DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (40 page)

     
"You'll never
like me, Dave. Maybe I can't blame you. But I give you my solemn word, I'll
protect Aaron Crown and I'll do everything I can to see him die a free
man," he said.

     
For just a moment I
saw the handsome, young L.S.U. quarterback of years ago who could be surrounded
by tacklers, about to be destroyed, his bones crushed into the turf, his very
vulnerability bringing the crowd to its feet, and then rocket an eighty-yard
pass over his tacklers' heads and charm it into the fingers of a forgotten
receiver racing across the goal line.

     
Some
Saturday-afternoon heroes will never go gently into that good night. At least
not this one, I thought.

P
robably over 90 percent of criminal investigations are solved by
accident or through informants. I didn't have an informant within Buford's
circle, but I did have access to a genuine psychotic whose dials never failed
to entertain if not to inform.

     
I called his
restaurant in New Orleans and two of his construction offices and through all
the innuendo and subterfuge concluded that Dock Green was at his camp on the
Atchafalaya River.

 
    
The sky was gray and the wide expanse of
the river dimpled with rain when I pulled onto the service road and headed
toward the cattle guard at the front of his property. I could see Dock, in a
straw hat and black slicker, burning what looked like a pile of dead trees by
the side of the house. But that was not what caught my eye. Persephone Green
had just gotten into her Chrysler and was roaring down the gravel drive toward
me, dirt clods splintering like flint from under the tires. I had to pull onto the
grass to avoid being hit.

     
A moment later, when
I walked up to the trash fire, I saw the source of Persephone's discontent. Two
stoned-out women, oblivious to the weather, floated on air mattresses in a
tall, cylindrical plastic pool, fed by a garden hose, in the backyard.

     
"Unexpected visit from the wife, Dock?" I asked.
      

     
"I don't know
why she's got her head up her hole. She's filing for divorce, anyway."

     
He poked at the fire
with a blackened rake. The wind shifted and suddenly the smell hit me. In the
center of burning tree limbs and a bed of white ash was the long, charred shape
of an alligator.

     
"It got stuck in
my culvert and drowned. A gator don't know how to back up," he said.

     
"Why don't you
bury it?"

     
"Animals would
dig it up. What d' you want here?"
      

     
"You've been out
in front of me all the time, Dock. I respect that," I said.
      

     
"What?"

     
"About the body
on the LaRose plantation and any number of other things. It's hard to float one
by you, partner."

     
His face was smeared
by charcoal, warm with the heat of the fire. He watched me as he would a
historical enemy crossing field and moat into his enclave.

     
"I spent some
time in the courthouse this afternoon. You've got state contracts to build
hospitals," I said.
      

     
"So?"

     
"The contracts
are already let. You're going to be a rich man. Eventually Buford's going to
take a fall. Why go down with him?"
      

     
"Good try, no
cigar."

     
"Tell me, Dock,
you think he'll have Crown popped if I set up Crown's surrender?"
      

     
"Who gives a
shit?"
      

     
"A grand
jury."

     
He brushed at his
nose with one knuckle, huffed air out a nostril, flicked his eyes off my face
to the women in the pool, then looked at nothing, all with the same degree of
thought or its absence.
      

     
"You're
dumb," he said.
      

     
"I see."

     
"You're worried
about a worthless geezer and nigger-trouble that's thirty years old. LaRose'll
put a two-by-four up your ass."
      

     
"How?"
      

     
"He wants
company."

     
"Sorry, Dock, I
don't follow your drift."

     
His thick palm
squeezed dryly on the hoe handle.

     
"Why don't
people want to step on graves? Because they care about the stiffs that's down
there? If he gets his hand on your ankle, he'll pull you in the box with
him," he said.

     
My lips, the skin
around my mouth, moved wordlessly in the wind.

B
ootsie and I did the dishes together after supper. It had stopped
raining, and the sky outside was a translucent blue and ribbed with purple and
red clouds.

     
"You're going to
set it up?" she asked.

     
"Yes."

     
"Why?"

     
"I want to cut
the umbilical cord."

     
"What's the
sheriff say?"

     
'"Do it.'"

     
"What's the
problem, then?"

     
"I don't trust
Buford LaRose."

     
"Oh, Dave,"
she said, her breath exhaling, her eyes closing then opening. She put her hands
on my arms and lay her forehead awkwardly on my shoulder, her body not quite
touching mine, like someone who fears her embrace will violate propriety.

I
n the morning I called Sabelle Crown and told her of Buford's
offer. Two hours later the phone on my desk rang.

     
"I can be out in
two or three years?" the voice said.

     
"Aaron?"

     
"Is that the
deal?" he asked.

     
"I'm not
involved. Use an attorney."

     
"It's lawyers
sold my ass down the river."

     
"Don't call here
again. Understand? I've got nothing more to do with your life."

     
"You goddamn
better hope you don't," he said, and hung up.

T
he rest of the workweek passed, and I heard nothing more about
Aaron Crown. Friday had been a beautiful December day, and the evening was just
as fair. The wind was off the Gulf, and you could
smell salt and
distant rain and night-blooming flowers and ozone in the trees, and you had to
remind yourself it was winter and not spring. Bootsie and I decided to go
Christmas shopping in Lafayette, and I asked Batist to close the bait shop and
stay up at the house with Alafair until we returned.

     
It wasn't even necessary.
She was playing at the neighbor's house next door. When we drove away, Batist
was standing in our front yard, his overalls straps notched into his T-shirt,
the smooth, saddle-gold texture of his palm raised to say good-bye.

T
he man in the
floppy hat and black
rubber
big-button raincoat came at sunset, from a great distance, where at first he
was just a speck on the horizon, walking across my neighbor's burned sugarcane
acreage, ash powdering around his boots, the treeline etched with fire behind
him. He could have been a fieldhand looking for a calf stuck in the coulee, a
tenant fanner shortcutting home from his rental acreage, or perhaps a hobo who
had swung down from a S.P. freight, except for the purpose in his gait, the set
of his jaw, the switch in his gloved hand that he whipped against his leg. When
clouds covered the sun and lightning struck in the field, the man in the
raincoat never broke stride. My neighbor's cows swirled like water out of his
path.

     
Batist had been
watching television in the living room. He went back into the kitchen to refill
his coffee cup, burned his lips with the first sip, then poured it into the
saucer and blew on it while he looked out the kitchen window at the ash lifting
in the fields, the rain slanting like glass across the sun's last spark in the
west.

     
The window was open
and he heard horses running on the sod and cattle lowing in the coulee, and
only when he squinted his eyes did he see the hatted and coated shape of the
man who whipped the switch methodically against his leg.

     
Batist rubbed his
eyes, went back into the living room for his glasses, returned to the window
and saw a milky cloud of rain and dust rising out of the field and no hatted
man in a black coat but a solitary Angus heifer standing in our yard.

     
Batist stepped out
into the yard, into the sulfurous smell blowing out of the fields, then walked
to the duck pond and down the fence line until he saw the fence post that had
been wedged sideways in the hole and the three strands of barbed wire that had
been stomped out of the staples into the ground.

     
"Somebody out
here?" he called.

     
The wind was like a
watery insect in his ears.

     
He latched the screen
door behind him, walked to the front of the house and stepped out on the
gallery, looked into the yard and the leaves spinning in vortexes between the
tree trunks, the shadows of overhead limbs thrashing on the ground. Down by the
bayou, one of our rental boats clanked against its chain, thumping against the
pilings on the dock.

     
He thought about his
dogleg twenty gauge down in the bait shop. The bait shop looked small and
distant and empty in the rain, and he wished he had turned on the string of
electric lights over the dock, then felt foolish and embarrassed at his own
thoughts.

     
He stood in the
center of the living room, the wind seeming to breathe through the front and
back screens, filling the house with a cool dampness that he couldn't
distinguish from the sheen of sweat on his skin.

 
    
He pulled aside a curtain and looked across the driveway at
the neighbor's house. The gallery was lighted and a green wreath and pinecones
wrapped with scarlet ribbon hung on the front door; a Christmas tree, a blue
spruce shimmering with tinsel, stood in a window. A sprinkler fanned back and
forth in the rain, fountaining off the tree trunks in the yard.

     
He picked up the
phone and started to dial a number, then realized he wasn't even certain about
whom he was dialing. He set the receiver back in the cradle, ashamed of the
feeling in his chest, the way his hands felt stiff and useless at his sides.

     
He wiped his face on
his sleeve, smelled a sour odor rising from his armpit, then stood hesitantly
at the front door again. In his mind's
eye he saw himself
walking down to the bait shop and returning up the slope with a shotgun like a
man who finally concedes that his fears have always been larger than his
courage. He unlatched the screen and pushed it open with the flat of his hand
and breathed the coolness of the mist blowing under the gallery eaves, then
stepped back inside and blew out his breath.

     
Batist never heard
the intruder in the black rubber raincoat, not until he cinched his arm under
Batist's throat and squeezed as though he were about to burst a walnut. He
wrenched Batist's head back into his own, drawing Batist's body into his loins,
a belt buckle that was as hard-edged as a stove grate, impaling him against his
chest, his unshaved jaw biting like emery paper into the back of Batist's neck.

     
The intruder's floppy
hat fell to the floor. He seemed to pause and look at it, as he would at a
distraction from the linear and familiar course of things and the foregone
conclusion that had already been decided for him and his victim.

     
From the corner of
his eye Batist saw a gold-tipped canine tooth that the intruder licked with the
bottom of his tongue. Then the arm snapped tight under Batist's chin again, and
through the front screen Batist saw the world as a place where trees torn from
their roots floated upside down in the rain.