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New Orleans was a wonderful place to be on a late evening in August.
That's what I thought, anyway, until I called Hippo Bimstine to tell him that he'd have to hire somebody else to dive the wrecks of Nazi submarines.
'Where are you?' he said.
'We're having supper at Mandina's, out on Canal.'
'You still tight with Clete Purcel?'
'Sure.'
'You know where Calucci's Bar is by St. Charles and Carrollton?'
'Yeah, it's across from your house, isn't it?'
'That's right. So right now I'm looking out my window at a shitstorm in the making. I'm talking about they got a SWAT team out there. Can you believe that? A fucking SWAT team in the middle of my neighborhood. I think they could use a diplomat out there, before the meat loaf ends up on the wallpaper, you get my meaning?'
'No.'
'The salt water still in your ears, Dave?'
'Look, Hippo—'
'It's Clete Purcel. He went apeshit in Calucci's and ran one guy all the way through the glass window. The guy's still lying in the flower bed. They say Purcel's got two or three others in there on their knees. If he don't come out, there's a supervising plainclothes in front says they're gonna smoke him. I got fucking Beirut, Lebanon, in my front yard.'
'Who's the supervising officer?'
'A guy named Baxter. Yeah, Nate Baxter. He used to be in Vice in the First District. You remember a plainclothes by that name?… Hey, Dave, you there?'
* * *
chapter two
Calucci's Bar had been fashioned out of an old white frame house, with tin awnings on the windows, in an old residential neighborhood at the end of St. Charles by the Mississippi levee. The rain looked like purple and green and pink sleet in the neon glow from the bar, and on the far side of the levee you could see mist rising off the river and hear horns blowing on a tug-boat.
The street in front of the bar was filled with a half dozen emergency vehicles, their revolving lights reflecting off the shrubs and wet cement and the palm trees on the esplanade. When Batist and I parked my pickup truck by the curb I saw Nate Baxter in the midst of it all, rainwater sluicing off his hat, his two-tone shoes and gray golf slacks splattered from passing cars. His neatly trimmed reddish beard was glazed with wet light, his badge and chrome-plated revolver clipped on his belt, his body hard and muscular with middle age and his daily workouts at the New Orleans Athletic Club.
A flat-chested black woman plainclothes, with skinny arms and a mouthful of gold teeth, was arguing with him. She wore a rumpled brown blouse that hung out of her dark blue slacks, makeup that had streaked in the rain, and loafers without socks. Nate Baxter tried to turn away from her, but she moved with him, her hands on her thin hips, her mouth opening and closing in the rain.
'I'm talking to you, Lieutenant,' she said. 'It's my opinion we have a situation that's gotten out of hand here. The response is not proportionate to the situation. Not in my opinion, sir. If you persist, I plan to file my own report. Are you hearing me, sir?'
'Do whatever you feel like, Sergeant. But please go do it somewhere else,' Baxter said.
'I'm responding to the call. I resent your talking to me like that, too,' she said.
'All right, I'll put it a little more clearly. You're a nuisance and a pain in the ass. You want to make a civil rights case out of that, be my guest. In the meantime, get out of here. That's an order.'
A uniformed white cop laughed in the background.
Baxter's eyes narrowed under the brim of his hat when he saw me.
'What are you doing, Nate?' I said.
He ignored me and began talking to a cop in a bulletproof vest and a bill cap turned backwards on his head.
'What are you trying to do to Clete Purcel?' I said
.
