DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (16 page)

    
 
"There's only one issue here, Karyn.
Buford's not the man people think he is. He's taking money from Jerry Joe
Plumb. The guy who delivered it to y'all's house was Mingo Bloomberg."

     
"Who?"

     
"He kills
people. Right now he's in custody for leaving a black girl to drown in a
submerged automobile in Henderson Swamp."

     
"I never heard
of him. I doubt if Buford has, either."

     
"Jerry Joe's
mobbed-up. Why do mobbed-up guys want your husband in Baton Rouge?"

     
"I can't
understand you. What are you trying to do to us? Buford's opponents are the
same people who supported David Duke."

     
"So what? Y'all
have made a scapegoat out of Aaron Crown."

     
"Dave, you've
let yourself become the advocate of a misanthropic degenerate who molested his
daughter and murdered the bravest civil rights leader in Louisiana."

     
"How do you know
he molested Sabelle?"

     
"I'm sorry, I'm
not going to discuss a man like that."

     
I looked out the
window, fiddled with a paper clip on my blotter.

     
"You're
committed to lost and hopeless causes," she said. "I don't think it's
because you're an idealist, either. It's pride. You get to be the iconoclast
among the Philistines."

     
"I used to buy
into psychobabble myself, Karyn. It's a lot of fun."

    
 
"I guess there's not much point in any
of this, is there?" she said.
Her skirt was tight against
her body when she gathered up her purse and rose from her chair. "I wish
it had been different, Dave. I wish the grog hadn't gotten you. I wish I'd been
able to help. I can't say for sure I loved you, but I loved being with you. Be
good to yourself, kiddo."

     
With that, she went
out the door. I could hear my ears ring in the silence.

J
ust before lunch the sheriff came into my office.

     
"This morning I've
had a call from the mayor's office, one from the chamber of commerce, and one
from the New Iberia Historical Preservation Society," he said. "Did
you know Jerry Joe Plumb just bought an acre lot right down from the
Shadows?"

     
"No."

     
"He also bought
a bunch of rural property south of the city limits. How well do you get along
with him?"

     
"All
right."

     
"Find out what
he's up to. I don't want any more phone calls."

     
"Where is
he?"

     
"Watching a
bulldozer level the house that's on the lot by the Shadows."

     
I drove down East
Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a
red brick and white-columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche. The
acre Jerry Joe had purchased was located between two Victorian homes and went
all the way back to the bayou and was shaded by oaks that were over one hundred
years old. I drove through the piked gate and parked next to a salvage truck
and an earth grader, where a group of workmen were eating lunch. Down by the
bayou was a huge pile of splintered cypress boards, twisted pipe, crushed
plaster powdering in the wind, and a flattened gazebo with the passion vine
still clinging to the lattice work.

     
"Y'all couldn't
move it instead?" I said.

     
"The termites
was too heavy to get on the truck. That's a pure fact," a man in a yellow
hard hat with a jaw full of bread and Vienna sausage said. He and his friends
laughed.

     
"Where's Jerry
Joe? I'll tell him how effective you are at doing PR with the sheriff's
department."

     
It was a short drive
to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. As soon as I stepped through the door I heard
Clifton Chenier's "Hey Tite Fille" on the jukebox and saw Jerry Joe
out on the polished wood floor, dancing with a waitress. His elbows were tucked
close to his ribs, his fingers pointed at angles like a 1940s jitterbugger, his
oxblood loafers glinting. His whole body seemed animated with rhythm. His
shoulders titled and vibrated; he jiggled and bopped and created an incredible
sense of energy and movement without ever stepping out of a twelve-inch radius,
and all the while his face beamed at the waitress with genuine pleasure and
affection.

     
I ordered a 7-Up at
the bar and waited for him to sit down. When he finished dancing he squeezed
the waitress's hand, walked past me, his eyes fixed on the black bar man, and
said, "Bring my friend the same order I got."

     
"Don't do that,
Jerry Joe," I said to his back.

     
He pulled out a chair
at a table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. "You got it
whether you want it or not . . . Catfish filet with etoufee on the top. This is
food you expect only in the afterlife," he said. He twisted another chair
out. "What's the haps?"

     
"Some people
want to know why you just bulldozed down a house that George Washington Cable
once lived in."

     
"Who?"

     
"A famous
writer."

     
"Because it had
an asbestos roof, because the floors were like walking on wet cardboard,
because there were vampire bats in the drainpipes."

     
"Why not work
with people, Jerry Joe, explain that to them, instead of giving them heart
failure?"

     
"Because the
problem is not what I'm tearing down, it's what they think I'm going to build.
Like maybe a pink elephant in the middle of the historical district." He
put a stuffed mushroom in his mouth.
"What?
Oh, I get it. They got
reason to have those kind of concerns?"

     
"I didn't say
that."

     
"What are we
talking about, then? I got it. It's not the house, it's me."

     
"No one can
accuse you of being a Rotarian."

     
"I told you, my
sheet's an embarrassment. I'm on a level with unlicensed church bingo."

     
"You and some
others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a
cement mixer."

     
"He was taking
scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out."

     
"Why are you
buying property south of town?"

     
He patted his palm on
top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside
the jukebox. "Maybe I want out. Maybe I'm tired of New Orleans, being in
the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I'm taking it."

     
"I'm not with
you."

     
"Buford LaRose
is good for business . . . Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave . . . What if
these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than
it already is."

     
"A Mexican guy
tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people
in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"

     
Jerry Joe scratched
the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

     
"Number one,
Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out
one day. The smart money is looking for a new home . . . Listen, to that. . .
'La Jolie Blon'. . . Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to
it."

     
"Where'd the hit
come from?"

     
"I don't know.
That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and
watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."

     
"How did
you—"

     
"You want to ask
me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the
tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to
tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw
down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"

     
He raised his eyes
and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and
looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was
bunched in a knot.

     
"You want a
breadstick?" he asked.

O
ur jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual
black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a
glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and
were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his
glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

     
He stared up at me
from his cluttered desk.

     
"So why are we
holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin
Parish?"

     
"We're treating
the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I
said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."

     
"Yeah, shit
rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."

     
"I'm sorry to
hear you take that attitude."

     
"This guy was
born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it
is."

     
"How about
starting over, Kelso?"

     
"He complains
he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making
him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants
isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

     
"I go, 'What
black guy?'

     
"He goes, 'How
the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'

     
"I go, 'Your
brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'

     
"He goes, 'I
come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me
with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else
would live in a shithole like this.'"

     
"You've got him
in isolation now?" I asked.

     
"A guy who uses
words like
cannibal
to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard,
teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it
wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."

     
Five minutes later I
checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second
guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds
of a jailhouse— clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half
dozen
stations, shouted voices echoing along the
ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was
suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without
either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The
stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded
in his scalp.

     
"Kelso says
you're being a pain in the ass," I said.

     
He let a towel dangle
between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

     
"Did your lawyer
tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.

     
I expected anger,
another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the
sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite
understood before.

     
"Did you hear
me?" I said.

     
"I talked to my
cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black
guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami's an open city. He's supposed to
look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the
guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got
the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."

     
"You're the
hit?"

     
He stared at the
floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.