Jimmie looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.
'Listen, Jim, this guy Buchalter is bad news,' I said. 'If he should come in your store, don't let on that you know me, don't try to detain him or drop the dime on him while he's here. Just get ahold of me or Clete Purcel after he leaves.'
'What's this guy done?'
I told him.
'I'm not showing offense here,' he said, 'but I'm a little shocked, you understand what I'm saying, you think a geek like that would be coming into my store. We're talking about the kind of guy hangs in skin shops, beats up on hookers, gets a bone-on hurting people, this ain't Jimmie Ryan just blowing you a lot of gas, Streak, this kind of guy don't like music, he likes to hear somebody scream.'
He leaned on his arms and bit down on his matchstick so that it arched upward into his mustache.
But my conversation with Jimmie was not quite over. A half hour later he called Clete Purcel's apartment, just before I was about to head back to New Iberia.
'I'm glad I got you,' he said. 'Something's wrong here.'
'What's happened?'
'It's the Count. After we close the shop, he always goes upstairs to his room and eats a can of potted meat and watches Pat Robertson on TV. Except tonight he kept droning and humming and walking in circles and cleaning the shelves till the place looked like a dust storm, then for no reason he goes crashing up the stairs and throws everything in a suitcase and flies out the back door with his cape flapping in the breeze.'
'You're saying Buchalter was in your store? Maybe when the Count was by himself?'
'You tell me. Hey, when a guy who talks to Olivia Newton-John through the hole in the lavatory is scared out of town by sickos, I'm wondering maybe I should move to Iraq or one of them places where all you got to worry about is your nose falling off from the BO.'
In the morning I got the autopsy report on Charles Sitwell. He didn't die of an air bubble being injected into his bloodstream. The syringe had been loaded with a mixture of water and roach paste.
It was time to talk to Tommy Lonighan about his knowledge of German U-boats and Silver Shirts, preferably in an official situation, in custody, outside of his own environment. I called Ben Motley and asked about the chances of rousting him from his house or gym and bringing him down to an interrogation room.
'On what basis?' he said.
'He's lying about the reasons for his interest in this U-boat.'
'So he didn't want to tell you his mother was a Nazi. It's not the kind of stuff anybody likes to hang on the family tree.'
'It's too much for coincidence, Motley. He's connected with Buchalter. He's got to be.'
'You want me to get a warrant on a guy, in a homicide investigation, because of something his mother did fifty years ago?'
'We just bring him in for questioning. Tommy likes to think of himself as respectable these days. So we step on his cookie bag.'
'I wonder why the words civil suit keep floating in front of my eyes. It probably has something to do with my lens prescription.'
'Don't give this guy a free pass. He's dirty, Motley. You know it.'
'Give me a call if you come up with something more. Until then, I don't think it helps to be flogging our rods over the wastebasket.'
'Listen to me, Ben—'
'Get real, Robicheaux. NOPD doesn't roust people, not even Tommy Blue Eyes, when they live on lakefront property. Keep it in your pants, my man.'
I worked late that evening on two other cases, one involving a stabbing in a black nightclub, the other, the possible suffocation of an infant by his foster parents.
The sky was the color of scorched pewter when I drove along the dirt road by the bayou toward my house. The wind was dry blowing across the marsh, and the willows were coated with dust and filled with the red tracings of fireflies. The deputy on guard at the house started his car engine, waved at me as he passed, and disappeared down the long corridor of oak trees.
Bootsie was washing dishes at the sink when I came in. She wore a pair of grass-stained white dungarees and a rumpled yellow blouse that was too small for her and exposed her midsection.
'Where's Alafair?' I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I could smell cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair.
'In the living room. Doing her homework,' she said. She kept her face turned toward the open window when she spoke.
'Where'd you go today?' I said.
'What does it matter?'
'Beg your pardon?'
'What does it matter where we go?'
'I don't understand, Boots.'
'It doesn't matter where we go. He's going to be there.'
'You mean Buchalter?'
'He called.'
'Here? When?'
'This afternoon.'
'Why didn't you call me at the office?'
'And tell you what?'
I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and turned her toward me. She breathed through her nose and kept her face at an angle to me.
'What did he say, Boots?'
'Nothing. I could hear music, like the kind you hear in a supermarket or an elevator. And then a man breathing. His breath going in and out, like he was waiting for something.'
'Maybe it was somebody else, maybe just a crank.'
'He did something else. He scratched a fingernail back and forth on the receiver. The way a cat paws at the door.'
Her mouth parted, and she looked up into my face. Her breath smelled like bourbon-scented orange slices.
'We'll get an unlisted number in the morning,' I said.
'It was Buchalter, wasn't it?'
'Maybe. But what we have to remember, Boots, is that when these guys try to scare people with telephone calls, they're running on the rims. They don't have anything else going.'
Her eyes went back and forth, searching inside mine.
'We've got a computer sketch of the guy all over town,' I said, 'I don't think he'll come back.'
'Then who killed the man in the hospital?'
'I don't know.'
'He's out there, Dave. I know he is.'
Her experience with Buchalter had been even worse than mine, and I knew that my words could not take the unrelieved sense of vulnerability out of her face. I held her against me, then walked her into the bedroom, turned on the shower, waited while she got inside the stall, locked the house, then said Alafair's prayers with her. The moon was down, the pecan and oak trees were motionless and black outside the screens, and the only sound I could hear besides the suck of the attic fan was Tripod running up and down on his chain and wire clothesline.
I poured a glass of milk, fixed a ham and onion sandwich, and ate it at the kitchen table. When the phone on the wall rang, I knew who I would be talking to.
His voice sounded as though he were waking from sleep, or as, though he had been disturbed during copulation. It was in slow motion, with a click to it, deep in his throat, that was both phlegmy and dry at the same time.
'It doesn't have to be bad between us.'
'What doesn't?'
'You, me, your wife. Y'all could be part of us.'
'Buchalter, you've got to understand this. I can't wave a wand over the gulf and bring up a depth-charged sub. I think you're a sick man. But if I get you in my sights, I'm going to take you off at the neck.'
Again, I heard a wet, clicking sound, like his tongue sticking to the insides of his cheeks.
'I like you,' he said.
'You like me?'
'Yes. A great deal.'
I waited before I spoke again.
'What do you think is going to happen the next time I see you?' I said.
'Nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'You'll come around to our way. It's a matter of time.'
My palm was squeezed damply on the receiver.
'Listen, every cop in Iberia Parish knows what you look like. They know what you've done, they're not big on procedure. Don't make the mistake of coming back here. I'm telling you this as a favor.'
&nbs
p; 'We can give you power.'
You're learning nothing. Change the subject.
'I know where you've been in New Orleans,' I said. 'You talked too much about music. You left a trail, Buchalter.'
'I could have hurt you the other night, in ways you can't dream about, but I didn't,' he said. 'Do you want to hear how they reach a point where they beg, what they sound like when they beg?'
'Will you meet with me?'
I heard him drinking from a glass, deeply, swallowing like a man who had walked out of a great, dry heat.
'Because I'm different, you shouldn't treat me as though I'm psychotic. I'm not. Good night,' he said. 'Tell your wife I remember our moment with fondness. She's a beautiful specimen of her gender.'
He hung up the receiver as gently as a man completing a yawn.
My heart was racing inside my chest. My pistol was still clipped to my belt. I unsnapped the holster, slipped the .45 out of the leather, which I had rubbed with saddle soap, and ran my fingers along the coolness of the metal. The balls of my fingers left delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil. I released the magazine from the butt, rubbed my thumb over the brass casing of the top round, pulled the slide back and forth, then shoved the magazine back into the butt. The grips felt hard and stiff inside my hand.
I looked through the window into the dark. I wanted Buchalter to be out there, perhaps parking his car behind a grove of trees, working his way across the fields, confident that this time he could pull it off, could invade my house and life with impunity. And this time—
I put the .45 on the nightstand in our bedroom and undressed in the dark. My own skin felt as dry and hot as a heated lamp shade. Bootsie was still asleep when I moved on top of her, between her legs, without invitation or consent, a rough beast who could have been hewn out of desert stone.
I made love to her as a starving man might. I put my tongue deep in her mouth and tasted the whiskey and candied cherries and sliced oranges deep in her wet recesses. I plummeted into her fecund warmth, I inhaled the alcohol out of her breath, I robbed her of the golden and liquid heat that had been aged in oak and presented mistakenly as a gift to her heart's blood rather than to mine.
* * *
chapter fourteen
The early sun looked like a sliver of pink ice, just above the horizon's misty rim, when I stopped my truck at the locked entrance to Tommy Lonighan's driveway. I got out of the truck and pushed the button on the speaker box.
'Who is it?' the voice of the man named Art said.
'Detective Dave Robicheaux. I'm here to see Tommy.'
'He's busy.'
'No, he's not.'
'The last time you were here you were busting up people with a shovel.'
'Yesterday's box score, Art.'
'It's seven o'clock in the fucking morning. How about some slack?'
'Are you going to open up or not? If not, I can come back with a warrant that has your name on it.'
'Is Purcel with you?'
'No.'
'You sure?'
'Last chance, Art.'
'Okay, take it easy, I'm buzzing you in. Tommy's out back. I'll tell him you're here. Hey, can you do me a favor?'
'What?'
'It's a nice day. The Indian and me are serving breakfast for Tommy and his guests out on the terrace. Let's keep it a nice day. Okay, man? Shit don't go good with grits and eggs.'
A minute later I parked my truck at the end of Lonighan's drive. The interior of the compound was the architectural and landscaped antithesis of everything in the Irish Channel neighborhood where Tommy had grown up. His imitation Tudor house was surrounded by citrus and pine and oak trees; steam rose from the turquoise surface of his screened-in pool and his coral goldfish ponds; the Saint Augustine grass was thick and wet from soak hoses, shining with dew in the hazy light. Beyond his protective brick walls, I could hear canvas sails flapping and swelling with wind on the lake.
He was behind the house, in an orange bikini swimsuit and a pair of black high-top ring shoes, thudding his taped fists into what looked like a six-foot stack of sandbags. His pale body, which rippled with sweat, Was the color and texture of gristle. A tubular, red scar, with tiny pink stitch holes on each side, wound in a serpentine line from his right kidney up to his shoulder blade.
He stopped hitting the bags when he saw me, and wiped his meringue hair and armpits with a towel. His flushed face smiled broadly.
'You're just in time to eat,' he said, pulling the adhesive tape off his hands. 'How about this weather? I think we got ourselves an early fall.' He flipped his towel on top of an azalea bush. His knuckles were round and hard and protruded from his skin as though he were holding a roll of quarters in each hand.
'You work out on sandbags, Tommy?'
'Cement. If you don't bust your hand or jam your wrist on a cement bag, you sure ain't gonna do it on a guy's face. What's up, Dave?'
'I've got a big problem with this guy Buchalter. He can't seem to stay out of my life.'
'If I can help, let me know.' He worked a blue jumper over his head as we walked down a gravel path toward a glass-topped table on his patio, where an ash blond woman in a terry-cloth robe was drinking coffee and reading the paper. 'I don't want a guy like this around, either. He gives the city a bad reputation.'
'I didn't say he was from New Orleans, Tommy.'
'You wouldn't be here unless you thought he was. Sit down and eat. You're too serious. Charlotte, this is Dave Robicheaux.'
She lowered her paper and looked at me with eyes that had the bright, blue tint of colored contact lenses, that were neither rude nor friendly, curious or wary. I suspected that she read news accounts of airline disasters with the same level of interest as the weather report. Her freckled, sun-browned skin had the smooth folds in it of soft tallow.
Her mouth was red and wet when she took it away from the coffee cup and acknowledged me.
'The gentleman who performs so well with a shovel,' she said.
'Sometimes it's better to use visual aids when you're talking to the Calucci brothers,' I said.
'Fucking A,' Tommy said. 'Neither one of those dagos could give himself a hand job without a diagram. But when you got to do business with the oilcans, you got to do business with the oilcans, right?'
'What kind of deals do you have with the Caluccis, Tommy?' I said.
'Are you kidding? Restaurant linen, valet parking, food delivery, carpenters and electricians working on my casino, you deal with the greaseballs or you get a picket line in front of everything you own.'
His house servant came out the back door with a huge, rope-handled wood tray between his hands and began setting silver-topped containers of scrambled eggs, grits, sausage links, bacon, and peeled oranges and grapefruit in front of us. The servant was the same enormous man I had seen on my earlier visit. His Indian face was as expressionless and flat as a cake pan, his brown, skillet-sized hands veined with scar tissue like tiny bits of white string.
'You're staring, Mr. Robicheaux,' Charlotte said.
'Excuse me?'
'At Manuel. It's rude to stare at people,' she said.
'He didn't mean anything,' Tommy said. 'Dave's a gentleman. He's got a college degree. In English literature, right, Dave? We're talking fucking class guy here.'
He winked at me as he spread his napkin.
The house servant named Manuel brushed against me when he poured my coffee. I could smell chemical fertilizer and garden dirt in his clothes. He never spoke, but after he went back inside the house, I saw his face look back at me from a kitchen window.
'Dig this,' Tommy said. 'Manny looks like he just got up out of a grave in Night of the Living Dead, but actually he's a fruit. He's gonna be in a music video called 'She's a Swinging Stud.' Hey, y'all quit looking at me like that. You think I could make up something like that? They show these kinds of videos in those homo joints on Dauphine.'
'Your mother was in the American-German Bund, Tommy,' I said.
'What?' His
face looked as though ice water had been poured on it.
'I guess it's common knowledge in the Channel. That's why you know what's in that sub, isn't it, partner?' I smiled at him.
'You're sitting at my breakfast table…' He cleared his throat and tried to regain his words. 'Right here at my table, at my own house, you're making insults about my mother?'
'That's not my intention.'
'Then clean the fucking mashed potatoes out of your mouth.'
The woman named Charlotte put her hand in his lap.
'It's one way or the other, Tommy,' I said.
'What is?'
'You either know something about the sub through your mother, or you've got a serious personal problem with Hippo Bimstine that you're not talking about.'
His tangled, white eyebrows were damp with perspiration against his red face. I saw the woman named Charlotte biting her lip, kneading her hand in his lap.
'What problem you talking about?' he said.
'You want it right down the pipe?'
'Yeah, I do.' But his face looked like stretched rubber, like that of a man about to receive a spear through the breastbone.
'He says you killed his little brother.'
His breath went in and out of his mouth. His eyes looked unfocused, impaired, as though he had been staring at a welder's electric arc. He pinched his nose and breathed hard through his nostrils, rolled his head on his neck.
But it was the woman who spoke.
'You filthy bastard,' she said.
'You want a free shot, Tommy?' I said.
'If I want to take a shot, you won't know what hit you,' he said. But his voice was suddenly hoarse and somehow separate from himself.
'Maybe it was a rough thing to say. But Will Buchalter is doing a number on my wife,' I said. 'It has to stop, Tommy. You understand what I'm saying to you? When you create a free-fire zone, it works both ways. We're not operating on the old rules here.'
'Where you get off talking free-fire zone? I had a Chinese bayonet unzip my insides when you were still fucking your fist.'
'You want one of my Purple Hearts?'
'You're a sonofabitch, Robicheaux,' he said.
'You don't make a convincing victim, Tommy.'