Dixie City Jam

face was hot with her work. For the first time I saw a prettiness in her. I sat on a wood box next to her and turned on the garden hose and let it sluice into the fresh hole while she fitted the plant in and troweled dirt over the roots.

'How'd you know I was home?' she said.

'Your office told me you're working nights now.'

'What were you talking to Zoot about out there?' she said, without looking up.

'Not too much… His friends.'

'You don't approve of them?'

'People sure know when they're around.'

'Well, I guess you're glad you don't have to be around them very long, aren't you?'

'A boy can gravitate to certain kids for a reason.'

'Oh?' she said, and rested her rump on her heels. As she looked at me she tilted her head in feigned deference.

'I don't know why you think it's funny. He's a good boy,' I said. 'Why don't you stop treating him like a douche bag?'

She made a sound like she had swallowed bile. 'I can't believe you just said that,' she said.

'Why don't you give the kid some credit? He's got a lot of courage. Did he tell you he went three rounds against a professional fighter who could have turned his brains into mush?'

'Where do you get off telling me how to raise my child?'

'That's it, Lucinda. He's not a child.'

Then she made the same sound again, as though she couldn't remove a vile taste from her throat. 'Please spare me this, would you?' she said. 'Go away somewhere, find a nice white neighborhood, find a white lady digging in her garden, and please give her your advice about the correct way to raise children. Can you do that for me, please?'

'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down on Terpsichore and Baronne.'

The heat went out of her eyes.

'Did you know him?' I said.

She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.

'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at the flower bed in front of her.

'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.

'Motley.'

'He'll do his best with it.'

'Somebody else won't?'

'The department has its problems.'

'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.

She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum plant with her garden trowel.

'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes being canceled out?'

'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the outrageousness of the idea.

'Some funny people keep showing up on it. Tommy Blue Eyes, Hippo Bimstine… you as the liaison person for NOPD. That's a peculiar combo, don't you think?'

'Lots of people want New Orleans to be like it was thirty years ago. For different reasons, maybe.'

'What's your own feeling? You think maybe the times are such that we should just whack out a few of the bad guys? Create our own free-fire zone and make up the rules later?'

'I don't think I like what you're saying.'

'I heard you went up to Angola to watch a man electrocuted.'

'That bothers you?'

'I had to witness an execution once. I had dreams about it for a long time.'

'Let me clarify something for you. I didn't go once. I do it in every capital conviction I'm involved with. The people who can't be there, the ones these guys sodomize and mutilate and murder, have worse problems than bad dreams.'

'You're a tough-minded lady.'

'Save the hand job for somebody else.'

I stood up and turned off the hose. The iron handle squeaked in my hand.

'The bad thing about vigilantes is that eventually they're not selective,' I said.

'Is that supposed to mean something to me?'

'I'm going to violate a confidence. If Zoot had walked into that crack house a little earlier this morning, he might have had his head opened up with that E-tool like some of the others. He's not a good listener, either, Lucinda.'

Her lips parted silently. I could not look at the recognition of loss spreading through her face.

It was hot that night, with an angry whalebone moon high above the marsh. The rumble of dry thunder woke me at three in the morning. I found Bootsie in the kitchen, sitting in the dark at the breakfast table, her bare feet in a square of moonlight. Her shoulders were rounded; her breasts sagged inside her nightgown.

'It's the lightning,' she said. 'It was popping out in the marsh. I saw a tree burning.'

I walked her back to the bed and lay beside her. In a little while the rain began ticking in the trees; then it fell harder, drumming on the eaves and the tin roof of the gallery. She fell asleep with her head on my arm and slept through a thunderstorm that broke across the marsh at daybreak and flooded the yard and blew a fine, cool mist through the screens.

At eight o'clock the sheriff called and told me to go directly to Iberia General rather than to the office. Charles Sitwell, our only link to Will Buchalter, would never be accused of ratting out on his friends.

chapter thirteen

The window blinds in Sitwell's hospital room were up, and the walls and the sheets on his bed were bright with sunlight. A nurse was emptying Sitwell's bedpan in the toilet, and the deputy who had stood guard on the door was chewing on a toothpick and staring up at a talk show on a television set whose sound was turned off.

'I can't tell you with any certainty when he died,' the doctor said. 'I'd say it was in the last two or three hours, but that's a guess. Actually, I thought he was going to make it.'

Sitwell's head was tilted back on the pillow. His mouth and eyes were open. A yellow liquid had drained out of the plaster and bandages on his face into the whiskers on his throat.

'You want to guess at what caused his death?' I said.

The doctor was a powerfully built, sandy-haired man, a tanned, habitual golf player, who wore greens and protective plastic bags over his feet.

'Look at his right hand,' he said. 'It's clutching the sheet like he was either afraid of something or he was experiencing a painful spasm of some kind.'

'Yes?'

'That's not unusual in itself, so maybe I'm just too imaginative.'

'You're going to have to be a little more exact for me, Doctor.'

He flipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them on his nose, then bent over Sitwell's body.

'Take at look at this,' he said, rotating Sitwell's chin sideways with his thumb. 'You see that red spot in his whiskers, like a big mosquito bite? Come around in the light. Here, right by the jugular.'