DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  She shook her head, sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.

  "That's hard to believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go through later, because I didn't make you take precautions. But when you tell me—"

  Unconsciously I touched my brow.

  "I had blackouts back then, Karyn. I lost whole days. If you say something happened, then—"

  "Blackouts?"

  "I'd get loaded at night on Beam and try to sober up in the morning with vodka."

  "How lovely. What if I told you I had an abortion?"

  The skin of my face flexed against the bone. I could feel a weakness, a sinking in my chest, as though weevil worms were feeding at my heart.

  "I didn't. I was just late. But no thanks to you, you bastard . . . Don't just look at me," she said.

  "I'm going now."

  "Oh no, you're not." She rose from the chair and stood in front of me. "My husband has some peculiar flaws, but he's still the best chance this state has and I'm not letting you destroy it."

  "Somebody tried to open me up with a machete. I think it had to do with Aaron Crown. I think I don't want to ever see you again, Karyn."

  "Is that right?" she said. The tops of her breasts were swollen and hard, veined with blue lines. I could smell whiskey on her breath, perfume from behind her ears, the heat she seemed to excrete from her sun-browned skin. She struck me full across the face with the flat of her hand.

  I touched my cheek, felt a smear of blood where her fingernail had torn the skin.

  "I apologize again for having come to your home," I said.

  I walked stiffly through the house, through the kitchen to the backyard and my parked pickup truck. When I turned the ignition, I looked through the windshield and saw her watching me through the back screen, biting the corner of her lip as though her next option was just now presenting itself.

  CHAPTER 6

  It rained all that night. At false dawn a white ground fog rolled out of the swamp, and the cypress trees on the far bank of the bayou looked as black and hard as carved stone. Deep inside the fog you could hear bass flopping back in the bays. When the sun broke above the horizon, like a red diamond splintering apart between the tree trunks, Batist and I were still bailing out the rental boats with coffee cans. Then we heard a car on the road, and when we looked up we saw a purple Lincoln Continental, with Sabelle Crown in the passenger's seat, stop and back up by our concrete boat ramp.

  It wasn't hard to figure out which American industry the driver served. He seemed to consciously dress and look the part—elk hide halftop boots, pleated khakis, a baggy cotton shirt that was probably tailored on Rodeo Drive, tinted rimless glasses, his brown hair tied in a pony tail.

  As he walked down the ramp toward me, the wind-burned face, the cleft chin, the Roman profile, become more familiar, like images rising from the pages of People or Newsweek magazine or any number of television programs that featured film celebrities.

  His forearms and wrists were thick and corded with veins, the handshake disarmingly gentle.

  "My name's Lonnie Felton, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

  "You're a movie director."

  "That's right."

  "How you do, sir?"

  "I wonder if we could go inside and talk a few minutes."

  "I'm afraid I have another job to go to when I finish this one."

  Sabelle stood by the fender of the Lincoln, brushing her hair, putting on makeup from her purse.

  "Some people are giving Aaron Crown a rough time up at the pen," he said.

  "It's a bad place. It was designed as one."

  "You know what the BGLA is?"

  "The Black Guerrilla Liberation Army?"

  "Crown's an innocent man. I think Ely Dixon was assassinated by a couple of Mississippi Klansmen. Maybe one of them was a Mississippi highway patrolman."

  "You ought to tell this to the FBI."

  "I got this from the FBI. I have testimony from two ex-field-agents."

  "It seems the big word in this kind of instance is always 'ex,' Mr. Felton," I said.

  He coughed out a laugh. "You're a hard-nose sonofabitch, aren't you?" he said.

  I stood erect in the boat where I'd been bailing, poured the water out of the can into the bayou, idly flicked the last drops onto the boat's bow.

  "I don't particularly care what you think of me, sir, but I'd appreciate your not using profanity around my home," I said.

  He looked off into the distance, suppressing a smile, watching a blue heron lift from an inlet and disappear into the fog.

  "We had a writer murdered in the Quarter," he said. "The guy was a little weird, but he didn't deserve to get killed. That's not an unreasonable position for me to take, is it?"

  "I'll be at the sheriff's department by eight. If you want to give us some information, you're welcome to come in."

  "Sabelle told me you were an intelligent man. Who do you think broke the big stories of our time? My Lai, Watergate, CIA dope smuggling, Reagan's gun deals in Nicaragua? It was always the media, not the government, not the cops. Why not lose the 'plain folks' attitude?"

  I stepped out of the boat into the shallows and felt the coldness through my rubber boots. I set the bailing can down on the ramp, wrapped the bow chain in my palm and snugged the boat's keel against the waving moss at the base of the concrete pad, and cleared an obstruction from my throat.

  He slipped his glasses off his face, dropped them loosely in the pocket of his baggy shirt, smiling all the while.

  "Thanks for coming by," I said.

  I walked up the ramp, then climbed the set of side stairs onto the dock. I saw him walk toward his car and shake his head at Sabelle.

  A moment later she came quickly down the dock toward me. She wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, pink tennis shoes, and walked splayfooted like a teenage girl.

  "I look like hell. He came by my place at five this morning," she said.

  "You look good, Sabelle. You always do," I said.

  "They've moved Daddy into a cellhouse full of blacks."

  "That doesn't sound right. He can request isolation."

  "He'll die before he'll let anybody think he's scared. In the meantime they steal his cigarettes, spit in his food, throw pig shit in his hair, and nobody does anything about it." Her eyes began to film.

  "I'll call this gunbull I know."

  "They're going to kill him, Dave. I know it. It's a matter of time."

  Out on the road, Lonnie Felton waited behind the steering wheel of his Lincoln.

  "Don't let this guy Felton use you," I said.

  "Use me? Who else cares about us?" Even with makeup, her face looked stark, as shiny as ceramic, in the lacy veil of sunlight through the cypress trees. She turned and walked back up the dock, her pink underwear winking through a small thread-worn hole in the rump of her jeans.

  The sheriff was turned sideways in his swivel chair, his bifocals mounted on his nose, twisting strips of pink and white crepe paper into the shape of camellias. On his windowsill was a row of potted plants, which he watered daily from a hand-painted teakettle. He looked like an aging greengrocer more than a law officer, and in fact had run a dry cleaning business before his election to office, but he had been humble enough to listen to advice, and over the years we had all come to respect his judgment and integrity.

  Only one door in his life had remained closed to us, his time with the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, until last year, when he suffered a heart attack and told me from a bed in Iberia General, his breath as stale as withered flowers, of bugles echoing off frozen hills and wounds that looked like roses frozen in snow.

  I sat down across from him. His desk blotter was covered with crepe paper camellias.

  "I volunteered to help decorate the stage for my granddaughter's school play. You any good at this?" he said.

  "No, not really. A movie director, a fellow named Lonnie Felton, was out at my
place with Sabelle Crown this morning. They say some blacks are trying to re-create the Garden of Gethsemane for Aaron Crown. I called Angola, but I didn't get any help."

  "Don't look for any. We made him the stink on shit."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "A lot of us, not everybody, but a lot of us, treated people of color pretty badly. Aaron represents everything that's vile in the white race. So he's doing our time."

  "You think these movie guys are right, he's innocent?"

  "I didn't say that. Look, human beings do bad things sometimes, particularly in groups. Then we start to forget about it. But there's always one guy hanging around to remind us of what we did or what we used to be. That's Aaron. He's the toilet that won't flush . . . Did I say something funny?"

  "No, sir."

  "Good, because what I've got on my mind isn't funny. Karyn LaRose and her attorney were in here earlier this morning." He set his elbows on his desk blotter, flipped an unfinished paper flower to the side. "Guess what she had to tell me about your visit last night at her house?"

  "I won't even try to."

  "They're not calling it rape, if that makes you feel any better." He opened his desk drawer and read silently from a clipboard. "The words are 'lascivious intention,''attempted sexual battery,' and 'indecent liberties.' What do you have to say?" His gaze moved away from my face, then came back and stayed there.

  "Nothing. It's a lie."

  "I wish the court would just accept my word on the perps. I wish I didn't have to offer any evidence. Boy, that'd be great."

  I told him what had happened, felt the heat climbing into my voice, wiped the film of perspiration off my palms onto my slacks.

  His eyes lingered on the scratch Karyn had put on my cheek.

  "I think it's a lie, too," he said. He dropped the clipboard inside the drawer and closed it. "But I have to conduct an internal investigation just the same."

  "I go on the desk?"

  "No. I'm not going to have my department manipulated for someone's political interests, and that's what this is about. You're getting too close to something in this Aaron Crown business. But you stay away from her."

  I still had my morning mail in my hand. On the top was a pink memo slip with a message from Bootsie, asking me to meet her for lunch.

  "How public is this going to get?" I asked.

  "My feeling is she doesn't intend it to be public. Aside from the fact I know you, that was the main reason I didn't believe her. Her whole account is calculated to be vague. Her charges don't require her to offer physical evidence—vaginal smears, pubic hair, that kind of stuff. This is meant as a warning from the LaRose family. If I have to, I'll carry this back to them on a dung fork, podna."

  He folded his hands on the desk, his face suffused with the ruddy glow of his hypertension.

  Way to go, skipper, I thought.

  Most people in prison deserve to be there. Old-time recidivists who are down on a bad beef will usually admit they're guilty of other crimes, perhaps much worse ones than the crimes they're down for.

  There're exceptions, but not many. So their burden is of their own creation. But it is never an easy one, no matter how modern the facility or how vituperative the rhetoric about country club jails.

  You're a nineteen-year-old fish, uneducated, frightened, with an IQ of around 100. At the reception center you rebuff a trusty wolf who works in records and wants to introduce you to jailhouse romance, so the trusty makes sure you go up the road with a bad jacket (the word is out, you snitched off a solid con and caused him to lose his good-time).

  You just hit main pop and you're already jammed up, worried about the shank in the chow line, the Molotov cocktail shattered inside your cell, the whispered threat in the soybean field about the experience awaiting you in the shower that night.

  So you make a conscious choice to survive and find a benefactor, "an old man," and become a full-time punk, one step above the yard bitches. You mule blues, prune-o, and Afghan skunk for the big stripes; inside a metal toolshed that aches with heat, you participate in the savaging of another fish, who for just a moment reminds you of someone you used to know.

  Then a day comes when you think you can get free. You're mainline now, two years down with a jacket full of goodtime. You hear morning birdsong that you didn't notice before; you allow your mind to linger on the outside, the face of a girl in a small town, a job in a piney woods timber mill that smells of rosin and hot oil on a ripsaw, an ordinary day not governed by fear.

  That's when you tell your benefactor thanks for all his help. He'll understand. Your next time up before the board, you've got a real chance of entering the world again. Why blow it now?

  That night you walk into the shower by yourself. A man who had never even glanced at you before, a big stripe, hare-lipped, flat-nosed, his naked torso rife with a raw smell like a freshly uprooted cypress, clenches your skull in his fingers, draws you into his breath, squeezes until the cracking sound stops and you hear the words that he utters with a lover's trembling fondness an inch from your mouth: I'm gonna take your eyes out with a spoon.

  It was late afternoon when the gunbull drove me in his pickup down to the Mississippi levee, where Aaron Crown, his face as heated as a baked apple under a snap-brim cap, was harrowing an open field, the tractor's engine running full bore, grinding the sun-hardened rows into loam, twisting the tractor's wheel back through the haze of cinnamon-colored dust, reslicing the already churned soil as though his work were an excuse to avenge himself and his kind upon the earth.

  At the edge of the field, by a grove of willows, four black inmates, stripped to the waist, were heaping dead tree branches on a fire.

  "Y'all ought to have Aaron in isolation, Cap," I said.

  He cut the ignition and spit tobacco juice out the window.

  "When he asks," he replied.

  "He won't."

  "Then that's his goddamn ass."

  The captain walked partway out in the field on his cane and raised the hook and held it motionless in the air. Aaron squinted out of the dust and heat and exhaust fumes, then eased the throttle back without killing the engine, as though he could not will himself to separate entirely from the mechanical power that had throbbed between his thighs all day.

  Aaron walked toward us, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief, past the group of blacks burning field trash. Their eyes never saw him; their closed circle of conversation never missed a beat.

  He stood by the truck, his body framed by the sun that hung in a liquid yellow orb over the Mississippi levee.

  "Yes, sir?" he said to the captain.

  "Water it and piss it, Crown," the captain said. He limped on his cane to the shade of a gum tree and lit his pipe, turned his face into the breeze off the river.

  "I understand you're having some trouble," I said.

  "You ain't heered me say it."

  He walked back to the watercooler belted with bungee cord to the wall of the pickup bed. He filled a paper cup from the cooler and drank it, his gaze fixed on the field, the dust devils swirling in the wind.

  "Is it the BGLA?" I asked.

  "I don't keep up with colored men's organizations."

  "I don't know if you're innocent or guilty, Aaron. But up there at Point Lookout, the prison cemetery is full of men who had your kind of attitude."

  "That levee yonder's got dead men in it, too. It's the way it is." He wadded up the paper cup by his side, kneaded it in his hand, a piece of cartilage working against his jawbone.

  "I'm going to talk to a civil rights lawyer I know in Baton Rouge. He's a black man, though. Is that going to be a problem?"

  "I don't give a shit what he is. I done tole you, I got no complaint, long as I ain't got to cell with one of them."

  "They'll eat you alive, partner."

  He stepped toward me, his wrists seeming to strain against invisible wires at his sides.

  "A man's got his own rules. I ain't ask for nothing except out. . . Goddamn it,
you tell my daughter she ain't to worry," he said, his eyes rimming with water. The top of his denim shirt was splayed tightly against his chest. He breathed through his mouth, his fists gathered into impotent rocks, his face dilated with the words his throat couldn't form.

  I got back home at dark, then I had to go out again, this time with Helen Soileau to a clapboard nightclub on a back road to investigate a missing person's report.