DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (45 page)

     
"I'm sorry, No
Duh. But I didn't tell you to creep Dock's house."

     
"My other choice
is I miss the vig again with Wee Willie Bimstine and get fed into an airplane
propeller? Thanks for your charitable attitudes."

     
"I've got a room
behind the bait shop. You can stay here till we square you with Wee
Willie."

     
"You'd do
that?"

     
"Sure."

     
"It's full of
snakes out here. You want the gen on Dock? Persephone eighty-sixed him after
she caught him porking his broads."

     
"That's old
news, No Duh."

     
"I got in his
desk. It's full of building plans for hospitals. Treatment places for drunks
and addicts. There was canceled checks from Jimmy Ray Dixon. Go figure."

     
"Figure
what?"

     
"Dock supplies
broads for every gash-hound in the mob. That's the only reason they let a crazy
person like him come around. But he don't cut no deal he don't piece off to the
spaghetti heads. When'd the mob start working with coloreds? You think it's a
mystery how the city got splashed in the bowl?"

     
"Who set up
Jerry Joe Plumb, No Duh?"

     
"He
did."

     
"Jerry Joe set
himself up?"

     
"He was always
talking about you, how your mothers use to work together, how he use to listen
to all your phonograph records over at your house. At the same time he was
wheeling and dealing with the Giacanos, washing money for them, pretending he
could walk on both sides of the line . . . You don't get it, do you? You know
what will get you killed in New Orleans? When they look in your eyes and know
you ain't like them, when they know you ain't willing to do things most people
won't even think about. That's when they'll cut you from your package to your
throat and eat a sandwich while they're doing it."

     
I took my grocery
sack of frozen crawfish and potato salad out of the truck and glanced at the
priest, who stood at the end of my dock, watching a flight of ducks winnow
across the tops of the cypress trees. His hair was snow white, his face
windburned in the fading
light. I wondered if his dreams were
troubled by the confessional tales that men like Dolowitz brought from the dark
province in which they lived, or if sleep came to him only after he granted
himself absolution, too, and rinsed their sins from his memory, undoing the
treachery that had made him the repository of their evil.

     
I walked up the
drive, through the deepening shadows, into the back door of my house.

a
t sunrise Clete
Purcel and
I
sat in my
truck on the side street next
to Persephone and Dock Green's home in the Garden District. The morning was
cold, and clouds of mist almost completely blanketed the two-story antebellum
house and the white brick wall that surrounded the backyard. Clete ate from a
box of jelly-filled doughnuts and drank out of a large Styrofoam cup of coffee.

     
"I can't believe
I got up this early just to pull No Duh's butt out of the fire," he said.
When I didn't reply, he said, "If you think you're going to jam up
Persephone Green, you're wrong. Didi Gee was her old man, and she's twice as
smart as he was and just as ruthless."

     
"She'll go down
just like he did."

     
"The Big C
killed Didi. We never touched him."

     
"It doesn't
matter how you get to the boneyard."

     
"What, we got an
exemption?" he said, then got out of the truck and strolled across the
street to the garden wall. The palms that extended above the bricks were dark
green inside the mist. I heard a loud splash, then saw Clete lean down and
squint through the thick grillwork on the gate. He walked back to the truck,
picked up another doughnut and his coffee off the floor and sat down in the
seat. He shook an image out of his thoughts.

     
"What is
it?" I said.

     
"It's forty-five
degrees and she's swimming in the nude. She's got quite a stroke . . ." He
drank out of his coffee cup and looked at the iron gate in the wall. He pursed
his mouth, obviously not yet free from an image that hovered behind his eyes. "Damn,
I'm not kidding you, Streak, you ought to see the gagongas on that broad."

     
"Look out
front," I said.

     
A gray stretch limo
with a rental U-Haul truck behind it pulled to the curb. Dock Green got out of
the back of the limo and strode up the front walk.

     
"Show
time," Clete said. He removed my Japanese field glasses from the glove box
and focused them on the limo's chauffeur, who was wiping the water off the
front windows. "Hey, it's Whitey Zeroski," Clete said.
"Remember, the wetbrain used to own a little pizza joint in the Channel?
He ran for city council and put megaphones and
vote for whitey
signs all over his car and drove into colored
town on Saturday night. He couldn't figure out why he got all his windows
broken."

     
A moment later we
heard Dock and Persephone Green's voices on the other side of the garden wall.

     
"It don't have
to shake out like this," he said.

     
"You milked
through the fence too many times, hon. I hope they were worth it," she
replied.

     
"It's over. You
got my word . . . Come out of the water and talk. We can go have breakfast
somewhere."

     
"Bye,
Dock."

     
"We're a team,
Seph. Ain't nothing going to separate us. Believe it when I say it."

     
"I hate to tell
you this but you're a disappearing memory. I've got to practice my backstroke
now . . . Keep your eyes somewhere else, Dock . . . You don't own the geography
anymore."

     
We heard her body
weight push off from the side of the pool and her arms dipping rhythmically
into the water.

   
  
"Let's 'front both of them," Clete
said, and started to get out of the truck.

     
"No, that'll
just get No Duh into it deeper."

     
"Where's your
head, Dave? That guy wouldn't piss on you if you
were on fire. The
object is to flush Mookie Zerrang out in the open and then take him off at the
neck."

     
"We have to
wait, Cletus."

     
I saw the frustration
and anger in his face. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was as hard as a cured
ham. When he didn't speak, I took my hand away.

     
"I appreciate
your coming with me," I said.

     
"Oh hell yeah,
this is great stuff. You know why I was a New Orleans cop? Because we could
break all the rules and get away with it. This town's problems aren't going to
end until we run all these fuckers back under the sewer grates where they
belong."

     
"I think
Persephone got to you, partner," I said.

     
"You're right. I
should have been a criminal. It's a simpler life."

     
For a half hour Dock
and two workmen carried out his office furniture, his computer, his files, and
a huge glass bottle, the kind mounted on water coolers, filled with an
amber-tinted liquid and the embalmed body of a bobcat. The bobcat's paws were
pressed against the glass, as though it were drowning.

     
Then the three of
them drove away without the limo. Clete and I got out of the truck and walked
to the gate. Through the grillwork and the banana fronds I could see steam
rising off the turquoise surface of the pool and hear her feet kicking steadily
with her long stroke.

     
"It's Dave
Robicheaux. How about opening up, Persephone?" I said.

     
"Dream on,"
she replied from inside the steam.

     
"You stole a
test for Karyn LaRose and got expelled from college. Why let her take you down
again?"

     
"Excuse
me?"

     
"Try this as a
fantasy, Seph. You and all your friends are on an airliner with Karyn and
Buford LaRose. Karyn and Buford are at the controls. The plane is on fire.
There are only two parachutes on board . . . Who's going to end up with the
parachutes?"

     
I could hear her
treading water in the stillness, then rising from the pool at the far end.

     
She appeared at the
gate in a white robe and sandals, a towel wrapped around her hair. She unlocked
the gate and pulled it back on its hinges, then turned and walked to an iron
table without speaking,
the long, tapered lines of her body molded
against the cloth of her robe.

     
She combed her hair
back with her towel, her face regal, at an angle to us, seemingly indifferent
to our presence.

     
"What's on your
mind?" she said. Her voice was throaty, her cheeks pale and slightly
sunken, her mouth the same shade as the red morning glories that cascaded down
the wall behind her.

     
Clete kept staring at
her.

     
"Has he been
fed?" she asked.

     
"You got to
pardon me. I was thinking you look like Cher, the movie actress. You even have
a tattoo," he said.

     
"My, you have
busy eyes," she said.

     
"Yeah, I was
noticing the hole over there by the compost pile. Is that where y'all buried No
Duh Dolowitz?" he said.

     
"The little man
with the grease mustache? That's what this is about?" she asked.

     
"He shouldn't
have come here, Persephone. He thought he was doing something for me. It was a
mistake," I said.

     
"I see. I'm
going to have him hurt?"

     
"You're a tough
lady," I said.

     
"I have no
interest in your friends,
Dave.
You don't mind if I call you 'Dave,' do
you, since you call me by my first name without asking?"

     
"Mookie Zerrang
is a bad button man, Seph. He doesn't do it for money. That means you've got no
dials on him."

     
"Did you ever
have this kind of conversation with my father, or do you speak down to me just
because I'm a woman?"

     
"In honesty, I
guess I did."

     
"What Streak
means is, he beat the shit out of Didi Gee with a canvas money bag filled with
lug nuts. He did this because your old man had his half-brother shot. You might
say y'all have a tight family history," Clete said.

     
Clete's mouth was
hooked downward at the corners, his face heated, the scar tissue through his
eyebrow and across his nose flexed tight against the skull. She tried to meet
his gaze, then looked away at the tongues of vapor rising from her swimming
pool.

"
W
hat was
that about?" I asked him in the truck.

     
"I told you, I'm
tired of being patient with lowlifes. You know what our finest hour was? The
day we popped that drug dealer and his bodyguard in the back of their Caddy.
The seats looked like somebody had thrown a cow through a tree shredder. Admit
it, it was a grand afternoon."

  
   
"Bad way to think, Cletus."

     
"One day you're
going to figure out you're no different from me, Dave."

     
"Yeah?"

     
"Then you're
going to shoot yourself."

     
He tried to hold the
seriousness in his face, but I saw his eyes start

to smile.

 
    
"You'll never change, Streak," he said, his
expression full of play

again.

     
I turned the
ignition, then looked through the front window and saw Whitey Zeroski, the limo
driver, walking toward us. He wore a gray chauffeur's uniform, with brass buttons
and a gray cap that sat low, military style, over his white eyebrows.