DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (4 page)

     
I wiped at my mouth
with my napkin, then walked around behind her chair, put my arms on her
shoulders, and kissed her hair. It was the color of dark honey and she brushed
it in thick swirls on her head, and it always smelled like strawberry shampoo.
I kissed her along the cheek and touched her breasts.

     
"You doin'
anything?" I said.

     
"You have to go
back to work."

     
"The
perps will understand."

     
She reached behind
the chair and fitted her hand around the back of my thigh.

    
 
The curtains in the bedroom, which were white
and gauzy and printed with tiny flowers, puffed and twisted in the wind that
blew through the trees in the yard. When Bootsie undressed, her body seemed
sculpted, glowing with light against the window. She had the most beautiful
complexion of any woman I ever knew; when she

made love it flushed with heat, as though she had a fever, and
took on the hue of a new rose petal. I kissed her breasts and took her nipples
in my mouth and traced my fingers down the flatness of her stomach, then I felt
her reach down and take me in her palm.

     
When I entered her
she hooked her legs in mine and laced the fingers of one hand in my hair and
placed the other hand hard in the small of my back. I could feel her breath
against the side of my face, the perspiration on her stomach and inside her
thighs, then her tongue on my neck, the wetness of her mouth near my ear. I
wanted to hold it, to give more satisfaction than I received, but that terrible
moment of male pleasure and solitary indulgence had its way.

     
"Boots—" I
said hoarsely.

     
"It's all right,
Dave. Go ahead," she whispered.

     
She ran both palms
down my lower back and pushed me deeper inside, then something broke like a dam
and melted in my loins and I closed my eyes and saw a sailfish rise from a
cresting wave, its mouth torn with a hook, its skin blue and hard, its gills
strung with pink foam. Then it disappeared into the wave again, and the
groundswells were suddenly flat and empty, dented with rain, sliding across the
fire coral down below.

I
t should have been a perfect afternoon. But on my way out Bootsie
asked, almost as an afterthought, "Was there any other reason you didn't
want to go to the LaRoses?"

     
"No, of course
not."

     
I tried to avert my
eyes, but it was too late. I saw the recognition in her face, like a sharp and
unexpected slap.

     
"It was a long
time ago, Boots. Before we were married."

     
She nodded, her
thoughts concealed. Then she said, her voice flat, "We're all modern people
these days. Like you say, Streak, no problem."

     
She walked down to
the pond at the back of our property by herself, with a bag of bread crusts, to
feed the ducks.

A
t sunrise the
next day,
while I was helping
Batist open up the bait shop before I went to work, the old-time gunbull called
me long-distance from Angola.

     
"You remember I
told you about them movie people come see me? There's one ain't gonna be around
no more," he said.

     
"What happened,
Cap?"

     
"My nephew's a
uniform at NOPD in the First District. They thought it was just a white man
interested in the wrong piece of jelly roll. That's till they found the
camera," he said.

     
After I hung up the
phone I filled minnow buckets for two fishermen, put a rental outboard in the
water, and pulled the tarp on guy wires over the spool tables on the dock in
case it rained. Batist was sprinkling hickory chips on the coals in the
barbecue pit, which we had fashioned from a split oil drum to cook chickens and
links of sausage for our midday customers.

     
"That was that
old man from up at the prison farm?" he asked.

     
"I'm afraid
so."

     
"I ain't going
to say it but once, no. It don't matter what that kind of man bring into your
life, it ain't no good."

     
"I'm a police
officer, podna. I can't always be selective about the people I talk to."

     
He cut his head and
walked away.

     
I left a message for
the nephew at NOPD and drove to the office just as it started to mist. He
returned my call two hours later, then turned over the telephone to a Homicide
detective. This is how I've reconstructed the story that was told to me.

V
ice had identified the hooker as Brandy Grissum, a black
twenty-five-year-old heroin addict who had done a one-bit in the St. John the
Baptist jail for sale and possession.

     
She worked with three
or four pimps and Murphy artists out of the Quarter. The pimps were there for
the long-term regular trade. The Murphy artists took down the tourists,
particularly those who were drunk, married, respectable, in town on
conventions, scared of cops and their employers.

     
It was an easy scam.
Brandy would walk into a bar, well dressed, perhaps wearing a suit, sit at the
end of the counter, or by herself in a booth, glance once into the John's face,
her eyes shy, her hands folded demurely in front of her, then wait quietly
while her partner cut the deal.

     
This is the shuck:
"My lady over there ain't a reg'lar, know what I'm sayin'? Kind of like a
schoolgirl just out on the town." Here he smiles. "She need somebody
take her 'round the world, know what I'm sayin'? I need sixty dollars to cover
the room, we'll all walk down to it, I ain't goin' nowhere on you. Then you
want to give her a present or something, that's between y'all."

     
The difference in the
scenario this time was the John had his own room as well as agenda.

     
His name was Dwayne
Parsons, an Academy Award nominee and two-time Emmy winner for his documentary
scripts. But Dwayne Parsons had another creative passion, too, one that was
unknown to the hooker and the Murphy artist and a second black man who was
about to appear soon—a video camera set up on a tripod in his closet, the lens
pointed through a crack in the door at the waterbed in his leased efficiency
apartment a block off Bourbon.

     
Parsons and the woman
were undressed, on top of black satin sheets, when the hard, insistent knock
came at the door. The man's head jerked up from the pillow, his face at first
startled, then simply disconcerted and annoyed.

   
  
"They'll go away," he said.

     
He tried to hold her
arms, hold her in place on top of him, but she slid her body off his.

     
"It's my
boyfriend. He don't let me alone. He's gonna break down the do'," she
said. She began to gather her clothes in front of her breasts and stomach.

     
"Hey, I look
like a total schmuck to you?" Parsons said. "Don't open that door . .
. Did you hear me. . . Listen, you fucking nigger, you're not hustling
me."

     
She slid back the
deadbolt on the door, and suddenly the back and conked and side-shaved head of
a gargantuan black man were in the lens. Whoever he was, he was not the man
Brandy Grissum had expected. She swallowed as though she had a razor blade in
her

throat.

     
But Dwayne Parsons
was still not with the script.

     
"You want to rob
me, motherfucker, just take the money off the dresser. You get the gun at the
Screen Actors Guild?" he said.

     
The black man with
the gun did not speak. But the terror in the woman's face left no doubt about
the decision she saw taking place

in his.

     
"I ain't seen
you befo', bitch. You trying to work independent?" he

said.

     
"No . . . I mean
yes, I don't know nobody here. I ain't from New Orleans." She pressed her
clothes against her breasts and genitalia. Her mouth was trembling.

     
One block away, a
brass street band was playing on Bourbon. The man thought some more, then
jerked the barrel of his automatic toward the door. She slipped her skirt and
blouse on, wadded up her undergarments and shoes and purse and almost flew out
the door.

Dwayne Parson's face had drained. He started to get up from the

bed.

     
"No, no, my
man," the black man said, approaching him, blocking off the camera's view
of Parson's face. "Hey, it comes to everybody. You got it on with the
sister. It could be worse. I said don't move, man. It's all gonna come out the
same way. They ain't no need for

suffering."

     
He picked up a
pillow, pressed it down in front of him, his upper

arm swelling to the diameter and hardness of a fireplug while
Dwayne Parson's body flopped like a fish's. The man with the gun stepped back
quickly and fired two shots into the pillow—
pop, pop
— and then went past
the camera's lens, one grizzled Cro-Magnon jaw and gold tooth flashing by like
a shark's profile in a zoo tank.

     
In the distance the
street band thundered out "Fire House Blues." Dwayne Parson's body,
the head still covered by the pillow, looked like a broken white worm in the
middle of the sheet.

T
he LaRose plantation was far out in the parish, almost to St.
Martinville. The main house had been built in 1857 and was the dusty color of
oyster shells, its wide, columned front porch scrolled by live oak trees that
grew to the third floor. A row of shacks in back that had once been slaves
quarters was now stacked with baled hay, and the old brick smithy had been
converted into a riding stable, the arched windows sealed by the original iron
shutters, which leaked orange rust as though from a wound.

     
Bootsie and I drove
past the LaRose company store, with its oxidized, cracked front windows and
tin-roofed gallery, where barrels of pecans sat by the double screen doors
through which thousands of indebted tenants had passed until the civil rights
era of the 1960s brought an end to five-dollar-a-day farm labor; then we turned
into a white-fenced driveway that led to the rear of the home and the lawn
party that was already in progress against a backdrop of live oaks and Spanish
moss and an autumnal rose-stippled sky that seemed to reassure us all that the
Indian summer of our lives would never end.

     
While the
buffet was being laid out on a row of picnic tables, Buford organized a touch
football game and prevailed even upon the most reluctant guests to put down
their drinks and join one team or another. Some were from the university in
Lafayette but most were people well known in the deceptively lighthearted and
carnival-like atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Unlike their counterparts from
the piney woods parishes to the north, they were bright, educated, openly
hedonistic, always convivial, more concerned about violations of protocol than
ideology.

     
They were fun to be
with; they were giddy with alcohol and the exertion of the game, their laughter
tinkling through the trees each

time the ball was snapped and there was a thumping of feet across
the sod and a loud pat of hands on the rump.

     
Then a white-jacketed
black man dinged a metal triangle and everyone filed happily back toward the
serving tables.

     
"Run out, Dave!
Let me throw you a serious one!" Buford hollered, the football poised in
his palm. He wore tennis shoes, pleated white slacks, the arms of his
plum-colored sweater tied around his neck.

     
"That's enough
for me," I said.

     
"Don't give me
that 'old man' act," he said and cocked his arm to fire a bullet, then
smiled and lofted an easy, arching pass that dropped into my hands as though he
had plopped it into a basket.

     
He caught up to me
and put his hand on my shoulder.

     
"Wow, you feel
like a bag of rocks. How much iron do you pump?" he said.

     
"Just enough to
keep from falling apart."