DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "What's going on, boss man?" she said, without turning around.

  I put my hand on her back.

  "There's an all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet in Lafayette for six-ninety-five," I said.

  "I already started something."

  "I used all the wrong words the last couple of days," I said.

  She rinsed a plate and set it in the rack. She gazed at a solitary mockingbird that stood on the redwood table.

  "There're some things a woman has a hard time accepting. It doesn't matter what caused them to happen," she said.

  She picked up another plate and rinsed it. I felt her weight lean forward, away from the touch of my hand.

  "You want to go to afternoon Mass?" I said.

  "I don't think I have time to change," she answered.

  That night I took Alafair and a friend of hers to a movie in New Iberia and for ice cream afterward. Later, I found things to do in the bait shop, even though the fishing season was almost over and few customers would be there in the morning. Through the black silhouette of trees up the slope, I could see the lighted gallery of our house, the darkened living room, Bootsie's shadow moving on the drawn shades in our bedroom.

  I called my A.A. sponsor, an ex-roughneck and barroom owner named Tee Neg, who'd had seven years sobriety when he walked into a bait and liquor store owned by a black man and had asked for a bucketful of shiners, then on an impulse, with no forethought other than his ongoing resentment over the fingers he'd pinched off on a drill pipe, had changed his order to a quart of whiskey and stayed drunk for the next five years. His next A.A. meeting was at Angola Prison.

  I told him about what had happened between me and Bootsie. I knew what was coming.

  "You took a drink over it?" he said.

  "No."

  "Hey, you ever get drunk while you was asleep?"

  "No."

  "Then go to bed. I'll talk to you in the morning, you." He hung up.

  After all the lights in the house went out, I walked up the slope and went inside and lay down on the living room couch in the dark.

  Wally, the dispatcher, called at one in the morning.

  "The St. Martin Parish sheriff's office is interviewing some hysterical kids at Henderson Swamp. I can't make sense out of it. You want to go up there?" he said.

  "Not really."

  "It sounds like Aaron Crown. That's where you think he's hid out at, right?"

  "What sounds like Aaron Crown?"

  "The one tore up these two people. They say the walls of the houseboat is painted with blood. The guy held the girl while he done the man, then he done it to the girl."

  "You're not making sense, Wally."

  "That's what I said. The deputy called it in didn't make no sense. So how about hauling your ass up there?"

  CHAPTER 20

  Sometimes the least reliable source in reconstructing a violent crime is the eyewitness to it. The blood veins dilate in the brain, the emotions short-circuit, memory shuts down and dulls the images that wish to disfigure the face of the human family.

  Seven emergency vehicles were parked along the Henderson levee when I got there. The moon was up and the water and the moss in the cypress were stained the color of pewter. A wood gangplank led from the levee through a stand of flooded willows to a large, motorized houseboat whose decks burned with the floodlights from a sheriff's boat moored next to it.

  The witnesses were an elderly man and his partially blind wife, who had been spending the weekend on their own houseboat, and a group of stoned high school kids who stunk of reefer and keg beer and were trembling at the prospect of what they had stepped into.

  Earlier, they had all seen the victims having drinks at a restaurant farther up the levee. Everyone agreed they were a handsome couple, tourists perhaps, pleasant and certainly polite, although the woman seemed a little young for the man; but he was charming, just the same, athletic-looking, friendly toward the kids, a decent sort, obviously in control of things (one of the stoned-out high school students said he "was kind of like a modern business-type guy, like you see on TV"); the man had wanted to rent fishing gear and hire a guide to take him out in the morning.

  The intruder came just before midnight, in a flat-bottomed aluminum outboard, the throttle turned low, the engine muttering softly along the main channel that rimmed the swamp, past the islands of dead hyacinths and the gray cypress that rose wedge-shaped out of the water at the entrance to the bays.

  But he knew his destination. In midchannel he angled his outboard toward the houseboat rented by the couple, then cut the gas and let his boat glide on its own wake through a screen of hanging willows and bump softly against the rubber tires that hung from the houseboat's gunnels.

  The people inside were still up, eating a late supper on a small table in the galley, a bottle of white wine and a fondue pan set between them. They either didn't hear the intruder, or never had time to react, before he pulled himself by one hand over the rail, lighting on the balls of his feet, his body alive with a sinewy grace that belied his dimensions.

  Then he tore the locked hatch out of the jamb with such violence that one hinge came with it.

  At first the kids, who were gathered around the tailgate of a pickup truck on the levee, thought the intruder was a black man, then they realized when he burst into the lighted cabin that he wore dark gloves and a knitted ski mask.

  But they had no doubt about what took place next.

  When the man they had seen in the restaurant tried to rise from his chair in the galley, the intruder swung a wide-bladed fold-out game dressing knife into the side of his throat and raked it at a downward angle into his rib cage, then struck him about the neck and head again and again, gathering the young woman into one arm, never missing a stroke, whipping the wounded man down lower and lower from the chair to the floor, flinging ropes of blood across the windows.

  He paused, as though he was aware he had an audience, stared out of the holes in his mask toward the levee, then opened his mouth, which rang with gold, licked the neck of the screaming young woman he held pinioned against his body with one muscle-swollen arm, and drew the knife across her throat.

  I stood just inside the torn hatch with a St. Martin Parish homicide detective and the medical examiner. The two bodies lay curled on the floor, their foreheads almost touching.

  "You ever see a blood loss like that?" the plainclothes said. He was dressed in a brown suit and a fedora, with a plain blue necktie, and he had clipped the tie inside his shirt. He bit into a candy bar. "I got a sugar deficiency," he said.

  Two paramedics began lifting the dead man into a body bag. His pony tail had been splayed by someone's shoe and was stuck to the linoleum.

  "You okay, Dave?" the plainclothes said.

  "Sure."

  "The perp cleaned out their I.D."

  "His name was Lonnie Felton. I don't know who the girl was. He was a film director."

  "You know him?"

  I nodded and looked at the stare in Felton's eyes.

  "I make Aaron Crown for this," the plainclothes said. "What do you think? How many we got around here could do something like this? . . . You listening, Dave?"

  "What?" I said. The paramedic worked the zipper on the vinyl bag over Felton's face. "Oh, sorry . . . ," I said to the plainclothes. "The kids were right the first time. It's a black guy. Mookie Zerrang's his name. It's funny what you said, that's all."

  "Come again?"

  "About listening. I told Felton the guy who'd do him wouldn't be a good listener. It seemed like a clever thing to say at the time."

  The plainclothes looked at me strangely, a smear of chocolate on his mouth.

  CHAPTER 21

  AFTER I was discharged from the army, a friend from my outfit and I drove across the country for a fishing vacation in Montana. On July 4 we stopped at a small town in western Kansas that Norman Rockwell could have painted. The streets were brick, lined with Chinese elm trees, and the limestone courthouse on the square rose
out of the hardware and feed and farm equipment stores like a medieval castle against a hard blue porcelain sky. Next to our motel was a stucco 3.2 beer tavern that looked like a wedding cake, shaded by an enormous willow that crowned over the eaves. At the end of the street you could see an ocean of green wheat that rippled in the wind as far as the eye could see. The rain that fell that afternoon on the hot sidewalks was the sweetest smell I ever experienced.

  What's the point?

  For years I thought of this place as an island untouched by the war in Indochina and disconnected from the cities burning at home. When I was a patrolman in uniform in the New Orleans welfare projects, I used to remember the hot, clean airy smell of the rain falling on those sidewalks in 1965.

  Then an ex-Kansas cop we picked up drunk on an interstate fugitive warrant told me the town that existed in my fond recollection was the site of Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood, the story of two pathological killers who murdered a whole family for thirty-nine dollars and a radio.

  You learn soon or you learn late: There are no islands.

  It was Monday morning and no one was in custody for the double homicide in St. Martin Parish.

  "I'm afraid they're not buying your theory about a black hit man," the sheriff said.

  "Why not?"

  "There's no evidence the man was black."

  "He had a mouthful of gold teeth, just like the guy who did the scriptwriter."

  "So what? Maybe Aaron Crown has gold fillings, too."

  "I doubt if Aaron ever bought a toothbrush, much less saw a dentist."

  "You believe somebody was trying to stop Felton from exposing our governor-elect as a moral troglodyte. Maybe you're right. But for a lot of people it's a big reach."

  "Crown didn't do this, Sheriff."

  "Look, the St. Martin M.E. says both victims had been smoking heroin before they got it. Felton's condo had a half kee of China white in it. St. Martin thinks maybe the killings are drug related. Robbery's a possible motive, too."

  "Robbery?"

  "The killer took the girl's purse and Felton's wallet. Felton was flashing a lot of money around earlier in the evening . . ." He stopped and returned my stare. "I haven't convinced you?"

  "Where are you trying to go with this, skipper?"

  "Nowhere. I don't have to. It's out of our jurisdiction. End of discussion, Dave."

  I opened the morning mail in my office, escorted a deranged woman from the men's room, picked up a parole violator in the state betting parlor out by the highway, helped recover a stolen farm tractor, spent my lunch hour and two additional hours waiting to testify at the courthouse, only to learn the defendant had been granted a continuance, and got back to the office with a headache and the feeling I had devoted most of the day to snipping hangnails in a season of plague.

  The state police now had primary responsibility for protecting Buford, and Aaron Crown and my problems with the LaRose family were becoming less and less a subject of interest to anybody else.

  But one person, besides Clete, had tried to help me, I thought.

  The tattooed carnival worker named Arana.

  I inserted the cassette Helen and I had made of his deathbed statement in a tape player and listened to it again in its entirety. But only one brief part of it pointed a finger: "The bugarron ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen him at the ranch. You messing everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man . . ."

  "Who's this guy?" my voice asked.

  And the man called Arana responded, "He ain't got no name. He got a red horse and a silver saddle. He like Indian boys."

  I clicked off the tape player and lay the cassette on my desk blotter and looked at it. Puzzle through that, I thought.

  Then, just as chance and accident are wont to have their way, I glanced out the window and saw a man blowing his horn at other drivers, forcing his way across two lanes to park in an area designated for the handicapped. His face was as stiff as plaster when he walked across the grass to the front entrance, oblivious to the sprinkler that cut a dark swath across his slacks.

  A moment later Wally called me on my extension.

  "Dave, we got a real zomboid out here in the waiting room says he wants to see you," he said.

  "Yeah, I know. Send him back."

  "Who is he?"

  "Dock Green."

  "That pimp from New Orleans suppose to got clap of the brain?"

  "The one and only."

  "Dave, we don't got enough local sick ones? You got to import these guys in here?"

  Dock Green wore a beige turtleneck polo shirt tucked tightly into his belt so that the movements of his neck and head seemed even more stark and elliptical, like moving images in a filmstrip that's been abbreviated. He sat down in front of my desk without being asked, his

  eyes focusing past me out the window, then back on my face again. The skin between his lip and the corner of his nose twitched.

  "I got to use your phone," he said, and picked up the receiver and started punching numbers.

  "That's a private . . . Don't worry about it, go ahead," I said.

  "I'll pick you up at six sharp . . . No, out front, Persephone he said into the receiver. "No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there . . . Good-bye."

  He hung up and blew his breath up into his face. "I got a charge to file," he said.

  "What might that be, Dock?"

  "I can see you're on top of things. There's another side to Jerry the Glide."

  "Yeah?"

  "He went out to my construction site with some of his asswipes and busted up my foreman. He held him down on the ground by his ears and spit in his face."

  "Spit in his face?"

  "There's an echo in here?"

  I wrote a note on my scratch pad, reminding myself to pick up a half gallon of milk on the way home.

  "We'll get right on this, Dock."

  "That's it?"

  "Yep."

  "You didn't ask me where."

  "Why don't you let me have that?"

  He gave me directions. I fingered the tape cassette containing the deathbed statement of the Mexican carnival worker.

  "Let's take a ride and see what Jerry Joe has to say for himself," I said.

  "Right now?"

  "You bet."

  The concentration in his eyes made me think of sweat bees pressed against glass.

  We drove in a cruiser through the corridor of live oaks on East Main to the site on Bayou Teche where Jerry Joe was building his new home. The equipment was shut down, the construction crew gone.

  "I guess we stuck out," I said, and turned across the drawbridge and headed out of town toward the LaRose plantation.

  "This ain't the way."

  "It's a nice day for a drive."

  I saw the recognition come together in Dock's face.

  "You're trying to piss on my shoes. You know my wife's out at Karyn LaRose's," he said.

  "I've got to check something out, Dock. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

  "Fuck that and fuck you. I don't like them people. I ain't going on their property."

  I pulled off on the shoulder of the road by the LaRoses' drive. Dust was billowing out of the fields in back, and the house looked pillared and white and massive against the gray sky.

  "Why not?" I asked.

  "I got to do business with hypocrites, it don't mean we got to use the same toilet. Hey, you don't think they got shit stripes in their underwear? They got dead people in the ground here."

  "You're talking about the cemetery in back?"

  "I ain't got to see a headstone to smell a grave. There's one by that tree over there. There's another one down by the water. A kid's in it."

  "You know about a murder?"

  But he didn't get to answer. A shudder went through him and he sank back into the seat and began to speak unintelligibly, his lips wrinkling back on his teeth as though all of his motors were misfiring, obscenity and spittle rolling off his tongu
e.

  I put the transmission in gear and turned into the drive.

  "You going to make it, Dock?" I said.

  His breath was as dense as sewer gas. He pressed his palm wetly against his mouth.