DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (24 page)

     
"It wouldn't
stick. Why not talk to somebody you trust about this, before you flame
out?"

     
"It might make
an interesting fire."

     
"I never met a
hype who was any different from a drunk. I'm talking about myself, Buford.
We're all smart-asses."

     
"You missed your
historical period. You should have sat at the elbow of St. Augustine. You were
born for the confessional. Come on, a new day is at hand, sir, if you would
just lend me yours for a moment."

     
I helped him sit down
on top of the toilet seat lid, then I watched, almost as a voyeur would, as the
color came back in his face, his breathing seemed to regulate itself, his
shoulders straightened, his eyes lifted merrily into mine.

     
"We glide on
gilded wings above the abyss," he said. "The revelers wait—"

     
I shattered his
syringe in the toilet bowl.

     
"Mark one off to
bad manners," I said.

E
arly the next morning the sheriff called me into his office.

     
"Lafayette P.D.
wants us to help with security at the Hotel Acadiana on Pinhook Road," he
said.

     
"Buford
again?"

    
 
"The guy's turned the governor's office
into a rolling party. We're probably going to be stuck with it a little
while."

     
"I want off it,
skipper."

     
"I want my old
hairline back."

     
"He's a
hype."

     
"You're telling
me we just elected a junkie?"

     
I told him what had
happened the night before. He blew out his breath.

     
"You're sure
he's not diabetic or something like that?" he asked.

     
"I think
it's speed."

     
"You didn't want
to take him down?"
      

     
"Busting a guy
in his bathroom with no warrant?"
      

     
He rubbed his temple.

     
"I hate to say
this, but I'm still glad he won rather than one of those other shitheads,"
he said. He waited. "No comment?"
      

     
"He's bad news.
We'll pay for it down the line."
      

     
"God, you're a
source of comfort," he said.

I
picked up my morning mail and went into my office just as my
phone rang. Dock Green must have hit the floor running.

     
"You tell that
Irish prick he wants to get in my face, I'll meet him in the street, in an
alley, out on a sandbar in the middle of the Atchafalaya. Somebody should have
busted his spokes a long time ago," he said.

     
"Which Irish
prick?" I said.

     
"Duh," he
answered. "He caused a big scene at my casino. Customers were going out
the doors like it was a fire drill. He threw a pool ball into a guy's head at
my restaurant."

     
"Tell him
yourself."

     
"I would. Except
I can't find him. He's too busy wiping his shit all over the city."

     
"Clete's
a one-on-one-type guy, Dock."

     
"Yeah? Well, I'm
a civilized human being. Jimmy Ray Dixon ain't. Your friend's been down in
Cannibal Town, saying they give up this black ape been making threats against
him or he's going to staple somebody's dork to the furniture. I hope they cook
him in a pot."

     
"The shooter we
want is a guy named Mookie. He's telling people he has permission to take
Purcel out. Who'd give him that kind of permission, Dock?"

     
"Try to fit this
into your head, Robicheaux—"

     
Then I heard a woman's
voice and hands scraping on the receiver, as though someone were pulling it
from Dock's grasp.

     
"Mr.
Robicheaux?"

     
"Yes."

     
"This is
Persephone Green. I met you years ago when my name was Giacano."

     
"Yes, I
remember," I said, although I didn't.

     
"Are you sure?
Because you were drunk at the time."

     
I cleared my throat.

     
"My husband is
trying to say, we don't have anything to do with problems in New Orleans' black
community," she said. "You leave us alone. You tell your friend the
same thing."

     
"Your husband's
a pimp."

     
"And you're an
idiot, far out of his depth," she said, and hung up the phone.

     
Either the feminists
had reached into the mob or the New Orleans spaghetti heads had spawned a new
generation.

I
used my overtime to take the afternoon off and went to Red
Lerille's Health and Racquet Club in Lafayette. I did four sets of curls and
military and bench presses with free weights, then went into the main workout
room, which had a glass wall that gave onto a shady driveway and the adjacent
tennis courts and was lined with long rows of exercise machines. Because it was
still early in the day, there were few people on the machines. A half dozen
off-duty steroid-pumped Lafayette cops were gathered around a pull-down bar,
seemingly talking among themselves.

     
But their eyes kept
drifting to the end of the room, where Karyn LaRose lay on a bench at an
inverted angle, her calves and ankles hooked inside two cylindrical vinyl
cushions while she raised herself toward her knees, her fingers laced behind
her head, her brown thighs shiny with sweat, her breasts as swollen as
grapefruit against her Harley motorcycle T-shirt.

     
I sat down on a
Nautilus leg-lift machine, set the pin at 140, and raised the bar with the tops
of my feet until my ankles were straight out from my knees and I could feel a
burn grow in my thighs.

     
I felt her on the
corner of my vision. She flipped her sweat towel against my leg like a wet
kiss.

     
"Our bodyguard
isn't speaking these days?" she said.

     
"Hello,
Karyn."

     
She wiped her neck
and the back of her hair. Her black shorts were damp and molded to her body.

     
"You still
mad?" she said.

     
"I never worry
about yesterday's box score."

     
Her mouth fell open.

     
"Sorry, bad
metaphor," I said.

     
"If you aren't a
handful."

     
"How about
requesting me off y'all's security?" I asked.

     
"You're stuck,
baby love."

     
"Why?"

     
"Because you're
a cutey, that's why." She propped her forearm on top of the machine. She
let her thigh touch mine.

     
"Sounds like
control to me," I said.

     
"That's what
it's all about, sweetie." She bumped me again.

     
"Stop playing
games with people, Karyn. Aaron Crown's out there. He doesn't care about clever
rhetoric."

     
"Then go find
him."

     
"I think he'll
find us. It won't be a good moment, either."

     
She looked down the
aisle through the machines. The off-duty Lafayette cops had turned their
attention to a dead-lift bar stacked with one-hundred-pound plates. Karyn
sucked on her index finger, her eyes fastened on mine, then touched it to my
lips.

L
ater, I drove to Sabelle Crown's bar down by the Lafayette
Underpass. Even though the day was bright, the bar's interior was as dark as
the inside of a glove. Sabelle was in a back storage shed, her body
crisscrossed with the sunlight that fell through the board walls, watching two
black men load vinyl bags bursting with beer cans onto a salvage truck.

     
"I wondered when
you'd be around," she said.

     
"Oh?"

     
"He wouldn't
come here. I don't know where he is, either."

     
"I don't believe
you."

     
"Suit yourself .
. ." She turned to the black men. "Okay, you guys got it all? Next
week I want you back here on time. No more 'My gran'mama been sick, Miz
Sabelle' stuff. There're creatures with no eyes living under the garbage I got
back here."

     
She watched the
truck, its slatted sides held in place with baling wire, lumber down the alley.
"God, what a life," she said. She sat down on a folding chair next to
the brick wall and took a sandwich out of a paper bag. A crazy network of wood
stairs and rusted fire escapes
zigzagged to the upper stories of the
building. She pushed another chair toward me with her foot. "Sit down,
Dave, you're making me nervous."

     
I looked at a smear
of something sticky on the seat and remained standing.

     
"There's only
one person in the world he cares about. Don't tell me he hasn't tried to
contact you," I said.

     
"You want a
baloney sandwich?"

     
"We can still
turn it around. But not if he hurts Buford."

     
"Buford was born
with a mammy's pink finger up his butt. Let him get out of his own problems for
a change."

     
"How about your
father?"

     
"Nobody will
ever change Daddy's mind about anything."

     
Her expression was
turned inward, heated with an unrelieved anger.

     
"What did Buford
do to you?" I asked.

     
"Who said he
did? I love the business I run, fighting with colored can recyclers, mopping
out the John after winos use it. Tell Buford to drop by. I'll buy him a
short-dog."

     
"He said he
didn't know you."

     
Her eyes climbed into
my face. "He did? Wipe off the chair and sit down. I'll tell you a story
about our new governor."

     
She started to rewrap
her sandwich, then she simply threw it in an oil barrel filled with smoldering
boards.

T
hat evening it was warm enough to eat supper in the backyard.

     
"You have to
work in Lafayette tonight?" Bootsie said.

     
"Worse. Buford
has a breakfast there in the morning. I'll probably have to stay over."

     
"They're really
making their point, aren't they?"

     
"You'd better
believe it."

     
"You mind if I
come over?"

     
"I think it's a
swell idea."

     
"Oh, I forgot.
Somebody left a letter in the mailbox with no stamp on it."

     
"Who put it in
there?"

     
"Batist said he
saw a black man on a bicycle stop out on the road . . . It's on the dining room
table."

     
I went inside and
came back out again. My name and address were printed in pencil, in broken letters,
on the envelope. Bootsie watched my face while I read the note inside.

     
"It's from
him,
isn't it?"

     
I lay the sheet of
Big Chief notebook paper on the picnic table so she could read it.

     
I
killed
the two blak boys in the tool bin cause they wuldnt let me be. But I still aint
to blame for the first one. Tell that bucket of shit done me all this grief he
aint going make Baton Rouge. You was good to me. So don't be standing betwix me
and a man that is about to burn in hell wich is where he shud have been sent a
long time ago.