DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (43 page)

     
"Yeah, that's fine."

     
She had wheeled Jerry
Joe Plumb's jukebox away from the wall, where I had pushed it front end first,
and unlocked the door and stacked the 45 rpm records on top of a soft towel on
the counter.

     
"I'm playing
each one of them on my portable and recording them on tape. I've already
recorded fifteen of them," she said. "You like all these, don't
you?"

     
I nodded, my eyes
gazing out the window at the lighted gallery of the house. "That's great,
Alf," I said.

     
"Who's the
buttwipe who cut the electric cord on the box?"

     
"Beg your
pardon?"

     
"The buttwipe
who sliced off the cord. What kind of person would do that?"

     
"How about it on
the language?"

     
"Big deal,"
she said. She slid a record off her machine and replaced it with another, her
face pointed downward so that her hair hid her expression.

     
"Why are you so
angry?" I asked.

     
"You and
Bootsie, Dave. Why don't y'all stop it?"

     
I sat down on a stool
next to her.

     
"I made some
mistakes," I said.

     
"Then unmake
them. You're my father. You're supposed to fix things. Not break the jukebox
'cause you're mad at it."

     
I crimped my lips and
tried to find the right words. If there were any, I didn't know them.

     
"Everything's
messed up in our house. I hate it," she said, her eyes shining, then
brimming with tears.

     
"Let's see what
we can do about it, then," I said, and walked up the slope, through the
trees, across the gallery and into the stillness of the house.

     
Bootsie was at the
kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. She wore a pair of straw sandals and
white slacks and a stonewashed denim shirt. The surfaces of her face looked as
cool and shiny as alabaster.

     
"The job's not
worth it anymore. It's time to hang it up," I said.

   
  
"Is that what you want?"

     
"I can always do
some P.I. stuff with Clete if we get jammed up."

     
"No."

     
"I thought you'd
approve."

     
"I had to go to
confession this afternoon," she said.

     
"What for?"

     
"I went to see
Batist at the hospital. When I left I wanted to kill the man who did that to
him. I wanted to see something even worse happen to Karyn and Buford. I told
Father Pitre my feelings probably won't go away, either. He said it was all
right, it's natural to feel what I do . . . But it's not going to be all right,
not until those people are punished. Nobody can be allowed to get away with
what they've done."

     
Her neck bloomed with
color. I stood behind her chair and put my hands on her shoulders and kneaded
my thumbs on her spine, then leaned over and pressed my cheek against her hair.
I felt her reach up over my head and touch the back of my neck, arching her
head against mine, rubbing her hair against my skin. Then she rose from her
chair and pressed herself against me, no holding back now, her breasts and flat
stomach and thighs tight against me, her mouth like a cold burn on my throat.

     
Through the screen I
could hear Alafair playing "La Jolie Blon" on her record player.

N
o Duh Dolowitz was a Jersey transplant and old-time pete man who
had been dented too many times in the head with a ball peen hammer, which
didn't diminish his talents as a safecracker but for some reason did develop in
him a tendency for bizarre humor, finally earning him the nickname among cops
of the Mob's Merry Prankster. He backed up a truck to the home of a contractor
in the Poconos and filled his wet bar and basement game room to the ceiling
with bituminous coal, stole a human head from the Tulane medical school and put
it in a government witness's bowling ball bag, and sabotaged the family-day
promotion of a floating casino by smuggling a group of black trans-vestites on
board to do the stage show.

     
Also, in terms of
information about the underworld, he was the human equivalent of flypaper.

     
Sunday morning Clete
and I found him in his brother-in-law's saloon and poolroom by the Industrial
Canal in New Orleans. He wore a maroon shirt, white suspenders, knife-creased
gray slacks, and a biscuit-colored derby hat. His face was tan and lean, his
mustache as black as grease. He sat with us at a felt-covered card table,
sipping black coffee from a demitasse with a tiny silver spoon in it. The
poolroom had a stamped tin ceiling, a railed bar, wood floors, and big glass
windows painted with green letters that gave a green cast to the inside of the
room. It was still early, and the poolroom was closed.

     
"Give No Duh a
beer and a shot. Put it on my tab," Clete called to the bartender, then
said to Dolowitz, "You're looking very copacetic, No Duh."

     
"Shitcan the
beer and the
 
shot," Dolowitz
 
said. "Why the
squeeze?"

     
"We're looking
for a guy named Mookie Zerrang," I said.

     
"A cannibal
looks like King Kong?" he said.

     
"He hurt a
friend of mine real bad. I think he killed Short Boy
Jerry, too," I said.

     
His brown eyes looked
without expression at a point on the far
wall.

     
"I hear you're
on the outs with the Giacanos," Clete said.

     
Dolowitz
shook his head nonchalantly, his face composed.

     
"You and Stevie Gee
got nailed on that pawnshop job. You made bond first and creeped Stevie's
house," Clete said.

     
"He mentioned he
boosted my mother's new car?" Dolowitz said.

     
"You've got bad
markers all over town and you're four weeks back on the vig to Wee Willie
Bimstine," Clete said.

     
"I'd tell you
'No duh,' Purcel, but I'm not interested in defending myself or having trouble
with either one of yous. You want to play some nine ball? A dollar on the
three, the six, and the nine."

     
"Dave can get
you a few bucks from his department. I can get Wee Willie off your back. How
about it?" Clete said.

     
"Zerrang's
freelance," Dolowitz said. "Look, check my jacket. I burned a safe or
two and did some creative favors for a few people. Zerrang blows heads. He's a
sicko, too. He likes being cruel when he

don't have to be."

     
"Three names I
want you to think about, No Duh," I said. "Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock
Green, and his wife, Persephone."

     
He was motionless in
his chair, the names registering in his eyes in ways you couldn't read. Then
the skin at the side of his mouth ticked slightly. His eyes hardened and his
upper lip filmed with moisture, as though the room had suddenly become close
and warm.

     
"Here's the rest
of it," Clete said. "You come up with the gen on these guys, I'll
make you righteous with Wee Willie. But you shine us off and miss another week
on the vig, you better get your skinny ass back up to the Jersey Shore, find a
hole, and pull it in after you."

     
When we left him, his
confidence had drained like water out of a sink and his face was filled with
the conflict of a hunted animal.

     
Clete and I stood on
the sidewalk under the dilapidated wood
colonnade that
shaded the front of the poolroom. It was cool in the shade, and the sunlight
looked bright and hard on the neutral ground and the palm trees.

     
"I can't do
this, Clete," I said.

     
"Don't screw it
up, mon."

     
I tapped on the door
glass for the bartender to open up.

     
"Do what you
feel comfortable with, No Duh. Nobody's going to twist you," I said.

     
"Go play with
your worms. Blimpo out there gets off on this. I hope in the next life both
yous come back a guy like me, see how you like it," he replied.

a
s a police
officer you accept the fact
that,
in all probability, you will become the instrument that delivers irreparable
harm to a variety of individuals. Granted, they design their own destinies, are
intractable in their attitudes, and live with the asp at their breasts; but the
fact remains that it is you who will appear at some point in their lives, like
the headsman with his broad ax on the medieval scaffold, and serve up a fate to
them that has the same degree of mercy as that dealt out by your historical
predecessor.

     
An image or two: A
soft-nosed .45 round that skids off a brick wall and topples before it finds
its mark; a baton swung too high that crushes the windpipe; or salting the
shaft on a killer of children, a guy you could never nail legitimately, a guy
who asks to see you on his last night, but instead of finding peace you watch
him vomit his food into a stainless steel chemical toilet and weep
uncontrollably on the side of his bunk while a warden reads his death warrant
and two opaque-faced screws unlock the death cage.

     
So the job becomes
easier if you think of them in either clinical or jailhouse language that
effectively separates them from the rest of us: sociopaths, pukes, colostomy
bags, lowlifes, miscreants, buckets of shit, street mutts, recidivists,
greaseballs, meltdowns, maggots,
gorillas in the mist. Any
term will do as long as it indicates that the adversary is pathologically
different from yourself.

     
Then your own
single-minded view of the human family is disturbed by a chance occurrence that
leads you back into the province of the theologian.

     
Early Monday morning
three land surveyors in a state boat set up a transit instrument on a sandspit
in the flooded woods across from the bait shop and began turning angles with
it, measuring the bayou frontage with a surveyor's chain, and driving flagged
laths at odd intervals into the mudbank.

     
"You mind
telling me what y'all are doing?" I said from the end of the dock.

     
The transit operator,
in folded-down hip waders and rain hat, swiped mosquitoes out of his face and
replied, "The state don't have a recent plat."

     
"Who
cares?"

     
"You got a
problem with it, talk to my boss in Lafayette. You think we're putting a
highway through your house?"

     
I thought about it.
"Yeah, it's a possibility," I said.

     
I called his
supervisor, a state civil engineer, and got nowhere. Then I called the
sheriff's department, told Wally I'd be in late, and drove to Lafayette.

     
I was on Pinhook
Road, down in the old section, which was still tree lined and unmarked by strip
malls, when I saw Karyn LaRose three cars ahead of me, driving a waxed yellow
Celica convertible. One lane was closed and the traffic was heavy at the red
light, but no one honked, no one tried to cut off another driver.

     
Except Karyn.

     
She pulled onto the
shoulder, drove around a construction barrier, a cloud of dust drifting off her
wheels through the windows of the other cars, and then cut back into the line
just before the intersection.

     
She changed the angle
on her rearview mirror and looked at her reflection, tilted up her chin,
removed something from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail, oblivious
to everyone around her. The oak limbs above her flickered with a cool
gold-green light. She
threw back her hair and put on her
sunglasses and tapped her ring impatiently on the steering wheel, as though she
were sitting reluctantly on a stage before an audience that had not quite
earned her presence.

     
An elderly black
woman, bent in the spine like a knotted turnip, with glasses as thick as
quartz, was laboring down a sidestreet with a cane, working her way toward the
bus stop, waving a handkerchief frantically at the bus that had just passed,
her purse jiggling from her wrist. She wore a print cotton dress and untied,
scuffed brown shoes that exposed the pale, calloused smoothness of her lower
foot each time she took a step.