DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "What are we talking about, then? I got it. It's not the house, it's me."

  "No one can accuse you of being a Rotarian."

  "I told you, my sheet's an embarrassment. I'm on a level with unlicensed church bingo."

  "You and some others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a cement mixer."

  "He was taking scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out."

  "Why are you buying property south of town?"

  He patted his palm on top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside the jukebox. "Maybe I want out. Maybe I'm tired of New Orleans, being in the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I'm taking it."

  "I'm not with you."

  "Buford LaRose is good for business . . . Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave . . . What if these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than it already is."

  "A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"

  Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

  "Number one, Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home . . . Listen, to that. . . 'La Jolie Blon'. . . Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it."

  "Where'd the hit come from?"

  "I don't know. That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."

  "How did you—"

  "You want to ask me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"

  He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.

  "You want a breadstick?" he asked.

  Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

  He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.

  "So why are we holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?"

  "We're treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."

  "Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."

  "I'm sorry to hear you take that attitude."

  "This guy was born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is."

  "How about starting over, Kelso?"

  "He complains he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

  "I go, 'What black guy?'

  "He goes, 'How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'

  "I go, 'Your brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'

  "He goes, 'I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.'"

  "You've got him in isolation now?" I asked.

  "A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."

  Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse— clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.

  "Kelso says you're being a pain in the ass," I said.

  He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

  "Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.

  I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.

  "Did you hear me?" I said.

  "I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami's an open city. He's supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."

  "You're the hit?"

  He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.

  "I never broke no rules. It feels funny," he said.

  "Who's setting it up, Mingo?"

  "How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out."

  "You ever hear of a bugarron?" I asked.

  "No . . . Don't ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it." His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot, haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"

  "Some."

  "I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said . . . in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no good."

  "Yes?"

  "That never made sense to me before."

  That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose's house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.

  I didn't wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.

  "You recognize this man?" I asked.

  "No. Who is he, a convict?"

  "Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb."

  "Sorry. I don't know him."

  I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.

  "That was taken last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."

  "You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe's connect
ed to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."

  "It sure sounds innocent enough."

  "I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your moral perspective . . . Don't go yet. I want to show you something."

  He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.

  "Come on, Dave. You made a point of bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more minutes of your time," he said.

  The land sloped down through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French inscriptions worn into faint tracings.

  Buford pushed open the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.

  "My great-grandparents are in that crypt," he said. He rubbed his hand along the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was cracked across the center. "Can you recognize the flower? My great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White Camellia."

  "Your wife told me."

  "They weren't ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were wrong."

  "What's the point?"

  "I believe it's never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in some way."

  "You're going to do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?"

  "I'm doing it for my family. Is there something wrong with that?" he said. He continued to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. "Dave?"

  "I'd better be going," I said.

  He touched the front of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.

  "I was speaking to you about a subject that's very personal with me. You presume a great deal," he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes. "Are you hard of hearing?" He touched my chest again, this time harder.

  "Don't do that," I said.

  "Then answer me."

  "I don't think they were fine men."

  "Sir?"

  "Shakespeare says it in King Lear. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford."

  I walked out the gate and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.

  "That's the last time you'll turn your back on me, sir," he said.

  "Go to hell."

  His hands closed and opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.

  "You fucked my wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult my family. I don't know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property. But it won't happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave."

  He was breathing hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes, stayed a moment, then left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.

  The skin of my face felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like tiny pieces of glass.

  "You catch me off the clock and repeat what you just said . . . ," I began.

  "You're a violent, predictable man, the perfect advocate for Aaron Crown," he said, and walked through the pines toward the house. He flung the hackamore into a tree trunk.

  That night I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, then sat on the side of the bed, my thoughts like spiders crawling out of a paper bag I didn't know how to get rid of. A thick, low fog covered the swamp, and under the moon the dead cypress protruded like rotted pilings out of a white ocean.

  "What is it?" Bootsie said.

  "Buford LaRose."

  "This morning?"

  "I want to tear him up. I don't think I've ever felt like that toward anyone."

  "You've got to let it go, Dave."

  I rubbed my palms on my knees and let out my breath.

  "Why does he bother you so much?" she asked.

  "Because you never let another man talk to you like that."

  "People have said worst to you." She lay her hand on my arm. "Put the covers over you. It's cold."

  "I'm going to fix something to eat."

  "Is it because of his background?"

  "I don't know."

  She was quiet for a long time.

  "Say it, Boots."

  "Or is it Karyn?" she asked.

  I went into the kitchen by myself, poured a glass of milk, and stared out the window at my neighbor's pasture, where one of his mares was running full-out along the fence line, her breath blowing, her muscles working rhythmically, as though she were building a secret pleasure inside herself that was about to climax and burst.

  The next morning I parked my truck on Decatur Street, on the edge of the French Quarter, and walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and on up St. Ann to the tan stucco building with the arched entrance and brick courtyard where Clete Purcel kept his office. It had rained before dawn, and the air was cool and bright, and bougainvillea hung through the grill work on the balcony upstairs. I looked through his window and saw him reading from a manila folder on top of his desk, his shirt stretched tight across his back, his glasses as small as bifocals on his big face.

  I opened the door and stuck my head inside.

  "You still mad?" I said.

  "Hey, what's goin' on, big mon?"

  "I'll buy you a beignet," I said.

  He thought about it, made a rolling, popping motion with his fingers and hands, then followed me outside.

  "Just don't talk to me about Aaron Crown and Buford LaRose," he said.

  "I won't."

  "What are you doing in New Orleans?"

  "I need to check out Jimmy Ray Dixon again. His office says he's at his pool hall out by the Desire."

  He tilted his porkpie hat on his head, squinted at the sun above the rooftops.

  "Did you ever spit on baseballs when you pitched American Legion?" he said.

  We had beignets and coffee with hot milk at an outdoor table in the Cafe du Monde. Across the street, sidewalk artists were painting on easels by the iron fence that bordered the park, and you could hear boat horns out on the river, just the other side of the levee. I told him about Mingo Bloomberg's death.

  "It doesn't surprise me. I think it's what they all look for," he said.

  "What?"

  "The Big Exit. If they can't get somebody to do it for them, they do it themselves. Most of them would have been better off if their mothers had thrown them away and raised the afterbirth."

  "You want to take a ride?"

  "That neighborhood's a free-fire zone, Streak. Let Jimmy Ray slide. He's a walking ad for enlistment in the Klan."

  "See you later, then."

  "Oh, your ass," he said, and caught up with me on the sidewalk, pulling on his sports coat, a powdered beignet in his mouth.

  The pool room was six blocks from the Desire welfare project. The windows were barred, the walls built of cinder blocks and scrolled with spray-painted graffiti. I parked by the curb and stepped up on the sidewalk, unconsciously looked up and down the street.

  "We're way up the Mekong, Dave. Hang your buzzer out," Clete said.

  I took out my badge holder and hooked it through the front
of my belt, listened to somebody shatter a tight rack and slam the cue stick down on the table's edge, then walked through the entrance into the darkness inside.

  The low ceiling seemed to crush down on the pool shooters like a fist. The bar and the pool tables ran the length of the building, a tin-hooded lamp creating a pyramid of smoky light over each felt rectangle. No one looked directly at us; instead, our presence was noted almost by osmosis, the way schooled fish register and adjust to the proximity of a predator, except for one man, who came out of the rest room raking at his hair with a steel comb, glanced toward the front, then slammed out of a firedoor.