DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  That night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his conception of America.

  He knew how to turn into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.

  With luck he would always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst, like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies thundered past it.

  That's the way it went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle, with leather sling and cloth bandoliers, propped in the wire like a monument to his own denouement.

  Even in my sleep I knew the dream was not about Vietnam.

  The next day I called Angola and talked to an assistant warden. Aaron Crown was in an isolation unit, under twenty-three-hour lockdown. He had just been arraigned on two counts of murder.

  "You're talking about first-degree murder? The man was attacked," I said.

  "Stuffing somebody upside down in a barrel full of oil and clamping down the top isn't exactly the system's idea of self-defense," he replied.

  I called Buford LaRose's campaign office in New Iberia and was told he was giving a speech to a convention of land developers in Baton Rouge at noon.

  I took the four-lane into Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya swamp. The cypress and willows were thick and pale green on each side of the elevated highway, the bays wrinkled with wind in the sunlight. Then the highway crossed through meadowland and woods full of palmettos, and up ahead I saw the Mississippi bridge and the outline of the capitol building and the adjacent hotel where Buford was speaking.

  He knew his audience. He was genteel and erudite, but he was clearly one of them, respectful of the meretricious enterprises they served and the illusions that brought them together. They shook his hand after his speech and touched him warmly on the shoulders, as if they drew power from his legendary football career, the radiant health and good looks that seemed to define his future.

  At the head table, behind a crystal bowl filled with floating camellias, I saw Karyn LaRose watching me.

  The dining room was almost empty when Buford chose to recognize me.

  "Am I under arrest?"

  "Just one question: Why did Crown leave his rifle behind?"

  "A half dozen reasons."

  "I've been through your book with a garden rake. You never deal with it."

  "Try he panicked and ran."

  "It was the middle of the night. No one else was around."

  "People tend to do irrational things when they're killing other people."

  The waiters were clearing the tables and the last emissary from the world of Walmart had said his farewell and gone out the door.

  "Take a ride up to Angola with me and confront Crown," I said.

  He surprised me. I saw him actually think about it. Then the moment went out of his eyes. Karyn got up from her chair and came around the table. She wore a pink suit with a corsage pinned above the breast.

  "Crown might get a death sentence for killing those two inmates," I said, looking back at Buford.

  "Anything's possible," he replied.

  "That's it? A guy you helped put in prison, maybe unjustly, ends up injected, that's just the breaks?"

  "Maybe he's a violent, hateful man who's getting just what he deserves."

  I started to walk away. Then I turned.

  "I'm going to scramble your eggs," I said.

  I was so angry I walked the wrong way in the corridor and went outside into the wrong parking lot. When I realized my mistake I went back through the corridor toward the lobby. I passed the dining room, then a short hallway that led back to a service elevator. Buford was leaning against the wall by the elevator door, his face ashen, his wife supporting him by one arm.

  "What happened?" I said.

  The elevator door opened.

  "Help me get him up to our room," Karyn said.

  "I think he needs an ambulance."

  "No! We have our own physician here. Dave, help me, please. I can't hold him up."

  I took his other arm and we entered the elevator. Buford propped the heel of his hand against the support rail on the back wall, pulled his collar loose with his fingers, and took a deep breath.

  "I did a five-minute mile this morning. How about that?" he said, a smile breaking on his mouth.

  "You better ease up, partner," I said.

  "I just need to lie down. One hour's sleep and I'm fine."

  I looked at Karyn's face. It was composed now, the agenda, whatever it was, temporarily back in place.

  We walked Buford down to a suite on the top floor and put him in bed and closed the door behind us.

  "He's talking to a state police convention tonight," Karyn said, as though offering an explanation for the last few minutes. Through the full-glass windows in the living room you could see the capitol building, the parks and boulevards and trees in the center of the city, the wide sweep of the Mississippi River, the wetlands to the west, all the lovely urban and rural ambiance that came with political power in Louisiana.

  "Is Buford on uppers?" I asked.

  "No. It's . . . He has a prescription. He gets overwrought sometimes."

  "You'd better get him some help, Karyn."

  I walked through the foyer to the door.

  "You're going?" she said.

  She stood inches from me, her face turned up into mine. The exertion of getting Buford into the room had caused her to perspire, and her platinum hair and tanned skin took on a dull sheen in the overhead light. I could smell her perfume in the enclosure, the heat from her body. She leaned her forehead into my chest and placed her hands lightly on my arms.

  "Dave, it wasn't just the alcohol, was it? You liked me, didn't you?"

  She tapped my hips with her small fists, twisted her forehead back and forth on my chest as though an unspoken conclusion about her life was trying to break from her throat.

  I put one hand on her arm, then felt behind me for the elongated door handle. It was locked in place, rigid across the sweating cup of my palm.

  CHAPTER 9

  A day later Clete Purcel's chartreuse Cadillac convertible, the top down, pulled up in front of the sheriff's department with Mingo Bloomberg in the passenger's seat. Clete and Mingo came up the walk, through the waiting room, and into my office. Mingo stood in front of my desk in white slacks and a lemon yellow shirt with French cuffs. He rotated his neck, as though his collar were too tight, then put a breath mint in his mouth.

  "My lawyer's getting me early arraignment and recognizance. I'm here as a friend of the court, so you got questions, let's do it now, okay?" he said. He snapped the mint in his molars.

  "Mingo, I don't think that's the way to start out the day here," Clete said.

  "What's going on, Clete?" I said.

  Clete stepped out into the hall and waited for me. I closed the door behind me.

  "Short Boy Jerry gave me two hundred bucks to deliver the freight. Don't let Mingo take you over the hurdles. Jerry Joe and NOPD both go
t their foot on his chain," he said.

  I opened the door and went back in.

  "How you feel, Mingo?" I said.

  "My car was boosted. I didn't drown a black girl. So I feel okay."

  "You a stand-up guy?" I said.

  "What's that mean?"

  "Jerry Ace is giving us an anchovy so we don't come back for the main meal. You comfortable with that, Mingo? You like being an hors d'oeuvre?" I said.

  "What I don't like is being in New Orleans with a target painted on my back. I'm talking about the cops in the First District who maybe stomped a guy's hair all over the cement . . . I got to use the John. Purcel wouldn't stop the car."

  He looked out the glass partition, then saw the face looking back at him.

  "Hey, keep her away from me," he said.

  "You don't like Detective Soileau?" I said.

  "She's a muff-diver. I told her over the phone, she ought to get herself a rubber schlong so she can whip it around and spray trees or whatever she wants till she gets it out of her system."

  Helen was coming through the door now. I put my hand on her shoulder and walked her back into the corridor.

  "Jerry Joe Plumb made him surrender," I said.

  "Why?" she said, her eyes still fastened on Mingo.

  "He's tied up somehow with Buford LaRose and doesn't want us in his face. Mingo says he's getting out on his own recognizance. I think he's going to head for our witnesses."

  "Like hell he is. Has he been Mirandized?"

  "Not yet."

  She opened the door so abruptly the glass rattled in the frame.

  A half hour later she called me from the jail.

  "Guess what? Shithead attacked me. I'll have the paperwork ready for the court in the morning," she said.

  "Where is he?"

  "Iberia General. He fell down a stairs. He also needed twelve stitches where I hit him with a baton. Forget recognizance, baby cakes. He's going to be with us awhile."

  "Helen?"

  "The paperwork is going to look fine. I went to Catholic school. I have beautiful penmanship."

  Clete and I ate lunch at an outdoor barbecue stand run by a black man in a grove of oak trees. The plank table felt cool in the shade, and you could smell the wet odor of green cordwood stacked under a tarp next to the stand.

  "Because I was up early anyway, I happened to turn on the TV and catch 'Breakfast Edition,' you know, the local morning show in New Orleans," he said. His eyes stayed on my face. "What the hell you doing, Streak?"

  "Aaron Crown bothers me."

  "You went on television, Dave, with this Hollywood character, what's-his-name, Felton, whatever."

  "I was taped here while he interviewed me on the phone, then it was spliced into the show."

  "Forget the technical tour. Why don't you resign your job while you're at it? What's your boss have to say?"

  "I don't think he's heard about it yet."

  "You don't take police business to civilians, big mon. To begin with, they don't care about it. They'll leave you hanging in the breeze, then your own people rat-fuck you as a snitch."

  "Maybe that's the way it's supposed to shake out," I said.

  He drank from a bottle of Dixie beer, one eye squinting over the bottle at me. "Something else is involved here, mon," he said.

  "Don't make it a big deal, Clete."

  "It's the broad, isn't it?" he said.

  "No."

  "You got into the horizontal bop once with her and you're worried you're going to do it again. So you got rid of temptation with a baseball bat. In the meantime maybe you just splashed your career into the bowl . . . Wait a minute, you didn't pork her again, did you?"

  "No . . . Will you stop talking like that?"

  "Dave, rich guys don't marry mud women from New Guinea. She's one hot-ass piece of work. We all got human weaknesses, noble mon. All I got to do is see her on TV and my Johnson starts barking."

  "You were a fugitive on a homicide warrant," I said. "The victim was a psychopath, and his death was a mistake, but the point is you killed him. What if you hadn't beat it? What if you were put away for life unjustly?"

  He wiped a smear of barbecue sauce off his palm with a napkin, looked out at the sunlight on the street.

  "This guy Crown must mean a lot to you ... I think I'm going to Red's in Lafayette, take a steam, start the day over again," he said.

  An hour later the sheriff buzzed my extension and asked me to walk down to his office. By now I was sure he had heard about my appearance on "Morning Edition," and all the way down the corridor I tried to construct a defense for conduct that, in police work, was traditionally considered indefensible. When I opened the door he was staring at a sheet of lined notebook paper in his hand, rubbing his temple with one finger. His Venetian blinds were closed, and his windowsill was green with plants.

  "Why is everything around here hard? Why can't we just take care of the problems in Iberia Parish? Can you explain that to me?" he said.

  "If you're talking about my being on 'Morning Edition,' I stand behind what I said, Sheriff. Aaron Crown didn't have motivation. I think Buford LaRose is building a political career on another man's broken back."

  "You were on 'Morning Edition'?"

  The room was silent. He opened the blinds, and an eye-watering light fell through the window.

  "Maybe I should explain," I said.

  "I'd appreciate that."

  When I finished he picked up the sheet of notebook paper and looked at it again.

  "I wish you hadn't done that," he said.

  "I'm sorry you feel that way."

  "You don't understand. I wanted to believe the Mexican with the machete was simply a deranged man, not an assassin. I wanted to believe he had no connection with the Crown business."

  "I'm not with you."

  "I don't want to see you at risk, for God's sake. We got two calls from Mexico this morning, one from a priest in some shithole down in the interior, the other from a Mexican drug agent who says he's worked with the DEA in El Paso . . . The guy with the spiderweb tattoos, the lunatic, some rurales popped holes all over him. He's dying and he says you will too . . . He says 'for the bugarron.' What's a bugarron?"

  "I don't know."

  "There's a storm down there. I got cut off before I could make sense out of this drug agent. . . Get a flight this afternoon. Take Helen with you. Americans with no backup tend to have problems down there."

  "We have money for this?"

  "Bring me a sombrero."

  CHAPTER 10

  We flew into El Paso late that night. By dawn of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved and had been up all night.

  "The guy try to kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the parking lot.

  "That's right," I said.

  "I wouldn't want a guy like that after me. Es indio, man, know what I mean? Guy like that will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen. "Gringita, you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along the road."

  He looked indolently at the flat stare in her face.

  "What did you call her?" I asked.

  "Maybe you all didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come down with one headlight."

  The sun rose in an orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of arroyos where the sandstone walls were scorched by grass fires, then we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a h
illside.

  "You looking at where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a tunnel there. The train's still inside."

  "Inside?" I said.

  "Pancho Villa blew the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."