Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

Both turnkeys escorted us into a bare-walled interview room that contained a scarred wood table and three folding chairs. They were powerful, heavyset men with the top-heavy torsos of weight lifters.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  But they remained where they were.

  “I want to be alone with him. I’d appreciate your unhooking him, too,” I said.

  The turnkeys looked at each other. Then the older one used his key on each of the cuffs and said, “Suit yourself. Bang on the door when you’re finished. We won’t be far.”

  After they went out, I could still see them through the elongated, reinforced viewing glass in the door.

  “It looks like they’re coming down pretty hard on you, Mingo. I thought you’d be sprung by now,” I said.

  “They say I’m a flight risk.”

  He was clean-shaven, his jailhouse denims pressed neatly, his copper hair combed back on his scalp like a 1930s leading man’s. But his eyes looked wired, and a dry, unwashed odor like sweat baked on the skin by a radiator rose from his body.

  “I don’t get it. Your people don’t protect cop killers,” I said.

  He propped one elbow on the table and bit his thumbnail.

  “It’s the other way around. At least that’s what the prosecutor’s office thinks. That’s what those clowns you used to work with at First District think,” he said.

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “You remember the narc who got capped in the Quarter last year? I was in the cage at First District when the cops brought in the boon who did it. Somebody, and I said somebody, stomped the living shit out of him. They cracked his skull open on a cement floor and crushed his, what do you call it, his thorax. At least that’s what people say. I don’t know, because I didn’t see it. But the dead boon’s family is making a big stink and suing the city of New Orleans for fifty million dollars. Some cops might end up at Angola, too. You ever see a cop do time? Think about the possibilities for his food before he puts a fork in it.”

  I kept my eyes flat, waited a moment, removed my sunglasses from their case and clicked them in my palm.

  “What are you trying to trade?” I asked.

  “I want out of here.”

  “I don’t have that kind of juice.”

  “I want out of lockdown.”

  “Main pop may not be a good place for you, Mingo.”

  “You live on Mars? I’m safe in main pop. I got problems when I’m in lockdown and cops with blood on their shoes think I’m gonna rat ’em out.”

  “You’re a material witness. There’s no way you’re going into the main population, Mingo.”

  The skin along his hairline was shiny with perspiration. He screwed a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. His blue eyes were filled with light when they stared into mine.

  “You worked with those guys. You get word to them, I didn’t see anything happen to the boon. I’ll go down on a perjury beef if I have to,” he said.

  I let my eyes wander over his face. There were tiny black specks in the blueness of his eyes, like pieces of dead flies, like microscopic traces of events that never quite rinse out of the soul. “How many people have you pushed the button on?” I asked.

  “What? Why you ask a question like that?”

  “No reason, really.”

  He tried to reconcentrate his thoughts. “A Mexican guy was at your place, right? A guy with fried mush. It wasn’t an accident he was there.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was muleing tar for the projects. They call him Araña, that means ‘Spider’ in Spanish. He’s from a village in Mexico that’s got a church with a famous statue in it. I know that because he was always talking about it.”

  “That sure narrows it down. Who sent him to my bait shop?”

  “What do I get?”

  “We can talk about federal custody.”

  “That’s worse. People start thinking Witness Protection Program.”

  “That’s all I’ve got.”

  He tore a match from a book and struck it, held the flame to his cigarette, never blinking in the smoke and heat that rose into his handsome face.

  “There’s stuff going on that’s new, that’s a big move for certain people. You stumbled into it with that peckerwood, the one who killed Jimmy Ray Dixon’s brother.”

  “What stuff?”

  He tipped his ashes in a small tin tray, his gaze focused on nothing. His cheeks were pooled with color, the fingers of his right hand laced with smoke from the cigarette.

  “I don’t think you’ve got a lot to trade, Mingo. Otherwise, you would have already done it.”

  “I laid it out for you. You don’t want to pick up on it . . .” He worked the burning end of the cigarette loose in the ashtray and placed the unsmoked stub in the package. “You asked me a personal question a minute ago. Just for fun, it don’t mean anything, understand, I’ll give you a number. Eleven. None of them ever saw it coming. The guy with the fried head at your place probably wasn’t a serious effort.

  “I say ‘probably.’ I’m half-Jewish, half-Irish, I don’t eat in Italian restaurants. I’m outside the window looking in a lot of the time. Hey, you’re a bright guy, I know you can connect on this.”

  “Enjoy it, Mingo,” I said, and hit on the door with the flat of my fist for the turnkey to open up.

  * * *

  Later that same day, just before I was to sign out of the office, the phone on my desk rang.

  It was like hearing the voice of a person who you knew would not go away, who would always be hovering around you like a bad memory, waiting to pull you back into the past.

  “How’s life, Karyn?” I said.

  “Buford will be in Baton Rouge till late tonight. You and I need to talk some things out.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You want me to come to your office? Or out to your house? I will, if that’s what it takes.”

  I left the office and drove south of New Iberia toward my home. I tried to concentrate on the traffic, the red sky in the west, the egrets perched on the backs of cattle in the fields, the cane wagons being towed to the sugar mill. I wasn’t going to give power to Karyn LaRose, I told myself. I owed her nothing. I was sure of that.

  I was still trying to convince myself of my freedom from the past when I made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the road and drove to the LaRose plantation.

  * * *

  She wore a yellow sundress, with her platinum hair braided up on her head, a Victorian sapphire brooch on a gold chain around her neck.

  “Why’d you park in back?” she said when she opened the door.

  “I didn’t give it much thought,” I said.

  “I bet.”

  “Let’s hear what you have to say, Karyn. I need to get home.”

  She smiled with her eyes, turned and walked away without speaking. When I didn’t immediately follow, she paused and looked back at me expectantly. I followed her through the kitchen, a den filled with books and glass gun cases and soft leather chairs, down a darkened cypress-floored hallway hung with oil paintings of Buford’s ancestors, into a sitting room whose windows and French doors reached to the ceiling.

  She pulled the velvet curtains on the front windows.

  “It’s a little dark, isn’t it?” I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.

  “There’s a horrid glare off the road this time of day,” she said. She put ice and soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.

  “I don’t care for anything, thanks,” I said.

  “There’s no whiskey in yours.”

  “I said I don’t want anything.”

  The phone rang in another room.

  “Goddamn it,” she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.

  I looked at my watch. I had already been ther
e ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black with the smoke of ack-ack bursts.

  I could hear Karyn’s voice rising in the next room: “I won’t sit still for this again. You rent a car if you have to . . . I’m not listening to that same lie . . . You’re not going to ruin this, Buford . . . You listen . . . No . . . No . . . No, you listen . . .”

  Then she pushed the door shut.

  When she came out of the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and poured another one. I looked away from her face.

  “Admiring the photo of Buford’s father?” she said. “He was one of the bombardiers who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of Buford’s other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia, hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford, you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life.”

  She drank three fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and cold-looking on the edge of the glass.

  “I’d better get going, Karyn. I shouldn’t have bothered you,” I said.

  “Don’t be disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with you.”

  “You’re not mixed up with me.”

  “Your memory is selective.”

  “I’m sorry it happened, Karyn. I’ve tried to indicate that to you. It’s you and your husband who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives.”

  “You say ‘it.’ What do you mean by ‘it’?”

  “That night by the bayou. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “You don’t remember coming to my house two weeks later?”

  “No.”

  “Dave?” Her eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie. “You have no memory of that afternoon, or the next?”

  I felt myself swallow. “No, I don’t. I don’t think I saw you again for a year,” I said.

  She shook her head, sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.

  “That’s hard to believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go through later, because I didn’t make you take precautions. But when you tell me—”

  Unconsciously I touched my brow.

  “I had blackouts back then, Karyn. I lost whole days. If you say something happened, then—”

  “Blackouts?”

  “I’d get loaded at night on Beam and try to sober up in the morning with vodka.”

  “How lovely. What if I told you I had an abortion?”

  The skin of my face flexed against the bone. I could feel a weakness, a sinking in my chest, as though weevil worms were feeding at my heart.

  “I didn’t. I was just late. But no thanks to you, you bastard . . . Don’t just look at me,” she said.

  “I’m going now.”

  “Oh no, you’re not.” She rose from the chair and stood in front of me. “My husband has some peculiar flaws, but he’s still the best chance this state has and I’m not letting you destroy it.”

  “Somebody tried to open me up with a machete. I think it had to do with Aaron Crown. I think I don’t want to ever see you again, Karyn.”

  “Is that right?” she said. The tops of her breasts were swollen and hard, veined with blue lines. I could smell whiskey on her breath, perfume from behind her ears, the heat she seemed to excrete from her sun-browned skin. She struck me full across the face with the flat of her hand.

  I touched my cheek, felt a smear of blood where her fingernail had torn the skin.

  “I apologize again for having come to your home,” I said.

  I walked stiffly through the house, through the kitchen to the backyard and my parked pickup truck. When I turned the ignition, I looked through the windshield and saw her watching me through the back screen, biting the corner of her lip as though her next option was just now presenting itself.

  CHAPTER

  6

  It rained all that night. At false dawn a white ground fog rolled out of the swamp, and the cypress trees on the far bank of the bayou looked as black and hard as carved stone. Deep inside the fog you could hear bass flopping back in the bays. When the sun broke above the horizon, like a red diamond splintering apart between the tree trunks, Batist and I were still bailing out the rental boats with coffee cans. Then we heard a car on the road, and when we looked up we saw a purple Lincoln Continental, with Sabelle Crown in the passenger’s seat, stop and back up by our concrete boat ramp.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out which American industry the driver served. He seemed to consciously dress and look the part—elk hide halftop boots, pleated khakis, a baggy cotton shirt that was probably tailored on Rodeo Drive, tinted rimless glasses, his brown hair tied in a ponytail.

  As he walked down the ramp toward me, the wind-burned face, the cleft chin, the Roman profile, become more familiar, like images rising from the pages of People or Newsweek magazine or any number of television programs that featured film celebrities.

  His forearms and wrists were thick and corded with veins, the handshake disarmingly gentle.

  “My name’s Lonnie Felton, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “You’re a movie director.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How you do, sir?”

  “I wonder if we could go inside and talk a few minutes.”

  “I’m afraid I have another job to go to when I finish this one.”

  Sabelle stood by the fender of the Lincoln, brushing her hair, putting on makeup from her purse.

  “Some people are giving Aaron Crown a rough time up at the pen,” he said.

  “It’s a bad place. It was designed as one.”

  “You know what the BGLA is?”

  “The Black Guerrilla Liberation Army?”

  “Crown’s an innocent man. I think Ely Dixon was assassinated by a couple of Mississippi Klansmen. Maybe one of them was a Mississippi highway patrolman.”

  “You ought to tell this to the FBI.”

  “I got this from the FBI. I have testimony from two ex-field-agents.”

  “It seems the big word in this kind of instance is always ‘ex,’ Mr. Felton,” I said.

  He coughed out a laugh. “You’re a hard-nose sonofabitch, aren’t you?” he said.

  I stood erect in the boat where I’d been bailing, poured the water out of the can into the bayou, idly flicked the last drops onto the boat’s bow.

  “I don’t particularly care what you think of me, sir, but I’d appreciate your not using profanity around my home,” I said.

  He looked off into the distance, suppressing a smile, watching a blue heron lift from” an inlet and disappear into the fog.

  “We had a writer murdered in the Quarter,” he said. “The guy was a little weird, but he didn’t deserve to get killed. That’s not an unreasonable position for me to take, is it?”

  “I’ll be at the sheriff’s department by eight. If you want to give us some information, you’re welcome to come in.”

  “Sabelle told me you were an intelligent man. Who do you think broke the big stories of our time? My Lai, Watergate, CIA dope smuggling, Reagan’s gun deals in Nicaragua? It was always the media, not the government, not the cops. Why not lose the ‘plain folks’ attitude?”

  I stepped out of the boat into the shallows and felt the coldness through my rubber boots. I set the bailing can down on the ramp, wrapped the bow chain in my palm and snugged the boat’s keel against the waving moss at the base of the concrete p
ad, and cleared an obstruction from my throat.

  He slipped his glasses off his face, dropped them loosely in the pocket of his baggy shirt, smiling all the while.

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said.

  I walked up the ramp, then climbed the set of side stairs onto the dock. I saw him walk toward his car and shake his head at Sabelle.

  A moment later she came quickly down the dock toward me. She wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, pink tennis shoes, and walked splay-footed like a teenage girl.

  “I look like hell. He came by my place at five this morning,” she said.

  “You look good, Sabelle. You always do,” I said.

  “They’ve moved Daddy into a cellhouse full of blacks.”

  “That doesn’t sound right. He can request isolation.”

  “He’ll die before he’ll let anybody think he’s scared. In the meantime they steal his cigarettes, spit in his food, throw pig shit in his hair, and nobody does anything about it.” Her eyes began to film.

  “I’ll call this gunbull I know.”

  “They’re going to kill him, Dave. I know it. It’s a matter of time.”

  Out on the road, Lonnie Felton waited behind the steering wheel of his Lincoln.

  “Don’t let this guy Felton use you,” I said.

  “Use me? Who else cares about us?” Even with makeup, her face looked stark, as shiny as ceramic, in the lacy veil of sunlight through the cypress trees. She turned and walked back up the dock, her pink underwear winking through a small thread-worn hole in the rump of her jeans.

  * * *

  The sheriff was turned sideways in his swivel chair, his bifocals mounted on his nose, twisting strips of pink and white crepe paper into the shape of camellias. On his windowsill was a row of potted plants, which he watered daily from a hand-painted tea kettle. He looked like an aging greengrocer more than a law officer, and in fact had run a dry cleaning business before his election to office, but he had been humble enough to listen to advice, and over the years we had all come to respect his judgment and integrity.

  Only one door in his life had remained closed to us, his time with the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, until last year, when he suffered a heart attack and told me from a bed in Iberia General, his breath as stale as withered flowers, of bugles echoing off frozen hills and wounds that looked like roses frozen in snow.