DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (32 page)

     
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 opened 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.

T
he 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 to 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.

A
fter 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.

A
t 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.

     
I could see the black
marble crypt and the piked iron fence that surrounded it at the top of the
slope, the silhouette of a state trooper who
was looking in the
opposite direction, a roan gelding tossing its head and backing out of
spiderwebs that were spread between two persimmon trunks.

     
Part of the coulee
had caved in, and the runoff had washed over the side and eroded a clutch of
wide rivulets in the shape of a splayed hand, down the embankment to the
bayou's edge. I pushed the paddle hard into the silt and watched the trees, the
palmettos, a dock and boathouse, and the pine-needle-covered, hoof-scarred
floor of the woods drift past me.

     
Then I saw it, in the
same way your eye recognizes mortality in a rain forest when birds lift
suddenly off the canopy or the wind shifts and you smell an odor that has
always lived like a dark thought on the edge of your consciousness.

     
But in truth it
wasn't much—a series of dimples on the slope, grass that was greener than it
should have been, a spray of mushrooms with poisonous skirts. Maybe my
contention with the LaRoses had broached the confines of obsession. I slipped
one of the oar locks, tied a handkerchief through it, and tossed it up on the
bank.

     
Then I drifted
sideways with the current into the silence of the next bend, yanked the starter
rope, and felt the engine's roar reverberate through my palm like a earache.

A
t sunset I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did a mile
and a half to the drawbridge, waved at the bridge tender, and turned back
toward home, the air like a cool flame on my skin. Ahead of me I saw a Buick
pull to the side of the road and park, the front window roll down, then the
door open halfway. Jerry Joe remained seated, his arms propped in the window as
though he were leaning on a bar, a can of Budweiser in one hand, a pint of
whiskey in the other. He looked showered and fresh, and he wore a white suit
with an open-collar lavender shirt. A flat cardboard box lay on the leather
seat next to him.

     
"You gonna bust me
for an open container?" he said.

     
"It's a
possibility."

     
"I'm sorry about
getting in your face yesterday."

     
"Forget
it."

     
"You remember my
mother?"

     
"Sure."

     
"She used to
make me go to confession all the time. I hated it. She was a real coonass, you
know, and she'd say, 'You feel guilty about you done something to somebody,
Jerry Joe, you gonna try to pretend you don't know that person no more 'cause
he gonna make you remember who you are and the bad thing you done, or maybe
you're gonna try to hurt him, you. So that's why you gotta go to confess,
you.'"

     
He tilted the bottle
and threaded a thin stream of bourbon into the opening of his beer can. Then he
drank from the can, the color in his eyes deepening.

     
"Yes?" I
said.

     
"People like
Karyn and Buford reinvent themselves. It's like my mother said. They don't want
mirrors around to remind them of what they used to be."

     
"What can I do
for you, partner?"

     
"I ain't lily
white. I've been mixed up with the LaRose family a long time. But the deal
going down now . . . I don't know . . . It ain't just the money . . . It
bothers me."