DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (46 page)

     
"What are you
guys doing here?" he said through my window, his eyes focusing on the
doughnut Clete was about to put in his mouth.

     
"You want a
doughnut, Whitey?" Clete said.

     
"I don't mind .
. . Thanks, Purcel. . . I'm stuck here . . . Dock says I should hang around in
case his wife wants to meet him up at Copeland's for breakfast."

     
"Dock better do
a reality check," Clete said.

     
"That fight, you
mean? It goes on all the time. Dock might give up lots of things, but his wife
ain't gonna be one of them."

     
"Oh yeah?"
Clete said.

     
"Dock's nuts,
but he ain't so nuts he forgot his wife's got the brains in the family."

     
"It's the stuff
of great love affairs," Clete said.

     
"Who built the
big casino downtown?" Whitey said. "Mobbed-up guys with real smarts
from Chicago and Vegas, right? Where do they build it? Between Louis Armstrong
Park and the Iberville welfare project, the two most dangerous areas in
downtown New Orleans. If
you win at the table, you just walk
outside and hand your money over to the muggers. How's that for fucking smarts?
You think the lesson is lost on the local schmucks?"
      

     
Clete and I looked at
each other.

T
wenty minutes later we were on I-10, speeding past Lake
Pontchartrain. Fog puffed out of the trees on the north shore of the lake, and
the rain was falling on the lake's surface inside the fog.

     
"She's the
funnel for the wiseguys and Jimmy Ray Dixon into LaRose's administration, isn't
she?" Clete said.

     
"That's the way
I'd read it."

     
"I don't think
I'm going to survive having a wetbrain like Whitey Zeroski explain that to
me," he said.

E
arly the next morning I went to Sabelle Crown's bar at the Underpass
in Lafayette. The black bartender told me I'd find her at the city golf course
on the northside.

     
"The golf
course?" I said.

     
"That's where
she go when she want to be alone," he said.

     
He was right. I found
her sitting on a bench under a solitary oak tree by the first fairway, a scarf
tied around her head, flipping bread crusts from a bag at the pigeons. The sky
was gray, and leaves were blowing out of the trees in the distance.

     
"Your old man
tried to drop a car frame on top of Jimmy Ray Dixon," I said.

     
"The things you
learn," she said.

     
"Who got you
started in the life, Sabelle?"

     
"You know, I
have a total blackout about all that stuff."

     
"You left New
Iberia for New Orleans, then disappeared up north."

   
  
"This is kind of a private place for
me, Dave. Buford LaRose tried to have Daddy killed out on the Atchafalaya
River. Haven't you done enough?"

     
"Were you in
Chicago?" I asked.

     
She brushed the bread
crumbs off her hands and walked to her parked automobile, the back of her scarf
lifting in the wind.

A
fter I returned to the office, I got a telephone call from the
sheriff.

     
"I'm in
Vermilion Parish. Drop what you're doing and come over for a history
lesson," he said.

     
"What's
up?"

   
  
"You said this character Mookie Zerrang
was a leg breaker on the Mississippi coast and a button man in Miami?"

     
"That's the
word."

     
"Think closer to
home."

     
I signed out of the
office and met the sheriff on a dirt road that fed into a steel-and-wood bridge
over the Vermilion River ten miles south of Lafayette. He was leaning against
his cruiser, eating from a roll of red boudin wrapped in wax paper. The sky had
cleared, and the sunlight on the water looked like hammered gold leaf. The sheriff
wiped his mouth with his wrist.

     
"Man, I love
this stuff," he said. "My doctor says my arteries probably look like
the sewer lines under Paris. I wonder what he means by that."

     
"What are we
doing here, skipper?" I said.

     
"That name, 'Zerrang,'
it kept bouncing around in my head. Then I remembered the story of that Negro
kid back during World War II. You remember the one? Same name."

     
"No."

     
"Yeah, you do.
He was electrocuted. He was fourteen years old and probably retarded. He was
too small for the chair, or the equipment didn't work right, I forget which.
But evidently what happened to him was awful."

     
His face became
solemn. He lay the waxpaper and piece of boudin on the cruiser's hood and
slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed at the river.

     
"I was a witness
at only one execution. The guy who got it was depraved and it never bothered
me. But whenever I think of that Zerrang kid back in '43,1 wonder if the human
race should be on the planet. . . Take a walk with me," he said.

     
We crossed an
irrigation ditch on a board plank and entered a stand of hackberry and
persimmon trees on the riverbank. Up ahead, through the foliage, I could see
three spacious breezy homes on big
green lots. But here, inside
the tangle of trees and air vines and blackberry bushes, was Louisiana's more
humble past—a cypress shack that was only a pile of boards now, some of them
charred, a privy that had collapsed into the hole under it, a brick chimney
that had toppled like broken teeth into the weeds.

     
"This is where
the boy's family lived, at least until a bunch of drunks set their shack on
fire. The boy had one brother, and the brother had a son named Mookie. What do
you think of that?" he said.

     
"Where'd you get
all this, Sheriff?" I asked.

     
"From my dad,
just this morning. He's ninety-two years old now. However, his memory is
remarkable. Sometimes it gives him no rest." The sheriff turned over a
blackened board with the toe of his half-topped boot.

     
"Did your father
grow up around here?"

     
The sheriff rubbed
the calluses of one palm on the backs of his knuckles.

     
"Sir?" I
said.

     
"He was one of
the drunks who burned them out. We can't blame Mookie Zerrang on the
greaseballs in Miami. He's of our own making, Dave."

b
atist had been
released from the hospital
that
day, and after work I shopped for him at the grocery in town and then drove out
to his house.

     
He was sitting in a
soft, stuffed chair on the gallery, wearing a flannel shirt over the bandages
that were taped on his shoulders. His daughter, a large, square woman who
looked more Indian than black, was in the side yard, hammering the dust out of
a quilt with an old tennis racquet.

     
I told Batist the
story about the Zerrang family, the fourteen-year-old boy who was cooked alive
in the electric chair, the drunks who burned his home.

     
Batist's face was
impassive while I spoke. His broad hands were motionless on his thighs, the
knuckles like carved wood.

     
"My daddy got
killed by lightning working for twenty cents an hour," he said. "The
white man owned the farm knowed mules draw lightning, but he sat on his gallery
while it was storming all over the sky and tole my daddy to keep his plow
turned in the field, not to come out till he'd cut the last row. That's what he
done to my daddy. But I ain't growed up to hate other people for it, no."

     
"You need
anything else, partner?"

     
"That nigger's
out yonder in the swamp. Fat Daddy's wife had a dream about him. He was wading
through the water, with a big fold-out knife in his hand, the kind you dress
deer with."

     
"Don't believe
in that stuff, Batist."

     
"Nigger like
that come out of hell, Dave. Don't say he cain't go in your dreams."

     
I walked back out to my
truck, trying not to think about his words, or the fact that Fat Daddy's wife
had somehow seen in her dream the type of wide-bladed, foldout game dressing
knife that Mookie Zerrang had used to murder Lonnie Felton and his girlfriend
at Henderson Swamp.

E
arly the next morning I called an old friend of mine named Minos
Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Then I called Buford at his house.

     
"Meet me in City
Park," I said.

     
"Considering our
track record, that seems inappropriate, Dave," he said.

     
"Persephone
Green is destroying your life. Is that appropriate?"

     
A half hour later I
was sitting at a picnic table when I saw him get out of his car by the old
brick fire station in the park and walk through the oak trees toward me. He
wore a windbreaker over a L.S.U. T-shirt and white pleated slacks without a
belt. His curly hair was damp and freshly combed and he had shaved so closely
that his cheeks glowed with color. He sat down at the plank table and folded
his hands. I pushed a Styrofoam cup of coffee toward him and opened the top of
a take-out container.

     
"Sausage and
eggs from Victor's," I said.

     
"No,
thanks."

     
"Suit
yourself," I said, and wrapped a piece of French bread around a sausage
paddy and dipped it in my coffee. Then I put it back in my plate without eating
it. "Persephone Green is the bag lady for the Giacano family and Jimmy Ray
Dixon and every other New Orleans lowlife who put money into your campaign. The
payback is the chain of state hospitals for drunks and addicts," I said.

     
"The contracts
are all going to legitimate corporations, Dave. I don't know all their
stockholders. Why should I?"

     
"Stockholders?
Dock tried to squeeze out Short Boy Jerry. When Jerry Joe wouldn't squeeze,
they had him beaten to death. Is that what stockholders do?"

     
"Is this why you
got me out here?"

     
"No. I couldn't
figure why you kept this sixties character, Clay Mason, around. Then I
remembered you'd published some papers on psychopharmacology, you know, curing
drunks with drugs and all that jazz."

     
"You belong to
A.A. You know only one point of view. It's not your fault. But there're other
roads to recovery."

     
"That's why
you're on the spike yourself?"

     
I saw the hurt in his
face, the stricture in his throat.

     
"I talked to a
friend in the DEA this morning," I said. "His people think Mason's
got money in your hospital chain. They also think he's involved with some
crystal meth labs down in Mexico. That's mean shit, Buford. Bikers dig it for
gangbangs, stomping people's ass, stuff like that."

     
"Do you get a
pleasure out of this? Why do you have this obsession with me and my wife? Can't
you leave us in peace?"

     
"Maybe I've been
in the same place you are."

     
"You're going to
save me? . . ." He shook his head, then his eyes grew close together and
filmed over. He sat very still for a long time, like a man who imagined himself
riding a bicycle along the rim of a precipice. "It's Karyn they own."

     
His face darkened
with anger. He stared at the bayou, as though the reflected sunlight he saw
there could transport him out of the moment he had just created for himself.

     
"How?" I
asked. "The cheating back in college? Persephone has been blackmailing her
over something that happened twenty years ago?"