DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (49 page)

     
"You were right
about Aaron Crown," I said. "He killed Ely Dixon. But it was a
mistake. He went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray. He didn't know that Jimmy Ray
had moved out and rented it to his brother."

     
"Why would he
want to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon?"

     
"Jimmy Ray got
Sabelle started in the life . . . You're vindicated, Buford. That means you get
word to Persephone Green to call Mookie Zerrang off."

     
"Are you insane?
Do you think I control these people? What in God's name is the matter with
you?"

     
"No, they
control you."

     
"Listen, I just
had that ghoul beating on my front door. I ran him off my property with a
pistol."

     
"Which
ghoul?"

     
"Who else, Dock
Green. His wife dumped him. He accused me and Karyn of being involved in a
ménage à trois with her. I guess that's her style."

     
"It seems late
to be righteous," I said.

     
"What's that
mean?"

     
"You treated
Sabelle Crown like shit."

     
He was silent for
what seemed a long time. Then he said, "Yeah, I didn't do right by her . .
. I wish I could change it . . . Good-bye, Dave."

     
He quietly hung up
the phone.

H
elen and I sat in the cabin of the St. Martin Parish sheriff's
boat. The exhaust pipes idled at the waterline while a uniformed deputy smoked
a cigarette in the open hatchway and waited for the boat skipper to return from
his truck with a can of gasoline.

     
I could feel Helen's
eyes on my face.

     
"What is
it?" I said.

     
"I don't like
the way you look."

     
"It hasn't been
a good day."

     
"Maybe you
shouldn't be in on this one," she said.

     
"Is that
right?"

     
"Unless he deals
it, Mookie Zerrang comes back alive, Streak."

     
"Well, you never
know how things are going to work out," I said.

     
Her lips were chapped,
and she rubbed them with the ball of her finger, her eyes glazed over with
hidden thoughts.

W
e went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across
the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by
flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural,
luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that
possessed color. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an
abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of
air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings.

     
"That's
it," I said to the boat pilot.

     
He cut back on the
throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we
didn't drift into the shore.

     
"You want to go
head-on in there?" he asked.

     
"You know
another way to do it?" I said.

     
"Bring in some
SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks," he replied.

     
A St. Martin Parish
plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the
bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its
occupants were.

     
"We want to talk
to y'all that's inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one
hand on your head. There won't nobody get hurt," he said.

     
But there was no
sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in
large drops on the bay's surface. The plain-clothes wiped his face with his
hand and tried again.

     
"Aaron, we know
you in there. We afraid somebody's come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain't it
time to give it up?" he said.

     
Again, there was
silence. The plainclothes' coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back
across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went
inside the cabin.

     
"Let's do it,
skipper," I said to the pilot.

     
He pushed the
throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat
receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths,
washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The
second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the
silt.

     
Helen and I dropped
off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray
mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with
the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my .45,
chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.

     
A flat-bottom
aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack.
Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes
fixed on the shack's shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to
an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.

     
On my left, the St.
Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line,
breaking their way through a stand of willows.

     
Helen and I walked
under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement
above.

     
Nothing.

     
Helen held the
twelve-gauge at port arms, her knuckles white on the stock and pump. Her faded
blue jeans were drenched up to her rump. The air was cold and felt like damp
flannel against the skin, and I could smell an odor like beached gars and gas
from a sewer main.

     
Then I felt something
tick against my face, like a mild irritant, a wet leaf, a blowfly.
Unconsciously, I wiped at it with my hand, then I felt it again, harder this
time, against my eyebrow, my forehead, in my hair, directly in my face as I
stared upward at the plank floor of the shack.

     
Helen's mouth was
parted wide, her face white.

     
I wiped my face on my
coat sleeve and stared at the long red smear across the cloth.

     
I felt a revulsion go
through my body as though I had been spat upon. I tore off my coat, soaked it
in the water at my knees, and wiped my face and hair with it, my hand
trembling.

     
Above me, strings of congealed
blood hung from the planks and lifted and fell in the wind.

     
I moved out from
under the shack, slipped the safety off the .45, and began climbing the ladder,
which was set at a gradual angle, almost like stairs. Helen moved out into the
water, away from the shack, and aimed the twelve gauge at the door above my
head, then, just before I went inside, swung the barrel away and followed me.

     
I reached the top
rung and paused, my hand on the doorjamb. The gunny sack curtain billowed back
on the nails it hung from, exposing a rusted icebox without power, a table and
chair, a solitary wood bunk, a coon hide that someone had been fleshing with a
spoon.

     
I pulled myself up
and went inside, tearing away the curtain, kicking back the door against the
wall.

     
Except it did not fly
back against the wall.

     
I felt the wood knock
into meat and bone, a massive and dense weight that did not surrender space.

     
I clenched the .45 in
both hands and pointed it at the enormous black shape behind the door, my
finger slick with sweat inside the trigger guard.

     
My eyes wouldn't
assimilate the naked man in front of me. Nor the fact that he was upside down.
Nor what had been done to him.

     
The fence wire that
had been looped around his ankles and notched into the roof beam was buried so
deeply in his ankles that it was nearly invisible.

     
Helen lumbered into
the room, her shotgun pointed in front of her. She lowered it to her side and
looked at the hanging man.

     
"Oh boy,"
she said. She propped open the shutter on a window and cleared her throat and
spit. She looked back at me, then blew out her breath. Her face was discolored,
as though she had been staring into a cold wind. "I guess he got
his," she said. Then she went to the window again, with the back of her
wrist to her mouth. But this time she collected herself, and when she looked at
me again her face was composed.

     
"Come on, we can
still nail him," I said.

     
The plainclothes
homicide investigator and two of the uniformed deputies were waiting for us at
the bottom of the ladder.

     
"What's up
there?" the plainclothes said. His eyes tried to peel meaning out of our
faces.
"What,
it's some kind of company secret?"

     
"Go look for
yourself. Be careful what you step in," Helen said.

     
"Crown killed
Mookie Zerrang. He couldn't have gone far," I said.

     
"He ain't gone
far at all," the third deputy said, sloshing toward us from the opposite
side of the woods. "Look up yonder through that high spot."

     
We all stared through
the evenly spaced tree trunks at a dry stretch of compacted silt that humped
out of the water like the back of a black whale. It was covered with palmettos
and crisscrossed with the webbed tracks of nutria, and in the middle of the
palmettos, squatting on his haunches, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, was
Aaron Crown.

     
We waded toward him,
our guns still drawn. If he heard or saw us, or even cared if we were in his
proximity, he showed no sign.

     
His body and clothes
were painted with blood from his pate to the mud-encrusted basketball shoes he
wore. His eyes, which were finally drained of all the heat and energy that had
defined his life, seemed to look out of a scarlet mask. We stood in a circle
around him, our weapons pointed at the ground. In the damp air, smoke hung at
the corner of his mouth like wisps of cotton.

     
"You know about
Sabelle?" I asked.

     
"That 'un in
yonder couldn't talk about nothing else before he died," he replied.

     
"You're an evil
man, Aaron Crown," I said.

     
"I reckon it
otherwise." He rubbed the cigarette's hot ash between his fingers until it
was dead. "If them TV people is out there, I need to wash up."

     
He looked up
at our faces, his lidless eyes waiting for an answer.

O
N CHRISTMAS MORNING I sat at the kitchen table and
looked at a photograph in the
Daily Iberian
of Buford and Karyn dancing
together at the country club. They looked like people who would live forever.

     
Bootsie
paused behind me, her palm resting on my shoulder.

    
"What are you thinking about?"
she asked.

     
"Jerry Joe
Plumb. . .No journalist will ever mention his name in association with theirs,
but he paid their dues for them. "

     
"He paid his
own, too, Dave."

     
"Maybe."

     
The window
was open and a balmy wind blew from my neighbor’s pasture and swelled the
curtains over the sink. I filled a cup with coffee and hot milk and walked
outside in the sunshine. Alafair sat at the redwood picnic table, playing with
Tripod in her lap and listening to the tape she had made of the records on
Jerry Joe’s jukebox. She flipped Tripod on his back and bounced him gently up
and down by pulling his tail while he pushed at her forearm with his paws.

     
"Thanks for all the presents. It’s a
great Christmas, " she said.

     
"Thanks for
everything you gave me, too, " I said.