DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (23 page)

     
"You can get me
some money?" she said.

     
"Depends on what
you've got, Brandy," I said.

     
"They gonna put
me out tomorrow. I ain't got nowhere to go. He
know where my
family's at."

     
"The
shooter?" I said.

     
"He found me
twice. He took me out in the woods ... he made me do things in the back of his
car." Her eyes flicked away from my face.

     
"Who's the guy,
Brandy?" Clete said.

     
"He call himself
Mookie. He says he's from Miami. But he talks French and he know all about
fishing in the bayous up I-10."

     
"Mookie
what?" I said.

     
"I don't want to
even be knowing his first name. I just want to get my li'l boy from my mother's
house and go somewheres else."

     
"Why are they
putting you out?"

     
She kneaded the top
of her forearm and looked out at the shell road in the twilight.

     
"They said my
urine was dirty when I come back to the house the other day. I say you can look
at my arm, I ain't got no new tracks. The proctor, she says I'm skin popping in
my thighs, the other women halfways seen it in the shower. I ain't skin popped,
though, that's the troot, and I ain't smoked no rock in thirty-seven
days."

     
"How'd you U.A.
dirty, then?" Clete said.

     
She picked at her
earlobe and raised her eyebrows. "Don't ax me," she said.

     
"Why'd Mookie
kill your John?" I asked.

     
"He said he was
doing it to hep out some friends. He said the guy didn't have no bidness
messing around with black women, anyway."

     
"You work for
Dock Green, Brandy?" I asked.

     
"I got a street
manager."

     
"You got a
Murphy artist," Clete said.

     
Her jawbone flexed
along one cheek.

     
"Why'd Mookie
let you slide?" I asked.

     
"He said he
liked me. He said I could have China white, all the rock, all the tar I want,
all I gotta do is ax. He was smoking rock in his car. He got a look in his face
that makes me real scared. Suh, I gotta get out of Lou'sana or he's gonna find
me again."

     
"You've got to
give me more information, Brandy," I said.

     
"You the
po-liceman from New Iberia?"

     
"That's
right."

     
"He know all
about you. He know about this one wit' you, too."

     
Clete had started to
light a cigarette. He took it out of his mouth and looked at her.

     
"He was saying,
now this is what he say, this ain't my words, 'If the fat one come around again
where he ain't suppose to be, I got permission to burn his kite.'"

     
"When was
this?" I said.

     
"A week ago.
Maybe two weeks ago. I don't remember."

     
"Is there a way
I can get a message to this guy?" Clete asked.

     
"I don't know no
more. I ain't axed for none of this. Y'all gonna give me train fare for me and
my li'l boy?"

     
I pulled an envelope
from my back pocket and handed it to her.

     
"This ain't but
two hundred dollars," she said.

     
"My piggy bank's
tapped out," I said.

     
"That means it's
out of the man's pocket," Clete said.

     
"It don't seem
very much for what I tole y'all."

     
"I think I'll
take a walk, throw some rocks at the garfish. Blow the horn when you're ready
to boogie. Don't you love being around the life?" Clete said.

T
he night before the election I lay in the dark and tried to think
my way through the case. Why had the gargantuan black man with the conked hair
hung around New Orleans after the hit on the screenwriter? Unless it was to
take out Mingo Bloomberg? Or even Clete?

     
But why expect
reasonable behavior of a sociopath?

     
The bigger question
was who did he work for? Brandy Grissum had said the black man had made a
threat on Clete one or two weeks ago, which was before we visited Dock Green. But
Dock had probably already heard we'd been bumping the furniture around, so the
time frame was irrelevant.

     
Also, I was assuming
that Brandy Grissum was not lying. The truth is, most people who talk with
cops—perps, lowlifes of any stripe, traffic violators, crime victims, witnesses
to crime, relatives of crime victims, or irritable cranks who despise their
neighbors' dogs—feel at some point they have to lie, either to protect
themselves, somebody else, or to ensure that someone is punished. The fact that
they treat you as a credulous moron seems to elude them.

     
I was still convinced
the center of the case lay on the LaRose plantation. The three avenues into it
led through Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock
Green, and Jerry Joe Plumb.
The motivation that characterized all the players was greed.

     
It wasn't a new
scenario.

     
But the presence of
power and celebrity gave it a glittering mask.
      
The LaRoses were what other people wanted to be, and their
sins seemed hardly worthy of recognition.

     
Except to one man,
whose ankles were marbled with bruises from leg chains and whose thoughts
flared without respite like dry boards being fed into a furnace.

CHAPTER
 
16

B
UFORD WON.

     
The northern portion
of the state was split by a third-party racist candidate, while the southern
parishes voted as a bloc for one of their own, a Catholic bon vivant football
hero who descended from Confederate cavalry officers but whose two Ph.D.'s and
identification with the New South would never allow his constituency to be
embarrassed.

     
The celebration that
night in Baton Rouge received the kind of network coverage that one associates
with Mardi Gras.

     
Wednesday
night the celebration moved to the LaRose plantation in New Iberia. The moist
air smelled of flowers and meat fires, and as if the season had wanted to
cooperate with Buford's political ascendancy, a full yellow moon had risen
above the bayou and the cleared fields and the thoroughbreds in the pasture,
all that seemed to define the LaRose family's historical continuity. First a
Dixieland, then a zydeco band played on top of a flatbed truck in the backyard.
Hundreds of guests ate okra and sausage gumbo and barbecued chicken wings off
of paper plates and lined up at the crystal bowls filled with whiskey-sour
punches. They behaved with the cheerful abandon of people who knew their time
had come; the crushed flowerbeds, the paper cups strewn on the grass, the
red-faced momentary coarseness, were just part of the tribute they paid to
their own validation.

     
Helen Soileau and I
walked the treeline along the back fields, talked to two state policemen who
carried cut-down pump shotguns, shined our flashlights in storage sheds and the
barn and the stables, and then walked back down the drive toward our cruiser in
front. It was going to be a long night.

     
Clay Mason was
smoking a cheroot cigar between two parked automobiles, one booted foot propped
on a bumper, looking wistfully at the cleared fields and the yellow moon that
had filled the branches of a moss-hung oak.

     
"Ah, Mr.
Robicheaux, how are you?" he asked.

     
"Are you
visiting, sir?" I said.

     
"Just long
enough to extend congratulations. By God, what an event! I'm surprised Buford's
father didn't get up out of the grave for it."

    
 
"I hear he was quite a guy."

     
"If that's how
you spell 'sonofabitch,' he was."

     
"How'd you know
his father?"

     
"They owned the
ranch next to my family's, out west of the Pecos."

     
"I see."

     
"My father used
to say it takes sonsofbitches to build great countries. What do you think about
a statement like that?" He puffed on his cigar.

     
"I wouldn't
know." I saw Helen get in the cruiser and close the door in the dark.

     
"Son, there's
nothing more odious than an intelligent man pretending to be obtuse."

     
"I'd better say
good night, Dr. Mason."

     
"Stop acting
like a nincompoop. Let's go over here and get a drink."

     
"No,
thanks."

     
He seemed to study
the silhouette of the oak branches against the moon.

     
"I understand
y'all matched the fingerprints of that Klansman, Crown, is that his name, to
some tin cans or cigarette papers you found in the woods," he said.

     
"That's right.

     
He flipped his cigar
sparking into a rosebed. "You catch that racist bastard, Mr.
Robicheaux."

     
"I don't think
Aaron Crown's a racist."

     
He placed his hand,
which had the contours of a claw, on my arm. An incisor tooth glinted in his
mouth when he grinned.

     
"A Ku Klux
Klansman? Don't deceive yourself. A man like that will rip your throat out and
eat it like a pomegranate," he said.

     
The breeze blew his
fine, white cornsilk hair against his scalp.

F
ifteen minutes later I had to use the rest room.

     
"Go
inside," Helen said.

     
"I'd like to
avoid it."

    
 
"You want to take the cruiser down the
road?"

     
"Bad form."

     
"I guess you get
to go inside," she said.

     
I walked
through the crowds of revelers in the yard, past the zydeco musicians on the
flatbed truck, who were belting out "La Valse Negress" with accordion
and fiddle and electric guitars, and with one man raking thimbles up and down a
replicated aluminum washboard that was molded like soft body armor to his
chest. The inside of the house was filled with people, too, and I had to go up
the winding stairs to the second floor to find an empty bathroom.

     
Or one that was
almost empty.

     
The door was ajar. I
saw a bare male thigh, the trousers dropped below the knee, a gold watch on a
hairy wrist. Decency should have caused me to step back and wait by the top of
the stairs. But I had seen something else too—the glassy cylindrical shape
between two fingers, the thumb resting on the plunger, the bright squirt of
fluid at the tip of the needle.

     
I pushed open the
door the rest of the way.

     
When Buford connected
with the vein, his eyes closed and opened and then glazed over, his lips parted
indolently and a muted sound rose from his throat, as though he were sliding
onto the edge of orgasm.

     
Then he heard me.

     
"Oh . . . Dave,"
he said. He put the needle on the edge of the lavatory and swallowed dryly, his
eyes flattening, the pupils constricting with the hit.

     
"Bad shit,
Buford," I said.

     
He buttoned his
trousers and tried to fix his belt.

     
"Goat glands and
vitamins. Not what you think, Dave," he said.

     
"So that's why
you shoot it up in your thighs?"

     
"John Kennedy
did it." He smiled wanly. "Are you going to cuff the governor-elect
in his home?"