DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (44 page)

     
Karyn stared at her
from behind her sunglasses, then turned out of the traffic and got out of her
convertible and listened without speaking while the old woman gestured at the
air and vented her frustration with the Lafayette bus system. Then Karyn knelt
on one knee and tied the woman's shoes and held her cocked elbow while the old
woman got into the passenger seat of the convertible, and a moment later the
two of them drove through the caution light and down the boulevard like old
friends.

     
I'm sure she never
saw me. Nor was her act of kindness a performance for passers-by, as it was
already obvious she didn't care what they thought of her. I only knew it was
easier for me to think of Karyn LaRose in one-dimensional terms, and endowing
her with redeeming qualities was a complexity I didn't need.

     
Twenty minutes later
the state engineer told me an environmental assessment was being made of the
swamp area around my dock and bait shop.

     
"What's that
mean?" I said.

     
"Lyndon Johnson
didn't like some of his old neighbors and had their property turned into a park
. . . That's a joke, Mr. Robicheaux . . . Sir, I'd appreciate your not looking
at me like that."

H
elen Soileau happened to glance up from the watercooler when I
came through the back door of the department from the parking lot. She
straightened her back and tucked her shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs and
grinned.

     
"What's
funny?" I said.

     
"I've got a
great story for you about Aaron."

     
"He's not my
idea of George Burns, Helen. Let me get my mail first."

     
I picked up my
messages and my mail from my pigeonhole and stopped by the cold drink machine
for a Dr Pepper. On the top of the stack was an envelope addressed to me in
pencil, postmarked in Lafayette, with no zip code. I had no doubt who had sent
it.

     
I sat down in a chair
by the cold drink machine and opened the envelope with one finger, like peeling
away a bandage on a wound. The letter was printed on a paper towel.

Dear Mr. Roboshow,

     
I thought you was
honest but you have shit on me just like them others. Thank God I am old and
have got to the end of my row and cant be hurt by yall no more. But that dont
mean I will abide your pity either, no sir, it dont, I have seen the likes of
yall all my life and know how you think so dont try to act like you are

better than me. Also tell that prissy pissant Buford LaRose I will

settel some old bidness then finish with him too.

     
You have permision
to pass this letter on to people in the press.

                                                                             
Sinserely yours,

                                             
                                
a loyal
democrat who voted for John Kennedy,

                                                                            
Aaron Jefferson Crown

     
Helen was waiting for
me inside my office.

     
"Crown went
after Jimmy Ray Dixon. Can you believe it?" she said.

     
I looked again at the
letter in my hand. "What's his beef with Jimmy Ray?"

     
"If Jimmy Ray
knows, he's not saying. He seems to have become an instant law-and-order man,
though."

     
She repeated the story
to me as it had been told to her by NOPD. You didn't have to be imaginative to
re-create the scene. The images were like those drawn from a surreal landscape,
where a primitive and
half-formed creature rose from a
prehistoric pool of genetic soup into a world that did not wish to recognize
its origins.

J
immy Ray had been at his fish camp with three of his employees and
their women out by Bayou Lafourche. The night was humid, the dirt yard
illuminated by an electric mechanic's lamp hung in a dead pecan tree, and Jimmy
Ray was on a creeper under his jacked-up truck, working with a wrench on a
brake drum, yelling at a second man to get him a beer from inside the shack.
When the man didn't do it fast enough, Jimmy Ray went inside to get the beer
himself, and another man, bored for something to do, took his place on the
creeper.

     
Aaron Crown had been
crouched on a cypress limb by the bayou's edge, listening to the voices inside
the lighted center of the yard, unable to see past a shed at who was speaking
but undoubtedly sure that it was Jimmy Ray yelling orders at people from under
the truck.

     
He released his grasp
on the limb and dropped silently into the yard, dressed in a seersucker suit
two sizes too small for him that he had probably taken from a washline or a
Salvation Army Dumpster, and brand-new white leather basketball shoes with
layers of mud as thick as waffles caked around the soles.

     
One of Jimmy Ray's
employees was smoking a cigarette, staring at the mist rising from the swamp,
perhaps yawning, when he smelled an odor from behind him, a smell that was like
excrement and sour milk and smoke from a meat fire. He started to turn, then a
soiled hand clamped around his mouth, the calluses as hard as dried fish scale
against his lips, and he felt himself pulled against the outline of Crown's
body, into each curve and contour, molded against the phallus and thighs and
whipcord stomach, suspended helplessly inside the rage and sexual passion of a
man he couldn't see, until the blood flow to his brain stopped as if his
jugular had been pinched shut with pliers.

     
The man under the
truck saw the mud-encrusted basketball shoes, the shapeless seersucker pants
that hung on ankles scarred by leg manacles, and knew his last night on earth
had begun even before Aaron began to rock the truck back and forth on the jack.

     
The man on the
creeper almost made it completely into the open
when the truck
toppled sideways and fell diagonally across his thighs. After the first
red-black rush of pain that arched his head back in the dirt, that seemed to
seal his mouth and eyes and steal the air from his lungs, he felt himself
gradually float upward from darkness to the top of a warm pool, where two
powerful hands released themselves from his face and allowed light into his
brain and breath into his body. Then he saw Aaron bending over him, his hands
propped on his knees, staring at him curiously.

     
"Damn if I can
ever get the right nigger or white man, either one," Aaron said.

     
He looked up at a sound
from the shack, shadows across a window shade, a car loaded with revelers
bouncing down a rutted road through the trees toward the clearing. His face was
glazed with sweat, glowing in the humidity, his eyes straining into the
darkness, caught between an unsatisfied bloodlust that was within his grasp and
the knowledge that his inability to think clearly had always been the weapon
his enemies had used against him.

     
Then, as silently as
he had come, he slunk away in the shadows, like a thick-bodied crab moving
sideways on mechanical extensions.

"
H
ow do
you figure it?" Helen said.

     
"It doesn't make
sense. What was it he said to the man under the truck?"

     
She read from her
notepad: '"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either
one.'"

     
"I think Aaron
has an agenda that none of us has even guessed at," I said.

     
"Yeah, war with
the human race."

     
"That's not
it," I answered.

     
"What is?"

     
It's the daughter, I
thought.

     
I visited Batist in
the hospital that afternoon, then picked up three pounds of frozen peeled
crawfish and a carton of potato salad in town, so Bootsie would not have to
cook, and drove down the dirt road toward the house. The bayou was half in
shadow and the sunlight looked like gold thread in the trees. Dust drifted out
on the bayou's
surface and coated the wild elephant ears
that grew in dark clumps in the shallows. My neighbor was stringing Christmas
lights on his gallery while his rotating hose sprinkler clattered a jet of
water among the myrtle bushes and tree trunks in his yard. It was the kind of
perfect evening that seemed outside of time, so gentle and removed from the
present that you would not be surprised if a news carrier on a bike with
balloon tires threw a rolled paper onto your lawn with a headline announcing
victory over Japan.

     
But its perfection
dissipated as soon as I pulled into the drive and saw a frail priest in a black
suit and Roman collar step out of his parked car and glare at me as though I
had just risen from the Pit.

     
"Could I help
you, Father?" I said.

     
"I want to know
why you've been tormenting Mr. Dolowitz," he said. His face called to mind
a knotted, red cauliflower.

     
I stooped down so I
could see the man in the passenger seat. He kept his face straight ahead, his
biscuit-colored derby hat like a bowl on his head.

     
"No Duh?" I
said.

     
"I understand
you're a practicing Catholic," the priest said.

     
"That's
correct."

     
"Then why have
you forced this man to commit a crime? He's terrified. What the hell's the
matter with you?"

     
"There's a
misunderstanding here, Father."

     
"Then why don't
you clear things up for me, sir?"

     
I took his hand and
shook it, even though he hadn't offered it. It was as light as balsa sticks in
my palm and didn't match the choleric heat in his face. His name was Father
Timothy Mulcahy, from the Irish Channel in New Orleans, and he was the pastor
of a small church off Magazine whose only parishioners were those too poor or
elderly to move out of the neighborhood.

     
"I didn't
threaten this man, Father. I told him he could do what was right for
himself," I said. Then I leaned down to the driver's window.
      
"No Duh, you tell Father Mulcahy
the truth or I'm going to mop up the yard with you."

     
"Ah, it's clear
you're not a violent man," the priest said.

     
"No Duh, now is
not the time—" I began.

     
"It was the
other guy, that animal Purcel, Father. But Robicheaux was with him," No
Duh said.

     
The priest cocked one
eyebrow, then tilted his head, made a self-deprecating smile.

     
"Well, I'm sorry
for my rashness," he said. "Nonetheless, Mr. Dolowitz shouldn't have
been forced to break into someone's home," he said.

     
"Would you give
us a few minutes?" I said.

     
He nodded and started
to walk away, then touched my arm and took me partway with him.

     
"Be easy with
him. This man's had a terrible experience," he said.

     
I went back to the
priest's car and leaned on the window jamb. Dolowitz took off his hat and set
it on his knees. His face looked small, waxlike, devoid of identity. He touched
nervously at his mustache.

     
"What
happened?" I asked.

     
"I creeped Dock
Green's house. Somebody left the key in the lock.
      
I stuck a piece of newspaper under the door and knocked the
key out and caught it on the paper and pulled it under the door. They got me
going back out. They didn't know I'd been inside. If they had, I wouldn't be
alive," he said.

     
"Who got
you?"

     
"Persephone
Green and a button guy works for the Giacanos and some other pervert gets off
hurting people." For the first time his eyes lifted into mine. They
possessed a detachment that reminded me of that strange, unearthly look we used
to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

     
"What they'd do
to you, partner?"

     
The fingers of one
hand tightened on the soft felt of his hat. "Buried me alive . . .,"
he said. "What, you surprised? You think only Dock's got this thing about
graves and talking with dead people under the ground? Him and Persephone are
two of a kind. She thought it was funny. She laughed while they put a garden
hose in my mouth and covered me over with a front-end loader. It was just like
being locked in black concrete, with no sound, with just a little string of dirty
air going into my throat. They didn't dig me up till this morning. I went to
the bathroom inside my clothes."