DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (21 page)

  
   
But the problem in dealing with Dock Green
was not his tormented and neurotic personality. It was his intuitive and
uncannily accurate sense about other people's underlying motivations, perhaps
even their thoughts.

     
"Who told you I
was here?" he said.

     
"You've got a
lot of respect around here, Dock. The St. Landry sheriff's office likes to know
when you're in town."

     
"Who's in the
shit machine?"

     
"Clete
Purcel."

     
He put down the
bucket, cupped one hand to his mouth, the other
to his genitalia,
and shouted, "Hey, Purcel, I got your corndog hanging!"

     
"Dock, I'm
looking for a black hooker by the name of Brandy Grissum."

     
"An addict, the
one saw the screenwriter get capped?"

     
"That's
right."

     
"I don't know
anything about her. Why's he parked out there?"

     
"You just
said—"

     
"NOPD already
talked to me. That's how I know." The skin under his eye puckered, like
paint wrinkling in a bucket. "Short Boy Jerry put you here?"

     
"Why would he do
that?" I smiled and tried to keep my eyes flat.

     
"Y'all went to
school together. Now he's moving back to New Iberia. Now you're standing on my
property. It don't take a big brain to figure it out."

     
"Give me the
girl, Dock. I'll owe you one."

     
"You looking for
a black whore or a black hit man, you should be talking to Jimmy Ray
Dixon."

     
"I'm firing in
the well, huh?" I said. The wind puffed the willow trees that grew on the
far side of the levee. "You've got a nice place here."

     
"Don't give me
that laid-back act, Robicheaux. I'll tell you what this is about. Short Boy
Jerry thought he could throw up some pickets on my jobs and run me under. It
didn't work. So now he's using you to put some boards in my head. I think he
dimed me with NOPD, too."

   
  
"You're pretty fast, Dock."

     
His eyes focused on
the front gate.

     
"I can't believe
it. Purcel's taking a leak in my cattleguard. I got neighbors here," Dock
said.

     
"You and the
Giacanos aren't backing Buford LaRose, are you?" I asked.

   
  
For the first time he smiled, thin-lipped,
his eyes slitted inside the hard cast of his face.

     
"I never bet on
anything human," he said. "Come inside. I got to get a Pepto or
something. Purcel's making me sick."

     
The pine walls of his
front room were hung with the stuffed heads of antelope and deer. A marlin was
mounted above the fireplace, its lacquered skin synthetic-looking and filmed
with dust. On a long
bookshelf was a line of jars filled with
the pickled, yellowed bodies of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins, a
hairless possum, box turtles, baby alligators, a nutria with its paddlelike
feet webbed against the glass.

     
Dock went into the
kitchen and came back with a beer in his hand. He offered me nothing. Behind
him I saw his wife, one of the Giacano women, staring at me, hollow-eyed, her
raven hair pulled back in a knot, her skin as white as bread flour.

     
"Purcel gets
under my skin," Dock said.

     
"Why?"

     
"Same reason you
do."

     
"Excuse
me?"

     
"You make a guy
for crazy, you think you can drop some coins in his slot, turn him into a
monkey on a wire. The truth is, I've been down in a place where your eye
sockets and your ears and your mouth are stuffed with mud, where there ain't
any sound except the voices of dead people inside your head . . . You learn
secrets down there you don't ever forget."

     
"I was over
there, too, Dock. You don't have a franchise on the experience."

     
"Not like I was.
Not even in your nightmares." He drank from his beer can, wiped his mouth
on the inside of his wrist. His eyes seemed to lose interest in me, then his
face flexed with an idle thought, as though a troublesome moth had swum into
his vision.

     
"Why don't you
leave me alone and go after that Klansman before he gets the boons stoked up
again. At least if he ain't drowned. We got enough race trouble in New Orleans
as it is," he said.

     
"Who are you
talking about?"

     
He looked at me for a
long moment, his face a bemused psychodrama, like a metamorphic jigsaw puzzle
forming and reforming itself.

     
"That guy Crown,
the one you were defending on TV, he jumped into the Mississippi this
morning," he said. "Your shit machine don't have a radio?"

     
He drank from his
beer can and looked at me blankly over the top of it.

I
T WAS RAINING AND DARK THE NEXT MORNING
when Clete let me
off
in front of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's
Department, then made an illegal U-turn into the barbecue stand across the
street. Lightning had hit the department's building earlier, knocking out all
the electricity except the emergency lights. When I went into the sheriff's
office, he was standing at his window, in the gloom, with a cup of coffee in
his hand, looking across the street.

     
"Why's Purcel in
town?" he asked.

 
    
"A couple of days' fishing."

     
"So he drives
you to work?"

     
"My truck's in
the shop."

     
"He's a rogue
cop, Dave."

     
"Too harsh,
skipper."

     
"He has a way of
writing his name with a baseball bat. That's not going to happen here, my friend."

     
"You made your
point, sir," I said.

     
"Good."

     
Then he told me about
yesterday's events at Angola and later at a sweet potato farm north of
Morganza.

     
Aaron Crown had
vomited in his cell, gone into spasms on the floor, like an epileptic during a
seizure or a man trying to pass gallstones. He was put in handcuffs and leg
chains and placed in the front seat of a van, rather than in the back, a
plastic sick bag in his lap, and sent on his way to the infirmary, with a young
white guard driving.

     
The guard paid little
attention, perhaps even averted his eyes, when Aaron doubled over with another
coughing spasm, never seeing the bobby pin that Aaron had hidden in his mouth
and that he used to pick one manacle loose from his left wrist, never even
thinking of Aaron as an escape risk within the rural immensity of the farm, nor
as an inmate whose hostility and violence would ever become directed at a white
man.

     
Not until they
rounded a curve by the river and Aaron's left arm wrapped around the guard's
neck and Aaron's right fist, the loose handcuff whipping from the wrist,
smashed into the guard's face and splintered his jawbone.

     
Then he was hobbling
through gum trees and a soybean field, over the levee, down into the willows
along the mudflat, where he waded out through the backwater and the reeds and
cattails and plunged into the current, his ankles raw and bleeding and still
chained together.

     
By all odds he should
have drowned, but later a group of West Feliciana sheriff's deputies with dogs
would find a beached tangle of uprooted trees downstream, with a piece of denim
speared on a root, and conclude that Aaron had not only grabbed onto the
floating island of river trash but had wedged himself inside its branches like
a muskrat and ridden the heart of the river seven miles without being seen
before the half-submerged trees bumped gently onto a sandspit on the far side
and let Aaron disembark into the free people's world as though he had been
delivered by a specially chartered ferry.

     
Then he was back into
the piney woods, hard-shell fundamentalist country in which he had been raised,
that he took for granted would never change, where a white man's guarantees
were understood, so much so that when he entered the barn of a black fanner
that night and began clattering through the row of picks and mattocks and
scythes and axes and malls hung on the wall to find a tool sharp and heavy
enough to cut the chain on his ankles, he never expected to be challenged, much
less threatened at gunpoint.

     
The black man was
old, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only the overalls he had pulled on when he
had heard Aaron break into his barn.

     
"What you doin',
old man?" he said, and leveled the dogleg twenty gauge at Aaron's chest.

     
"It's fixing to
storm. I come out of it." Aaron held his right wrist, with the manacle
dangling from it, behind his back.

     
The lightning outside
shook like candle flame through the cracks in the wall.

     
"You got a chain
on your feet," the black man said.

     
"Cut it for
me."

     
"Where you got
out of?"

     
"They had me for
something I ain't did. Cut the chain. I'll come back and give you some
money."

     
"You the one
they looking for, the one that killed that NAACP man, ain't you?"

 
    
"It's a goddamn lie they ruint my life over."

     
"Now, I ain't
wanting to harm you . . . You stand back, I said you—"

     
Aaron tore the
shotgun from the black man's hand and clutched his throat and squeezed until
the black man's knees collapsed, then he wrapped him to a post with baling
wire, tore the inside of his house apart, and looted his kitchen.

     
Five minutes later
Aaron Crown disappeared into the howling storm in the black man's pickup truck,
the shotgun and a cigar box filled with pennies and a bag of groceries on the
seat beside him.

"
W
here you
think he's headed?" I said.

     
"He got rid of
the pickup in Baton Rouge late last night. A block away a Honda was stolen out
of a filling station. Guess what? Crown's lawyer, the one who pled him guilty,
has decided to go to Europe for a few weeks."

     
"How about the
judge who sent him up?"

     
"The state
police are guarding his house." He watched my face.
      
"What's on your mind?"

     
"If I were Aaron
Crown, my anger would be directed at somebody closer to home."

     
"I guess you
picked my brain, Dave."

     
"I don't like
the drift here, Sheriff."

     
"The next
governor is not going to get murdered in our jurisdiction."

     
"Not me. No,
sir."

     
"If you don't
want to be around the LaRoses personally, that's your choice. But you're going
to have to coordinate the surveillance on their house . . . Look, the
election's Tuesday. Then the sonofabitch will probably be governor. That's the
way we've always gotten rid of people we don't like—we elect them to public
office. Go with the flow."

     
"Wrong
man."

     
"Karyn LaRose
doesn't think so. She called last night and asked for you specifically . . .
Could you be a little more detailed on y'all's history?"

     
"It all seems
kind of distant, for some reason."

     
"I see. . .
" He sucked a tooth. "Okay, one other thing. . .Lafayette P.D. called
a little earlier. Somebody broke into a pawnshop about five this morning. He
took only one item — a scoped .303 Enfield rifle with a sling. You ever hear of
a perp breaking into a pawnshop and stealing only one item? . . . I saw British
snipers use those in Korea. They could bust a silhouette on a ridge from five
hundred yards . . . Don't treat this as an nuisance assignment, Dave."