DR07 - Dixie City Jam Read Online Free PDF

removed a half dozen eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white
photographs from his desk drawer and dropped them in front of me. 'You
ever see that much blood at a crime scene? Check out the chest wound.
Has your friend ever been into voodoo?'
    'You're using a homicide investigation to settle an old score,
Nate. Don't tell me you're not.'
    'Is the light in here bad? That must be the problem. The
killer sawed the guy's heart out. That wasn't enough for him, either.
He stuffed purple roses into the heart cavity.'
    'What's your point?'
    'Your friend wears a dime on a string around his ankle,'
Baxter said. 'He carries a shriveled alligator's foot in his pocket. He
had bones in his suitcase. The murder has all the characteristics of a
ritual killing. If you were in my place, who would be your first
suspect? Is there any chance it might be a superstitious backwater
black guy who had already assaulted and threatened the victim the same
day of the homicide and then left his prints at the crime scene? No,
don't tell me. Just go think about it somewhere and drop me a card
sometime.'
    'I want to see him.'
    'Be my guest. Please. By the way, I saw the black broad blow
you off. In case you want to get more involved with her, I hear she's
starting up a charm school. Take it easy, Robicheaux. You never
surprise me,' he said.
     
    But while I had been talking with Nate
Baxter, Batist had
already been locked to a wrist chain and taken to morning arraignment.
By the time I got to the courtroom the public defender, who did not
look to be over twenty-five, was trying to prevail upon the judge to
set a reasonable bail. He was methodical, even eloquent, in his
argument and obviously sincere. He pointed out that Batist had no
arrest record and had been employed for years at a boat-rental dock run
by a law officer in Iberia Parish, that he had lived his entire life in
one small community and was not apt to leave it.
    But Judge James T. Flowers was a choleric white-knuckle
alcoholic who stayed dry without a program by channeling his inner
misery into the lives of others. His procedures and sentences kept a
half dozen ACLU attorneys occupied year round.
    He looked at the clock and waited for the public defender to
finish, then said, 'Hell's hot, my young friend. Perhaps it's time some
of your clients learned that. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars.
Next case.'
    An hour later Sergeant Motley arranged for me to see Batist in
an interrogation room. The walls were a smudged white and windowless,
and the air smelled like refrigerated cigarette smoke and cigar butts.
Batist sat across from me at the wood table and kept rubbing his hands
on top of each other. The scars on them looked like tiny pink worms.
His face was unshaved and puffy with fatigue, his eyes arterial red in
the corners with broken blood veins.
    'What's gonna happen, Dave?'
    'I'm going to call a bondsman first, then we'll see about a
lawyer. We just have to do it a step at a time.'
    'Dave, that judge said fifty t'ousand dollars.'
    'I'm going to get you out, partner. You just have to trust me.'
    'What for they doin' this? What they get out of it? I never
had no truck with the law. I ain't even seen these people befo'.'
    'A bad cop out there is carrying a grudge over some things
that happened a long time ago. Eventually somebody in the prosecutor's
office will probably figure that out. But in the meantime we have a
problem, Batist. They say your fingerprints were on the door of that
cottage across the street.'
    I looked into his face. He dropped his eyes to the table and
opened and closed his hands. His knuckles looked as round and hard
against the skin as ball bearings.
    'Tell me,' I said.
    'After you was gone, after I bust that man's lip, I seen them
kids t'rew the window, hangin' round his cottage do' again. When I call
the po-lice, they ax me what he done. I say he sellin' dope to
children, that's what he done. They ax me I seen it, I seen him take
money from somebody, I seen somebody