Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  I looked through the doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a white-haired man.

  “That gentleman there?” I asked Wally.

  “Let’s see, we got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the johns, and the professor. Let me know which one you t’ink, Dave.” His face beamed at his own humor.

  Clay Mason, wearing a brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny feet, sat in a folding chair with a high-domed pearl Stetson on his crossed knee.

  I was prepared to dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn that psychedelic harlequins don’t survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

  “Could I help you, sir?” I asked.

  “Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes,” he said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow, and was struck by his fragility, the lightness of his bones.

  A moment later I closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black trusties mowing the lawn.

  “Yes, sir?” I said.

  “I’ve interposed myself in your situation. I hope you won’t take offense,” he said.

  “Are we talking about the LaRoses?” I tried to smile when I said it.

  “She’s contrite about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu of that, however, I’m passing on an apology for her.” The accent was soft, deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

  “Karyn lied, Dr. Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don’t get absolution by sending a surrogate to confession.”

  “That’s damn well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?”

  “No.”

  “Your feelings are your feelings, sir. I wouldn’t intrude upon them.” His gaze went out the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. “It never really changes, does it?”

  “Sir?”

  “The black men in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race.”

  “One of those guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife’s face with a string knife.”

  “Then they’re a rough pair and probably got what’s coming to them,” he said, and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.

  I walked him to the back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses. Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

  “Listen to it rumble, by God. It’s a magic land. There’s a thunder of calvary in every electric storm,” he said.

  I asked a deputy to walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

  “Don’t be too hard on the LaRoses,” Mason said as the deputy took his arm. “They put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the “kingdom of the dead. Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion.”

  Keep your eye on this one, I thought.

  Karyn leaned forward and started her car engine, wetting her mouth as she might a ripe cherry.

  * * *

  Helen Soileau walked into my office that afternoon, anger in her eyes.

  “Pick up on my extension,” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mingo Bloomberg. Wally put him through to me by mistake.”

  I punched the lighted button and placed the receiver to my ear. “Where are you, Mingo?” I said.

  “You got Short Boy Jerry to jam me up,” he said.

  “Wrong.”

  “Don’t tell me that. The bondsman pulled my bail. I got that material witness beef in my face again.” A streetcar clanged in the background, vibrated and squealed on the tracks.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Something to come in.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t like being made everybody’s fuck.”

  “You let that girl drown. You’re calling the wrong people for sympathy.”

  “She wanted some ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and the car’s gone.”

  I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  “I delivered money to Buford LaRose’s house,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “How do I know? It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone books.”

  “If that’s all you’re offering, you’re up Shit’s Creek.”

  “The guy gonna be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don’t make your berries tingle?”

  “We don’t monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you’re serious. Right now I’m busy,” I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.

  “You going to leave him out there?” she said.

  “It’s us or City Prison in New Orleans. I think he’ll turn himself in to us, then try to get to our witnesses.”

  “I hope so. Yes, indeedy.”

  “What’d he say to you?”

  “Oh, he and I will have a talk about it sometime.” She opened a book that was on my desk. “Why you reading Greek mythology?”

  “That fellow Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice . . . They’re characters out of Greek legend,” I said. She flipped through several pages in the book, then looked at me again. “Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife. But he couldn’t pull it off. Hades got both of them.”

  “Interesting stuff,” she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. “Bloomberg goes down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction, anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this one.”

  “Why would it be otherwise?”

  She leaned on the desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard against the cuffs of her sleeves.

  “Because you’ve got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose,” she said.

  * * *

  That night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent’s. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and rural shit-holes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his conception of America.

  He knew how to turn into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter’s flame.

  With luck he would always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst, like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies thundered past it.

  That’s the way it we
nt down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle, with leather sling and cloth bandoliers, propped in the wire like a monument to his own denouement.

  Even in my sleep I knew the dream was not about Vietnam.

  * * *

  The next day I called Angola and talked to an assistant warden. Aaron Crown was in an isolation unit, under twenty-three-hour lockdown. He had just been arraigned on two counts of murder.

  “You’re talking about first-degree murder? The man was attacked,” I said.

  “Stuffing somebody upside down in a barrel full of oil and clamping down the top isn’t exactly the system’s idea of self-defense,” he replied.

  I called Buford LaRose’s campaign office in New Iberia and was told he was giving a speech to a convention of land developers in Baton Rouge at noon.

  I took the four-lane into Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya swamp. The cypress and willows were thick and pale green on each side of the elevated highway, the bays wrinkled with wind in the sunlight. Then the highway crossed through meadowland and woods full of palmettos, and up ahead I saw the Mississippi bridge and the outline of the capitol building and the adjacent hotel where Buford was speaking.

  He knew his audience. He was genteel and erudite, but he was clearly one of them, respectful of the meretricious enterprises they served and the illusions that brought them together. They shook his hand after his speech and touched him warmly on the shoulders, as if they drew power from his legendary football career, the radiant health and good looks that seemed to define his future.

  At the head table, behind a crystal bowl filled with floating camellias, I saw Karyn LaRose watching me.

  The dining room was almost empty when Buford chose to recognize me.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Just one question: Why did Crown leave his rifle behind?”

  “A half dozen reasons.”

  “I’ve been through your book with a garden rake. You never deal with it.”

  “Try he panicked and ran.”

  “It was the middle of the night. No one else was around.”

  “People tend to do irrational things when they’re killing other people.”

  The waiters were clearing the tables and the last emissary from the world of Wal-Mart had said his farewell and gone out the door.

  “Take a ride up to Angola with me and confront Crown,” I said.

  He surprised me. I saw him actually think about it. Then the moment went out of his eyes. Karyn got up from her chair and came around the table. She wore a pink suit with a corsage pinned above the breast.

  “Crown might get a death sentence for killing those two inmates,” I said, looking back at Buford.

  “Anything’s possible,” he replied.

  “That’s it? A guy you helped put in prison, maybe unjustly, ends up injected, that’s just the breaks?”

  “Maybe he’s a violent, hateful man who’s getting just what he deserves.”

  I started to walk away. Then I turned.

  “I’m going to scramble your eggs,” I said.

  I was so angry I walked the wrong way in the corridor and went outside into the wrong parking lot. When I realized my mistake I went back through the corridor toward the lobby. I passed the dining room, then a short hallway that led back to a service elevator. Buford was leaning against the wall by the elevator door, his face ashen, his wife supporting him by one arm.

  “What happened?” I said.

  The elevator door opened.

  “Help me get him up to our room,” Karyn said.

  “I think he needs an ambulance.”

  “No! We have our own physician here. Dave, help me, please. I can’t hold him up.”

  I took his other arm and we entered the elevator. Buford propped the heel of his hand against the support rail on the back wall, pulled his collar loose with his fingers, and took a deep breath.

  “I did a five-minute mile this morning. How about that?” he said, a smile breaking on his mouth.

  “You better ease up, partner,” I said.

  “I just need to lie down. One hour’s sleep and I’m fine.”

  I looked at Karyn’s face. It was composed now, the agenda, whatever it was, temporarily back in place.

  We walked Buford down to a suite on the top floor and put him in bed and closed the door behind us.

  “He’s talking to a state police convention tonight,” Karyn said, as though offering an explanation for the last few minutes. Through the full-glass windows in the living room you could see the capitol building, the parks and boulevards and trees in the center of the city, the wide sweep of the Mississippi River, the wetlands to the west, all the lovely urban and rural ambience that came with political power in Louisiana.

  “Is Buford on uppers?” I asked.

  “No. It’s . . . He has a prescription. He gets overwrought sometimes.”

  “You’d better get him some help, Karyn.”

  I walked through the foyer to the door.

  “You’re going?” she said.

  She stood inches from me, her face turned up into mine. The exertion of getting Buford into the room had caused her to perspire, and her platinum hair and tanned skin took on a dull sheen in the overhead light. I could smell her perfume in the enclosure, the heat from her body. She leaned her forehead into my chest and placed her hands lightly on my arms.

  “Dave, it wasn’t just the alcohol, was it? You liked me, didn’t you?”

  She tapped my hips with her small fists, twisted her forehead back and forth on my chest as though an unspoken conclusion about her life was trying to break from her throat.

  I put one hand on her arm, then felt behind me for the elongated door handle. It was locked in place, rigid across the sweating cup of my palm.

  CHAPTER

  9

  A day later Clete Purcel’s chartreuse Cadillac convertible, the top down, pulled up in front of the sheriff’s department with Mingo Bloomberg in the passenger’s seat. Clete and Mingo came up the walk, through the waiting room, and into my office. Mingo stood in front of my desk in white slacks and a lemon yellow shirt with French cuffs. He rotated his neck, as though his collar were too tight, then put a breath mint in his mouth.

  “My lawyer’s getting me early arraignment and recognizance. I’m here as a friend of the court, so you got questions, let’s do it now, okay?” he said. He snapped the mint in his molars.

  “Mingo, I don’t think that’s the way to start out the day here,” Clete said.

  “What’s going on, Clete?” I said.

  Clete stepped out into the hall and waited for me. I closed the door behind me.

  “Short Boy Jerry gave me two hundred bucks to deliver the freight. Don’t let Mingo take you over the hurdles. Jerry Joe and NOPD both got their foot on his chain,” he said.

  I opened the door and went back in.

  “How you feel, Mingo?” I said.

  “My car was boosted. I didn’t drown a black girl. So I feel okay.”

  “You a stand-up guy?” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Jerry Ace is giving us an anchovy so we don’t come back for the main meal. You comfortable with that, Mingo? You like being an hors d’oeuvre?” I said.

  “What I don’t like is being in New Orleans with a target painted on my back. I’m talking about the cops in the First District who maybe stomped a guy’s hair all over the cement . . . I got to use the john. Purcel wouldn’t stop the car.”

  He looked out the glass partition, then saw the face looking back at him.

  “Hey, keep her away from me,” he said.

  “You don’t like Detective Soileau?” I said.

  “She’s a muff-diver. I told her over the phone, she ought to get herself a rubber schlong so she can whip it around and spray trees or whatever she wants till she gets it
out of her system.”

  Helen was coming through the door now. I put my hand on her shoulder and walked her back into the corridor.

  “Jerry Joe Plumb made him surrender,” I said.

  “Why?” she said, her eyes still fastened on Mingo.

  “He’s tied up somehow with Buford LaRose and doesn’t want us in his face. Mingo says he’s getting out on his own recognizance. I think he’s going to head for our witnesses.”

  “Like hell he is. Has he been Mirandized?”

  “Not yet.”

  She opened the door so abruptly the glass rattled in the frame.

  A half hour later she called me from the jail.

  “Guess what? Shithead attacked me. I’ll have the paperwork ready for the court in the morning,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Iberia General. He fell down a stairs. He also needed twelve stitches where I hit him with a baton. Forget recognizance, baby cakes. He’s going to be with us awhile.”

  “Helen?”

  “The paperwork is going to look fine. I went to Catholic school. I have beautiful penmanship.”

  Clete and I ate lunch at an outdoor barbecue stand run by a black man in a grove of oak trees. The plank table felt cool in the shade, and you could smell the wet odor of green cordwood stacked under a tarp next to the stand.

  “Because I was up early anyway, I happened to turn on the TV and catch ‘Breakfast Edition,’ you know, the local morning show in New Orleans,” he said. His eyes stayed on my face. “What the hell you doing, Streak?”

  “Aaron Crown bothers me.”

  “You went on television, Dave, with this Hollywood character, what’s-his-name, Felton, whatever.”

  “I was taped here while he interviewed me on the phone, then it was spliced into the show.”

  “Forget the technical tour. Why don’t you resign your job while you’re at it? What’s your boss have to say?”

  “I don’t think he’s heard about it yet.”

  “You don’t take police business to civilians, big mon. To begin with, they don’t care about it. They’ll leave you hanging in the breeze, then your own people rat-fuck you as a snitch.”

  “Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to shake out,” I said.