DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (14 page)

     
I put one hand on her
arm, then felt behind me for the elongated door handle. It was locked in place,
rigid across the sweating cup of my palm.

A
day later Clete Purcel's
chartreuse
Cadillac convertible, the top down, pulled up in front of the
sheriff's department with Mingo Bloomberg in the passenger's seat. Clete and
Mingo came up the walk, through the waiting room, and into my office. Mingo
stood in front of my desk in white slacks and a lemon yellow shirt with French
cuffs. He rotated his neck, as though his collar were too tight, then put a
breath mint in his mouth.

     
"My lawyer's
getting me early arraignment and recognizance. I'm here as a friend of the
court, so you got questions, let's do it now, okay?" he said. He snapped
the mint in his molars.

     
"Mingo, I don't
think that's the way to start out the day here," Clete said.

     
"What's going
on, Clete?" I said.

     
Clete stepped out
into the hall and waited for me. I closed the door behind me.

     
"Short Boy Jerry
gave me two hundred bucks to deliver the freight. Don't let Mingo take you over
the hurdles. Jerry Joe and NOPD both got their foot on his chain," he
said.

     
I opened the door and
went back in.

     
"How you feel,
Mingo?" I said.

     
"My car was
boosted. I didn't drown a black girl. So I feel okay."

     
"You a stand-up
guy?" I said.

     
"What's that
mean?"

     
"Jerry Ace is
giving us an anchovy so we don't come back for the main meal. You comfortable
with that, Mingo? You like being an hors d'oeuvre?" I said.

     
"What I don't
like is being in New Orleans with a target painted on my back. I'm talking
about the cops in the First District who maybe stomped a guy's hair all over
the cement . . . I got to use the John. Purcel wouldn't stop the car."

     
He looked out the
glass partition, then saw the face looking back at him.

     
"Hey, keep her
away from me," he said.

     
"You don't like
Detective Soileau?" I said.

     
"She's a
muff-diver. I told her over the phone, she ought to get herself a rubber
schlong so she can whip it around and spray trees or whatever she wants till
she gets it out of her system."

     
Helen was coming
through the door now. I put my hand on her shoulder and walked her back into
the corridor.

     
"Jerry Joe Plumb
made him surrender," I said.

     
"Why?" she
said, her eyes still fastened on Mingo.

     
"He's tied up
somehow with Buford LaRose and doesn't want us in his face. Mingo says he's
getting out on his own recognizance. I think he's going to head for our
witnesses."

     
"Like hell he
is. Has he been Mirandized?"

     
"Not yet."

     
She opened the door
so abruptly the glass rattled in the frame.

     
A half hour later she
called me from the jail.

     
"Guess what?
Shithead attacked me. I'll have the paperwork ready for the court in the
morning," she said.

     
"Where is
he?"

     
"Iberia General.
He fell down a stairs. He also needed twelve stitches where I hit him with a
baton. Forget recognizance, baby cakes. He's going to be with us awhile."

     
"Helen?"

     
"The
paperwork is going to look fine. I went to Catholic school. I have beautiful
penmanship."

     
Clete and I ate lunch
at an outdoor barbecue stand run by a black man in a grove of oak trees. The
plank table felt cool in the shade, and you could smell the wet odor of green
cordwood stacked under a tarp next to the stand.

     
"Because I was
up early anyway, I happened to turn on the TV and catch 'Breakfast Edition,'
you know, the local morning show in New Orleans," he said. His eyes stayed
on my face. "What the hell you doing, Streak?"

     
"Aaron Crown
bothers me."

     
"You went on
television, Dave, with this Hollywood character, what's-his-name, Felton,
whatever."

     
"I was taped here
while he interviewed me on the phone, then it was spliced into the show."

     
"Forget the
technical tour. Why don't you resign your job while you're at it? What's your
boss have to say?"

     
"I don't think
he's heard about it yet."

     
"You don't take
police business to civilians, big mon. To begin with, they don't care about it.
They'll leave you hanging in the breeze, then your own people rat-fuck you as a
snitch."

     
"Maybe that's
the way it's supposed to shake out," I said.

     
He drank from a
bottle of Dixie beer, one eye squinting over the bottle at me. "Something
else is involved here, mon," he said.

     
"Don't make it a
big deal, Clete."

     
"It's the broad,
isn't it?" he said.

     
"No."

     
"You got into
the horizontal bop once with her and you're worried you're going to do it
again. So you got rid of temptation with a baseball bat. In the meantime maybe
you just splashed your career into the bowl . . . Wait a minute, you didn't
pork her again, did you?"

     
"No . . . Will you
stop talking like that?"

     
"Dave, rich guys
don't marry mud women from New Guinea. She's one hot-ass piece of work. We all
got human weaknesses, noble mon. All I got to do is see her on TV and my
Johnson starts barking."

     
"You were a
fugitive on a homicide warrant," I said. "The victim was a
psychopath, and his death was a mistake, but the point is you killed him. What
if you hadn't beat it? What if you were put away for life unjustly?"

     
He wiped a smear of
barbecue sauce off his palm with a napkin, looked out at the sunlight on the
street.

     
"This guy Crown
must mean a lot to you ... I think I'm going to Red's in Lafayette, take a
steam, start the day over again," he said.

A
n hour later the sheriff buzzed my extension and asked me to walk
down to his office. By now I was sure he had heard about my appearance on
"Morning Edition," and all the way down the corridor I tried to
construct a defense for conduct that, in police work, was traditionally
considered indefensible. When I opened the door he was staring at a sheet of
lined notebook paper in his hand, rubbing his temple with one finger. His
Venetian blinds were closed, and his windowsill was green with plants.

     
"Why is
everything around here hard? Why can't we just take care of the problems in
Iberia Parish? Can you explain that to me?" he said.

     
"If you're
talking about my being on 'Morning Edition,' I stand behind what I said,
Sheriff. Aaron Crown didn't have motivation. I think Buford LaRose is building
a political career on another man's broken back."

     
"You were on
'Morning Edition'?"

     
The room was silent.
He opened the blinds, and an eye-watering light fell through the window.

     
"Maybe I should
explain," I said.

     
"I'd appreciate
that."

     
When I finished he
picked up the sheet of notebook paper and looked at it again.

     
"I wish you
hadn't done that," he said.

     
"I'm sorry you
feel that way."

     
"You don't
understand. I wanted to believe the Mexican with the machete was simply a
deranged man, not an assassin. I wanted to believe he had no connection with
the Crown business."

     
"I'm not with
you."

     
"I don't want to
see you at risk, for God's sake. We got two calls from Mexico this morning, one
from a priest in some shithole down in the interior, the other from a Mexican
drug agent who says he's worked with the DEA in El Paso . . . The guy with the
spiderweb tattoos, the lunatic, some
rurales
popped holes all over him.
He's dying and he says you will too . . . He says 'for the
bugarron.'
 
What's a
bugarron?"

     
"I don't
know."

     
"There's a storm
down there. I got cut off before I could make sense out of this drug agent. . .
Get a flight this afternoon. Take Helen with you. Americans with no backup tend
to have problems down there."

     
"We have money
for this?"

     
"Bring me a
sombrero."

W
e flew into El
Paso late that night.
By dawn
of the next day we were on a shuttle flight to a windswept dusty airport set
among brown hills five hundred miles into Mexico. The Mexican drug agent who
met us wore boots and jeans, a badge on his belt and a pistol and a sports coat
over a wash-faded blue golf shirt. His name was Heriberto, and he was unshaved
and had been up all night.

     
"The guy try to
kill you, huh?" he said, as he unlocked the doors to the Cherokee in the
parking lot.

     
"That's
right," I said.

     
"I wouldn't want
a guy like that after me.
Es indio,
man, know what I mean? Guy like that
will cook your heart over a fire," he said. He looked at Helen.
"Gringita,
you want to use the rest room? Where we going, there ain't any bushes along
the road."

     
He looked indolently
at the flat stare in her face.

     
"What did you
call her?" I asked.

     
"Maybe you all
didn't get no sleep last night," he said. "You can sleep while I
drive. I never had a accident on this road. Last night, with no moon, I come
down with one headlight."

     
The sun rose in an
orange haze above hills that looked made of slag, with cactus and burnt
mesquite and chaparral on the sides. The dirt road twisted through a series of
arroyos where the sandstone
walls were scorched by grass fires, then
we forded a river that splayed like coffee-stained milk over a broken wood dam
and overflowed the banks into willows and rain trees and a roofless mud brick
train station by tracks that seemed to disappear into a hillside.

     
"You looking at
where those tracks go?" Heriberto said. "The mine company had a
tunnel there. The train's still inside."

     
"Inside?" I
said.

     
"Pancho Villa blew
the mountain down on the tunnel. When a train full of Huerta's jackals was
coming through. They're still in there, man. They ain't coming out."

     
I took my notebook
out of my shirt pocket and opened it.

     
"What's
bugarron
mean?" I asked.

     
Helen had fallen
asleep in back, her head on her chest.

     
"It's like
maricon,
except the
bugarron
considers himself the guy."

     
"You're talking
about homosexuals? I don't get it."

     
"He's
adicto,
man. Guy's got meth and lab shit in his head. Those double-ought buckshots
in him don't help his thinking too good, either."

     
"What lab
shit?"

     
He concentrated on
the road, ignoring my question, and swerved around an emaciated dog.

     
"Why'd you bring
us down here?" I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.