DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  "Hang loose, babe," I said, and walked through the drive and the porte cochere into the backyard, where a state trooper in sunglasses was eating a bowl of ice cream in a canvas lawn chair.

  I opened my badge.

  "I'd like to check the stables," I said.

  "What for?"

  I averted my gaze, stuck my badge holder in my back pocket.

  "It's just a funny feeling I have about Crown," I answered.

  "Help yourself."

  I climbed through the rails of the horse lot and entered the open end of the old brick smithy that had been converted into a stable. The iron shutters on the arched windows were closed, and motes of dust floated in the pale bands of light as thickly as lint in a textile mill. The air was warm and sour-sweet with the smells of leather, blankets stiff with horse sweat, chickens that wandered in from outside, the dampness under the plank floors, fresh hay scattered in the stalls, a wheelbarrow stacked with manure, a barrel of dried molasses-and-grain balls.

  I went inside the tack room at the far end of the building. Buford's saddles were hung on collapsible two-by-fours that extended outward on screwhooks from the wall. The English saddles were plain, utilitarian, the leather unmarked by the maker's knife. But on the western saddles, with pommels as wide as bulls' snouts, the cantles and flaps and skirts were carved with roses and birds and snakes, and in the back of each cantle was a mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.

  But the man named Arana had said the bugarron rode a silver saddle, and there was none here.

  "What you looking for in the tack room, Detective Robicheaux?" the trooper said behind me. He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms folded, his expression masked behind his shades. He wore a campaign hat tilted over his eyes, like a D.I.'s, with the leather strap on the back of his head.

  "You never can tell what you might trip across."

  "Somehow that don't ring right."

  "I know you?"

  "You do now. Ms. LaRose says she'd prefer you wasn't on her place."

  "She'll prefer it less if Aaron's her next visitor . . . Have a nice day."

  I walked down the wood floor between the stalls toward the opened end of the building.

  "Don't be back in the stable without a warrant, sir," the trooper said behind me.

  I climbed through the rails in the horse lot and walked under the trees in the backyard toward the porte cochere. Karyn LaRose came out the side screen door, a drink in her hand, with Persephone Green behind her. Karyn turned around and lifted her fingers in the air.

  "Let me talk to Dave a minute, Seph," she said.

  There was a pinched, black light in Persephone Green's face as she glared at me. But she did as she was asked and closed the door and disappeared behind the glass.

  "I'm going to drain the blood out of your veins for what you did to me," Karyn said.

  "What I did to you?"

  "In front of your wife, in the hotel. You rotten motherfucker."

  "Your problem is with yourself, Karyn. You just don't know it."

  "Save the cheap psychology for your A.A. meetings. Your life's going to be miserable. I promise."

  "Dock Green says there're dead people under the tree in your side yard."

  "That's marvelous detective work. They were lynched and buried there over a century ago."

  "How about the kid in the unmarked grave by the water?"

  Her skin under her makeup turned as pale and dry as paper.

  CHAPTER 22

  The next morning I walked up to Jerry Joe Plumb on his plot of tree-dotted land in the middle of the historical district on East Main. He was watching two cement mixers pour the foundation for his home on the bayou, one half-topped engineering boot propped on a felled tree. He wore khakis and his leather flyer's jacket, and the sunlight through the oaks looked like yellow blades of grass on his face.

  "Dock Green says you knocked around his construction foreman," I said.

  "It got a little out of hand."

  "You held him down and spit in his face?"

  "I apologized."

  "I bet he appreciated that."

  "I went on a tab for three hundred large to back Buford's campaign. You know what the vig is on three hundred large? Now Dock's wheeling and dealing with Buford while I got building suppliers looking at me with knives and forks."

  "Then quit protecting Buford."

  "You got it wrong . . . But. . . Never mind, come in my trailer and I'll show you something."

  Inside, he spread a roll of architect's plans across a drafting table and weighted down the ends, then combed his hair while he looked admiringly at the sketch of the finished house. "See, it's turn-of-the-century. It'll fit right in. The brick's purple and comes out of a hundred-year-old house I found over in Mississippi," he said.

  The building was three stories high, a medieval fortress rather than a house, with balconies and widow's walks and windbreaks that were redundant inside a city, and I thought of Jerry Joe's description of the LaRose home out west of the Pecos, where he had fled at age seventeen.

  "You're going to let Buford burn you because of the old man, what was his name, Jude?" I said.

  "If it wasn't for Jude, I'd a been majoring in cotton picking on a prison farm."

  "I took Dock out to the LaRose plantation yesterday. He says there's a kid's grave down by the water."

  "Better listen to him, then."

  "Oh?"

  "The guy hears voices. It's like he knows stuff people aren't supposed to know. He puts dead things in jars. Maybe he's a ghoul."

  I started to leave. "Stay away from his construction site, okay?" I said.

  "I'm not the problem, Dave. Neither is Dock. You got a disease in this town. The whole state does, and it's right up the bayou."

  "Then stop letting Buford use you for his regular punch," I said.

  Jerry Joe clipped his comb inside his shirt pocket and stepped close to my face, his open hands curved simianlike by his sides, the white scar at the corner of his eye bunching into a knot.

  "We're friends, but don't you ever in your life say anything like that to me again," he said.

  After I got back to the department, the sheriff buzzed my extension and asked me to come into his office. He sat humped behind his desk, scraping the bowl of his pipe with a penknife.

  "Our health carrier called this morning. They've developed a problem with your coverage," he said.

  "What problem?"

  "Your drinking history."

  "Why call about it now?"

  "That's the question. You were in therapy a few years back?"

  "That's right."

  "After your wife was killed?"

  I nodded, my eyes shifting off his.

  "The psychologist's file on you went through their fax this morning," he said. "It came through ours, too. It also went to the Daily Iberian." Before I could speak, he said, "I tore it up. But the guy from Blue Cross was a little strung out."

  "Too bad."

  "Dave, you're sober now, but you had two slips before you made it. I guess there was a lot of Vietnam stuff in that file, too. Civilians don't handle that stuff well." He set the pipe down and looked at the tops of his hands. "Who sent the fax?"

  "The therapist died two years ago."

  "So?"

  "I'm not omniscient."

  "We both know what I'm talking about."

  "He had an office in the Oil Center. In the same suite as Buford LaRose's."

  "It wasn't Buford, though, was it?"

  "I don't know if Buford's potential has ever been plumbed."

  "Dave, tell me you haven't been out to see Karyn."

  "Yesterday . . . I took Dock Green out there."

  His swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. His teeth made a clicking sound on the stem of his dead pipe.

  At dawn the next morning I cut the gas on my outboard engine north of the LaRose plantation and let the aluminum boat float sideways in the current, past the barbed wire fenceline that
extended into the water and marked the edge of Buford's property. The sun was an orange smudge through the hardwood trees, and I could hear horses nickering beyond the mist that rose out of the coulee. I used a paddle to bring the boat out of the current and into the backwater, the cattails sliding off the bow and the sides, then I felt the metal bottom bite into silt.

  I could see the black marble crypt and the piked iron fence that surrounded it at the top of the slope, the silhouette of a state trooper who was looking in the opposite direction, a roan gelding tossing its head and backing out of spiderwebs that were spread between two persimmon trunks.

  Part of the coulee had caved in, and the runoff had washed over the side and eroded a clutch of wide rivulets in the shape of a splayed hand, down the embankment to the bayou's edge. I pushed the paddle hard into the silt and watched the trees, the palmettos, a dock and boathouse, and the pine-needle-covered, hoof-scarred floor of the woods drift past me.

  Then I saw it, in the same way your eye recognizes mortality in a rain forest when birds lift suddenly off the canopy or the wind shifts and you smell an odor that has always lived like a dark thought on the edge of your consciousness.

  But in truth it wasn't much—a series of dimples on the slope, grass that was greener than it should have been, a spray of mushrooms with poisonous skirts. Maybe my contention with the LaRoses had broached the confines of obsession. I slipped one of the oar locks, tied a handkerchief through it, and tossed it up on the bank.

  Then I drifted sideways with the current into the silence of the next bend, yanked the starter rope, and felt the engine's roar reverberate through my palm like a earache.

  At sunset I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did a mile and a half to the drawbridge, waved at the bridge tender, and turned back toward home, the air like a cool flame on my skin. Ahead of me I saw a Buick pull to the side of the road and park, the front window roll down, then the door open halfway. Jerry Joe remained seated, his arms propped in the window as though he were leaning on a bar, a can of Budweiser in one hand, a pint of whiskey in the other. He looked showered and fresh, and he wore a white suit with an open-collar lavender shirt. A flat cardboard box lay on the leather seat next to him.

  "You gonna bust me for an open container?" he said.

  "It's a possibility."

  "I'm sorry about getting in your face yesterday."

  "Forget it."

  "You remember my mother?"

  "Sure."

  "She used to make me go to confession all the time. I hated it. She was a real coonass, you know, and she'd say, 'You feel guilty about you done something to somebody, Jerry Joe, you gonna try to pretend you don't know that person no more 'cause he gonna make you remember who you are and the bad thing you done, or maybe you're gonna try to hurt him, you. So that's why you gotta go to confess, you.'"

  He tilted the bottle and threaded a thin stream of bourbon into the opening of his beer can. Then he drank from the can, the color in his eyes deepening.

  "Yes?" I said.

  "People like Karyn and Buford reinvent themselves. It's like my mother said. They don't want mirrors around to remind them of what they used to be."

  "What can I do for you, partner?"

  "I ain't lily white. I've been mixed up with the LaRose family a long time. But the deal going down now . . . I don't know . . . It ain't just the money . . . It bothers me."

  "Tell somebody about it, Jerry Joe. Like your mom said." I tried to smile.

  He reached around behind him and picked up the cardboard box from the seat. "I brought you something belongs to you. It was still buried behind the old house."

  I rested the box on the window and lifted the top. The hand crank to our old phonograph lay in the middle of a crinkled sheet of white wrapping paper. The metal was deformed and bulbous with rust, and the wood handle had been eaten by groundwater.

  "So I returned your property and I got no reason to be mad at you," he said. He was smiling now. He closed his car door and started his engine.

  "Stay on that old-time R&B," I said.

  "I never been off it."

  I walked the rest of the way home. The sun was gone now and the air was damp and cold, and the last fireflies of the season traced their smoky red patterns in the shadows.

  CHAPTER 23

  WHEN your stitches are popping loose and your elevator has already plummeted past any reasonable bottom and the best your day offers is seeds and stems at sunrise to flatten the kinks or a street dealer's speedball that can turn your heart into a firecracker, you might end up in a piece of geography as follows:

  A few blocks off Canal, the building was once a bordello that housed both mulatto and white women; then in a more moral era, when the downtown brothels were closed by the authorities and the girls started working out of taxicabs instead, the building was partitioned into apartments and studios for artists, and finally it became simply a "hotel," with no name other than that, the neon letters emblazoned vertically on a tin sign above a picture glass window that looked in upon a row of attached theater seats. Old people seemingly numbed by the calamity that had placed them in these surroundings stared vacantly through the glass at the sidewalk.

  The Mexican man had climbed the fire escape onto the peaked roof, then had glided out among the stars. He hit the courtyard with such an impact that he split a flagstone like it was slate.

  The corridor was dark and smelled of the stained paper bags filled with garbage that stood by each door like sentinels. Clete opened the dead man's room with a passkey.

  "A Vietnamese boat lady owns the place. She found the guy's pay stub and thought I could get his back rent from the state," he said.

  Most of the plaster was gone from the walls. A mattress was rolled on an iron bed frame, and a pile of trash paper, green wine bottles, and frozen TV dinner containers was swept neatly into one corner. A flattened, plastic wallet and a cardboard suitcase and a guitar with twelve tuning pegs and no strings lay on top of a plank table. The sound hole on the guitar was inlaid with green and pink mollusk shell, and the wood below the hole had been cut with scratches that looked like cat's whiskers.

  "What was he on?" I said.

  "A couple of the wetbrains say he was cooking brown skag with ups. The speed is supposed to give it legs. The mamasan found the wallet under the bed."

  It contained no money, only a detached stub from a pay voucher for ninety-six dollars, with Buford LaRose's name and New Iberia address printed in the upper left-hand corner, and a Catholic holy card depicting a small statue of Christ's mother, with rays of gold and blue light emanating from it. Underneath the statue was the caption La Virgin de Zapopan.

  I unsnapped the suitcase. His shirts and trousers and underwear were all rolled into tight balls. A pair of boots were folded at the tops in one corner. The toes were pointed and threadbare around the welt, the heels almost flat, the leather worn as smooth and soft as felt in a slipper. Under the boots, wrapped in a towel, was a solitary roweled spur, the cusp scrolled with winged serpents.

  "It looks like the guy had another kind of life at one time," Clete said.

  "Does NOPD know he worked for Buford LaRose?"

  "The mamasan called them and got the big yawn. They've got New Orleans cops pulling armed robberies. Who's got time for a roof flyer down here in Shitsville?"

  "Dock Green says a kid's buried on the LaRose property."

  "You try for a warrant?"

  "The judge said insufficient grounds. He seemed to think I had personal motivations as well."

  "You're going about it the wrong way, Streak. Squeeze somebody close to LaRose."

  "Who?"

  "That old guy, the poet, the fuckhead left over from the sixties, he was working his scam out at Tulane last night. He's doing a repeat performance up on St. Charles this afternoon."

  He drummed the square tips of his fingers on the face of the guitar.

  "No grand displays, Clete," I said.

  "Me?"

  Cl
ay Mason's poetry reading was in a reception hall above a restaurant in the Garden District. From the second-story French doors you could look down upon a sidewalk cafe, the oaks along the avenue, the iron streetcars out on the neutral ground, a K&B drugstore on the corner whose green and purple neon hung like colored smoke in the rain.

  Clete and I sat on folding chairs in the back of the hall. We were lucky to get seats at all. College kids dressed in Seattle grunge lined the walls.