DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (2 page)

     
He had to take
mincing steps, and because both wrists were cuffed to the chain just below his
rib cage he had the bent appearance of an apelike creature trussed with baling
wire.

     
"I don't want to
talk to Aaron like this. How about it, Cap?" I said to the gunbull, who
had been shepherding Angola convicts under a double-barrel twelve gauge for
fifty-five years.

     
The gunbull's
eyes were narrow and valuative, like a man constantly measuring the potential
of his adversaries, the corners webbed with wrinkles, his skin wizened and dark
as a mulatto's, as if it had been smoked in a fire. He removed his briar pipe
from his belt, stuck it in his mouth, clicking it dryly against his molars. He
never spoke while he unlocked the net of chains from Aaron Crown's body and let
them collapse around his ankles like a useless garment. Instead, he simply
pointed one rigid callus-sheathed index finger into Aaron's face, then unlocked
the side door to a razor-wire enclosed dirt yard with a solitary weeping willow
that had gone yellow with the season.

     
I sat on a weight
lifter's bench while Aaron Crown squatted on his haunches against the fence and
rolled a cigarette out of a small leather pouch that contained pipe tobacco.
His fingernails were the thickness and mottled color of tortoiseshell. Gray
hair grew out of his ears and

nose; his shoulders and upper chest were braided with knots of
veins and muscles. When he popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped
it in the wind, he inhaled the sulfur and glue and smoke all in one breath.

     
"I ain't did
it," he said.

     
"You pleaded
nolo contendere, partner."

     
"The shithog got
appointed my case done that. He said it was worked out." He drew in on his
hand-rolled cigarette, tapped the ashes off into the wind.

     
When I didn't reply,
he said, "They give me forty years. I was sixty-eight yestiday."

     
"You should have
pleaded out with the feds. You'd have gotten an easier bounce under a civil
rights conviction," I said.

     
"You go federal,
you got to cell with colored men." His eyes lifted into mine.
"They'll cut a man in his sleep. I seen it happen."

    
 
In the distance I could see the levee along
the Mississippi River and trees that were puffing with wind against a vermilion
sky.

     
"Why you'd
choose me to call?" I asked.

     
"You was the one
gone after my little girl when she got lost in Henderson Swamp."

     
"I see. . . I
don't know what I can do, Aaron. That was your rifle they found at the murder
scene, wasn't it? It had only one set of prints on it, too—yours."

     
"It was stole,
and it didn't have no
set
of prints on it. There was one thumbprint on
the stock. Why would a white man kill a nigger in the middle of the night and
leave his own gun for other people to find? Why would he wipe off the trigger
and not the stock?"

     
"You thought
you'd never be convicted in the state of Louisiana."

     
He sucked on a tooth,
ground out the ash of his cigarette on the tip of his work boot, field-stripped
the paper and let it all blow away in the wind.

     
"I ain't did
it," he said.

     
"I can't help
you."

     
He raised himself to
his feet, his knees popping, and walked toward the lockdown unit, the silver
hair on his arms glowing like a monkey's against the sunset.

t
he flooded cypress and willow trees
were gray-green smudges in the early morning mist at Henderson
Swamp. My adopted daughter, Alafair, sat on the bow of the outboard as I swung
it between two floating islands of hyacinths and gave it the gas into the bay.
The air was moist and cool and smelled of schooled-up
sac-a-lait,
or
crappie, and gas flares burning in the dampness. When Alafair turned her face
into the wind, her long Indian-black hair whipped behind her in a rope. She was
fourteen now, but looked older, and oftentimes grown men turned and stared at
her when she walked by, before their own self-consciousness corrected them.

     
We traversed a long,
flat bay filled with stumps and abandoned oil platforms, then Alafair pointed
at a row of wood pilings that glistened blackly in the mist. I cut the engine
and let the boat float forward on its wake while Alafair slipped the anchor, a
one-foot chunk of railroad track, over the gunwale until it bit into the silt
and the bow swung around against the rope. The water in the minnow bucket was
cold and dancing with shiners when I dipped my hand in to bait our lines.

     
"Can you smell
the
sac-a-lait?
There must be thousands in here," she said.

     
"You bet."

     
"This is the
best place in the whole bay, isn't it?"

     
"I don't know of
a better one," I said, and handed her a sandwich after she had cast her
bobber among the pilings.

     
It had been almost
nine years since I had pulled her from the submerged and flooded wreckage of a
plane that had been carrying Salvadoran war refugees. Sometimes in my sleep I
would relive that moment when I found her struggling for breath inside the
inverted cabin, her face turned upward like a guppy's into the wobbling and
diminishing bubble of air above her head, her legs scissoring frantically above
her mother's drowned form.

     
But time has its way
with all of us, and today I didn't brood upon water as the conduit into the
world of the dead. The spirits of villagers, their mouths wide with the
concussion of airbursts, no longer whispered to me from under the brown
currents of the Mekong, either, nor did the specter of my murdered wife Annie,
who used to call me up long-distance from her home under the sea and speak to
me through the rain.

     
Now water was simply
a wide, alluvial flood plain in the Atchafalaya Basin of south Louisiana that
smelled of humus and wood smoke, where mallards rose in squadrons above the
willows and trailed in long black lines across a sun that was as yellow as egg
yoke.

     
"You really went
to see that man Aaron Crown at Angola, Dave?" Alafair asked.

     
"Sure did."

     
"My teacher said
he's a racist. He assassinated a black man in Baton Rouge."

     
"Aaron Crown's
an ignorant and physically ugly man. He's the kind of person people like to
hate. I'm not sure he's a killer, though, Alf."

     
"Why not?"

     
"I wish I
knew."

     
Which was not only an
inadequate but a disturbing answer.

     
Why? Because Aaron
Crown didn't fit the profile. If he was a racist, he didn't burn with it, as
most of them did. He wasn't political, either, at least not to my knowledge. So
what was the motivation, I asked myself. In homicide cases, it's almost always
money, sex, or power. Which applied in the case of Aaron Crown?

     
"Whatcha
thinking about, Dave?" Alafair asked.

     
"When I was a
young cop in New Orleans, I was home on vacation and Aaron Crown came to the
house and said his daughter was lost out here in a boat. Nobody would go after
her because she was fourteen and had a reputation for running off and smoking
dope and doing other kinds of things, you with me?"

     
She looked at her
bobber floating between the pilings.

     
"So I found her.
She wasn't lost, though. She was in a houseboat, right across the bay there,
with a couple of men. I never told Aaron what she had been doing. But I think
he knew."

     
"You believe
he's innocent?"

     
"Probably not.
It's just one of those strange deals, Alf. The guy loved his daughter, which
means he has emotions and affections like the rest of us. That's something we
don't like to think about when we assign a person the role of assassin and
community geek."

     
She thought the word
geek
was funny and snorted through her nose.

     
It started to
sprinkle, and we hung raincoats over our heads like cloistered monks and pulled
sac-a-lait
out of the pilings until mid-morning, then layered them with
crushed ice in the cooler and headed for home just as a squall churned out of
the south like smoke twisting inside a bottle.

     
We gutted and
half-mooned the fish at the gills and scaled them with spoons under the canvas
tarp on the dock. Batist, the black man who worked for me, came out of the bait
shop with an unlit cigar stuck in his jaw. He let the screen slam behind him.
He was bald and wore bell-bottomed blue jeans and a white T-shirt that looked
like rotted cheesecloth on his barrel chest.

     
"There's a guard
from the prison farm inside," he said.

     
"What's he
want?" I said.

     
"I ain't axed.
Whatever it is, it don't have nothing to do with spending money. Dave, we got
to have these kind in our shop?"

     
Oh boy, I thought.

     
I went inside and saw
the old-time gunbull from the lockdown unit I had visited at Angola just
yesterday. He was seated at a back table by the lunch meat cooler, his back
stiff, his profile carved out of teak.

He wore a fresh khaki shirt and trousers, a hand-tooled belt, a
white straw hat slanted over his forehead. His walking cane, whose point was
sheathed in a six-inch steel tube, the kind road gang hacks used to carry, was
hooked by the handle over the back of his chair. He had purchased a fifty-cent
can of soda to drink with the brown paper bag of ginger snaps he had brought
with him.

     
"How's it goin',
Cap?" I said.

     
"Need your
opinion on something," he replied. His accent was north Louisiana hill
country, the vowels phlegmy and round and deep in the throat, like speech
lifted out of the nineteenth century.

     
His hands, which were
dotted with liver spots, shook slightly with palsy. His career reached back
into an era when Angola convicts were beaten with the black Betty, stretched
out on anthills, locked down in sweatboxes on Camp A, sometimes even murdered
by guards on a whim and buried in the Mississippi levee. In the years I had
know him I had never seen him smile or heard him mention any form of personal
life outside the penitentiary.

     
"Some movie people
is offered me five thousand dollars for a interview about Crown. What do you
reckon I ought to do?" he said.

     
"Take it. What's
the harm?"

     
He bit the edge off a
ginger snap.

     
"I got the
feeling they want me to say he don't belong up there on the farm, that maybe
the wrong man's in prison."

     
"I see."

     
"Something's
wrong, ain't it?"

     
"Sir?"

     
"White man kills
a black man down South, them Hollywood people don't come looking to get the
white man off."

     
"I don't have an
answer for you, Cap. Just tell them what you think and forget about it." I
looked at the electric clock on the wall above the counter.

     
"What I think is
the sonofabitch's about half-human." My eyes met his. "He's got a
stink on him don't wash off. If he ain't killed the NAACP nigger, he done it to
somebody else."

     
He chewed a ginger
snap dryly in his jaw, then swallowed it with a small sip of soda, the leathery
skin of his face cobwebbed with lines in the gloom.

W
ord travels fast among the denizens of the nether regions.

     
On Tuesday morning
Helen Soileau came into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and
said we had to pick up and hold a New Orleans hoodlum named Mingo Bloomberg,
who was wanted as a material witness in the killing of a police officer in the
French Quarter.

     
"You know
him?" she asked. She wore a starched white shirt and blue slacks and her
badge on her gunbelt. She was a blonde, muscular woman whose posture and bold
stare always seemed to anticipate, even relish, challenge or insult.