DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (31 page)

     
"You okay,
Dave?" the plainclothes said.

     
"Sure."

     
"The perp
cleaned out their I.D."

     
"His name was
Lonnie Felton. I don't know who the girl was. He was a film director."

     
"You know
him?"

     
I nodded and looked
at the stare in Felton's eyes.

     
"I make Aaron
Crown for this," the plainclothes said. "What do you think? How many
we got around here could do something like this? . . . You listening,
Dave?"

     
"What?" I
said. The paramedic worked the zipper on the vinyl bag over Felton's face.
"Oh, sorry . . . ," I said to the plainclothes. "The kids were
right the first time. It's a black guy. Mookie Zerrang's his name. It's funny
what you said, that's all."

     
"Come
again?"

     
"About
listening. I told Felton the guy who'd do him wouldn't be a good listener. It
seemed like a clever thing to say at the time."

     
The plainclothes
looked at me strangely, a smear of chocolate on his mouth.

A
FTER I
was discharged from
the army,
a friend from my outfit and I drove across the country for a
fishing vacation in Montana. On July 4 we stopped at a small town in western
Kansas that Norman Rockwell could have painted. The streets were brick, lined
with Chinese elm trees, and the limestone courthouse on the square rose out of
the hardware and feed and farm equipment stores like a medieval castle against
a hard blue porcelain sky. Next to our motel was a stucco 3.2 beer tavern that
looked like a wedding cake, shaded by an enormous willow that crowned over the
eaves. At the end of the street you could see an ocean of green wheat that
rippled in the wind as far as the eye could see. The rain that fell that
afternoon on the hot sidewalks was the sweetest smell I ever experienced.

     
What's the point?

     
For years I thought
of this place as an island untouched by the war in Indochina and disconnected
from the cities burning at home. When I was a patrolman in uniform in the New
Orleans welfare projects, I used to remember the hot, clean airy smell of the
rain falling on those sidewalks in 1965.

     
Then an ex-Kansas cop
we picked up drunk on an interstate fugitive warrant told me the town that
existed in my fond recollection was the site of Truman Capote's novel
In
Cold Blood,
the story of two
pathological killers who
murdered a whole family for thirty-nine dollars and a radio.

     
You learn soon or you
learn late: There are no islands.

I
t was Monday morning and no one was in custody for the double
homicide in St. Martin Parish.

     
"I'm afraid
they're not buying your theory about a black hit man," the sheriff said.

     
"Why not?"

     
"There's no
evidence the man was black."

     
"He had a
mouthful of gold teeth, just like the guy who did the scriptwriter."

     
"So what? Maybe
Aaron Crown has gold fillings, too."

     
"I doubt if
Aaron ever bought a toothbrush, much less saw a dentist."

     
"You believe
somebody was trying to stop Felton from exposing our governor-elect as a moral
troglodyte. Maybe you're right. But for a lot of people it's a big reach."

     
"Crown didn't do
this, Sheriff."

     
"Look, the St.
Martin M.E. says both victims had been smoking heroin before they got it.
Felton's condo had a half kee of China white in it. St. Martin thinks maybe the
killings are drug related. Robbery's a possible motive, too."

     
"Robbery?"

     
"The killer took
the girl's purse and Felton's wallet. Felton was flashing a lot of money around
earlier in the evening . . ." He stopped and returned my stare. "I
haven't convinced you?"

   
  
"Where are you trying to go with this,
skipper?"

     
"Nowhere. I
don't have to. It's out of our jurisdiction. End of discussion, Dave."

I
opened the morning mail in my office, escorted a deranged woman
from the men's room, picked up a parole violator in the state betting parlor
out by the highway, helped recover a stolen farm tractor, spent my lunch hour
and two additional hours waiting to testify at the courthouse, only to learn
the defendant had been granted a continuance, and got back to the office with a
headache and the feeling
I had devoted most of the day to snipping
hangnails in a season of plague.

     
The state police now
had primary responsibility for protecting Buford, and Aaron Crown and my
problems with the LaRose family were becoming less and less a subject of
interest to anybody else.

     
But one person,
besides Clete, had tried to help me, I thought.

     
The tattooed carnival
worker named Arana.

     
I inserted the
cassette Helen and I had made of his deathbed statement in a tape player and
listened to it again in its entirety. But only one brief part of it pointed a
finger: "The
bugarron
ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen
him at the ranch. You messing everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man
. . ."

     
"Who's this
guy?" my voice asked.

     
And the man called
Arana responded, "He ain't got no name. He got a red horse and a silver
saddle. He like Indian boys."

     
I clicked off the
tape player and lay the cassette on my desk blotter and looked at it. Puzzle through
that, I thought.

     
Then, just as chance
and accident are wont to have their way, I glanced out the window and saw a man
blowing his horn at other drivers, forcing his way across two lanes to park in
an area designated for the handicapped. His face was as stiff as plaster when
he walked across the grass to the front entrance, oblivious to the sprinkler
that cut a dark swath across his slacks.

     
A moment later Wally
called me on my extension.

     
"Dave, we got a
real zomboid out here in the waiting room says he wants to see you," he
said.

     
"Yeah, I know.
Send him back."

     
"Who is
he?"

     
"Dock
Green."

     
"That pimp from
New Orleans suppose to got clap of the brain?"

     
"The one and
only."

     
"Dave, we don't
got enough local sick ones? You got to import these guys in here?"

     
Dock Green wore a
beige turtleneck polo shirt tucked tightly into his belt so that the movements
of his neck and head seemed even more stark and elliptical, like moving images
in a filmstrip that's been abbreviated. He sat down in front of my desk without
being asked, his

eyes focusing past me out the window, then back on my face again.
The skin between his lip and the corner of his nose twitched.

     
"I got to use
your phone," he said, and picked up the receiver and started punching
numbers.

     
"That's a
private . . . Don't worry about it, go ahead," I said.

     
"I'll pick you
up at six sharp . . . No, out front, Persephone he said into the receiver.
"No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there
. . . Good-bye."

     
He hung up and blew
his breath up into his face. "I got a charge to file," he said.

     
"What might that
be, Dock?"

     
"I can see
you're on top of things. There's another side to Jerry the Glide."

 
    
"Yeah?"

     
"He went out to
my construction site with some of his asswipes and busted up my foreman. He
held him down on the ground by his ears and spit in his face."

     
"Spit in his
face?"

     
"There's an echo
in here?"

     
I wrote a note on my
scratch pad, reminding myself to pick up a half gallon of milk on the way home.

     
"We'll get right
on this, Dock."

     
"That's
it?"

     
"Yep."

     
"You didn't ask
me where."

     
"Why don't you
let me have that?"

     
He gave me
directions. I fingered the tape cassette containing the deathbed statement of
the Mexican carnival worker.

     
"Let's take a
ride and see what Jerry Joe has to say for himself," I said.

     
"Right
now?"

     
"You bet."

     
The concentration in
his eyes made me think of sweat bees pressed against glass.

     
We drove in a cruiser
through the corridor of live oaks on East Main to the site on Bayou Teche where
Jerry Joe was building his new home. The equipment was shut down, the
construction crew gone.

     
"I guess we
stuck out," I said, and turned across the drawbridge and headed out of
town toward the LaRose plantation.

     
"This ain't the
way."

     
"It's a nice day
for a drive."

     
I saw the recognition
come together in Dock's face.

     
"You're trying
to piss on my shoes. You know my wife's out at Karyn LaRose's," he said.

     
"I've got to
check something out, Dock. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

     
"Fuck that and
fuck you. I don't like them people. I ain't going on their property."

 
    
I pulled off on the shoulder of the road
by the LaRoses' drive. Dust was billowing out of the fields in back, and the
house looked pillared and white and massive against the gray sky.

     
"Why not?"
I asked.

     
"I got to do
business with hypocrites, it don't mean we got to use the same toilet. Hey, you
don't think they got shit stripes in their underwear? They got dead people in
the ground here."

     
"You're talking
about the cemetery in back?"

     
"I ain't got to
see a headstone to smell a grave. There's one by that tree over there. There's
another one down by the water. A kid's in it."

     
"You know about
a murder?"

     
But he didn't get to
answer. A shudder went through him and he sank back into the seat and began to
speak unintelligibly, his lips wrinkling back on his teeth as though all of his
motors were misfiring, obscenity and spittle rolling off his tongue.

     
I put the
transmission in gear and turned into the drive.

     
"You going to
make it, Dock?" I said.

     
His breath was as
dense as sewer gas. He pressed his palm wetly against his mouth.

     
"Hang loose,
babe," I said, and walked through the drive and the porte cochere into the
backyard, where a state trooper in sunglasses was eating a bowl of ice cream in
a canvas lawn chair.

     
I opened my badge.

     
"I'd like to
check the stables," I said.

     
"What for?"

     
I averted my gaze,
stuck my badge holder in my back pocket.

     
"It's just a
funny feeling I have about Crown," I answered.

     
"Help
yourself."

  
   
I climbed through the rails of the horse
lot and entered the open end of the old brick smithy that had been converted
into a stable. The iron shutters on the arched windows were closed, and motes
of dust floated in the pale bands of light as thickly as lint in a textile
mill. The air was warm and sour-sweet with the smells of leather, blankets
stiff with horse sweat, chickens that wandered in from outside, the dampness
under the plank floors, fresh hay scattered in the stalls, a wheelbarrow
stacked with manure, a barrel of dried molasses-and-grain balls.