DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (3 page)

     
"He's a button
man for the Giacano family," I said.

     
"We don't have
that."

     
"Bad
communications with NOPD, then. Mingo's specialty is disappearing his victims.
He's big on fish chum."

     
"That's
terrific. Expidee Chatlin is baby-sitting him for us."

     
We checked out a
cruiser and drove into the south part of the parish on back roads that were
lined with sugarcane wagons on their way to the mill. Then we followed a levee
through a partially cleared field to a tin-roofed fish camp set back in a grove
of persimmon and pecan trees. A cruiser was parked in front of the screened-in
gallery, the front doors opened, the radio turned off.

     
Expidee Chatlin had
spent most of his law-enforcement career as a crossing guard or escorting
drunks from the jail to guilty-court. He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a
tube of fat around his waist, and a thin mustache that looked like grease
pencil. He and another uniformed deputy were eating sandwiches with Mingo Bloomberg
at a plank table on the gallery.

     
"What do you
think you're doing, Expidee?" Helen asked.

     
"Waiting on
y'all. What's it look like?" he replied.

     
"How's
it hanging, Robicheaux?" Mingo Bloomberg said.

     
"No haps,
Mingo."

     
He emptied his beer
can and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was a handsome man and wore
beltless gray slacks and loafers and a long-sleeve shirt printed with flowers.
His hair was copper-colored and combed straight back on his scalp, his eyes ice
blue, as invasive as a dirty finger when they locked on yours.

     
He opened his lighter
and began to flick the flint dryly, as though we were not there.

     
"Get out of that
chair and lean against the wall," Helen said.

     
He lowered the
lighter, his mouth screwed into a smile around his cigarette. She pulled the
cigarette out of his mouth, threw it over her shoulder, and aimed her nine
millimeter into the middle of his face.

     
"Say something
wise, you fuck. Go ahead. I want you to," she said.

     
I pulled him to his
feet, pushed him against the wall, and kicked his ankles apart. When I shook
him down I tapped a hard, square object in his left pocket. I removed a .25
caliber automatic, dropped the magazine, pulled the slide back on the empty
chamber, then tossed the pistol into Expidee's lap.

     
"Nobody told me.
I thought the guy was suppose to be a witness or something," he said.

     
Helen cuffed Mingo's
wrists behind him and shoved him toward the screen door.

     
"Hey,
Robicheaux, you and the lady take your grits off the stove," he said.

     
"It's up to you,
Mingo," I said.

     
We were out front
now, under a gray sky, in the wind, in leaves that toppled out of the trees on
the edge of the clearing. Mingo rolled his eyes. "Up to me? You ought to
put a cash register on top of y'all's cruiser," he said.

     
"You want to
explain that?" I said.

     
He looked at Helen,
then back at me.

     
"Give us a
minute," I said to her.

     
I walked him to the
far side of our cruiser, opened the back door and sat him down behind the
wire-mesh screen. I leaned one arm on the roof and looked down into his face.
An oiled, coppery strand of hair fell down across his eyes.

     
"You did the
right thing with this guy Crown. You do the right thing, you get taken care of.
Something wrong with that?" he said.

     
"Yeah. I'm not
getting taken care of."

     
"Then that's
your fucking problem."

     
"When you get
back to the Big Sleazy, stay there, Mingo," I said, and closed the car
door.

     
"I got a permit
for the piece you took off me. I want it back," he said through the open
window.

     
I waited for Helen to
get behind the wheel, drumming my fingers on the cruiser's roof, trying to
conceal the disjointed expression in my face.

I
f you seriously commit yourself to alcohol, I mean full-bore, the
way you take up a new religion, and join that great host of revelers who sing
and lock arms as they bid farewell to all innocence in their lives, you quickly
learn the rules of behavior in this exclusive fellowship whose dues are the
most expensive in the world. You drink down. That means you cannot drink in
well-lighted places with ordinary people because the psychological insanity in
your face makes you a pariah among them. So you find other drunks whose
condition is as bad as your own, or preferably even worse.

     
But time passes and
you run out of geography and people who are in some cosmetic way less than
yourself and bars where the only admission fee is the price of a 6
a.m.
short-dog.

     
That's when you come
to places like Sabelle Crown's at the Underpass in Lafayette.

     
The Underpass area
had once been home to a dingy brick hotel and row of low-rent bars run by a
notorious family of Syrian criminals. Now the old bars and brick hotel had been
bulldozed into rubble, and all that remained of the city's last skidrow refuge
was Sabelle's, a dark, two-story clapboard building that loomed above the
Underpass like a solitary tooth.

     
It had no mirrors,
and the only light inside came from the jukebox and the beer signs over the
bar. It was a place where the paper Christmas decorations stayed up year-round
and you never had to see your reflection or make an unfavorable comparison
between yourself and others. Not unless you counted Sabelle, who had been a twenty-dollar
whore in New Orleans before she disappeared up north for several years. She was
middle-aged now, with flecks of gray in her auburn hair, but she looked good in
her blue jeans and V-necked beige sweater, and her face retained a kind of hard
beauty that gave fantasies to men who drank late and still believed the
darkness of a bar could resurrect opportunities from their youth.

     
She opened a bottle
of 7-Up and set it in front of me with a glass of ice.

     
"You doin' all
right, Streak?" she said.

     
"Not bad. How
about you, Sabelle?"

     
"I hope you're
not here for anything stronger than Seven-Up."

     
I smiled and didn't
reply. The surface of the bar stuck to my wrists. "Why would a New Orleans
gumball named Mingo Bloomberg have an interest in your father?" I said.

     
"You got
me."

     
"I went over
everything I could find on Aaron's case this afternoon. I think he could have
beat it if he'd had a good lawyer," I said.

     
She studied my face
curiously. The beer sign on the wall made tiny red lights, like sparks, in her
hair.

     
"The big problem
was Aaron told some other people he did it," I said.

     
She put out her
cigarette in the ashtray, then set a shot glass and a bottle of cream sherry by
my elbow and walked down the duckboards and around the end of the bar and sat
down next to me, her legs hooked in the stool's rungs.

     
"You still
married?" she said.

     
"Sure."

     
She didn't finish her
thought. She poured sherry into her shot glass and drank it. "Daddy went
to the third grade. He hauled manure for a living. Rich people on East Main
made him go around to their back doors."

     
I continued to look
into her face.

     
"Look, when this
black civil rights guy got killed with Daddy's rifle, he started making up stories.
People talked about him. He got to be a big man for a while," she said.

     
"He lied about a
murder?"

     
"How'd you like
to be known as white trash in a town like New Iberia?"

     
"Big
trade-off," I said.

     
"What
isn't?"

     
She gestured to the
bartender, pointed to a shoebox under the cash register. He handed it to her
and walked away. She lifted off the top.

     
"You were in the
army. See what you recognize in there. I don't know one medal from
another," she said.

     
It was heavy and
filled with watches, rings, pocketknives, and military decorations. Some of the
latter were Purple Hearts; at least two

were Silver Stars. It also contained a .32 revolver with
electrician's tape wrapped on the grips.

     
"If the medal's
got a felt-lined box, I give a three-drink credit," she said.

     
"Thanks for your
time," I said.

     
"You want to
find out about my father, talk to Buford LaRose. His book sent Daddy to
prison."

     
"I might do
that."

     
"When you see
Buford, tell him—" But she shook her head and didn't finish. She pursed
her lips slightly and kissed the air.

I
went home for lunch the next day, and as I came around the curve
on the bayou I saw Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible back out of my drive
and come toward me on the dirt road. She stopped abreast of me and removed her
sunglasses. Her teeth were white when she smiled, her tanned skin and platinum
hair dappled with sunlight that fell through the oak trees.

     
"What's up,
Karyn?"

     
"I thought this
would be a grand time to have y'all out."

     
"I beg your
pardon?"

     
"Oh, stop all
this silliness, Dave."

     
"Listen,
Karyn—"

     
"See you,
kiddo," she said, shifted into first, and disappeared in my rearview
mirror, her hair whipping in the wind.

I
pulled into our dirt drive and parked by the side of the house,
which had been built out of notched and pegged cypress during the Depression by
my father, a huge, grinning, hard-drinking Cajun who was killed on the salt in
an oil well blowout. Over the years the tin roof on the gallery had turned
purple with rust and the wood planks in the walls had darkened and hardened
with rain and dust storms and smoke from stubble fires. My wife, Bootsie, and I
had hung baskets of impatiens from the gallery, put flower boxes in the
windows, and planted the beds with roses, hibiscus, and hydrangeas, but in the
almost year-round shade of the live oaks and pecan trees, the house had a dark
quality that seemed straight out of the year 1930, as though my father still
held claim to it.

     
Bootsie had fixed ham
and onion sandwiches and iced tea and potato salad for lunch, and we set the
kitchen table together and sat down to eat. I kept waiting for her to mention
Karyn's visit. But she didn't.

     
"I saw Karyn
LaRose out on the road," I said.

     
"Oh, yes, I
forgot. Tomorrow evening, she wants us to come to a dinner and lawn
party."

     
"What did you
tell her?"

     
"I didn't think
we had anything planned. But I said I'd ask you." She had stopped eating.
I felt her eyes on my face. "You don't want to go?"

     
"Not
really."

     
"Do you have a
reason? Or do we just tell people to drop dead arbitrarily?"

     
"Buford's too
slick for me."

     
"He's a
therapist and a university professor. Maybe the state will finally have a
governor with more than two brain cells."

     
"Fine, let's go.
It's not a problem," I said.

     
"Dave
.
. ."

     
"I'm looking
forward to it."

     
Finally her
exasperation gave way to a smile, then to a laugh.

     
"You're too
much, Streak," she said.