Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  “I used to buy into psychobabble myself, Karyn. It’s a lot of fun.”

  “I guess there’s not much point in any of this, is there?” she said. Her skirt was tight against her body when she gathered up her purse and rose from her chair. “I wish it had been different, Dave. I wish the grog hadn’t gotten you. I wish I’d been able to help. I can’t say for sure I loved you, but I loved being with you. Be good to yourself, kiddo.”

  With that, she went out the door. I could hear my ears ring in the silence.

  * * *

  Just before lunch the sheriff came into my office.

  “This morning I’ve had a call from the mayor’s office, one from the chamber of commerce, and one from the New Iberia Historical Preservation Society,” he said. “Did you know Jerry Joe Plumb just bought an acre lot right down from the Shadows?”

  “No.”

  “He also bought a bunch of rural property south of the city limits. How well do you get along with him?”

  “All right.”

  “Find out what he’s up to. I don’t want any more phone calls.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Watching a bulldozer level the house that’s on the lot by the Shadows.”

  I drove down East Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a red brick and white-columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche. The acre Jerry Joe had purchased was located between two Victorian homes and went all the way back to the bayou and was shaded by oaks that were over one hundred years old. I drove through the piked gate and parked next to a salvage truck and an earth grader, where a group of workmen were eating lunch. Down by the bayou was a huge pile of splintered cypress boards, twisted pipe, crushed plaster powdering in the wind, and a flattened gazebo with the passion vine still clinging to the lattice work.

  “Y’all couldn’t move it instead?” I said.

  “The termites was too heavy to get on the truck. That’s a pure fact,” a man in a yellow hardhat with a jaw full of bread and Vienna sausage said. He and his friends laughed.

  “Where’s Jerry Joe? I’ll tell him how effective you are at doing PR with the sheriff’s department.”

  It was a short drive to Mulate’s in Breaux Bridge. As soon as I stepped through the door I heard Clifton Chenier’s “Hey Tite Fille” on the jukebox and saw Jerry Joe out on the polished wood floor, dancing with a waitress. His elbows were tucked close to his ribs, his fingers pointed at angles like a 1940s jitterbugger, his oxblood loafers glinting. His whole body seemed animated with rhythm. His shoulders titled and vibrated; he jiggled and bopped and created an incredible sense of energy and movement without ever stepping out of a twelve-inch radius, and all the while his face beamed at the waitress with genuine pleasure and affection.

  I ordered a 7-Up at the bar and waited for him to sit down. When he finished dancing he squeezed the waitress’s hand, walked past me, his eyes fixed on the black barman, and said, “Bring my friend the same order I got.”

  “Don’t do that, Jerry Joe,” I said to his back.

  He pulled out a chair at a table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. “You got it whether you want it or not . . . Catfish filet with étoufée on the top. This is food you expect only in the afterlife,” he said. He twisted another chair out. “What’s the haps?”

  “Some people want to know why you just bulldozed down a house that George Washington Cable once lived in.”

  “Who?”

  “A famous writer.”

  “Because it had an asbestos roof, because the floors were like walking on wet cardboard, because there were vampire bats in the drainpipes.”

  “Why not work with people, Jerry Joe, explain that to them, instead of giving them heart failure?”

  “Because the problem is not what I’m tearing down, it’s what they think I’m going to build. Like maybe a pink elephant in the middle of the historical district.” He put a stuffed mushroom in his mouth. “What? Oh, I get it. They got reason to have those kind of concerns?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What are we talking about, then? I got it. It’s not the house, it’s me.”

  “No one can accuse you of being a Rotarian.”

  “I told you, my sheet’s an embarrassment. I’m on a level with unlicensed church bingo.”

  “You and some others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a cement mixer.”

  “He was taking scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out.”

  “Why are you buying property south of town?”

  He patted his palm on top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside the jukebox. “Maybe I want out. Maybe I’m tired of New Orleans, being in the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I’m taking it.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “Buford LaRose is good for business . . . Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave . . . What if these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than it already, is.”

  “A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?”

  Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

  “Number one, Mingo’s not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope’s gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home . . . Listen, to that . . . ‘La Jolie Blon’ . . . Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it.”

  “Where’d the hit come from?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose.”

  “How did you—”

  “You want to ask me where she’s got a certain birthmark?” He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. “Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain’t any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?”

  He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.

  “You want a breadstick?” he asked.

  * * *

  Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

  He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.

  “So why are we holding the guy here if he’s got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?”

  “We’re treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish,” 1 said. “We’re working with St. Martin on the other charge.”

  “Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I’m always downhill from you, Robicheaux.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you take that attitude.”

  “This guy was born for Camp J. He don’t belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is.”

  “How about starting over, Kelso?”

  “He complains he’s being discriminated against, get this, because he’s Jewish and we’re making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty’s face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there’s a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

  “I go, ‘What black guy?’

  “He goes, ‘How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.’

  “I go, ‘Your brain’s been doing too many pushups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.’

  “He goes, ‘I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.’ ”

  “You�
��ve got him in isolation now?” I asked.

  “A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn’t for guys like you, Robicheaux.”

  Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse—clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.

  “Kelso says you’re being a pain in the ass,” I said.

  He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

  “Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?” I said.

  I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.

  “Did you hear me?” I said.

  “I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There’s a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance ’cause Miami’s an open city. He’s supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he’s the guy did this screen-writer in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy’s got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail.”

  “You’re the hit?”

  He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.

  “I never broke no rules. It feels funny,” he said.

  “Who’s setting it up, Mingo?”

  “How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out.”

  “You ever hear of a bugarron?” I asked.

  “No . . . Don’t ask me about crazy stuff I don’t know anything about. I’m not up for it.” His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. “You’ve read a lot, haven’t you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?”

  “Some.”

  “I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said . . . in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don’t do you no good.”

  “Yes?”

  “That never made sense to me before.”

  * * *

  That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo’s face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.

  CHAPTER

  12

  It was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose’s house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.

  I didn’t wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.

  “You recognize this man?” I asked.

  “No. Who is he a convict?”

  “Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know him.”

  I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.

  “That was taken last night,” I said. “We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower.”

  “You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe’s connected to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes.”

  “It sure sounds innocent enough.”

  “I’m sorry it doesn’t fit into your moral perspective . . . Don’t go yet. I want to show you something.”

  He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfishing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.

  “Come on, Dave. You made a point of bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more minutes of your time,” he said.

  The land sloped down through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French inscriptions worn into faint tracings.

  Buford pushed open the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.

  “My great-grandparents are in that crypt,” he said. He rubbed his hand along the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was cracked across the center. “Can you recognize the flower? My great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White Camellia.”

  “Your wife told me.”

  “They weren’t ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were wrong.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “I believe it’s never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in some way.”

  “You’re going to do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?”

  “I’m doing it for my family. Is there something wrong with that?” he said. He continued to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. “Dave?”

  “I’d better be going,” I said.

  He touched the front of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.

  “I was speaking to you about a subject that’s very personal with me. You presume a great deal,” he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes. “Are you hard of hearing?” He touched my chest again, this time harder.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Then answer me.”

  “I don’t think they were fine men.”

  “Sir?”

  “Shakespeare says it in King Lear. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford.”

  I walked out the gate and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.

  “That’s the last time you’ll turn your back on me, sir,” he said.

  “Go to hell.”

  His hands closed and opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.

  “You fucked my wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult my family. I don’t know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property. But it won’t happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave.”

  He was breathing hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes, stayed a moment, th
en left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.

  The skin of my face felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like tiny pieces of glass.

  “You catch me off the clock and repeat what you just said . . . ,” I began.

  “You’re a violent, predictable man, the perfect advocate for Aaron Crown,” he said, and walked through the pines toward the house. He flung the hackamore into a tree trunk.

  * * *

  That night I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, then sat on the side of the bed, my thoughts like spiders crawling out of a paper bag I didn’t know how to get rid of. A thick, low fog covered the swamp, and under the moon the dead cypress protruded like rotted pilings out of a white ocean.

  “What is it?” Bootsie said.

  “Buford LaRose.”

  “This morning?”

  “I want to tear him up. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that toward anyone.”

  “You’ve got to let it go, Dave.”

  I rubbed my palms on my knees and let out my breath.

  “Why does he bother you so much?” she asked.

  “Because you never let another man talk to you like that.”

  “People have said worst to you.” She lay her hand on my arm. “Put the covers over you. It’s cold.”

  “I’m going to fix something to eat.”

  “Is it because of his background?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was quiet for a long time.

  “Say it, Boots.”

  “Or is it Karyn?” she asked.

  I went into the kitchen by myself, poured a glass of milk, and stared out the window at my neighbor’s pasture, where one of his mares was running full-out along the fence line, her breath blowing, her muscles working rhythmically, as though she were building a secret pleasure inside herself that was about to climax and burst.