DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (22 page)

L
onnie Felton's purple Lincoln Continental was parked under a
dripping oak in my drive when Clete dropped me off from work that evening. I
ran through the rain puddles in the yard, onto the gallery, and smelled the
cigarette smoke drifting through the screen.

     
He sat on the divan,
tipping his ashes in a glass candy dish. Even relaxed, his body had the
muscular definition of a gymnast, and with his cleft chin and Roman profile and
brown ponytail that was shot with gray, he could have been either a first-rate
charismatic confidence man, second-story man, or the celebrity that he actually
was.

     
"How you do,
sir?" I said.

     
"I feel old
enough without the 'sir,'" he said. His teeth were capped and white, and,
like most entertainment people I had met, he didn't allow his eyes to blink, so
that they gave no indication of either a hidden insecurity or the presence or
absence of an agenda.

     
"I'm trying to
get Mr. Felton to stay for dinner," Bootsie said.

     
I took off my
raincoat and hat and put them on the rack in the hall. "Sure, why don't
you do that?" I said.

     
"Thanks, another
night. I'll be around town a week or so."

     
"Oh?"

     
"I want to use
Aaron Crown's old place, you know, that Montgomery Ward brick shack on the
coulee, and juxtapose it with the LaRose plantation."

     
"It seems like
you'd have done that early on," I said, and sat down on the stuffed chair
at the end of the coffee table.

     
His eyes looked
amused. The
Daily Iberian
was folded across the middle on top of the
table. I flipped it open so he could see the front page. A three-column
headline read: "LOCAL MAN ESCAPES ANGOLA."

     
"The end of your
documentary might get written in New Iberia," I said.

     
"How's
that?"

     
"You tell
me," I said.

     
"I have a hard
time following your logic. You think the presence of a news camera caused Jack
Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald?"

     
Bootsie got up
quietly and went into the kitchen and began fixing coffee on a tray. His eyes
stayed on her as she left the room, dropping for a split second to her hips.

     
"What do you
want from me, sir?" I asked.

     
"You're an
interesting man. You had the courage to speak out on Crown's behalf. I'd like
for you to narrate two or three closing scenes. I'd like to be with you during
the surveillance of LaRose's house."

     
"I think you
want gunfire on tape, sir."

     
He put on his glasses
and craned his head around so he could see the wall area next to the window
behind him.

     
"Is that where
the bullet holes were?" he asked.

     
"What?"

     
"I did some deep
background on you. This is where your wife killed another woman, isn't it? You
didn't have media all over you after she splattered somebody's brains on your
wallpaper?"

     
"My wife saved
my life. And you get out of our house, Mr. Felton."

     
Bootsie stood framed
in the kitchen doorway, frozen, the tray motionless between her hands.

     
Felton put out his
cigarette in the candy dish and got to his feet slowly, unruffled, indifferent.

     
"If I were you,
I'd spike Buford LaRose's cannon while I had the

chance. I think he's a believer in payback," he said. He
turned toward Bootsie. "I'm sorry for any inconvenience, Ms.
Robicheaux."
      
"If my
husband told you to get out, he meant it, bubba," she said.

A
year ago I had stripped the paper from the wall next to the
window, put liquid wood filler in the two bullet holes there, then sanded them
over and repapered the cypress planks. But sometimes in an idle moment, when my
gaze lingered too long on the wall, I remembered the afternoon that an assassin
had pointed a .22 caliber Ruger at the side of my face, when I knew that for me
all clocks everywhere were about to stop and I could do nothing about it but
cross my arms over my eyes, and Bootsie, who had never harmed anyone in her
life, had stepped out into the kitchen hallway and fired twice with a
nine-millimeter Beretta.

     
Lonnie Felton backed
his Lincoln into the road, then drove toward the drawbridge through the mist
puffing out of the tree trunks along the bayou's edge.

     
"There goes your
Hollywood career, Streak," Bootsie said.

     
"Somehow I don't
feel the less for it."

     
"You think Aaron
Crown is back?"

     
"It's too bad if
he is. Say, you really shook up Felton's cookie bag."

     
"You like that
hard gal stuff, huh? Too bad for whom?"

     
"I think
Buford's hooked up with some New Orleans wiseguys. Maybe Aaron won't make the
jail. . . Come on, forget this stuff. Let's take the boat down the bayou this
evening."

     
"In the
rain?"

     
"Why not?"

     
"What's
bothering you, Dave?"

     
"I have to
baby-sit Buford. His plane comes back in from Monroe at ten."

     
"I see."

     
"It'll be over
Tuesday."

     
"No it
won't," she said.

     
"Don't be that
way," I said, and put my hands on her shoulders.

     
"Which way is
that?" Then her eyes grew bright and she said it again, "Which way is
that, Dave?"

L
ater that night Helen Soileau and I met Buford's private plane at
the Lafayette airport and followed him back to the LaRose plantation in a
cruiser. Then we parked by his drive in the dark and waited for the midnight
watch to come on. The grounds around the house, the slave quarters now filled
with baled hay, the brick, iron-shuttered riding stable, were iridescent in the
humidity and glare of the security flood lamps that burned as brightly as
phosphorous flares. One by one the lights went off inside the house.

     
"Can you tell me
why an assignment like this makes me feel like a peon with a badge?" Helen
said.

     
"Search
me," I said.

     
"If you were
Crown and you wanted to take him out, where would you be?"

     
"Inside that
treeline, with the sun rising behind me in the morning."

     
"You want to
check it out?"

     
"It's not
morning."

     
"Casual
attitude."

     
"Maybe Buford
should have the opportunity to face his sins."

     
"I'll forget you
said that."

     
The next morning,
Saturday, just before sunrise, I dressed in the cold, with Bootsie still
asleep, and drove back to the LaRose plantation and walked the treeline from
the road back to the bayou. In truth, I expected to find nothing. Aaron had no
military background, was impetuous, did not follow patterns, and drew on a hill
country frame of reference that was as rational as a man stringing a crowning
forest fire around his log house.

     
However, I had
forgotten that Aaron was a lifetime hunter, not for sport or even for personal
dominion over the land but as one who viewed armadillos and deer, possums and
ducks, squirrels and robins, even gar that could be shot from a boat, as food
for his table, adversaries that he slew in order to live, none any better or
worse or more desirable than another, and he went about it as thoroughly and
dispassionately as he would butcher chickens and hogs on a block.

     
On second
consideration, I thought the best trained military sniper could probably take a
lesson from Aaron Crown.

     
One hundred yards
from Buford's backyard, with a clear view of the converted carriage house, the
driveway, the parked automobiles, I
saw the broken gray leaves,
the knee and boot marks in the soft ground behind a persimmon tree, an empty
Vienna sausage can, crumbs from saltine crackers, the detritus of
field-stripped hand-rolled cigarettes.

     
Then I thought I
heard feet running, a shadow flowing between trees, dipping down into a dry
coulee bed, racing past the black marble crypt in the center of the LaRose
cemetery. But in the muted pink softness of the morning, in the rain that
continued to tumble like crystal needles out of the sunlight, I looked again
and saw only red horses turning among the tree trunks, divots of impacted
layered leaves exploding from their hooves, their backs aura-ed with vapor from
their bodies.

     
I took a Ziploc bag
from my coat pocket and began picking up the torn cigarette papers and the
Vienna sausage can with the tip of a ballpoint pen just as Buford came out his
back door, dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, charcoal suede jacket, and gray
Stetson hat, his face raised toward the dawn and the special portent that it
seemed to contain.

     
I wondered if he had
ever envisioned his face locked down inside a telescopic sight, just before a
toppling .303 round was about to scissor a keyhole through the middle of it.

     
Maybe he had. Or
maybe my fantasy indicated a level of abiding resentment that I did not want to
recognize.

T
hat afternoon Clete parked his Cadillac by the boat ramp and
walked down the dock and into the bait shop, where I was stacking the chairs
and mopping the floor. He poured a cup of coffee for himself at the counter and
drank it.

     
"You looked like
you got rained on today," I said.

     
"I did."

     
"You catch
anything?"

     
"Nope. The
water's getting too cool. I found Brandy Grissum, though."

     
I fitted a chair
upside down on a table and put down my mop.

     
"My main meal
ticket is still running down bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie
Bimstine," he said. "So I checked in with Nig this afternoon to see
if he had anything for me, and out of
nowhere he tells me
a black broad named Brandy Grissum skipped on a prostitution charge and left
Nig and Willie holding the bond. But because most of the lowlifes consider Nig
a fairly decent guy for a bondsman, Brandy calls him up from a halfway house in
Morgan City and says she's scared shitless to come back to New Orleans, and can
Nig square her beef with the court and renew her bond.

     
"Can you imagine
the faith these people put in a bondsman? I used to miss my shield. Now I think
I'll get me one of those little cinder block offices with a neon sign down by
the City Prison."

     
"She's in a
halfway house?" I said.

     
"Not for long.
She's about to get kicked out. Y'all got a snitch fund?"

     
"We're lucky to
pay the light bill."

     
"I wouldn't put
that on the top of the discussion."

T
he two-story halfway house was painted canary yellow and decorated
with flower boxes on a shell road that paralleled a canal lined with banana
trees and wild elephant ears. The leaves of the elephant ears were withered and
streaked white from the water splashed out of potholes by passing automobiles.
A rotted-out shrimp boat was half submerged on the far side of the canal, and
gars were feeding on something dead that streamed off one of the scuppers. The
gallery of the halfway house was cluttered with green plants and straight-back
wood chairs, on which both black and white people sat, most of them in
mismatched clothes, and smoked cigarettes and looked at nothing or at their
shoes or watched the passing of an automobile, until it finally turned onto the
highway that led back into Morgan City, which seemed painted with an electric
glow against the evening sky.

     
Brandy Grissum sat
with us at a picnic table strewn with children's toys under a Chinaberry tree.
She wore lip gloss and rouge high on her cheekbones and a hair net with sequins
in it, and jeans and purple cloth slippers and a long-sleeve denim shirt with
lace sewn on the cuffs. The whites of her eyes were threaded with blood
vessels.