DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "You see that power pole there? There's a light on it. It comes on every night," I said.

  The diver walked out of the shallows next to the overturned Lincoln as the winch slid it up on the mud bank. All the windows were closed, and the interior was filled from the roof to the floor with brown water. Then, through the passenger's side, we saw a brief pink-white flash against the glass, like a molting fish brushing against the side of a dirty aquarium.

  The diver tried to open the door, but it was wedged into the mud. He got a two-handed ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a brick, and smashed in the passenger window.

  The water burst through the folded glass, peppering the levee with crawfish, leeches, a nest of ribbon-thin cottonmouths that danced in the grass as though their backs were broken. But those were not the images that defined the moment.

  A woman's hand, then arm, extended itself in the rushing stream, as though the person belted to the seat inside were pointing casually to an object in the grass. The fingers were ringed with costume jewelry, the nails painted with purple polish, the skin eaten by a disease that had robbed the tissue of its color.

  I squatted down next to the man who had seen the accident and extended my business card on two fingers.

  "He didn't try to pull her out. He didn't call for help. He let her drown, alone in the darkness. Don't let him get away with this, podna," I said.

  Clete called the bait shop Saturday morning, just as I was laying out a tray of chickens and links on the pit for our midday fishermen.

  "You got a boat for rent?" he asked.

  "Sure."

  "Can you rent the guy with me some gear?"

  "I have a rod he can borrow."

  "It's a fine day for it, all right."

  "Where are you?"

  "Right up the road at the little grocery store. The guy's sitting out in my car. But he doesn't like to go where he's not invited, know what I'm saying, Dave? You want Mingo? Anytime I got to run down a skip, all I got to do is talk to the guy in my car. In this case, he feels a personal responsibility. Plus, y'all go back, right?"

  "Clete, you didn't bring Jerry Joe Plumb here?" I said.

  He was notorious by the time he was expelled from high school his senior year—a kid who'd grin just before he hit you, a bouree player who won high stakes from grown men at the saloon downtown, the best dancer in three parishes, the hustler who cast aluminum replicas of brass knuckles in the metal shop foundry and sold them for one dollar apiece with the ragged edges unbuffed so they could stencil daisy chains of red flowers on an adversary's face.

  But all that happened after Jerry Joe's mother died his sophomore year. My memory was of a different boy, from a different, earlier time.

  In elementary school we heard his father had been killed at Wake Island, but no one was really sure. Jerry Joe was one of those boys who came to town and left, entered and withdrew from school as his mother found work wherever she could. They used to live in a shack on the edge of a brickyard in Lafayette, then for several years in a trailer behind a welding shop south of New Iberia. On Sundays and the first Fridays of the month we would see him and his mother walking long distances to church, in both freezing weather and on one-hundred-degree afternoons. She was a pale woman, with a pinched and fearful light in her face, and she made him walk on the inside, as though the passing traffic were about to bolt across the curb and kill them both.

  For a time his mother and mine worked together in a laundry, and Jerry Joe would come home from school with me and play until my mother and his came down the dirt road in my father's lopsided pickup. We owned a hand-crank phonograph, and Jerry Joe would root in a dusty pile of 78's and pull out the old scratched recordings of the Hackberry Ramblers and Iry LeJeune and listen to them over and over again, dancing with himself, smiling elfishly, his shoulders and arms cocked like a miniature prizefighter's.

  One day after New Year's my father came back unexpectedly from offshore, where he worked as a derrick man, up on the monkey board, high above the drilling platform and the long roll of the Gulf. He'd been fired after arguing with the driller, and as he always did when he lost his job, he'd spent his drag-up check on presents for us and whiskey at Provost's Bar, as though new opportunity and prosperity were just around the corner.

  But Jerry Joe had never seen my father before and wasn't ready for him. My father stood silhouetted in the doorway, huge, grinning, irreverent, a man who fought in bars for fun, the black hair on his chest bursting out of the two flannel shirts he wore.

  "You dance pretty good. But you too skinny, you. We gone have to fatten you up. Y'all come see what I brung," he said.

  At the kitchen table, he began unloading a canvas drawstring bag that was filled with smoked ducks, pickled okra and green tomatoes, a fruit cake, strawberry preserves, a jar of cracklings, and bottle after long-necked bottle of Jax beer.

  "Your mama work at that laundry, too? . . . Then that's why you ain't eating right. You tell your mama like I tell his, the man own that place so tight he squeak when he walk," my father said. "Don't be looking at me like that, Davie. That man don't hire white people lessen he can treat them just like he do his colored."

  Jerry Joe went back in the living room and sat in a stuffed chair by himself for a long time. The pecan trees by the house clattered with ice in the failing light. Then he came back in the kitchen and told us he was sick. My father put a jar of preserves and two smoked ducks in a paper bag for him and stuck it under his arm and we drove him home in the dark.

  That night I couldn't find the hand crank to the phonograph, but I thought Jerry Joe had simply misplaced it. The next day I had an early lesson about the nature of buried anger and hurt pride in a child who had no one in whom he could confide. When the school bus stopped on the rock road where Jerry Joe lived, I saw a torn paper bag by the ditch, the dog-chewed remains of the smoked ducks, the strawberry preserves congealed on the edges of the shattered Mason jar.

  He never asked to come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.

  Clete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers, beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it. I said he walked down the dock. That's not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat spinning on his finger, his thighs flexing against his slacks, change and keys ringing in his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders as pronounced as oiled rope.

  "Comment la vie, Dave? You still sell those ham-and-egg sandwiches?" he said, and went through the screen door without waiting for an answer.

  "Why'd you do this, Clete?" I said.

  "There're worst guys in the life," he replied.

  "Which ones?"

  Jerry Joe bought a can of beer and a paper plate of sliced white boudin at the counter and sat at a table in back.

  "You're sure full of sunshine, Dave," he said.

  "I'm off the clock. If this is about Mingo, you should take it to the office," I said.

  He studied me. At the corner of his right eye was a coiled white scar. He speared a piece of boudin with a toothpick and put it in his mouth.

  "I'm bad for business here, I'm some kind of offensive presence?" he asked.

  "We're way down different roads, Jerry Joe."

  "Pull my jacket. Five busts, two convictions, both for operating illegal gambling equipment. This in a state that allows cock fighting . . . You got a jukebox here?"

  "No."

  "I heard about the drowned black girl. Mingo's dirty on this?"

  "That's the name on the warrant."

  "He says his car got boosted."

  "We've got two witnesses who can put him together with th
e car and the girl."

  "They gotta stand up, though. Right?" he asked.

  "Nobody had better give them reason not to."

  He pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand, leaned forward on his elbows, rolling the toothpick across his teeth. Under the bronze hair of his right forearm was a tattoo of a red parachute and the words 101st Airborne.

  "I hire guys like Mingo to avoid trouble, not to have it. But to give up one of my own people, even though maybe he's a piece of shit, I got to have . . . what's the term for it. . . compelling reasons, yeah, that's it," he said.

  "How does aiding and abetting sound, or conspiracy after the fact?"

  He scratched his face and glanced around the bait shop. His eyes crinkled at the corners. "You like my tattoo? Same outfit as Jimi Hendrix," he said.

  I pushed a napkin and a pencil stub toward him. "Write down an address, Jerry Joe. NOPD will pick him up. You won't be connected with it."

  "Why don't you get a jukebox? I'll have one of my vendors come by and put one in. You don't need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent," he said. "Hey, Dave, it's all gonna work out. It's a new day. I guarantee it. Don't get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff."

  "What?"

  But he drank his beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the Cadillac to wait for Clete.

  CHAPTER 8

  Monday morning, when I went into work, I walked past Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout on her mouth.

  "There's a guy talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave," Wally, the dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.

  I looked through the doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a white-haired man.

  "That gentleman there?" I asked Wally.

  "Let's see, we got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the Johns, and the professor. Let me know which one you t'ink, Dave." His face beamed at his own humor.

  Clay Mason, wearing a brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny feet, sat in a folding chair with a high-domed pearl Stetson on his crossed knee.

  I was prepared to dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn that psychedelic harlequins don't survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

  "Could I help you, sir?" I asked.

  "Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes," he said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow and was struck by his fragility, the lightness of his bones.

  A moment later I closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black trusties mowing the lawn.

  "Yes, sir?" I said.

  "I've interposed myself in your situation. I hope you won't take offense," he said.

  "Are we talking about the LaRoses?" I tried to smile when I said it.

  "She's contrite about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu of that, however, I'm passing on an apology for her." The accent was soft, deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

  "Karyn lied, Dr. Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don't get absolution by sending a surrogate to confession."

  "That's damn well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?"

  "No."

  "Your feelings are your feelings, sir. I wouldn't intrude upon them." His gaze went out the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. "It never really changes, does it?"

  "Sir?"

  "The black men in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race."

  "One of those guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife's face with a string knife."

  "Then they're a rough pair and probably got what's coming to them," he said, and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.

  I walked him to the back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses. Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

  "Listen to it rumble, by God. It's a magic land. There's a thunder of calvary in every electric storm," he said.

  I asked a deputy to walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

  "Don't be too hard on the LaRoses," Mason said as the deputy took his arm. "They put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the kingdom of the dead. Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion."

  Keep your eye on this one, I thought.

  Karyn leaned forward and started her car engine, wetting her mouth as she might a ripe cherry.

  Helen Soileau walked into my office that afternoon, anger in her eyes.

  "Pick up on my extension," she said.

  "What's going on?"

  "Mingo Bloomberg. Wally put him through to me by mistake."

  I punched the lighted button and placed the receiver to my ear. "Where are you, Mingo?" I said.

  "You got Short Boy Jerry to jam me up," he said.

  "Wrong."

  "Don't tell me that. The bondsman pulled my bail. I got that material witness beef in my face again." A streetcar clanged in the background, vibrated and squealed on the tracks.

  "What do you want?" I said.

  "Something to come in."

  "Sorry."

  "I don't like being made everybody's fuck."

  "You let that girl drown. You're calling the wrong people for sympathy."

  "She wanted some ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and the car's gone."

  I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  "I delivered money to Buford LaRose's house," he said.

  "How much?"

  "How do I know? It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone books."

  "If that's all you're offering, you're up Shit's Creek."

  "The guy gonna be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don't make your berries tingle?"

  "We don't monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you're serious. Right now I'm busy," I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.

  "You going to leave him out there?" she said.

  "It's us or City Prison in New Orleans. I think he'll turn himself in to us, then try to get to our witnesses."

  "I hope so. Yes, indeedy."

  "What'd he say to you?"

  "Oh, he and I will have a talk about it sometime." She opened a book that was on my desk. "Why you reading Greek mythology?"

  "That fellow Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice . . . They're characters out of Greek legend," I said. She flipped through several pages in the book, then looked at me again.

  "Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife. But he couldn't pull it off. Hades got both of them."

  "Interesting stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes
down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction, anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this one."

  "Why would it be otherwise?"

  She leaned on the desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard against the cuffs of her sleeves.

  "Because you've got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.