Dixie City Jam

skipper keeps it for him in Biloxi. So the drunk thought he'd make a few bucks by renting it to these three guys. But at the last minute the three guys decided they didn't need to pay him the money after all, so instead they just stomped the shit out of him. They told him if he made a beef about it they'd catch him later and kick one of his own whiskey bottles up his ass.'

'Who were the guys?'

'The two in custody are just a couple of Biloxi beach farts who've been in and out of Parchman on nickel-and- dime B and E's. But dig this, the guy who got run through the propeller had some beautiful Nazi artwork on both arms-swastikas and SS lightning bolts.'

'So do most cons in the Aryan Brotherhood,' I said.

'But here's the kicker, mon. This guy was not homegrown. The Coast Guard found his passport on the cabin cruiser. He was from Berlin.'

'Do the guys in custody say what they were after?'

'They were hired by the German guy, but they claim the German guy wouldn't tell them what was down there. They thought maybe it was a scuttled boat with a lot of dope on it. Here's the real laugh, though. The Coast Guard says there's no boat down at that spot. What the beach farts and the skinhead probably saw on their sonar was an oil rig that sank there in a hurricane about twenty years ago.'

'Thanks for the information, Clete.'

'You want to talk to the guys in custody?'

'Maybe.'

'I'd do it soon. The rummy in Biloxi isn't filing charges, and the kraut's death is going down as accidental. I don't guess anybody's going to lose sleep over a skinhead getting turned into potted meat out on the salt.'

'Thanks again, Clete.'

'You think they were after that sub?'

'Who knows?'

'Hippo Bimstine does. I want in on this, mon. When Streak operates in the Big Sleazy, he needs his old podjo to cover his back. Am I right?'

'Right. Good night, Cletus.'

I heard him pop the cap on a bottle and pour it into a glass.

'Bless my soul, I love that old-time rock 'n' roll, when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide made their puds shrivel up and hide,' he said.

My palms felt stiff with fatigue, hard to fold closed, and my eyes burned as though there were sand behind the lids. Clete was still talking, rattling fresh ice into his glass, when I said good night a final time and eased the receiver down into the telephone cradle.

Tommy Lonighan's Sport Center was located on the edge of downtown New Orleans, in a late-nineteenth- century two-story brick building that had originally been a firehouse, then an automotive dealership in the 1920s, and finally a training gym for club boxers who fought for five dollars a fight during the Depression.

The interior smelled of sweat and leather and moldy towels; the canary yellow paint on the walls was blistered and peeling above the old iron radiators; the buckled and broken spaces in the original oak flooring had been patched over with plywood and linoleum. The bodybuilding equipment was all out of another era-dumbbells and weight-lifting benches, curling bars, even a washtub of bricks hung on a cable for pull downs. The canvas on the four rings had been turned almost black from scuff marks, body and hair grease, and kicked-over spit buckets.

But it was still the most famous boxing gym in New Orleans, and probably more Golden Gloves champions had come out of it than out of any other boxing center in the South. In the sunlight that poured down through the high windows, black, Latin, Vietnamese kids and a few whites sparred in headgear and kidney guards, clanked barbells up and down on a wide rubber pad, skipped rope with the grace of tap dancers, and turned timing bags into flying, leathery blurs.

A small, elderly white man, with a thick ear and a flat, toylike face, who was pulling the laces out of a box full of old gloves, pointed out Zoot to me.

'That tall kid about to break his nose on the timing bag,' he said. 'While you're over there, tell him he ain't carried the trash out to the Dumpster yet.'

The boy had his mother's elongated turquoise eyes and clear, light-brown skin. But he was unnaturally tall for his age, over six feet, and as slim and narrow-shouldered as if his skin had been stretched on wire. The elastic top of his trunks was sopping with the sweat that streamed in rivulets down his hairless chest. Each time his fist missed the timing bag, he would glance nervously a few feet away at another kid who had turned his timing bag into an explosion of sound and movement. Then Zoot would smash the bag with a right cross, snapping it back on the chain, try to connect with a left, miss, swing again with his right, and miss again.

'Try not to hit harder with one hand than the other,' I said. 'You have to create a kind of circular momentum.'

'A what?'

Great choice of words, I told myself.

'You called my house yesterday,' I said.

'You Mr. Robicheaux?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, yeah, well-I be with you in a minute, okay? They waiting for me over at the ring. I'm gonna go three with that white boy putting on his kidney guard.'

'You said you had some pretty important things to tell me, Zoot.'

His eyes flicked sideways, then came back on my face again.

'I gotta go my three. This ain't an easy place to talk, you know what I mean?'

'Yeah, I guess so.' I looked at the white kid who was climbing up in the corner of one of the rings. His skin had the alabaster iridescence of someone who seldom went out in the sunlight, but his stomach, which was tattooed with a red-and-green dragon, was a washboard, and the muscles in his arms looked like pieces of pig iron. 'Who is he?' I asked.

'Ummm, he fights in Miami and Houston a lot.'

'He's a pro?'

'Yes, suh.'

'You sure you want to do this, partner?'

He licked his lips and tried to hide the shine of fear in his eyes.

'He's a good guy. He's been up against some big names. He don't do this for just anybody,' Zoot said. 'I'll be right back. You ain't got to watch if you don't want. There's a Coca-Cola machine back in the dressing room.'

'I'll just take a seat over here.'

'Yes, suh. I'll be right back.'

I don't think I ever saw anyone box quite as badly as Zoot. Either he would hold both gloves in front of his face so that he was unable to see his opponent or he would drop his guard suddenly and float his face up like a balloon, right into a rain of blows. His stance was wrong-footed, he led with his right hand, he used his left like a flipper, he took shot after shot in the mouth and eyes because he didn't know how to tuck in his chin and raise his shoulder against a right cross.

Fortunately the white kid went easy on him, except in the third round when Zoot swung at the white kid's head coming out of a clench. The white kid stepped inside Zoot's long reach and hooked a hard chop into his nose. Zoot went down on his butt in the middle of the canvas, his long legs splayed out in front of him, his mouth-piece lying wet in his lap, his eyes glazed as though someone had popped a flashbulb in his face.

Twenty minutes later he came out of the dressing room in his street clothes, combing his wet hair along the sides of his head. His nose had stopped bleeding, but his left eye had started to discolor and puff shut at the corner. We walked across the street to a cafe that sold pizza by the slice and sat at a table in back under a rotating electric fan.

'Have you been boxing long?' I said.

'Since school let out.'