DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

JAMES LEE

BURKE

HYPERION

NEW YORK

Copyright
©1996
James Lee Burke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.
Printed in the United

States of America. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth
Avenue, New

York, New York 10011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burke, James Lee, 1936-

Cadillac Jukebox : a novel by James Lee Burke.

p.
   
cm. ISBN
0-7868-6175-4

1.
 
Robicheaux, Dave
(Fictitious character)—Fiction.

2.
 
Private
investigators—Louisiana—New Orleans— Fiction.
   
3. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction.
  

 
I. Title
PS3552.U723C33
   
1996

813'.54—dc20
                                                      
95-50045

CIP

Designed by Holly McNeeley

FIRST EDITION

13579
   
10
   
8642

for Russ and Jayne Piazza

by James Lee
Burke

A
ARON CRown should
not have
come back into our
lives. After all, he had never really been one of us, anyway, had he? His
family, shiftless timber people, had come from north Louisiana, and when they
arrived in Iberia Parish, they brought their ways with them, occasionally
stealing livestock along river bottoms, poaching deer, perhaps, some said,
practicing incest.

     
I first saw Aaron
Crown thirty-five years ago when, for a brief time, he tried to sell
strawberries and rattlesnake watermelons out on the highway, out of the same
truck he hauled cow manure in.

     
He seemed to walk
sideways, like a crab, and wore bib overalls even in summertime and paid a
dollar to have his head lathered and shaved in the barber shop every Saturday
morning. His thick, hair-covered body gave off an odor like sour milk, and the
barber would open the front and back doors and turn on the fans when Aaron was
in the chair.

     
If there was a
violent portent in his behavior, no one ever saw it. The Negroes who worked for
him looked upon him indifferently, as a white man who was neither good nor bad,
whose moods and elliptical peckerwood speech and peculiar green eyes were
governed by thoughts and explanations known only to himself. To entertain the
Negroes who hung around the shoeshine stand in front of the old
Frederick Hotel on Saturday mornings, he'd scratch matches alight
on his clenched teeth, let a pool of paraffin burn to a waxy scorch in the
center of his palm, flip a knife into the toe of his work boot.

     
But no one who looked
into Aaron Crown's eyes ever quite forgot them. They flared with a wary light
for no reason, looked back at you with a reptilian, lidless hunger that made
you feel a sense of sexual ill ease, regardless of your gender.

     
Some said he'd once
been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, expelled from it for fighting inside a Baptist
church, swinging a wood bench into the faces of his adversaries.

     
But that was the
stuff of poor-white piney woods folklore, as remote from our French-Catholic
community as tales of lynchings and church bombings in Mississippi.

     
How could we know
that underneath a live oak tree hung with moss and spiderwebs of blue
moonlight, Aaron Crown would sight down the barrel of a sporterized Mauser
rifle, his body splayed out comfortably like an infantry marksman's, the
leather sling wrapped tightly around his left forearm, his loins tingling
against the earth, and drill a solitary round through a plate glass window into
the head of the most famous NAACP leader in Louisiana?

     
It took twenty-eight
years to nail him, to assemble a jury that belonged sufficiently to a younger
generation that had no need to defend men like Aaron Crown.

     
Everyone had always
been sure of his guilt. He had never denied it, had he? Besides, he had never
been one of us.

I
t was early fall, an election year, and each morning after the sun
rose out of the swamp and burned the fog away from the flooded cypress trees
across the bayou from my bait shop and boat-rental business, the sky would
harden to such a deep, heart-drenching blue that you felt you could reach up
and fill your hand with it like bolls of stained cotton. The air was dry and
cool, too, and the dust along the dirt road by the bayou seemed to rise into
gold columns of smoke and light through the canopy of oaks overhead. So when I
glanced up from sanding the planks on my dock on a Saturday morning and saw
Buford LaRose and his wife, Karyn, jogging through the long tunnel of trees
toward me, they seemed like part of a photograph in a health
magazine, part of an idealized moment caught by a creative
photographer in a depiction of what is called the New South, rather than an
oddity far removed from the refurbished plantation home in which they lived
twenty-five miles away.

     
I convinced myself
they had not come to see me, that forcing them to stop their run out of reasons
of politeness would be ungenerous on my part, and I set down my sanding machine
and walked toward the bait shop.

     
"Hello!" I
heard Buford call.

     
Your past comes back
in different ways. In this case, it was in the form of Karyn LaRose, her
platinum hair sweat-soaked and piled on her head, her running shorts and
purple-and-gold Mike the Tiger T-shirt glued to her body like wet Kleenex.

     
"How y'all
doin'?" I replied, my smile as stiff as ceramic.

     
"Aaron Crown
called you yet?" Buford asked, resting one hand on the dock railing,
pulling one ankle up toward his muscular thigh with the other.

     
"How'd you
know?" I said.

     
"He's looking
for soft-hearted guys to listen to his story." Buford grinned, then winked
with all the confidence of the eighty-yard passing quarterback he'd been at
L.S.U. twenty years earlier. He was still lean-stomached and narrow-waisted,
his chest flat like a prizefighter's, his smooth, wide shoulders olive with
tan, his curly brown hair bleached on the tips by the sun. He pulled his other
ankle up behind him, squinting at me through the sweat in his eyebrows.

     
"Aaron's decided
he's an innocent man," he said. "He's got a movie company listening
to him. Starting to see the big picture?"

     
"He gets a dumb
cop to plead his cause?" I said.

     
"I said
'soft-hearted,'" he said, his face beaming now.

     
"Why don't you
come see us more often, Dave?" Karyn asked.

     
"That sounds
good," I said, nodding, my eyes wandering out over the water.

     
She raised her chin,
wiped the sweat off the back of her neck, looked at the sun with her eyelids
closed and pursed her lips and breathed through them as though the air were
cold. Then she opened her eyes again and smiled good-naturedly, leaning with
both arms on the rail and stretching her legs one at a time.

     
"Y'all want to
come in for something to drink?" I asked.

     
"Don't let this
guy jerk you around, Dave," Buford said.

     
"Why should
I?"

     
"Why should he
call you in the first place?"

  
   
"Who told you this?" I asked.

     
"His
lawyer."

     
"Sounds like
shaky legal ethics to me," I said.

     
"Give me a
break, Dave," he replied. "If Aaron Crown ever gets out of Angola,
the first person he's going to kill is his lawyer. That's after he shoots the
judge. How do we know all this? Aaron called up the judge, collect, mind you,
and told him so."

     
They said good-bye
and resumed their jog, running side by side past the sprinklers spinning among
the tree trunks in my front yard. I watched them grow smaller in the distance,
all the while feeling that somehow something inappropriate, if not unseemly,
had just occurred.

     
I got in my pickup
truck and caught up with them a quarter mile down the road. They never broke
stride.

     
"This bothers
me, Buford," I said out the window. "You wrote a book about Aaron
Crown. It might make you our next governor. Now you want to control access to
the guy?"

     
"Bothers you,
huh?" he said, his air-cushioned running shoes thudding rhythmically in
the dirt.

     
"It's not an
unreasonable attitude," I said.

     
Karyn leaned her face
past him and grinned at me. Her mouth was bright red, her brown eyes happy and
charged with energy from her run.

     
"You'll be
bothered a lot worse if you help these right-wing cretins take over Louisiana
in November. See you around, buddy," he said, then gave me the thumbs-up
sign just before he and his wife poured it on and cut across a shady grove of
pecan trees.

S
he called me that evening, not at the house but at the bait shop.
Through the screen I could see the lighted gallery and windows in my house,
across the dirt road, up the slope through the darkening trees.

     
"Are you upset
with Buford?" she said.

     
"No."

     
"He just doesn't
want to see you used, that's all."

     
"I appreciate
his concern."

     
"Should I have
not been there?"

     
"I'm happy y'all
came by."

     
"Neither of us
was married at the time, Dave. Why does seeing me make you uncomfortable?"

     
"This isn't
turning into a good conversation," I said.

     
"I'm not big on
guilt. It's too bad you are," she replied, and quietly hung up.

     
The price of a velvet
black sky bursting with stars and too much champagne, a grassy levee blown with
buttercups and a warm breeze off the water, I thought. Celibacy was not an easy
virtue to take into the nocturnal hours.

     
But guilt over an
impulsive erotic moment wasn't the problem. Karyn LaRose was a woman you kept
out of your thoughts if you were a married man.

A
aron Crown was dressed in wash-faded denims that were too tight
for him when he was escorted in leg and waist chains from the lock-down unit
into the interview room.