DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (10 page)

     
At the edge of the
field, by a grove of willows, four black inmates, stripped to the waist, were
heaping dead tree branches on a fire.

     
"Y'all ought to
have Aaron in isolation, Cap," I said.

     
He cut the ignition
and spit tobacco juice out the window.

 
    
"When he asks," he replied.

     
"He won't."

     
"Then that's his
goddamn ass."

     
The captain walked
partway out in the field on his cane and raised the hook and held it motionless
in the air. Aaron squinted out of the dust and heat and exhaust fumes, then
eased the throttle back without killing the engine, as though he could not will
himself to separate entirely from the mechanical power that had throbbed
between his thighs all day.

     
Aaron walked toward
us, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief, past the group of blacks burning
field trash. Their eyes never saw him; their closed circle of conversation
never missed a beat.

     
He stood by the
truck, his body framed by the sun that hung in a liquid yellow orb over the
Mississippi levee.

     
"Yes, sir?"
he said to the captain.

     
"Water it and
piss it, Crown," the captain said. He limped on his cane to the shade of a
gum tree and lit his pipe, turned his face into the breeze off the river.

     
"I understand
you're having some trouble," I said.

     
"You ain't
heered me say it."

     
He walked back to the
watercooler belted with bungee cord to the wall of the pickup bed. He filled a
paper cup from the cooler and drank it, his gaze fixed on the field, the dust
devils swirling in the wind.

     
"Is it the
BGLA?" I asked.

     
"I don't keep up
with colored men's organizations."

     
"I don't know if
you're innocent or guilty, Aaron. But up there at Point Lookout, the prison
cemetery is full of men who had your kind of attitude."

  
   
"That levee yonder's got dead men in
it, too. It's the way it is." He wadded up the paper cup by his side,
kneaded it in his hand, a piece of cartilage working against his jawbone.

     
"I'm going to
talk to a civil rights lawyer I know in Baton Rouge. He's a black man, though.
Is that going to be a problem?"

     
"I don't give a
shit what he is. I done tole you, I got no complaint, long as I ain't got to
cell with one of them."

     
"They'll eat you
alive, partner."

     
He stepped toward me,
his wrists seeming to strain against invisible wires at his sides.

     
"A man's got his
own rules. I ain't ask for nothing except out. . . Goddamn it, you tell my
daughter she ain't to worry," he said, his eyes rimming with water. The
top of his denim shirt was splayed tightly against his chest. He breathed
through his mouth, his fists gathered into impotent rocks, his face dilated
with the words his throat couldn't form.

I
got back home at dark, then I had to go out again, this time with
Helen Soileau to a clapboard nightclub on a back road to investigate a missing
person's report.

     
"Sorry to drag
you out, Dave, but the grandmother has been yelling at me over the phone all
day," Helen said. "I made a couple of calls, and it looks like she's
telling the truth. The girl's not the kind to take off and not tell
anybody."

     
A black waitress had
left the club with a white man the night before; she never returned home, nor
did she report to work the next day. The grandmother worked as a cook in the
club's kitchen and lived in a small frame house a hundred yards down the road.
She was a plump, gray-haired woman with a strange skin disease that had eaten
white and pink discolorations in her hands, and she was virtually hysterical
with anger and grief.

     
"We'll find her.
I promise you," Helen said as we stood in the woman's dirt yard, looking
up at her on her tiny, lighted gallery.

     
"Then why ain't
you looking right now? How come it takes all day to get y'all out here?"
she said.

     
"Tell me what
the man looked like one more time," I said.

     
"Got a brand-new
Lincoln car. Got a pink face shaped like an egg. Got hair that ain't blond or
red, somewhere in between, and he comb it straight back."

     
"Why did she go
off with him?" I asked.

     
'"Cause she's
seventeen years old and don't listen. 'Cause she got this on her hands, just
like me, and reg'lar mens don't pay her no mind. That answer your
question?"

     
Helen drove us back
down the dirt road through the fields to the state highway. The night was
humid, layered with smoke from stubble fires, and the stars looked blurred with
mist in the sky. We passed the LaRose company store, then the plantation
itself. All three floors of the house were lighted, the columned porch
decorated with pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned from cane stalks and straw
hats. In a back pasture, behind a railed fence, horses were running in the
moonlight, as though spooked by an impending storm or the rattle of dry poppy
husks in the wind.

     
"What's on your
mind?" Helen asked.

     
"The description
of the white man sounds like Mingo Bloomberg."

     
"I thought he
was in City Prison in New Orleans."

     
"He is. Or at
least he was."

     
"What would he
be doing back around here?"

     
"Who knows why
these guys do anything, Helen? I'll get on it in the morning."

     
I looked back over my
shoulder at the LaRose house, the glitter of a chandelier through velvet
curtains, a flood-lighted gazebo hooded with Confederate jasmine and orange
trumpet vine.

     
"Forget those
people. They wouldn't spit on either one of us unless we had something they
wanted. Hey, you listening to me, Streak?" Helen said, and hit me hard on
the arm with the back of her hand.

I
got up early the next morning, left a message on Clete Purcel's
answering machine, then drove back to the grandmother's house by the nightclub.
The girl, whose name was Barbara Lavey, had still not returned home. I sat in
my truck by the front of the grandmother's
house and looked at
the notes in my notebook. For some reason I drew a circle around the girl's
name. I had a feeling I would see it on a case file for a long time.

     
The grandmother had
gone back inside and I had forgotten her. Suddenly she was at the passenger
door window. Her glasses fell down on her nose when she leaned inside.

     
"I'm sorry I was
unpolite yestiday. I know you working on it. Here's somet'ing for you and the
lady," she said. She placed a brown paper bag swollen with pecans in my
hand.

T
he sun was still low in the eastern sky when I approached the
LaRose plantation. I saw Buford, naked to the waist, in a railed lot by the
barn, with a half dozen dark-skinned men who were dressed in straw hats coned
on the brims and neckerchiefs and cowboy boots and jeans molded to their
buttocks and thighs.

     
I knew I should keep
going, not put my hand again into whatever it was that drove Karyn and Buford's
ambitions, not fuel their anger, not give them a handle on an Internal Affairs
investigation, but I was never good at taking my own counsel and I could feel
the lie she had told turning in my chest like a worm.

     
I turned into the
drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked
by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the
cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair
were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the
railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.

     
When I stepped out of
the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were
flecked with mud and tucked inside his polished riding boots. His eyes looked
serene, his face pleasant and cool with the freshness of the morning.

     
I almost extended my
hand.

     
He looked at the sunrise
over my shoulder.

     
'"Red sky at
dawn, sailor be forewarned,'" he said. But he was smiling when he said it.

     
"I shouldn't be
here, but I needed to tell you to your face the charges your wife made are
fabricated. That's as kind as I can say it."

     
"Oh, that stuff.
She's dropping it, Dave. Let's put that behind us."

     
"Excuse
me?"

     
"It's over. Come
take a look at my horses."

     
I looked at him
incredulously.

     
"She slandered
someone's name," I said.

     
He blew out his breath.
"You and my wife were intimate. She probably still bears you a degree of
resentment. The god Eros was never a rational influence, Dave. At the same time
she doesn't want to see my campaign compromised because you've developed this
crazy notion about Aaron Crown being railroaded. So she let both her
imagination and her impetuosity cause her to do something foolish. We're sorry
for whatever harm we've done you."

     
I cupped my hand on a
fence rail, felt the hardness of the wood in my palm, tried to see my thoughts
in my head before I spoke.

     
"I get the
notion I'm in a therapy session," I said.

     
"If you were,
you'd get a bill."

     
The back door of the
house opened, and a slender, white-haired man with a pixie face, one wrinkled
with the parchment lines of a chronic cigarette smoker, stepped out into the
wind and waved at Buford. He wore a navy blue sports jacket with brass buttons
and a champagne-colored silk scarf. I knew the face but I couldn't remember
from where.

     
"I'll be just a minute,
Clay," Buford called. Then to me, "Would you like to join us for
breakfast?"

     
"No,
thanks."

     
"How about a
handshake, then?"

     
Two of the wranglers
were yelling at each other in Spanish as the horses swirled around them in the
lot. One had worked a hackamore over a mare's head and the other was trying to
fling a blanket and saddle on her back.

     
"No? Stay and
watch me get my butt thrown, then," Buford said.

     
"You were born
for it."

     
"I beg your
pardon?"

     
"The political
life. You've got ice water in your veins," I said.

     
"You see that
dead oak yonder? Two men were lynched there by my ancestors. When I went after
Aaron Crown, I hoped maybe I could atone a little for what happened under that
tree."

     
"It makes a great
story."

     
"You're a
classic passive-aggressive, Dave, no offense meant. You feign the role of
liberal and humanist, but Bubba and Joe Bob own your heart."

     
"So long,
Buford," I said, and walked back to my truck. The wind splayed and
flattened the poplar trees against Buford's house. When I looked back over my
shoulder, he was mounted on the mare's back, one hand twisted in the mane, the
hackamore sawed back in the other, his olive-tan torso anointed with the sun's
cool light, sculpted with the promise of perfection that only Greek gods know.

L
ater, Clete Purcel returned my call and told me Mingo Bloomberg
had been sprung from City Prison three days ago by attorneys who worked for
Jerry Joe Plumb, also known as Short Boy Jerry, Jerry Ace, and Jerry the Glide.

     
But even as I held
the receiver in my hand, I couldn't concentrate on Clete's words about Mingo's
relationship to a peculiar player in the New Orleans underworld. The dispatcher
had just walked through my open door and handed me a memo slip with the simple
message written on it:
Call the Cap up at the zoo re: Crown. He says urgent.