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“It was meant as a joke,” she said. “You don’t like me, Mr. Robicheaux. It’s in your eyes and your tone of voice. You think I’m the serpent in the garden. But you’re wrong.”
“Oh?”
“This place was corrupt long before I got here,” she said.
She hefted the rest of her equipment and went inside the building.
THE FIRST MUSICIAN to take the stage was not a re-creator of 1940s music but a Louisiana legend from the 1950s by the name of Dixie Lee Pugh. He had grown up in a backwater shithole on the Mississippi and at age seventeen had become a piano player in a hot-pillow joint across the river in an area known as Natchez Under-the-Hill. Notice that I did not say Dixie Lee was born in a shithole on the Mississippi. Dixie Lee was not born; he was shot out of the womb like a rocket and, ever since, had been ricocheting off every concrete and steel surface in the Western world.
Three fifths of his stomach had been surgically removed. He had not only failed at rehab but had been kicked out of the Betty Ford Center his first day in the program. He used to tell me his life’s ambition was to live to 150 and get lynched for rape. None of his outrageous behavior could equal the night he first performed at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. The host was Alan Freed. Dixie Lee thought he was supposed to close the show, but Freed believed the honor should go to a famous black rocker who had influenced and changed the genre forever. Dixie Lee was told that next time out he would close, but tonight belonged to the older rocker. So he took his place at the piano and went into his signature song, pounding and riffling the keys and screaming into the microphone, the modus operandi for which he was famous. In the middle of the song, he rose to his feet and pulled a pop bottle full of kerosene from inside his jacket and sloshed it all over the piano. When he threw a match on it, the flames exploded in a red-yellow cone and almost took his face off, then dripped onto the keys and ran down the piano legs onto the stage. Dixie Lee was undaunted. He leaned into the fire and thundered out the rest of his song, his coat sleeves burning, his hair singeing, the sprinklers in the ceiling raining down all over the theater.
The kids in the audience went crazy, screaming and jumping up and down for more. A cop hosed down Dixie Lee with a fire extinguisher, but not before he finished the song. When Dixie Lee walked off the stage with smoke rising from his clothes and extinguisher foam sliding down his scorched face, he turned and said to the black rocker, “Follow that, son of a bitch.”
“He was your roommate at SLI?” Alafair said.
We were sitting at the rear of the audience, but I could see Gretchen Horowitz below the far corner of the stage, focusing her camera on Dixie Lee. “In 1956,” I said. “Just before he appeared on The Steve Allen Show.”
“Did you tell Gretchen that?” she said.
“No, why should I?”
“She’d probably like to interview him.”
“She’s dangerous, Alafair. That’s the truth, not an opinion.”
“Down inside she’s a little girl, Dave.”
Alafair was probably right. But the majority of people we send to the injection table go out like children. The irony is that most of them die with dignity, and some die with much more courage than I would expect of myself. They killed other people, and yet in most instances they cannot adequately explain their behavior to themselves or to others. That’s the way they leave the earth, apologizing briefly to the family of the victim, unresisting, sick and gray with fear, their story, whatever it is, dying with them.
Alafair’s suggestion had not been a bad one. What was there to lose in doing a good deed for a woman who might be salvageable? I got up from my seat and walked down the aisle to the spot in the shadows where Gretchen was filming Dixie Lee. His fingers were flying up and down on the keys, strands of his wavy dyed-gold hair hanging in his eyes, his cheeks puffed like a blowfish’s, his blue suede stomps pounding up and down under the piano, his adenoidal accent rising like notes from a clarinet into the rafters. “Dixie Lee is an old friend of mine, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “I bet he’d be happy to give you an interview.”
“Meaning you’ll introduce me?” she said.
“I’d love to.”
“Why?”
“Because Dixie Lee Pugh is probably the best white blues musician in America, and everybody in the business knows it. No one has ever given him the credit he deserves.”
She lowered her camera and looked past me into the recesses of the audience. “You know a broad named Julie Ardoin?”
“Yeah, she’s in the department.”
“What else is she into?”
“Excuse me?”
“Somebody told me she transported coke for Varina and Jesse Leboeuf,” she said.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Somebody told me maybe she killed her husband.”
“Who’s the somebody?”
“Is it true or not?”
“Both stories are ridiculous.”
