DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "No. He ain't the reason I called you. It's that big black man. He ain't up to no good."

  "Which black man?"

  "The biggest one I ever seen around here."

  "I'll be down in a minute."

  I went out on the gallery. Bootsie still sat in the swing, pushing it back and forth with one foot.

  "I need to go down to the dock for a few minutes," I said.

  "Right."

  "Boots, you've got to cut me some slack."

  "You don't see it."

  "What?"

  "You hate the LaRoses and what they stand for. That's the power they have over you."

  "I'm a police officer. They're corrupt."

  "You say they are. Nobody else does." She went inside. The swing twisted emptily on its chains under the bug light.

  I walked down the slope through the trees to the dock. The string of lights was turned on over the dock, and you could see bream night feeding off the insects that fell into the water. Batist was cleaning out the coffee urn inside the bait shop.

  "Tell me about the black guy," I said.

  Batist looked up from his work and studied my face. His head was titled, one eyebrow arched.

  "What you mad about?" he asked.

  "Nothing."

  "I can see that, all right. . . That movie fella rented a boat and took pictures up and down the bayou. That's when I first seen this black man up the road in a pickup truck, watching the bayou out the window. Later he come on in and axed if a movie's getting made here.

  "I say that's what it looks like. He axed me if it's a movie about this white man broke out of Angola, the one killed that black civil rights man in Baton Rouge a long time ago. When I tole him I don't know, he said he's got a story he can give this movie fella, if he gets any money for it, he's gonna give me some, but he's got to find out where the movie man's staying at first.

  "I said, 'What you want here?'

  "He had on this straw hat, with a colored band around it. He took it off and the side of his head was shaved down to the scalp. He goes, 'I'm so strong I got muscles in my shit, old man. I'd watch what I say.' All the time smiling with gold all over his teet'.

  "I go, 'I'm fixing to clean up. You want to buy somet'ing?'

  "Dave, this man's arms was big as my thigh. His shoulders touched both sides of that do' when he come in. He goes, 'You sure that movie fella ain't tole you where he stay at?'

  "I go, 'It ain't my bidness. Ain't nobody else's here, either.'

  "He kept looking at me, grinning, messing with the salt shaker on top of the counter, like he was fixing to do somet'ing.

  "So I said, 'Nigger, don't prove your mama raised a fool.'

  "He laughed and picked up a ham sandwich and crumpled up a five-dollar bill and t'rew it on the counter and walked out. Just like that. Man didn't no more care if I insulted him than a mosquito was flying round his head."

  "Call me if you see him again. Don't mess with him."

  "Who he is, Dave?"

  "He sounds like a guy named Mookie Zerrang. He's a killer, Batist."

  He started to wipe down the counter, then flipped his rag into the bucket.

  "They ain't nothing for it, is they?" he said.

  "Beg your pardon?"

  "They out there, they in here. Don't nobody listen to me," he said, and waved his arm toward the screened windows, the floodlighted bayou, the black wall of shadows on the far bank. "It ain't never gonna be like it use to. What for we brought all this here, Dave?"

  He turned his back to me and began dropping the board shutters on the windows and latching them from the inside.

  CHAPTER 19

  early saturday morning I made coffee and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries in the bait shop and ate breakfast by myself at the counter and watched the sun rise over the swamp. It had rained, then cleared during the night, and the bayou was yellow with mud and the dock slick with rainwater. A week ago Jerry Joe's vending machine company had delivered a working replica of a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox while I wasn't in the shop; it sat squat and heavy in the corner, its plastic casing marbled with orange and red and purple light, the rows of 45 rpm records arrayed in a shiny black semicircle inside the viewing glass. I had resolved to have Jerry Joe's people remove it.

  I still hadn't made the phone call.

  I punched Jimmy Clanton's "Just a Dream," Harry Choates's 1946 recording of "La Jolie Blon," Nathan Abshire's "Pine Grove Blues."

  Their voices and music were out of another era, one that we thought would never end. But it did, incrementally, in ways that seemed inconsequential at the time, like the unexpected arrival at the front gate of a sun-browned oil lease man in khaki work clothes who seemed little different from the rest of us.

  I unplugged the jukebox from the wall. The plastic went dead and crackled like burning cellophane in the silence of the room.

  Then I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana library in Lafayette.

  Buford's bibliography was impressive. He had published historical essays on the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League and the violent insurrection they had led against the federal occupation after the War Between the States. The articles were written in the neutral and abstruse language of academic journals, but his sentiments were not well disguised: the night riders who had lynched and burned had their roles forced upon them.

  His other articles were in psychological and medical journals. They seemed to be diverse, with no common thread, dealing with various kinds of phobias and depression as well as hate groups that could not tolerate a pluralistic society.

  But in the last five years he seemed to have changed his professional focus and begun writing about the science of psychopharma-cology and its use in the cure of alcoholics.

  I returned the magazines and journals to the reference desk and was about to leave. But it wasn't quite yet noon, and telling myself I had nothing else to do, I asked the librarian for the student yearbooks from the early 1970s, the approximate span when Karyn LaRose attended U.S.L.

  She hadn't been born into Buford's LaRose's world. Her father had been a hard-working and likable man who supplied gumballs and novelties, such as plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails, for dimestore vending machines. The family lived in a small frame house on the old St. Martinville road, and the paintless and desiccated garage that fronted the property was rimmed along the base with a rainbow of color from the gumballs that had rotted inside and leaked through the floor. If you asked Karyn what her father did for a living, she always replied that he was in the retail supply business.

  Most of us who attended U.S.L. came from blue-collar, French-speaking families or could not afford to attend L.S.U. or Tulane. Most of us commuted from outlying parishes, and as a result the campus was empty and quiet and devoid of most social life on the weekends.

  But not for Karyn. She made the best of her situation, and her name and photograph appeared again and again in the yearbooks that covered her four years at U.S.L. She made the women's tennis team and belonged to a sorority and the honor society; she was a maid of honor to the homecoming queen one year, and homecoming queen the next. In her photographs her face looked modest and radiant, like that of a person who saw only goodness and promise in the world.

  I was almost ready to close the last yearbook and return the stack to the reference desk when I looked again at a group photograph taken in front of Karyn's sorority house, then scanned the names in the cutline.

  The coed on the end of the row, standing next to Karyn, was Persephone Giacano. Both of them were smiling, their shoulders and the backs of their wrists touching.

  I began to look for Persephone's name in other yearbooks. I didn't find it. It was as though she had appeared for one group photograph in front of the sorority house, then disappeared from campus life.

  The administration building was still open. I used the librarian's phone and called the registrar's office.

  "We have a Privacy Act, you know?" the woman
who answered said.

  "I just want to know which years she was here," I said.

  "You're a police officer?"

  "That's correct."

  I heard her tapping on some computer keys.

  "Nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-three," she said.

  "She dropped out or she transferred to another school?" I asked.

  She was quiet a moment. The she said, "If I were you, I'd look through some of the campus newspapers for that period. Who knows what you might find?"

  It took a while. The story was brief, no more than four column inches with a thin caption on page three of a late spring 1973 issue of the Vermilion, written in the laconic style of an administrative press handout that does not want to dwell overly long on a university scandal.

  A half dozen students had been expelled for stealing tests from the science building. The article stated the tests had been taken from a file cabinet, but the theft had been discovered before the examinations had been given, and the professors whose exams would have been compromised had all been notified.

  At the very bottom of the article was the line, A seventh U.S.L. student, Persephone Giacano, voluntarily withdrew from the university before charges were filed against her.

  I called the registrar's office again, and the same woman answered.

  "Can I look at an old transcript?" I asked. "You send those out upon request, anyway, don't you?"

  "Why don't you come over here and introduce yourself? You sound like such an interesting person," she answered.

  I walked across the lawn and through the brick archways to the registrar's office and stood at the counter until an elderly, robin-breasted lady with blue hair waited on me. I opened my badge.

  "My, you're exactly what you say you are," she said.

  "Does everyone get this treatment?"

  "We save it for just a special few."

  I wrote Karyn's maiden name on a scratch pad and slid it across the counter to the woman. She looked at it a long time. The front office area was empty.

  "It's important in ways that are probably better left unsaid," I said.

  "Why don't you walk back here?" she answered.

  I stood behind her chair while she tapped on the computer's keyboard. Then I saw Karyn's transcript pop up on the blue screen. "She was here four years and graduated in 1974. See," the woman said, and slowly rolled Karyn's academic credits down the screen, shifting in her chair so I could have a clear view.

  Karyn had been a liberal arts major and had made almost straight A's in the humanities. But when an accounting class, or a zoology or algebra class rolled across the screen, the grades dropped to C's, or Ws for "Withdrew."

  "Could you drop it back to the spring of 1973?" I asked.

  The woman in the chair hesitated, then tapped the "page up" button. She waited only a few seconds before shutting down the screen. But it was long enough.

  Karyn had made A's in biology and chemistry the same semester that Persephone Giacano had been forced to leave the university.

  Karyn was nobody's fall partner.

  I parked my truck in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar and entered it through the back door. The only light came from the neon beer signs on the wall and the television set that was tuned to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech game. The air was thick with a smell like unwashed hair and old shoes and sweat and synthetic wine.

  Sabelle was mopping out her tiny office in back.

  "I need Lonnie Felton's address," I said.

  She stuck her mop in the pail and took a business card out of her desk drawer.

  "He rented a condo over the river. Good life, huh?" she said. She resumed her work, her back to me, the exposed muscles in her waist rolling with each motion of her arms.

  "Aaron was here, wasn't he?" I said.

  "What makes you think that?" she answered, her voice flat.

  "He was carrying the thirty-two I saw in that shoebox full of medals you keep behind the bar."

  She stopped mopping and straightened up. Her head was tilted to one side.

  "You didn't know that?" I said.

  She went out to the bar and returned with the shoebox, slipped the rubber band off the top, and poured the collection of rings and watches and pocketknives and military decorations onto the desk.

  Her gaze was turned inward, as though she were reviewing a film-strip. I could hear her breathing through her nose in the silence. Her fingernails were curled into the heels of her hands.

  "I guess I majored in being anybody's fuck," she said.

  "You don't have to be."

  She took a roll of breath mints out of her blue jeans and put one in her mouth with her thumb. "Lonnie was here. In the middle of the night," she said. "He interviewed Daddy right out there at the bar. I went out to get food. When I came back, only Lonnie was here."

  "Felton knew your father had the gun?"

  "You tell me," she said. The skin of her face was shiny and tight against the bone, her eyes swimming with an old knowledge about the nature of susceptibility and betrayal.

  I found Lonnie Felton by the swimming pool, in the courtyard of the white brick condominium he had rented above the Vermilion River. The surface of the water was glazed with a slick of suntan lotion and the sunlight that filtered through the moss in the trees overhead. Lonnie Felton lay on a bright yellow double-size plastic lounge chair, with a redheaded girl of eighteen or nineteen beside him. They both wore dark glasses and wet swimsuits, and their bodies looked hard and brown and prickled with cold. Lonnie Felton took a sip from a collins glass and smiled at me, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, his lips spreading back from his teeth. His girlfriend snuggled closer to his side, her knees and elbows drawn up tightly against him.

  "You know what aiding and abetting is?" I asked.

  "You bet."

  "I can hang it on you."

  He smiled again. His lips were flat and thin against his teeth, his sex sculpted against his swimsuit. "The Napoleonic Code supersedes the First Amendment?" he said.

  "I think Mookie Zerrang was at my bait shop yesterday. He wanted to know where you lived."

  "Who?"

  "The black guy who murdered your scriptwriter."

  "Oh yeah. Well, keep me informed, will you?"

  "It's cold, Lonnie. I want to go inside," the girl next to him said. She teased the elastic band on his trunks with the tips of her fingers.

  "I've got to admire your Kool-Aid. I'd be worried if a guy like that was looking for me," I said.

  "Let me lay it out for you. Dwayne Parsons, that's the great writer we're talking about here, was an over-the-hill degenerate who factored himself into the deal because he filmed some friends doing some nasty things between the sheets. What I'm saying here is, he had a sick karma and it caught up with him. Look, if this black guy comes here to do me, you know what I'm going to tell him? 'Thanks for not coming sooner. Thanks for letting me have the life I've lived.' I don't argue with my fate, Jack. It's that simple."

  "I have a feeling he won't be listening."

  A cascade of tiny yellow and scarlet leaves tumbled out of the trees into the swimming pool. The redheaded girl rubbed her face against Lonnie Felton's chest and lay her forearm across his loins.

  "You don't like us very much, do you?" he said.

  "Us?"

  "What you probably call movie people."

  "Have a good day, Mr. Felton. Don't let them get behind you."

  "What?"

  "Go to more movies. Watch a rerun of Platoon sometime."

  I drove along the river and caught the four-lane into Broussard, then took the old highway toward Cade and Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The highway was littered with crushed stalks of sugarcane that had fallen off the wagons on their way to the mill, and dust devils spun out of the bare and harrowed fields and in the distance I could see egrets rise like a scattering of white rose petals above a windbreak of poplar trees.

  I had lied to Lonnie Felton. It was doubtful that I could make a
n aiding and abetting charge against him stick. But that might turn out to be the best luck he could have ever had, I thought.

  I turned on the radio and listened to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech game the rest of the way home.

  Bootsie was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a purple shirt with green and red flowers printed on it. The tips of her hair were gold in the light through the screen.