DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (37 page)

     
"You want to bag
some of it?" Helen said.

     
"It's a waste of
time. Buford beat us to it."

     
"It was a long
shot," Helen said. "You've got to consider the source, too, Dave.
Dock Green's nuts."

     
"No, he's not.
He's just different."

     
"That's a new
word for it."

     
I didn't say
anything. We walked up the slope and through the trees toward the house. The
air was filled with gold shafts of light inside the trees, and you could smell
the water in the coulee and the fecund odor of wet fern and the exposed root
systems that trailed in the current like torn cobweb.

     
"Can I get out
of line a minute?" Helen said.

     
I looked at her and
waited. She kept walking up the incline, her face straight ahead, her shoulders
slightly bent, her masculine arms taut-looking with muscle.

     
"The homicides
you're worried about took place out of our jurisdiction. The Indian guy who
tried to mess you over with the machete is dead. We don't have a crime
connected with the LaRoses to investigate in Iberia Parish, Dave," she
said.

     
"They're both
dirty."

     
"So is the
planet," she said.

     
We took a shorter
route back and exited the woods by a cleared field and passed the brick stables
and an adjacent railed lot where a solitary bay gelding stood like a piece of
stained redwood in a column of dust-laden sunlight. The brand on his flank was
shaped in the form of a rose, burned deep into the hair like calcified
ringworm.

     
"They sure leave
their mark on everything, don't they?" I said.

     
"What should
they use, spray cans? Give it a break," Helen said.

    
 
"I'll tell them we're leaving now,"
I said.

     
"Don't do it,
Dave."

     
"I'll see you in
the car, Helen."

     
She continued on
through the field toward the driveway. I walked through the backyard toward the
porte cochere, then glanced through a screen of bamboo into the glassed-in rear
of the house where Karyn had been doing her aerobic exercises. We stared into
each other's face with a look of mutual and surprised intimacy that went beyond
the moment, beyond my ability to define or guard against, that went back into a
deliberately forgotten image of two people looking nakedly upon each other's
faces during intercourse.

     
I had caught her
unawares in front of a small marble-topped bar with a champagne glass and a
silver ice bucket containing a green bottle of Cold Duck on it. But Karyn was
not one to be undone by an unexpected encounter with an adversary. With her
eyes fastened on my face, a pout on her mouth like an adolescent girl, she
unhooked her halter and let it drop from her breasts and unbuttoned her shorts
and pushed them and her panties down over her thighs and knees and stepped out
of them. Then she pulled the pins from her platinum hair and shook it out on
her shoulders and put the glass of Cold Duck to her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine,
as empty as death.

J
immy Ray Dixon
was one of those
in-your-face
people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume
they have nothing to hide themselves.

     
It's a good ruse.
Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For
example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.

     
After Jimmy Ray and
his entourage had left the dock, I'd called a friend at the Veterans
Administration in New Orleans.

     
The following day,
when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called
and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.

     
He didn't lose a hand
clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese
thieves, his business partners in selling stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black
market, cut it off.

     
A cross-referenced
CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin
home in GI coffins.

     
So he lied about his
war record, I thought. But who wouldn't, with a file like that?

     
That was not what had
bothered me.

     
At the dock Jimmy Ray
had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.

     
His
home.

     
I went to the public
library and the morgue at the
Daily Iberian
and began searching every
piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.

     
Only one story, in
Newsweek
magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he
rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the
article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.

     
I drove back to the
department and went into the sheriff's office.

     
"What if the
wrong man was killed?" I said.

     
"I have a
feeling my interest is about to wane quickly," he said.

     
"It was the
sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers
lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target."

     
"You're trying
to figure out the motivation on a homicide that's twenty-eight years old? Who
cares? The victim doesn't. He's dead just the same."

     
He could barely
contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair
sideways so he wouldn't have to look directly at me when he spoke.

     
"I like you a
lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don't listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron
Crown fall in his own shit."

     
"I told Helen we
don't execute people in Iberia Parish."

     
"Don't be
deluded. That's because the electric chair doesn't travel anymore."

     
He began fiddling
with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair
and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.

B
atist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper
Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the
previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt
road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated
roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass
in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his
crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked
cracklings in the fall.

     
Over the years, in
early spring, when he broke the thatched hard-pan on his garden, his
single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a
wagon spring, .58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a
molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters
CSA,
the remains
from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in
1863.

     
I first met Batist
when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith's helper in a
rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked
for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving
Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in
the wide doors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw
hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock's comb.

     
Anyone who wished
could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called "the
War."

     
Few did.

     
But I'll never forget
one he told me and Batist.

     
It was during Jubal
Early's last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A
fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of
his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to
an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two
hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead,
his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone
wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in
disbelief.

     
Not one of them fired
his weapon.

     
Instead, when the
boy's horse labored up the slope and surged through a gap in the wall, three
federal soldiers pulled him from the saddle and took his colors and pinioned
him to the ground. The boy flailed and kicked until one soldier in blue said,
"Son, you ain't got to study on it no more. You're over on the Lord's side
now."

     
Mr. Antoine slapped
his thigh and howled at the implications of his story, whatever they were.

     
Later, I would read a
similar account about Cemetery Ridge. Maybe it was all apocryphal. But if you
ever doubted Mr. Antoine's authority as a veteran of the Civil War, he would
ask you to feel the
cyst-encrusted pistol ball that protruded
like a sparrow's egg below his right elbow.

     
The irony was the
fact that the man who probably knew more firsthand accounts of Mr. Antoine's
War, and the man who grew food in the detritus of a Confederate encampment, was
a descendant of slaves and did not know how to read and write and consequently
was never consulted as a source of information by anyone.

     
He sat down with the
soup at the kitchen table in a pair of slippers and surplus navy dungarees and
a denim shirt buttoned at the throat. The sun glimmered off the bayou through
the trees behind his house.

     
"Fat Daddy
Babineau brought me some poke chops, but they ain't good for you when you got a
stomach upsetness. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though," he said.

     
"You going to be
all right by yourself?" I said.
      

     
"I'm gonna be
fine." He looked at Alafair, who was examining some minié balls on his
kitchen shelf. Then he looked back at me.
      

     
"What is
it?" I asked.

     
"Fat Daddy just
left. I was fixing to call you." He kept his eyes on my face.

     
"Alf, you want
to take the truck to the four corners and get a half gallon of milk?" I
said.

     
"Pretty slick
way of getting rid of me. But. . . okay," she said, one palm extended for
the keys, the other on her hip.

     
"Fat Daddy seen
this man bring his pirogue out of the swamp," Batist said after Alafair
had gone out the door. "Him and his wife was fishing on the bank, and this
big nigger wit' one side of his head shaved paddled out of the trees. It was
the same morning you seen that man wit' a light out past our dock, Dave.

     
"Fat Daddy said
this big nigger had gold teet' and arms thick as telephone poles. There was a
gun up in the bow, and when Fat Daddy seen it, the nigger give him such a mean
look Fat Daddy's wife wanted to get in the car. It's the same man come to our
shop, ain't it?"
      

     
"It sounds like
him."

     
"That ain't all
of it, no. Fat Daddy and his wife was walking down the levee when they seen the
same nigger again, this time busting out the bottom of the pirogue with his
foot. He smashed big holes all over
it and sunk it right in the
canal. Why he want to do somet'ing like
that?"

     
"Who knows?
Maybe he didn't want to leave his fingerprints
around."

  
   
"That ain't all of it. He seen them
watching him and he walked up on the levee and got between Fat Daddy and Fat
Daddy's car and says, 'Why you following me around?'

     
"Fat Daddy says,
'We come here to fish, not to mind nobody else's
bidness.'