DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (27 page)

     
"I've seen it
before. In a shoebox full of military decorations at Sabelle Crown's bar,"
I said.

A
n hour later, a half mile away, somebody reported a grate pried
off a storm drain. A Lafayette city cop used his flashlight and crawled down
through a huge slime-encrusted pipe that led under the streets to a bluff above
the Vermilion River. The bottom of the pipe was trenched with the heavy
imprints of a man's brogans or work boots. The prints angled off the end of the
pipe through the brush and meandered along the mudbank, below the bluff and an
apartment building where people watched the late news behind their sliding
glass doors, oblivious to the passage of a man who could have stepped out of a
cave at the dawn of time.

     
He found a powerboat
locked with a chain to a dock, tore the chain and the steel bolt out of the
post, then discovered a hundred yards downstream he had no gas. He climbed up
the bank with a can, flung the dress in the brush, and followed a coulee to a
lighted boulevard, climbed through a corrugated pipe, and walked into a filling
station, wearing only his trousers and brogans, his hairy, mud-streaked torso
glowing with an odor that made the attendant blanch.

     
Aaron opened his
calloused palm on a bone-handle pocketknife.

     
"How much you
give me for this?" he asked.

     
"I don't need
one," the attendant replied, and tried to smile. He was young, his black
hair combed straight back; he wore a tie that attached to the collar of his
white shirt with a cardboard hook.

     
"I'll take six
dollars for it. You can sell it for ten."

     
"No, sir, I
really don't need no knife."

     
"I just want
five dollars gas and a bag of them pork rinds. That's an honest deal."

     
The attendant's eyes
searched the empty pavilion outside. The rain was slanting across the
fluorescent lights above the gas pumps.

     
"You're trying
to make me steal from the man I work for," he said.

     
"I ain't got a
shirt on my back. I ain't got food to eat. I come in out of the rain and ask for
hep and you call me a thief. I won't take that shit."

     
"I'll call my
boss and ax him. Maybe you can talk to him."

     
The attendant lifted
the telephone receiver off the hook under the counter. But Aaron's huge hand
closed on his and squeezed, then squeezed harder, splaying the fingers, mashing
the knuckles like bits of bone against the plastic, his eyes bulging with
energy and power an inch from the attendant's face, his grip compressing the
attendant's hand into a ball of pain until a cry broke from the attendant's
throat and his free hand flipped at the power switch to an unleaded pump.

     
Aaron left the
pocketknife on top of the counter.

     
"My name's Aaron
Crown. I killed two niggers in Angola kept messing with me. You tell anybody I
robbed you, I'll be back," he said.

B
ut the party at the Acadiana never slowed down. The very fact that
Aaron had failed so miserably in attempting to penetrate the governor-elect's
security, like an insect trying to fight its way out of a glass bell, was almost
a metaphorical confirmation that a new era had begun, one in which a
charismatic southern leader and his beautiful wife danced like college
sweethearts to a Dixieland band and shared their own aura with such a
generosity of spirit that even the most hard-bitten self-made contractor felt
humbled and ennobled to be in their presence.

     
But I was worn out
when I got back from the search for Aaron Crown and didn't care anymore about
the fortunes of the LaRose family and just wanted to go to sleep. There was a
message from Bootsie at the desk when I picked up my room key:
The truck
broke down by Spanish Lake and I had to wait for the wrecker. I'm borrowing my
sister's car but will be there quite late.

     
I left a note for
Bootsie with the room number on it and started toward the elevator.

     
"Mr. Robicheaux,
you have another message," the clerk said.

     
I took the
piece of paper from his hand and read it.

     
Streak, I got the
gen on our man Mookie. We 're talking about your mainline subhuman here. I'll
fill you in later. Let's ROA at the bar. Dangle easy, big mon
—
Clete.

     
"I'm a little
confused. This is my friend's handwriting. He's here at the hotel?" I
said.

     
The clerk took the
slip of paper out of my hand and looked at it.

     
"Oh yes, he's
here. He is certainly here, sir."

     
"Excuse
me?"

     
"I think there
was a problem about his invitation. He didn't seem to have it with him. Someone
tried to put his hand on your friend's arm and walk him to the door."

     
"That must have
made an interesting show."

     
"Oh it was, sir.
Definitely." The clerk was laughing to himself now.

     
I went into the bar
and restaurant, looked on the dance floor and in the banquet and meeting rooms.
Normally tracking Clete Purcel's progress through a given area was like
following the path of a wrecking ball, but I saw no sign of him and I rode the
elevator up to the top floor, where I had been given a room at the end of the
hall from Buford and Karyn's, unlocked the door, undressed, and lay down on the
bed in the dark.

     
It was storming
outside now, and through the wide glass window I could see the flow of traffic
across the bridge and the rain falling out of the electric light into the
water. At one time this area had been called Vermilionville, and in 1863
Louisiana's boys in butternut had retreated up the Teche, exhausted,
malnourished, their uniforms in rags, often barefoot, and had fought General
Banks' federal troops, right here, on the banks of the river, to keep open the
flow of supplies from Texas to the rest of the Confederacy.

     
As I fell onto the
edges of sleep I saw sugarcane fields and houses burning and skies that were
plum-colored with smoke and heard the popping of small-arms fire and the
clatter of muskets and bayonets as a column of infantry ran down the dirt road
toward an irrigation ditch, and I had no doubt which direction my sleep was
about to take.

     
This time the sniper
was not Victor Charles.

     
I was trapped in the
middle of the dirt road, my feet unable to run. I saw a musket extend itself
from a clump of violent green brush, saw
the stiffness of its
barrel rear in the sunlight, and in my mind, as though I had formed a contract
between the condemned and the executioner, the sniper and I became one, joined
irrevocably together as co-participants in my death, and just before the .58
caliber round exploded from the barrel I could feel him squeeze the musket in
his hands, as though it was really I who cupped its wet hardness in my palms.

     
In my sleep I heard
the door to the hotel room open, then close, heard someone set down a key on
the nightstand and close the curtains, felt a woman's weight on the side of the
bed and then her hand on my hip, and I knew Bootsie had arrived at the hotel
safely.

     
I lay on my back,
with the pillow across my face, and heard her undressing in the dark. She lay
beside me, touched my stomach, then moved across my loins, her thighs spread,
and put my sex between her legs. Then she leaned close to me, pushed the pillow
from my face, and kissed my cheek and put her tongue inside my mouth and placed
my sex inside her.

     
Her tongue tasted
like candy, like cherries that had been soaked in bourbon. She raised herself
on her arms, the tops of her swollen breasts half-mooned with tan.

     
I stared upward into
the face of Karyn LaRose, who smiled lazily and said, "Tell me you don't
like it, Dave. Tell me. See if you can tell me that. . . Tell me . . . tell me
. . . tell me . . ."

I
found Clete Purcel at the
bar.
He was drinking a shot of tequila, with a Corona and a saucer of
salted limes on the side, his porkpie hat cocked over one eye. The band was
putting away its instruments and the bar was almost empty.

     
"Where you been,
noble mon? You look a couple of quarts down," he said.

     
"A long
day." I sat next to him and rubbed my face. My skin felt

cold, dead to the touch.

     
"I thought I saw
Boots go out the lobby."

     
"You did."

     
"What's going
on?"

     
"Don't worry
about it. What'd you find out about this guy
Mookie?"

     
His eyes seemed to go
inside mine, then he tipped back the shot and drank from the bottle of Corona.

     
"The black
broad, Brandy Grissum, came into Nig's office hysterical today. Dig this, she
used the two yards you gave her to score a shitload of rock and get wiped out.
So while she was on the nod at her mother's house in St. John the Baptist, our
man Mookie tools on up for some more R&R. Guess what? Mookie decided he
wasn't interested in a stoned-out twenty-buck street whore. So he sodomized her
little sister."

     
He put a Lucky Strike
in his mouth and fiddled with his Zippo, as though he were trying to remove an
image from his mind, then dropped the Zippo on the bar without lighting the
cigarette.

     
"His last name is
Zerrang," he said. "He used to be a leg breaker for a couple of
shylocks on the Mississippi coast, then he made the big score as a hit man for
the greaseballs in Miami. He must be pretty slick, though. I had a friend at
NOPD punch on the computer. He's never been down."

     
"Who's he
working for now?"

     
"Brandy doesn't
know. This time I think she's telling the truth . . . You don't look good,
Streak. What's troubling you, mon?"

     
I told him. We were
the only people at the bar now. Clete listened, his face empty of expression.
He rubbed his thumb against his cheekbone, and I could see white lines inside
the crow's feet at the corner of his eye.

     
He made a coughing
sound in his throat.

     
"That's quite a
story," he said.

     
I picked up one of
the salted limes from his saucer, then set it down again.

     
"Bootsie walked
in on it?" he asked.

     
"When Karyn was
dressing."

     
"How did the
LaRose broad get in?"

     
"She got a pass
key from the maid."

     
"Dave, you were
throwing her out. Bootsie doesn't know that?"

     
"I didn't have a
chance to tell her. I'll call her when she's back home."

     
"Man." He
breathed through his nose, his lips crimped together.
      

     
"You told Karyn
LaRose to peddle her bread somewhere else, though?"

     
"Something like
that." A scrolled green and red Dixie beer sign was lit over the row of
whiskey bottles behind the bar. I felt tired all over and my palms were stiff
and dry when I closed and opened them.

     
"You didn't do
anything wrong. You just got to make Boots see that. Right? This isn't a big
deal," he said. He watched me rub the salt in the saucer with the tip of
my finger. "Let's find a late-night joint and get a steak."

     
"I'm going to
take a shower and go to bed," I said.

 
    
"I'm going up with you."

     
"The hell you
are."

     
"I
know
you,
Streak. You're going to get inside your own head and build a case against
yourself. The slop chute is closing. For you it's closed permanently. You got
that, big mon?"

     
"There's no
problem here, Clete."

     
"Yeah, I bet.
That broad couldn't buy you, so she decided to fuck your head." He stood
up from the barstool, then grimaced slightly. "I feel like an upended
bottle. Come on, let's get out of here. Remind me in the future to drink in
low-class dumps that aren't full of the right people."