Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  “Who told you I was here?” he said.

  “You’ve got a lot of respect around here, Dock. The St. Landry sheriff’s office likes to know when you’re in town.”

  “Who’s in the shit machine?”

  “Clete Purcel.”

  He put down the bucket, cupped one hand to his mouth, the other to his genitalia, and shouted, “Hey, Purcel, I got your corndog hanging!”

  “Dock, I’m looking for a black hooker by the name of Brandy Grissum.”

  “An addict, the one saw the screenwriter get capped?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know anything about her. Why’s he parked out there?”

  “You just said—”

  “NOPD already talked to me. That’s how I know.” The skin under his eye puckered, like paint wrinkling in a bucket “Short Boy Jerry put you here?”

  “Why would he do that?” I smiled and tried to keep my eyes flat.

  “Y’all went to school together. Now he’s moving back to New Iberia. Now you’re standing on my property. It don’t take a big brain to figure it out.”

  “Give me the girl, Dock. I’ll owe you one.”

  “You looking for a black whore or a black hit man, you should be talking to Jimmy Ray Dixon.”

  “I’m firing in the well, huh?” I said. The wind puffed the willow trees that grew on the far side of the levee. “You’ve got a nice place here.”

  “Don’t give me that laid-back act, Robicheaux. I’ll tell you what this is about. Short Boy Jerry thought he could throw up some pickets on my jobs and run me under. It didn’t work. So now he’s using you to put some boards in my head. I think he dimed me with NOPD, too.”

  “You’re pretty fast, Dock.”

  His eyes focused on the front gate.

  “I can’t believe it. Purcel’s taking a leak in my cattleguard. I got neighbors here,” Dock said.

  “You and the Giacanos aren’t backing Buford LaRose, are you?” I asked.

  For the first time he smiled, thin-lipped, his eyes slitted inside the hard cast of his face.

  “I never bet on anything human,” he said. “Come inside. I got to get a Pepto or something. Purcel’s making me sick.”

  The pine walls of his front room were hung with the stuffed heads of antelope and deer. A martin was mounted above the fireplace, its lacquered skin synthetic-looking and filmed with dust. On a long bookshelf was a line of jars filled with the pickled, yellowed bodies of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins, a hairless possum, box turtles, baby alligators, a nutria with its paddlelike feet webbed against the glass.

  Dock went into the kitchen and came back with a beer in his hand. He offered me nothing. Behind him I saw his wife, one of the Giacano women, staring at me, hollow-eyed, her raven hair pulled back in a knot, her skin as white as bread flour.

  “Purcel gets under my skin,” Dock said.

  “Why?”

  “Same reason you do.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You make a guy for crazy, you think you can drop some coins in his slot, turn him into a monkey on a wire. The truth is, I’ve been down in a place where your eye sockets and your ears and your mouth are stuffed with mud, where there ain’t any sound except the voices of dead people inside your head . . . You learn secrets down there you don’t ever forget.”

  “I was over there, too, Dock. You don’t have a franchise on the experience.”

  “Not like I was. Not even in your nightmares.” He drank from his beer can, wiped his mouth on the inside of his wrist. His eyes seemed to lose interest in me, then his face flexed with an idle thought, as though a troublesome moth had swum into his vision.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone and go after that Klansman before he gets the boons stoked up again. At least if he ain’t drowned. We got enough race trouble in New Orleans as it is,” he said.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  He looked at me for a long moment, his face a bemused psychodrama, like a metamorphic jigsaw puzzle forming and reforming itself.

  “That guy Crown, the one you were defending on TV, he jumped into the Mississippi this morning,” he said. “Your shit machine don’t have a radio?”

  He drank from his beer can and looked at me blankly over the top of it.

  CHAPTER

  15

  It was raining and dark the next morning when Clete let me off in front of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, then made an illegal U-turn into the barbecue stand across the street. Lightning had hit the department’s building earlier, knocking out all the electricity except the emergency lights. When I went into the sheriff’s office, he was standing at his window, in the gloom, with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking across the street.

  “Why’s Purcel in town?” he asked.

  “A couple of days’ fishing.”

  “So he drives you to work?”

  “My truck’s in the shop.”

  “He’s a rogue cop, Dave.”

  “Too harsh, skipper.”

  “He has a way of writing his name with a baseball bat. That’s not going to happen here, my friend.”

  “You made your point, sir,” I said.

  “Good.”

  Then he told me about yesterday’s events at Angola and later at a sweet potato farm north of Morganza.

  Aaron Crown had vomited in his cell, gone into spasms on the floor, like an epileptic during a seizure or a man trying to pass gall-stones. He was put in handcuffs and leg chains and placed in the front seat of a van, rather than in the back, a plastic sick bag in his lap, and sent on his way to the infirmary, with a young white guard driving.

  The guard paid little attention, perhaps even averted his eyes, when Aaron doubled over with another coughing spasm, never seeing the bobby pin that Aaron had hidden in his mouth and that he used to pick one manacle loose from his left wrist, never even thinking of Aaron as an escape risk within the rural immensity of the farm, nor as an inmate whose hostility and violence would ever become directed at a white man.

  Not until they rounded a curve by the river and Aaron’s left arm wrapped around the guard’s neck and Aaron’s right fist, the loose handcuff whipping from the wrist, smashed into the guard’s face and splintered his jawbone.

  Then he was hobbling through gum trees and a soybean field, over the levee, down into the willows along the mudflat, where he waded out through the backwater and the reeds and cattails and plunged into the current, his ankles raw and bleeding and still chained together.

  By all odds he should have drowned, but later a group of West Feliciana sheriff’s deputies with dogs would find a beached tangle of uprooted trees downstream, with a piece of denim speared on a root, and conclude that Aaron had not only grabbed onto the floating island of river trash but had wedged himself inside its branches like a muskrat and ridden the heart of the river seven miles without being seen before the half-submerged trees bumped gently onto a sandspit on the far side and let Aaron disembark into the free people’s world as though he had been delivered by a specially chartered ferry.

  Then he was back into the piney woods, hard-shell fundamentalist country in which he had been raised, that he took for granted would never change, where a white man’s guarantees were understood, so much so that when he entered the barn of a black farmer that night and began clattering through the row of picks and mattocks and scythes and axes and malls hung on the wall to find a tool sharp and heavy enough to cut the chain on his ankles, he never expected to be challenged, much less threatened at gunpoint.

  The black man was old, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only the overalls he had pulled on when he had heard Aaron break into his barn.

  “What you doin’, old man?” he said, and leveled the dogleg twenty gauge at Aaron’s chest.

  “It’s fixing to storm. I come out of it.” Aaron held his right wrist, with the manacle dangling from it, behind his back.

  The lightning outside shook like candle flame through the cracks in
the wall.

  “You got a chain on your feet,” the black man said.

  “Cut it for me.”

  “Where you got out of?”

  “They had me for something I ain’t did. Cut the chain. I’ll come back and give you some money.”

  “You the one they looking for, the one that killed that NAACP man, ain’t you?”

  “It’s a goddamn lie they ruint my life over.”

  “Now, I ain’t wanting to harm you . . . You stand back, I said you—”

  Aaron tore the shotgun from the black man’s hand and clutched his throat and squeezed until the black man’s knees collapsed, then he wrapped him to a post with baling wire, tore the inside of his house apart, and looted his kitchen.

  Five minutes later Aaron Crown disappeared into the howling storm in the black man’s pickup truck, the shotgun and a cigar box filled with pennies and a bag of groceries on the seat beside him.

  * * *

  “Where you think he’s headed?” I said.

  “He got rid of the pickup in Baton Rouge late last night. A block away a Honda was stolen out of a filling station. Guess what? Crown’s lawyer, the one who pled him guilty, has decided to go to Europe for a few weeks.”

  “How about the judge who sent him up?”

  “The state police are guarding his house.” He watched my face. “What’s on your mind?”

  “If I were Aaron Crown, my anger would be directed at somebody closer to home.”

  “I guess you picked my brain, Dave.”

  “I don’t like the drift here, Sheriff.”

  “The next governor is not going to get murdered in our jurisdiction.”

  “Not me. No, sir.”

  “If you don’t want to be around the LaRoses personally, that’s your choice. But you’re going to have to coordinate the surveillance on their house . . . Look, the election’s Tuesday. Then the sonofabitch will probably be governor. That’s the way we’ve always gotten rid of people we don’t like—we elect them to public office. Go with the flow.”

  “Wrong man.”

  “Karyn LaRose doesn’t think so. She called last night and asked for you specifically . . . Could you be a little more detailed on y’all’s history?”

  “It all seems kind of distant, for some reason.”

  “I see . . . ” He sucked a tooth. “Okay, one other thing . . . Lafayette P.D. called a little earlier. Somebody broke into a pawnshop about five this morning. He took only one item — a scoped .303 Enfield rifle with a sling. You ever hear of a perp breaking into a pawnshop and stealing only one item? . . . I saw British snipers use those in Korea. They could bust a silhouette on a ridge from five hundred yards . . . Don’t treat this as a nuisance assignment, Dave.”

  * * *

  Lonnie Felton’s purple Lincoln Continental was parked under a dripping oak in my drive when Clete dropped me off from work that evening. I ran through the rain puddles in the yard, onto the gallery, and smelled the cigarette smoke drifting through the screen.

  He sat on the divan, tipping his ashes in a glass candy dish. Even relaxed, his body had the muscular definition of a gymnast, and with his cleft chin and Roman profile and brown ponytail that was shot with gray, he could have been either a first-rate charismatic confidence man, second-story man, or the celebrity that he actually was.

  “How you do, sir,” I said.

  “I feel old enough without the ‘sir,’ ” he said. His teeth were capped and white, and, like most entertainment people I had met, he didn’t allow his eyes to blink, so that they gave no indication of either a hidden insecurity or the presence or absence of an agenda.

  “I’m trying to get Mr. Felton to stay for dinner,” Bootsie said.

  I took off my raincoat and hat and put them on the rack in the hall. “Sure, why don’t you do that?” I said.

  “Thanks, another night. I’ll be around town a week or so.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want to use Aaron Crown’s old place, you know, that Montgomery Ward brick shack on the coulee, and juxtapose it with the LaRose plantation.”

  “It seems like you’d have done that early on,” I said, and sat down on the stuffed chair at the end of the coffee table.

  His eyes looked amused. The Daily Iberian was folded across the middle on top of the table. I flipped it open so he could see the front page. A three-column headline read: LOCAL MAN ESCAPES ANGOLA.

  “The end of your documentary might get written in New Iberia,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “I have a hard time following your logic. You think the presence of a news camera caused Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Bootsie got up quietly and went into the kitchen and began fixing coffee on a tray. His eyes stayed on her as she left the room, dropping for a split second to her hips.

  “What do you want from me, sir?” I asked.

  “You’re an interesting man. You had the courage to speak out on Crown’s behalf. I’d like for you to narrate two or three closing scenes. I’d like to be with you during the surveillance of LaRose’s house.”

  “I think you want gunfire on tape, sir.”

  He put on his glasses and craned his head around so he could see the wall area next to the window behind him.

  “Is that where the bullet holes were?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I did some deep background on you. This is where your wife killed another woman, isn’t it? You didn’t have media all over you after she splattered somebody’s brains on your wallpaper?”

  “My wife saved my life. And you get out of our house, Mr. Felton.”

  Bootsie stood framed in the kitchen doorway, frozen, the tray motionless between her hands.

  Felton put out his cigarette in the candy dish and got to his feet slowly, unruffled, indifferent.

  “If I were you, I’d spike Buford LaRose’s cannon while I had the chance. I think he’s a believer in payback,” he said. He turned toward Bootsie. “I’m sorry for any inconvenience, Ms. Robicheaux.”

  “If my husband told you to get out, he meant it, bubba,” she said.

  * * *

  A year ago I had stripped the paper from the wall next to the window, put liquid wood filler in the two bullet holes there, then sanded them over and repapered the cypress planks. But sometimes in an idle moment, when my gaze lingered too long on the wall, I remembered the afternoon that an assassin had pointed a .22-caliber Ruger at the side of my face, when I knew that for me all clocks everywhere were about to stop and I could do nothing about it but cross my arms over my eyes, and Bootsie, who had never harmed anyone in her life, had stepped out into the kitchen hallway and fired twice with a nine-millimeter Beretta.

  Lonnie Felton backed his Lincoln into the road, then drove toward the drawbridge through the mist puffing out of the tree trunks along the bayou’s edge.

  “There goes your Hollywood career, Streak,” Bootsie said.

  “Somehow I don’t feel the less for it.”

  “You think Aaron Crown is back?”

  “It’s too bad if he is. Say, you really shook up Felton’s cookie bag.”

  “You like that hard gal stuff, huh? Too bad for whom?”

  “I think Buford’s hooked up with some New Orleans wiseguys. Maybe Aaron won’t make the jail . . . Come on, forget this stuff. Let’s take the boat down the bayou this evening.”

  “In the rain?”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s bothering you, Dave?”

  “I have to baby-sit Buford. His plane comes bask in from Monroe at ten.”

  “I see.”

  “It’ll be over Tuesday.”

  “No it won’t,” she said.

  “Don’t be that way,” I said, and put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Which way is that?” Then her eyes grew bright and she said it again, “Which way is that, Dave?”

  * * *

  Later that night Helen Soile
au and I met Buford’s private plane at the Lafayette airport and followed him back to the LaRose plantation in a cruiser. Then we parked by his drive in the dark and waited for the midnight watch to come on. The grounds around the house, the slave quarters now Filled with baled hay, the brick, iron-shuttered riding stable, were iridescent in the humidity and glare of the security flood lamps that burned as brightly as phosphorous flares. One by one the lights went off inside the house.

  “Can you tell me why an assignment like this makes me feel like a peon with a badge?” Helen said.

  “Search me,” I said.

  “If you were Crown and you wanted to take him out, where would you be?”

  “Inside that treeline, with the sun rising behind me in the morning.”

  “You want to check it out?”

  “It’s not morning.”

  “Casual attitude.”

  “Maybe Buford should have the opportunity to face his sins.”

  “I’ll forget you said that.”

  The next morning, Saturday, just before sunrise, I dressed in the cold, with Bootsie still asleep, and drove back to the LaRose plantation and walked the treeline from the road back to the bayou. In truth, I expected to find nothing. Aaron had no military background, was impetuous, did not follow patterns, and drew on a hill country frame of reference that was as rational as a man stringing a crowning forest fire around his log house.

  However, I had forgotten that Aaron was a lifetime hunter, not for sport or even for personal dominion over the land but as one who viewed armadillos and deer, possums and ducks, squirrels and robins, even gar that could be shot from a boat, as food for his table, adversaries that he slew in order to live, none any better or worse or more desirable than another, and he went about it as thoroughly and dispassionately as he would butcher chickens and hogs on a block.

  On second consideration, I thought the best trained military sniper could probably take a lesson from Aaron Crown.

  One hundred yards from Buford’s backyard, with a clear view of the converted carriage house, the driveway, the parked automobiles, I saw the broken gray leaves, the knee and boot marks in the soft ground behind a persimmon tree, an empty Vienna sausage can, crumbs from saltine crackers, the detritus of field-stripped hand-rolled cigarettes.