DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (30 page)

     
"I guess I
majored in being anybody's fuck," she said.

     
"You don't have
to be."

     
She took a roll of
breath mints out of her blue jeans and put one in her mouth with her thumb.
"Lonnie was here. In the middle of the night," she said. "He
interviewed Daddy right out there at the bar. I went out to get food. When I
came back, only Lonnie was here."

     
"Felton knew
your father had the gun?"

     
"You tell
me," she said. The skin of her face was shiny and tight against the bone,
her eyes swimming with an old knowledge about the nature of susceptibility and
betrayal.

I
found Lonnie Felton by the swimming pool, in the courtyard of the
white brick condominium he had rented above the Vermilion River. The surface of
the water was glazed with a slick of suntan lotion and the sunlight that
filtered through the moss in the trees overhead. Lonnie Felton lay on a bright
yellow double-size plastic lounge chair, with a redheaded girl of eighteen or
nineteen beside him. They both wore dark glasses and wet swimsuits, and their bodies
looked hard and brown and prickled with cold. Lonnie Felton took a sip from a
collins glass and smiled at me, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, his lips
spreading back from his teeth. His girlfriend snuggled closer to his side, her
knees and elbows drawn up tightly against him.

     
"You know what
aiding and abetting is?" I asked.

     
"You bet."

     
"I can hang it
on you."

     
He smiled again. His
lips were flat and thin against his teeth, his sex sculpted against his
swimsuit. "The Napoleonic Code supersedes the First Amendment?" he
said.

     
"I think Mookie
Zerrang was at my bait shop yesterday. He wanted to know where you lived."

     
"Who?"

     
"The black guy
who murdered your scriptwriter."

     
"Oh yeah. Well,
keep me informed, will you?"

     
"It's cold,
Lonnie. I want to go inside," the girl next to him said. She teased the
elastic band on his trunks with the tips of her fingers.

     
"I've got to
admire your Kool-Aid. I'd be worried if a guy like that was looking for
me," I said.

     
"Let me lay it
out for you. Dwayne Parsons, that's the great writer we're talking about here,
was an over-the-hill degenerate who factored himself into the deal because he
filmed some friends doing some nasty things between the sheets. What I'm saying
here is, he had a sick karma and it caught up with him. Look, if this black guy
comes here to do me, you know what I'm going to tell him? 'Thanks for not
coming sooner. Thanks for letting me have the life I've lived.' I don't argue
with my fate, Jack. It's that simple."

     
"I have a
feeling he won't be listening."

     
A cascade of tiny
yellow and scarlet leaves tumbled out of the trees into the swimming pool. The
redheaded girl rubbed her face against Lonnie Felton's chest and lay her
forearm across his loins.

     
"You don't like
us very much, do you?" he said.

     
"Us?"

     
"What you
probably call movie people."

     
"Have a good
day, Mr. Felton. Don't let them get behind you."

     
"What?"

     
"Go to more
movies. Watch a rerun of
Platoon
sometime."

     
I drove along the
river and caught the four-lane into Broussard, then took the old highway toward
Cade and Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The highway was littered with crushed
stalks of sugarcane that had fallen off the wagons on their way to the mill,
and dust devils spun out of the bare and harrowed fields and in the distance I
could see egrets rise like a scattering of white rose petals above a windbreak
of poplar trees.

     
I had lied to Lonnie
Felton. It was doubtful that I could make an aiding and abetting charge against
him stick. But that might turn out to be the best luck he could have ever had,
I thought.

     
I turned on
the radio and listened to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech game the rest of the way
home.

B
ootsie was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. She wore
a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a purple shirt with green and red
flowers printed on it. The tips of her hair were gold in the light through the
screen.

     
"What's going
on, boss man?" she said, without turning around.

     
I put my hand on her
back.

     
"There's an
all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet in Lafayette for six-ninety-five," I said.

     
"I already
started something."

     
"I used all the
wrong words the last couple of days," I said.

     
She rinsed a plate
and set it in the rack. She gazed at a solitary mockingbird that stood on the
redwood table.

     
"There're some
things a woman has a hard time accepting. It doesn't matter what caused them to
happen," she said.

     
She picked up another
plate and rinsed it. I felt her weight lean forward, away from the touch of my
hand.

     
"You want to go
to afternoon Mass?" I said.

     
"I don't think I
have time to change," she answered.

T
hat night I took Alafair and a friend of hers to a movie in New
Iberia and for ice cream afterward. Later, I found things to do in the bait
shop, even though the fishing season was almost over and few customers would be
there in the morning. Through the black silhouette of trees up the slope, I
could see the lighted gallery of our house, the darkened living room, Bootsie's
shadow moving on the drawn shades in our bedroom.

     
I called my
A.A. sponsor, an ex-roughneck and barroom owner named Tee Neg, who'd had seven
years sobriety when he walked into a bait and liquor store owned by a black man
and had asked for a bucketful of shiners, then on an impulse, with no
forethought other than his ongoing resentment over the fingers he'd pinched off
on a drill pipe, had changed his order to a quart of whiskey and stayed drunk
for the next five years. His next A.A. meeting was at Angola Prison.

     
I told him about what
had happened between me and Bootsie. I knew what was coming.

     
"You took a
drink over it?" he said.

     
"No."

     
"Hey, you ever
get drunk while you was asleep?"

     
"No."

     
"Then go to bed.
I'll talk to you in the morning, you." He hung up.

     
After all the lights
in the house went out, I walked up the slope and went inside and lay down on
the living room couch in the dark.

    
 
Wally, the dispatcher, called at one in the
morning.

     
"The St. Martin
Parish sheriff's office is interviewing some hysterical kids at Henderson
Swamp. I can't make sense out of it. You want to go up there?" he said.

     
"Not
really."

     
"It sounds like
Aaron Crown. That's where you think he's hid out at, right?"

     
"What sounds
like Aaron Crown?"

     
"The one tore up
these two people. They say the walls of the houseboat is painted with blood.
The guy held the girl while he done the man, then he done it to the girl."

     
"You're not
making sense, Wally."

     
"That's what I
said. The deputy called it in didn't make no sense. So how about hauling your
ass up there?"

S
ometimes the
least reliable source
in
reconstructing a violent crime is the eyewitness to it. The blood veins dilate
in the brain, the emotions short-circuit, memory shuts down and dulls the
images that wish to disfigure the face of the human family.

     
Seven emergency
vehicles were parked along the Henderson levee when I got there. The moon was
up and the water and the moss in the cypress were stained the color of pewter.
A wood gangplank led from the levee through a stand of flooded willows to a
large, motorized houseboat whose decks burned with the floodlights from a
sheriff's boat moored next to it.

     
The witnesses were an
elderly man and his partially blind wife, who had been spending the weekend on
their own houseboat, and a group of stoned high school kids who stunk of reefer
and keg beer and were trembling at the prospect of what they had stepped into.

     
Earlier, they had all
seen the victims having drinks at a restaurant farther up the levee. Everyone
agreed they were a handsome couple, tourists perhaps, pleasant and certainly
polite, although the woman seemed a little young for the man; but he was
charming, just the same, athletic-looking, friendly toward the kids, a decent
sort, obviously in control of things (one of the stoned-out high school
students said he "was kind of like a modern business-type guy, like you
see on
TV"); the man had wanted to rent
fishing gear and hire a guide to take him out in the morning.

     
The intruder came
just before midnight, in a flat-bottomed aluminum outboard, the throttle turned
low, the engine muttering softly along the main channel that rimmed the swamp,
past the islands of dead hyacinths and the gray cypress that rose wedge-shaped
out of the water at the entrance to the bays.

     
But he knew his
destination. In midchannel he angled his outboard toward the houseboat rented
by the couple, then cut the gas and let his boat glide on its own wake through
a screen of hanging willows and bump softly against the rubber tires that hung
from the houseboat's gunnels.

     
The people inside
were still up, eating a late supper on a small table in the galley, a bottle of
white wine and a fondue pan set between them. They either didn't hear the
intruder, or never had time to react, before he pulled himself by one hand over
the rail, lighting on the balls of his feet, his body alive with a sinewy grace
that belied his dimensions.

     
Then he tore the
locked hatch out of the jamb with such violence that one hinge came with it.

     
At first the kids,
who were gathered around the tailgate of a pickup truck on the levee, thought
the intruder was a black man, then they realized when he burst into the lighted
cabin that he wore dark gloves and a knitted ski mask.

     
But they had no doubt
about what took place next.

     
When the man they had
seen in the restaurant tried to rise from his chair in the galley, the intruder
swung a wide-bladed fold-out game dressing knife into the side of his throat
and raked it at a downward angle into his rib cage, then struck him about the
neck and head again and again, gathering the young woman into one arm, never
missing a stroke, whipping the wounded man down lower and lower from the chair
to the floor, flinging ropes of blood across the windows.

     
He paused, as though
he was aware he had an audience, stared out of the holes in his mask toward the
levee, then opened his mouth, which rang with gold, licked the neck of the
screaming young woman he held pinioned against his body with one muscle-swollen
arm, and drew the knife across her throat.

     
I stood just inside
the torn hatch with a St. Martin Parish homicide
detective and the
medical examiner. The two bodies lay curled on the floor, their foreheads
almost touching.

     
"You ever see a
blood loss like that?" the plainclothes said. He was dressed in a brown
suit and a fedora, with a plain blue necktie, and he had clipped the tie inside
his shirt. He bit into a candy bar. "I got a sugar deficiency," he
said.

     
Two paramedics began
lifting the dead man into a body bag. His pony tail had been splayed by
someone's shoe and was stuck to the linoleum.