DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "Boots—" I said hoarsely.

  "It's all right, Dave. Go ahead," she whispered.

  She ran both palms down my lower back and pushed me deeper inside, then something broke like a dam and melted in my loins and I closed my eyes and saw a sailfish rise from a cresting wave, its mouth torn with a hook, its skin blue and hard, its gills strung with pink foam. Then it disappeared into the wave again, and the groundswells were suddenly flat and empty, dented with rain, sliding across the fire coral down below.

  It should have been a perfect afternoon. But on my way out Bootsie asked, almost as an afterthought, "Was there any other reason you didn't want to go to the LaRoses?"

  "No, of course not."

  I tried to avert my eyes, but it was too late. I saw the recognition in her face, like a sharp and unexpected slap.

  "It was a long time ago, Boots. Before we were married."

  She nodded, her thoughts concealed. Then she said, her voice flat, "We're all modern people these days. Like you say, Streak, no problem."

  She walked down to the pond at the back of our property by herself, with a bag of bread crusts, to feed the ducks.

  CHAPTER 3

  At sunrise the next day, while I was helping Batist open up the bait shop before I went to work, the old-time gunbull called me long-distance from Angola.

  "You remember I told you about them movie people come see me? There's one ain't gonna be around no more," he said.

  "What happened, Cap?"

  "My nephew's a uniform at NOPD in the First District. They thought it was just a white man interested in the wrong piece of jelly roll. That's till they found the camera," he said.

  After I hung up the phone I filled minnow buckets for two fishermen, put a rental outboard in the water, and pulled the tarp on guy wires over the spool tables on the dock in case it rained. Batist was sprinkling hickory chips on the coals in the barbecue pit, which we had fashioned from a split oil drum to cook chickens and links of sausage for our midday customers.

  "That was that old man from up at the prison farm?" he asked.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "I ain't going to say it but once, no. It don't matter what that kind of man bring into your life, it ain't no good."

  "I'm a police officer, podna. I can't always be selective about the people I talk to."

  He cut his head and walked away.

  I left a message for the nephew at NOPD and drove to the office just as it started to mist. He returned my call two hours later, then turned over the telephone to a Homicide detective. This is how I've reconstructed the story that was told to me.

  Vice had identified the hooker as Brandy Grissum, a black twenty-five-year-old heroin addict who had done a one-bit in the St. John the Baptist jail for sale and possession.

  She worked with three or four pimps and Murphy artists out of the Quarter. The pimps were there for the long-term regular trade. The Murphy artists took down the tourists, particularly those who were drunk, married, respectable, in town on conventions, scared of cops and their employers.

  It was an easy scam. Brandy would walk into a bar, well dressed, perhaps wearing a suit, sit at the end of the counter, or by herself in a booth, glance once into the John's face, her eyes shy, her hands folded demurely in front of her, then wait quietly while her partner cut the deal.

  This is the shuck: "My lady over there ain't a reg'lar, know what I'm sayin'? Kind of like a schoolgirl just out on the town." Here he smiles. "She need somebody take her 'round the world, know what I'm sayin'? I need sixty dollars to cover the room, we'll all walk down to it, I ain't goin' nowhere on you. Then you want to give her a present or something, that's between y'all."

  The difference in the scenario this time was the John had his own room as well as agenda.

  His name was Dwayne Parsons, an Academy Award nominee and two-time Emmy winner for his documentary scripts. But Dwayne Parsons had another creative passion, too, one that was unknown to the hooker and the Murphy artist and a second black man who was about to appear soon—a video camera set up on a tripod in his closet, the lens pointed through a crack in the door at the waterbed in his leased efficiency apartment a block off Bourbon.

  Parsons and the woman were undressed, on top of black satin sheets, when the hard, insistent knock came at the door. The man's head jerked up from the pillow, his face at first startled, then simply disconcerted and annoyed.

  "They'll go away," he said.

  He tried to hold her arms, hold her in place on top of him, but she slid her body off his.

  "It's my boyfriend. He don't let me alone. He's gonna break down the do'," she said. She began to gather her clothes in front of her breasts and stomach.

  "Hey, I look like a total schmuck to you?" Parsons said. "Don't open that door . . . Did you hear me. . . Listen, you fucking nigger, you're not hustling me."

  She slid back the deadbolt on the door, and suddenly the back and conked and side-shaved head of a gargantuan black man were in the lens. Whoever he was, he was not the man Brandy Grissum had expected. She swallowed as though she had a razor blade in her

  throat.

  But Dwayne Parsons was still not with the script.

  "You want to rob me, motherfucker, just take the money off the dresser. You get the gun at the Screen Actors Guild?" he said.

  The black man with the gun did not speak. But the terror in the woman's face left no doubt about the decision she saw taking place

  in his.

  "I ain't seen you befo', bitch. You trying to work independent?" he

  said.

  "No . . . I mean yes, I don't know nobody here. I ain't from New Orleans." She pressed her clothes against her breasts and genitalia. Her mouth was trembling.

  One block away, a brass street band was playing on Bourbon. The man thought some more, then jerked the barrel of his automatic toward the door. She slipped her skirt and blouse on, wadded up her undergarments and shoes and purse and almost flew out the door.

  Dwayne Parson's face had drained. He started to get up from the

  bed.

  "No, no, my man," the black man said, approaching him, blocking off the camera's view of Parson's face. "Hey, it comes to everybody. You got it on with the sister. It could be worse. I said don't move, man. It's all gonna come out the same way. They ain't no need for

  suffering."

  He picked up a pillow, pressed it down in front of him, his upper

  arm swelling to the diameter and hardness of a fireplug while Dwayne Parson's body flopped like a fish's. The man with the gun stepped back quickly and fired two shots into the pillow—pop, pop— and then went past the camera's lens, one grizzled Cro-Magnon jaw and gold tooth flashing by like a shark's profile in a zoo tank.

  In the distance the street band thundered out "Fire House Blues." Dwayne Parson's body, the head still covered by the pillow, looked like a broken white worm in the middle of the sheet.

  The LaRose plantation was far out in the parish, almost to St. Martinville. The main house had been built in 1857 and was the dusty color of oyster shells, its wide, columned front porch scrolled by live oak trees that grew to the third floor. A row of shacks in back that had once been slaves quarters was now stacked with baled hay, and the old brick smithy had been converted into a riding stable, the arched windows sealed by the original iron shutters, which leaked orange rust as though from a wound.

  Bootsie and I drove past the LaRose company store, with its oxidized, cracked front windows and tin-roofed gallery, where barrels of pecans sat by the double screen doors through which thousands of indebted tenants had passed until the civil rights era of the 1960s brought an end to five-dollar-a-day farm labor; then we turned into a white-fenced driveway that led to the rear of the home and the lawn party that was already in progress against a backdrop of live oaks and Spanish moss and an autumnal rose-stippled sky that seemed to reassure us all that the Indian summer of our lives would never end.

  While the buffet was being laid out on a row
of picnic tables, Buford organized a touch football game and prevailed even upon the most reluctant guests to put down their drinks and join one team or another. Some were from the university in Lafayette but most were people well known in the deceptively lighthearted and carnival-like atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Unlike their counterparts from the piney woods parishes to the north, they were bright, educated, openly hedonistic, always convivial, more concerned about violations of protocol than ideology.

  They were fun to be with; they were giddy with alcohol and the exertion of the game, their laughter tinkling through the trees each

  time the ball was snapped and there was a thumping of feet across the sod and a loud pat of hands on the rump.

  Then a white-jacketed black man dinged a metal triangle and everyone filed happily back toward the serving tables.

  "Run out, Dave! Let me throw you a serious one!" Buford hollered, the football poised in his palm. He wore tennis shoes, pleated white slacks, the arms of his plum-colored sweater tied around his neck.

  "That's enough for me," I said.

  "Don't give me that 'old man' act," he said and cocked his arm to fire a bullet, then smiled and lofted an easy, arching pass that dropped into my hands as though he had plopped it into a basket.

  He caught up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

  "Wow, you feel like a bag of rocks. How much iron do you pump?" he said.

  "Just enough to keep from falling apart."

  He slipped the football out of my hands, flipped it toward the stable. He watched it bounce and roll away in the dusk, as though he were looking at an unformed thought in the center of his mind.

  "Dave, I think we're going to win next month," he said.

  "That's good."

  "You think you could live in Baton Rouge?"

  "I've never thought about it."

  Someone turned on the Japanese lanterns in the trees. The air smelled of pecan husks and smoke from a barbecue pit dug in the earth. Buford paused.

  "How'd you like to be head of the state police?" he asked.

  "I was never much of an administrator, Buford."

  "I had a feeling you'd say something like that."

  "Oh?"

  "Dave, why do you think we've always had the worst state government in the union? It's because good people don't want to serve in it. Is the irony lost on you?"

  "I appreciate the offer."

  "You want to think it over?"

  "Sure, why not?"

  "That's the way," he said, and then was gone among his other

  guests, his handsome face glowing with the perfection of the evening and the portent it seemed to represent.

  Karyn walked among the tree trunks toward me, a paper plate filled with roast duck and venison and dirty rice in one hand, a Corona bottle and cone-shaped glass with a lime slice inserted on the rim gripped awkwardly in the other. My eyes searched the crowd for Bootsie.

  "I took the liberty," Karyn said, and set the plate and glass and beer bottle down on a table for me.

  "Thank you. Where'd Boots go?"

  "I think she's in the house."

  She sat backward on the plank bench, her legs crossed. She had tied her hair up with a red bandanna and had tucked her embroidered denim shirt tightly into her blue jeans. Her face was warm, still flushed from the touch football game. I moved the Corona bottle and glass toward her.

  "Nope."

  "You want a Coke?"

  "I'm fine, Karyn."

  "Did Buford talk to you about the state police job?"

  "He sure did."

  "Gee, Dave, you're a regular blabbermouth, aren't you?"

  I took a bite of the dressing, then rolled a strip of duck meat inside a piece of French bread and ate it.

  Her eyes dilated. "Did he offend you?" she said.

  "Here's the lay of the land, Karyn. A hit man for the New Orleans mob, a genuine sociopath by the name of Mingo Bloomberg, told me I did the right thing by not getting involved with Aaron Crown. He said I'd get taken care of. Now I'm offered a job."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Believe what?"

  "You. Your fucking presumption and self-righteousness."

  "What I told you is what happened. You can make of it what you want."

  She walked away through the shadows, across the leaves and molded pecan husks to where her husband was talking to a group of

  people. I saw them move off together, her hands gesturing while she spoke, then his face turning toward me.

  A moment later he was standing next to me, his wrists hanging loosely at his sides.

  "I'm at a loss, Dave. I have a hard time believing what you told

  Karyn," he said.

  I lay my fork in my plate, wadded up my paper napkin and dropped it on the table.

  "Maybe I'd better go," I said.

  "You've seriously upset her. I don't think it's enough just to say you'll go."

  "Then I apologize."

  "I know about your and Karyn's history. Is that the cause of our problem here? Because I don't bear a resentment about it."

  I could feel a heat source inside me, like someone cracking open the door on a woodstove.

  "Listen, partner, a guy like Mingo Bloomberg isn't an abstraction. Neither is a documentary screenwriter who just got whacked in the Quarter," I said.

  His expression was bemused, almost doleful, as though he were looking down at an impaired person.

  "Good night to you, Dave. I believe you mean no harm," he said, and walked back among his guests.

  I stared at the red sun above the sugarcane fields, my face burning with embarrassment.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT was raining hard and the traffic was heavy in New Orleans when I parked off St. Charles and ran for the colonnade in front of the Pearl. The window was steamed from the warmth inside, but I could see Clete Purcel at the counter, a basket of breadsticks and a whiskey glass and a schooner of beer in front of him, reading the front page of the Times-Picayune.

  "Hey, big mon," he said, folding his paper, grinning broadly when I came through the door. His face was round and Irish, scarred across the nose and through one eyebrow. His seersucker suit and blue porkpie hat looked absurd on his massive body. Under his coat I could see his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black .38 revolver. "Mitch, give Dave a dozen," he said to the waiter behind the counter, then turned back to me. "Hang on a second." He knocked back the whiskey glass and chased it with beer, blew out his breath, and widened his eyes. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead on his coat sleeve.

  "You must have had a rocky morning," I said.

  "I helped repossess a car because the guy didn't pay the vig on his bond. His wife went nuts, said he wouldn't be able to get to work, his kids were crying in the front yard. It really gives you a

  sense of purpose. Tonight I got to pick up a skip in the Iberville Project. I've got another one hiding out in the Desire. You want to hear some more?"

  The waiter set a round, metal tray of raw oysters in front of me. The shells were cold and slick with ice. I squeezed a lemon on each oyster and dotted it with Tabasco. Outside, the green-painted iron streetcar clanged on its tracks around the corner of Canal and headed up the avenue toward Lee Circle.

  "Anyway, run all this Mingo Bloomberg stuff by me again," Clete

  said.

  I told him the story from the beginning. At least most of it.

  "What stake would Bloomberg have in a guy like Aaron Crown?" I said.

  He scratched his cheek with four fingers. "I don't get it, either. Mingo's a made-guy. He's been mobbed-up since he went in the reformatory. The greaseballs don't have an interest in pecker-woods, and they think the blacks are cannibals. I don't know,

  Streak."

  "What's your take on the murdered scriptwriter?"

  "Maybe wrong place, wrong time."

  "Why'd the shooter let the girl slide?" I said.

  "Maybe he didn't want to snuff a sister."

  "C
ome on, Clete."

  "He knew she couldn't turn tricks in the Quarter without permission of the Giacano family. Which means she producing a weekly minimum for guys you don't mess with."