“No, this time you shut up, Dave. Aaron Crown didn’t do what he was told. He was supposed to throw his rifle in the water. Instead, he flashed a soda can or something in a window and a trooper started shooting. I tried to stop it.”
“You were there?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I think you’re lying,” I said. But his explanation was disarming.
“It’s what happened. Check it out.”
“The black man who works for me was almost beaten to death last night.”
“I’m sorry. But what does that have to do with me?”
I felt my anger and confidence wane. I rubbed at one eye with the heel of my hand and saw concentric circles of red light receding into my brain. My hands felt cold and thick and I could smell my own odor. I started to speak but the words wouldn’t come.
“Dave, are you okay?” he said. His voice was odd, marked with sympathy.
I hung up and sat at the counter and rested my forearms on the counter, my head bent forward, and felt a wave of exhaustion and a sense of personal impotence wash through me like the first stages of amoebic dysentery. Through the window I heard Bootsie’s car back into the road, then I saw her and Alafair drive away through the long corridor of oaks toward town. A small metallic mirror hung on a post behind the counter. The miniature face of the man reflected inside it did not look like someone I knew.
CHAPTER
31
Clete and I went back to Iberia General to visit Batist, then drove to Red Lerille’s Gym in Lafayette. Clete ordered a baked potato smothered with cheese and sour cream and bacon strips and green onions at the cafe outside the weight room and ate it at a table by the glass wall and watched me while I worked out for a half hour on the machines. Then he put on a pair of trunks and swam outside in the heated pool and later met me in the steam room.
“How you feel?” he said.
“All right. It’s just a touch of the mosquito.”
A man sitting next to us folded the newspaper he was reading and lay it on the tile stoop and went out. Clete waited until the man closed the door behind him.
“You’re beating up on yourself unfairly, big mon,” he said.
“People are dead. No one’s in custody. A man like Batist is attacked by a degenerate. Tell me what I’ve done right.”
“You listen to me,” he said, and raised his finger in my face. The skin of his massive shoulders and chest looked boiled and red in the steam. “You’re a police officer. You can’t ignore what you see happening around you. If you fuck up, that’s the breaks. In a firefight you stomp ass and take names and let somebody else add up the arithmetic. Get off your own case.”
“One day we’re going to get your shield back,” I said.
He cupped his hand around the back of my neck. I could feel the moisture and grease ooze out from under his palm and fingers. “If I had to play by the rules, I couldn’t cover my old podjo’s back,” he said.
His smile was as gentle as a girl’s.
* * *
I dropped him off at a motel by the four-lane in New Iberia and drove home alone. I waved at the deputy parked in a cruiser by the bait shop and turned into our dirt driveway and cut the engine and listened to it cool and tick while I looked at Bootsie’s car and the doves that rose out of my neighbor’s field against the late sun and then at Bootsie’s face in the middle of a windy swirl of curtains at a window in the rear of the house before she turned away as though I were not there.
I started toward the back door, forming words in my mind to address problems I couldn’t even define, then stopped, the way you do when thinking doesn’t work anymore, and walked down the slope to the bait shop, into the green, gaslike odor of the evening, the pecan husks breaking under my shoes, as though I could walk beyond the box of space and time and loveless tension that my father’s hand-hewn cypress house had become.
The string of electric lights was turned on over the dock and I could hear music through the screens.
“What are you doing, Alf?” I said.
“I got the key to the jukebox out of the cash register. Is that all right?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
She had wheeled Jerry Joe Plumb’s jukebox away from the wall, where I had pushed it front end first, and unlocked the door and stacked the 45 rpm records on top of a soft towel on the counter.
“I’m playing each one of them on my portable and recording them on tape. I’ve already recorded fifteen of them,” she said. “You like all these, don’t you?”
I nodded, my eyes gazing out the window at the lighted gallery of the house. “That’s great, Alf,” I said.
“Who’s the buttwipe who cut the electric cord on the box?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“The buttwipe who sliced off the cord. What kind of person would do that?”
“How about it on the language?”
“Big deal,” she said. She slid a record off her machine and replaced it with another, her face pointed downward so that her hair hid her expression.
“Why are you so angry?” I asked.
“You and Bootsie, Dave. Why don’t y’all stop it?”
I sat down on a stool next to her.
“I made some mistakes,” I said.
“Then unmake them. You’re my father. You’re supposed to fix things. Not break the jukebox ’cause you’re mad at it.”
I crimped my lips and tried to find the right words. If there were any, I didn’t know them.
“Everything’s messed up in our house. I hate it,” she said, her eyes shining, then brimming with tears.
“Let’s see what we can do about it, then,” I said, and walked up the slope, through the trees, across the gallery and into the stillness of the house.
Bootsie was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a stonewashed denim shirt. The surfaces of her face looked as cool and shiny as alabaster.
“The job’s not worth it anymore. It’s time to hang it up,” I said.
“Is that what you want?”
“I can always do some P.I. stuff with Clete if we get jammed up.”
“No.”
“I thought you’d approve.”
“I had to go to confession this afternoon,” she said.
“What for?”
“I went to see Batist at the hospital. When I left I wanted to kill the man who did that to him. I wanted to see something even worse happen to Karyn and Buford. I told Father Pitre my feelings probably won’t go away, either. He said it was all right, it’s natural to feel what I do . . . But it’s not going to be all right, not until those people are punished. Nobody can be allowed to get away with what they’ve done.”
Her neck bloomed with color. I stood behind her chair and put my hands on her shoulders and kneaded my thumbs on her spine, then leaned over and pressed my cheek against her hair. I felt her reach up over my head and touch the back of my neck, arching her head against mine, rubbing her hair against my skin. Then she rose from her chair and pressed herself against me, no holding back now, her breasts and flat stomach and thighs tight against me, her mouth like a cold burn on my throat.
Through the screen I could hear Alafair playing “La Jolie Blon” on her record player.
* * *
No Duh Dolowitz was a Jersey transplant and old-time pete man who had been dented too many times in the head with a ball peen hammer, which didn’t diminish his talents as a safecracker but for some reason did develop in him a tendency for bizarre humor, finally earning him the nickname among cops of the Mob’s Merry Prankster. He backed up a truck to the home of a contractor in the Poconos and filled his wet bar and basement game room to the ceiling with bituminous coal, stole a human head from the Tulane medical school and put it in a government witness’s bowling ball bag, and sabotaged the family-day promotion of a floating casino by smuggling a group of black transvestites on board to do the stage show.
Also, in terms of informatio
n about the underworld, he was the human equivalent of flypaper.
Sunday morning Clete and I found him in his brother-in-law’s saloon and poolroom by the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. He wore a maroon shirt, white suspenders, knife-creased gray slacks, and a biscuit-colored derby hat. His face was tan and lean, his mustache as black as grease. He sat with us at a felt-covered card table, sipping black coffee from a demitasse with a tiny silver spoon in it. The poolroom had a stamped tin ceiling, a railed bar, wood floors, and big glass windows painted with green letters that gave a green cast to the inside of the room. It was still early, and the poolroom was closed.
“Give No Duh a beer and a shot. Put it on my tab,” Clete called to the bartender, then said to Dolowitz, “You’re looking very copacetic, No Duh.”
“Shitcan the beer and the shot,” Dolowitz said. “Why the squeeze?”
“We’re looking for a guy named Mookie Zerrang,” I said.
“A cannibal looks like King Kong?” he said.
“He hurt a friend of mine real bad. I think he killed Short Boy Jerry, too,” I said.
His brown eyes looked without expression at a point on the far wall.
“I hear you’re on the outs with the Giacanos,” Clete said.
Dolowitz shook his head nonchalantly, his face composed.
“You and Stevie Gee got nailed on that pawnshop job. You made bond first and creeped Stevie’s house,” Clete said.
“He mentioned he boosted my mother’s new car?” Dolowitz said.
“You’ve got bad markers all over town and you’re four weeks back on the vig to Wee Willie Bimstine,” Clete said.
“I’d tell you ‘No duh,’ Purcel, but I’m not interested in defending myself or having trouble with either one of yous. You want to play some nine ball? A dollar on the three, the six, and the nine.”
“Dave can get you a few bucks from his department. I can get Wee Willie off your back. How about it?” Clete said.
“Zerrang’s freelance,” Dolowitz said. “Look, check my jacket. I burned a safe or two and did some creative favors for a few people. Zerrang blows heads. He’s a sicko, too. He likes being cruel when he don’t have to be.”
“Three names I want you to think about, No Duh,” I said. “Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock Green, and his wife, Persephone.”
He was motionless in his chair, the names registering in his eyes in ways you couldn’t read. Then the skin at the side of his mouth ticked slightly. His eyes hardened and his upper lip filmed with moisture, as though the room had suddenly become close and warm.
“Here’s the rest of it,” Clete said. “You come up with the gen on these guys, I’ll make you righteous with Wee Willie. But you shine us off and miss another week on the vig, you better get your skinny ass back up to the Jersey Shore, find a hole, and pull it in after you.”
When we left him, his confidence had drained like water out of a sink and his face was filled with the conflict of a hunted animal.
Clete and I stood on the sidewalk under the dilapidated wood colonnade that shaded the front of the poolroom. It was cool in the shade, and the sunlight looked bright and hard on the neutral ground and the palm trees.
“I can’t do this, Clete,” I said.
“Don’t screw it up, mon.”
I tapped on the door glass for the bartender to open up.
“Do what you feel comfortable with, No Duh. Nobody’s going to twist you,” I said.
“Go play with your worms. Blimpo out there gets off on this. I hope in the next life both yous come back a guy like me, see how you like it,” he replied.
CHAPTER
32
As a police officer you accept the fact that, in all probability, you will become the instrument that delivers irreparable harm to a variety of individuals. Granted, they design their own destinies, are intractable in their attitudes, and live with the asp at their breasts; but the fact remains that it is you who will appear at some point in their lives, like the headsman with his broad ax on the medieval scaffold, and serve up a fate to them that has the same degree of mercy as that dealt out by your historical predecessor.
An image or two: A soft-nosed .45 round that skids off a brick wall and topples before it finds its mark; a baton swung too high that crushes the windpipe; or salting the shaft on a killer of children, a guy you could never nail legitimately, a guy who asks to see you on his last night, but instead of finding peace you watch him vomit his food into a stainless steel chemical toilet and weep uncontrollably on the side of his bunk while a warden reads his death warrant and two opaque-faced screws unlock the death cage.
So the job becomes easier if you think of them in either clinical or jailhouse language that effectively separates them from the rest of us: sociopaths, pukes, colostomy bags, lowlifes, miscreants, buckets of shit, street mutts, recidivists, greaseballs, meltdowns, maggots, gorillas in the mist. Any term will do as long as it indicates that the adversary is pathologically different from yourself.
Then your own single-minded view of the human family is disturbed by a chance occurrence that leads you back into the province of the theologian.
Early Monday morning three land surveyors in a state boat set up a transit instrument on a sandspit in the flooded woods across from the bait shop and began turning angles with it, measuring the bayou frontage with a surveyor’s chain, and driving flagged laths at odd intervals into the mudbank.
“You mind telling me what y’all are doing?” I said from the end of the dock.
The transit operator, in folded-down hip waders and rain hat, swiped mosquitoes out of his face and replied, “The state don’t have a recent plat.”
“Who cares?”
“You got a problem with it, talk to my boss in Lafayette. You think we’re putting a highway through your house?”
I thought about it. “Yeah, it’s a possibility,” I said.
I called his supervisor, a state civil engineer, and got nowhere. Then I called the sheriff’s department, told Wally I’d be in late, and drove to Lafayette.
I was on Pinhook Road, down in the old section, which was still tree lined and unmarked by strip malls, when I saw Karyn LaRose three cars ahead of me, driving a waxed yellow Celica convertible. One lane was closed and the traffic was heavy at the red light, but no one honked, no one tried to cut off another driver.
Except Karyn.
She pulled onto the shoulder, drove around a construction barrier, a cloud of dust drifting off her wheels through the windows of the other cars, and then cut back into the line just before the intersection.
She changed the angle on her rearview mirror and looked at her reflection, tilted up her chin, removed something from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail, oblivious to everyone around her. The oak limbs above her flickered with a cool gold-green light. She threw back her hair and put on her sunglasses and tapped her ring impatiently on the steering wheel, as though she were sitting reluctantly on a stage before an audience that had not quite earned her presence.
An elderly black woman, bent in the spine like a knotted turnip, with glasses as thick as quartz, was laboring down a sidestreet with a cane, working her way toward the bus stop, waving a handkerchief frantically at the bus that had just passed, her purse jiggling from her wrist. She wore a print cotton dress and untied, scuffed brown shoes that exposed the pale, callused smoothness of her lower foot each time she took a step.
Karyn stared at her from behind her sunglasses, then turned out of the traffic and got out of her convertible and listened without speaking while the old woman gestured at the air and vented her frustration with the Lafayette bus system. Then Karyn knelt on one knee and tied the woman’s shoes and held her cocked elbow while the old woman got into the passenger seat of the convertible, and a moment later the two of them drove through the caution light and down the boulevard like old friends.
I’m sure she never saw me. Nor was her act of kindness a performance for passers-by, as it was already obvious she didn’t ca
re what they thought of her. I only knew it was easier for me to think of Karyn LaRose in one-dimensional terms, and endowing her with redeeming qualities was a complexity I didn’t need.
Twenty minutes later the state engineer told me an environmental assessment was being made of the swamp area around my dock and bait shop.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“Lyndon Johnson didn’t like some of his old neighbors and had their property turned into a park . . . That’s a joke, Mr. Robicheaux . . . Sir, I’d appreciate your not looking at me like that.”
* * *
Helen Soileau happened to glance up from the watercooler when I came through the back door of the department from the parking lot. She straightened her back and tucked her shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs and grinned.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“I’ve got a great story for you about Aaron.”
“He’s not my idea of George Burns, Helen. Let me get my mail first.”
I picked up my messages and my mail from my pigeonhole and stopped by the cold drink machine for a Dr Pepper. On the top of the stack was an envelope addressed to me in pencil, postmarked in Lafayette, with no zip code. I had no doubt who had sent it.
I sat down in a chair by the cold drink machine and opened the envelope with one finger, like peeling away a bandage on a wound. The letter was printed on a paper towel.
Dear Mr. Roboshow,
I thought you was honest but you have shit on me just like them others. Thank God I am old and have got to the end of my row and cant be hurt by yall no more. But that dont mean I will abide your pity either, no sir, it dont, I have seen the likes of yall all my life and know how you think so dont try to act like you are better than me. Also tell that prissy pissant Buford LaRose I will settel some old bidness then finish with him too.
You have permision to pass this letter on to people in the press.
Sinserely yours,
a loyal democrat who voted for John Kennedy,
Aaron Jefferson Crown
Helen was waiting for me inside my office.
“Crown went after Jimmy Ray Dixon. Can you believe it?” she said.
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