DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (34 page)

T
he next evening, at sunset, I drove my truck up the state road
that paralleled Bayou Teche and parked in a grove across the water from
Buford's plantation. Through my Japanese field glasses I could see the current
flowing under his dock and boathouse, the arched iron shutters on the smithy,
the horses in his fields, the poplars that flattened in the wind against the
side of his house. Then I moved the field glasses along the bank, where I had
thrown the oar lock tied with my handkerchief. The oar lock was gone, and
someone had beveled out a plateau on the slope and had poured a concrete pad
and begun construction of a gazebo there.

     
I propped my elbows
on the hood of my truck and moved the glasses through the trees, and in the
sun's afterglow, which was like firelight on the trunks, I saw first one state
trooper, then a second, then a third, all of them with scoped and leather-slung
bolt-action rifles. Each trooper sat on a chair in the shadows, much like
hunters positioning themselves in a deer stand.

     
I heard a boot crack
a twig behind me.

     
"Hep you with
something?" a trooper asked.

     
He was big and gray,
close to retirement age, his stomach protruding like a sack of gravel over his
belt.

     
I opened my badge
holder.

     
"On the job,"
I said.

     
"Still ain't too
good to be here. Know what I mean?" he said.

     
"I don't."

     
"This morning
they found work boot prints on the mudbank. Like boots a convict might
wear."

     
"I see."

     
"If he comes in,
they don't want him spooked out," the trooper said. We looked at each
other in the silence. There was a smile in his eyes.

     
"It looks like
they know their work," I said.

     
"Put it like you
want. Crown comes here, he's gonna have to kill his next nigger down in
hell."

T
he backyard was dim with mist when I fixed breakfast in the
kitchen the next morning. I heard Bootsie walk into the kitchen behind me. The
window over the sink was open halfway and the radio was playing on the
windowsill.

     
"Are you
listening to the radio?" she said.

     
"Yeah, I just
clicked it on."

     
"Alafair's still
asleep."

     
"I wasn't
thinking. I'll turn it off."

     
"No, just turn
it down."

     
"All
right," I said. I walked to the sink and turned down the volume knob. I
looked out the window at the yard until I was sure my face was empty of
expression, then I sat down again and we ate in silence.

     
We were both happy
when the phone rang on the wall.

     
"You have the
news on?" the sheriff asked.

     
"No."

     
"I wouldn't call
so early but I thought it'd be better if you heard it from me . . ."

     
"What is it,
skipper?"

     
"Short Boy
Jerry. NOPD found his car by the Desire welfare project a half hour ago . . .
He was beaten to death . . ."

     
I felt a tick jump in
my throat. I pressed my thumb hard under my ear to clear a fluttering sound,
like a wounded butterfly, out of my hearing. I saw Bootsie looking at me, saw
her put down her coffee cup gently and her face grow small.

     
"You there,
podna?" the sheriff said.

 
    
"Who did it?"

     
"NOPD thinks a
gang of black pukes. I'll tell you up front, Dave, he went out hard."

     
"I need the
plane," I said.

T
he sun was pale,
almost white,
like a sliver
of ice hidden behind clouds above Lake Pontchartrain, when Clete Purcel met me
at the New Orleans airport and drove us back down I-10 toward the city.

     
"You really want
to go to the meat locker, Streak?" he asked.

     
"You know
another place to start?"

     
"It was just a
question."

     
Morgues deny all the
colors the mind wishes to associate with death. The surfaces are cool to the
touch, made of aluminum and stainless steel, made even more sterile in
appearance by the dull reflection of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The
trough and the drains where an autopsy was just conducted are spotless; the
water that wells across and cleanses the trough's bottom could have issued from
a spring.

     
But somehow, in the
mind, you hear sounds behind all those gleaming lockers, like fluids dripping,
a tendon constricting, a lip that tightens into a sneer across the teeth.

     
The assistant wore a
full-length white lab coat that looked like a nineteenth-century duster. He
paused with his hand on the locker door. He had a cold and kept brushing at his
nose with the back of his wrist.

     
"The guy's hands
are bagged. Otherwise, he's like they found him," he said.

     
"This place is
an igloo in here. Let's see it, all right?" Clete said.

     
The assistant looked
at Clete oddly and then pulled out the drawer. Clete glanced down at Jerry Joe,
let out his breath, then lifted his eyes to mine.

     
"When it's this
bad, it usually means a tire iron or maybe a curb button. The uniforms found
him on the pavement, so it's hard to tell right now," the assistant said.
"You knew the guy?"

     
"Yeah, he knew
the guy," Clete answered.

     
"I was just
wondering what he was doing in that neighborhood at night, that's all,"
the assistant said. "If a white guy's down there at night, it's usually
for cooze or rock. We on the same side here?"

     
Most of Jerry Joe's
teeth had been broken off. One of his eyes looked like a tea-stained egg. The
other was no longer an eye. I lifted his left hand. It felt like a heavy piece
of old fruit inside the plastic bag.

     
"Both of them
are broken. I don't know anything about this guy, but my bet is, he went the
whole fifteen before they clicked off his switch," the attendant said.

     
"Thank you, sir,
for your time," I said, and turned and walked outside.

I
talked with the scene investigator at the District from a filling
station pay phone. He had a heavy New Orleans blue-collar accent, which is far
closer to the speech of Brooklyn than to the Deep South; he told me he had to
go to a meeting and couldn't talk to me right now.

     
"When can you
talk?" I asked.

     
"When I get out
of the meeting."

     
"When is
that?"

     
"Leave your
number."

     
We pulled back into
the traffic. Clete's window was down and the wind whipped the hair on his head.
He kept looking across the seat at me.

     
"Streak, you're
making me tense," he said.

     
"You buy kids
did this?" I asked.

     
"I think that's
how it's going to go down."

     
"You didn't
answer my question."

     
He took a swizzle
stick off his dashboard and put it in his mouth. A neutral ground with palm
trees on it streamed past his window. "I can't see Jerry Ace getting taken
down by pukes. Not like this, anyway. Maybe if he got capped—"

     
"Why would he be
down by the Desire?"

     
"He dug R&B.
He was a paratrooper. He thought he had magic painted on him . . . Dave, don't
try to make sense out of it. This city's in flames. You just can't see
them."

     
Jerry Joe's blue
Buick had already been towed to the pound. A uniformed cop opened the iron gate
for us and walked with us past a row of impounded cars to the back of the lot.
The Buick was parked against a brick wall, its trunk sprung, its dashboard
ripped out, the glove box rifled, the leather door panels pried loose, the
stereo speakers gouged with screwdrivers out of the headliner. A strip of torn
yellow crime scene tape was tangled around one wheel, flapping in the wind.

     
"Another half
hour and they would have had the engine off the mounts," Clete said.

     
"How do you read
it?" I said.

     
"A gang of
street rats got to it after he was dead."

     
"It looks like
they had him made for a mule."

     
"The side
panels? Yeah. Which means they didn't know who he was."

     
"But they
wouldn't have hung around to strip the car if they'd killed him, would they?"
I said.

     
"No, their
consciences were clean. You hook them up, that's what they'll tell you. Just a
harmless night out, looting a dead man's car. I think I'm going to move to East
Los Angeles," he said.

     
We went to the
District and caught the scene investigator at his desk. He was a blond, tall,
blade-faced man named Cramer who wore a sky blue sports coat and white shirt
and dark tie with a tiny gold pistol and chain fastened to it. The erectness of
his posture in the chair distracted the eye from his paunch and concave chest
and the patina of nicotine on his fingers.

     
"Do we have
anybody in custody? No. Do we have any suspects? Yeah. Every gangbanger in that
neighborhood," he said.

     
"I think it was
a hit," I said.

     
"You think a
hit?" he said.

     
"Maybe Jerry Joe
was going to dime some people, contractors lining up at the trough in Baton
Rouge," I said.

     
"You used to be
at the First District, right?"

     
"Right."

     
"Tell me when I
say something that sounds wrong—a white guy down by the Desire at night isn't
looking to be shark meat."

     
"Come on,
Cramer. Kids aren't going to kill a guy and peel the car with the body lying on
the street," I said.

     
"Maybe they
didn't know they'd killed him. You think of that?"

     
"I think you're
shit-canning the investigation," I said.

     
"I punched in at
four this morning. A black kid took a shot at another kid in the Desire. He
missed. He killed a three-month-old baby instead. Short Boy Jerry was a mutt.
You asking me I got priorities? Fucking 'A' I do."

     
His phone rang. He
picked it up, then hit the "hold" button.

     
"Y'all get a cup
of coffee, give me ten minutes," he said.

     
Clete and I walked
down the street and ate a hot dog at a counter where we had to stand, then went
back to the District headquarters. Cramer scratched his forehead and looked at
a yellow legal pad on his blotter.

     
"That was the
M.E. called," he said. "Short Boy Jerry had gravel and grains of
concrete in his scalp, but it was from a fall, not a blow. There were pieces of
leather in the wounds around his eyes, probably from gloves the hitter was
wearing or a blackjack. Death was caused by a broken rib getting shoved into
the heart."

     
He lit a cigarette
and put the paper match carefully in the ashtray with two fingers, his eyes
veiled.

     
"What's the rest
of it?" I asked.

     
"The M.E. thinks
the assailant or assailants propped Short Boy Jerry up to prolong the beating.
The bruises on the throat show a single hand held him up straight while he was
getting it in the stomach. The brain was already hemorrhaging when the rib went
into the heart . . ."