DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (13 page)

     
I walked him to the
back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust
and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the
windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses.
Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

     
"Listen to it
rumble, by God. It's a magic land. There's a thunder of calvary in every
electric storm," he said.

     
I asked a deputy to
walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

     
"Don't be too
hard on the LaRoses," Mason said as the deputy took his arm. "They
put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the kingdom of the dead.
Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion."

     
Keep your eye on this
one, I thought.

     
Karyn leaned forward
and started her car engine, wetting her mouth as she might a ripe cherry.

H
elen Soileau walked into my office that afternoon, anger in her
eyes.

 
    
"Pick up on my extension," she said.

     
"What's going
on?"

     
"Mingo
Bloomberg. Wally put him through to me by mistake."

     
I punched the lighted
button and placed the receiver to my ear. "Where are you, Mingo?" I
said.

     
"You got Short Boy
Jerry to jam me up," he said.

     
"Wrong."

     
"Don't tell me
that. The bondsman pulled my bail. I got that material witness beef in my face
again." A streetcar clanged in the background, vibrated and squealed on
the tracks.

     
"What do you
want?" I said.

     
"Something to
come in."

     
"Sorry."

     
"I don't like
being made everybody's fuck."

     
"You let that
girl drown. You're calling the wrong people for sympathy."

     
"She wanted some
ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and
the car's gone."

     
I could hear him
breathing in the silence.

     
"I delivered
money to Buford LaRose's house," he said.

     
"How much?"

     
"How do I know?
It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone
books."

     
"If that's all
you're offering, you're up Shit's Creek."

     
"The guy gonna
be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don't make your berries
tingle?"

     
"We don't
monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you're serious. Right now
I'm busy," I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at
Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.

     
"You going to
leave him out there?" she said.

     
"It's us or City
Prison in New Orleans. I think he'll turn himself in to us, then try to get to
our witnesses."

     
"I hope so. Yes,
indeedy."

     
"What'd he say
to you?"

     
"Oh, he and I
will have a talk about it sometime." She opened a book that was on my
desk. "Why you reading Greek mythology?"

     
"That fellow
Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice . . . They're
characters out of Greek legend," I said. She flipped through several pages
in the book, then looked at me again.

"Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife.
But he couldn't pull it off. Hades got both of them."

     
"Interesting
stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her
short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes
down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction,
anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this
one."

     
"Why would it be
otherwise?"

     
She leaned on the
desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard
against the cuffs of her sleeves.

     
"Because you've
got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.

T
hat night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again
through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his
triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he
himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the
lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action
and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a
condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the
Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and
improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and
rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his
conception of America.

     
He knew how to turn
into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin
cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the
muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the
black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.

     
With luck he would
always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the
brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst,
like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies
thundered past it.

     
That's the way it
went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the
rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in
the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle, with leather sling and
cloth bandoliers, propped in the wire like a monument to his own denouement.

     
Even in my sleep I
knew the dream was not about Vietnam.

T
he next day I called Angola and talked to an assistant warden.
Aaron Crown was in an isolation unit, under twenty-three-hour lockdown. He had
just been arraigned on two counts of murder.

     
"You're talking
about first-degree murder? The man was attacked," I said.

     
"Stuffing
somebody upside down in a barrel full of oil and clamping down the top isn't
exactly the system's idea of self-defense," he replied.

     
I called Buford
LaRose's campaign office in New Iberia and was told he was giving a speech to a
convention of land developers in Baton Rouge at noon.

     
I took the four-lane
into Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya swamp. The cypress and
willows were thick and pale green on each side of the elevated highway, the
bays wrinkled with wind in the sunlight. Then the highway crossed through
meadowland and woods full of palmettos, and up ahead I saw the Mississippi
bridge and the outline of the capitol building and the adjacent hotel where
Buford was speaking.

     
He knew his audience.
He was genteel and erudite, but he was clearly one of them, respectful of the
meretricious enterprises they served and the illusions that brought them
together. They shook his hand after his speech and touched him warmly on the
shoulders, as if they drew power from his legendary football career, the
radiant health and good looks that seemed to define his future.

     
At the head table,
behind a crystal bowl filled with floating camellias, I saw Karyn LaRose
watching me.

     
The dining room was
almost empty when Buford chose to recognize me.

     
"Am I under
arrest?"

     
"Just one
question: Why did Crown leave his rifle behind?"

     
"A half dozen
reasons."

   
  
"I've been through your book with a
garden rake. You never deal with it."

     
"Try he panicked
and ran."

     
"It was the
middle of the night. No one else was around."

     
"People tend to
do irrational things when they're killing other people."

   
  
The waiters were clearing the tables and the
last emissary from the world of Walmart had said his farewell and gone out the
door.

     
"Take a ride up
to Angola with me and confront Crown," I said.

     
He surprised me. I
saw him actually think about it. Then the moment went out of his eyes. Karyn
got up from her chair and came around the table. She wore a pink suit with a
corsage pinned above the breast.

     
"Crown might get
a death sentence for killing those two inmates," I said, looking back at
Buford.

     
"Anything's
possible," he replied.

     
"That's it? A
guy you helped put in prison, maybe unjustly, ends up injected, that's just the
breaks?"

     
"Maybe he's a
violent, hateful man who's getting just what he deserves."

     
I started to walk
away. Then I turned.

     
"I'm going to
scramble your eggs," I said.

     
I was so angry I
walked the wrong way in the corridor and went outside into the wrong parking
lot. When I realized my mistake I went back through the corridor toward the
lobby. I passed the dining room, then a short hallway that led back to a
service elevator. Buford was leaning against the wall by the elevator door, his
face ashen, his wife supporting him by one arm.

     
"What
happened?" I said.

     
The elevator door
opened.

     
"Help me get him
up to our room," Karyn said.

     
"I think he
needs an ambulance."

     
"No! We have our
own physician here. Dave, help me,
please.
I can't hold him up."

     
I took his other arm
and we entered the elevator. Buford propped the heel of his hand against the
support rail on the back wall, pulled his collar loose with his fingers, and
took a deep breath.

     
"I did a
five-minute mile this morning. How about that?" he said, a smile breaking
on his mouth.

     
"You better ease
up, partner," I said.

     
"I just need to
lie down. One hour's sleep and I'm fine."

     
I looked at Karyn's
face. It was composed now, the agenda, whatever it was, temporarily back in
place.

     
We walked Buford down
to a suite on the top floor and put him in bed and closed the door behind us.

     
"He's talking to
a state police convention tonight," Karyn said, as though offering an
explanation for the last few minutes. Through the full-glass windows in the
living room you could see the capitol building, the parks and boulevards and
trees in the center of the city, the wide sweep of the Mississippi River, the
wetlands to the west, all the lovely urban and rural ambiance that came with
political power in Louisiana.

     
"Is Buford on
uppers?" I asked.

   
  
"No. It's . . . He has a prescription.
He gets overwrought sometimes."

     
"You'd better
get him some help, Karyn."

     
I walked through the
foyer to the door.

     
"You're
going?" she said.

     
She stood inches from
me, her face turned up into mine. The exertion of getting Buford into the room
had caused her to perspire, and her platinum hair and tanned skin took on a
dull sheen in the overhead light. I could smell her perfume in the enclosure,
the heat from her body. She leaned her forehead into my chest and placed her
hands lightly on my arms.

     
"Dave, it wasn't
just the alcohol, was it? You liked me, didn't you?"

     
She tapped my hips
with her small fists, twisted her forehead back and forth on my chest as though
an unspoken conclusion about her life was trying to break from her throat.