. Next case.'

An hour later Sergeant Motley arranged for me to see Batist in an interrogation room. The walls were a smudged white and windowless, and the air smelled like refrigerated cigarette smoke and cigar butts. Batist sat across from me at the wood table and kept rubbing his hands on top of each other. The scars on them looked like tiny pink worms. His face was unshaved and puffy with fatigue, his eyes arterial red in the corners with broken blood veins.

'What's gonna happen, Dave?'

'I'm going to call a bondsman first, then we'll see about a lawyer. We just have to do it a step at a time.'

'Dave, that judge said fifty t'ousand dollars.'

'I'm going to get you out, partner. You just have to trust me.'

'What for they doin' this? What they get out of it? I never had no truck with the law. I ain't even seen these people befo'.'

'A bad cop out there is carrying a grudge over some things that happened a long time ago. Eventually somebody in the prosecutor's office will probably figure that out. But in the meantime we have a problem, Batist. They say your fingerprints were on the door of that cottage across the street.'

I looked into his face. He dropped his eyes to the table and opened and closed his hands. His knuckles looked as round and hard against the skin as ball bearings.

'Tell me,' I said.

'After you was gone, after I bust that man's lip, I seen them kids t'rew the window, hangin' round his cottage do' again. When I call the po-lice, they ax me what he done. I say he sellin' dope to children, that's what he done. They ax me I seen it, I seen him take money from somebody, I seen somebody lighting up a crack pipe or somet'ing. I say no I ain't seen it, you got to see a coon climb in a tree to know coons climb in trees?