DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (26 page)

     
"Do you hear
little piggy feet running toward the trough?" Helen Soileau said. We were
standing like posts by one side of the banquet room entrance. A jazz combo was
playing inside. Helen kept stoking her own mood.

     
"What a bunch .
. . Did you see Karyn in the bar? I think she's half in the bag," she
said.

     
"I don't think
she's entirely comfortable with her new constituency."

     
"Not in the
daylight, anyway . . . Check out who just came in the door."

     
Persephone Green wore
a black see-through evening dress and a sapphire and diamond necklace around
her throat. Her shoulders were as white and smooth as moonstone.

     
"How do you know
Dock Green's wife?" I said.

     
"I was in
uniform with NOPD when she shot a prowler at her home in the Garden District.
She shot him five times."

     
Persephone Green
paused by the banquet room door, her black sequined bag dangling from her wrist
by a spidery cord.

     
"You get
around," she said to me. Her hair was pulled straight back and threaded
with a string of tiny diamonds.

     
"Looking after
the common good, that sort of thing," I said.

     
"We'll all sleep
more secure, I'm sure." Her gaze roved indolently over Helen's face.
"You have a reason for staring at me, madam?"

     
"No,
ma'am."

     
"I know
you?"

     
"I was the first
officer at the scene when you popped that black guy by your swimming pool. I
pulled his head out of the water," Helen said.

     
"Oh yes, how
could I forget? You're the charm school graduate who made some
accusations."

     
"Not really. I
probably have poor night vision. I was the only one who saw a powder burn by
the guy's eyebrow," Helen said.

     
"That's right,
you made quite a little squeaking noise, didn't you?"

     
"The scene
investigator probably had better eyesight. He's the one took early retirement
the same year and bought a liquor store out in Metairie," Helen said.

     
"My, what a
clever sack of potatoes."

     
Persephone Green
walked on inside the banquet room. The back of her evening dress was an open V
that extended to the lower tip of her vertebrae.

     
"I'm going up on
the roof," Helen said.

     
"Don't let her
bother you."

     
"Tomorrow I'm
off this shit. The old man doesn't like it, he can have my shield."

     
I watched her walk
through the crowd toward the service elevator, her back flexed, her arms
pumped, her expression one that dissipated smiles and caused people to glance
away from her face.

     
I walked through the
meeting rooms and the restaurant and bar area. Karyn LaRose was dancing by the
bandstand with Jerry Joe Plumb. Her evening dress looked like frozen pink
champagne poured on her body. She pulled away from him and came up to me, her
face flushed and hot, her breath heavy with the smell of cherries and bourbon.

     
"Dance with
me," she said.

     
"Can't do it on
the job."

     
"Yes you
will." She slipped her hand into mine and held it tightly between us. She
tilted her chin up; a private thought, like a self-indulgent memory, seemed to
light her eyes.

     
"It looks like
you're enjoying yourself," I said.

     
"I know of only
one moment that feels as good as winning," she said. She smiled at the
corners of her mouth.

     
"Better have
some coffee, Karyn."

     
"You're a pill.
But you're going to end up in Baton Rouge just the same, honey bunny."

     
"Adios,"
I said, and pulled loose from her and went out the side door and into the
parking lot.

     
It was warm and muggy
outside, and the moon was yellow and veiled inside a rain ring. There were
Lafayette city cops in the parking lot and state police with rifles on the
roof. I walked all the way around the hotel and talked with a state policeman
and a black security guard at the back door, then checked the opposite side of
a hedge that bordered the parking lot, and, finally, for want of anything else
to do, walked down toward the river.

     
Where would Aaron
Crown be, I asked myself.

     
Not in a town or
city, I thought. Even before he had been a hunted man, Aaron was one of those
who sought out woods and bogs not only as a refuge of shadow and invisibility
but as a place where no concrete slab would separate the whirrings in his chest
from the power that he instinctively knew lay inside rotted logs and layers of
moldy leaves and caves that were as dark as a womb.

     
Maybe in the
Atchafalaya Basin, I thought, holed up in a shack on stilts, smearing his skin
with mud to protect it from mosquitoes, eating nutria or coon or gar or
whatever bird he could knock from a tree with a club, his ankles lesioned with
sores from the leg chains he had run in.

     
If
 
he tried to get Buford tonight, in all
probability it would have to be from a distance, I thought. He could come down
the Vermilion, hide his boat under a dock, perhaps circle the hotel, and hunch
down in the shrubbery behind the parking lot. With luck Buford would appear
under a canvas walkway, or between parked automobiles, and Aaron would wind the
leather sling as tightly as a tourniquet around his left forearm, sight the
scope's crosshairs on the man who had not only sent him to prison but had used
and discarded his daughter as a white overseer would a field woman, then grind
his back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure while he squeezed off the round
and watched the world try to deal with Aaron Crown's handiwork.

     
But he had to get
inside the perimeter to do it.

     
I used the pay phone
in a restaurant on the riverbank to call Bootsie. While I listened to my own
voice on the answering machine, I gazed out the window at the parking lot and
the four-lane flow of headlights on Pinhook. A catering truck turned into the
hotel, a rug cleaning van driven by a woman, a white stretch limo filled with
revelers, a half dozen taxi cabs.

     
I hung up the phone
and went back outside. It was almost 9
p.m.
Where was Bootsie?

     
I went back inside
the hotel and rode the service elevator up to the roof. The wind was warm and
smelled of rain, and there were yellow slicks of moonlight, like patches of oil
paint, floating on the river's surface.

 
    
Down below, at the service entrance, the caterers were
carrying in stainless steel containers of food, and a blonde woman in a baggy
gray dress was pulling a hamper loaded with rug cleaning equipment from her van.
A drunk man in a hat and a raincoat wandered through the parked cars, then
decided to work his way into the hedge at the back of the lot, simultaneously
unzipping his fly. The state policeman at the service door walked out into the
lot and paused under a light, his hands on his hips, then stepped close in to
the hedge, raised on his
toes, and tried to see the man in the
raincoat. The state policeman disappeared into the shadows.

     
"What is
it?" Helen said.

     
"A state trooper
went after a drunk in the hedge. I don't see either one of them now . . . Get
on the portable, will you?"

     
"What y'all got
down there?" she said into her radio.

     
"Ain't got
nothing," the voice of a black man said.

     
"Who is
this?"

     
"The security
guard."

     
"Put an officer
on."

     
"They ain't
one."

     
"What's going on
with the guy in the hedge?"

     
"What guy?"

     
"The drunk the
state trooper went after. Look, find an officer and give him the radio."

     
"I done tried to
tell you, they ain't nothing going on. Except somebody down here don't have no
bidness working in a hotel."

     
"What are you
talking about?" Helen said.

     
"Somebody down
here got B.O. could make your nose fall off, that's what I'm talking about.
That clear enough?" There was a pause. The security guard was still
transmitting but he was speaking to someone else now: "I told you, you got
to have some ID . . . You ain't suppose to be inside here . . . Hey, don't you
be coming at me like that. . ."

     
The portable radio
struck the floor.

     
Helen and I ran for
the service elevator.

B
y the time we got down to the first floor a Lafayette city cop and
a state policeman were running down the hallway ahead of us toward the service
entrance. Through the glass I could see the catering truck and the rug cleaning
van in the parking lot.

     
"There ain't
anybody here," the city cop said, looking at the empty hallway, then
outside. He wore sideburns and his hat was too large for his head. He sniffed
the air and made a face. "Man, what's that smell? It's like somebody rubbed
shit on the walls."

     
The hallway
made a left angle toward the kitchen. Halfway down it were two ventilated wood
doors that were closed on a loud humming sound inside. A clothes hamper loaded
with squeegee mops and a rug-cleaning machine and bottles of chemicals rested
at an angle against the wall. I opened one of the doors and saw, next to the
boilers, a thin black man, with a mustache, in the uniform of a security guard,
sitting against a pile of crumpled cardboard cartons, his knees drawn up before
him, his hands gripping his loins, his face dilated with shock.

     
"What happened
to you, partner?" I said.

     
"The woman done
it," he answered.

     
"The
woman?"

     
"I mean, she was
dressed like a woman. She come at me. I ain't wanted to do it, but I hit her
with my baton. It didn't even slow her up. That's when she grabbed me. Down
here. She twisted real hard. She kept saying, 'Tell me where LaRose at or I
tear it out.'" He swallowed and widened his eyes.

     
"We'll get the
paramedics. You're going to be all right," I said. I heard Helen go back
out the door.

     
"I ain't never
had nothing like this happen," he said. His face flinched when he tried to
change the position of his legs. "It was when I seen her socks. That's
what started it, see. I wouldn't have paid her no mind."

     
"Her
socks?" I said.

     
"The catering
guys went in the kitchen with all the food. I thought it was one of them
stinking up the place. Then I looked at the woman's feet 'cause she was
tracking the rug. She had on brogans and socks with blood on them. I axed her
to show me some ID. She say it's in the van, then y'all called me on the
radio."

     
"Where'd this
person go?" I said.

     
"I don't know.
Back outside, maybe. She was kicking around in these cartons, looking for
something. I think she dropped it when I hit her. It was metal-looking. Maybe a
knife."

     
Helen came back
through the door.

     
"Check this. It
was out in the lot," she said, and held up a fright wig by one ropy blond
strand.

     
"You did
fine," I said to the security guard. "Maybe you saved the governor's
life tonight."

     
"Yeah? I done
that?"

     
"You bet,"
I said. Then I saw a piece of black electrician's tape and a glint of metal
under a flattened carton. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the carton and
inserted my ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a revolver whose broken
wood grips were taped to the steel frame.

     
"It looks like a
thirty-two," Helen said.

     
"It sure
does."

     
"What, that
means something?" she asked.