Cadillac Jukebox

  “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.

  CHAPTER

  21

  After 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.

  * * *

  It 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 laid 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 c
orridor 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 struck 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.

  I went inside the tack room at the far end of the building. Buford’s saddles were hung on collapsible two-by-fours that extended outward on screwhooks from the wall. The English saddles were plain, utilitarian, the leather unmarked by the maker’s knife. But on the western saddles, with pommels as wide as bulls’ snouts, the cantles and flaps and skirts were carved with roses and birds and snakes, and in the back of each cantle was a mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.

  But the man named Arana had said the bugarron rode a silver saddle, and there was none here.

  “What you looking for in the tack room, Detective Robicheaux?” the trooper said behind me. He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms folded, his expression masked behind his shades. He wore a campaign hat tilted over his eyes, like a D.I.’s, with the leather strap on the back of his head.

  “You never can tell what you might trip across.”

  “Somehow that don’t ring right.”

  “I know you?”

  “You do now. Ms. LaRose says she’d prefer you wasn’t on her place.”

  “She’ll prefer it less if Aaron’s her next visitor . . . Have a nice day.”

  I walked down the wood floor between the stalls toward the open end of the building.

  “Don’t be back in the stable without a warrant, sir,” the trooper said behind me.

  I climbed through the rails in the horse lot and walked under the trees in the backyard toward the porte cochere. Karyn LaRose came out the side screen door, a drink in her hand, with Persephone Green behind her. Karyn turned around and lifted her fingers in the air.

  “Let me talk to Dave a minute, Seph,” she said.

  There was a pinched, black light in Persephone Green’s face as she glared at me. But she did as she was asked and closed the door and disappeared behind the glass.

  “I’m going to drain the blood out of your veins for what you did to me,” Karyn said.

  “What I did to you?”

  “In front of your wife, in the hotel. You rotten motherfucker.”

  “Your problem is with yourself, Karyn. You just don’t know it.”

  “Save the cheap psychology for your A.A. meetings. Your life’s going to be miserable. I promise.”

  “Dock Green says there’re dead people under the tree in your side yard.”

  “That’s marvelous detective work. They were lynched and buried there over a century ago.”

  “How about the kid in the unmarked grave by the water?”

  Her skin under her makeup turned as pale and dry as paper.

  CHAPTER

  22

  The next morning I walked up to Jerry Joe Plumb on his plot of tree-dotted land in the middle of the historical district on East Main. He was watching two cement mixers pour the foundation for his home on the bayou, one half-topped engineering boot propped on a felled tree. He wore khakis and his leather flyer’s jacket, and the sunlight through the oaks looked like yellow blades of grass on his face.

  “Dock Green says you knocked around his construction foreman,” I said.

  “It got a little out of hand.”

  “You held him down and spit in his face?”

  “I apologized.”

  “I bet he appreciated that.”

  “I went on a tab for three hundred large to back Buford’s campaign. You know what the vig is on three hundred large? Now Dock’s wheeling and dealing with Buford while I got building suppliers looking at me with knives and forks.”

  “Then quit protecting Buford.”

  “You got it wrong . . . But . . . Never mind, come in my trailer and I’ll show you something.”

  Inside, he spread a roll of architect’s plans across a drafting table and weighted down the ends, then combed his hair while he looked admiringly at the sketch of the finished house. “See, it’s turn-of-the-century. It’ll fit right in. The brick’s purple and comes out of a hundred-year-old house I found over in Mississippi,” he said.

  The building was three stories high, a medieval fortress rather than a house, with balconies and widow’s walks and windbreaks that were redundant inside a city, and I thought of Jerry Joe’s description of the LaRose home out west of the Pecos, where he had fled at age seventeen.

  “You’re going to let Buford burn you because of the old man, what was his name, Jude?” I said.

  “If it wasn’t for Jude, I’d a been majoring in cotton picking on a prison farm.”

  “I took Dock out to the LaRose plantation yesterday. He says there’s a kid’s grave down by the water.”

  “Better listen to him, then.”

  “Oh?”

  “The guy hears voices. It’s like he knows stuff people aren’t supposed to know. He puts dead things in jars. Maybe he’s a ghoul.”

  I started to leave. “Stay away from his construction site, okay?” I said.

  “I’m not the problem, Dave. Neither is Dock. You got a disease in this town. The whole state does, and it’s right up the bayou.”

  “Then stop letting Buford use you for his regular punch,” I said.

  Jerry Joe clipped his comb inside his shirt pocket and stepped close t
o my face, his open hands curved simianlike by his sides, the white scar at the corner of his eye bunching into a knot.

  “We’re friends, but don’t you ever in your life say anything like that to me again,” he said.

  * * *

  After I got back to the department, the sheriff buzzed my extension and asked me to come into his office. He sat humped behind his desk, scraping the bowl of his pipe with a penknife.

  “Our health carrier called this morning. They’ve developed a problem with your coverage,” he said.

  “What problem?”

  “Your drinking history.”

  “Why call about it now?”

  “That’s the question. You were in therapy a few years back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “After your wife was killed?”

  I nodded, my eyes shifting off his.

  “The psychologist’s file on you went through their fax this morning,” he said. “It came through ours, too. It also went to the Daily Iberian.” Before I could speak, he said, “I tore it up. But the guy from Blue Cross was a little strung out.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Dave, you’re sober now, but you had two slips before you made it. I guess there was a lot of Vietnam stuff in that file, too. Civilians don’t handle that stuff well.” He set the pipe down and looked at the tops of his hands. “Who sent the fax?”

  “The therapist died two years ago.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not omniscient.”

  “We both know what I’m talking about.”

  “He had an office in the Oil Center. In the same suite as Buford LaRose’s.”

  “It wasn’t Buford, though, was it?”

  “I don’t know if Buford’s potential has ever been plumbed.”

  “Dave, tell me you haven’t been out to see Karyn.”

  “Yesterday . . . I took Dock Green out there.”

  His swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. His teeth made a clicking sound on the stem of his dead pipe.

  * * *

  At dawn the next morning I cut the gas on my outboard engine north of the LaRose plantation and let the aluminum boat float sideways in the current, past the barbed wire fenceline that extended into the water and marked the edge of Buford’s property. The sun was an orange smudge through the hardwood trees, and I could hear horses nickering beyond the mist that rose out of the coulee. I used a paddle to bring the boat out of the current and into the backwater, the cattails sliding off the bow and the sides, then I felt the metal bottom bite into silt.