Cadillac Jukebox

  “You really want to go to the meat locker, Streak?” he asked.

  “You know another place to start?”

  “It was just a question.”

  Morgues deny all the colors the mind wishes to associate with death. The surfaces are cool to the touch, made of aluminum and stainless steel, made even more sterile in appearance by the dull reflection of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The trough and the drains where an autopsy was just conducted are spotless; the water that wells across and cleanses the trough’s bottom could have issued from a spring.

  But somehow, in the mind, you hear sounds behind all those gleaming lockers, like fluids dripping, a tendon constricting, a lip that tightens into a sneer across the teeth.

  The assistant wore a full-length white lab coat that looked like a nineteenth-century duster. He paused with his hand on the locker door. He had a cold and kept brushing at his nose with the back of his wrist.

  “The guy’s hands are bagged. Otherwise, he’s like they found him,” he said.

  “This place is an igloo in here. Let’s see it, all right?” Clete said.

  The assistant looked at Clete oddly and then pulled out the drawer. Clete glanced down at Jerry Joe, let out his breath, then lifted his eyes to mine.

  “When it’s this bad, it usually means a tire iron or maybe a curb button. The uniforms found him on the pavement, so it’s hard to tell right now,” the assistant said. “You knew the guy?”

  “Yeah, he knew the guy,” Clete answered.

  “I was just wondering what he was doing in that neighborhood at night, that’s all,” the assistant said. “If a white guy’s down there at night, it’s usually for cooze or rock. We on the same side here?”

  Most of Jerry Joe’s teeth had been broken off. One of his eyes looked like a tea-stained egg. The other was no longer an eye. I lifted his left hand. It felt like a heavy piece of old fruit inside the plastic bag.

  “Both of them are broken. I don’t know anything about this guy, but my bet is, he went the whole fifteen before they clicked off his switch,” the attendant said.

  “Thank you, sir, for your time,” I said, and turned and walked outside.

  * * *

  I talked with the scene investigator at the District from a filling station pay phone. He had a heavy New Orleans blue-collar accent, which is far closer to the speech of Brooklyn than to the Deep South; he told me he had to go to a meeting and couldn’t talk to me right now.

  “When can you talk?” I asked.

  “When I get out of the meeting.”

  “When is that?”

  “Leave your number.”

  We pulled back into the traffic. Clete’s window was down and the wind whipped the hair on his head. He kept looking across the seat at me.

  “Streak, you’re making me tense,” he said.

  “You buy kids did this?” I asked.

  “I think that’s how it’s going to go down.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He took a swizzle stick off his dashboard and put it in his mouth. A neutral ground with palm trees on it streamed past his window. “I can’t see Jerry Ace getting taken down by pukes. Not like this, anyway. Maybe if he got capped—”

  “Why would he be down by the Desire?”

  “He dug R&B. He was a paratrooper. He thought he had magic painted on him . . . Dave, don’t try to make sense out of it. This city’s in flames. You just can’t see them.”

  Jerry Joe’s blue Buick had already been towed to the pound. A uniformed cop opened the iron gate for us and walked with us past a row of impounded cars to the back of the lot. The Buick was parked against a brick wall, its trunk sprung, its dashboard ripped out, the glove box rifled, the leather door panels pried loose, the stereo speakers gouged with screwdrivers out of the headliner. A strip of torn yellow crime scene tape was tangled around one wheel, flapping in the wind.

  “Another half hour and they would have had the engine off the mounts,” Clete said.

  “How do you read it?” I said.

  “A gang of street rats got to it after he was dead.”

  “It looks like they had him made for a mule.”

  “The side panels? Yeah. Which means they didn’t know who he was.”

  “But they wouldn’t have hung around to strip the car if they’d killed him, would they?” I said.

  “No, their consciences were clean. You hook them up, that’s what they’ll tell you. Just a harmless night out, looting a dead man’s car. I think I’m going to move to East Los Angeles,” he said.

  We went to the District and caught the scene investigator at his desk. He was a blond, tall, blade-faced man named Cramer who wore a sky blue sports coat and white shirt and dark tie with a tiny gold pistol and chain fastened to it. The erectness of his posture in the chair distracted the eye from his paunch and concave chest and the patina of nicotine on his fingers.

  “Do we have anybody in custody? No. Do we have any suspects? Yeah. Every gangbanger in that neighborhood,” he said.

  “I think it was a hit,” I said.

  “You think a hit?” he said.

  “Maybe Jerry Joe was going to dime some people, contractors lining up at the trough in Baton Rouge,” I said.

  “You used to be at the First District, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me when I say something that sounds wrong—a white guy down by the Desire at night isn’t looking to be shark meat.”

  “Come on, Cramer. Kids aren’t going to kill a guy and peel the car with the body lying on the street,” I said.

  “Maybe they didn’t know they’d killed him. You think of that?”

  “I think you’re shit-canning the investigation,” I said.

  “I punched in at four this morning. A black kid took a shot at another kid in the Desire. He missed. He killed a three-month-old baby instead. Short Boy Jerry was a mutt. You asking me I got priorities? Fucking ‘A’ I do.”

  His phone rang. He picked it up, then hit the “hold” button.

  “Y’all get a cup of coffee, give me ten minutes,” he said.

  Clete and I walked down the street and ate hot dogs at a counter where we had to stand, then went back to the District headquarters. Cramer scratched his forehead and looked at a yellow legal pad on his blotter.

  “That was the M.E. called,” he said. “Short Boy Jerry had gravel and grains of concrete in his scalp, but it was from a fall, not a blow. There were pieces of leather in the wounds around his eyes, probably from gloves the hitter was wearing or a blackjack. Death was caused by a broken rib getting shoved into the heart.”

  He lit a cigarette and put the paper match carefully in the ashtray with two fingers, his eyes veiled.

  “What’s the rest of it?” I asked.

  “The M.E. thinks the assailant or assailants propped Short Boy Jerry up to prolong the beating. The bruises on the throat show a single hand held him up straight while he was getting it in the stomach. The brain was already hemorrhaging when the rib went into the heart . . .”

  “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.

  * * *

  That 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 formati
ons 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.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Early 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.

  * * *

  Monday 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 handkerchief 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.

  * * *

  That 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.

  * * *

  The 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.

  I put on my khakis and loafers and flannel shirt, took a flashlight out of the nightstand and my .45 automatic out of the dresser drawer and walked to the end of the dock.