Dixie City Jam

He had been driving a car with Mississippi plates, had access to a studio an hour from New Orleans, and had made a telephone call within earshot of a beach.

The German skinhead who had been run down by his friends out on the salt had been diving from a cabin cruiser he and his friends had stolen from a berth in Biloxi.

Hippo Bimstine's friends had broken up a meeting of a hate group with baseball bats and expropriated their Nazi film footage in a cinder-block house north of Pascagoula.

I lowered the bar to my thighs, then curled it into my chest, released it slowly again, pausing in midair as the muscles in my arms burned and filled with blood. The air felt as cool as a knife blade in my lungs.

Maybe the circle was starting to tighten on Will Buchalter.

Before we went to bed, Bootsie and I ate a piece of pie at the kitchen table.

'Is something bothering you?' she said.

'I thought Clete might call.'

'Clete has his own way of doing things.'

'You're right about that.'

That night the wind blew hard out of the south, and I could hear our rental boats knocking against the pilings in the dock. Then it began to rain, and in my sleep I heard another sound, a distant one, metal striking methodically against metal, one pinging blow after another, muffled by the envelope of water it had to travel through.

In my dream I saw a group of Nazi sailors huddled in a half-flooded compartment, salt water pinwheeling through the leaks above their heads, their faces white with terror in the dimming light while they breathed their own stink and the coldness crept above their loins and one man kept whanging a wrench against the bulkhead.

I woke from the dream, my chest laboring for air. Through the clicking of the rain in the trees, I could still hear the rhythmic twang of metal hitting against metal. I slipped on my loafers and khakis, pulled a raincoat over my head, and, with a flashlight in my hand, ran from the back door to the collapsed barn by my duck pond. A sheet of corrugated tin roofing, purple with rust, was swinging from a broken beam against the remains of my father's old hay baler.

I pulled the broken beam and sheet of tin loose from the pile and threw them out into the field.

But I couldn't shake the dream. Why? What did I care about the fate of Nazis drowned fifty years ago?

The dream was not about submariners. Someone close to me was in trouble, maybe because of information I had given him, and I was trying to deny that simple fact.

Where was Clete Purcel?

chapter twenty-nine

Tommy Lonighan had turned up the heat inside his glassed-in sunporch, even though it was seventy-five degrees outside and he was wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. My face was moist with heat, but his skin looked dry and gray; almost flaccid, as though his glands had stopped secreting; he sat forward on his reclining chair, his eyes still trying to follow the action in a movie playing on his VCR, a furious conclusion working in his face.

'This is a piece of crap,' he said, pulled the cassette from the VCR, and flung it clattering into a pile of other cassettes. 'You saw that movie Reservoir Dogs? It's sickening. A bunch of made guys are beating up and torturing a cop. No mobbed-up guys would do something like that. The guy who wrote this don't know dick about crime. You know what I think, it's the guy wrote this is sick, not the fucking criminals.'

'Can you help me find Clete or not?'

'Where do you find an elephant? You go to the circus. How should I know where he is? Ask his punch, the one getting in my face about Jews.'

'I went by Martina's apartment this morning. No one's seen her in two or three days.'

'Cause she's with Purcel. 'Cause he's got a warrant on him, he don't wake up with a boner?'

'You're unbelievable, Tommy.'

'If Max or Bobo did something to him, I'd a heard about it, and I ain't.' He freed something from a nostril and sniffed dryly. 'Can I tell you something? I don't give a shit, either. I wish the Caluccis would try to hit somebody now. Maybe they'd get taken down like they deserve.'

'You're talking about my friend.'

'I should worry about Purcel? I got maybe three, four months, then the doctor says he'll start me on morphine. Maybe it ain't gonna do the job, either. You know why I got all this grief in my life? It's punishment 'cause I got mixed up with those fucking greasebags. They're immoral, they got no honor, they-'

'Then why not dime 'em and be done with it, Tommy?'

'I thought you knew.' His eyes were close-set, like BB's. Blotches of color broke in his face. 'You guys don't use telephones, you don't talk to each other?'

'What is it?' I said.

'Late yesterday, I spilled my guts, everything,' he said. 'I haven't been charged yet, but they'll do that Monday.'

I waited. The room was ablaze with sunlight and color-the deep blue tile floor, the cane deck furniture and canary yellow cushions-but in its midst Tommy looked stricken, like a man who had mistakenly thought the source of his abiding shame had at least become known and accepted if not forgiven.

'Max and Bobo wanted to scare the coloreds out of the trade in the projects,' he said. 'They used Manny to do three guys. They told him these coloreds were evil spirits and had to be killed 'cause they were selling dope and corrupting little kids. He comes from a bunch of headhunters or cannibals that's got a flower and death cult or something. Or maybe Max made him think he did after he got ahold of this documentary on these prehistoric people that's running around in South America. I don't know about that stuff.'

He scowled into space. White clouds were tumbling in the sky, leaves blowing across the freshly clipped lawn.

'You think I'm toe jam, don't you?' he said.

I kept my face empty and brushed at the crystal on my watch with my thumb.

'A couple of button guys did the other hits, I heard Jamaicans out of Miami,' he said. 'It's been putting boards in my head. I feel miserable. It's like nothing's any good anymore. There's some kind of smell won't wash out of my clothes. Here, you smell it?'

He extended his shirt cuff under my nose.

'Where you going?' he said.

'I've got to find Clete.'

'Stay. I'll fix some chicken sandwiches.'

'Sorry.'

He blew his nose in a Kleenex and dropped the Kleenex in a paper bag full of crumpled tissue, many of them flecked with blood.

'You seen Hippo?' he said.

'We're not on good terms, I'm afraid.'

'He ain't such a bad guy.' He stared disjointedly at the leaves blowing against the windows. 'You see him again, tell him I said that.'

'Sure.'

'You want to take some movie cassettes? I get them for two bucks from a guy sells dubs in Algiers.'

'Dubs?'

'What world you hang out in, Dave? Anything that's electronically recorded today gets dubbed and resold. Those music tapes you see in truck stops, you think Kenny Rogers sells his tapes for three-ninety-five? What, I'm saying the wrong thing again?'

'No, I just haven't been thinking clearly about something, Tommy. See you around.'