DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  She repeated the story to me as it had been told to her by NOPD. You didn't have to be imaginative to re-create the scene. The images were like those drawn from a surreal landscape, where a primitive and half-formed creature rose from a prehistoric pool of genetic soup into a world that did not wish to recognize its origins.

  Jimmy Ray had been at his fish camp with three of his employees and their women out by Bayou Lafourche. The night was humid, the dirt yard illuminated by an electric mechanic's lamp hung in a dead pecan tree, and Jimmy Ray was on a creeper under his jacked-up truck, working with a wrench on a brake drum, yelling at a second man to get him a beer from inside the shack. When the man didn't do it fast enough, Jimmy Ray went inside to get the beer himself, and another man, bored for something to do, took his place on the creeper.

  Aaron Crown had been crouched on a cypress limb by the bayou's edge, listening to the voices inside the lighted center of the yard, unable to see past a shed at who was speaking but undoubtedly sure that it was Jimmy Ray yelling orders at people from under the truck.

  He released his grasp on the limb and dropped silently into the yard, dressed in a seersucker suit two sizes too small for him that he had probably taken from a washline or a Salvation Army Dumpster, and brand-new white leather basketball shoes with layers of mud as thick as waffles caked around the soles.

  One of Jimmy Ray's employees was smoking a cigarette, staring at the mist rising from the swamp, perhaps yawning, when he smelled an odor from behind him, a smell that was like excrement and sour milk and smoke from a meat fire. He started to turn, then a soiled hand clamped around his mouth, the calluses as hard as dried fish scale against his lips, and he felt himself pulled against the outline of Crown's body, into each curve and contour, molded against the phallus and thighs and whipcord stomach, suspended helplessly inside the rage and sexual passion of a man he couldn't see, until the blood flow to his brain stopped as if his jugular had been pinched shut with pliers.

  The man under the truck saw the mud-encrusted basketball shoes, the shapeless seersucker pants that hung on ankles scarred by leg manacles, and knew his last night on earth had begun even before Aaron began to rock the truck back and forth on the jack.

  The man on the creeper almost made it completely into the open when the truck toppled sideways and fell diagonally across his thighs. After the first red-black rush of pain that arched his head back in the dirt, that seemed to seal his mouth and eyes and steal the air from his lungs, he felt himself gradually float upward from darkness to the top of a warm pool, where two powerful hands released themselves from his face and allowed light into his brain and breath into his body. Then he saw Aaron bending over him, his hands propped on his knees, staring at him curiously.

  "Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one," Aaron said.

  He looked up at a sound from the shack, shadows across a window shade, a car loaded with revelers bouncing down a rutted road through the trees toward the clearing. His face was glazed with sweat, glowing in the humidity, his eyes straining into the darkness, caught between an unsatisfied bloodlust that was within his grasp and the knowledge that his inability to think clearly had always been the weapon his enemies had used against him.

  Then, as silently as he had come, he slunk away in the shadows, like a thick-bodied crab moving sideways on mechanical extensions.

  "How do you figure it?" Helen said.

  "It doesn't make sense. What was it he said to the man under the truck?"

  She read from her notepad: '"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one.'"

  "I think Aaron has an agenda that none of us has even guessed at," I said.

  "Yeah, war with the human race."

  "That's not it," I answered.

  "What is?"

  It's the daughter, I thought.

  I visited Batist in the hospital that afternoon, then picked up three pounds of frozen peeled crawfish and a carton of potato salad in town, so Bootsie would not have to cook, and drove down the dirt road toward the house. The bayou was half in shadow and the sunlight looked like gold thread in the trees. Dust drifted out on the bayou's surface and coated the wild elephant ears that grew in dark clumps in the shallows. My neighbor was stringing Christmas lights on his gallery while his rotating hose sprinkler clattered a jet of water among the myrtle bushes and tree trunks in his yard. It was the kind of perfect evening that seemed outside of time, so gentle and removed from the present that you would not be surprised if a news carrier on a bike with balloon tires threw a rolled paper onto your lawn with a headline announcing victory over Japan.

  But its perfection dissipated as soon as I pulled into the drive and saw a frail priest in a black suit and Roman collar step out of his parked car and glare at me as though I had just risen from the Pit.

  "Could I help you, Father?" I said.

  "I want to know why you've been tormenting Mr. Dolowitz," he said. His face called to mind a knotted, red cauliflower.

  I stooped down so I could see the man in the passenger seat. He kept his face straight ahead, his biscuit-colored derby hat like a bowl on his head.

  "No Duh?" I said.

  "I understand you're a practicing Catholic," the priest said.

  "That's correct."

  "Then why have you forced this man to commit a crime? He's terrified. What the hell's the matter with you?"

  "There's a misunderstanding here, Father."

  "Then why don't you clear things up for me, sir?"

  I took his hand and shook it, even though he hadn't offered it. It was as light as balsa sticks in my palm and didn't match the choleric heat in his face. His name was Father Timothy Mulcahy, from the Irish Channel in New Orleans, and he was the pastor of a small church off Magazine whose only parishioners were those too poor or elderly to move out of the neighborhood.

  "I didn't threaten this man, Father. I told him he could do what was right for himself," I said. Then I leaned down to the driver's window. "No Duh, you tell Father Mulcahy the truth or I'm going to mop up the yard with you."

  "Ah, it's clear you're not a violent man," the priest said.

  "No Duh, now is not the time—" I began.

  "It was the other guy, that animal Purcel, Father. But Robicheaux was with him," No Duh said.

  The priest cocked one eyebrow, then tilted his head, made a self-deprecating smile.

  "Well, I'm sorry for my rashness," he said. "Nonetheless, Mr. Dolowitz shouldn't have been forced to break into someone's home," he said.

  "Would you give us a few minutes?" I said.

  He nodded and started to walk away, then touched my arm and took me partway with him.

  "Be easy with him. This man's had a terrible experience," he said.

  I went back to the priest's car and leaned on the window jamb. Dolowitz took off his hat and set it on his knees. His face looked small, waxlike, devoid of identity. He touched nervously at his mustache.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "I creeped Dock Green's house. Somebody left the key in the lock. I stuck a piece of newspaper under the door and knocked the key out and caught it on the paper and pulled it under the door. They got me going back out. They didn't know I'd been inside. If they had, I wouldn't be alive," he said.

  "Who got you?"

  "Persephone Green and a button guy works for the Giacanos and some other pervert gets off hurting people." For the first time his eyes lifted into mine. They possessed a detachment that reminded me of that strange, unearthly look we used to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

  "What they'd do to you, partner?"

  The fingers of one hand tightened on the soft felt of his hat. "Buried me alive . . .," he said. "What, you surprised? You think only Dock's got this thing about graves and talking with dead people under the ground? Him and Persephone are two of a kind. She thought it was funny. She laughed while they put a garden hose in my mouth and covered me over with a front-end loader. It was just like being lock
ed in black concrete, with no sound, with just a little string of dirty air going into my throat. They didn't dig me up till this morning. I went to the bathroom inside my clothes."

  "I'm sorry, No Duh. But I didn't tell you to creep Dock's house."

  "My other choice is I miss the vig again with Wee Willie Bimstine and get fed into an airplane propeller? Thanks for your charitable attitudes."

  "I've got a room behind the bait shop. You can stay here till we square you with Wee Willie."

  "You'd do that?"

  "Sure."

  "It's full of snakes out here. You want the gen on Dock? Persephone eighty-sixed him after she caught him porking his broads."

  "That's old news, No Duh."

  "I got in his desk. It's full of building plans for hospitals. Treatment places for drunks and addicts. There was canceled checks from Jimmy Ray Dixon. Go figure."

  "Figure what?"

  "Dock supplies broads for every gash-hound in the mob. That's the only reason they let a crazy person like him come around. But he don't cut no deal he don't piece off to the spaghetti heads. When'd the mob start working with coloreds? You think it's a mystery how the city got splashed in the bowl?"

  "Who set up Jerry Joe Plumb, No Duh?"

  "He did."

  "Jerry Joe set himself up?"

  "He was always talking about you, how your mothers use to work together, how he use to listen to all your phonograph records over at your house. At the same time he was wheeling and dealing with the Giacanos, washing money for them, pretending he could walk on both sides of the line . . . You don't get it, do you? You know what will get you killed in New Orleans? When they look in your eyes and know you ain't like them, when they know you ain't willing to do things most people won't even think about. That's when they'll cut you from your package to your throat and eat a sandwich while they're doing it."

  I took my grocery sack of frozen crawfish and potato salad out of the truck and glanced at the priest, who stood at the end of my dock, watching a flight of ducks winnow across the tops of the cypress trees. His hair was snow white, his face windburned in the fading light. I wondered if his dreams were troubled by the confessional tales that men like Dolowitz brought from the dark province in which they lived, or if sleep came to him only after he granted himself absolution, too, and rinsed their sins from his memory, undoing the treachery that had made him the repository of their evil.

  I walked up the drive, through the deepening shadows, into the back door of my house.

  CHAPTER 33

  at sunrise Clete Purcel and I sat in my truck on the side street next to Persephone and Dock Green's home in the Garden District. The morning was cold, and clouds of mist almost completely blanketed the two-story antebellum house and the white brick wall that surrounded the backyard. Clete ate from a box of jelly-filled doughnuts and drank out of a large Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  "I can't believe I got up this early just to pull No Duh's butt out of the fire," he said. When I didn't reply, he said, "If you think you're going to jam up Persephone Green, you're wrong. Didi Gee was her old man, and she's twice as smart as he was and just as ruthless."

  "She'll go down just like he did."

  "The Big C killed Didi. We never touched him."

  "It doesn't matter how you get to the boneyard."

  "What, we got an exemption?" he said, then got out of the truck and strolled across the street to the garden wall. The palms that extended above the bricks were dark green inside the mist. I heard a loud splash, then saw Clete lean down and squint through the thick grillwork on the gate. He walked back to the truck, picked up another doughnut and his coffee off the floor and sat down in the seat. He shook an image out of his thoughts.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "It's forty-five degrees and she's swimming in the nude. She's got quite a stroke . . ." He drank out of his coffee cup and looked at the iron gate in the wall. He pursed his mouth, obviously not yet free from an image that hovered behind his eyes. "Damn, I'm not kidding you, Streak, you ought to see the gagongas on that broad."

  "Look out front," I said.

  A gray stretch limo with a rental U-Haul truck behind it pulled to the curb. Dock Green got out of the back of the limo and strode up the front walk.

  "Show time," Clete said. He removed my Japanese field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the limo's chauffeur, who was wiping the water off the front windows. "Hey, it's Whitey Zeroski," Clete said. "Remember, the wetbrain used to own a little pizza joint in the Channel? He ran for city council and put megaphones and vote for whitey signs all over his car and drove into colored town on Saturday night. He couldn't figure out why he got all his windows broken."

  A moment later we heard Dock and Persephone Green's voices on the other side of the garden wall.

  "It don't have to shake out like this," he said.

  "You milked through the fence too many times, hon. I hope they were worth it," she replied.

  "It's over. You got my word . . . Come out of the water and talk. We can go have breakfast somewhere."

  "Bye, Dock."

  "We're a team, Seph. Ain't nothing going to separate us. Believe it when I say it."

  "I hate to tell you this but you're a disappearing memory. I've got to practice my backstroke now . . . Keep your eyes somewhere else, Dock . . . You don't own the geography anymore."

  We heard her body weight push off from the side of the pool and her arms dipping rhythmically into the water.

  "Let's 'front both of them," Clete said, and started to get out of the truck.

  "No, that'll just get No Duh into it deeper."

  "Where's your head, Dave? That guy wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. The object is to flush Mookie Zerrang out in the open and then take him off at the neck."

  "We have to wait, Cletus."

  I saw the frustration and anger in his face. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was as hard as a cured ham. When he didn't speak, I took my hand away.

  "I appreciate your coming with me," I said.

  "Oh hell yeah, this is great stuff. You know why I was a New Orleans cop? Because we could break all the rules and get away with it. This town's problems aren't going to end until we run all these fuckers back under the sewer grates where they belong."

  "I think Persephone got to you, partner," I said.

  "You're right. I should have been a criminal. It's a simpler life."

  For a half hour Dock and two workmen carried out his office furniture, his computer, his files, and a huge glass bottle, the kind mounted on water coolers, filled with an amber-tinted liquid and the embalmed body of a bobcat. The bobcat's paws were pressed against the glass, as though it were drowning.

  Then the three of them drove away without the limo. Clete and I got out of the truck and walked to the gate. Through the grillwork and the banana fronds I could see steam rising off the turquoise surface of the pool and hear her feet kicking steadily with her long stroke.

  "It's Dave Robicheaux. How about opening up, Persephone?" I said.

  "Dream on," she replied from inside the steam.

  "You stole a test for Karyn LaRose and got expelled from college. Why let her take you down again?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Try this as a fantasy, Seph. You and all your friends are on an airliner with Karyn and Buford LaRose. Karyn and Buford are at the controls. The plane is on fire. There are only two parachutes on board . . . Who's going to end up with the parachutes?"

  I could hear her treading water in the stillness, then rising from the pool at the far end.

  She appeared at the gate in a white robe and sandals, a towel wrapped around her hair. She unlocked the gate and pulled it back on its hinges, then turned and walked to an iron table without speaking, the long, tapered lines of her body molded against the cloth of her robe.

  She combed her hair back with her towel, her face regal, at an angle to us, seemingly indifferent to our presence.

  "What's on your mind?" she s
aid. Her voice was throaty, her cheeks pale and slightly sunken, her mouth the same shade as the red morning glories that cascaded down the wall behind her.

  Clete kept staring at her.

  "Has he been fed?" she asked.

  "You got to pardon me. I was thinking you look like Cher, the movie actress. You even have a tattoo," he said.

  "My, you have busy eyes," she said.

  "Yeah, I was noticing the hole over there by the compost pile. Is that where y'all buried No Duh Dolowitz?" he said.

  "The little man with the grease mustache? That's what this is about?" she asked.