down because he doesn't like the guy. That's why he'll never carry a shield again.'
'How do you think the case against the Indian is going to stand up?'
'Circumstantial evidence, a retard on the stand, a defense attorney who lets the jury know the retard is a grunt for a rich gangster who actually drowned somebody with a fire hose and got away with it. Take a guess how the jury might vote.'
'Thanks for all the good news.'
'It's not all bad. The word on the street is Lonighan's dying.'
'For some reason that doesn't fill me with joy, partner.'
'Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis and the dope trade in the projects. Those black kids we bust all the time, they weren't addicts when they came out of their mamas' womb. Believe it or not, even those dead dealers had families, Robicheaux.'
Why argue with charity? I eased the receiver down in the cradle and stared out i the window at the palm trees rattling in the wind. The bottom of the sky looked green over the gulf.
What was Clete Purcel doing?
I went home for lunch. When I came back the sheriff stopped me at the watercooler.
'The FBI just relayed some stuff to us from Interpol. They've got a fix on the woman,' he said.
'What?'
'Read it. It's on your desk. I thought stuff like that only went on in the Barker family.' He walked away and left me staring after him.
The statement from Interpol consisted of four paragraphs. There was nothing statistical or demonstrable about the information in them. As with all the other documents in the case, it was as though the writer were trying to describe an elusive presence that had been mirrored only briefly in the eyes of others.
But the images he used weren't those of the ordinary technical writer; they remained in the memory like splinters under the skin.
Two undercover antiterrorist agents in Berlin believed that the man known as William Buchalter and Willie Schwert and other variations operated inside a half dozen neo-Nazi groups with a half sister named Marie. A skinhead in a beer garden told a story of an initiation into a select inner group known in England and the United States as the Sword. A kidnapped Turkish laborer had knelt trembling on the dirt floor of a potato cellar, his wrists wired behind him, a burlap sack pulled over his face, while the initiates pledged their lives to the new movement. Then the woman named Marie had set the kidnapped man on fire.
I opened and closed my mouth, as though my ears were popping from cabin pressure in an airplane, and continued to read. The details in the last paragraph gave another dimension to the sweaty, hoarse voices that I had heard over the telephone.
The sheriff stood in my doorway with a coffee cup in his hand.
'You think that's our phony nun?' he said.
'Yeah, I do.'
'You believe that stuff at the end of the page?'
'They're perverse people. Why should anything they do be a surprise?'
'Did you know Ma Barker and one of her sons were incestuous? They committed suicide by machine-gunning each other. They were even buried together in the same casket, to keep the tradition intact. That's a fact.'
'Interesting stuff,' I said.
'You've got to have some fun with it or you go crazy. I got to tell you that?'
'No, you're right.'
He walked over and squeezed me on the shoulder. I could smell his leather gunbelt and pipe tobacco in his clothes.
'You sleeping all right at night?' he said.
'You bet.'
He grunted under his breath.
'That's funny, I don't. Well, maybe we'll drop that pair in their own box. Who knows?' he said.
He walked his fingernails across my desk and went back out the door.
The best lead on Buchalter, the only one, really, was still music.
Brother Oswald Flat, I thought.
I got his telephone number from long-distance information.
'Didn't you say you played with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys?' I asked.
'What about hit?'
'Did you ever have any connection with jazz or blues musicians?'
'Son, I like you. I really do. But a conversation with you is like trying to teach someone the recipe for ice water.'
'I'm afraid I'm not following you.'
'That's the point. You never do.'
'I'll try to listen carefully, sir, if you can be patient with me.'
'Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church. Hit don't matter which room you're in, long as you're in the building. You with me?'
'You know some jazz musicians?'
'I'll have a go at hit from a different angle,' he said. 'I used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?'
'I think Will Buchalter has some kind of involvement with historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is.'
The phone was silent.
'Reverend?'
'Why didn't you spit hit out?'
This time I didn't answer. His voice had changed when he spoke again.
'I won't interrupt you or insult you again,' he said.
I recounted the most recent late-night phone call, with Beiderbecke's 'In a Mist' playing in the background; Buchalter's knowledge of early Benny Goodman and the proper way to handle old seventy-eights; the Bunk Johnson record that someone had left playing on my phonograph.
'You impress me, son. You
Again, I was silent.
'An evil man cain't love music,' he said. 'He's interested in hit for some other reason.'
'I think you're right.'
'There's a band plays on Royal Street. I mean, out in the street, when the cops put the barricades up and close off the traffic. They got a piano on a truck, a Chinese kid playing harmonica, some horns, a colored, I mean a black, man on slide guitar. The black man comes to my church sometimes. But he don't live in New Orleans. He's in Morgan City.'
'Yes?'
'If I call and see if he's home, can you meet me there in a couple of hours?'
'I think you'd better clarify yourself.'
'That's all you get. Holler till your face looks like an eggplant.'
'This is part of a police investigation, Reverend. You don't write the rules.'
'He's been in the penitentiary. He won't talk to you unless I'm there. You want my he'p or not?'
The black man's name was Jesse Viator, and he lived in a dented green trailer set up on concrete blocks thirty feet from the bayou's edge. He had only three teeth in his mouth, and they protruded from his gums like the hooked teeth in the mouth of a barracuda. We sat on old movie theater seats that he had propped up on railroad ties in his small, tidy backyard. A shrimp boat passed with its lights on, and near the far bank swallows were swooping above an oil barge that had rusted into a flooded shell.
Jesse Viator was not comfortable in the presence of a police officer.
