Dixie City Jam

'Will Buchalter and his sister have hurt my family,' I said. 'So we're not working on conventional rules anymore. Do you believe me when I say that?'

'Yes, sir. You got no trouble from me.'

'So what's that smell?'

'I was just trying to clean up… The guy gets crazy sometimes… He started hitting her with his fists for no reason, then he went in there with some scissors. I didn't have anything to do with it, man.'

'Hit who?'

'The broad… I thought that's why you were here. The broad he's been holding.' He stared at the look on my face. 'Oh shit, man, this ain't my doing. You got to believe that.'

I scraped the pail and mop out of the way with my foot and opened the side door.

She was tied to a chair with clothesline, her mouth and eyes wrapped with silver tape, her reddish hair shorn and hacked to the scalp. One nostril was caked with dried blood, her neck and shoulders marbled with bruises the color of pomegranates. She turned her head toward my sound, like a blind person, her nostrils dilating with fear.

'Martina?' I said, my heart dropping.

She tried to talk through the tape.

I removed it first from her eyes, then her mouth. Her right eye was swollen shut, the inside of her lips gashed, her teeth pink, as though they had been painted with Mercurochrome. I opened my Puma knife and sliced the rope from the arms and back of the chair. She held me around the waist while I stroked her shorn head.

'It's all right,' I said. 'We'll get you to a hospital. I'll have somebody stay with you. You hear me? Buchalter's gone. Everything's going to be okay.'

She turned her face up to me. Her left eyeball jittered, as though a nerve in it were impaired. 'Where's Clete?' she said.

'I don't know. But we'll find him.'

'The man who beat me, he told me about the things he was going to do to Clete. He has pictures of what he's done to people.'

She leaned forward with her face in her hands, sobbing. There were white places the size of nickels with raw cuts inside them all over her scalp.

'I'll be right back,' I said.

The man in cuffs on the floor was trembling.

'I took her to the bathroom, I give her food when I wasn't supposed to,' he said.

'Where's your phone?'

'On the desk,' he said, exhaling the words like a man who knows the fury and intensity of the world is about to move past him.

I called 911 and asked for an ambulance and a sheriffs car.

'Here's how it shakes out, partner,' I said to the man on the floor. 'You're probably going down as an accessory to assault and battery, kidnapping, and anything else the locals can dream up. But no matter how you cut it, it's a serious bounce. You want to tell me where he is, I'll see what I can do for you later.'

'He knows how to get to people. Anywhere. Lock-down, isolation, Witness Protection Program. There's white guys even paid the Black Guerrillas to protect them. It didn't work.'

'Last chance.'

'Him and Marie, this morning, they got excited about something in a newspaper. Then they took off.'

'Where's the newspaper?'

'I burned it in the trash barrel. With her hair I swept up. I was trying to keep the place clean, and I go down on a kidnapping beef. You tell me that's fair, man.'

I heard sirens in the distance, outside the window, a black man was looking up the street.

'I don't want to be rough on you, but I'd reconsider my attitude about cooperating,' I said to the man in handcuffs. 'When we nail Buchalter, he's going to find out we talked to you first. Who do you think he's going to blame his problems on?'

His face turned ashen.

I rode in the ambulance with Martina to the hospital, then used the phone at the Harrison County Sheriff's Department to call home and Clete's office. I recorded a long message on his machine, assured him Martina was going to be all right, and left him the number of the hospital.

But I would soon discover that I wasn't thinking clearly. I called Ben Motley.

'It's Saturday afternoon. Believe it or not, Robicheaux, I'd like forty-eight hours without thinking about pus bags.'

'Buchalter doesn't take weekends off,' I said.

'You got the woman back. You traced Buchalter to his nest. Count your blessings. Ease up.'

'Now's the time to staple him to the wall, Ben. Call Fart, Barf, and Itch in New Orleans for me.'

'What else?'

'Nothing.' Then I happened to glance at a deputy across the room who was eating a sandwich with his feet on the desk and reading the sports page in the newspaper.

'Wait a minute. Do you have this morning's Times-Picayune?'

'What do you want?'

'Look in the personals for me.'

'That's what they do when they're bored over in Vice.'

'Come on, Ben.'

He put down the phone, then I heard newspaper pages rattling.

'Do you see anything in there that looks peculiar?' I said.

'That's like asking if there's any washroom graffiti that shouldn't be on a Hallmark card,' he said. 'Hold on… Here's one that's all numbers. No message, just numbers.'

'Read them.' I could hear my own breath in the phone. I wrote the numbers down as he read them off. 'Those are the coordinates for that Nazi sub, Ben. You check with The Times-Picayune, you'll find Clete ran that ad.'

'I don't get it.'

'Buchalter kidnapped Martina and forced Clete to find out where I'd seen the sub. I gave him the coordinates. But it took a couple of days for the ad to come out. Look, we need to get a boat or a chopper out there.'

'Call your own department.'

'We don't have anything available.'

'You think I can snap my fingers on Saturday afternoon and come up with a boat or a helicopter? We don't have jurisdiction out on the salt, anyway.'

'You don't understand. I left a message on Clete's machine. I told him Martina's all right. As soon as he retrieves the message, you know where he's headed.'

'So let him light up the fun house. It's what Purcel does best.'

'He might lose, too. I need a boat.'

'You won't get it from me this weekend.'

'Motley-'

'It's Motley now? Why don't you call Nate Baxter? See what kind of help you get.'

I started back home, It was getting dark now, and the palm trees along the highway were beating in the wind, the rain spinning in my headlights. It would take me at least four and a half hours to reach New Iberia, then another seven, maybe more, with the bad weather, to get my boat down Bayou Teche and into the gulf south of Grand Isle.

I pulled into a filling station by the Pearl River and called Lucinda Bergeron's house. The gum trees around the phone booth were green and brightly lit by the filling station's signs, and the leaves were ripping like paper in the wind.

'Zoot?'

'Hey, Mr. Dave, what's happenin'?'