07 Dixie City Jam by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, Crime, General, Hard-Boiled, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780786889006
Publisher: Orion
Published: 1994-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

chapter eighteen

Before he had been elected to office, the sheriff had owned a dry-cleaning business and had been president of the local Rotary Club, or perhaps it was the Lions, I don’t recall which, but it was one of those businessmen’s groups which manage to do a fair amount of civic good in spite of their unprofessed and real objective.

He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted flowered teapot while I told him of my 2:00 a.m. visitor. He had a round, cleft chin, soft cheeks veined with tiny blue and red lines, and a stomach that pouched over his gunbelt, but his posture was always so erect, his shirt tucked in so tightly, that he gave you the impression of a man who was both younger and in better physical condition than he actually was.

But even though the Rotary or Lions Club still held strong claim on the sheriff’s soul, he often surprised me with a hard-edged viewpoint that I suspected had its origins in his experience at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, which he refused, under any circumstances, to discuss with anyone.

‘Well, you didn’t drink any of it. That’s what seems most important, if you ask me.’

‘Some people might call that a pretty cavalier attitude,’ I said.

‘It’s your call. Write it up, Dave. Bring our fingerprint man in on it. I don’t know what else to say.’

He sat down in his swivel chair behind his desk. He pushed at his stomach with his stiffened fingers. Then he had another running start at it.

‘Dave, what’s it going to sound like when you tell people that somebody, maybe a woman, did a B and E on you so she could cover your butcher block with a tablecloth and set it with burgundy, cold beer, and expensive whiskey?’

‘It’s Buchalter, Sheriff. Or somebody working with him.’

‘What was the motive for his house call last night?’

‘He doesn’t need one. He’s a psychopath.’

‘That’s no help.’ He began picking a series of bent paper clips out of a glass container and throwing them at the waste can. ‘Before you came to the department, we had a particularly nasty homicide case.’ Ping. ‘Maybe you remember it. A lowlife degenerate named Jerry Dipple raped and then hanged a four-year-old child.’ Ping. ‘We thought we had him dead bang. His prints were all over the murder scene, there was a torn theater ticket in his shirt pocket from the show where he’d abducted the child, the rope he used was in the bottom of his closet.’ Ping. ‘Guess what? The lamebrain handling the investigation went into Dipple’s house and seized the evidence without a warrant. Then when he realized he’d screwed up, he put the evidence back and let his partner find it later.’ Ping.

‘Guess what again? I learned about it and didn’t say a thing. But Dipple’s lawyer was a smart greasebag from Lafayette, you know him, the same guy who was fronting points for a PCB-incinerator outfit last year, and he found out what the lamebrain and his partner had done.

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