DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (35 page)

     
"What's that
numeral at the bottom of the page?" I asked.

     
"The blows in
the ribs were from a fist maybe six inches across."

     
"You got a sheet
on a gangbanger that big?" I said.

     
"That doesn't
mean there's not one."

     
"Start looking
for a black mechanic named Mookie Zerrang," I said.

     
"Who?" he
said.

     
"He looks like a
stack of gorilla shit with gold teeth in it. Feel flattered. He gets ten large
a whack in Miami. I'm surprised he'd be seen in a neighborhood like this. No
kidding, they say the guy's got rigid standards," Clete said, fixing his
eyes earnestly on Cramer's face.

T
hat evening I let Batist go home early and cleaned the bait shop
and the tables on the dock by myself. The air was cool, the sky purple and
dense with birds, the dying sun as bright as an acetylene flame on the horizon.
I could see flights of ducks in V formations come in low over the swamp, then
circle away and drop beyond the tips of the cypress into the darkness on the
other side.

     
I plugged in Jerry
Joe's jukebox and watched the colored lights drift through the plastic casing
like smoke from marker grenades. There were two recordings of "La Jolie
Blon" in the half-moon rack, one by Harry Choates and the other by Iry
LeJeune. I had never thought about it before, but both men's lives seemed to be
always associated with that haunting, beautiful song, one that was so pure in its
sense of loss you didn't have to understand French to comprehend what the
singer felt. "La Jolie Blon" wasn't about a lost love. It was about
the end of an era.

     
Iry LeJeune was
killed on the highway, changing a tire, and Harry Choates died in alcoholic
madness in the Austin city jail, either after beating his head bloody against
the bars or being beaten unmercifully by his jailers.

     
Maybe their tragic
denouements had nothing to do with a song that had the power to break the
heart. Maybe such a conclusion was a product of my own alcoholic mentality. But
I had to grieve just a moment on their passing, just as I did for Jerry Joe,
and maybe for all of us who tried to hold on to a time that was quickly passing
away.

     
Jerry the Glide had
believed in Wurlitzer jukeboxes and had secretly worshipped the man who had
helped burn Dresden. What a surrogate, I thought, then wondered what mine was.

     
A car came down the
road in the dusk, then slowed, as though the
driver might want to
stop, perhaps for a beer on the way home. I turned off the outside flood lamps,
then the string of lights over the dock, then the lights inside the shop, and
the car went past the boat ramp and down the road and around the curve. I
leaned with my forearm against the jukebox's casing and started to punch a
selection. But you can't recover the past with a recording that's forty years
old, nor revise all the moments when you might have made life a little better
for the dead.

     
I could feel the
blood beating in my wrists. I jerked the plug from the wall, sliced the cord in
half with my pocketknife, and wheeled the jukebox to the back and left it in a
square of moonlight, face to the wall.

E
arly Sunday
morning
I
parked
my pickup in the alley behind
Sabelle Crown's bar in Lafayette. The alley was littered with bottles and beer
cans, and a man and woman were arguing on the landing above the back entrance
to the bar. The woman wore an embroidered Japanese robe that exposed her thick
calves, and her chestnut hair was unbrushed and her face without makeup. The
man glanced down at me uncertainly, then turned back to the woman.

     
"You t'ink you
wort' more, go check the mirror, you," he said. He walked down the wood
stairs and on down the alley, stepping over a rain puddle, without looking at
me. The woman went back inside.

     
I climbed the stairs
to the third story, where Sabelle lived by herself at the end of a dark hallway
that smelled of insecticide and mold.

     
"It's seven in
the morning. You on a drunk or something?" she said when she opened the
door. She wore only a T-shirt without a bra and a pair of blue jeans that
barely buttoned under her navel.

     
"You still have
working girls here, Sabelle?" I said.

     
"We're all
working girls, honey. Y'all just haven't caught on." She left the door
open for me and walked barefoot across the linoleum and took a coffee pot off
her two-burner stove.

     
"I want you to
put me with your father."

     
"Like meet with
him, you're saying?"

     
"However you want
to do it."

     
"So you can have
him executed?"

     
"I believe
Buford LaRose is setting him up to be killed."

     
She set the coffee
pot back on the stove without pouring from it.

     
"How do you know
this?" she said.

     
"I was out to
his place. Those state troopers aren't planning to take prisoners."

     
She sucked in her
bottom lip.

     
"What are you
offering?" she asked.

     
"Maybe transfer
to a federal facility."

     
"Daddy hates the
federal government."

     
"That's a dumb
attitude."

     
"Thanks for the
remark. I'll think about it."

     
"There're only a
few people who've stood in Buford's way, Sabelle. The scriptwriter and Lonnie
Felton were two of them. Jerry Joe Plumb was another. He was killed yesterday
morning. That leaves your dad."

     
"Jerry
Joe?" she said. Her face was blank, like that of someone who has been
caught unawares by a photographer's flash.

     
"He was
methodically beaten to death. My guess is by the same black guy who killed
Felton and his girlfriend and the scriptwriter."

     
She sat down at her
small kitchen table and looked out the window across the rooftops.

     
"The black guy
again?" she said.

     
"That means
something to you?"

     
"What do I know
about black guys? They pick up the trash. They don't drink in my bar."

     
"Get a hold of
your old man, Sabelle."

     
"Say, you're
wrong about one thing."

     
"Oh?"

     
"Daddy's not the
only guy in Buford's way. Take it from a girl who's been there. When he decides
to fuck somebody, he doesn't care if it's male or female. Keep your legs
crossed, sweetie."

     
I looked at the glint
in her eye, and at the anger and injury it represented, and I knew that her
friendship with me had always been a presumption and vanity on my part and that
in reality Sabelle Crown
had long ago consigned me, unfairly or
not, to that army of male violators and users who took and never gave.

M
onday an overweight man in a navy blue suit with hair as black as
patent leather tapped on my office glass. There was a deep dimple in his chin.

     
"Can I help
you?" I said.

     
"Yeah, I just
kind of walked myself back here. This is a nice building y'all got." His
right hand was folded on a paper bag. I waited.
      
"Oh, excuse me," he said. "I'm Ciro Tauzin,
state police, Baton Rouge. You got a minute, suh?"

     
His thighs splayed on
the chair when he sat down. His starched dress shirt was too small for him and
the collar button had popped loose under the knot in his necktie.

     
"You know what I
got here?" he asked, putting his hand in the paper bag. "An oar lock
with a handerchief tied through it. That's a strange thing for somebody to find
on their back lawn, ain't it?"

     
"Depends on who
the person is."

     
"In this case,
it was one of my men found it on Buford LaRose's place. So since an escaped
convict is trying to assassinate the governor-elect, we didn't want to take
nothing for granted and we took some prints off it and ran them through AFIS,
you know, the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System. I tell you, podna,
what a surprise when we found out who those prints belonged to. Somebody steal
an oar lock off one of your boats, suh?"

     
"Not to my
knowledge."

     
"You just out
throwing your oar locks on people's lawn?"

     
"It was just an
idle speculation on my part. About a body that might have been buried
there."

     
"Is that right?
I declare. Y'all do some fascinating investigative work in Iberia Parish."

     
"You're welcome
to join us."

     
"Ms. LaRose says
you got an obsession, that you're carrying out a vendetta of some kind. She
thinks maybe you marked the back of the property for Aaron Crown."

     
"Karyn has a
creative mind."

     
"Well, you know
how people are, suh. They get inside their heads
and think too much.
But one of my troopers told me you were knocking around in the stables, where
you didn't have no bidness. What you up to, Mr. Robicheaux?"

     
"I think Aaron's
a dead man if he gets near your men."

     
"Really? Well,
suh, I won't bother you any more today. Here's your oar lock back. You're not
going to be throwing nothing else up in their yard, are you?"

     
"I'm not
planning on it. Tell me something."

     
"Yes, suh?"

     
"Why would the
LaRoses decide to put in a gazebo right where I thought there might be an
unmarked burial?"

     
"You know, I
thought about that myself. So I checked with the contractor. Mr. LaRose put in
the order for that gazebo two months ago."

     
He rose and extended
his hand.

     
I didn't take it.

     
"You're fronting
points for a guy who's got no bottom, Mr. Tauzin. No offense meant," I
said.

T
hat night I went to bed early, before Bootsie, and was almost
asleep when I heard her enter the room and begin undressing. She brushed her
teeth and stayed in the bathroom a long time, then clicked off the bathroom
light and lay down on her side of the bed with her head turned toward the wall.
I placed my palm on her back. Her skin was warm through her nightgown.

     
She looked up into
the darkness.

     
"You all
right?" she said.

     
"Sure."

     
"About Jerry
Joe, I mean?"

     
"I was okay
today."

     
"Dave?"

     
"Yes?"

     
"No . . . I'm
sorry. I'm too tired to talk about it tonight."

     
"About
what?"

     
She didn't reply at
first, then she said, "That woman . . . I hate her."

 
    
"Come on, Boots. See her for what she
is."

     
"You're playing
her game. It's a rush for both of you. I'm not going to say any more . .
." She sat on the side of the bed and pushed her
feet in her slippers. "I can't take this, Dave," she
said, and picked up her pillow and a blanket and went into the living room.

T
he moon was down, the sky dark, when I was awakened at five the
next morning by a sound out in the swamp, wood knocking against wood, echoing
across the water. I sat on the edge of the bed, my head still full of sleep,
and heard it again through the half-opened window, an oar striking a log
perhaps, the bow sliding off a cypress stump. Then I saw the light in the mist,
deep in the flooded trees, like a small halo of white phosphorous burning
against the dampness, moving horizontally four feet above the waterline.