I remembered the name from years ago when he had broadcast his faith-healing show from Station XERF, one of the most powerful radio transmitters in the Western Hemisphere, located across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, in old Mexico so that the renters of its airtime were not governed by FCC restrictions. Sandwiched between ads for tulip bulbs, bat guano, baby chicks, aphrodisiacs, and memberships in every society from the Invisible Empire to the Black Muslims, were sermons by Brother Oswald, as he was called, that were ranting, breathless pieces of Appalachian eloquence. Sometimes he would become virtually hysterical, gasping as though he had emphysema, then he would snort air through his nostrils and begin another fifteen-minute roller-coaster monologue that would build with such roaring, unstoppable intensity that the technicians would end his sermon for him by superimposing a prerecorded ad.
He and his wife, a woman in a print cotton dress with rings of fat under her chin, were eating barbecue at the only table in the bait shop when I opened the screen door. It must have been ninety degrees in the shop, even with the window fans on, but Oswald Flat wore a long-sleeve denim work shirt buttoned at the wrists and a cork sun helmet that leaked sweat out of the band down the sides of his head. His eyes were pale behind his rimless glasses, the color of water flowing over gravel, liquid-looking in the heat, the back of his neck and hands burned the deep hue of chewing tobacco.
'That's Dave yonder,' Batist said to him from behind the counter, seemingly relieved. He picked up a can of soda pop and went outside to drink it at one of the telephone-spool tables under the awning that shaded the dock.
Flat's eyes went up and down my body. His wife began eating a Moon Pie, chewing with her mouth or open while she stared idly out the window at the bayou.
'Looks like you're a hard man to grab holt of,' he said.
'Not really. I was up at the house.'
'Don't like to bother a man in his home.'
'What could I do for you, sir?'
'I belong to the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans.
I make no apology for hit. The town's a commode. But I don't like what got done to your colored boy.'
'Boy?'
His southern mountain accent grated like piano wire drawn through a hole punched in a tin can. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket, worked it into a back tooth, and measured me again with his bemused, pale eyes.
'You one of them kind gets his nose up in the air about words he don't like?' he said.
'Batist is older than I am, Reverend. People hereabouts don't call him a boy.'
'He probably ain't gonna get much older if you don't take the beeswax out of your ears. There's something bad going on out yonder. I don't like hit.' He waved his hand vaguely at the eastern horizon.
'You mean the vigilante?'
'Maybe. Maybe something a whole lot bigger than that.'
'I don't follow you.'
'Things falling apart at the center. I think it's got to do with the Antichrist.'
'The Antichrist?'
'You got woodpecker holes in your head or something?'
'I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about.'
'There's signs and such, the way birds fly around in a dead sky right before a storm. You had a president with the numbers in his name.' He puffed out both his cheeks. 'I can tell you're thinking, son. I can smell the wood burning.'
'What numbers?'
'Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six-six-six. The Book of Revelation says hit, you'll know him by the numbers in his name. I think that time's on us.'
'Could I get y'all anything else?'
'Does somebody have to hit you upside the head with a two-by-four to get your attention?' he said.
'Stop talking to the man like that, Os,' his wife said, opening another Moon Pie, her gaze fixed indolently on the willows bending in the breeze.
'That colored fellow out yonder's innocent,' he said to me. 'These murders, I don't care if hit's dope dealers being killed or not, they ain't done by somebody on the side of justice. People can pretend that's the case, but hit ain't so. And that bothers me profoundly. God's honest truth, son. That's all I come here to tell you.'
'Do you know something about the murders, Reverend?'
'You'll be the first to hear about hit when I do.' His face was dilated and discolored in the heat, as though it had been slowly poached in warm water.
After he and his wife drove away in their flatbed truck, the exact nature of their mission still a mystery to me, I called up to the house.
'Hey, Boots, I'm going to Lafayette to talk to a lawyer, then I have to pick up some ice for the coolers,' I said. 'By the way, that man in the blue shirt you saw… I think he was just in the shop. He's a fundamentalist radio preacher. I guess he's trying to do a good deed of some kind.'
'Why was he staring up at the house?'
'You've got me. He's probably just one of those guys who left his grits on the stove too long. Anyway, he seems harmless enough.'
If I had only mentioned his name or the fact that he was with his wife, or that he was elderly, or that he was a southern mountain transplant. Any one of those things would have made all the difference.
* * *
chapter six
She had just changed into a pair of shorts and sandals to work in the garden when he knocked on the front screen door. He wore a blue cotton short-sleeve shirt and a Panama hat with a flowered band around the crown. His physique was massive, without a teaspoon of fat on it, his neck like a tree stump with thick roots at the base that wedged into his wide shoulders. His neatly creased slacks hung loosely on his tapered waist and flat stomach.
But his green eyes were shy, and they crinkled when he smiled. He carried a paper sack under his right arm.
'I wasn't able to give this to your husband, but perhaps I can give it to you,' he said.
'He'll be home a little later, if you want to come back.'
'I'm sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name's Will Buchalter. Actually this is for you and the little girl.'
'I'm not quite sure I understand.'
'It's a gift. Some candy.' He slipped the box, which was wrapped in ribbon and satin paper, partially out of the sack.
'That's very nice of you, I'm sure, but it might be better if you drop back by when Dave's here.'
'I didn't mean to cause an inconvenience. I'm a little bit inept sometimes.'
'No, I didn't mean that you were—'
'Could I have a glass of water, please?' He took off his hat. His fine blond hair was damp in the heat.
Her eyes went past his shoulder to the dock, where she could see Batist washing fish fillets in a bloody pan.
'Or I can just walk down to the bait shop,' he said.
'No, no, come in. I'll get you one,' she said, and opened the screen for him. 'Dave said he was talking to you earlier about something?'
He nodded, his eyes crinkling again, filling with light, focusing on nothing. When she returned from the kitchen, he was sitting on the couch, examining two seventy-eight rpm records that he had removed from the metal racks where I kept my historical jazz collection.
'Oh,' she said. 'Those are quite rare. They have to be handled very carefully.'
'Yes, I know,' he said. 'This is Benny Goodman's nineteen thirty-three band. But there's dust along the rim. You see, the open end of the jacket should always be turned toward the back of the shelf.' He slipped his large hand inside one of the paper jackets and slid out the record.
'Please, you shouldn't do that.'
'Don't worry. I have a big collection of my own,' he said. 'Watch my hands. See, I don't touch the grooves. Fingerprints can mar a record in the same way they cause rust on gun blueing.'
He rubbed the record's rim softly with a piece of Kleenex, then carefully inserted it back in the paper jacket. He looked up into Bootsie's face.
'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have handled them,' he said, twisting sideways and replacing both records on the rack. 'But a shudder goes through me when I see dust
on a beautiful old record. You have some wonderful ones in your collection. I'd give anything to have those Bix Beiderbeckes and Bunk Johnsons in mine.'
'Dave's collected them since he was in high school. That's why I'm a little nervous if somebody picks them up.' She handed him the glass of water and remained standing.
'Well, I won't take any more of your time. I just wanted to leave this little gift and introduce myself.' He took a small sip from the water glass and placed the box of candy on the arm of the couch. 'Before I go, could I show you something? It'd mean a lot to me.'
The hair on his forearms looked golden and soft, like down, in the shaft of sunlight that fell through the side window. He removed a silver leather-bound scrapbook from the paper bag and rested it in his lap.
'It'll only take a minute,' he said.
'I'm a little behind in my work today.'
'Please. Then I won't bother y'all any more.'
'Well, for just a minute,' she said.
She sat down next to him, her legs crossed, her hands folded on her knee.
'I know that Mr. Bimstine has talked to Dave, but unfortunately he's sometimes not a truthful man,' he said.
'Bimstine?'
'Yes, Hippo Bimstine. Sometimes he has a way of concealing what he's really up to. I'm afraid it might just be another racial characteristic with him and some of his friends.'
'I'm not making the connection. I'm not sure of what you're doing here, either.'
He patted his palms lightly on the silver leather of the scrapbook.
'I don't want to say something that's offensive to anyone,' he said. 'But Mr. Bimstine lies about the causes he serves. I doubt that he's told your husband he raises money for Israel.'
'You had better come back later and talk to Dave about this.'
'You're misunderstanding me. I didn't come here to criticize Mr. Bimstine. I just wanted to show you how a hoax can be created.' His thumb peeled back several stiff pages of the scrapbook to one that contained two clipped-out newspaper photographs of men in striped prison uniforms and caps, staring out at the camera from behind barbed wire. Their faces were gaunt and unshaved, their eyes luminous with hunger and fear. 'These are supposed to be Jews in a German extermination camp in nineteen forty-four. But look, Mrs. Robicheaux.' He flipped to the next page. 'Here are the same photographs as they appeared in a Polish newspaper in nineteen thirty-one. These were Polish convicts, not German political prisoners. This is all part of a hoax that was perpetrated by British Intelligence… I'm sorry. Have I upset you about something?'
'I mistook you for someone else,' she said rising to her feet. 'I have to go somewhere now.'
'Where?'
'That's not your… Please go now.'
He rose to his feet. His face looked down into hers, only inches away. For the first time she noticed that there were blackheads, like a spray of pepper,- at the corners of his eyes.
'I only wanted to help,' he said. 'To bring you and your husband some information that you didn't have before. You invited me in.'
'I thought you were someone else,' she repeated. 'It's not your fault. But I want you to leave.'
'I'd like to help you, if you'd let me.'
'I'm going out the door now. If you don't leave, I'll call—'
'Who? That black man washing fish? I think you're very tense. You don't need to stay that way, Mrs. Robicheaux. Believe me.'
'Please get out of my way.'
He rested both of his hands on her shoulders and searched in her eyes as a lover might. 'How does this feel?' he asked, then tightened his fingers on her muscles and inched them down her back and sides, widening his knees slightly, flexing his loins.
'You get away from me. You disgusting—' she said, his breath, the astringent reek of his deodorant washing over her.
'I wouldn't hurt you in any way. You're a lovely woman, but your husband is working for Jews. Hush, hush, now, I just want to give you something to remember our little moment by.'
His arms encircled her waist, locking hand-on-wrist in the small of her back, tightening until she thought her rib cage would snap. He bent her backwards, smothering her body with his, then pushed his tongue deep inside her mouth. He held her a long moment, and as he did, he clenched her left kidney with one hand, like a machinist's vise fastening on a green walnut, and squeezed until yellow and red patterns danced behind her eyes and she felt urine running from her shorts.
She sat cross-legged and weeping against the wall, her face buried in her hands as he started his red convertible in the drive, tuned his radio, and backed out into the dirt road, the dappled sunlight spangling on the waxed finish of his car.
* * *
chapter seven
There was no record of a Will Buchalter with the New Iberia city police or the sheriffs department or with the state police in Baton Rouge. No parish or city agency in New Orleans had a record of him, either, nor did the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C. Nor could Bootsie identify him from any of the mug shots at the Iberia Parish sheriff's office.
Our fingerprint man lifted almost perfect sets of prints from the water glass used by the man who called himself Will Buchalter, from the record jackets he'd touched, and from the box of candy he'd left behind. But without a suspect in custody or corresponding prints on file, they were virtually worthless.
There was another problem, too, one that many victims of a sexual assault discover. Sexual crimes, as they are defined by our legal system, often fall into arbitrary categories that have nothing to do with the actual degree of physical pain, humiliation, and emotional injury perpetrated on the victim. At best we would probably only be able to charge the man who called himself Will Buchalter with misdemeanor battery, committed under circumstances that would probably make a venal defense lawyer lick his teeth.
I called Hippo Bimstine early the next morning, then drove to New Orleans and met him at his house in the Carrollton district by the levee. He sat in a stuffed red velvet chair by the front window, which reached from the floor to the ceiling, and kept fooling with a cellophane-wrapped cigar that was the diameter of a twenty-five-cent piece. His hair was wet and freshly combed, parted as neatly as a ruled line down the center of his head. His lower stomach bulged like a pillow under his slacks. Hanging on the wall above the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Hippo and his wife and their nine children, all of whom resembled him.
'How about sitting down, Dave?' he said. 'I don't feel too comfortable with a guy who acts like he was shot out of a cannon five minutes ago.'
'He knew you.'
'So do a lot of people. That doesn't mean I know them.'
'Who is he, Hippo?'
'A guy who obviously doesn't like Jews. What else can I tell you?'
'You'd better stop jerking me around.'
'How about a Dr Pepper or something to eat? Look, you think I rat-fuck my friends? That's what you're telling me, I set you up for some lowlife to come in your house and molest your wife?'
'He said you were raising money for Israel.'
'Then he's full of shit. I'm an American businessman. The big word there is American. I care about this city, I care about this nation. You bring me that Nazi fuck and I'll clip him for you.'
'How do you know he's a Nazi?'
'I took a wild guess.'
'What's in that sub?'
'Seawater and dead krauts. Jesus Christ, how do I know what's in there? Like I've been down in German submarines?' He looked at me a long moment, started to unwrap his cigar, then dropped it on the coffee table and stared out the window at a solitary moss-strung oak in his front yard. 'I'm sorry what this guy did to your wife. I don't know who he is, though. But maybe there're more of these kinds of guys around than you want to believe, Dave. Come on in back.'
I followed him deep into his house, which had been built in the 1870s, with oak floors, spiral staircases, high ceilings, and enormous windows that were domed at the top with stained glass. Then we crossed his tree-shaded, brick-
walled backyard, past a swimming pool in which islands of dead oak leaves floated on the chemical green surface, to a small white stucco office with a blue tile roof that was almost completely encased by banana trees. He used a key on a ring to unlock the door.
The furniture inside was stacked with boxes of documents and files, the corkboards on the walls layered with thumbtacked sheets of paper, newspaper clippings, yellowed photographs with curled edges, computer printouts of people's names, telephone numbers, home and business addresses. The room was almost frigid from the air-conditioning unit in the window.
I stared at an eight-by-ten photograph in the middle of a cork-board. In it a group of children, perhaps between the ages of five and eight, had rolled up their coat sleeves from their right forearms to show the serial numbers that had been tattooed across their skin.
'Those kids look like they're part of a hoax, Dave?' he said.
'What's going on, partner?'
He didn't answer. He sat down at his desk, his massive buttocks splaying across the chair, his huge head sinking into his shoulders like a pumpkin, and clicked on his computer and viewing screen. I watched him type the name 'Buchalter' on the keyboard, then enter it into the computer. A second later a file leaped into the blue viewing screen. Hippo tapped on a key that rolled the screen like film being pulled through a projector while his eyes narrowed and studied each entry.
'Take a look,' he said. 'I've got a half dozen Buchalters here, but none of them seem to be your man. These guys are too old or they're in jail or dead.'
'What is all this?'
'I belong to a group of people who have a network. We keep tabs on the guys who'd like to see more ovens and searchlights and guard towers in the world—the Klan, the American Nazi party, the Aryan Nation, skinheads out on the coast, a bunch of buttwipes called Christian Identity at Hayden Lake, Idaho. They don't just spit Red Man anymore, Dave. They're organized, they all know each other, they've got one agenda—they'd like to make bars of soap out of people they disagree with. Not just Jews. People like you'd qualify, too.'