DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (5 page)

     
He slipped the
football out of my hands, flipped it toward the stable. He watched it bounce
and roll away in the dusk, as though he were looking at an unformed thought in
the center of his mind.

     
"Dave, I think
we're going to win next month," he said.

     
"That's
good."

     
"You think you
could live in Baton Rouge?"

     
"I've never
thought about it."

     
Someone turned on the
Japanese lanterns in the trees. The air smelled of pecan husks and smoke from a
barbecue pit dug in the earth. Buford paused.

     
"How'd you like
to be head of the state police?" he asked.

     
"I was never
much of an administrator, Buford."

     
"I had a feeling
you'd say something like that."

     
"Oh?"

     
"Dave, why do
you think we've always had the worst state government in the union? It's
because good people don't want to serve in it. Is the irony lost on you?"

     
"I appreciate
the offer."

     
"You want to
think it over?"

 
    
"Sure, why not?"

     
"That's the
way," he said, and then was gone among his other

guests, his handsome face glowing with the perfection of the
evening and the portent it seemed to represent.

     
Karyn walked among
the tree trunks toward me, a paper plate filled with roast duck and venison and
dirty rice in one hand, a Corona bottle and cone-shaped glass with a lime slice
inserted on the rim gripped awkwardly in the other. My eyes searched the crowd
for Bootsie.

     
"I took the
liberty," Karyn said, and set the plate and glass and beer bottle down on
a table for me.

     
"Thank you.
Where'd Boots go?"

     
"I think she's
in the house."

     
She sat backward on
the plank bench, her legs crossed. She had tied her hair up with a red bandanna
and had tucked her embroidered denim shirt tightly into her blue jeans. Her
face was warm, still flushed from the touch football game. I moved the Corona
bottle and glass toward her.

     
"Nope."

     
"You want a
Coke?"

     
"I'm fine,
Karyn."

     
"Did Buford talk
to you about the state police job?"

     
"He sure
did."

     
"Gee, Dave,
you're a regular blabbermouth, aren't you?"

     
I took a bite of the
dressing, then rolled a strip of duck meat inside a piece of French bread and
ate it.

     
Her eyes dilated.
"Did he offend you?" she said.

     
"Here's the lay
of the land, Karyn. A hit man for the New Orleans mob, a genuine sociopath by
the name of Mingo Bloomberg, told me I did the right thing by not getting
involved with Aaron Crown. He said I'd get taken care of. Now I'm offered a
job."

     
"I don't believe
you."

     
"Believe
what?"

     
"You.
Your fucking presumption and
self-righteousness."

     
"What I told you
is what happened. You can make of it what you want."

     
She walked away
through the shadows, across the leaves and molded pecan husks to where her
husband was talking to a group of

people. I saw them move off together, her hands gesturing while
she spoke, then his face turning toward me.

     
A moment later he was
standing next to me, his wrists hanging loosely at his sides.

     
"I'm at a loss,
Dave. I have a hard time believing what you told

Karyn," he said.

     
I lay my fork in my
plate, wadded up my paper napkin and dropped it on the table.

     
"Maybe I'd
better go," I said.

     
"You've
seriously upset her. I don't think it's enough just to say you'll go."

     
"Then I
apologize."

     
"I know about
your and Karyn's history. Is that the cause of our problem here? Because I
don't bear a resentment about it."

     
I could feel a heat
source inside me, like someone cracking open the door on a woodstove.

     
"Listen,
partner, a guy like Mingo Bloomberg isn't an abstraction. Neither is a
documentary screenwriter who just got whacked in the Quarter," I said.

     
His expression was
bemused, almost doleful, as though he were looking down at an impaired person.

     
"Good night to
you, Dave. I believe you mean no harm," he said, and walked back among his
guests.

     
I stared at the red
sun above the sugarcane fields, my face burning with embarrassment.

I
T
was raining hard and the
traffic
was heavy in New Orleans when I parked off St. Charles and ran
for the colonnade in front of the Pearl. The window was steamed from the warmth
inside, but I could see Clete Purcel at the counter, a basket of breadsticks
and a whiskey glass and a schooner of beer in front of him, reading the front
page of the
Times-Picayune.

     
"Hey, big
mon," he said, folding his paper, grinning broadly when I came through the
door. His face was round and Irish, scarred across the nose and through one
eyebrow. His seersucker suit and blue porkpie hat looked absurd on his massive
body. Under his coat I could see his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black .38
revolver. "Mitch, give Dave a dozen," he said to the waiter behind
the counter, then turned back to me. "Hang on a second." He knocked
back the whiskey glass and chased it with beer, blew out his breath, and
widened his eyes. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead on his coat
sleeve.

     
"You must have
had a rocky morning," I said.

     
"I helped
repossess a car because the guy didn't pay the vig on his bond. His wife went
nuts, said he wouldn't be able to get to work, his kids were crying in the
front yard. It really gives you a

sense of purpose. Tonight I got to pick up a skip in the Iberville
Project. I've got another one hiding out in the Desire. You want to hear some
more?"

     
The waiter set a
round, metal tray of raw oysters in front of me. The shells were cold and slick
with ice. I squeezed a lemon on each oyster and dotted it with Tabasco.
Outside, the green-painted iron streetcar clanged on its tracks around the
corner of Canal and headed up the avenue toward Lee Circle.

     
"Anyway, run all
this Mingo Bloomberg stuff by me again," Clete

said.

     
I told him the story
from the beginning. At least most of it.

     
"What stake
would Bloomberg have in a guy like Aaron Crown?"
 
I said.

     
He scratched his
cheek with four fingers. "I don't get it, either. Mingo's a made-guy. He's
been mobbed-up since he went in the reformatory. The greaseballs don't have an
interest in pecker-woods, and they think the blacks are cannibals. I don't
know,

Streak."

     
"What's your
take on the murdered scriptwriter?"

     
"Maybe wrong place,
wrong time."

     
"Why'd the
shooter let the girl slide?" I said.

     
"Maybe he didn't
want to snuff a sister."

     
"Come on,
Clete."

     
"He knew she
couldn't turn tricks in the Quarter without permission of the Giacano family.
Which means she producing a weekly minimum for guys you don't mess with."

     
"Which means the
guy's a pro," I said.

     
He raised his
eyebrows and lit a cigarette. "That might be, noble mon, but it all sounds
like a pile of shit you don't need," he said. When I didn't answer, he
said, "So why are you putting your hand

in it?"

     
"I don't like
being the subject of Mingo Bloomberg's conversation."

      
His green eyes
wandered over my face.

     
"Buford LaRose
made you mad by offering you a job?" he asked.

     
"I didn't say
that."

     
"I get the
feeling there's something you're not telling me. What
was that about his wife?" His eyes continued to search my
face, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

     
"Will you stop
that?"

     
"I'm getting
strange signals here, big mon. Are we talking about memories of past
boom-boom?"

     
I put an oyster in my
mouth and tried to keep my face empty. But it was no use. Even his worst
detractors admitted that Clete Purcel was one of the best investigative cops
NOPD ever had, until his career went sour with pills and booze and he had to
flee to Central America on a homicide warrant.

     
"So now she's
trying to work your crank?" he said.

     
"Do you have to
put it that way? . . . Yeah, okay, maybe she is."

     
"What for? . . .
Did you know your hair's sweating?"

     
"It's
the Tabasco. Clete, would you ease up, please?"

     
"Look, Dave,
this is the basic lesson here—don't get mixed up with rich people. One way or
another, they'll hurt you. The same goes for this civil rights stuff. It's a
dead issue, leave it alone."

     
"Do you want to
go out and talk to Jimmy Ray Dixon or not?" I said.

     
"You've never
met him?"

     
"No."

     
"Jimmy Ray is a
special kind of guy. You meet him once and you never quite forget the
experience."

     
I waited for him to
finish but he didn't.

     
"What do I
know?" he said, flipped his breadstick into the straw basket, and began
putting on his raincoat. "There's nothing wrong with the guy a tube of
roach paste couldn't cure."

W
e drove through the Garden District, past Tulane and Loyola
universities and Audubon Park and rows of columned antebellum homes whose yards
were filled with trees and flowers. The mist swirled out of the canopy of oak
limbs above St. Charles, and the neon tubing scrolled on corner restaurants and
the empty outdoor cafes looked like colored smoke in the rain.

     
"Was he in
Vietnam?" I asked.

     
"Yeah. So were
you and I. You ever see his sheet?" Clete said.

     
I shook my head.

     
"He was a pimp
in Chicago. He went down for assault and battery and carrying a concealed
weapon. He even brags on it. Now you hear him talking on the radio about how he
got reborn. The guy's a shit-head, Dave."

     
Jimmy Ray Dixon owned
a shopping center, named for his assassinated brother, out by Chalmette. He
also owned apartment buildings, a nightclub in the Quarter, and a five-bedroom
suburban home. But he did business in a small unpainted 1890s cottage hung with
flower baskets in the Carrollton district, down by the Mississippi levee, at
the end of St. Charles where the streetcar turned around. It was a neighborhood
of palm trees and green neutral grounds, small restaurants, university
students, art galleries and bookstores. It was a part of New Orleans unmarked by
spray cans and broken glass in the gutters. In five minutes you had the sense
Jimmy Ray had chosen the role of the thumb in your eye.

     
"You're here to
ask me about the cracker that killed my brother?

You're kidding, right?"

     
He chewed and snapped
his gum. He wore a long-sleeve blue-striped shirt, which hid the apparatus that
attached the metal hook to the stump of his left wrist. His teeth were
gold-filled, his head mahogany-colored, round and light-reflective as a waxed
bowling ball. He never invited us to sit down, and seemed to make a point of
swiveling his chair around to talk to his employees, all of whom were black, in
the middle of a question.