Free DR07 - Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke Page B

in Madison Square Garden.'
    'That's right. And an offshoot of the Bund was a group called
the Silver Shirts. One of their founders was this guy Jon Matthew
Buchalter. He went to federal prison for treason and got out in
nineteen fifty-six, just in time to die of liver cancer.'
    'Okay?'
    'He was from Grand Isle.'
    'So maybe the guy who came to my house is related to him?'
    He clicked off his computer and turned to face me in his
chair. His head sank into his neck, and his jowls swelled out like the
bottom of a deflated basketball. 'I've got no answers for you,' he
said. 'Sometimes I wonder if I haven't gone around the bend. How many
people keep a rat's nest of evil like this in their backyard?'
    I looked into his eyes.
    'I don't want to offend you, Hippo, but I don't think you've
squared with me. Is there something about this submarine you haven't
told me?'
    'Hey, time for a flash, Dave. You told
me
about the sub, remember? You bargained with
me
about the finder's fee. You think I got secrets, I live in a private
world? You bet your oysters I do. The bars on my house windows, the
electronic security system, the rent-a-cops I pay to watch my kids, you
think I got all that because I'm worried a bunch of coloreds from
Magazine are gonna walk off with my lawn furniture? You're living in
the New Jerusalem, Dave. It's the year zero; it's us against them. We
either make it or we don't.'
    'I'm not sure I get what you're saying, Hippo. I'm not sure I
want to, either. It sounds a little messianic'
    His face was flushed, his collar wilted like damp tissue paper
around his thick neck.
    'Go on back to the worm business, Dave,' he said. 'That guy
comes around your house again, do the earth a favor, screw a gun barrel
in his mouth and blow his fucking head off. Leave me alone now, will
you? I don't feel too good. I got blood pressure could blow gaskets out
of a truck engine.'
    He wiped at his mouth with his hand. His lips were purple in
the refrigerated gloom of his office. He stared at a collection of
thumbtacked news articles and photographs on his corkboard as though
his eyes could penetrate the black-and-white grain of the paper, as
though perhaps he himself had been pulled inside a photograph, into a
world of freight cars grinding slowly to a stop by a barbed-wire gate
that yawned open like a hungry mouth, while dogs barked in the
eye-watering glare of searchlights and files of the newly arrived moved
in silhouette toward buildings with conical chimneys that disappeared
into their own smoke.
    Or was I making a complexity out of a histrionic and
disingenuous fat man whose self-manufactured drama had accidentally
brought a stray misanthrope out of the woodwork?
    It was hard to buy into the notion that somehow World War II
was still playing at the Bijou in New Orleans, Louisiana.
    I left him in his office and walked outside into the light.
The heat was like a match flame against my skin.
     
    'It sounds deeply weird,' Clete said,
biting into his po'-boy
sandwich at a small grocery store up by Audubon Park, where the owner
kept tables for working people to eat their lunch. 'But maybe we're
just living in weird times. It's not like the old days.'
    'You believe this American Bund stuff?'
    'No, it's the way people think nowadays that bothers me. Like
this vigilante gig and this Citizens Committee for a Better New
Orleans. You knew Bimstine and Tommy Lonighan are both on it?'
    'No. When did Lonighan become a Rotarian?'
    'Law-and-order and well-run vice can get along real good
together. Conventioneers looking for a blow job don't like getting
rolled or ripped off by Murphy artists. Did you know that Lucinda
Bergeron is NOPD's liaison person with the Committee?'
    He chewed his food slowly, watching my face. Outside, the wind
was blowing and denting the canopy of spreading oaks along St. Charles.
    'Then this preacher whose head glows in the dark shows up at
your dock and tells you he's part of the same bunch. You starting to
see some patterns here,