DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox

  CHAPTER 5

  Monday morning the sky was blue, the breeze warm off the Gulf when I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in Lafayette to talk with Buford LaRose. Classes had just let out for the noon hour, and the pale green quadrangle and colonnaded brick walkways were filled with students on their way to lunch. But Buford LaRose was not in his office in the English department, nor in the glassed-in campus restaurant that was built above a cypress lake behind old Burke Hall.

  I called his office at the Oil Center, where he kept a part-time therapy practice, and was told by the receptionist I could find him at Red Lerille's Health and Racquet Club off Johnson Street.

  "Are you sure? We were supposed to go to lunch," I said.

  "Dr. LaRose always goes to the gym on Mondays," she answered.

  Red's was a city-block-long complex of heated swimming pools, racquet ball and clay tennis courts, boxing and basketball gyms, indoor and outdoor running tracks, and cavernous air-conditioned rooms filled with hundreds of dumbbells and weight benches and exercise machines.

  I looked for Buford a half hour before I glanced through the narrow glass window in the door of the men's steam room and saw him reading a soggy newspaper, naked, on the yellow tile stoop.

  I borrowed a lock from the pro shop, undressed, and walked into the steam room and sat beside him.

  His face jerked when he looked up from his paper. Then he smiled, almost fondly.

  "You have a funny way of keeping appointments," I said.

  "You didn't get my message?"

  "No."

  "I waited for you. I didn't think you were coming," he said.

  "That's peculiar. I was on time."

  "Not by my watch," he said, and smiled again.

  "I wanted to tell you again I was sorry for my remarks at your party."

  "You went to a lot of trouble to do something that's unnecessary."

  The thermostat kicked on and filled the air with fresh clouds of steam. I could feel the heat in the tiles climb through my thighs and back. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my hand.

  "Your jaw's bruised," he said.

  "We had a visitor at the bait shop this weekend. NOPD thinks he's a Mexican carnival worker who got loose from a detox center."

  He nodded, gazed without interest at the tile wall in front of us, pushed down on the stoop with the heels of his hands and worked the muscles in his back, his brown, hard body leaking sweat at every pore. I watched the side of his face, the handsome profile, the intelligent eyes that seemed never to cloud with passion.

  "You have Ph.D. degrees in both English and psychology, Buford?" I said.

  "I received double credits in some areas, so it's not such a big deal."

  "It's impressive."

  "Why are you here, Dave?"

  "I have a feeling I may have stuck my arm in the garbage grinder. You know how it is, you stick one finger in, then you're up to your elbow in the pipe."

  "We're back to our same subject, I see," he said.

  Other men walked back and forth in the steam, swinging their arms, breathing deeply.

  "How do you know Aaron Crown's daughter?" I asked.

  "Who says I do?"

  "She does."

  "She grew up in New Iberia. If she says she knows me, fine . . . Dave, you have no idea what you're tampering with, how you may be used to undo everything you believe in."

  "Why don't you explain it to me?"

  "This is hardly the place, sir."

  We showered, then went into an enclosed, empty area off to one side of the main locker room to dress. He dried himself with a towel, put on a pair of black nylon bikini underwear and flipflops, and began combing his hair in the mirror. The muscles in his back and sides looked like tea-colored water rippling over stone.

  "I've got some serious trouble, Dave. These New York film people want to make a case for Aaron Crown's innocence. They can blow my candidacy right into the toilet," he said.

  "You think they have a vested interest?"

  "Yeah, making money . . . Wake up, buddy. The whole goddamn country is bashing liberals. These guys ride the tide. A white man unjustly convicted of killing a black civil rights leader? A story like that is made in heaven."

  I put on my shirt and tucked it in my slacks, then sat on the bench and slipped on my loafers.

  "Nothing to say?" Buford asked.

  "Your explanations are too simple. The name Mingo Bloomberg keeps surfacing in the middle of my mind."

  "This New Orleans mobster?"

  "That's the one."

  "I've got a fund-raiser in Shreveport at six. Come on the plane with me," he said.

  "What for?"

  "Take leave from your department. Work for me."

  "Not interested."

  "Dave, I'm running for governor while I teach school. I have no machine and little money. The other side does. Now these sonsofbitches from New York come down here and try to cripple the one chance we've had for decent government in decades. What in God's name is wrong with you, man?"

  Maybe Buford was right, I thought as I drove down the old highway through Broussard into New Iberia. I sometimes saw design where there was none, and I had maintained a long and profound distrust of all forms of authority, even the one I served, and the LaRose family had been vested with wealth and power since antebellum days.

  But maybe it was also time to have another talk with Mingo Bloomberg, provided I could find him.

  As irony would have it, I found a message from Mingo's lawyer in my mailbox when I got back to the department. Mingo would not be hard to find, after all. He was in New Orleans' City Prison and wanted to see me.

  Late Tuesday morning I was at the barred entrance to a long corridor of individual cells where snitches and the violent and the incorrigible were kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown. The turnkey opened Mingo's cell, cuffed him to a waist chain, and led him down the corridor toward me. While a second turnkey worked the levers to slide back the door on the lockdown area, I could see handheld mirrors extended from bars all the way down the series of cells, each reflecting a set of disembodied eyes.

  Both turnkeys escorted us into a bare-walled interview room that contained a scarred wood table and three folding chairs. They were powerful, heavyset men with the top-heavy torsos of weight lifters.

  "Thanks," I said.

  But they remained where they were.

  "I want to be alone with him. I'd appreciate your unhooking him, too," I said.

  The turnkeys looked at each other. Then the older one used his key on each of the cuffs and said, "Suit yourself. Bang on the door when you're finished. We won't be far."

  After they went out, I could still see them through the elongated, reinforced viewing glass in the door.

  "It looks like they're coming down pretty hard on you, Mingo. I thought you'd be sprung by now," I said.

  "They say I'm a flight risk."

  He was clean-shaved, his jailhouse denims pressed neatly, his copper hair combed back on his scalp like a 1930s leading man's. But his eyes looked wired, and a dry, unwashed odor like sweat baked on the skin by a radiator rose from his body.

  "I don't get it. Your people don't protect cop killers," I said.

  He propped one elbow on the table and bit his thumbnail.

  "It's the other way around. At least that's what the prosecutor's office thinks. That's what those clowns you used to work with at First District think," he said.

  "You've lost me."

  "You remember the narc who got capped in the Quarter last year? I was in the cage at First District when the cops brought in the boon who did it. Somebody, and I said somebody, stomped the living shit out of him. They cracked his skull open on a cement floor and crushed his, what do you call it, his thorax. At least that's what people say. I don't know, because I didn't see it. But the dead boon's family is making a big stink and suing the city of New Orleans for fifty million dollars. Some cops might end up at Angola, too. You ever see a co
p do time? Think about the possibilities for his food before he puts a fork in it."

  I kept my eyes flat, waited a moment, removed my sunglasses from their case and clicked them in my palm.

  "What are you trying to trade?" I asked.

  "I want out of here."

  "I don't have that kind of juice."

  "I want out of lockdown."

  "Main pop may not be a good place for you, Mingo."

  "You live on Mars? I'm safe in main pop. I got problems when I'm in lockdown and cops with blood on their shoes think I'm gonna rat 'em out."

  "You're a material witness. There's no way you're going into the main population, Mingo."

  The skin along his hairline was shiny with perspiration. He screwed a cigarette into his mouth but didn't light it. His blue eyes were filled with light when they stared into mine.

  "You worked with those guys. You get word to them, I didn't see anything happen to the boon. I'll go down on a perjury beef if I have to," he said.

  I let my eyes wander over his face. There were tiny black specks in the blueness of his eyes, like pieces of dead flies, like microscopic traces of events that never quite rinse out of the soul. "How many people have you pushed the button on?" I asked.

  "What? Why you ask a question like that?"

  "No reason, really."

  He tried to reconcentrate his thoughts. "A Mexican guy was at your place, right? A guy with fried mush. It wasn't an accident he was there."

  "Go on."

  "He was muleing tar for the projects. They call him Arana, that means 'Spider' in Spanish. He's from a village in Mexico that's got a church with a famous statue in it. I know that because he was always talking about it."

  "That sure narrows it down. Who sent him to my bait shop?"

  "What do I get?"

  "We can talk about federal custody."

  "That's worse. People start thinking Witness Protection Program."

  "That's all I've got."

  He tore a match from a book and struck it, held the flame to his cigarette, never blinking in the smoke and heat that rose into his handsome face.

  "There's stuff going on that's new, that's a big move for certain people. You stumbled into it with that peckerwood, the one who killed Jimmy Ray Dixon's brother."

  "What stuff?"

  He tipped his ashes in a small tin tray, his gaze focused on nothing. His cheeks were pooled with color, the fingers of his right hand laced with smoke from the cigarette.

  "I don't think you've got a lot to trade, Mingo. Otherwise, you would have already done it."

  "I laid it out for you. You don't want to pick up on it..." He worked the burning end of the cigarette loose in the ashtray and placed the unsmoked stub in the package. "You asked me a personal question a minute ago. Just for fun, it don't mean anything, understand, I'll give you a number. Eleven. None of them ever saw it coming. The guy with the fried head at your place probably wasn't a serious effort.

  "I say 'probably.' I'm half-Jewish, half-Irish, I don't eat in Italian restaurants. I'm outside the window looking in a lot of the time. Hey, you're a bright guy, I know you can connect on this."

  "Enjoy it, Mingo," I said, and hit on the door with the flat of my fist for the turnkey to open up.

  Later that same day, just before I was to sign out of the office, the phone on my desk rang.

  It was like hearing the voice of a person who you knew would not go away, who would always be hovering around you like a bad memory, waiting to pull you back into the past.

  "How's life, Karyn?" I said.

  "Buford will be in Baton Rouge till late tonight. You and I need to talk some things out."

  "I don't think so."

  "You want me to come to your office? Or out to your house? I will, if that's what it takes."

  I left the office and drove south of New Iberia toward my home. I tried to concentrate on the traffic, the red sky in the west, the egrets perched on the backs of cattle in the fields, the cane wagons being towed to the sugar mill. I wasn't going to give power to Karyn LaRose, I told myself. I owed her nothing. I was sure of that.

  I was still trying to convince myself of my freedom from the past when I made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the road and drove to the LaRose plantation.

  She wore a yellow sundress, with her platinum hair braided up on her head, a Victorian sapphire broach on a gold chain around her neck.

  "Why'd you park in back?" she said when she opened the door.

  "I didn't give it much thought," I said.

  "I bet."

  "Let's hear what you have to say, Karyn. I need to get home."

  She smiled with her eyes, turned and walked away without speaking. When I didn't immediately follow, she paused and looked back at me expectantly. I followed her through the kitchen, a den filled with books and glass gun cases and soft leather chairs, down a darkened cypress-floored hallway hung with oil paintings of Buford's ancestors, into a sitting room whose windows and French doors reached to the ceiling.

  She pulled the velvet curtains on the front windows.

  "It's a little dark, isn't it?" I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.

  "There's a horrid glare off the road this time of day," she said. She put ice and soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.

  "I don't care for anything, thanks," I said.

  "There's no whiskey in yours."

  "I said I don't want anything."

  The phone rang in another room.

  "Goddamn it," she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.

  I looked at my watch. I had already been there ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black with the smoke of ack-ack bursts.

  I could hear Karyn's voice rising in the next room: "I won't sit still for this again. You rent a car if you have to . . . I'm not listening to that same lie . . . You're not going to ruin this, Buford . . . You listen . . . No . . . No . . . No, you listen . . ."

  Then she pushed the door shut.

  When she came out of the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and poured another one. I looked away from her face.

  "Admiring the photo of Buford's father?" she said. "He was one of the bombardiers who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of Buford's other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia, hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford, you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life."

  She drank three fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and cold-looking on the edge of the glass.

  "I'd better get going, Karyn. I shouldn't have bothered you," I said.

  "Don't be disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with you."

  "You're not mixed up with me."

  "Your memory is selective."

  "I'm sorry it happened, Karyn. I've tried to indicate that to you. It's you and your husband who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives."

  "You say 'it.' What do you mean by 'it'?"

  "That night by the bayou. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

  "You don't remember coming to my house two weeks later?"

  "No."

  "Dave?" Her eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie. "You have
no memory of that afternoon, or the next?"

  I felt myself swallow. "No, I don't. I don't think I saw you again for a year," I said.